24 - 30 May 2001
Issue No.535
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 May 2001 Issue No.535 |
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Graphic, then less so
It happens sometimes, and it is not necessarily an unwelcome happening when, by accident or design, a gallery gives itself over, body and soul, to the graphic. Well, perhaps more body than soul, because the latter, ineffable at best, is rarely more than barely present, rarely present at all, indeed, in the work of graphic artists. And whatever claims are being made for the two photographers currently exhibiting at the Townhouse, they are, in the end -- and certainly on this showing -- more graphic than not. This, too, is no bad thing, though those on the receiving end of the appellation sometimes display a tendency to think otherwise.
Do not read the catalogue before seeing Youssef Nabil's photographs -- the introductory essay is full of unfortunate twaddle: "Nabil feeds his own obsessions in order to keep them alive knowing that introspective analysis purges the soul, leaving us to face the perplexity of a white vacuum. Perhaps this is a way to purify himself from the fruitful asymmetry which is the personal path of his soul, even if that means it must remain plain and sterile."
So runs one passage. Now, I suspect I know what the writer is trying to get at, and I do not think it is to suggest that the photographer's soul is sterile -- that would be strangely at odds with the clearly adulatory tone that is consistently struck. Nor does it seem likely that the writer really means to suggest that Nabil has abandoned the fruitful in favour of the sterile, or that the photographer has abandoned any form of introspection. The point that is being elucidated -- groped at would, perhaps, be the better term -- is that a tension exists between the supposed fecundity of the artist's image-making and the hard-edged, desiccated quality of many of the images. The odd thing is that this tension is not automatically problematic. It is simply a function of a particular graphic style. It need not be subjected to such a half-baked apology.
Nabil uses a number of well-trodden gambits, some of which can be all too neatly sourced. Has the photographer suddenly developed an interest in Marcel Duchamp? The appearance of a photograph of a urinal might suggest so, though simply by virtue of being so tastefully coloured by hand the impression is that Nabil has either failed to grasp quite what Duchamp's urinal was all about or else is attempting to subvert the master, a not very profitable exercise. The shadow of Duchamp falls again, thinly, in a photograph of Doris, posed as the Mona Lisa. There is less misunderstood aesthetic politicking here, and the resulting image is rather more successful than that of the urinal, not least because it recalls those old fashioned sea-side photographs in which the subject was required to place his or her head through a hole in a painted scene. Head through hole, you can be anyone, from Marilyn Monroe to Arnold Shwarzenegger -- even an icon of Western art. Less here, I think, for that wily old subversive Duchamp to be upset about.
Mona Lisa reappears, though the reference is probably no more than titular, as a head peering from the foot of an old fashioned bath. The colouring of this particular image -- tiled wall and floor a barely modulated pink, bath and flesh the same yellow -- serves to neutralise the different surfaces. The flesh of the face might as well be the cast iron of the bath, and they are both the colour of sandstone. The bath has a leg, an unpleasant looking claw: this Mona Lisa has become a sphinx, and is sufficiently enigmatic.
Such a process of reification, though, is occasionally undermined by the desire to impose a narrative on the set pieces photographed, a gambit that fails sensationally in the image unaccountably chosen for the poster. "Seeing myself leaving" places a staring head and naked torso on a green tiled floor, fencing sword by side, a pool of blood draining towards the bottom of the picture. It is a red and green technicolour melodrama, a still from the kind of B movies that they simply don't make anymore. It is no more than this, though, sadly, the portentousness of the title is not tongue-in-cheek. This is kitsch the photographer cannot himself imagine, which is a pity because with a little more of the "introspective analysis" so ridiculously derided in the catalogue Nabil may well find a seam to profitably mine.
"Playboy" is a less sensational narrative failure: boy, lying on bed, naked, a copy of Playboy across his chest -- his hand, because we are where we are, covering the cover -- is clearly intended to carry a suggestion of onanism, either pre- or post. Within the context of this exhibition -- and it doesn't take a particularly astute viewer, amid all these B-movie set-pieces, the pretty boys and glamour queens -- to identify the element of camp, this display of conventionally red-blooded male sexuality strikes a woefully wrong note. It is the kind of alibi that, even in a Bette Davies' film, would be unlikely to hold water beyond the first courtroom cross-examination.
Alongside the hand-tinted photographs -- who, one wonders does the colouring? The absence of any accreditation would imply that it is Nabil, though I doubt that this is the case -- are a smaller number of black and white images, mostly of celebrities. Youssra is given a classic, 40's movie star makeover, face and shoulders reflected in a highly polished surface. Lucy drives her car. Fifi Abdou lies on her bed, fur trimmed cape fanned beneath her, enormous, gilded headboard rising above. In a second photograph, cropped beneath the shoulders, she is reduced to legs, heavily braceleted arms, and a dramatically asymmetric hemline. Youssef Chahine looks every inch the auteur.
The less tricksy, the less they strive after allegory, after a significance not there, the better: it is a crude rule of thumb, and one that does not work with every image in this exhibition. But it works with most.
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