7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Happier times
Think of artist Salah Enani and if any pictures come to mind they will probably include a large woman, of a certain age, in a ludicrously tight and probably sleeveless dress styled sometime in the 1940's. She will be smooching with a chap who exhibits equally retro tastes, and her neckline is likely to be cut sufficiently low to display a significant amount of cleavage. Or else an obviously popular couple will be seated, or standing, in a room obviously situated in some popular quarter. They too will be smooching. Poverty may be their lot but it is a poverty that has somehow secured them an enviable degree of freedom and vitality. The protagonists in Salah Enani's painting all do exactly what they want to do in a popular, Never-Never Land that appears to exist sometime before Enani's own birth in 1955.
That much of Enani's art smacks not just of a cinematic sentimentalising of the poor, but of a cinematic sentimentalising some two generations out of date, is not quite the point. What does matter, though, is that he is one of Egypt's most successful painters, producing images that strike a happy and, one must assume, an ultimately lucrative chord with the public.
What Enani deals in, of course, is nostalgia, and when nostalgia enters the equation it is almost inevitable that the waters become incredibly murky. Mostly, though not always, nostalgia serves to sanitise the past and in the process of sanitising obscures. And while it is hardly an original observation to note that nostalgia encapsulates the desire to desire it remains, nonetheless, a useful observation, not least when thinking about the work of many contemporary artists, for Enani is not alone in his airbrushing of the past.
Amina Mansour's work is less accessible than that of Enani. Her intricate sculptures, most typically bouquets of flowers painstakingly constructed from raw cotton displayed in plexi-glass boxes, may well seem a world away from the populous alleyways of the painter, but they operate in a similar manner, at least when it comes to romanticising a past that has been systematically discredited.
Material is of primary importance in Mansour's sculptures: that they are made of raw cotton is significant not just formally but as a necessary underpinning for any reading of the works' intended meanings. Yet without the correct signposting the meticulous details, the stamens, drooping buds, the flowers and leaves, might come to seem no more than wedding cake frippery. Admittedly, it is Miss Haversham's wedding cake, and that in itself endows the pieces with a sometimes overwhelming pathos. The meticulous care that goes into the construction of these sculptures is also in itself impressive.
Happily, the sculptor thoughtfully provided the necessary signposting in a piece exhibited several seasons ago at the Townhouse. It consisted of a trademark bouquet, exhibited in a display case on which were written the names of wealthy Alexandrian families. And their wealth was based on cotton, the very stuff from which the fragile flowers within the display case had been constructed.
If Enani's subjects tend to be poor, Mansour's subject is wealth. Both poverty and wealth, however, are firmly located outside the present. And if, in providing her list of family names, Mansour is far less equivocal than Enani in furnishing a pre-revolutionary set of referents -- in the paintings we have to depend on costumes, and on cinematic/literary evocations -- both take an essentially nostalgic view of their subject. Neither is willing to explore the realities of the past in which their present work is located for fear of undermining the romanticism that in the end becomes their subject. They do not quite bake their cakes for fear of melting the icing.
The delicacy of Mansour's sculptures could not be more removed from the realities of the wealth they are intended to invoke. Nor is the sense of fragility that she suggests goes hand in hand with that wealth particularly convincing. The vitality with which Enani endows his subjects, these poor but salt-of-the-earth types (more than once that cinematic/literary cliché the tart-with-a-heart takes centre stage in his canvasses) could not be further removed from the realities of poverty. Both choose to ignore the power relationships involved in the equation in favour of an ersatz glamorising of the two opposing states.
That it is possible to argue that Mansour does this far more consciously than Enani is hardly the point. Far more significant is that two such different artists -- their approaches to their work are, formally at least, diametrically opposed -- should be working such similar themes.
But this should not, perhaps, come as too much of a surprise. If, on many levels, the revolution of 1952 remains sacrosanct, this very proscription has eventually come to act as an impetus for attempts at the rehabilitation of a discredited ancien regime. The delineation of a right history is not, after all, at issue: the present has probably come to cloud views far too efficiently to allow for that always impossible endeavour to be an attractive proposition. Which is why Enani and Mansour are only the tip of an iceberg that, it can be argued, includes at its bottom that eccentric publishing venture, the Royal Albums, and the endless number of photographs of men in tarboushes, the kind of photographs that have by now become an essential component in the decorative schemes of any newly opened restaurant.
Maybe the past, safely tucked behind us, is just less traumatic than the present. For in the past, the poor were happy just being themselves, the rich were always worthy. And if we desire anything, we desire happier times.
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