6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Towards the minimal
The suggestion was made in passing and, it is more than likely, in all innocence. Why not meet at a newly refurbished bar restaurant in Mohandessin? And being at an uncharacteristically loose end, it was easy to agree. So off we went -- as many of you will too -- to yet another bar-restaurant. The place might as well remain unnamed, not out of any coyness on my part but because all these places are the same.
You know it has been newly refurbished because the door is unfamiliar and the paintwork as yet unchipped. In a couple of months neither of these will be the case. And the bar, in all likelihood, will have been repositioned. But apart from this very little will have changed. A complete design overhaul will not have been contemplated, though those responsible for the redecoration will almost certainly have been under the illusion that this was precisely what they were doing. Yet in the end, everything remains tiresomely familiar. There will be lots of wrought iron, some of it old, some of it pretending to be. There will be tricksy little lights hanging here and there dripping superfluous bits of coloured glass on chains. There will be pseudo-astrological symbols and other bits of new-age tat. A simple shelf, far from being a simple shelf, will end in a flourish, a star burst, a sun symbol or flouncy little scroll. It will also be gilded, in a distressed kind of way.
Clean lines, attention to spatial disposition? Nothing could be further away. Any and every surface will be filled with some form of ethnic junk, and the whole impression will be one of unbearable clutter.
Ben Nicholoson, White Relief
It is the same all over town, this predilection for ethnic trinkets, for utterly useless objects that when you look at them in the hard light of day manage to be uninteresting ethnographically, and ugly to boot. Yet they are relentlessly crammed into every nook and cranny. And it is not only restaurants that have fallen prey to a fad that is now at least two decades old. People do it to their own homes. They fill walls with rows of batiks, spurious rural idylls usually featuring a palm tree or two, a donkey and a couple of fellahin in galabiyas. They fill tables with anything inlaid, anything made of silver, anything that can be thought of as decorative, a sadly all-encompassing designation. Around these tables are arranged sets of ornately carved or else impossibly spindly chairs, so many, in fact, that there is, in the end, nowhere to actually sit. And then there are the bits of crystal, hanging in clusters like grapes from an over-burgeoned vine, or matt black twirls of metal supporting conical lampshades of marbled glass. There are sashes and swags of fabric, preferably with a sheen. Bows, and tassles, rugs and throws, and little ceramic dishes of virulently coloured pot pourri, all waiting -- all screaming -- to be knocked over, torn down, ripped to shreds.
Moving home is, psychologists claim, one of life's more traumatic events, coming a close third to bereavement and divorce, though such a league table obviously discounts such unusual occurrences as attempts on one's life. And I suspect that one of the reasons moving home is so traumatic is that it forces a reevaluation of one's possessions. Do you really want, do you really need, all these things? What on earth possessed you to acquire them in the first place? Look at them coldly, these accumulations from a portion of your life, look at them from a utilitarian and from an aesthetic point of view (if indeed the two can be wholly separated), and you will probably find that they are not really the kind of things with which you want to spend the rest of your life. Yet out of habit, or misplaced sentiment, most people tend to retain all the junk. In doing so, they forego the liberating experience of sloughing several decades of unhappy consumerism.
And where does it all come from, this tendency to first fill, and then layer, the spaces we inhabit. Certainly, there is nothing in the Egyptian landscape that could account for this propensity. The desert is either frankly tedious, or else geometrically absolute. No room here for frills. And though it is impossible to identify anything that might be convincingly presented as an architectural vernacular, what models have survived from the past tend towards the same absolutism as the landscape. The blunt angularities of ancient monuments, the striking spatial effects of medieval mosque architecture, neither prepares one for the complete absence of feeling for either line or space that is the dominating feature of the modern home, or for the refurbishments of bar restaurants, or the bizarre attempts to decorate city squares.
The time has come, perhaps, for a massive spring clean, for a wholesale dumping of all the accretions that obscure the basics of line and space. Ethnic knick knacks, the kind of things that make Cairo's middle classes look like tourists in their own country, endlessly searching for yet another souvenir, should be piled high on every street corner and ceremoniously burned. Those little wrought iron flourishes that end each and every shelf should be snapped off by disgruntled customers, an act less of vandalism than of aesthetic cleansing. A voluntary moratorium should be placed on the hanging of tassles, or the swagging of shiny curtaining fabric, for at least a decade, to allow befuddled householders an opportunity to contemplate the shape of their windows before deciding quite how, or if, it should be disguised. Misplaced attempts at prettification, at window dressing, if they cannot be expelled from the public sphere, could at least be banished from the domestic space. And that, at least, would be a start. For charity begins at home.
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