20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
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Beneath the rhetoric
Art Practices from Lebanon promises to be something of a handful, even if it is appended only as a subtitle, as it is, to Missing Links, currently showing at the Townhouse.
It begs, of course, a great many questions, if only because it intimates an overview of contemporary practice. That would be a difficult one to pull off anywhere. But this is not just anywhere, this is Lebanon. The group show is itself problematic enough as a format without having to cope with the added baggage of representing the practices of an entire nation.
The questions begged come thick and fast, foremost among which is just who is behind this particular choice of art practices, who has decided that these represent Lebanon. The answer to that one can be found on the inside cover of the accompanying pamphlet. This show is held under the umbrella of the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan. So this is their selection.
Never judge a book by its cover, a piece of homespun wisdom that by now needs to be qualified. Never judge a book exclusively by its cover is a piece of wisdom perhaps more pertinent to the times, for in the cover lies a great deal, if not quite everything. And this particular pamphlet has a very handsome cover indeed. Which means, I suppose, that the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts is not necessarily short of cash.
A glance through the CVs of the artists involved betrays a number of overlaps. Of the seven artists included, three have taken part in previous Ashkal Alwan projects. Three were also included in Mediterranean Metaphors II, an exhibition held at the Borusan Culture and Art Centre, Istanbul.
Now, I mention all of this merely as a coda, as a warning against taking any exhibition at the face value it sets itself. Some galleries and curators, though by no means all, display a tendency to make overblown claims and it is important to remember that they do this for the sake of their own reputations. It is a public relations exercise, no more and no less.
It is easiest, though, to forget the politics of representation, to forget what is claimed, or at least take it with a pinch of salt, and simply see the show. It is undoubtedly worthwhile, if a little uneven.
The problem with group shows of this type -- to extend the advertising metaphor they are no more than convenient packaging, the artistic equivalent of those variety packs of miniature cereal boxes -- is that they tend to foist something thematic on the individual participants, even when this does not, cannot, exist.
View the art as discrete, even if it does all happen to come from Beirut.
The city itself features prominently in the work of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, in the form of a massive aerial photograph. But the photographic image has been broken, into hundreds and hundreds of rectangles, each the same size, each a piece of adhesive, sticky-backed paper. Assembled on an enormous mirror, the photograph, at the opening of the exhibition at least, remained whole. But visitors are encouraged to remove a piece of the image, to peel away one of the rectangles, revealing the mirror beneath and, presumably, a reflection of the spectator. So this photograph of Beirut becomes fragmented, as pieces are gradually peeled away. The gaps between become larger, and it is all, in its tricksy way, peculiarly depressing. Hadjithomas and Joreige offer their own interpretation: "Beirut does not exist and makes us exist individually, threatening the dream of a community that is revealed obviously [as] ever more Utopian. The installation fights recycling, the mythification of banner images, touristic icons, the orientalist heritage, but confesses its incapacity at stating: 'There, this is Beirut.'"
I peered and peered, in search of the Carlton Hotel, a concrete structure on the Corniche that holds fond, and some less fond, memories. Sadly, though, I was obviously not the only person to have made use of its services: no trace of the hotel remained, and instead I was peering at myself. Four stickers, the entire hotel, had been removed by previous visitors. The only tourist icon I wanted had already been appropriated.
Other portrayals of the city are sufficiently fragmented to begin with not to engineer further disintegrations. Lamia Joreige's first floor room includes grainy black and white stills -- three -- of snipers caught in a doorway. On another wall are three more stills, of a woman walking in a street, just as grainy, as if on old newsprint, just as quotidian in the repetition, only this time each image is slightly blown up, so that by the third print the woman's head is outside the frame and we notice, with a slight shock, that she is not wearing shoes. It is an affecting detail, an underlining of the subject's vulnerability in that most public of places, the street. Opposite, three more images, similarly printed, of a man lying on the ground, a casualty, perhaps, of the snipers.
Turn, and on the fourth wall three looped videos play. And there she is again. The first video of the woman in the stills, walking in the street. The third is of a man, falling, again as if shot, in a deserted, garage like space. And between them is the sea, lapping endlessly, its surface broken by an eternity of waves. Again the accompanying pamphlet contains the artists version of her intentions: "The site of irreversible rupture: the sea, that of departures... a familiar yet extraordinary imagery... Here it separates two bodies -- a man and a woman -- each perpetuating a vain act, revealing the impossibility for them to be. He falls many times and does not die, though he never stops falling, never stops dying. She runs, coming towards us again and again; she doesn't stop running, she doesn't stop escaping."
Elsewhere in this at times badly signposted show are other videos, other installations. One room comprises coloured nylon washing lines, strung haphazardly between walls, on to which are threaded hundreds of circular baladi loaves. An impossibly impractical abacus, and an alarming waste of bread.
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