4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
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A is for...
Khalil Rabah, feeling (a)part: it is at the Townhouse gallery, and is delimited, albeit approximately, by an innocuous a, though one rendered less so by being in parenthesis. It is standard notation, these days, the inclusion of a set of brackets or two. It condenses equivocation, lends it a slighter harder edge, conferring the illusion of semantic precision on something that is far from precise. It is a useful shorthand yet as a gambit has perhaps become a little too ubiquitous for many people to notice it is quietly running out of steam, is in danger of becoming an acrostic redundancy.
But there we have it: feeling (a)part. And once you have grasped the title the rest falls easily, perhaps too easily, into place. First comes the olive tree, a real tree, lying on a surgically white glass table. It is a reasonably sized tree, though not large enough to droop over the edges of its sanitised plinth. The leaves confront you on entering the show. The roots, together with some dried earth, lie on the other side of the table. The roots remain: without them we would be exploring rootlessness; with them we are in the territory of the uprooted, even if the differences are for the spectator to surmise. Such is the literalness of this visual punning. The tree, of course, will wither through the course of this show. It will be a matter of desiccation rather than rot, a dry mutability rather than succulent corruption. Those in search of something juicer should try elsewhere.
Beyond the uprooted, in the adjacent gallery, a video runs, an eight minute sequence, a performance filmed. The artist struggles with a shoe. It is in his lap, and no contortion will allow the foot access. He chews the shoe, and finally gets a foot partially in. But the shoe does not fit. This Cinderella ain't going to no balls.
That one watches the video seated on wooden coffee shop chairs, with metal coffee shop tables, could be an attempt at contextualisation, or merely an essay towards convenience. For the irony of the literalness, the presumed precision of such visual imaging is that it can kick start a process of potentially endless, and often irrelevant, analogy.
There is a third room on the ground floor. On a plinth sits an open dictionary. The pages are nailed down, a forest of steel compacting the pages, covering every definition except one. Philistine: one who can appreciate neither art nor culture, or words to that effect. Here is a total absence of equivocation. It is too deliberately heavy-handed to allow for that. In nailing a predictably offensive item in the Enlightenment lexicon, it nails, too, its own colours to the mast. And at times they are all too easy to read from a distance.
In this exhibition, as in a great deal of conceptual art, there is at once both more and less than meets the eye. Yet that the object so irresistibly becomes a cypher does not automatically constitute a problem, though if it happens too frequently the tendency is inevitably towards stultification.
The second floor of the gallery, over which feeling (a)part has spread, presents rather more problems, and offers a more welcoming space for conjecture, than the first. Quite how one should navigate the exhibits, in what order, is by no means clear, though this in itself presents no real difficulties, despite the gaps between imposing with what one feels should be a significant weight. It is not: the demarcations are almost entirely practical.
The pointed heavy-handedness of the dictionary reappears in a second video. An olive lies on the ground then, thud, it is squashed by a stone. Thud, another olive squashed, and another, and another. The ant that crawls around the olive, an accident this of a felicitous fate (or perhaps not) remains to reappear in a frame with another olive, and then another, all destined to be squashed. It is relentless. The gallery reverberates with the thuds. And the relentlessness is the point, no more and no less.
Elsewhere, though, there is a straining after something that might border on lyricism, or at least make room for the lyrical. Making a right heart comprises four photographs, arranged in a cross. Each is of a naked torso, three hands clutched to the right breast. Again, the punning of the title acts to direct the responses of the spectator.
The torso is male and two of the hands belong to the torso; the third, also male, does not. There is an obvious, homoerotic straining here, though it is often undercut by the blatant corporeality of the photographs, the redness of the knuckles, the medical dictionary illustration-like detailing of surface that disavows anything that might approach idealisation. The titling here, though, focuses one problematic: in it one can conjecture a challenge but a challenge that works only by being predicated on an assumed homophobia. For other spectators Making a right heart could all too easily become mired in an overly saccharine sentimentality.
A necessary change of register has been instigated, though, and it carries into other rooms. On a plinth, isolated in space, lies a knife. It is, though, a construction: the wooden handle of one knife supports the blade of another. They are the wrong sizes: seemingly mismatched, the blade penetrating the handle too far and in doing so rendering the new unity hopeless for its original tasks, for slashing, cutting, chopping, dismemberment. The title of this particular piece is Togetherness, and it, too, posits a beginning for any amount of speculation, this time markedly less redundant. Here the insistent thud thudding of the crushing of olives is barely an echo: room has at last been made for the equivocation of an a that has moved beyond the tricksy perimeters set by its brackets.
Close by the artist stands by an olive tree, sits and lies by the same. Three photographs, black and white, the olive tree old, and in Palestine, the artist younger, and Palestinian. Facing them, on a television screen, the frozen frame of a video. Here, there is colour. It is the same scene, the same tree. But there is movement. The sitting, standing, lying figure is here frozen in a moment of exhilaration, leaping in the air. And significantly, in this one image, this declamatory freezing of a moment from a longer narrative, a second figure has entered the frame.
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