Issue No. 591
Culture
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20 - 26 June 2002 Issue No. 591 Culture |
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Carved, then plastered
Stones -- they can be remarkably versatile things. They can roll, and when they do gather no moss. They can be cobbled, and dressed. They can pave, and clad, support barrel vaults and domes, be assembled into enormous pyramids. They can be quarried and cut and carved. Stones provided the first surfaces to be adorned by graffiti, Paleolithic scratchings that appear here and there in the most inhospitable climates. Gathered into dove cot shaped cairns they make the perfect support for flags planted atop hitherto unclimbed mountains. Flat stones can be made to bounce across water, if thrown along the right trajectory and with sufficient force. And this is barely to scratch the surface. An amiable roll call of activities for something generally considered so intractable.
Stone can also be made to resemble cloth, or at least to hang in drapes from the shoulder, carefully gathered and falling in dramatic folds to reach the floor and sweep along behind august senators. It can be made into a perfectly formed medieval mantle, in which to place a medieval effigy on top of a medieval tomb. With a little Gothic ingenuity it can be perforated until it appears as insubstantial as lace, though lace strong enough to support hundreds of thousands of tons of cathedral roofing. It is even, and perhaps most famously, manipulated into an approximation of flesh, though here, it has to be said, the illusionism begins to ring hollow. Flesh, in many ways far less malleable than rock, does not lend itself quite so easily to reproduction.
Not that attempts to do so lack resonance. Or history. Fat little earth goddesses are occasionally dredged up from pre-history, and they are instantly recognisable as the kind of too too solid flesh that keeps the diet industry in clover. Daily crowds gather around the Michelangelo pieta in the Vatican but half of that configuration is dead flesh, which is, I suspect, a slightly less problematic substance for the sculptor. David is the quintessential High Renaissance icon. Yet even Michelangelo had to admit defeat in the end: think only of the late work, the muscular slaves struggling to escape the rocks from which they are carved. They look unfinished, and with purpose. It is an acknowledgment of the fatuity of the endeavour, and this from its greatest proponent. Flesh will not become stone, and there is no alchemical process that can make the equation operate in reverse. If David embodies the overweening pride of the Renaissance, then the Slaves mark the fall.
And there are, of course, the tablets, and the things written on them. In the beginning these were wholly prescriptive, a temptation that is perfectly understandable given the indelibility of the form. The memorial is equally understandable, and for the same reasons. Latterly, though, this carving of legends in stone has been co-opted to lend an air of respectable permanence to quite ephemeral enterprises. Consider the Roman typography above the main entrance to Sednaoui's one-time flag-ship store in Ezbekiya: the type is a direct descendent of lettering once thought appropriate for the supporting pedestals of the busts of humanist heroes. It is deliberately antique, self- consciously senatorial, perfectly measured in its Latinate propriety. And it is intended to declare the majesty of commerce, the permanence of a consumerism at the apex of which stood the department store, one of the great inventions of the last century. And now, of course, that august lettering, like the rest of the building, the golden domes and serpentine metalwork, simply gathers dust. When did you last go to Ezbekiya in search of a department store?
The typeface may well be intended as a declaration of permanence, but it is one that operates on the level of allusion rather than relying on the nature of the material into which it is carved. Peer carefully, and through the furry layer of dust you will notice that the lettering is painted. Black, with a hint of gilding. The permanence of stone has been dressed up with a substance notorious for its ability to peel.
This cladding of stone is a peculiarity of Cairo, a resistance, perhaps, to the stentorian, to the overly loud declaration of permanence. In a land that produced so many colossi, so many alien- faced statues carved out of granite, so many icons of stasis detached from whatever gave them meaning and thrown willy- nilly wherever, longevity, or illusions of, are rightly suspected. Cairenes know exactly where such presumptions get you: they get you stuck in a run down square, surrounded by an ever growing tangle of spaghetti-like overpasses, choked by exhaust fumes. Longevity, in a land where the sands part to reveal yet another temple, is not something after which many people strive.
And so, at the corner of Qasr Al-Aini Street and Tahrir Square, opposite Al- Mugamma', yet another building is being demolished. It is a two-storey building, part of the palatial enclosure that holds adjuncts of the legislature, and, oddly enough, a small ethnographic museum. The demolition has been going on for some time now, and it is a laborious process. One of the first things to be removed was the bland facing of stucco, the plaster applied to the exterior walls into which lines had been cut in an unconvincing intimation of perfectly dressed, large blocks of stones. Chip, chip, chip, and off came the plaster, only to reveal, beneath, row upon row of large blocks of slightly rusticated sandstone. The real thing had been disguised by an obviously false version of itself, exposed only at the point of destruction. The most permanent, the most resilient seeming of building materials had been disguised, the better to display obsolence. You can overendow posterity, and it ain't necessarily reassuring.
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