Issue No. 603
Culture
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Culture |
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Say it with flowers
Amin El-Dib
Ever since Eve set the balls of corruption rolling the vegetable kingdom has been an impossibly loaded symbolic site. The little Golden Delicious that costs 10 pounds a kilo may just be an apple to you; to others, though, it is the reason we are not still sitting in Paradise, and instead find ourselves at desks, tapping out words, or digging up streets, or sitting in a dingy flat waiting for the cheque to arrive in the post.
Fruit and flowers: fresh, cut, corrupted, without them an entire branch of art historical scholarship would simply fall off the tree, and no one would ever have had to put pen to paper to unravel the iconographic intricacies of 17th century Dutch still-life, or the parables of Crivelli, replete with the gourds of fidelity, or Archimboldo's mad, vegetable people. There would, too, be far less to be said about Amin El-Dib's current show at the Gezira Arts Centre, which comprises black-and-white photographs of flowers, cut, in vases, and in various stages of decomposition.
The show is, quite clearly, a study of mutability. It is the florist's window from hell, the kind of table decoration Miss Haversham came to favour, and through no real fault of her own. El-Dib's sometimes clinical still-lifes can occasionally seem a little too close to science text-book illustration as he focusses on the fetid water and its attendant vegetation, but it is all to the point, even if the number of exhibits stretches this somewhat. It is only the pond-life that is missing, the wriggling, protozoic things.
Less graphic are the flower studies in an earlier stage of disintegration. The microscopic is here abandoned for a credible kind of overview: subject recognition is immediate, and there is a gap between that recognition and the realisation that all is not well with the flowers, a gap that allows a faint sense of unease to emerge. For these are still Blakean roses, or if not roses, then gladioli and sunflowers: the invisible worm, though, remains the same, and his dark secret love is no respecter of variety. Life does not go on forever.
Formally perfect in their reductionism, lit almost invariably from above, great care is taken to avoid the distraction of shadows. In only one image are these allowed to play, and then it is less for the sake of atmosphere than for compositional reasons. This is an impressively stark exhibition, and if it is not overweening in its ambition, that is grounds to be grateful. El-Dib records a harvest festival at which the rot has set in: there is nothing new in this, but it is, in its way, quite perfect.
A lack of ambition is not a charge that could be levelled at a great many of the participants in the Salon of Youth, though it would have been a good idea for the exhibits to have been pruned more ruthlessly. There is always something problematic about the group show. When the group comprises hundreds, when the space is limited and 50 or more pieces have to be assembled in the tiny galleries created by the architectural cutesiness of the Palace of Arts, the problems become overwhelming.
Whoever hung this show deserves to spend a great deal of time in Siberia, where he or she can engage in long conversations about the future of art with whoever else was responsible for the selection.
The Salon of Youth purports to showcase work by artists under the age of 35, though showcasing is not a particularly precise term for what is taking place. And it is a great shame that those whose work is interesting find themselves lumped in with so much dross. So there is the usual teen angst, the expected quotations from Dali and Bacon, the monsters that invade the nightmares of the not very imaginative, the nightmares of those who need their monsters prefabricated. And there is, too, the historical moment: Palestinians, who suffer enough, are here made the subject of youthful artistic endeavour. It is a mock heroism, a mock outrage, too glib by far. Cut out all this nonsense and there might have been room to actually make a stab at the promised showcasing.
If this year's salon has its strengths, many of them are to be found in the photographic exhibits. Apart from the Palestinian component, and the perhaps well meant but eventually crass attempts to express solidarity, the most appalling failures tend to be space consuming installations, though that is a general rule of thumb and there are exceptions. And just occasionally there is a fortuitous accident, an arbitrary miracle, when something is actually displayed in a manner that makes sense. Or, rather, there is one such occasion -- a retro sci-fi construction, a torn sheet, lit from within, that you suddenly come across turning a corner. It's a pretty tedious work, but it at least contrives a vague, theatrical impact.
A dispiriting event, then, with all the usual culprits: the outline of figures painted on a block of asphalt; boxes of sand with unidentifiable bits of anatomy, ceramic, blood-red, scattered here and there; faces behind bars, faces hidden by keys; lone figures walking down empty roads to an indistinct horizon. The young do that kind of thing, they always have.
It takes rather more than a kind heart to plough through the Salon of Youth while giving it the attention it deserves, and this is not the fault of the participants, even if many of them should not have been there in the first place.
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