Issue No. 606
Culture
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3 - 9 October 2002 Issue No. 606 Culture |
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Form over content
Imagining the Book is an international exhibition, staged by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and continuing until the end of next week. You may not have heard about it: a couple of weeks ago we gave it a push on these pages, and other publications have no doubt done the same, but one should never take the power of the press too seriously. A photo-caption is a photo-caption: it might, to the editor of a page, that has to be filled to deadline, assume a looming significance, but few others are likely to accord it such import. Otherwise the publicity for Imagining the Book has been rather more undersheet than blanket.
Artists were flown in from Japan, from the US, Europe and the Middle East, installed in hotels and fed, and if not exactly feted at least treated with the courtesy guests of an institution such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina might expect. There were one or two hiccups, as there always are. Half an hour before the exhibition opened, a couple of distraught artists were scanning the gates of the complex, anxiously awaiting the arrival of promised vans that would deliver works that for weeks had been held up in customs. Were they constructed of compressed hashish? Had someone foolishly taken it upon themselves to imagine Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater? The reasons, alas, were less exciting: a simple lack of coordination between the concerned departments, a sad lack of organisation with which we are all abysmally familiar.
And then there was the venue, the new Conference Centre that is destined to be part of the library complex when it is complete. That "when it is complete" is important, for these artists had been flown in, at somebody's expense -- is it the taxpayers? -- to exhibit works in a building that is still under construction. There are no doors, the façade is covered in scaffolding, windows are being put in, the interior being finished. True, the two halls in which the exhibits were placed are complete. It is just that to access them you must negotiate what is still, to all intents and purposes, a building site. And in the absence of publicity, with little if anything to indicate what lies beyond the scaffolding, and the glaziers, and the men with drills, it becomes a perfectly justifiable question to ask just how the organisers think the audience -- for surely exhibitions are staged with an audience in mind -- is going to find this exhibition.
All of this mismanagement is a great pity, for the exhibition itself is a perfectly respectable affair. True the remit is vague -- vaguer, one might suppose, than was originally intended. But then a showing of artists' books, and only artists' books, would have been far less exciting that what eventually emerged. And in the midst of this accidental construction site -- the builders, one assumes, have missed their own completion deadlines -- it seems only fair that the organisers' intentions should have been accidentally deconstructed, that the exhibitors should have interpreted the rubric to include the pre- and post-history of the book as well as -- this one is a bit more difficult -- an umbrella to display works shown in completely different contexts at some earlier date. This latter certainly applies to some of the Egyptian participants and there is no reason why it is not equally likely to apply to many of the foreign artists.
Given the slipshod nature of the organisation the fact that almost all the participants maintained their humour was nothing short of a miracle. But maintain it they did: the German artist whose piece was destined to hang in the main entrance to the library proper smiled his way through the delays at customs, shrugged off constantly being told his work would be arriving on the hour, every hour, by the end of the afternoon, tomorrow, and when it did arrive just in time for the reception that was not the opening but happened on the evening of the same day, installed his work with unruffled equanimity. So too the English artist who, having been reassured before departing London -- this one at her own expense -- that there would be full technical support, found herself begging drills and scaffolding from the builders simply so that she could hang the exhibits she had been invited to transport across a continent.
No lack, then, of goodwill on the part of those showing, just as there has been no lack of good will shown towards the mother institution, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Which makes the fact that any reciprocity did not include ensuring that this exhibition come to the notice of a wider audience all the more dispiriting. It is not, after all, the first exhibition to be staged in Egypt, and it is certainly not the last. Nor is it inscribed in tablets of stone that things cannot be done properly. So why the indifference to those for whom the event is supposedly being staged -- ie the public?
It is a question that has posed itself insistently throughout the decade and a bit that I have lived in Egypt, years during which I, along with every one else, have been subjected to the ongoing debate, the endless seminars organised by supreme councils of this and that and reported ad nauseum, circular articles published here, there and everywhere, all addressing the vexed question of modernity versus tradition. And in truth it has often seemed nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence, a luxury to be engaged in only by those who already know, or are in a position to know, that Egypt is the modernist's dream come true, the ultimate triumph of form over content.
You want an exhibition, you get an exhibition, artists flown in from all over, a photo-caption here, listings there, press-releases dutifully broadcast by those who should, and almost certainly do, know better. You want a newspaper, you get a newspaper, with banners and by-lines and mast heads. You want a cultural capital, you get a cultural capital, with seminars, and intellectual debates, and endless festivals and biennales and youth salons and new museums opening to great fanfare at the rate of two-a-day it sometimes seems. But just try and examine the content. Go on, hustle for an invite.
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