Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture | The mechanics of meat

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

The mechanics of meat
By Nigel Ryan

Car maintenance, a kind of cosmic flower thing, the moderately distressed surface and flesh not quite as too, too solid as it might be: a difficult quartet to begin with and one not made any easier by a ratbag of references running from the metaphysically loaded gestures of the drippier abstract expressionists to the kinds of fowl that inhabited the wall paintings of Akhenaten's new capital, Amarna. Not that the exhibitions by Scott Bailey, Jenny Leimert, Ayman Ramadan and Hisham El-Zeiny, running concurrently at the Townhouse until 11 December, should be taken as a package. It is no more than an accident, though hardly fortuitous, that taken in a single viewing involuntary cross-referencing becomes inevitable. It is to no one's advantage, least of all the viewer's.
Ayman Ramadan is responsible for the car maintenance class. Three cars, in various states of disrepair, occupy the centre of the Townhouse's largest space, with the periphery all but redundant. Around the cars are bits and pieces of engine. And these are the real McCoy, real cars, real bits and pieces of engine. There is real music blaring from a real tape-recorder, and it is the kind of music to which real car mechanics might well listen. And then there are the mechanics, sheet metal people, flat, one dimensional, curved over bonnets, entering the real cars at unwieldy angles, faceless, anonymous and in constant danger of becoming a bit rusty. There is, too, a flat sheet metal shoe-shine person, crouched over a real shoe-shine box on which is placed a real shoe, and one of those metal food carts, a real cart, though lacking real food. That would have presented a logistical dilemma, however welcome the biodegradable note.
There might, just might, be some comment emerging on the facelessness of those who perform what are deemed menial tasks in which case (though I doubt it is the case) it would have been altogether more effective to eliminate the flat sheet-metal people and to have turned the space into the Marie Celeste of car repair workshops, unpeopled beyond the privileged gallery goer though with ample evidence -- more evidence than is actually provided -- of the activities taking place. Stretching things a little further, by so resolutely ignoring the surroundings in which the exhibit is placed -- the three cars are in a line, in the centre of the room, around which the figures and other bits and pieces stand in mute penumbra, isolated -- the aestheticising tendencies found in more self-conscious installations are, perhaps, being pointedly undermined. But this too is likely to be wide of the mark: these cars and their dismembered insides are -- the impression is unavoidable -- merely an excuse for the sculptural elements, the flat sheet-metal people. It is stage setting, and not particularly interesting as such. It might have had more resonance in the street, but here again there are logistical difficulties, as well as bureaucratic. These faceless, flat, and dull sculptures are the real subject of the show, whatever the window dressing, whatever the half-baked strategies to contextualise.
Jenny Leimert accounts for the cosmic, flower thing. A lot of archaeological motifs, bulls, hippopotamus gods, bits of zodiac, as well as more decorative reworkings of Pharaonic designs. Then there are occasional oddities, two small pieces, miniature banners, with cartoon like aeroplanes. In one of these the ground is striped, a faded red and blue, and the sky is spangled, as well as aeroplane filled, though the stars have archaeological roots. This, among the smallest pieces in Leimert's exhibit, manages a major perspectival shift, engineering a rightful diminishing of apparently sensational events. Elsewhere the decorative is handled with a reasonable aplomb though there is little of any real substance. Thinner than Leimert's usual, not as worked, it smacks of hurry.
On the ground floor of the Townhouse proper are Scott Bailey's large square canvases in acrylic and oil. They are exhibited under the title Crimson and there is certainly a deal of red around. The paintings are themselves supplemented by intricate, contrived miniature sculptures, stills from an educational film explaining the properties of surface tension reworked in three dimensions. Drops of red paint frozen as they fall back in the pot. And they do seem to indicate the possibility of a kind of splish-splash reading of the larger paintings though the abstract expressionist comparisons do not lead anywhere in particular, do not bear much weight. Red, though, and liquid: the easiest loading is to make the bloody analogy. So blood and gore? But this is too easy. Forget the meat and think of flowers, think bowl of gladioli, think hybridised Lilly; forget Pollock and think Georgia O'Keefe in her turgid, gigantic and increasingly uninteresting magnified flower phase. It is, at the very least, an amusing exercise, and more responsive to the finish of these paintings. The artist's sculptured drips may well be crimson herrings, for whatever the process here it is the finish that tells, and it would be difficult to imagine anything more slick. In which direction lies most, perhaps all, of the accomplishment here. This particular show is an essay in competence. Whatever other conclusions we may want to draw we draw several decades too late.
A little more whimsy is Hisham El-Zeiny's show, and it does not go amiss. Distressed monochromes, a variegated sepia experience. The images are mostly small, the backgrounds distressed, collaged and sculptural elements carefully integrated. Some of the paintings contain newsprint mug shots, others coffee cups in slight relief, bent metal, at first sight, but given the beige treatment. Some are amusing and clearly intended as visual puns. Others have a spurious, geometric overlay, the spokes of bicycle wheels furnishing the necessary scaffolding. El-Zeiny provides the kind of ease that should not be disparaged as a matter of course: it is ease born from the absence of the declamatory, from the refusal of volume, size, vainglory. And in this context it is refreshing. These are four shows. There is nothing, could never be anything, of the group about them. If there is any advantage to the accidents of time- tabling, though, it ends, through no manoeuvring on El-Zeiny's part, in his court.

Send a letter to the Editor Recommend this page Print-friendly