In progress:
Cremaster dreams
By
Youssef Rakha
Doaa Aly, a graduate of the Fine Arts College, Cairo University, exhibited paintings in the first Nitaq, the downtown arts event, in 1999, contributing what has been described as "a three-dimensional comic strip" to the second Nitaq in 2000. She has been featured in collective exhibitions and books, undertaking a solo exhibition of paintings at the Mashrabiya Gallery in 2001. Her concern with conceptual art does not undermine her conviction that a work of art should promote aesthetic pleasure.
At the moment I'm working on... Well, this will have to cover the rest of the year, because I think I have the year taken care of... There is the [Young Arab Theatre Fund, YATF] Minya project, with Salib Fawzi; I happen to have been the last to be commissioned, so the point was to come up with something that necessarily includes Salib. I never work out concepts beforehand and then endeavour to carry them out, as it were. Each commission is something I begin anew, and according to its given parametres the concept is then developed. The provisional title is "Goldfish", because he will be sitting within an enclosed space, like a goldfish, singing many various songs and constantly changing positions. This will be video-taped and projected onto a wall, and the performance will involve her (i.e. me) on the outside, persistently trying, and failing, to draw outlines of his figure on that wall. The idea is that he is constantly shifting -- there is a map along which the route of his mood progresses, and the songs, selected for what their lyrics say, work to evoke these moods -- so that she will never manage to pin him down, as it were, fix him into any coherent form.
It's as if she's looking at the goldfish, trying to seize any one of its feelings, and constantly unable to do so. At one point she begins to give up, he goes on moving. At another point he is more willing to be fixed, but she has reached such a degree of boredom she will no longer try to draw his figure. They are running around, pursuing each other, until they reach at point at which they have both given up. She then switches off the projector and walks away, and what the viewer is left with are all those incomplete outlines -- intimations of moods, aspects of this being who remains ineffable -- and nothing concrete. We are going to build a space here [at the Townhouse Gallery] that should evoke this feeling of being enclosed, in which to film Salib's part. The costumes will work to suggest this notion of him being a goldfish, her being like Medusa, whose attempt to make contact with people turns them into stone, fixes them for eternity. Neither of us will have facial features. All this happens in the framework of miscommunication, a very simple, naive idea without philosophical or undertones or sources other than my own day-to-day life. And the priority is that the performance should have a high aesthetic value. My concern is to create something beautiful before thinking about whether or not it has any meaning.
There are a number of other things besides. The Townhouse Open Studios, for example, which will involve 10 artists from Egypt and 10 from abroad taking up studio residences in the building and working in an open-ended way. The idea is that people will come in and find out about what they are doing, and the artists themselves will of course interact with each other as well. There will be lots of "artists' talks" and interactive events -- the whole thing will be a kind of workshop. I know very little about the details at present. The main thing is that it's not important that actual art works should be produced, the point is the process. What else? There is a painting show for Mashrabiya, there is the Small Works Salon at the Centre of Arts, which opens at the end of April. This project, unlike the YATF commission, involves handing over the work of art that is produced for the occasion; five artists will be given prizes; and some of the work will be added to the Museum of Modern Art collection. I'm also working with Shahira [Soliman] on a puppet fashion show for the next Nitaq: Shahira is doing the costumes, I am doing the puppetry, which is a single marionette performing a fashion show. And that takes care of the next year, don't you think?
At this stage the person whose work I'm most interested in is Mathew Barney, who did this string of five films called The Cremaster Cycle, which he finished in 2001. The cremaster is the muscle that controls the movement of the testicles; and in these films -- he spent 14 years building up to them -- the human body and what happens inside it is the centre of attention. He explores gender, sports, the kind of repressed desires to which athletes are subject and the physical and psychological damage that results from their repression. His idea is to close the orifices of the body and make everything happen inside the body, concentrating on the first seven weeks of umbreal growth and exploring all that might happen if the chemistry goes wrong; even his logo is an orifice with a bar drawn over it. I am not necessarily drawn to his themes, they are his influences -- he was an athlete and a medical student -- and they have nothing to do with me. What I admire is that, through a conceptual approach and a single focus that he followed through for many, many years, he has managed to produce a great, great art work that is both aesthetically and intellectually pleasing -- not conceptual for no reason. What I like about him is that he has focus -- and guts.
