A decade on
By
Nigel Ryan
Dining with people you have not been in contact with for several years can be a trying business. There is the inevitable updating, the being asked questions the answers to which are of little if any interest to the questioner; there is the reciprocation, the asking of questions of equally limited interest. It is, you tell yourselves, a matter of catching up. Only it isn't. It is the sniffing out of turf long since abandoned.
There is a remote possibility that the exercise will not be entirely fruitless, though this depends on post-event rationalisation. That matters of mutual interest are no longer of mutual interest could in itself be interesting depending, of course, on the degree of personal excavation in which you habitually indulge. And if it is healthier, on the whole, to avoid an archaeological approach to temperament, it is not always possible, or practical.
And so, recently, I found myself sitting in a restaurant, being asked about the making of art in Egypt in the nineties by someone I had not seen for the best part of that decade. For many of these years I had been a regular reviewer of exhibitions: more recently the regularity of the exercise has palled to the extent that it is now difficult to walk into a gallery and almost impossible to attend an opening where in any case it is not the art that matters but those in attendance. How else can you explain that, in public and private exhibition spaces alike, hundreds of people will turn up for the first night, obscuring from view the objects that are the supposed raison d'être of the occasion, while for the next three or four weeks, when the exhibits themselves can actually be seen, the gallery will be lucky if it has a couple of dozen people passing through?
Having been as honest as is permissible for a reviewer in print -- and not being blind, not having any specific agendas to pursue -- after 10 years a gallery full of artists is a far from comfortable place. Some raise their voices, some look at you with barely concealed loathing, others move to the other side of the room. There are the exceptions, those that will acknowledge that at least you took the trouble to look, and look hard, but they are few and far between. Honourable behaviour is as rare among artists as any others.
This not having a particular agenda to pursue is a double-edged sword, particularly for the outsider -- my first published review in Egypt may have appeared under the name Nagui Rayan but that was a convoluted typographical error, an accidental sobriquet quickly corrected -- who can always be marginalised. You refuse the agendas because they cannot be taken seriously; your refusal is proof that you do not understand and therefore cannot have anything to say. However flimsy the reasoning it does not alter the effectiveness of the mechanism. Your marginalisation is cast in concrete. It is non-negotiable. It is the opposite situation to that faced by the local reviewer whose opinions, it is rightly or wrongly assumed, are always coloured by considerations other than those that should rightly be under review.
And so it is that there have been very few art reviews appearing under my name of late, an abnegation of responsibility, perhaps, but have a heart, there is just so much déjà vu you can reasonably expect the reviewer to undergo. Which is, more or less, what I said to the person with whom I was dining.
The nineties? Well, there has been the emergence of what might constitute, if you are inclined to optimism, a larger "independent" scene. This notion of independence, though, must be subjected to interrogation rather than being accepted at face value. Matters of funding are never neutral. Money talks, and it is determined, one way or another, to have the last word.
There is a certain reassurance, however bleak, in continuities. And in the nineties it is the continuities that have been more blatant than the breaks. A decade of looking at things hanging on walls, projected on walls or displayed on tables and floors between the same walls, confirms that it is nigh on impossible for work to emerge from beneath the dead hand of the institution. And the larger the institution the more potentially suffocating its effects. Thus one is forced to witness the tortured arabesques undertaken by those who when I arrived in Cairo really did believe they constituted an independent scene and somehow still believe they do. Their poses are the same, their gestures; they say the same things with the same emphases -- having worked on a routine I suppose there is a vested interest in seeing it run and run -- but the whole performance has slipped into vicious parody, if indeed it was ever convincing. And now they occupy posts the previous holders of which they once denigrated. The vanity of the co-opted is one of the great constants of life: personality was always the problem, never structure, and now that they are firmly ensconced in the office things can only get better. The contortions they are forced to undergo to sustain their own illusions are positively freakish. Such vanity, as always, requires no response.
Good work slips, as it always has, from beneath the dead hand by accident. And it does not matter if the hand belongs to foreign -- and post-11 September there has been a large amount of money available for foreign curators willing to showcase art from the region and post this monstrous war in Iraq there will undoubtedly be a great deal more -- or government funders; it does not matter if it belongs to the bureaucratic hierarchy or the private gallerist. Work occasionally escapes, as it always has, the systems in which it is embedded to take you by surprise. The making of important things is, as always, on the outside edge of the possible, and there it will remain however much one rails. It is a sporadic accident, a miracle of sorts, and there is no trick to it. No directions, no new attitude to the body, no rearranging of space, none of the questions I was asked over dinner. And if its making requires the stoniest of egos it requires, too, that unlikely honesty that refuses vanity to better accommodate the more solid truths.
