Juno Salazar Parreñas and Daniel Lie, Daiara Tukano and Nnenna Okore, in their practices and in the conversations that unfolded between them during the C-MAP seminar, engage more-than-human worlds, closely attuned to the relationships within them, and reaching across differences and disciplinary divides. Through specific in-depth emphases, they all carry memories and knowledge of historical damage and toxicities toward futurities, divergently imagined. These conversations made me think through, again but differently with the distance and learning that has transpired since a 2015 exhibition I co-organized at Aarhus Kunsthal with Elaine Gan and Steven Lam entitled DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking“ (figs. 1-3, as above).¹ DUMP! sought to think away from the primacy of making and production in the field of art, evoking the heap of decomposition and unruly combinations of Donna Haraway, but also the place where production becomes detritus: the trash heap of our contemporary anthropocenic present.² Alongside artworks, we included organisms and dumped a pile of wood chips (fig. 4, below) that was watered frequently (the Kunsthal graciously welcomed activities not normally allowed in a museum space) to invite fungal decomposition. A symposium that took place during the exhibition featured, among other things, culminations of collaborations between artists and scientists; a resumption of Cecilia Vicuña’s Semiya (fig. 5), a call for seeds originally proposed to Salvador Allende in 1971; a potato harvest (fig. 6, further down); a forage followed by a meal; a talk between anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and biologist Jens Christian Svenning; and a reading group focused on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.³ The project sought to actively break down dichotomies and binaries—nature and culture, science and the humanities, wonder and comprehension, humans and more-than-humans—at the heart of historical hierarchies that have justified subordinations like white supremacy, man over matter, man over woman, and destructions wrought by colonialism and imperialism.

Despite the dissolution of boundaries that is so important to thinking through our present and to imagining a better future, I still find myself grappling with some key contradictions at the heart of ecological and environmental thought and the ways they are bound up with culture and art. These contradictions do not easily decompose in my mind, leaving me to alternate from one perspective to another in a movement that doesn’t seem conducive to reconciliation. The proposed methodology of transversalism of the C-MAP seminar does not deny differences but rather is preoccupied with weaving through them, and the sessions’ speakers demonstrated an investment in breaking down divisions while grappling with problems head on. With this background, I thought it would be a good exercise to focus on some of these contradictions as a way to reflect upon current practices and to acknowledge that when binaries are dissolved, the trajectory is not necessarily clear.⁴

What follows is a calling out of three key contradictions that I find particularly pertinent to art’s embeddedness with various ecologies. In compiling this list, which is by no means all-encompassing or conclusive, I am indebted to many collaborators over the years and to the conversations between Salazar Parreñas, Lie, Tukano, and Okore in the C-MAP seminar.⁵ My thinking on this subject is in progress, and what follows will likely read as the exercise of writing-thinking that produced it: a dumpy dialectic.

The Damaged and the Pristine

DUMP! dwelled in the trash heap, thereby unwinding the logic of nature as pristine. A parallel site to that of the Kunsthal was Søby Brunkulslejerne, a deeply contaminated brown-coal mining site some 50 miles from the exhibition venue. Despite the focus on ecosystems affected by industrialization and colonialism, I still ponder how images conjuring landscapes without traces of modernity and colonialism at the same time can elicit fabulation and the imagination of better futures. Chief among the contradictions and contrasts that I find particularly sticky is that the capacity to think hope and healing on a damaged planet hinges on the ideas and imaginaries of precolonial, pre-destroyed landscapes. This amounts to so many national romantic imaginaries across the world, images that often accompanied colonial expansion and the destruction by industrialization of those landscapes, but also the sweeping vistas of screen savers and so many vacation photos that I too am guilty of perpetrating.

It is important to recognize the stronghold of the pre-destroyed or repaired landscape in the field of art. Art that deals with landscape inevitably comes to jostle with the histories of these imaginaries and the ways in which such images have been and continue to be conducive to a denial of the past and present damages and destructions induced by colonialism, imperialism, and modernity. Images of nature untouched also contribute to the marketing of landscapes, which have been completely altered by colonialism and conquest, for ecotourism that in turn further displaces the very populations who have historically inhabited the land.⁶ Ignoring histories of destruction and subordination, notions of the pristinely natural also belie the fact that every corner of the earth is affected by human intervention, whether visibly or not: microplastics are distributed everywhere, fusing with all bodies as well as geological material, just as the particles from prior nuclear detonations continue to circumnavigate the globe.⁷ These imaginaries also contribute to greenwashing and recycling that obfuscate the reality that nothing ever actually goes away; it just ends up broken down, redistributed, and somewhere else.

Colonial histories in relation to what came before them also resonates with the representation and inclusion of indigenous cultures in Western institutions. Activist and artist Daiara Tukano powerfully confronted the contemporary artworld’s gradual coming to terms with the historical exclusion of indigenous perspectives, including the fact that Western aesthetic categories have been intricately bound up with the construction of indigenous peoples as racialized and inferior. Such inclusions in Western presentational frames, as Tukano has called out, risk confining indigenous peoples and cultures to a historical past, banished from the present, and absorbed into the very systems of presentation and oppression that served colonialism and imperialism. Conversely, an approach that denies precolonial perspectives and notions of origin, integral to many indigenous cosmologies, risks occluding the valuable insights that these alternate ontologies hold for a future that is not dominated by extractivist, capitalist logics.⁸ With the future of the Tukano people as stated objective, employing a counter-colonial methodology, Tukano articulated Western institutions as her first interlocutor, thereby flipping the script: rather than framing indigenous cultures in the manner of Western institutions, Tukano insisted on the West’s desperate need for a radically different framework, with coexistence at its heart, a prerequisite for more-than-human survival.

Omnipotence and Impotence

Another key contradiction that I find inextricably intertwined with questions of the environment and how it is perceived concerns the concept of human agency. Humans can be construed as piles of bacteria, and yet they can also be characterized as authors of nuclear detonations, oil spills, and carbon emissions. Despite some humans’ role in setting off chain reactions of environmental destruction, the processes in motion are beyond human control. Global warming, though propelled by industrial processes, has created a multitude of effects that humans do not steer, just as the coronavirus, likely caused by the human-driven destruction of habitats, has killed millions of people on the planet.⁹ An important political problem at the crux of these contradictions has to do with the potential for humans to change the course of this chain of events—logics that typically rely on flawed characterizations of human agency and omnipotence by ignoring that we are inseparably linked to other species and our surrounding environment.

Along this jagged contradictory line, it was perhaps at the moment when the climate crisis was presented as “fixable”—a hole in the ozone layer to be patched—that the environmental movement in the West was born. Scientific approaches to encountering the world tend to double down on human-centric views—the very conceptions that must be overturned in order to address the crisis that the planet’s beings are currently facing. Inversely, conceptions that present all beings as equals (both between species and among humans) risk disavowing the hierarchies that have served to fix some species and human beings as subservient and inferior, and the fact that only some have done the most harm.

In art, the logics of individual agency and autonomy have been central to artistic practice and they have engendered ideological constructions of individuals as separate from one another and the world, mischaracterizing the complex webs from which humans cannot be torn. Nevertheless, artists have produced work that effectively decenters humankind, opening up production and reception to other makers and species communities. Such is the case of Åsa Sonjasdotter and her contribution to DUMP! (fig. 6), which featured photographs from the Groß Lüsewitz Breeding Institute in East Germany, an entity initiated by the Soviet Union in 1948, and renamed the Institute for Potato Research in 1968, where the Adretta potato variety was first developed. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, former employees of the Institute established a company, utilizing research gained and patenting the potato, which continues to be planted by small farms. For the show, the potato grew, with watering support, in the Kunsthal courtyard. Pawel Wojtasik’s film Naked (2006) (fig. 7) shows a colony of mole rats living in a laboratory at a major American university. Due to human meddling, the mole rat is the most inbred species on the planet and has the longest lifespan of any laboratory animal of its size. The film gets up close, following the animals’ lives in detail and their otherwise overlooked socialities in—and in spite of—their captivity.

While creation and production is increasingly acknowledged as being the work of many actors, including the more-than-human collaboration, the aesthetic experience and perception nevertheless often seem to default to the individual realm, of one aesthetic experience isolated and against the next. To my mind, it is important for art to think through whether perception and experience can be conceived beyond solipsism.

Sense and Nonsense

Representation and signification are pivotal to art, and yet it is important to recognize that they are also distancing mechanisms, pulling us away from matter. Central to the question of expanding our frame beyond the human is to reckon with the fact that the privileged modes of human perception and communication, sight and language, cannot be relied upon for properly experiencing, accounting for, and relating to the world. There is great risk when human perception and modes of understanding come to guide environmental action, and thus when human cognition and prioritizations are projected onto other species and ecosystems. In crossing barriers of intelligibility and communication, there is always a real threat of domination and violence, of giving what is not desired or needed—a gift that might be tantamount to harm.¹⁰ Sight is a notoriously flawed mode for producing understanding and signification can obstruct more-than-human perspectives and material ways of knowing. Indeed, so much of the world cannot be grasped by vision and language alone. All the senses must be taken into account in order to fully perceive the world we inhabit, and nonverbal communications needs to be appreciated as equally relational. It is also crucial to acknowledge that multitudes are unknown or not yet known as a step toward countering human delusions of omnipotence. Moreover, vision has been historically bound up with distance and separation and is intrinsically linked to Western epistemologies’ privileging of surface and appearance. The conception of appearance as a depth relation has importantly been instrumental in the logics of racism, white supremacist hierarchies and extractivism.

While language is exclusionary and denies other species the right to speak, one cannot deny that it is the default means of communication among humans, who hold the capacity to both produce and prevent destruction at great scales. And despite the powerful role scientific practices have played in colonial invasion, conquest, and extermination, methods of empirical observation, classification, and analyses still hold important possibilities for gaining knowledge and understanding of other species, across lines of difference. Mycology, the study of fungi, for instance, has opened up so many ways of breaking down habitual binary understandings (life and death, creation and destruction, gendered constructions, and more). Furthermore, scientific discoveries are, as artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña calls attention to, often in alignment with indigenous cosmologies and material knowledges.¹¹

Art sits fitfully within this space, between histories of depiction and signification and what cannot be codified, represented, communicated. All of the speakers provided openings into this field: Daniel Lie spoke about situating their practice within “the other-than-you-other-than-me”; Daiara Tukano addressed the nonhuman as a key interlocutor and the centrality of cosmovisions to her practice; Nnenna Okore invoked Ibo call-and-response and speaking beyond the human as a background for her work; Salazar Parreñas addressed the unknowability of orangutan desires as a framework that acknowledges incommensurability as well as codependence. As I listened, binaries were dismantled but contradictions sprouted and blossomed; questions led to more wonder.

DUMP! sought to decenter representation and signification as the primary modes of exhibition-making. It aimed to bring in materialities that could be experienced through different sensorial means. To this effect, Vicuña’s Semiya (figs. 8-9) included seeds collected by the artist in Chile as well as seeds brought to the exhibition by visitors. These were studied carefully through magnifying glasses, their minute scale enlarged and reminiscent of constellations holding the enormity of galaxies. The transversal proposes for us a perspective that allows us to think across distance, through the near and the far, perhaps even allowing us to connect the minute with the majestic. Nestled within this methodology, and pertaining to perception and communication, too, is the conundrum of solidarity on a planetary scale. Broaching vast distances clashes with the learned experience that knowing and communication, despite technological advancements, still relies on sensing, nonverbal communication and listening in the near. To address these planetary crises necessitates encounter and meeting, best up close, which paradoxically accelerates the crisis on our hands.

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Ana Janevski/Sarah Lookofsky: A prescient place to begin would be with the final chapter of your book Comradeship, published last year. Titled “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary,” it is a kind of science fiction account of the aftermath of some unknown but cataclysmic event that has destroyed all material culture, including buildings and objects, with only memories left in its wake. You write: 

These days we meet and talk in underground chambers, beneath the ruins of our former institutions; all we have left are our human resources. (…) No museums, no careers, no Documenta, no Venice. No competition over prestige, no funding, no government. Just a bloody fight for survival, with no hypocrisy or masquerades. I recognize now that this struggle did not start with the catastrophe. My years at the Moderna galerija were already a battle, one I hardly would have survived without a community held together not just by family ties or personal friendship but by a cause bigger than any of us as individuals. Through war to peace, through socialism to capitalism, from the Yugoslav dinar to the Slovene tolar and finally to the euro. The last moment, remember, when Slovenia joined the European Union, was somehow meant to signal the end of the great social transition! How ironic, then, that this transition was accompanied by the election of a right-wing government in Slovenia and, we feared, a new era of fascism. But that bad future didn’t last. The living memory of civil society from the 1980s was too strong. That spirit reawakened and answered the threat. A spirit of collectivism lives on, too, in L’Internationale, the international confederation of institutions launched in the very place where Nika and I sit now. Our museums are gone, and we don’t meet as often since we can no longer travel by plane. But our friendship has only grown stronger. Cynical reason having lost its purchase, there is now even greater idealism among us. The senses of solidarity and shared humanity once left in the dustbin of history are in the new light of aftermath being revived and redefined. I think we will survive this disaster. My friends are alive and I can hardly wait to see them roar again like young lions—to sit down with them again in some ruin and start planning a renewed world.

It is incredible to think that you published this last year, with a launch in New York, where we saw you. One could argue that version of what you described then has now come to pass: a global virus has ravaged countries around the world, with many institutions reeling as a result, some may not reopen. With this peculiar collapse of past and future, fiction and fact, can you talk about your thinking and planning as COVID-19 became a reality that demanded your institutional response?

Zdenka Badinovac: I believe two things I predicted in My Post-Catastrophic Glossary have come true with this pandemic: just as I had imagined, it took a disaster of planetary proportions to derail us, and we had to find ourselves without our museums, standing on their ruins as it were, before we could change our thinking. True, we were only left without access to our museums for two months, but the experience was quite sobering. Working from home taught us a great deal, lessons we may well revisit time and again. Clearly, museums will have to be thought about differently for quite some time; the epidemic can strike again at any moment, which is one of the reasons why planning costly exhibitions has become just too risky. Many of my colleagues working in museums want to show solidarity with others, it’s something we have discussed also within our confederation of museums L’Internationale—all of our member museums are ready to work differently now, to seriously consider redistributing funds to projects that could involve precarious artists and other external collaborators. Solidarity has become a key issue, not as an expression of our goodness, but as a condition of our collaboration in general, since otherwise prosperous institutions will only be able to collaborate with other prosperous institutions, which does not allow for the production of new knowledge. In the case of our institution, MG+MSUM, the situation is pretty dire: it was a low-budget institution even before this crisis, now things are bound to only get worse. I see a possible solution in diverse local and international agents coming together for projects that are sustainable, meaning that they involve care for others and a different economy of solidarity not based exclusively on market economy, but potentially involving also direct exchange of services and goods… Of course, people cannot live without money, so more than that has to be done; there is a lot of talk about public works, which might provide a source of income for artists, at least for a while. The state should provide funds for weathering this crisis both for artists and the sphere of culture in general. At MG+MSUM, we have decided to prioritize purchasing works from living artists, the dead can wait. A sustainable museum must lean on its constituents, forging various temporary alliances with them, alliances that are configured and reconfigured. We are probably about to face a time of major changes in institutions, which will assume a greater social role rather than follow the logic of cultural industries. Just like health care and education, culture and art also need to be predominantly publicly financed, as this corona crisis has proven.

AJ/SL: The opening essay of the book is your catalog essay for the exhibition “Body and the East,” 1998, which was the first international survey of the art performed in Eastern Europe from the 60s until the 90s. It included artists and researchers from fourteen Eastern European countries. You said that by putting body art at the center of the first EE survey about post avant-garde art coming from the East, you wanted to emphasize how body art incorporated important social experience and to discuss the representational character of “Eastern art.” Your interest in body art and performance is not engaged with the metaphysics of presence, but open-ended, social and mediated. COVID-19 has put the body at the center of attention: physical proximity is marked as potentially lethal; the representation of sick bodies is strangely rare despite the immensity of the global death toll; and new technologies of both tracking and digital interaction are precipitously advancing. How are you now thinking of the contemporary status of the body and whether it still involves any kind of geographic differentiation?

ZB: In my text for the Body and the East catalogue I wrote that Tomislav Gotovac streaking through the streets of Zagreb and Belgrade probably did not differ in action from other artists doing something similar in the streets of New York or London in the 1960s and 1970s. What was different, what is different is always the perception of the environment. In Yugoslavia during socialist times, such actions were automatically seen as political provocations. But then, they are also seen as provocation today. This week, two Slovene performers stripped in front of the building of the Ministry of Culture in Ljubljana in protest against the current cultural politics, and it was clear to everyone why they did it. A naked body may always look the same everywhere, but in reality it is not, nudity is always situated in the context of a specific socio-political moment and it is also interpreted as such. Another thing the coronavirus pandemic did was remind us of our mortality; our civilization had relegated death to the margins, but now the significance of rituals is being discussed again, saying goodbye to departed loved ones, mourning and grieving. I am currently working on an exhibition dealing with the notion of heroism, with the question of what we are actually prepared to die for. This is a very important question since it concerns freedom. With the numbers of authoritative state leaders increasing, freedom is in jeopardy, and the pandemic has contributed to this considerably. In body art, artists have often pushed themselves close to death in order to feel free. As we witness thousands of people dying of the coronavirus today, we naturally put empathy first, but that does not make the issue of freedom any less important.

AJ/SL: “Care: ‘relations [that] maintain and repair a world so that humans and non-humans can live in it as well as possible in a complex life-sustaining web.’ – Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017” is the opening line of a statement that the network of museums that you co-founded, L’Internationale, has issued during the coronavirus lockdown. Care and sustainability have been central to think about our present and future. You mentioned several times in your writing that an art institution should not merely respond to the context but create context or be a “revolutionary subject” of the time we inhabit. In her essay, Lockdown Theatre (2): Beyond the time of the right care: A letter to the performance artist, the writer and theorist Bojana Kunst quotes Puig de La Bellacasa and makes an interesting distinction between the “right care,” which follows norms, and “care with” that involves a knitting together of systems and processes of co-survival and support. Are there any recent examples of “caring with” that you can think of?

ZB: Art institutions can serve as the place where micro- and macro-politics can come together. This pandemic has brought “care” to the foreground as a key word that must be used with precision. Both Bellacasa and Kunst know what they are talking about and both have radical forms of care in mind. But I also think that this word gives emphasis to something that has long been inherent to art, and partly also to art institutions. Socially critical art always strives for a better world. It is simply a matter of not being indifferent, of caring about what goes on around us. And, having worked for an art institution for thirty years, I see it as essential that all these micro-efforts and experiences should be incorporated into the structures of education, culture, urban planning, etc. Sustainable solutions cannot remain confined to micropolitics, but can and must be protected by systems, and here is where museums can play an important role. They can at least enact something that the state should organize on a much larger scale. Because of the pandemic, museums lost many of their external collaborators and workers, such as museum attendants, educators, designers… Most of our museum attendants at the MG+MSUM are students and artists. When our museum buildings closed and the staff working from home, our external coworkers were suddenly out of work. In response, we launched the “Fill Two Needs with One Deed” action, employing our museum attendants to look after sick artists and pensioners by doing their shopping, talking to them on the phone or over video chat, etc. Not all who found themselves out of work were involved in this, but I nonetheless feel that this project was an important symbolic gesture of what an institution can do and that an institution should always take a stand and clearly express that it cares.

AJ/SL: There is a lot of discussion about whether there is a return to normal or what will be a “new normal.” In former Yugoslavia, there is an experience of the process of normalization after the war and then, following EU integration, a normalization through cultural integration, in which “culture” was more or less explicitly understood as a means of integration, of bringing Eastern Europe closer to standards of Western liberal-capitalistic order. The call for the online exhibition that the museum initiated in response to COVID-19, Viral Self Portrait, ends with “The future is either corona capitalism as the next stage of cognitive capitalism or else a corona rebellion against this standardization – and this is where art can play a major role.” We know you can’t predict the future but do you hold out hope that rebellion might prevail over normalization?

ZB: Today, we see people protesting all over the world. In Europe, they are rebelling against autocratic leaders and corruption, as is currently the case in Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary to name a few; in the United States, there is a veritable rebellion against racism; and soon there will be more and more fired workers in the streets around the globe. Until recently, progressive artists and theorists in the territory of former Yugoslavia looked back to the positive experience of socialism in their work, to a society of solidarity that no longer exists. While such revisiting of the past frequently bore a nostalgic note, this pandemic has forcibly pushed to the foreground the issue of the public healthcare system, as countries with predominantly privatized healthcare had great difficulties and high numbers of casualties. Where matters were not organized on the national level, people self-organized within their communities to help one another; we could see all manner of civil initiatives taking place. Care came alive in myriad micro-relations, and now it’s up to the large systems to learn from them. The experience of care “from below” is crucial in this moment; if macro-politics were to incorporate it, this would be a huge historical leap forward. There are still two possible outcomes before us: an even more ruthless form of capitalism or a society of solidarity.

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The Mokick S50 series is a design classic from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Communist East German state that existed between 1949 and 1990. Conceived by Karl Clauss Dietel with Lutz Rudolph in 1967 and produced under the Simson name from 1974 to 1990,¹ the motorcycle is defined by a linear clarity in which its structural components, such as the gas tank, seat, and motor, are clearly defined and delicately separated from one another. This design sets the Mokick apart from a common motorcycle typology in which a uniform, molded body disguises the underlying mechanics. As an object of industrial manufacture, with interlinking aesthetic and functional properties, the Mokick is interesting to consider not only in relation to the econonomic context of the GDR, but also, more broadly, in relation to the history of postwar design.

A group of MoMA staff met with Dietel, a pivotal industrial designer in the GDR, in his home in Chemnitz, where he showed us examples of his creations for East German production—including typewriters, radios, and public sculpture—and introduced us to his long career of formal invention with the aims of fabrication and use within the context of a Communist state. Particularly revelatory was his statement that the motorcycle’s form was inspired by the compositions of Jean (Hans) Arp in which singular forms are autonomous yet still contribute to a cohesive whole. This aesthetic structure was given utilitarian function in what has been termed the “open principle” (das offene Prinzip), in which each component of the motorcycle is compositionally independent, with space around it. This construct not only facilitated easier repair of individual parts, it also has availed the vehicle to modification and technological improvement over the course of the sixteen models that constitute its production history. This includes, for instance, upgrades to the motor in 1980 and 1982, updates to the the gas tank in 1978 and 1981, and the addition of a rev counter in 1982.

Dietel—while acknowledging that censorship, intervention by the state, and limited resources put severe constrictions on creativity in the GDR²—was insistent that his work should be seen not only as belonging to an isolated history of GDR production but also as part of a longer tradition of German industrial design. As such, he sees his vehicle designs, which include designs for the iconic East German Trabant, as connected to a strong tradition of automotive production in Germany in which Chemnitz was an important prewar center.³ In our conversation, Dietel also recognized the important influence of the Bauhaus, where his professors at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin-Weißensee had trained, which is clearly resonant in the Mokick’s functionality. He also emphasized the inspiring work of Marianne Brandt (German, 1893–1983), the legendary Bauhaus teacher and also a resident of Chemnitz, who was his mentor and close friend.

Dietel further called attention to the fact that his products were sometimes ahead of their Western counterparts, describing, for example, a transistor radio that features a particular speaker construction later used in Sony models, which are more recognized. Toward the end of our time together, I asked Dietel about his knowledge of Western design objects while he was working in the GDR. Recognizing in my question the supposition that the GDR must have been copying Western precedents, he responded by stating that not all objects in the West were good, and not all objects produced for the GDR were bad.

Though the Mokick S50 series must, of course, be understood within an economic context in which product longevity was bound to resource scarcity and the absence of a consumer economy, the design has clearly withstood the test of time. Throughout our trip, the model still, more than twenty-five years after production of it ceased, can be spotted on German streets—no doubt owing to the fact that its freestanding parts continue to enable ongoing tinkering by contemporary aficionados. While a product of its time, the S50 series is nonetheless striking in its contemporaneity: the notion of an ever-customizable product appeals to ideals of sustainable design that counter the ecological effects of an economy based on planned obsolescence, just as the principle of inventing with a view to later modification is in tune with iterative digital design that is premised on continual improvement upon use rather than on a final product.

Current resonances aside, this GDR motorcycle holds its place in the history of industrial design as well as in the postwar global legacies of the Bauhaus. Although the Bauhaus was accused of decadent formalism and thus officially repressed by the East German state,⁴  its impact clearly extended to objects manufactured within the GDR system, including to this design that brought utilitarian purpose to Arp’s compositional syntax. As such, this vehicle not only offers a fecund example for a broader study of the functionalist aims and manifest outcomes of the Bauhaus, it also unsettles a historical approach that seeks to uphold an iron division between Eastern and Western useful things.

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Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

Publication al-Adab
Date 1956
Language Arabic

“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis. The resulting answers reflect a diversity of viewpoints on the status of the arts vis-à-vis burgeoning independent nations, cultural heritage, and historical tradition, as well as on the legacies of colonial artistic influence.

The questionnaire, here represented in full, was excerpted for the 2018 publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. To access a PDF of the original roundtable in Arabic and other sources translated for the book, please visit the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) website.

Art and Us

In presenting this special edition, we are led to ask ourselves about the state of art in the Arab world in this period in which a true awareness is violently impelling us to renew our strength and exploit our potential. There is no doubt that the answer to this question will point to the state of the artistic sense within our being, indicating whether it is healthy or ill, whether it is active or ailing. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the artistic sense of a particular nation is a measure of its quality of life and its ability to create a civilization.

To what extent is this artistic sense healthy within our being?

Upon reviewing the state of contemporary Arab arts—including painting, sculpture, photography, music, singing, dance, theater, and cinema—those who know a bit about culture will find no difficulty in recognizing that those arts collectively inspire a sense of reassurance, and may promise a better future than their current reality.

Without fear of generalizing, we can say that all of these arts suffer, first and foremost, from the fact that they have not found a distinctive personal style, a style that would convey their characteristics. These arts have nearly lost their character, and for this reason, they are on the verge of being exposed as unworthy of immortality.

There may be individual painters who have found a particular style that reflects the integration of a character with clear features. However, they are all a long way from making painting an art with distinctive traits that are the result of inspiration from the geographical environment and social milieus, and from the historical heritage. It is rare that we find in the effects of our painters a focused direction, whether psychological or social. Although there are ties that could bind a number of these painters together to form a group, these ties generally fail to indicate a clear trend, let alone an outlined school. Perhaps the most prominent shortcoming that appears in painting in our region is that many who practice this art form are more likely to incorporate the characteristics of foreign schools of art—at the expense of seeking vibrant and genuine inspiration from the reality of their own lives and the lives of their people. Such painters do not have proper awareness of the issue of content, for if they did, they also would have proper awareness of form. Let any one of us question, upon seeing Surrealist, Cubist, or abstract paintings, the value of the psychological and artistic development that their creators went through before reaching this stage in their production!

We might not be wrong to say the same about our region’s sculpture, which is the brother of its painting. Most works produced in sculpture have, until now, been limited to statues of great, important, and notable figures; rare are the works that are produced by an “idea,” or that depict a “condition,” or denote a “trend.” Rather, in all cases they remain linked to the principle of commerce—a principle that is forever fated to corrupt the artistry of any work that seeks to be artistic. Among the reasons for this—or the results of this—may be the fact that we have yet to have the chance to see exquisite sculptural work that aspires to stand before one of those foreign works carved by nervous, creative fingers through whose veins runs the essence of sacrifice and burning inspiration.

As for instrumental music in our region, it verges on being absent. We cannot find a single Arab musician who has tried to compose a complete piece of music that expresses a thematic unity, such as the well-known classical works that, based in science, enjoy undisputed aesthetic value. It is almost strange that our modern musicians evidence such shortcomings in musical capacity, and that their utmost in composing is to make melodies to accompany the genre of poetic material being sung. As for sung music, it falls into one of two categories: The first is popular music, which may have personal characteristics. However, it is nearly petrified, for it is not developing, and it remains in a primitive state insofar as it is not following a course to becoming art. The second illegitimate form, in its claims to represent a renewal, is dependent on stealing foreign melodies without even attempting to be influenced or enriched by them, or to draw from them.

Whether this music is instrumental or sung, it has created for itself, within the realm of expression, a suffocating framework in which melodies and tunes revolve only around the subject of bemoaned love. This music is guilty of the greatest negligence in attempting to emulate the consciousness that the Arab nation is struggling to bring forth.

In terms of dance, I believe that no country has seen a deterioration like the one that has occurred in our countries. Individual dancing, almost entirely restricted to silly bodily movements based on repetition, shaking, and vibrations, lacks any artistic flair. Indeed, this dancing aims to arouse the senses in a superficial manner incapable of producing any refined pleasure. As for popular group dancing (folkloric dancing), it is virtually nonexistent, and there is not anyone who attributes any artistic value to this dance in its modern form.

Theater and cinema are what remain, and they are—outside of Egypt—nearly nonexistent. Within Egypt, the former has made significant headway but it has been unable to reach an artistic level that would satisfy an informed intellectual. We do not need to stop too long to consider cinema, as its value is deteriorating in all aspects. As such, it is no exaggeration to describe the cinema as being in a state of decline.

Now then, I am not painting a bleak picture of art in our region, but rather detailing the reality of the situation. What can we conclude from this review? Is our artistic sense ailing? Or has our ability to produce beautiful works of art disappeared, or at the very least, been reduced?

I myself am not able to answer these questions, for to do so would require that I study the subject more faithfully than I have—despite the fact that I consider this quick overview to be close to the truth, for it represents what many believe to be true, even though they may disagree as to why. 

However, I believe that publishing this special issue on the arts, both Arab and Western, is a broad way of posing the questions: Where do our arts stand in terms of the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation in this period? Is it possible for us to discern from the current state of these arts anything that points us away from pessimism and toward more positive signs about the future, in either the short or long term?

I doubt that the literature of our region, in terms of poetry and the novel at least, finds itself in a better state than that of the plastic arts. In order to experience a civilizational renaissance that is fruitful and productive, we should be provided with this important aspect—the artistic aspect—in the life of every idea. This art must be maintained at a high level to ensure that our artistic sense is alive and well.

—Souheil Idriss

Artists’ Questionnaire: “Art and Arab Life” (1956)

Modern Arab societies have gone through important periods of development and growth, to which numerous factors have contributed—and art has been one of these driving, influential factors. What role has art played in the field of your specialty (painting, music, theater, cinema, etc.) in terms of its impact on Arab society, and in terms of the impact of Arab society on it?

al-Adab posed this question to a group of people working in art in different Arab countries and received from them the following responses:

Response of Mr. Moustafa Farroukh (Lebanon)

If we examine the truth of our artistic production, and its relationship with our reality and our lives, we find that everything connected with culture in the Arab world is unconnected to anything of our reality. We find that chaos, unbelief, and turmoil dominate our reality and that the Arab thinker “lives in one valley” while the rest of the Arab nation lives in another completely.

Art, as one of the elements of culture and guidance, is rarely linked to our current reality. It fumbles about in the chaos of different foreign artistic currents. It is not inspired, whether in small or large part, by personal or national feelings, with the exception of certain phenomena. Most of this art was transferred or copied from foreign arts.

And we can see that art in Lebanon—which we might claim to be more developed than the other Arab countries due to its antiquity as well as for other reasons—is for the most part a copy, an imitation, and a repetition of foreign arts. Rarely does it express its reality, or derive from its surroundings and history or from personal feelings.

I do not wish to narrate events or to disclose certain artistic scandals; this is not my goal. Instead, I will leave this to time and the people’s cultural development, which will guarantee that all of it comes to light.

In sum, the dominant spirit of art in our region is a spirit of commercialism and the endless pursuit of money. Any careful observer will note that the jealousy, animosity, disaffection, and loss of communication between artists all comprise irrefutable evidence of the soundness of this statement. Thus, one does not hope that present-day art will undergo improvement or revival, for art anywhere in the world—and including in Lebanon—must be based on a spirit of love, and an artistic work must be for the sake of art and nothing but that.

As for the state of art in the rest of the Arab countries, it is no better off. Most of this art is based on copying and imitating art movements established in Europe, without making any attempt to deny this or to draw inspiration from the present realities and exigencies of Arab countries. At the same time, the mission of art, as we know, is the truthful expression of the feelings and reality of the nation.

For all these reasons, I am of the opinion that true artists must move away from the idea of commercialism and work solely for the sake of the art. They must seek inspiration from within themselves and from the nature of their countries, clearly after studying the principles and laws of art in proper art schools. Then they must leave behind the idea of commercialism and the acquisition of wealth, for art has never, throughout its long history, been a means of acquiring money and wealth. Finally, the adherents of art in our countries must not let envy permeate their being. Instead, they should possess a beautiful spirit and a good character, for this is the fertile soil in which true art can be established, and from which it can carry out its noble mission.

Response of Mr. Kaiser al-Jamil (Lebanon)

There is no relationship between our current reality and our artistic production. The artist has lived throughout the ages in a world of pleasure, pain, and imagination. He has lived among the people, with legends and the gods of legends. He, like the poet, if shaken by a sudden real event, will resort to symbolism to express his feelings.

Our social reality is not devoid of alluring novelty. If an artist is affected by this novelty, and if it penetrates the depths, he will transform it into a painting or sculpture, or compose it into a poem. However, adherence to reality limits the imagination and results in codification, which the artist’s nature abhors and to which it refuses to submit. I wish to say that the value of the subject of a painting is very insignificant, for the painting is in itself an independent artistic work—it is the world of the artist, in which he gathers his things, orders them, and then bestows on them from his mind and heart what tinges them with this strange hue that is what the tune is to the string, what the scent is to perfume, and what love is to the heart.

Response of Mr. Rachid Wehbe (Lebanon)

It is well known that art is considered the truthful mirror of every people. Indeed, it seeks inspiration from images of its past and its heritage, and it expresses its present and portrays its desires and hopes for the future. As such, art is a symbol of the spirit of that people. It echoes their responses to their environment and times, and in doing so presents a vibrant picture of life over time. If we search in the light of this truth for the relationship between our artistic production and our current reality, we will not find it to be a closely linked relationship. This is because, if we mention certain artistic works that attempt to approach this reality, and its stamping by national traits, we cannot forget that our present artistic production is represented by the theory of “art is for art’s sake,” where art exists in its ivory tower, far from the environment and the people; and literary ideas remain secondary to formal considerations, which center artistic value around the creation of a harmonious composition of volumes, lines, and colors.

Even though this theory enjoys a great deal of support from international artistic circles, we should nevertheless take into account our specific circumstances, as a people who are building for history, and ensure that we improve the alignment of the pillars onto which our solid edifice will be raised, so that our works present a true picture of what we feel and experience. Art is one of the most prominent of the intellectual aspects that accompany the renaissances of nations. The true artist is the person who lives in his environment, searching and inquiring in order to convey the feelings and impressions that influence him. Art in our region suffers from the foreign influences that nearly divert it from its ideal direction and separate it from our current realities. In many cases, our production comes as if it were another image from those schools whose artistic principles we have borrowed or taken. Drawing from others is necessary to develop our artistic culture, yet there is a major difference between consciously drawing from another’s work and adopting his ideas to the point of becoming lost in his personality, estranged from our context and our environment. Here, in order to successfully navigate this critical stage of our artistic life, we should work to liberate ourselves from all that obstructs our proper nationalist direction, in order to be rid of all foreign influence on our artistic thinking and to establish sound foundations for the independence of our artistic personality. We must search for this personality in our Eastern, Lebanese surroundings, which are full of vibrant, exciting light, as well as in our glorious national heritage and in the subjects that have value for us. We should remember that these surroundings have already enchanted Western artists and served as a source of innovation and inspiration for them. What would be more appropriate for us, as we revive these surroundings, than to draw from them the impetus for an elevated artistic production, consistent with our environmental circumstances—which we sense more fully than anyone else. Let us adopt them as a basis on which we plant the foundations of our artistic renaissance, that very renaissance we are working to bring about. And let us move forward by its light with strength, determination, and faith.

Response of Mr. Fouad Kamel (Egypt)

The art of Mahmoud Said is considered the first stage in the history of modern Egyptian art. He who researches Said’s two paintings zhat al-jada’il al-zhahabeyya [The One with Golden Locks] and ad-da’wa ila as-safar [A Call to Travel] will see in them the logical and emotional development of an artist who wished to link his studies of Western composition—including of light, shadow, and perspective—to the heritage of Coptic and Islamic art, so as to grow with his art in terms of humanism and populism. 

Just prior to 1940, sets of liberated ideas began to be formulated, based on a social awareness built on a material and psychological understanding. The magazine at-Tatawwur [Development] and then al-Majalla al-Jadeeda [The New Magazine] continued to publish these ideas, alongside the activities of the Art and Liberty group, who organized exhibitions of free art. We saw for the first time in modern history a union between art and literature, for the sake of achieving a revolutionary social language. Egypt read the poetry of George Hanin, the stories of Albert Cossery, and the articles of Anwar Kamel, Hussein Yousef Amin, and Yousef al-Afifi. It also saw the images of Ramses Younan, Kamel al-Telmasany, and Fouad Kamel. A revolutionary spirit filled the air, denouncing the facts of this corrupt life. Images and hopes of a new life were crafted out of the symbols of this dream.

Yousef al-Afifi and Hussein Yousef Amin made a significant contribution to the field of art education by developing the “New Awareness” current, and especially when Yousef al-Afifi dedicated himself to establishing the Higher Institute of Art Education for Teachers. A generation, led by Mahmoud Y. el-Bassiouny, Hamdy Khamees, Saad al-Khadim, and Latfy Zakki, completed their studies abroad. They resumed the work of spreading artistic awareness by forming art schools in public education.

The Contemporary Art group, established by Hussein Yousef Amin, drew from Egyptian legend and popular literature as the basis for its philosophy. It also took the tools used in daily life as forms for its artistic composition. Myth emerged for the first time from the literary domain into the realm of form and color. We find in the art of Aj-Jazzar and Hamed Nada a trend that is more compatible in this respect, while we find in the paintings of Samir Rafa’, Ibrahim Massa’ouda, Kamel Yousef, Mahmoud Khalil, and Salem Habashy certain subjective, rational, or poetic traits that are the result of the encounter with world cultures. As for art criticism and its value in defining and creating artistic currents, there was no clearly defined dogmatic criticism prior to the writings, lectures, and discussions of George Hanin, Yousef al-Afifi, Hussein Yousef Amin, Erik de Ghosh, and Cyril de Bou. This criticism and argumentation was only rarely published in the press. Rather, it was circulated within the art community and at private events. These discussions played an important role in forming and developing numerous artistic personalities.

We cannot ignore the importance of the attempts of Ahmed Rassem, who wrote for the first time to the Arab Library about modern Egyptian art in its first stages. We must also note that Rassem was interested in presenting the art of Kamel al-Telmasani in a lengthy article in the al-Ahram newspaper.

It was necessary for critics to emerge to re-create the history of Egyptian art and awaken the youth to its treasures and sources. Philip Darscott wrote and provided general images in which he chronicled and critiqued modern trends, yet he did not adopt a specific viewpoint, in contrast to the critic Aimé Azar, whose book The History of Modern Art in Egypt is comprised of six parts. After establishing a philosophy and objective for the book, Azar gathered together an assortment of modern Egyptian art. We should mention the crime that is committed by the Egyptian press today against these rising generations through its atrocious disregard for art criticism—or its recourse to personalities who are not knowledgeable or studied in either the origins of criticism or providing guidance. Numerous artistic personalities attempt to continue producing art, and they come together or split apart when showing their works. We find Yousef Sayyeda, Taheyya Haleem, Hassan al-Telmasani, Hamed Abdullah, Fathi al-Bakri, Ezzeddin Hamouda, Saleh Yosri, and Walim Ishaq, and yet this is an irresolute and ambiguous continuation.

Since 1953, Egyptian artists have felt the need to establish more vibrant arenas in which to display their developing art. Discussions in some of the newspapers have begun to ask about the role of art in relation to society, and debates have been initiated regarding the methods of realism in art—thereby following the current trend of freethinking that began with the establishment of the Art and Liberty group. Today we see that the Egyptian artist is nearly suffocating in his own art. If he does not set out for new horizons, armed with a progressive awareness of art and science, this artistic generation will be doomed to annihilation, and Egypt will continue to wait for another new generation to hold its dreams in their minds and hearts. These new horizons are the mural arts. And fortunately, the modern Egyptian artist has a long artistic heritage at his disposal, beginning with cave paintings from the prehistoric era and including pharaonic art and the art of churches and mosques. These different images and various materials can well serve as a fertile source for study, revival, and development. The Egyptian artist may be assured that the mural is also found in modern artistic heritage, as in the creations of Mexico’s artists such as [José Clemente] Orozco, [Diego] Rivera, and [Rufino] Tamayo, which occupy government buildings, halls of science, theaters, restaurants, and all the popular institutions. These are tall, broad pages, on which developed, modern artistic principles may be manifested in murals, without slipping into prevalent academic taste.

Today’s insightful critic senses the seeds of this art in the works of Hamed Nada in its latest phase.

The collective dreams of today should push beyond the limits of the frame and the salons, to be rejuvenated and to live under the sun, before the eyes of millions.

Response of Mr. Hamed Abdalla (Egypt)

Art and society simultaneously influence and are influenced by each other. The true artist takes reality as his raw material. He does not convey this reality literally, but rather revives it through his whole living being, “viewing it from within” as he creates it anew as a more vibrant reality. Society is also impacted by art and responds to its inspiration. For this reason, the content of art is the content of life. 

As for the artists who, adhering to pure formalism, imagine that pedantically creating empty forms is art, or the artists who imitate external reality or depict it in an anecdotal manner, considering art to be a means of comprehension and not an actual modality of knowledge, or who create art for the purpose of propaganda in any of its forms—those artists represent superficiality and stagnation in art, for they are only grazing the surface of life.

We note that every phase of society’s development is also a phase of the development of art and all sorts of ways of thinking. We find in Egyptian society’s phases of struggle—in the middle of this century, for example, for the cause of independence—that modern Egyptian representational art has been liberated from the influence of Western art and has been guided to its correct path: connected with its ancient, inherited past, and with the well of the art of the people and their traditions, adopting the principles of the artistic origins of the ancient East without imitating them, in contrast to the artistic origins of the West, which observe the rules of perspective painting, or the personification through the Modèle or Modulation. Those original principles of the West aimed to depict objects as seen by the eye without regard for their truth, and constitute a certain submission to the false appearance of nature—the principle that the contemporary West rejected when it abandoned easel painting for wall painting.

Response of Mr. Hamdy Ghaith (Egypt)

I would like us first to agree on the concept of the word theater, which is contained in the question. The theater, as I understand it, is this work or that artistic phenomenon that we see in the Dar al-Ta’lil and that comprises the literary text as well as production and acting in all their elements of movement, gesture, rhythm, music, sound, silence, lighting, and decor. In this way, theater becomes the complete dramatic act, not just the written play—for the written play, as long as it remains such, is not a theatrical act but merely a literary work.

If we understand the word theater in this way, then we are able to say that theater cannot influence nationalist thought, because it is, by nature, a result of this nationalist thinking, meaning, it follows from it rather than precedes it. If theater in Egypt (as opposed to Egyptian theater) has influenced nationalist thinking, this influence is reflected only in the men behind it, in that the producer and the actor have surpassed the playwright. This is because theater in Egypt began through the translation of Western literature. As such, its sole influence is in having established the art form of drama in Egyptian literature. If we wish to speak about theater in terms of the literary text that we call the play, it cannot be said that theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. This is because nationalist thought is a continuous current that takes on various forms, including the novel, poetry, photography, and plays. It cannot be said that the novel, for example, has influenced nationalist thought or been influenced by it, as the story itself is among the forms of this thought.

Thus, it is not possible to speak about the extent to which Egyptian theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. However, we can ask whether Egyptian theater has moved in pace with nationalist thought, or lagged behind it.

The nationalist thought contemporaneous to the establishment of Egyptian theater was itself what paved the way for the revolution of 1919. It preached political and social liberation. As for Egyptian theater, we unfortunately have to affirm that it has always lagged behind nationalist thought. In political terms, Egyptian theater did not play the same role as that played by other artistic and literary forms. Theater was never an expression of the Egyptian revolution; rather, it was surprised by it. Theater’s only role was to cry out in the wake of the revolution. The theater was highly insignificant on the battlefield, as the revolution’s events were always greater than it.

As the theater was mired in the melodrama that was translated or composed and that overran the Ramses troupe, Egyptian literature took a different course—a new path blazed by Taha Hussein, al-Mazni, and al-Aqqad. Though romantic theater may have been considered an expression of the middle class, meaning a natural expression of the Egyptian political and social revolution, it was incapable of comprehending this awareness; instead it took melodrama itself as a means of expression, but of what?

Perhaps we know that the melodrama was a theatrical expression of the regret of the collapsing landed gentry and its sense of doom in the face of the revolutionary tide of the middle class. In this way, the theater—represented first and foremost by the work of the Ramses troupe—was reactionary and misleading. This is absolutely clear not only from nationalist novels, but also from the novels that address social problems. We can take as an example of this the issue of women’s liberation, which has pervaded nationalist ideas in Egypt from the beginning of this century. On this issue, Egyptian theater adopted a reactionary position that, expressed in novels such as Zawgatina [Our Wives], asserts that the natural place for women is in the home.

All of this applies to Egyptian theater in the period in which we are living. The theater until now remains unable to adapt to new nationalist thought, for many reasons that cannot be mentioned here. While the realist school emerges in Egyptian literature, theater remains stuck in melodrama and vaudeville. And while Egyptian society is shaken from time to time by political and social uprisings, the theater is always surprised by these uprisings and never joins the calls for such uprisings in anything more than—in the best of cases—a weak voice that is quickly drowned out by these decisive popular movements. This is because the theater dealt with and continues to deal with political and social matters in an unsophisticated manner—rather than undertaking a real analysis and coming to a clear understanding of the truth of these matters in terms of their economic and social aspects, instead of solely within a socially regressive framework.

Finally, I wish to say that Egyptian theater has not been born yet, even if many signs indicate that its birth is not far off.

*Mr. Ghaith restricted his response to Arab theater in Egypt, due to its connection to his particular experience and his depiction of the general characteristics of theater in other Arab countries.

Response of Mr. Khalil al-Masry (Egypt)

Many researchers differ in their views of the arts in general, and of music in particular. Some say that art leads to renaissances. Others assert that art follows renaissances or, more clearly put, that art is a depiction of these renaissances, and that true art gives us a true picture. Since our views of this picture may differ, we may think of it as a point of origin, one that influences and guides society. Yet the meticulous researcher does not overlook the fact that this so-called true picture is merely a copy of the original, which is society. As such, art is but a chronicler of history, not an instigator of renaissances. If we accept this position, we find that Arab art has been able to depict the renaissances of its peoples and, with its limited or local capabilities, to give us a true picture of their prevalent anxiety. Arab music was influenced by Turkish music when the Turks had a say in the rule of our country, and it was influenced by the Western music that was present among us when we looked to the West and moved toward it. However, Arab music did not become completely devoted to the West, nor did it lose its identity and its ancient civilization. Rather, this influence embellished and enhanced Arab music, and moved it toward becoming a global art.

However, many factors existed in Arab countries that led to the decline of the arts, two of which are extremely important and thus worthy of mention: 

These two factors caused feelings of inadequacy among the Arab people and divided them into two groups, which moved in opposite directions. The first looked to the West, believed that Egypt was capable of rising to its level, and demanded the highest degree of freedom possible. The second was oriented toward the East, struggled to admit its own inadequacy, and clung to the flimsy threads of its Eastern identity—it called for conserving this identity by imposing strict censorship.

Despite this there is significant evidence today that Arab music is responding to and being influenced by the renaissances of the people. However, I disagree with those who say that Arab music is the creator and inspiration behind this reawakening.

Response of Mr. Maher Ra’ef (Egypt)

The West came before the East in revolting against men of religion—not religious teachings—who, without good intentions, appointed themselves the protectors and advocates of religion, after placing stumbling blocks on the road to the progress of civilization for so long. The impact of this was that the West made great strides in the fields of science, discovery, and invention, which with the East has been unable to keep pace. The West thus extended its authority over the East and launched a siege to prevent it from progressing, and even to block it from freedom. This became clearer than ever in art in general and particularly in the plastic arts, which are the topic of this discussion.

If art is the equal of science in the field of human progress, then we attempt to understand the truth of our external reality through science and to probe the depths of our internal reality through art. The two are linked in a way that reveals the extent of the importance of art to human life and the extent of its influence in the field of human progress.

The East, led by Egypt, has attempted to awaken from its ignorance and to cast off the effects of the political occupation and the foreign monopoly on Eastern thought and taste. By the East, I mean the Arab East. The effect of this revolution against this occupation and monopoly emerged in the field of plastic arts. And if it was right for us to keep pace with the West’s scientific progress and to take from the West its latest inventions, we do not have the least right to keep pace with the West in terms of its art, for art has a nation from which it must spring forth. And it has traditions, customs, and norms associated with a group of people who define its form and subject, and even the direction of its development. Those who attempt this not only carry within themselves the tools of their own destruction and the obliteration of their identity, they also help the West to directly or indirectly solidify its hold on the East.

Currently in Egypt, there are those doing all they can to embrace artistic trends to liberate Egyptian art from its slavery to foreign art, and even from a return to ancient Egyptian art—despite the fact that others claim the latter would return originality to Egyptian art. Yet this is not in accordance with the social environment, which defines the general image of art, even if the geographical environment is the same in both cases.

These modern trends have succeeded. In art, more or less, those embracing them have achieved their objective through their dedication to the principle upon which these ideas are based and through their keenness to expose themselves to modern global culture, which is necessary for the contemporary artist to be successful in realizing his mission. That he shares in abundance in addressing subjects related to social life in Egypt, with a view permeated by the logic of modern thought.

If the Egyptian public as a whole does not appreciate works of modern art, it is because these works are not as familiar to them as the thousand varieties of art presented to them by foreign artists and by teaching professors who took art from the institutes of Europe and circulated it, or worked to circulate it, in our region.

Response of Mr. Jewad Selim (Iraq)

In any time or place, all important and good artistic production is a mirror that reflects the reality in which it exists. How we perceive this product—whether it is truly human, and how it can be a genuine and powerful expression—all this is related to the freedom of the artist to express his surroundings. This is simultaneously an intellectual freedom and an economic one. There are hundreds of “shoulds” and “musts” that are repeatedly mentioned in our newspapers and magazines, and in most cases the writer is attempting to express his own superiority or the nobleness of his ideas, trying to extricate the artist from his stupefaction or backwardness. This generally indicates the presence of old commonplaces in new molds. Most authors who are agitated with lofty human ideas are quick to offer guidance to writers or artists, even when they themselves do not know or intentionally forget the contents of museums and books, and all the art that humanity has produced that restores our trust in humanity’s goodness.

Response of Mr. Hafidh al-Droubi (Iraq)

Our reality suffers in its appearance, but not in its essence, from the dominance of European character. Our way of life has taken on affectation in order to fit with European life. Local dress is on the verge of being swept aside by European styles as we leave the countryside and move to the cities. Moreover, there is a great contradiction between our core equilibrium as Eastern people and these almost completely false and affected appearances. This is in terms of our reality. In terms of art, the problem is different, for art in our region suffers from Western domination in both its essence and its external forms. In other words, the contradiction mentioned above is nearly nonexistent, for art in our region is in fact Western in its entirety. The reason for this goes back to the fact that painters, and Iraqi painters in particular, had their artistic beginnings and studies in Europe and in the style of European schools, and as such their views of things became that of a Western person. In addition, there was a dark period that cut us off from our heritage—whether ancient or Islamic civilizations—following which Iraqi artists opened their eyes and saw nothing but mature European art before them. As for our civilizational heritage, it remained concealed until only recently, when museums were established. As for local art, it is extremely simple in impression, so much so that is difficult to use it as any kind of basis. Another thing is that the local art market is invaded by an artistic culture with a European art affect, whether in in inquiry or in outline. We have barely any access to authentic Eastern art—such as Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art—despite the fact that the West has also been influenced by it, and despite its maturity and importance.

Today, we feel intense pain at this move away from local reality and national character. Most of us attempt and endeavor to establish an art that represents this reality, that influences it and is influenced by it, and each of us seeks to achieve it according to his specific point of view. Some deal with line and composition, attempting through them to claim something of the Assyrian and Sumerian spirit, yet they remain European nevertheless. Yet these artists try—always, they try.

Others continuously call for a specifically Iraqi art, yet they themselves have not found such a character. One of the Europeans who said that “dusty colors are of an Iraqi character” may have been mistaken, for Iraq is never dusty. And these are our colors. And this is our sun.

There are artists who consider their attempts to be Iraqi art, even as they follow the direction of the modern European school, and the French school in particular. This is because France had a major educational influence on these artists.

As for me personally, despite the fact that I continually endeavor to paint Iraqi subjects, on the basis of my upbringing in a purely Iraqi context, I continue to think of the work of European painters when picking up the brush and painting. As such, I continue to consider myself to be playing the role of attempting to establish a modern Iraqi school. Even though I have at times proceeded along the lines of the ancient Iraqi way, these were an imitation and nothing more.

As for how this relationship should be: we believe it should be a close relationship. Artistic tendencies are not subject to logical controls, but rather to the circumstances surrounding the art, the abovementioned factors, and other factors. These current schools will endeavor to create a sound, strong connection with reality, which continues to develop, and to strive to find its particular character.

Response of Mr. Ismaeil al-Sheikhly (Iraq)

For a long time, the Arab world has lagged behind the rest of the world in scientific progress as well as in social and political spheres. The inevitable result is a backwardness that is reflected in our social reality and that has led to a backwardness in thought, literature, and art.

The Arab world has been isolated from the rest of the world and thus rarely influenced by the intellectual currents that affect our times. The Baghdad school of painting under Abbasid rule deserves mention, although it ended with the Abbasid era. Al-Wasiti was one of the most prominent painters of this period. Yet throughout the last fifty years, the experience from which Iraq and the other Arab countries have suffered due to their contact with the civilized world—and to its innovations in the fields of science, industry, and thought—has led them to “borrow” from it. I doubt whether this assimilation of Western intellectual and artistic currents is deep and true, as our regressive reality is different from the natural, progressive reality of the West. For example, the appearance of Cubism in the Western world is justified, as it is an artistic form that evolved from previous artistic forms. We can say the same about the other artistic schools in the West. The Cubist trends in our country, however, fail to represent a genuine reality not only in terms of the type of production, but also in terms of our present historical circumstances. Owing to this, the artistic movement in Iraq has yet to acquire distinguishing characteristics and a clear identity in either form or content. The truth is that the artistic movement in our country represents nothing but confusion and turbulence resulting from the underdevelopment of the Iraqi identity in terms of expressing its condition, environment, and historical circumstances.

However, Iraq is on the verge of making major social, economic, and cultural progress, which will surely impact the production of our artists. Iraqi artists must seek inspiration from this new life, yet imbue it with their own particular Iraqi character. In my opinion, Iraqi artists should work toward establishing a connection to the public, for the purpose of developing the artistic taste of its people. This will not happen unless artists channel public concerns and feelings, through the expression of public and private subjects directly related to daily life, and unless the public acknowledges its own reality. However, at present this production carries no more than the purpose we envisage for it, which is only the development of artistic taste, a sense of beauty, and the artistic feelings of the public. The natural relationship between the artist and his audience will undoubtedly influence both the quality of artistic production and the public’s taste. Indeed, one of these factors will affect the other until art takes on an authentic form or many authentic forms that express the needs of the people and are simultaneously understood by them.

Response of Mr. Atta Sabri (Iraq)

Artistic production and reality have been interrelated since time immemorial. The first humans expressed the shape of animals due to their dire need for those animals and in order to cast away the dangers posed by them. Later came arts that expressed the ancient civilizations, such as in China, followed by those in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. In Mesopotamia, art represented power, might, and the conquests that were undertaken, such as the Lion of Babylon, the winged lion, and the reliefs that represent the kings of Assyria and others in their wars and conquests.

If we move on to thirteenth-century Baghdad and its famous artistic school, we see that the painter [Yehia bin Mahmoud al-Wasiti], in his illustrations of the Maqamat of al-Hariri, held today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris, realistically depicted views of human social life in the form of large drawings that remind us of wall reliefs. He depicted thirteenth-century Arabs in mosques, in the desert or field, in libraries, or in inns. Another famous manuscript, Kalila wa Dimnah, was painted by other artists to express their social circumstances and events through pictures of animals.

Moving ahead to Europe, particularly the age of the Renaissance in Italy and other countries, we see the artistic productions of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci in paintings such as The Last Supperby Leonardo, The Resurrection by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, as well as his great sculptures of Moses and David, and Raphael’s many paintings of the Virgin and Christ. Then came [Francisco de] Goya in Spain, who expressed in his paintings the atrocities of the French and their occupation, as well as the scandals of war.

If we move forward to today’s era, we find that the chaos, decadence, confusion, moral collapse, and apathy that followed the two [world] wars have had a major impact on artists. We find them defeated by reality and moving in different, confused directions. Their artistic production was in ebb and flood, until artists in some domains arrived at Social Realism and began to assert their social and political opinions in murals that gave expression to the working class, peasants, and others. This is what happened in Mexico at the hands of the artist [Diego] Rivera and others.

Here we see that the state entered the field and supported and directed artists, or imposed its will on them, so that these artists give voice to their society or political regime, either directly or indirectly. Whereas [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, with his regime known as the “New Deal,” moved to encourage artists materially and morally and left the field open to them with complete freedom of artistic production, the dictatorships prior to World War II imposed restrictions and conditions on the kinds of art permitted.

As for today in Iraq, following a long period of stagnation, we have embarked on a new and blessed artistic movement, initiated about a quarter of a century ago with our deceased artist Abdul Qadir al-Rassam, the “artist of Tigris and Baghdad,” who captured peaceful views of the landscape in his oil paintings. Then, after 1930, artistic missions began to go to Europe at the behest of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, and returned to their homeland after lengthy study in a new mold and with a European character. These new Iraqi artists, and their students after them, began to look to Europe as a source of revelation and inspiration for their artistic paintings and even their subjects, which became Leda and the Swan, flowers, landscapes, etc. They forgot all but a very little of their surroundings and the environment in which they lived.

Others then emerged who conducted their artistic experiments in the manner of the European artists who were prominent between the two wars, with distinguishing circumstances and causes. They began, in painting their pictures and images, to adopt the schools and methods of Cubism, Surrealism, or abstraction, regardless of the reasons that led European artists to use such modes of expression in their own paintings. As such, they imitated [Pablo] Picasso and others in order to be “modernized” painters. The truth is that we today are facing social, economic, and political problems and circumstances and going through new developments that differ completely from those of European artists.

We noticed that the exhibition of Indian art held in Baghdad three years ago bore a distinctly Indian character, and was tending toward the formation of a modern Indian school. Undoubtedly, that had a pronounced effect on the psyches of Iraqi artists and on a majority of those who visited this exhibition, thus prompting Iraqi artists to think about new and prospective ways to arrive at an Iraqi artistic school, or create a local character, or to form a style that represents Baghdad. Yet this cannot be attained in a single day, or even in a year. Rather, writers, literary figures, and artists must unite to establish the solutions and capacities for attaining a local character, with connection to the international artistic movement.

The new generation in Iraq today has begun to appreciate art in a very encouraging manner for this goal. For we must present more art exhibitions, with facilitation from the Ministry of Education via the Institute of Fine Arts, so as to connect with foreign countries and bring art exhibitions to Iraq, whether of the old works by their masters and schools or of the contemporary. And I think it is incumbent for artists to work to create an artistic and literary magazine to consolidate a public of readers who are thirsty for arts and literature.

Iraq today is going through the birth of a comprehensive architectural and industrial movement. As such, our architects must open the field to painters and sculptors to create murals and bas-relief sculptures on the walls of these buildings, and particularly government buildings, so as to be completely integrated. On the other hand, attention must be paid to commercial art, so that it can meet the needs of the country’s industrial production for images, advertisements, and other commercial art forms. Art must also be used for social purposes, such as social services and other uses. The new and expansive squares and open areas to be created upon completion of Baghdad’s city planning will be among the best arenas for sculptors in our country to erect monumental statues, which will become a Ka’aba for visitors and for excursionists who seek an escape from the people or fill their free time, just as in the squares of Rome, Paris, and London.

Our artistic production should be a true expression of our current reality. It must reflect the pains of the people as well as their joys, in social and popular subjects. The artist faces an open field, for these subjects have not been addressed previously. Art today is moving toward a kind of new realism, by which it is possible to record daily life in our country in tremendous, expressive paintings.

Response of Mr. Fateh al-Moudarres (Syria)

The Arab arts have suffered through a long period of decline, from painting to styles of buildings, from metal engraving to textiles, and even popular traditions of dress and song. In addition, a permanent religious opposition, combined with the shallowness of the scientific culture, and the lack of genuine, constructive attempts by Arab governments to revive popular Arab heritage—all this has led to the obliteration of what remained of a distinctive artistic heritage.

Along with all these urgent ailments, European imperialism arrived to spread distortion and poverty and poisoned relations between the remaining religious sects so as to politicize them. All this destroyed the last remaining bastion of Arab art in the East, and it remains in ruins.

If we wish to define a character for any Arab artistic production, or if we wish to find a link between any such production and our reality, we will fail. If a European critic today were to view any painting by an Arab painter, he would not find anything but a Turkish fez, the face of a dome, an ancient minaret, a strangely designed water pipe in a carnival of cafés, or a piece of embroidery from a worn-out Shiraz carpet!

The modern concept of contemporary realist Arab art is difficult to define, as the nonexistence of inherited artistic features has, to a great extent, rendered our Arab artistic production weak in terms of its identity. Indeed, the contemporary art of each state in the world is based on substantial inheritances. In India, we see in the paintings of modern artists clear references to the ancient Indian artistic heritage. The same is true of modern China, as well as Japan. We see in the exhibitions of all the nations an originality and differentiation that indicate that this painting is Indian or that painting is Chinese or Finnish. However, the painting created in the Arab East has no identity, for its character is lost, its originality erased, and it consists of a distorted, mixed-up imitation of the European schools. We can thus assert, for all the preceding reasons, that Arab artistic production has no relationship at all with our reality or our renaissance.

In order to bless contemporary Arab taste with a truly Arab art that interprets its reality and its social struggle on all fronts, we must begin a new “renaissance” era—meaning an era based on the rebirth of ancient Arab art, grafted to current modern concepts, in a light rich in distinctive color and inherited, authentic designs.

The reasons for the chaos to be found in the exhibitions held in Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad have become clear: There is no close coordination between governments and painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, and authors. Nor is there even a sense that this collaboration is lacking.

Come with me: Stand next to me before an Arab painting, and let us assume that its creator has called it an Arabic name meaning “Awakening” or “Revolution” or “Protest.” What would you find in this painting? You would not find anything except a carnival of influences, firstly because the artist has no personal style. You would not find any colors from the East, nor would you find that authentic effort to highlight originality in the orientation of the design and the subject as a whole. Perhaps the reason for this goes back to the fact that Arab history is not studied, on one hand, and on the other to the dearth of understanding of common artistic schools. Thus, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects are unable to establish a distinctive character by which they might define their place in the ranks of universal art.

The development of the artistic understanding of a contemporary people is not incompatible with the inherited ancient values that have a unique character. If you were to take even the most contemporary of schools, such as Surrealism, and if you as an artist fervently cling to your Arab nationalism, you would be able to render an original expression from your lines. And even if you were an advocate of the abstract or the nonobjective schools, you would be able to maintain a distinctive Arab character. This matter is inevitable for modern architects who insist on taking from the style of Le Corbusier! Indeed, if Le Corbusier had been Eastern or Arab, he would have given his school a distinctive character, while still observing the latest requirements of the age, because comprehending character requires it, and national pride as well!

I visited Europe this year, and found a unique character in every country I visited. When the steamer docked us back on Syrian shores, the absurd hodgepodge became apparent in the buildings, the music, and all signs of life—even in people’s faces! The East appeared before me as if it had been hit by a hydrogen bomb! How, then, can we respond to the original question: Does contemporary Arab artistic production have a connection to our reality—apart from what we have said in the preceding lines?

Our situation is disgraceful, our values cheap, and our confidence nonexistent. As such, our distinctive Arab identity is also absent. If we have been allowed to stand among the many nations, it is only because we have not yet died out completely.

Look: This man is Chinese, that one is Siamese; this man is Filipino, that one is French—and who do we have here? Tell me, by God, who is this strange creation who wears a fez on his head and on top of that a hat, and below them a tie, and on his shoulders an overcoat, and over that an abaya, and on his feet crepe-soled shoes. He speaks in a language that is neither Arabic nor Chinese nor Siamese, nor anything recognizable—his language does not even resemble the language of the birds! Now look at his face, and you will not even find distinctive Eastern features in it! After all this, how does your stomach accept and digest the painting the Arab holds in his hands, as if he were a beggar holding out an empty bowl, begging for the peoples’ sympathy before they judge him with sweeping verdicts, but not daring to reveal it! How do we accept to call this a painting? Such an Arab, when standing among the ranks of nations, should bow his head in shame.

We can lie to ourselves, but the matter is different in the eyes of others, who must see us as we truly are—who must see that our pride in our distinctive values has ceased to exist.

If we wish to have a modern Arab art, we must initiate an era of rebirth for all that has become extinct. We must build it up and graft to it what we will, according to what the old outlines will accept in terms of new turns and appearances. As I say this, regret fills my heart, because the matter applies to my own work as well!

Response of Mr. Munir Sulayman (Syria)

The question about art and its link to our Arab reality is frequently repeated, and the people respond to it with a host of different answers. The most important of these answers is that the greatest purpose of art is to express the features of life in its various aspects. In all Arab countries, art remains far from this. If you were to see a painting that represents a landscape or face or still life, you would feel that there is a dense veil blocking you from seeing the truth of these objects or separating you and the life that pulses within each of them.

The important thing in painting is that people see in every canvas something of themselves, something of their hopes and dreams for life. Even more, the artist seeks to depict through his painting the life that is lived by the people, as well as the hopes that stir in his heart and in theirs. The artist succeeds to the extent that he expresses these dreams and makes them speak in his painting with a power to affect the people, even influencing the simple souls among them who have not had the good fortune to enjoy a culture of art.

The function of art, whatever its color and whatever its form, is to serve life. A beautiful painting—whether of a river, or the breast or legs of a beautiful woman, or the shoulders of a man of great stature, or his arm—is beautiful because it suits its organic function, and its concept is nothing but the elevated rendering of our many needs. Indeed, it is the perpetual extension of these needs, meaning that the concept distills the future of these powerful, unrestrained needs and makes it evident, just as the flower and the fruit condense the tree, promulgate it, and extend its life into immortality.

Yet this eternal truth remains unfamiliar to artists in all the Arab countries. For this reason, we cannot claim that there is art in the Arab countries, and we will remain far from it so long as artists are distantly removed from the essence and secret of art, and even from its fundamental components.

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In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat, and published in January 1966 in the Arabic daily al-‘Alam. In it, Chebaa argues for an authenticity of representation in modern Moroccan art. The poster by Mohammed Melehi that advertised the exhibition, in MoMA’s collection, signals this group of artists’ contemporary practice, grounded in vernacular forms and international graphic arts and design modes.

Author Mohammed Chebaa
Date 1966
Language Arabic

On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language (1966)

Mohammed Chebaa

The exhibition is a fitting occasion to take a look at the situation of our plastic arts in recent years.¹

We cannot deny that we are subject to the various problems that this situation poses, despite the impossibility of doing justice to them, with all their ramifications and complications, in a single essay or presentation. I believe that this plight comes from the fact that all of these problems have been fully raised, and now various opinions regarding them contend with one another.

Before we examine these problems, we need to take a small step back to see how the phenomenon of painting emerged in our country and what ultimately has become of it—virtually the only manifestation of the plastic arts movement that we have—and to examine the social and political influences it was subject to.

Our preliminary investigation foregrounds paintings by the oldest of the painters among us, who are now well-known figures: the likes of [Mohammed] Ben Ali Rbati of Tangier, around 1920, for example. Rbati’s paintings are not entirely primitive; rather they are symbolic figurative paintings. I believe that they are an extension of the paintings that typically accompany illuminated manuscripts—an art form still practiced by a small number of Moroccan artists, the most famous of whom is al- Qadiri of Fez—for they are closer to Persian painting than to European painting, not least because Persian artists have employed similar methods for ornamental painting on architecture as well as furniture, such as tables and chairs.

To this extent, this phenomenon remains purely Moroccan, although we notice that the abundance of painting production by these older artists often was due to the support of certain foreigners who discovered them and then exploited their production for various reasons, the most common being the quest for the exotic and the primitive. Rbati, for example, was a cook in one of the large English families living in Tangier at the time. And after this phase, which is still characterized by a Moroccan authenticity, came another phase that included many foreign patrons, most of who were expatriates in Morocco during the Protectorate and after it, whose inclinations and intentions varied.

We will only be concerning ourselves with two examples here. One of them is from the north, and the other is from the south. In the north, the Spanish painter [Mariano] Bertuchi was commissioned by the Spanish Protectorate to preside over the fine arts, and the most important of his initiatives was the founding of a school of fine arts, which, in Tétouan, is there to this day, and a school of Islamic arts. The school of fine arts played an important role in preparing Moroccan painters and sculptors to pursue studies abroad, in particular in Spain, just as the school of Islamic arts took part in revitalizing the national arts of the north: wood, metal, and plaster engraving; pottery; and mosaics. In the school of fine arts, Moroccan pupils became familiar with painting according to an academic concept of representation.

I believe the most important example in the south was undertaken in Marrakesh by the French painter [Jacques] Majorelle, who had both direct and indirect influence on the emergence of painting there. I once heard that the first female painter in Morocco was a woman who worked with Majorelle and who he guided toward painting.

In addition to these two examples, which are positive to a certain extent, there were also deleterious elements among the foreign painters, some of who exerted a negative influence on the emergence of our painting, for in their painting, they were only interested in views of daily life. This lent their work, and that of those Moroccan painters who were influenced by them, a touristic and documentary quality.

It is for this reason that those paintings are not in any way characterized by a Moroccan authenticity; rather, they are nothing more than distortions of what Moroccan painting might be, in addition to being inferior examples of what might be characterized as European art. And if we recall that European painting was, in that particular phase, in the process of distancing itself greatly from purely representational classical painting, we further realize that those foreign painters did not present us with good examples of what authentic Moroccan painting might be. After this, there came a phase that is much nearer to us, in which the phenomena of primitive painting and the naïf painter arose. The strongest examples are works by Mohamed Ben Allal and Moulay Ahmed Drissi, both of whom are from Marrakesh. It is common knowledge that the backers of these two artists were foreign patrons, led by a few foreign painters. I believe that this foreign support—first by the French Protectorate’s fine arts administration prior to independence, and by the French cultural mission after independence—was a way of highlighting an artistic phenomenon based (given our backward characteristics) upon exoticism, and not by any means upon support of popular art, as some people might believe.

Immediately after this, certain young painters emerged who demonstrated a particular openness to modern art, and especially to abstraction. They were sponsored by those same circles, and were sent to Paris to benefit from its school. All those painters did in fact return to Morocco, and most of them were greatly influenced by the city of Paris, and they are the ones who now represent the abstractionist trend in general, and Art Informel in particular, with [Jilali] Gharbaoui being their most prominent figure.

As a result, most of those painters also fail to demonstrate a trace of Moroccan authenticity, still less any African authenticity. The patrons and supporters I mentioned sense this, and so they seek a new outlet. When they opt to abandon these artists by renouncing their most prominent representative, Gharbaoui, then they soon find him wandering the streets without food or shelter, with illness gnawing away at his body!² And in their search they find “new talents,” but this time we see those talents returning to the ranks of the primitives. For the best those foreign supporters can find among the artists who come after Ben Allal—who has become too old for them—is [Ahmed] Ouardighi. And so they bring Ouardighi out into the open, and set up exhibitions for him at home and abroad, and create a market that no Moroccan painter has ever even dreamed of (some of his paintings have sold for record sums).

Although this presentation was brief due to space constraints, we can see that our manifestation of painting is closely linked to our associations with foreigners, and consequently to our lived historical and political circumstances during the Protectorate, and during the independence after it. Indeed, some of the aforementioned foreign circles imposed their patrimony on the artistic and cultural renaissance. Painting’s turn away from African and Arab traditions goes back, firstly, to the guidance of those circles, and secondly to a lack of awareness on the part of our painters with our cultural and intellectual identity, in light of the weakness of their own education—most of our painters are illiterate.

The disadvantages of that artistic orientation do not stop here, however. Their repercussions also include the fact that some of our intellectuals now associate representational painting with Moroccan reality, unaware of the fact that the essence of our art was not and will never be representational, for there is nothing representational in either our Islamic art or our Berber art. Rather, it is abstraction and symbol—the abstraction of nature in geometric painting, engraving, mosaic ornament, and Berber carpets. It is impossible for us to be authentic in our work by orienting ourselves toward representation in painting, so how would such an orientation be appropriate for us at a time when research in the plastic arts in the West is turning toward the symbolic and abstract, after abandoning their classical traditions; attempting to draw benefit in that new research from our [collective] mentalities so as to reach a rejuvenation, a symbolism and art that is in keeping with what might be a foundation for art of the future?! This leads to a certain confusion between the understanding of plastic arts and that of literary language, and consequently to a lack of understanding of the true function of painting: they demand from the painting that it tell stories, that it depict events for them, as if it were a report or a narrative record. And they also demand that the painting perform the same task that the newspaper—or writing in general—performs, or that photography performs, and here there is a serious confusion between the characteristics of languages and their identity. For if I demanded of a painting that it merely record an event for me, then it would be more appropriate for me to read an article in the newspaper, which might very well be a clearer and more faithful rendering of that event!

The language of the plastic arts is not subject to the requirements of verbal or literary language, for these are two separate entities, each with its own rules and characteristics, and neither of them needs the other in order to accomplish its task fully, although both of them do have certain points in common with other languages —mathematics, music, theater, etc.—in embodying the human intellect and its civilization.

The treatment of this topic leads us to discuss an important problem: that of commitment in art. There are many conflicting opinions concerning this principle, but those who have hitherto posed this problem have, in my opinion, made the same mistake that we mentioned earlier: for in their understanding, commitment comprises “representational” painting, and the personification of the feelings and problems that the people are subject to in their bitter struggles. They also believe—and rightly so, this time—that painting must express the people and be understood by the people.

From this erroneous perspective, it appears as if the woman who weaves carpets in the remotest tribe of the Atlas Mountains does not understand the carpets she has woven, the designs of which she herself has created. A few conclusions can be drawn from this:

“Representational realism is not at the core of our artistic mentality. Rather, it was imposed by a different, European mentality—a reactionary one—which is alien to us.

Primitive art is not the only fitting direction our plastic art movement can take.

True commitment does not necessarily mean returning to regressive artistic models that are alien to us.”

So what is the solution, then?

Just as I do not claim here to comprehensively treat all the elements that were at the origin of our current situation in the plastic arts, neither do I claim to be able to put forward solutions to the problems that this situation poses. All I can do is suggest elements of solutions, which I hope we can discuss.

My presentation should not lead anyone to think that I am defending what is called abstraction simply for abstraction’s sake. Instead, I want to have been of benefit to the reader by demonstrating that the problem is not that of “abstraction vs. realism?” Rather, it is the following: research within the plastic arts befitting our rich traditions, our mentality, and our true perspective on the future.

And I believe that the best research within our plastic arts will be none other than investigation that takes the facts that we mentioned earlier into account. In my opinion, we must stop equating representation and figuration in painting with realism, since our artistic heritage—that of geometric ornament—is more realist and expressive of our historical mentality than any image that depicts a scene from everyday life!

I believe that this is the path of our true commitment.

Translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu Zeid.

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“I have seen a vibrant genius and an innovative Arab sensibility”: Visitors’ impressions of the 1933 Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair

Date 1933
Language Arabic, French, English

The texts below are entries taken from the 1933 guest book from the first solo exhibition of the work of Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1905–1988), a young Palestinian female artist, held in the Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair, organized in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Sa‘di, who had studied with the renowned “Jerusalem School” icon painter Nicola Saig (1863-1942), exhibited a range of work: oil paintings of landscapes, still life compositions, and portraits of Arab heroes as well as contemporary cultural and political figures—the latter, such as King Faysal I of Iraq, which is illustrated here, drew on the photographic sources then circulating in the expanding print media—alongside applied arts such as embroidery works.

Hundreds of visitors signed the guest book, many of them identifying hometowns and origins from across the Arab East. Entries are predominantly in Arabic, but also in French and English. The remarks offer a window into a moment when even the format of the solo art exhibition held a kind of modern novelty, demonstrating visitors’ searches for appropriate vocabularies to articulate their responses to al-Sa‘di’s work as well as a common impulse to express national pride.

Guest book entries for Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1933)

The fine arts leave a fine impression on the soul, and the work I’ve seen here has left a deep impression on my soul. I can’t help but rejoice for Miss Zulfa, for this work has amazed me and my companions.

From Gaza, July 22, 1933

Have you heard the lovely melodies? Have you experienced how they make you quiver in delight and arouse sweet hopes and desires in you? This is how a person feels when he sees the refined lady Zulfa al-Sa‘di. The wonderful handicrafts on display in the Arab exhibition stir up great hope in the spectator—the hope that our women are on their way to a renaissance through such beneficial work. This brings us pride and joy.

Tanious Naser, newspaper owner, 1st day of the month of Rabi‘ II, 1352 [July 24, 1933]

We should have great admiration for the skillful hand that produced everything we saw in the first Arab exhibition—the hand of Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di, who truly counts as one of the treasures of the artistic renaissance in Arab Palestine. We plead to God for more women like Miss Zulfa, so that the men of this nation can come together to revive the glory and civilization that has been wiped out. God bless.

Abd al-Ghani al-Karmi and Muhammad Taha, 1st day of the month of Rabi‘ II, 1352 [July 24, 1933]

I am very proud of the artisanal renaissance that is being carried out by young Arab women in Palestine. I was delighted by the work I saw during my visit to the Arab exhibition, which demonstrates Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s excellent taste. Hopefully the young women of the future will follow in her footsteps. Bravo, Miss al-Sa‘di, and cheers to her work and to all who follow her example—onward until we acquire independence.

Abu Khaldoun, Tulkarem, July 26, 1933 

Art expresses the purity and delicateness of the soul and the refinement of morals and excellence. The wonders of Miss Zulfa’s art are a source of pride for Arab handicrafts. She deserves our appreciation, and we commend the precision of her art and wish her brilliant success in her quest.

Omar al Saleh, lawyer, July 27, 1933

The works I found here in this room are truly the best I’ve seen in this blessed Arab exhibition, which is a good start for Arabs in general. The fair hands that worked at night to create these things are a testament to the Arab renaissance of the future. The hands of Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di will be the best means of spreading the Arab renaissance in the future. Good luck.

[Name illegible], July 27, 1933

I have seen a vibrant genius and an innovative Arab sensibility in Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s exhibited handicrafts. These works demonstrate precision and creativity. May God grant her success—I hope one day she becomes the director of an artisanal school for women, so that future young Arab women can benefit from her singular genius and her innovative taste. Many thanks to her.

Abd al-Raziq Mayri, Aleppo, Syria, July 27, 1933

Zulfa is a wellspring of verse and oratory, for poetry is nothing but tireless effort. Take a look at your creations, Zulfa: they’re marvels, the best on display at the Arab exhibition. The creation of Zulfa, is there wonder in magic? For the magic it contained, bewitched those who beheld it.

Yes, this is truly magic, and a wonder—or rather, many wonders: such extreme precision in the embroidery, such marvelous mastery in the craftsmanship, and such superb representation in the paintings, beyond even the skill of professional painters. When I saw her miraculous paintings, and in particular the one of the cactus fruit, I couldn’t help but try to grab one of the fruits and eat it! 

This genius, this lady’s brilliance, is something every Arab can be proud of. It is fair to say that Miss Zulfa’s works are innovations to which nothing can be added—one is left speechless, for such creativity is unprecedented.

Al-Afghani, July 29, 1933 

I visited the Arab exhibition, and the truth is that I couldn’t find anything that demonstrates more genius and artistic taste than Ms. Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s handicrafts, oil paintings, and other works. I am truly proud that someone in my dear country has achieved such status in the world of art, for I am but one of that country’s servants.

Akram Abd al-Salam al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Farjouli [?] Raouf Darwish [?], Adnan [illegible], Jerusalem

—From the guest book of Zulfa al-Sa’di’s 1933 exhibition, accessed from the research files of Rhonda Saad, departed colleague of the editors of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, who was preparing a study of Palestinian art and its publics until her unexpected death in 2010. Translations from Arabic to English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

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Sarah Lookofsky: Let’s begin with your exhibition at MoMA PS1 consisting of the diptych series Volume Eleven (flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism) (2016) and the film Tripoli Cancelled (2017), which premiered at documenta 14 in Athens. Both works revolve around a singular character’s narrative in ways that blur fictional accounts and pivotal historical events. Volume Eleven addresses the writings of your great-uncle Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904–1974), particularly his 1930s essays in which he misrecognizes the German army as a potential liberator of India from British colonial rule. Tripoli Cancelled is a fictional departure from your father’s involuntary stay at Ellinikon International Airport after losing his passport in transit, however, in the film, it’s unclear where and when the story is taking place and who this personage is. Can you talk a bit about the deliberate slippages in the narratives of these works, which are then transferred to viewers as they try to “situate” them?

Naeem Mohaiemen: These slippages you refer to begin from the language the characters speak, and then they move into the crisscrossing of events from different times. When we were planning the MoMA PS1 show, there were conversations with Peter Eleey about the “Muselmann” chapter in the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz. Muselmann is an antiquated German word for Muslim, and was used at Auschwitz for prisoners who were too weak to survive and had given up hope. This use was documented in the Holocaust memoirs of Primo Levi and Adolf Gawalewicz, among others (the latter I tracked down through documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyk, who had a copy of the Polish original). It was presumed to be a reference to the stooped posture of starving prisoners, which was supposedly “similar” to the Muslim form of prayer. Agamben gives a complex redefinition, suggesting that this word could signify “submission” to god. I am unconvinced that this was the origin of the term, but that needs a much longer discussion. 

This “Muselmann” figure shows up in the film’s protagonist’s letter to his wife on the runway, and then in the bar scene, when he refuses a whisky, explaining, “I’m a Muselmann.” The phantom bartender replies, “Ah yes, we had a Muselmann here before. He was leaving Germany.” The “leaving Germany” reference is to the Muslim Germans (tiny in number), who may also have been persecuted by the Nazis but aren’t noted in historical accounts.

So Tripoli Cancelled contains “Der Muselmann” as an end state in Auschwitz, and “a Muselmann” as an escapee from Germany. The unnamed protagonist refers to a dinner guest, meant to be Hannah Arendt, reporting from the Jerusalem trial and infuriating readers with the “Banality of Evil” thesis. In the back room of the PS1 show, in Volume Eleven, my great-uncle asks of Arendt, “Write alongside me / this banality we ignored / century’s witness.” His posthumous mea culpa says: I was wrong, but so were many others. 

None of these events are contemporaneous, and that is the other slippage in the work: my great-uncle’s essays were written in the early 1930s, and Arendt’s book on Adolf Eichmann came out thirty years later, in 1963. They could never have written “alongside”—he had returned to Asia; his European time was over. A Muslim author, from [British] India, with a German lover—this is a trifecta of conditions that would not make it easy for him to recover from the error of supporting the German army. Putting the time out of joint in my work was one way of giving Mujtaba Ali a chance of a fair(er) hearing.

Lookofsky: And what to make of the repeated reference to the Holocaust across several of your works? For Agamben, it is the paradigmatic modern event, requiring for its execution a modern state apparatus. The foregrounding of 1945 as a global marker has been contested by some as yet more Eurocentrism (massive killings wrought by colonialism and 1947’s Partition of the subcontinent are also pivotal modern events, for example). These two works of yours speak not to the events themselves, but perhaps instead to their reverberations.

Mohaiemen: I have for a long time been invested in burrowing into the Holocaust’s centrality to a European concept of “zero hour”—this also shows up in my earlier video Der Weisse Engel (2011). The camps loom large in Tripoli Cancelled, and later so do the trials in the reference to Arendt. And then a fatal misreading of the German genocide project in Mujtaba Ali’s essays, which is the reveal of Volume Eleven, in the back room. An idea of modernity hitting a reset, a “never seen before” brutality. In actuality, colonial praxis had already refined this template of subjugation, domination, and annihilation. The system shock of the Holocaust is the boomeranging of these same tactics onto the European body. Human history has been a replay of this breakdown—a willed blindness to genocidal tactics, whether carried out by neighbor or state, as long as they target an accepted subject of dominion, framed by holy doctrine or racialized capitalism. The Holocaust, and the debates around the parameters of its inscribing (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ordinary Germans, Harun Farocki’s aerial blindness, or Giorgio Agamben’s Muselmann), open up ways to look at other instances of human history from within even this over-familiar, presumably “Eurocentric” space. 

Lookofsky: I’d like to segue to your three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral, which premiered at documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, and which specifically addressed the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a topic we have engaged in through our research at MoMA. The titular two meetings refer to two transnational summits in the early history of Bangladesh, since it achieved independence in 1971 following a civil war with Pakistan. The first is the fourth summit of NAM in Algeria in 1973. In this context, Bangladesh was allied with India, one of the founding members of the organization, and loyal to the project of finding a socialist alternative to the Soviet model. The second meeting that brackets the story is the conference of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held in Pakistan a year later, in 1974. As the film’s intertitles invoke, participation in this second meeting marked a shift from socialist aspirations to a new Islamic alignment shaped by the geopolitical oil bloc, which prevails in a weaker form to this day. 

There is a prevailing sense of failure, loss, and even mourning in Two Meetings, and in other of your works that address transnational left networks. Of course, as your work teases out, these words have different implications, also alluding to the fact that some projects failed due to external imperial intervention, while others were perhaps ill conceived or doomed by internal power struggles. The contemporary protagonists of your film all display different degrees of what I would characterize as melancholy. I wonder, from your own perspective, if you think that there are elements of the original aspirations that are not completely lost in the present. Other works of yours have deliberately addressed left nostalgia, but I wonder how you would diagnose your own relationship to these histories.

Mohaiemen: I didn’t set out to write a history of failure, left or otherwise. That would be an enervating way to spend eleven years, knowing that that is what it is going to be at the outset. When I started the overall project The Young Man Was in 2006, I had several problems I was trying to work through. The one that dominated was what I call the “accidental trojan horse”—an equation where an insurrectionary left political force, if it fails to seize power, ends up ushering in an even more rightist force than that which it was trying to unseat. It’s not ever (I hope) a left project to provide an alibi or channel for rightist forces, and that’s why it is “accidental.” Misrecognition—of staging ground, historic situation, vulnerabilities, and allies—could produce an end result that is anti- or misplaced solidarity, with catastrophic results. Over time, as my project kept collecting stories, failure as a result, and the memory of failure as an affective condition—with all the rivulets of melancholy, nostalgia, and regret—came out very sharply.

But consider the experience of Peter Custers, protagonist of Last Man in Dhaka Central [premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2016]. Inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Peter drops out of his PhD program at Johns Hopkins University and moves to Asia in search of a “revolutionary proletariat.” When things go wrong, he is arrested along with members of an underground group, tortured, and only released because of the intervention of the Dutch parliament. Does he remember the time in jail in 1975 to be failure? The song at the beginning of that film is a famous Lucky Akhand one from my teenage years—not Peter’s early 1970s, but rather my late 1980s. It’s a song in the line of “you broke my heart and one day I will make you cry,” a story of vengeful and soured love. I wanted to use it to think through the modes of forgetting, betrayal, and leaving behind that are embedded in Peter’s survival while his comrades died in jail. Peter and I debated my choice of this song—one of many debates we had while making this film. He wanted to hold on to the story of the 1970s as something very different from how we talk of it now. He had not surrendered his story to the audience; he had not whispered, “Do as you will.” And in that fierce insistence that the survivor retains the right to the tone of the story is the refusal of this framing of loss or failure. I think, generationally, there’s a sharp and enduring struggle over how to remember the left project of the 1970s—as the survivors themselves wish to tell it, or how those of us who never lived it see it in the aftermath of now.

Lookofsky: Vijay Prashad—author of The Darker Nations, a key history of Third World movements—poignantly notes that he sees no visual evidence of anti-colonialism in Oscar Niemeyer’s Algerian sports stadium, La Coupole. One question that kept coming up for us at MoMA over the course of our research was whether these networks that were principally political and economic, and which are certainly pertinent as historical models to think about, also had notable or valuable cultural and artistic impacts—or if their principal aesthetic was a gigantism that mimics imperial international styles. Have you come across visual/aesthetic translations of anti-colonialism, egalitarianism, etc., or artistic projects that grew out of these international connections, that you find of value today?

Mohaiemen: Two Meetings is a project partially obsessed with buildings as the remains of that day. Many of these structures were completed in the 1970s, at a moment when oil revenues had been dramatically increasing. Like many of the OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] countries that became rich in the 1970s, Algeria didn’t plan for a future where carbon resources would run out. Vijay is overwhelmed by the nonuse of the space of La Coupole. But there are other moments—some didn’t make it into the final film—when he is inspired by the sweeping architecture as well. The aesthetics of that moment aren’t automatically empty or wasteful. Many structures were designed in the flush of space exploration, intended to also evoke existence within the long durée of the universe. 

Thinking of anti-colonial aesthetics that do resonate, I also want to shift from the buildings to the people who inhabited them. Dominique Malaquais of Institut des Mondes Africains in Paris presented a research project at the Returns conference in Chicago. It is a work on the gatherings of pan-African solidarity—four pan-African cultural festivals, including Festac ’77 in Lagos. Among the things I appreciated there were the commemorative impulse and the material culture around which that remembering can take place—akin to the tactile pleasure of celluloid. In these four festivals, the aesthetic of the individual participants is not grandstanding, but rather a joyful and confident proposal of an alter-modernity.

Lookofsky: One of the most striking features of the film is your contemporary movement through architectural spaces from this period. We see the now-empty buildings as shells that sharply contrast with the bustling action in the archival documentation of the meetings that were once held there. 

Mohaiemen: The Palais des Nation in Algiers was a vacuum space and, for us, a sentimental space as well. It is sometimes used for conferences, but that wasn’t the case when we were there. The venue has a team of people who clean every day. We have some of that on camera, where they’re sweeping the floors and changing the tablecloths—even though there’s no dinner happening, as if a grand dinner is always about to happen. 

Lookofsky: For me, one effect of the film’s back-and-forth between past and present is that both periods become destabilized: received truths about the past are unmoored and the certainty and fixity of the present, and its power distributions, might be too. On another level, the film also dwells on the temporality of these conferences, which appear very long and thus dominated by inattention, small talk, distraction, even boredom. Why did you decide to focus on these records of the talks?

Mohaiemen: The exhaustive record, iteratively viewed, can suddenly produce unexpected moments of insight. Certain speeches and personas are more visually provocative—they are what we’re drawn to, but not where the actual work is happening. The real event is the backroom meeting, where there is no camera rolling. The conversations over endless coffees and cigarettes were where decisions were made. In NAM, Bandung’s Afro-Asian unity proposal is no longer dominant. Those who were wary of Soviet expansionism wanted to have their own zone of influence—NAM was also a power bloc, and it was never innocent of those maneuvers. Since there was still a socialist commitment, there should have been class alliances that span all member nations. But NAM also included the OPEC bloc countries, which were not always signaling to socialism—so they’re an uneasy fit. These contradictions come spilling out in the small, offstage visual moments of the conference.

In one newsreel, you see Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia saying onstage, “We wish our brother, Salvador Allende, to prevail,” and then we learn that Allende was assassinated four days later. NAM appears to be, in that scene, opposed to military juntas. Yet, when the impassive camera pans, there are other Latin American leaders attending in full military gear! So NAM fails to take up a position that welcomes only democratic countries. This is a contradiction that jumps out in the long, slow visual record of the meetings. It is not so much what is onstage, but what gets picked up as the camera roves and happens upon chance encounters in a cavernous meeting hall. During the extended credit sequence, if you watch closely, you start to notice who gets up from their table to greet which leader. Also, who stands up first, and who stays seated—these are all part of the archaeology, a way to map the bodily expressions of hierarchy and power.

Lookofsky: The film powerfully opens with a comment by the then–minister of foreign affairs of Singapore, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, in which he addresses a technical breakdown of the communication system at the NAM conference, noting that the equipment used to threaten imperial powers is built by them; “They turn it off, we are lost.” This is of course a potent and brutal metaphor about the very possibility, even futility, of creating alternative power networks in a world in which the infrastructure of power and wealth is so unequally distributed. Could you unpack a bit your use and interpretation of Rajaratnam’s metaphor?

Mohaiemen: What was the common project of NAM? It was “outside of alignment” with great powers, but it was supposed to be much more. Rajaratnam says “the old cold power” is over—because the Algiers meeting is taking place after the signing by the US and Soviets of the first SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treaty. Essentially, he is asking, now that one of our primary rationales for being together is removed, what is the need for nonalignment. (Of course the Cold War revives it, but in 1973 he could not yet see that.)

Singapore is largely ignored in that NAM summit, because the way he frames the question is not quite welcome. He frames it as a question of technology autonomy, of trading blocs, of shared industrialization. This type of focus on trade-driven growth, minus Soviet, OPEC, or other subsidies, was an unwelcome formulation within the socialist-leaning rubric of NAM. But this association with socialism is also ambivalent and contradictory. Oil wealth, Cold War–driven subsidies, and imported labor underwrote some of the rapid infrastructure development of the 1970s. The structural problems of socialism, including what kind of sustainable industrialization and trade policy you may have, remained unaddressed.

The fact that a large portion of the audience, including the charismatic liberators, all had their headphones off during Rajaratnam’s speech is a telltale sign they were not really listening to him. His warnings to evolve, and to control the means of technological production, went largely unheard. I am interested to sometimes imagine an alter-history—one where the writer Rajaratnam (who was mentored by George Orwell), rather than the charismatic guerrilla leader Fidel Castro, could have been the leader of that 1973 NAM summit. That is the history that did not come to pass—whether it would have delivered a version of socialism that could have survived, we will never know.

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Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who combines performance and media in a variety of formats. She currently serves as the Andrew Banks Endowed Chair at the College of Arts at the University of Florida.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kiev, Ukraine. He is a member of Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kiev in 2008.

Ram Rahman is a photojournalist, artist, curator, designer, and activist, and co-founder of the Sahmat Collective, which was founded in 1989 in New Delhi, India. The collective is a platform for exchanging ideas and voicing resistance.

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