In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

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I spent my childhood in the hills or in the sea. I liked to listen to the fog. I ran cross-country, I ran through the woods, the grass, and the meadows; I ran all the time, so much I wore out my knees and now my knees ache at random. When my friends and I got our licenses, we often went to the Marin Headlands. By the time we got to it, the Headlands was a national park; it still is. First though, it was Coast Miwok lands. All of California is unceded. Later, the area was home to Portuguese and Spanish dairy farmers, and marked by all the violence of their arrival. Since the 1900s, it has been a federal military base, which swelled into a monster of an outpost in the 1940s to protect Americans from the perceived threat from the other side of the Pacific. Nobody came. Nevertheless, it was deemed appropriate to intern our own citizens and residents.¹ I remember mulling over this violence when I was still young: Why did that happen like that? It is funny to remember that sense of confusion, despite not knowing or having any of the knowledge then that I do now about the trinity of imperialism, racism, and colonization. Though it was nameless then, I still felt the ambient, unflinching whine of the accumulation of capital, among its cacophonous cohort of atrocities.

There are two ways to get to the Headlands. The way the tourists go, which involves traffic on the weekends and an incredible drop straight to the ocean. Or the way you go when you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge before: through a five-minute-long one-way tunnel that spits you out into a valley surrounded by gentle hills, rambling to the sea. Winding through and around and then down a little (if you drive fast, you can make your stomach flip), the beach unveils itself, a lagoon, a parking lot, the cliffs, dark sand; there’s a particular vibrancy and depth to the blue of the Headlands; everything is shrouded with it, the dark swirling, freezing ocean. The sand is so fine and on some days nearly black. The surf in its verticality is so strong, there is kind of a steepness imprinted in the sand, not quite an embankment, a steep slip to the ocean. Meters-high rocks, scale, scale, scale, wind, brush, sage, rumors of a helicopter landing for unknown reasons, and then back in the hills, which were filled with bunkers, deep, crazy caverns, cracking and dripping. I’ve never seen anything darker, filled with people, at least we wagered, kids from other high schools had tall tales buoyed by the traces; lots of jokes are based in fear, writing our names timidly near the entrances, never going much deeper. Rin was here.

Years later, on the street in the rain, Mad told me I was reserved, not quiet. I realized later walking home how I emulated the landscape of my childhood. I think of the darkness of the bunkers and the fog meandering across that big expanse of whatever you call gray when it’s blue, the city across the way and then the bowing horizon, and always a ship going out to the Pacific. Sometimes, I notice things really quickly, and other times, I’m so busy living inside of one thing, I don’t realize the illusion of the other. Like how those ships are so large, the city seemed closer than it was. What was in those containers? It did not matter then, we found the boat a kind of metronome. We’d be sure to see it, smoking somebody’s brother’s California medical marijuana out of an apple on that federal territory before going back to our cars to giggle, or if I was with a lover,² to touch each other until the sun was long gone and the great white lights of the federal police told us from their loud speakers to go home.

In a cafe, as a lark, I suggest to X—a curator who has invited me to do an exhibition in Shanghai—that I would like to cross the Pacific Ocean. I base this lark on the fact that yes, I will always be tied to the Atlantic for the accident of birth.³ However, in practicality, I feel far more tied to the Pacific, having grown up in it, around it, having visited family who had transplanted themselves to Hawai’i, and always, always swimming in it, even now, by chance, marrying a woman from the other side of it. That to cross the Pacific on the various highways of winds that flow across might provide an interesting exercise, one that might not be possible in the future. There were also things that made this act of crossing an American one, more specifically a colonial one. Obvious question: How much has my country irrevocably changed the nations of the Pacific? Besides that there was something about the fact that it matters how you get somewhere, and more in there too that I wasn’t quite sure about all of it; what is the point of this?⁴ It was something, though. In short, I talk myself into a knot and then look up at X. They smile, they think that’s the best idea I’ve presented and that I should indeed cross the Pacific. The Pacific grows in their mind too; it zigzags or maybe bogs up beside us both. So, I will cross. My next preoccupation: how?

Likely the last time I sailed was at age 13 off the coast of Pimu (Catalina Island). In the water I was focused, sharklike. I won my races; I got the gold star in sailing. The only phrase that has really stuck with me after these 20 years is “tacking into the wind,” that to go forward you’d have to do a dance in triangles to arrive at your destination, never being pushed backward, but never straight forward exactly either. This is around the time I think if I had been born a bit later, I would have come out as trans; I didn’t know what to call it then, even with trans adults floating near me in San Francisco. I was too afraid of them. On the water and in it, the changing of my form and its congruous incongruencies with myself were held at a remove. The sheltered bays of Pimu are not the open waters of the Pacific.

I settle on some sort of 40- to 50-foot boat, which I will rent or buy. I learn I’ll need to leave between January and April, and if I don’t stop, it will take me around 30 to 40 days, depending on how things go with the weather. I won’t go alone. I’ll need some companions. I search for them. Likely, we will go in a regatta, with some others who are crossing. This is safest. I begin to compile the tools I’ll need to properly sail. I spend hours on the internet, researching alone and chatting excessively with ChatGPT. I learn that, in addition to my boat and the various rations, I will need the following in both analog and digital forms:

1. A compass
2. GPS
3. Charts and maps
4. SSB radio and VHF radio
5. Weather-forecasting tools
6. GPS-enabled sextant
7. A logbook
8. Automatic identification system (AIS).

Each tool is familiar to me except for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is used for automatic tracking of large ships and passenger boats. It allows the operator of the vessel to receive and transmit information, such as the ship’s name, position, course, and speed, to other AIS-equipped vessels and shoreside traffic-control centers. Essentially, it transmits who you are to everybody and transmits who everybody says they are to you too. On the water, they say, see and be seen.⁵ Or that’s how it’s meant to be.

I increase my watching of sailing videos on YouTube, I focus on crossing. I watch other people cross in 15-20-30-60-minute bursts, families, solos, couples. I watch their tensions, boredom, the horizons, the fish they catch, their bodies writhing in pain, flipping, the humans grinning holding that transparent line, the flat eye of the fish narrowing in exhaustion,⁶ intermingled as if imbibed with hot sauce into the human, exhausted in the late hours, the sudden squalls, the choppy waves. I watch them stare at their digital charts, their compasses, and their AIS.

Every group I watch eventually struggles with readings on their devices and often on their AIS. Either there are ships that are spoofing—pretending to be larger or smaller than they actually are—or there are ships that have turned off their AIS altogether.

On their voyage to Uruguay, sailing couple Kate and Curtis of the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca, chronicle their run-in with an illegal fishing vessel.⁷ The episode begins, as most sailing vlogs do, with a teaser of the big event and then jumps right into their day-to-day. They explain how their dog, Roxy, uses the restroom on board the sailboat,⁸ breakfast is made, routes are planned, a day passes, things are fixed, wind is scarce until it isn’t. On the third night of their voyage, during heavy winds—and all the efforts it takes to move through those—the radar alarm⁹ goes off and they discover that there is something very close to them. Kate identifies it as a fishing boat, and it is less than a mile away. The drama of this moment is narrated and explained more than felt in a traditional dramatic sense. Visually, to a non-sailor; the moment feels somehow confusingly mellow. The fishing boat looks far away, just a white light splitting the darkness into horizon and sky. The stress level in Kate’s voice drives home a truism of sailing: distance on the water is very different from distance on land.

“Curtis has been battling him for at least the last half hour,” Kate explains. “He keeps changing direction every time we change direction, making a collision course with us, so finally we had to turn on the motor . . . and just try to get by him.” They try to radio the fishing boat, but there is no response. Kate turns the camera to reveal their view, the main sail, the ropes flexing, sailing in the dark, into nothingness, tool-dependent, tipped to the right, the wind is fast at 20 knots, there is spray coming over the bow, it’s wet.¹⁰ “What the **** is this guy,” Curtis says in calm frustration. He’s spotted another boat on the AIS and asks Kate to go down and take a closer look. It is a 91-foot fishing vessel going 3.5 knots. The boat’s AIS popped on and then off again, suddenly. While it is common enough for boats not to always leave their AIS on, in this circumstance, it is odd; in this weather, at night, usually you’d be in communication via radio with the other vessel, doing what you can to avoid one another. So now there are two boats. One directly behind the other. And suddenly, they’re closer. Still no response on the radio, the spray continues. Frustrated, Kate says, “We all have to respect each other, but I don’t know what this is, it’s just carelessness.” At this point, Kate and Curtis are going upwind using their motor and doing everything they can to avoid this second boat, which reads a mile away from them. It continues, their radar isn’t picking up the second boat’s location, and now Kate and Curtis must depend on their vision alone to figure out how to avoid them. They can see their lights and that’s it; they can’t tell which side of the boat they’re seeing, what direction the boat might be taking. These confusions have forced Kate and Curtis to continue to keep their motor on, going straight into waves that are beating their boat down.

Unbelievably, Curtis spots another vessel. Kate takes a look, “It’s almost like it’s two different AISs for the same vessel.” Curtis agrees, “He’s got a fake-out AIS. These guys are probably all illegal.” Kate gives us a further description: One AIS went off, another went on, they’re in the same position according to the charts. They’re spoofing. “God, it shows him pointing directly at us too, like he wants to hit us.” Kate and Curtis have all their lights on, they want to be visible, they are not trying to hide, they’re just trying to get through. Kate predicts that this will be a sleepless night for her and Curtis; the wind picks up. A week later, Curtis and Kate will find out that the Uruguayan navy caught a Chinese fishing vessel in the same location they had been sailing in.¹¹ Kate notes in her final narration that she and Curtis cannot say for sure if these boats were illegally fishing or not, but given their behavior, it seems quite possible.

The Uruguayan navy put footage of the capture of the fishing vessel on YouTube. The whining of a helicopter provides a heavy soundtrack as the large blue-hulled fishing vessel bobs in the water alongside the navy ship.¹² In another shot, two dinghies surround the fishing vessel. This dance from my view, the computer, seems static, like a painting; the charge is the matter.

Likely, when a boat does not come up on an AIS, that boat’s main job is to transship. I am trans, we must be related. (I’ve told this joke before.)

“Transshipment” is a term used to describe the transferring of cargo from one mode of transportation to another during its transit from point of origin to final destination. For example, this could mean transferring cargo from a ship to a train, or from one ship to another ship. In the Pacific Ocean, transshipment has a long history that isn’t worth relaying here. We can speculate that transshipment likely hit some sort of uptick with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.¹³ And that uptick at the Panama Canal then grew exponentially with the growth of the globalizing economy in the 1990s.¹⁴ In its innocent form, transshipment is used to optimize logistics and save on transportation costs. However, as obvious as this is to state, transshipment can also be used to bypass bottlenecks or trade barriers. 

Illegal transshipment can take many forms: smuggling, tax evasion, fraud. Transshipment is resorted to in order to avoid tariffs and quotas. To further avoid inspection, goods are mislabeled, paperwork is falsified, and certain circuitous shipping routes are taken. Transshipment can be used to smuggle goods like drugs and weapons, or live beings like rare wildlife and nolonger-living beings like fish and other dead sea creatures. These activities all live under the title of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU). IUU fishing vessels will engage in transshipment at sea, where the fish is caught by one vessel and then transferred to another (and sometimes even another) to then be brought to market.

To accomplish the first part of this IUU fishing, a ship will turn off their AIS to conceal their identity and location, or at the very least, confusing or, for lack of a better word, troubling it. This process of concealment is known as “dark shipping,” and it is this practice that Kate and Curtis found themselves caught in the middle of.

In Hakai Magazine’s article “Catch Me If You Can: The Global Pursuit of a Fugitive Ship,” writer Sarah Toy details the complex and intense process of catching the IUU fishing vessel STS-50 in 2018. The capture involved multiple governments and agencies all working together in tandem, often the effort coming down to one email or phone call. Before the vessel was caught, it operated for eight years under different names, with crew members coming and going, some knowing the legality of the ship’s activities, and others just passing through. STS-50, like many other IUU ships, sold its catch to many different middlemen.

As investigators began to close in on STS-50, Toy narrates:

“STS-50 tried to evade tracking by periodically switching off its AIS and using a generic Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a nine-digit code that is supposed to be unique to each vessel. With the generic identification number, the STS-50 was able to hide under other ships’ transmission signals, says Bergh, “a bit like everybody trying to talk on the same frequency on a radio.” Specialists at Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norwegian nonprofit that provides vessel tracking analysis to FISH-i Africa, were able to decipher the STS-50’s intermittent satellite signals and detect where the vessel really was. It was like playing a game of cat and mouse in an area larger than the Australian continent.”

STS-50 fled toward Indonesia, a nation whose task force to combat illegal fishing had blown up more than 400 illegal fishing boats since 2014. Since STS-50 only occasionally turned on its AIS, trackers found themselves predicting the ship’s location between each ping, assuming its course. Eventually it pinged in, likely to let the owner of the ship know its location, and the Indonesian navy was able to intercept it. The captain was fined and put in prison, but the owners cannot be prosecuted. “On the high seas, the bad guys have almost always gotten away—a frustrating reality of the seemingly Sisyphean task of policing lawbreakers in such a vast arena.”¹⁵

A vast arena, liquid and thus confusing, it can hold me yet—shipping, illegal fishing—whole ecosystems and beings we’ve never met and probably never will. Paradoxically, once something is nameable, it can be contained. Maybe it’s better to play the homophone and hear that it’s a parallax. The incongruities of trying to make an image when the lens is actually lower than where your eye composes the picture. Transshipment—in its evasion of being known by continuing to go across—sounds familiar. In the case of the shipment, an exploited group of beings taken and going from one state to the next.

What is a definition but an act mired in its traces? We know that transshipment is happening because we see the boats, the boats are caught, the fish are gone, but are we literally seeing the fish brought up onto the decks? Not often. Fragmentation by way of commodification. Confusingly, we have a lot in common—that is me, the act of transshipping, and the very things that are being transshipped. We are reliant on others to exist on multiple levels. We are full of legal and illegal missions and substrates. In IUU transshipment, there is the plundering of the oceans, and in transness, there is a liberation for the person bearing the label.

The self is a troubling political object. Its maintenance is a pawn to be trifled with, exchanged for a different person’s will, whether that is being in the world or what one ingests in order to live. Containment means not just the possibility to be incorporated into capital accumulation but the possibility to be obliterated because of lack of access to things that are basic to one’s survival. My lines of logic have me running toward myself as a commodity. Is that what I share with the shipment? Commodities are to be traded. I won’t be going to Tennessee or Kentucky any time soon. What does the marine life say? Let’s all trade places in this merry-go-round of exploitation.

Vexing statement: Trans is whatever the group needs it to be. In certain instances, nobody needs it to be much of anything; in others, it is the very structure upon which the entire artifice of social interaction is built; and still in others, it is the perfect scapegoat for the uncomfortable god-level truth, change. Trans is the demon, the liberator, the cocoon, the bear, the cave, the ship, the fisherman, the sailor, and me.

There is a phenomenon called “group random dance.” What happens is groups of people get together and play clips of K-pop songs, and if you know the dance, you go to the center and do it. These groups are large, young, queer, trans. Their vibe is good, diverse; there is an air of excitement, encouragement. They are showing off together. These random dances happen all over the world and are very popular. My five-year-old daughter and I watch these random dances while we draw in my studio. In one random dance in Frankfurt, we stop drawing for a long time to witness this group energy. As is custom, each clip is followed by a computerized voice counting down to the next clip, 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . There’s a collective pause as each song comes on; usually there’s a few squeals, a shout, a scream, and then always a mad dash for the center. Places! Then my daughter and I wait for the moment when they all, together, really do perfectly sync up. A lift of a leg, a hip pop, a head shake, a raised hand in a circular motion.

We also watch for a phenomenon we haven’t fully named yet, something like the confusion of the mirror. What happens is that some of the people dancing know the dance from one perspective, and others know the dance from another. So that means they’re doing the same moves, but one is going right while the other goes left. Elbows knock and concentrations are broken.¹⁶ Implied in these public random dances is that they all kind of know what’s going on, not enough to be the “real” thing, but they’ll try all together, kind of knowing the dance is enough; the point is to be dancing, to be giving it a go, to all be trying. Or at least that’s the point I’m seeing from it (we can only read so much of another person’s reasoning through the filter of our own logic). Trying is worth it at least.

Night in our corner of Berlin is quiet, mostly just footsteps and the occasional shout, and still I am unable to sleep. I give in, walk myself to my computer, I begin looking for 40-foot sailboats; there’s one in Providence that could be promising. My ears burn when I am afraid but I kind of like the feeling. I imagine myself reading charts at the shining table on this particular vessel. Poring over the lines, the weather. I bid on the boat; it will be my most expensive artistic endeavor. Anything to cross over. I walk to the window to hear the morning birds. I wait.

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There is a chasm between classical and contemporary Southeast Asian art—as there is between specialists in the former and the latter. On the one side is the devotional object, iconographic signification, politico-religious context, and material means—largely bound together today as in the past century by a scholarly investment in the empirical reliant especially on archaeological investigation and connoisseurial skill. On the other is theoretical exploration, where artistic and art historical practices meet to sound objectivity as a means not of abandoning the pursuit of truth but of reinforcing it, to query codification, and to push boundaries of interpretive foreclosure. Attempts to bridge the chasm are engineered, usually from the contemporary critical edge, through constructs of continuity and change, indigeneity, alternative modernities, and decoloniality—all frequently underpinned by deference, sincere or feigned, to classical knowledge—and harnessing the subaltern to the past through anthropological research. I have tumbled into its depths more than once. Here, rather than hoisting myself up to peer obliquely over the edge of the past, as I am wont to do, I am trying to eke out an existence within, probing where meaning might take root underground—between the two.

Taking “tradition” as a starting point strikes me as an increasingly anachronistic gesture, be it on the part of the artist or the art historian. The gesture is premised on the image of a static-dynamic tandem in which contemporary art is a site of research into fixed things. The premise effectively denies the multiple contemporaneities of historical objects even as it seeks to reactivate them. From the subterranean vantage point I am attempting to sustain, where roots take hold but also grow and branch, historical conditioning proceeds from the work of art as much as precedes it. The materials I am considering here are as historical as they are contemporary, and as contemporary as they are timeless insofar as they all comprise dynamic sites of practice-led research. I see that they theorize in themselves. And their work is never done. If the artworks embody theorization-in-the-making, they do not—indeed cannot—reify history or theory.

This means taking underground culture literally: seeking at once the point of view of the ancestors, buried as they are and yet made to regulate social order by virtue of their very assimilation with the enduring earth, and that of the disruptors of normativity, those who, shunted beneath the surface, are made to bolster the foundations of normativity itself. Still, mingling to make a scene that can be seen now and again, these perspectives all hold the promise of a breakthrough. At stake in exploring this common ground are, from my point of view, important dimensions of the practice of art history today as it might probe the imbrication of the normative and its challenge at the heart of the work of art, old and new.

Two artworks will ground me. At first glance, the one is on the order of a prototype: an iconography-cum-narrative reproduced in sculpture, painting, and performance with scant variation over time; the other, a film, is by contrast an original work that explores inheritance of and in art. Appealing to Hubert Damisch, we might call the iconography a “theoretical object.”¹ The iconography has, in Damisch’s terms, “emblematic value”: it is a staid model that exceeds history not only in historical terms as it endures through repetition over time but also in theoretical terms as a site of ever-unsettled and unsettling exploration of its essential referent—in this case, the gendered aesthetics of figure and ground. The more apparently original work teases out the like emblematic value of its subjects.

Artworks

My first theoretical object is the Māravijaya scene as it typically appears in Cambodian art from the eleventh century to the present (fig. 1). I have worked extensively on this and related iconographies elsewhere, and will only summarize below the narrative and interpretive points most pertinent to discussions here.² The Māravijaya, or “Victory over Evil,” is an episode in the life of the Buddha. The young Siddhartha has rejected the domestic world of the palace, the harem, the parents, the wife and child, to seek he does not know what—something more or less than the mundane. After a long period of searching for the right path, he finds himself meditating in a final approach to Awakening. A demon named Māra, the embodiment of Evil, comes to challenge Siddhartha to the throne on which he sits. Remaining nearly impassive, the Buddha-to-be reaches his right hand down to call the Earth to witness. This moment in the story is denoted by the bhūmisparśa mudrā, the hand gesture of “touching the Earth.” The Earth bears witness to the future Buddha’s accomplishments over past lives. This proves that the future Buddha’s wealth of merit exceeds that of Māra, and in such, confirms the former’s right to the throne. In the process, the Earth is shown to bear—to conserve and to reveal on demand—ancestral history in a Buddhist sense in which one is one’s own ancestor via the cycle of rebirths known as the saṃsāra. The means by which the Earth bears witness varies across time and space. In textual accounts, the Earth quakes at the future Buddha’s touch, and sometimes takes the form of a woman. The latter is the case in much Southeast Asian visual representation, and nearly systematically in Cambodian art. More specifically, a voluptuous woman with long wet hair appears out of the Buddha’s pedestal; she is standing or dancing, and wrings out her hair, making it into a weapon with which she drowns Evil.

On the one hand, the normative binary constructions could not be clearer: the prince rejects the mundane to achieve transcendence, with women—wife or Earth—as his foil, which is to say, as the pedestal on which he appears a transcendent figure, the Buddha. On the other hand, the iconographic ensemble works to deconstruct the very normative structures it nonetheless promotes. The phallic attributes of the Earth figured in the pedestal are oddly matched by the Buddha figure’s embodiment of ambiguous gender. He has shed manhood to become a “Great Man” (Mahāpurus) sublimating (hetero)sexuality in ways that align them with the non-binary if not also the female sex. In formal terms, the Earth Goddess sometimes becomes a figure in her own right, outgrowing the Buddha’s pedestal as it were to stand atop her own. The iconography is bound up in Southeast Asian “cadastral religion” as analyzed by Paul Mus:³ the iconography establishing the Buddha’s sovereignty over the Great Earth, who is shown to attest to his superiority, functions also as a macrocosmic affirmation of mundane practices of territorial organization.

The second artwork, which I will argue also calls the Earth to witness in probing analogous theoretical objects, is Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s 2015 essay film Letters from Panduranga (fig. 3).⁴ The thirty-five-minute single-channel video is a measured contemplation of the Cham people and heritage of south-central Vietnam. The work grew from an activist response to Vietnamese government plans to build nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuận province, Cham ancestral lands once known as Panduranga. The Vietnamese government installation would have caused yet another displacement of a people subjected to multiple colonialisms over the course of the second millennium. The Cham were once synonymous with Champa, a loose confederation of principalities located in what is now central and southern Vietnam from the fourth to the seventeenth century. The gradual expansion south of Vietnamese governance in the second millennium ultimately effaced Champa and displaced the Cham people. The shift in the ethno-political organization of the region was concomitant with a complex religious shift that saw some Cham communities embrace Islam on the back of centuries of Hindu-Buddhist practice embedded in a matrilineal kinship system. The ancient Cham material culture linked Cham peoples to their ancestral lands even as monuments fell into ruin and people moved on—or perhaps because of such transformations. From the nineteenth century, French colonial authorities worked to restore Cham temples and statues not to any contemporary owner deemed rightful, but rather as testimony to the universal value of the art produced by an ancient civilization discovered and recovered by modern colonial power. This is the landscape in which and about which Nguyễn Trinh Thi made Letters from Panduranga. As a Vietnamese citizen-artist, she seeks with her film to restitute some degree of dignity to the Cham people and places she meets.

In formal terms, the film develops through an intimate narrative exchange—a feminine voice and a masculine voice exchanging orally what seem to be the “letters” of the film’s title. The feminine voice begs seamless elision with the filmmaker, while the masculine voice conveys a sort of alter ego, in which a similar elision is nonetheless tempered with différance. The velvety texture of the two voices accompanying the camera in slow-paced trial-and-error shots of people, landscapes, and things envelops viewers in the collaborative contemplation of field encounters and techniques for engendering and adequately recording them. With notable exceptions, the filmed subjects look back at or beyond the camera but say little.⁵

Letters from Panduranga, Take 1

In an analysis of what she will finally call “an aesthetics of matriarchal potentiality”⁶ in Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s essay films, May Adadol Ingawanij alerts viewers to a fine line between repressive and progressive impulses in the assimilation of women with land: “The association of women with background and silence may superficially resemble a colonial trope of visualizing the landscape of conquest.” But Nguyễn, she argues, “complicates the commonly problematized binary, of female/background/non-speech and male/foreground/speech” by evoking a competing association, this time of artists with women, both “silenced by censorship and relegated to the background in modern Vietnam.”⁷ I want to supplement this historical commentary with further consideration of ways in which the complication of the binary engenders Letters from Panduranga’s visual and vocal fields. As the female/background/non-speech is made to emerge into the foreground of the work of art, the subject positions of artist and filmed subject are subtly exchanged. It is nonetheless the background that is foregrounded, the female who is figured, non-speech that is made to be heard. That is, the exchange does not operate a simple inversion of the binary, in which the ground becomes wholly figure and the figure wholly ground. Nor does the film arrive at a resolution fixing subject positions in their proper place. The exchange is ongoing: subject positions vacillate. Though to my knowledge we never actually see them, in the voice, the artist themself is alternately foregrounded and backgrounded, as is the woman/land/silence filmed. They are shown to be resilient and made to be so in the showing. The artwork draws from an underground power, which at the same time, it creates. The power that it makes seen is one characterized by its capacity to relinquish its own hold. The fine line between the progressive and the regressive separates the two contrary motions while also binding them. And it is this relation at work between the normative and its challenge that I see the artwork to probe as it effectively calls the Earth to witness.

There are many stand-ins for the silenced, buried woman in Letters—notably men: old Cham men whose emasculation by the consecutive colonization of Vietnamese, French, and World Heritage regimes shows on their dignified, weathered faces; Vietnamese deminers whose emasculation is hidden in plain sight by the blatant cover-up of regressive labor exploitation in futuristic garb that, along with their undeniable bravery, makes them tragic superheroes; a shirtless, beer-guzzling Cham intellectual whose emasculation finds casual, noble expression in a learned citation of Nietzsche on the joke that is life perfectly void of irony; and the Vietnamese artist’s own male counter-ego whose gentle and wise narrative voice matches her own. Still, if the women in Letters are made to show potentiality in resilience, the men are made to show resignation.

This is to say that in the hands of the artist, the binary holds the seed of its own deconstruction. The Cham/women/land are called to witness, and they do, but they do not speak back to take back; nor does the artist speak for them. Yet, in the call-and-response the artist plays out, she is more than one person, one sex, one ethnicity. The unrelenting acknowledgment of the unbridgeable gap between the artist and their subjects holds the promise of exchange and in such, uncannily and fleetingly unites them. The “matriarchal potentiality” lies then in the background as it is given form.

Letters from Panduranga, Take 2 (Clip 1)

The female narrator-filmmaker’s “favorite place to be” in the Ninh Thuận region of Vietnam is “the cemetery of the Cham Bani, who mix Islam and Brahmanism with local traditions.”⁸ A wide-angle shot of a full, tall tree against a gray sky introduces these words. The nearly two-and-a-half-minute passage that follows takes place in the cemetery in the middle of Letters from Panduranga. The camera pans from the treetop down. Birds sing. A mountain range comes vaguely into view in the distance. Reaching the ground, the camera pulls in to pan the foreground of boulders on a sandy surface before cutting to a woman standing on the sand among neat rows of rounded stones (see fig. 2). The background is now a low building and distant water. The woman is a bit rounded too, hair tied back, oval face, dark eyes, a long scarf draped over her shoulders with the lengths pinned down under either arm, hands clasped under her belly, a taut top, a long full skirt billowing in the wind. The camera lingers on her among the stones. Holding still for the full-frontal portrait, she seems to teeter. She averts her eyes briefly. The narrative voice continues, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones.”

A colleague’s query brought into focus my obscure sense of the uncanny interplay between voice and image here. He asked, “Was the woman standing in the cemetery the filmmaker?” In contrast to the enunciation of the “I” elsewhere in the film where the narrator explicitly reflects on her difference from the Cham, this phrase, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones,” suggests an identification between the narrating subject and the subject filmed. Pictured lying in the landscape, the narrator collapses the distance elsewhere made so apparent between herself and her subjects. Yet, the narrated image jars: the woman is actually pictured, that is to say filmed, standing. The resolution of this enigma follows but is no less jarring. The film cuts to a close-up of a pair of stones. The narrative voice continues, “The Cham Bani have the tradition of burying the dead on the chest of their deceased mother.” This is the first of fifteen cuts to different pairs of stones. “At each spot under a pair of stones, there might be a dozen skeletons lying on each other’s chests,” the narrative voice continues.

When she lies down among the stones, and when she pictures herself doing so in words, the narrator, it turns out, is identifying with the dead. It is a striking gesture of agency—lying down with the dead, where agency is defined as the ultimate form of passivity. In herself making like the dead, the narrator imbues a like passive agency to the stones lying on the sand as to the living woman standing among them. Any line between living and dead, as between the filmmaker and the filmed, is blurred. The camera cuts and lingers on each pair of stones just as it had on the woman. The stones also hold still under the gaze—which is to say they are made capable of movement. Do they flinch? Or do we? Once we are made to look, each pair appears different, in size, color, and positioning. They have character.

The burial image is odd: How are the dead made to lie on the chest of their deceased mother? Does the whole body not lie atop the whole body? The chest functions metonymically, that is, the pairs of stones evoke the ancestral mother’s breasts as a stand-in for the whole abstract body—ancestor and land, time and space as one.⁹ Silence ensues. The camera opens up, from one pair to show the following sequence of pairs; and out, to show many rows of pairs stretching to the horizon. The stones have taken the place of the standing woman. Was the woman standing in the cemetery a ghost?

Letters from Panduranga, Take 3 (Clip 2)

Otherwise uncanny is the incorporation of Hanoi’s Statue of Liberty into a Buddha statue in the wake of World War II and the filmic account of this historical event (fig. 3).¹⁰ This is another take on the return of the repressed, where Nguyễn makes us see a palimpsest of narratives embedded in a single image. On one register is the “perfect study of the ‘destiny’ for the ‘colonial remnants’” as the artist-narrator’s alter ego tells it in this passage. The Hanoi Statue of Liberty, a small-scale version of the French gift to America, would become the city’s own beacon of freedom. Locally named bà đầm xoè, the “Open-Dressed Dame,” in an insider’s tongue-in-cheek critique of Western expressions of freedom, the Statue of Liberty had once stood atop Turtle Tower in Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm lake. She was taken down and melted down after the war as the Vietnamese gathered strength against the French seeking to reestablish colonial authority in “‘Indochina.” In literally recasting this quintessential embodiment of Western power as a Buddha statue—that is, as a quintessential embodiment of Eastern power—the repressed emerged victorious.

On another register is the filmic excavation of this story and its standing woman. The images accompanying the narration invite analysis on the model of that undertaken by the film itself, zooming in and out to discern detail, assess context, and performatively consider development of method. The passage is framed by a study of stone specimens. Someone—presumably the male speaker—holds an earthy rock up to the camera. A glass jar, with what looks like a plant rooting in water, is out of focus in the background. The hand holding the rock mirrors the camera, both unsteady, as the rock is brought in and out of focus. A small light beam abruptly illuminates its surface, which is reddish, rough, grainy. This is one of a series of specimens presented in the same manner: the presenter puts the first rock down and puts another to the same test, before then presenting a sequence of black-and-white colonial postcards also made to come in and out of focus. The particular “study of the ‘destiny’ for ‘colonial remnants”’ comes into focus as the camera homes in on the fuzzy details of one postcard featuring an engraving—Vietnamese people going about their lives on the ground. The camera moves up the card surface to reveal a tiny statue atop a building set at the far side of a lake; the narrator points her out—Hanoi’s Open-Dressed Dame—as he tells the story. The camera pulls out to show the bigger picture: a larger statue in the foreground rises above the people first shown close up. They are all set in a park. Seen from behind, the larger statue mirrors the tiny one across the lake. The man and the woman are both standing on high pedestals. They appear to face each other, communicating in the common language of their bodies standing straight and tall extending skyward—for Liberty with her hallmark right arm raised to hold a torch aloft; for her counterpart, a flagpole held to his left. The flag envelops the figure from behind to effectively expand his body in a dramatic manner: the pole appears as an extraordinary extension of his left arm. A screenshot of another postcard view of the Open-Dressed Dame rising above Turtle Tower islet across the lake, but this one, a sepia-colored photograph, is placed on top of the first, covering part of it. The camera flits between the two, highlighting different details. When the camera zooms out, we can read the postcard legend: “AUTOUR DE LA STATUE DE PAUL BERT A HA-NOI” (Around the statue of Paul Bert in Hanoi). Paul Bert was the resident-general of Tonkin and Annam for a short few months in 1886. The 2.85-meter replica of the Statue of Liberty was erected in a park at the symbolic heart of colonial administration in Hanoi in 1887. It was displaced in 1890 to make room there for the new statue of the deceased resident-general. Press reports at the time record local anger at the erection of the Open-Dressed Dame atop Turtle Tower, a monument commemorating the fifteenth-century legendary defeat of Ming Chinese colonizers and the foundation of a new dynasty to lead the independent Vietnamese state.

The humiliation can also be imagined through contemplation of the statue that took its place. Viewed frontally, the sculpture depicts Paul Bert with his right palm pressing down above the head of a Vietnamese man appearing to cower at the Frenchman’s feet.¹¹ This “statue of Paul Bert” is actually a sculptural ensemble. The grand figure of the resident-general is made to stand out by the smaller figure at his feet, a figure that is, then, effectively part of the resident-general’s pedestal. Here, we see an earlier iteration of how “the colonized nations were called upon to testify to the superiority of the colonizers” in the public exhibition of “art,”’ to quote Thomas McEvilley on the symbolic work in the famous 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at The Museum of Modern Art.¹²

It is as if the colonial sculptural ensemble is a warped reiteration of the Māravijaya—or vice versa: unperturbed in their sovereignty, the men call to witness those who have gone to ground. The point is not to reduce the one artwork to the other in the name of the universal, to diminish colonial violence in eliding it with Buddhist order, or to equate two historico-culturally distinct expressions of Enlightenment leading to Liberation. Rather, it is to highlight the complex engendering of figure and ground at work at this nexus of historical settings. As history has it, many statues were incorporated like relics into the victorious postwar Buddha. But it is the French statue of Liberty that Nguyễn Trinh Thi calls to witness here to attest to the victory of the Vietnamese and in the process, now, to attest also to her own history. The filmmaker makes her reemerge from within the Buddha before our eyes, standing, right arm aloft. Like the woman in the cemetery of the Cham Bani—the filmmaker-narrator?—she too teeters in the faintly shaky hand of the presenter and the camera(wo)man. We know she has been melted down and yet she reappears, barely, like a ghost. The passage ends with the natural specimens brought back into focus.

The story is loosely reconstituted by the narrator’s alter ego as an exemplar of the truth beating fiction at its own game. Fiction, he reflects, can bring on a closer approach to the real in introducing a distance from it. The fiction the artist conjures is effectively surreal, a true story that appears so outrageous as to appear unreal. Like the shirtless Cham intellectual in Ninh Thuận province citing Nietzsche on the joke that is life.

Deep thanks to Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Nguyễn Hoàng Hương Duyên, Wong Binghao, Panggah Ardiyansyah, Pamela N. Corey, May Adadol Ingawanij, Vandy Rattana and the members of the Harvard University Collective on Gender, Religion and the Arts of Asia, for their interest and support in the development of this essay.

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The proliferation of diverse photographic practices across the world soon after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 is by now well-known. For example, Deborah Poole’s pioneering work on the early history of photography has shown that the movement of photography between Europe, North America, and Latin America constituted the making of a transcultural visual economy, one that was very much about deploying the “truthful” optics of the camera to justify discrimination and imperialism.¹ Photographed people became visual data in the making of modern scopic regimes of difference. For example, photography made race a visible “fact,” and slaving societies, such as the United States, used photographic representation to legitimize slavery and later segregation. But photography also engendered unforeseen horizons of visibility and agency. Portrait photography as an expressive force of modernity was embraced by many. By the 1850s, commercial photography studios could be found all across the globe, including in Buenos Aires, New York, Shanghai, Cairo, Bombay, and Accra. It is striking that in all of these cities, many separated by two oceans people posed for similar portraits, often holding identical standing poses in front of standardized backdrops. Yet rather than being peripheral simulations of the European experience, these pictures are representative of a complex web of connected, yet different image worlds.

However, what is much less known is that eastern Africa, especially the Swahili Coast, was also a fulcrum of the consumption and production of photography. Here photographs did not connect to local practices of picture-making, as in Asia, West Africa, and the Middle East. In fact, Swahili Coast culture was generally aniconic before the nineteenth century (although sculptors did create low-relief semiabstract zoomorphic carvings in architectural settings). This suggests that not all histories of photography are about pictorial illusionism and the mimetic capacities of photography. Rather, photography’s role as a thing in the world, as matter and materiality, played a significant role.²

The Swahili Coast of eastern Africa is one of the most fluid nodes of the Global South, where people, ideas, and materials from all over the world converge and intermingle. A Muslim cultural complex, its ports have acted as intersections of vastly different social and economic systems for more than a millennium. The region has long connected the African heartland to places across the Indian Ocean, especially to the coastal regions of South Asia and the Middle East. As a result, local people are masters of the in-between, easily negotiating between different worldviews and cultural traditions. The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed moment in a long history of transcontinental connectivity. The North Atlantic world, including would-be colonizers and capitalists, increasingly focused on controlling the trade and resources of Africa and the Indian Ocean world. When Zanzibar became the seat of the British-backed Busaidi Sultanate of Oman in 1837, the entire region became the center of competing imperial projects. While its main port towns, such as Zanzibar and Mombasa, have always been vanguard places, during this time, new technologies and infrastructures of movement, communication, and mass media rapidly accelerated transcontinental exchange, contracting space and time with unprecedented intensity.

By the 1870s, photography, one of industrial modernity’s most revolutionary mediums, was essential to local aesthetic practice. The first photographs likely arrived in markets of the region’s port towns from Bombay and other South Asian and Middle Eastern trading centers, although Zanzibaris had already been photographed in 1846, when a visiting French naval officer created a series of anthropological daguerreotype plates. Initially, locals did not have access to original photographs but rather to mass-produced picture postcards, or cartes de visite, and chromolithographs. Photographs were printed onto card stocks and paper using various photomechanical processes. By the 1900s, such small-format cards were circulating in the millions across the Indian Ocean and along the caravan routes of eastern Africa. As elsewhere in the world, photography was about both oppression and liberation in myriad ways.

While some locals had the ability to commission their own portrait photographs, many more could buy photographs of strangers, along with other cheap commodities, which were flooding the local markets at this time. Small, mobile, and easily amassed and collected, these pictures connected to older traditions of displaying transoceanic commodities in one’s home. For local consumers, photographs were tantalizingly exotic, endowed with a foreign materiality that made them perfect artifacts for display and pleasure.

By the 1870s, commercial photography studios also proliferated, serving a diverse clientele. At first, local photographers primarily catered to European immigrants, colonial officials, and Omani Arabs, but by the turn of the twentieth century, mainland Africans, Swahilis, and South Asians all frequented them to have portraits made or to buy images of others. Goans, who were Christians and Portuguese subjects, opened the first commercial photography houses in Zanzibar and Mombasa. Although it is often assumed that they came directly from present-day India to the Swahili Coast, many had been living in other ports of the western Indian Ocean. For example, A. C. Gomes first opened a studio in Aden (in present-day Yemen) in 1869, where he also served as a photographer to the British government. He and his family migrated to Zanzibar sometime in the 1870s, when British interests in the Indian Ocean region shifted from the coastal towns of the Arabian Peninsula to the Swahili Coast. In fact, Goan photographers also sold affordable imports, including textiles, household wares, and fashionable items of adornment, such as jewelry and perfumes. They were key agents and purveyors of the commodity culture of the Indian Ocean.

During their early history, studio photographs functioned as portraits and also as objects of good taste. In fact, the ruling elite and wealthy merchants often displayed framed studio portraits of their family members in carefully curated domestic spaces. The photograph in figure 1, for example, shows an interior view of a multiuse room in a large mansion in Stone Town. The room is filled with European glass chandeliers, Middle Eastern carpets, Goan furniture, export-ware porcelain, and German factory-made chairs. Studio portraits are also central to the room’s decorative program. Three large, mounted, and framed portraits of men in Omani dress are set on the ornate Indo-Portuguese cabinet in the right foreground of the image, and another occupies the small nightstand next to the bed. Versions of this photograph exist in many archives across the world, and it was published in a British book in the 1890s, where the byline noted, “The conflict between Oriental and Western civilization is clearly discernable in the decorations of the chamber.”³ Yet this layering of diverse cultural strands in Zanzibari homes did not represent a conflict to locals. The young man sitting in the center of the room, his name no longer known, exudes confidence and authority. His body language is relaxed as he leans against the curve of the chair’s back, extending his legs slightly before him. The carefully arranged collection of prized furnishings and objects d’art reflects his globally inflected aesthetic sensibility. Here photographs, although certainly portraits of family members, also worked in tandem with the collected items that filled this room, to create a layered space of exotica.

For more than one hundred years, until around the 1990s, locals avidly posed for (fig. 2), collected, and created elaborately staged studio portraits of themselves and others for an array of reasons. The great majority of studio photographs from Africa still in circulation today, especially those in European and North American private and public collections, are the historical picture postcards that fall in the “native studies” category (figs. 3-10).⁴ The postcards themselves are very much part of the leisure and collecting culture of Europeans and North American audiences; although, most feature photographs taken by the most successful commercial photographers of the Swahili Coast, including A. C. Gomes, Pereira de Lord, and J. P. Fernandes. They simply sent their photographs to Europe, where they were reprinted as picture postcards, which were then shipped back to eastern Africa to be sold to visitors, who in turn sent them back to Europe and other places overseas. As postcards, local photographs circulated across oceans with unprecedented ease. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a regular schedule of steamships connected the main ports of the Indian Ocean with those of Europe, including Hamburg, London, and Marseilles. Interestingly, before the 1890s, the majority of Swahili Coast commercial studios worked with German postcard printing houses, especially those located in Hamburg.⁵

Studio prints and postcards depicting local people wearing elaborate costumes and holding contrived poses were especially popular during the colonial period, when the coast was part of the British protectorate (1890–1963). Many show local young women, because they evoke a much-loved phantasm of exotic feminine sensuality. The women’s bodies and clothes are sometimes hand colored in luscious hues (figs. 4, 5, 7-9), endowing them with a compelling realism. Clearly, many compositions met the desires of North Atlantic audiences, although scholars and oral histories suggest that postcards also featured photographs that locals had commissioned of themselves; it seems that commercial studios had portraits reprinted as postcards, likely without the permission or knowledge of the sitters. We cannot be sure which photographs were once personal mementos because locals also sometimes posed and dressed in ways that played with North Atlantic photographic tropes. In fact, through photography, diverse clients mixed Swahili aesthetics of self-display, local rules of public propriety, colonial categories of race and identity, and modern notions of the individual.

Although today we have access to thousands of picture postcards in both private and public archives, the lives of those photographed remain largely opaque. We also can only guess about the kinds of negotiations that took place between photographer and photographed.⁶ The majority of postcards, especially the nameless “native type” postcards, show poor people and young women, who were likely hired or forced to perform in front of the camera. Especially the most Orientalizing and seductive compositions (fig. 6) are part of a long history of transforming people into pretty pictures and delectable objects. Today we like to imagine that the sitters in these photographs had some agency in their self-presentation. We see something confident and powerful in these women (especially figs. 4 and 5), believing that they are somehow subverting the oppressive force of the colonial and male gaze defining them. Because of the mimetic realism of photography, we interpret gazes, postures, and gestures as intimating a trace of a sitter’s inner and intimate life. In fact, in many cases, the people who could choose to remain invisible had a great deal more autonomy than those pictured in such postcards. This does not mean the pictured women do not require our serious consideration. They lived complex lives and struggled for self-determination in ways that these photographs can never reveal. Yet, paradoxically, they are also often all that remains of their historical selves, and as such, archival traces of their lived experience. Reading such postcards against the grain of objectification is an important project.

Tourists who bought and sent picture postcards likely did not consider the sitters’ subjectivities or life worlds, but rather saw them as souvenirs, or nameless bodies. As postcards, they are comfortably distant and purely ornamental. The desire for pleasing ornament was why many postcards featured theatrical arrangements of women’s bodies, which were transformed into striking arrangements (figs. 9 and 10). The captions never provide the names of the subjects, but instead a more generic description, such as “Swahili Beauties” (fig. 10), for example. Some reference to “beauty” is printed on many postcards (fig. 8). The subject’s individuality is subsumed by their perceived visual attractiveness; each person is transformed into a pleasurable component of a composition. These postcards are in many ways exemplary of the violence of photography, pandering to the voyeuristic desire of viewers for possession of and power over others.

Many of these women, and also young men, were vulnerable to other forms of violence, including economic, bodily, and sexual violence. These photographs perhaps do not overtly suggest extreme subjugation, but without a doubt, many of the sitters were touched by the violence of slavery. It was a local tradition for retinues of bonded or enslaved women, wearing elaborate costumes, to perform pleasing dances in public. Their dress and jewelry spoke of the wealth and good taste of their enslavers. They often wore matching turbans, body skimming caftans, and tight pants, as seen in figure 10. There existed even a specific category of enslaved women, wapambe, which means “the ornamented ones,” whose primary role was to beautify parades and festivals. Also, as historical recent research has shown, enslavement and its many legacies shaped daily life in myriad ways for decades after the Abolition Decree of 1897.⁷ Abolition was especially ambiguous for women. For instance, the decree officially offered freedom to all, except women categorized as concubines. In fact, many powerful locals declared all enslaved women in their house to be concubines to forestall their manumission.

These postcards therefore hint at the continuation of extreme injustices and hardships, even as the sitters’ smiles and delightful poses suggest play and fun. They very much reveal something about local histories and legacies of violence and are not just about the predations of colonialist photography. They certainly continue to reverberate in Zanzibar today because painful questions about who enslaved whom still shape local interpretations of the nineteenth century.⁸

Clearly these postcards are complicated objects. They are not simply about the North Atlantic taste for exotic bodies, although that is their most obvious role. They are also composites—“local,” “Western,” and “colonial” —all at once. The camera turned living people into mediated effigies, objects that adopted the shape of human beings, that in turn could be shipped across oceans in mobile postcard form. But they also hold onto real lives and specific histories, histories that suggest individual experiences of dehumanization—not just photographic violence.

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It is well established that in 1907 Pablo Picasso came across a variety of African masks and other African objects in different contexts but settled on the Trocadero Ethnography Museum (now the Musée de l’Homme) as his primary resource.¹ Encountering these objects would precipitate his “Africa Period,” the time between 1907 and 1909 when his investigation and analysis of the African mask and figure would lead to the dissection of form in his painting and sculpture, and to the flattened curves and planes characteristic of works such as Woman’s Head (Fernande). Together with his contemporaries, he revolutionized Western artistic practice with this shift, heralding the avant-garde. The Trocadero opened in 1882 with displays of both ancient and contemporary African objects, most from the French colonies in Africa. As is reflected in the institution’s own description of its first period, little thought was given to these objects as being the result of artistic production: “Between the lack of funds and the inflow of new objects from the colonies, and despite the best of intentions, the museum had begun to look like nothing more than a giant curiosity cabinet.”²

Similarly, in MoMA’s 1984–85 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern slightly more than a century later, William Rubin explains that Primitivism is “anchored in tribal (rather than exotic court) objects—heretofore considered just curiosities—and involved an appreciation of both their affective ‘magical’ force and their plasticity.”³ And he goes on to maintain an attitude of a singular cultural focus:⁴ “I want to understand the Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists ‘discovered’ them.”⁵Today, more than three decades later, we are more than ready to reconsider how we engage with the twentieth-century “traditional” African objects embedded within the modernist narrative.⁶

In the Museum’s 2015–16 exhibition Picasso: Sculpture, Picasso’s status as a self- taught sculptor is emphasized.⁷ By likening his practice to that of the self-taught artist—or, by extension, artists not academically trained, such as the traditional African artists—we increase the number of shared attributes between artists and can more readily think of them as closely aligned. If we can commit to this way of thinking, then we can perhaps continue by identifying the artists who emboldened Picasso to “break all the rules,” by name, culture, or country of origin as is the standard.⁸ Paul Gauguin was the harbinger of Picasso’s transformation, and subsequently Umberto Boccioni named Picasso as the main influence for his own sculptures of 1913.⁹ And these three artists are further tied to both past and more recent histories, connections not afforded traditional African artists. We know that “none of the African pieces Picasso saw in his first few years of fascination with ‘art nègre’ were more than just decades old,”¹⁰ and that they came from a set of cultures¹¹ in the region of West Africa.¹² These details are readily available.¹³ The added benefit of specificity is that it allows us to begin to chip away at the idea of Africa as monolithic, and to understand that traditional African sculpture encompasses different forms and types. Applying this small detail makes it possible to deepen our scholarship and to broaden our scope—and thus, potentially, to provide us with a new way of telling the story of modernism and to offer more accurate ways of seeing and developing new audiences.

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Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

“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:

1. Most funders in these countries are not from these countries.
2. These countries were struggling under the yoke of foreign occupation.

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 Supper by 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.

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

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.

Four of these entries were selected for translation and inclusion in the 2018 publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. And in this online format, we are pleased to make five additional entries available in translation to readers interested in the development of artistic discourses around the world. To access a pdf of extended guest book entries in their original languages, please visit The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) website.

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

On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language

By Mohammed Chebaa | 1966

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.

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.

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! 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.

Belkahia, Chebaa, Melehi at the Mohammed V Theatre in Rabat, January 9–February 17, 1966.

Eds.: This is a reference to the mental illness and hospitalization of Jilali Gharbaoui, who had earlier gained fame in Paris as an Informel painter.

The Crystalist Manifesto

By Hassan Abdallah, Hashim Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, Naiyla Al Tayib | 1976

Introduction

Man himself is the endeavor and the subject of a crystal that extends endlessly within. This happens simultaneously in isolation from and in connection to other things. We believe that the contradictions inherent in the claim that the universe is finite are no less than the contradictions inherent in the claim that the universe is infinite.

In the face of this crisis, the Crystalist idea emerges: the universe is at once finite and infinite; things have dual natures. When we say dual, we do not mean contradictory, for we go further and say that truth itself has a dual nature. When we refer to the duality of truth, we do not mean its multiplicity. This is not an issue that can be contained within a simple quantity; but perhaps it can be contained within a teleological quantity, namely, pleasure.

Theorization

Truth is relative, and absolute nature is dependent on man as a limited proposition. The struggle between man and nature always tries to find forms and claims for the opposite, that is, the absolute man, face-to-face with the limited forms and institutions in nature, which are themselves man-made. If the dialectic in classical modern thought is expressed with the phrases there are no isolated phenomena and man’s knowledge of matter lies in his knowledge of the forms of that matter’s movement, then we, in accordance with the idea of the crystal, may venture that the dialectic is a substitute for nature itself.

The basic premise for Crystalist thought, or modern liberalism, is to reject the essential quality of things, for it is now clear that any essence is nothing but a semblance for another essence. In the past, it was said that the atom was the irreducible essence, but then a whole world was discovered within it—nuclei, electrons, protons. This applies to subatomic particles, sub-subatomic particles, and to the limitless forms of existence of the entire cosmos. Man’s struggle with nature is but a transition from semblance to essence, which is in turn a semblance for another essence, and so the undoing of contradictions continues endlessly. This is what we mean when we speak of the transition from the opaque to the transparent, i.e., the removal of layers of concealment. The discovery of atoms does not negate the surface existence of things. Hence the naming of our school Crystalism, which implies the existence of both the semblance, or form, of the crystal and the dimensions and spectrums perceived within it. In the past, the transition from semblance to essence, and then to semblance, and so on, was regarded as idealistic thought, the standing objection being: Is there no difference between semblance and essence? And does that not also entail a beginning and an end? To that we say: The difference is primarily one of research methodology, and that the differentiation between semblance and essence is also subject to the same infinite sequence: semblance, essence, semblance, essence. . . .

But in order not to drag others into precarious territory, we opt for simplification and describe the process as follows: the transition is from relative semblance to relative essence, which creates another relative semblance that contains a new essence, and so the undoing of contradictions continues. Furthermore, the idea itself, as well as objections to it, are ultimately nothing but a potential embodiment of the crystal in its infinite spectra and its semblances, themselves also subject to endlessness. It is self-evident that a book lying before its owner is nothing but a semblance of a deeper essence, but we would here add that the same book is an essence for the semblance that surrounds it. That is to say, the crystal not only moves forward but also extends backward. To be more precise, it moves in all directions, or in all of space; or, if you will, the Crystalist school is nothing other than a negation of the objectification of objects.

The Unit of Measurement

The possibilities that nature lays before our eyes are not the ultimate possibilities. When an electron is two thousand times smaller than a proton, and one gram measures six hundred million trillion protons, it is understandable that a human being today—with disparate senses and a simple, empirical mind—would feel extremely alienated when attempting to grasp such massive numbers. We believe that the crisis lies originally in the old unit of measurement, for philosophy and the empirical sciences make man the unit of measurement, which leads to a dead end. The solution to this contradiction is to resurrect the essence, not the semblance, as the unit of measurement. Man’s essence is pleasure, and that should be the sole unit of measurement everywhere, including in the sciences, philosophy, and art—there is no other criterion. Pleasure in fact represents a full circle, in the sense that it is both a means and an end. Our goal is to seek out the teleological quantity.

The Chaos of Quantity

The dramatic struggle between materialism and idealism has resulted in familiar theories regarding the reality of things. Since antiquity, idealist thinking has claimed that the difference in things lies in expansions and contractions in quantity, and that, per Pythagoras and Democritus, numerical proportions are the basis of differences between things. Materialism, on the other hand, declared differences between things to be qualitative and occurring as a result of quantitative accumulation. From the crystal’s perspective, we believe that neither of these approaches sufficiently grasps the reality of things, for both deal with quantity and accumulation as fixed realities rather than a reality full of myriad contradictions. Quantity itself is simultaneously rational and irrational. Taking, for example, the number one as a unit of quantity, we find that it is made up of an accumulation of three thirds. But if, for the sake of precision, we divide it decimally by three, we unexpectedly find the result to be cyclic fractions that extend into infinity, which means that the accumulation in the number one is irrational, for it is both finite and infinite. Furthermore, when one is divided by an even number—for example, two—we find that the result is infinitely divisible by two.

We are confronted with the truth of the statement It is irrational for the finite to contain the infinite. We conclude that the number 1 is an irregular accumulation that, despite its finiteness, contains infiniteness. But we are still faced with the quantitative unit of “one.” In response to this quantum chaos, Crystalist thought emerges and proposes the teleological quantity, which is pleasure, and which also has a dual nature, being simultaneously a means and an end.

The Unit of Time

From the perspective of the crystal, we assert that things produce their own time, that there is more than one time depending on the diversity and difference of nature’s possibilities, and that what we live in is not that mythical collective time supposedly agreed upon by all people and shared by all things. Understanding the interconnectedness of multiple times is not particularly difficult, but it does require a high level of Crystalism. Man’s current alienation does not lie in the discrepancy of public times produced separately by separate things, but rather in the discrepancy of personal times, considering that each person is a construct of multiple and diverse things. The time unit of the individual is a matter of utmost importance.

Knowledge

Neoclassicism asserts that knowledge moves from the specific to the general, then back to the specific. We believe that generalization is a domain of repression. What really happens is that the specific and the free are pulled into the general domain and then returned in chains. We aim to liberate things from the repression of knowledge itself. To say that we seek knowledge that liberates things from knowledge itself does not make us self-contradictory; it makes us Crystalists. If knowledge was once based on the paradigm that a thing cannot be known in isolation from other things or from itself, then what we are currently proposing, in accordance with Crystalism, is that a thing cannot be known in isolation from infinity, or, in other words, that a thing can only be known in isolation from finiteness. We attach great importance to the claim that nothing is something, and that the dissolution of objective boundaries is itself a new objective boundary.

The Unit of Space

Matter exists in space. Things can exist above or below, to the North or the South, to the East or the West, etc. In other words, space is direction. But a thing is itself a space in the sense of an area, and area is determined by specificity, meaning that it would be difficult to claim that space is area, since area is extracted from the absence of area. We therefore say that when direction is specified it should be called an area, or, in other words, when it is perceived it should be called an area. Hence, North or East are also spaces in the sense of areas, except that they extend infinitely and are relative; indeed, infinite extension is possible from any relative point. Quantity is corrupt! We do not mean to claim that space does not exist in reality, but rather that it is an intellectual methodology. Based on the idea that space is direction, it is possible to say that the thing itself exists everywhere and, to complicate matters further, that the thing exists here and there in the same direction. In the face of this chaos of space, we propose teleological space, which is pleasure.

Language

Language, in its current state, being extremely close to objects, demonstrates its own corruption. The only way out of this is to dissolve language and turn it into a transparent crystal that moves in all directions: between the name, the subject, the thought, and their components; between the word and its components; and between the letter and its components. We expect this to happen in such a way that the fundamental opposition in language becomes an opposition between the crystal of meaning and the crystal of vocalization, which is a first and necessary step. We should mention here that the science of semiotics, [Claude] Shannon’s information theory, the methods for measuring quantitative possibilities of all information contained in a vocalization, the methods of measuring the information contained within one letter of the alphabet, and all associated mathematical laws—are nothing but dry academic methodologies as far as the problem of language is concerned. They are all based on the corrupt notion of quantity, and so do not rise to the level of the crisis.

Community

There are three types of repression suffered by the human form. Seen from a modern perspective, the first type is the repression that started with the separation of organic and inorganic matter, leading to the creation of man. The second type is the emergence of the objective mind, which is the mind of man’s entry into community. We also concede that at first, man collided with reality and outwitted it by creating certain institutions to fight it. It was inevitable, then, to form a community, and accordingly, man gave up a portion of his freedom in order to achieve harmony between his individual interests and the community’s interests. At the time, this price he paid was almost a freedom in itself. Ever since entering into community, man has been confronted with certain historical epochs characterized by different production relationships that were adopted by the intellectual institutions of each epoch, all confirming that instrument of repression. But the truth we are now facing is that the repression that occurred with the emergence of the objective mind continued to be inherited from one generation to the next. The idea of behavioral inheritance has much to support it, despite its being intentionally neglected for a long time. The obvious battle was between the schools of [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck and [Charles] Darwin on the one hand, and those of [Hugo] de Vries and [August] Weismann—with their germ-cell research and evening primrose discoveries—on the other. In recent times, McDonough¹ came up with the decisive response to the question of behavioral inheritance. In all cases, we currently adhere to the idea that the function creates the organ and not the other way around. The third type of repression is the ongoing repression that is linked to the individual from birth to the present moment. As mentioned earlier, repression at first was both a necessity and a form of freedom, but through the acquisition of characteristics and its normalization, things become one’s nature, so that repression is no longer a price that man paid that ends with the end of its causes, but has become a human characteristic. Furthermore, man now finds pleasure in repression itself, having replaced sensual pleasure with nonphysical pleasure. There would be nothing wrong with that had the insufficiency of abstract pleasure not been scientifically proven. This has led to the creation of a new man for this age, the indifferent man, the refusing man, the man who does not experience pleasure. Modern literature, from Albert Camus’s “stranger” and Colin Wilson’s “outsider” to Tayeb Salih’s character Mustafa Sa‘eed, speaks of the indifferent man, the man who does not experience pleasure. We believe that anyone who reads such literature and appreciates it also carries a similar current within him. The risk is magnified by the fact that the undoing of that repression and the liberation of man, and thus all forms of his creative activities and energies—arts and literature—would be achieved by negating the objective mind.

Transparency

Crystalism seeks transparency, and so does Sufism, but the difference between the two can be summarized as follows: while Sufism (a mode of behavior) calls for dissolving into the self by negating personal volition, we believe that negating personal volition itself requires volition, or, in other words, that negating volition is itself a volitional act. When continued infinitely—volition, negation, volition, negation, and so on—an extending, infinite crystal is created, which again means the endlessly extending presence of semblances and essence.

But similarities do exist: the idea of the crystal is mentioned, both explicitly and implicitly, in a number of religions, for example Manichaeism, Orphism, Christianity, and Islam.

Beauty

In response to the question of what beauty is, we say that the crystal represents utmost beauty, and that the most prominent quality of the crystal is its liberality, in the sense of its being liberated. Furthermore, we maintain that a thing becomes beautiful when it has acquired a certain measure of dissolving objective limitations.

Plastic Art

Line: The basic value of the line lies in its direction. As mentioned earlier, matter exists in a direction, which is space, and matter is itself space in the sense of area. But in the final analysis, a line is a dynamic spatial dimension that contains temporal differences and transforms into them. The most exciting things about the line are its tangible bias toward the concept of space as direction rather than as area, and its containment of simple and dynamic temporal differences.

Color: Color is a composite. Taking for instance the color red, we find it to be unlimited both positively and negatively. This has prompted academics to break it down into principal bundles—scarlet, vermilion, crimson, and rose—in a desperate attempt to contain its limitlessness. To make things easier, we call for a change in the names of colors, so that instead of red we would say redness. Furthermore, there are numerous principal factors that negate the limitedness of color, such as:

1. The inclination of unlimited color toward other colors, [as] blue exists in reddish or greenish tones, in utterly limitless variations.
2. The amount of light falling on a color and reflecting off it.
3. The proportion of whiteness or blackness in a color.
4. The eye’s capacity to see, taking into consideration: a) the eye’s physiological makeup; b) the eye’s training in seeing and perception.
5. Spatial distance, which is also limited. Color is completely different, depending on whether it is one centimeter away or ten thousand meters away. This can be clearly discerned in natural landscapes, where the color red is the first to fade, turning gradually to brown until it disappears.
6. Also, the psychological state of the viewer, which can simultaneously be both certain and doubtful.
7. The possibilities of the nature of color presented before us at any given moment are not final, for the colors of nature are limitless.
8. Colors exist in nature in the form of surface. It follows that no surface in nature is without a specific color. Areas themselves appear geometrically or organically. Once again, geometric forms are limitless, as are organic forms.
9. Another relative factor for the surface of a color, if its form is defined, is its size. Blue, for instance, can exist in an area as wide as the sea, or it can cover just one millimeter. Again, there are no limits to how big or small an area can be. This leads us to unequivocally assert that colors exist in nature in limitless forms and possibilities: each color has limitless tonalities, the number of colors in nature is limitless, and the relationships among colors are limitless.

It can be said that simply being aware of a thing causes it to lose its essential characteristic, provided it had one to begin with. In this regard, Mao Zedong says that to know the taste of an apple you must taste it, meaning that you must change its taste in order to know it. Saying that green cannot be known in isolation from other colors would be an incomplete claim. The truth is that green can be known in isolation from finiteness.

Form: Objects acquire plastic value from their external movement: the value of a triangle lies in its triangularity. The academic perspective then studies the affiliations or relationships of a triangle with regard to other related forms, i.e., its external movement within the set of external movements of forms that it influences, or by which it is influenced. Aspects of similarity, balance, sequence, rhythm, and the rejection of disharmonies are studied. We assert that the triangle itself is of unlimited triangularity, assuming the validity of its reality as a triangle. The possibilities of its relationships with other forms are also unlimited. But let us forget all this and return to the academic perspective, where forms have always been divided into geometric and organic. Then, as knowledge progressed, academics had to budge a little, for it was proven that organic forms are only the product of geometric accumulations. As for geometric forms, those were eventually relegated to the museum of history with a massive sign that read “Euclid.” The old dreams have all collapsed—that two parallel lines never meet, that a straight line is the shortest route between two points, and the most impregnable stronghold of all, that light moves in a straight line. The old academics clung to these for a while, believing that an equivalent of the straight line existed in nature. But modern physics showed no mercy for any of these beliefs, and now the straight line no longer has any existence whatsoever. The differentiation between geometric and organic forms was a result of a quantitative understanding of things, but in reality everything is simultaneously geometric and organic.

An Appeal

We call on all plastic artists to use the color blue, for it has great potential in showing internal dimensions and depths—in other words, it has the ability to create a Crystalist vision. It is currently the clearest embodiment of Crystalism within the color spectrum. We must stress that the human ability to see internal dimensions in the color blue is not merely the result of a conditional reflex specific to the blueness of the sea and the sky.

Drama

The idea of the three dimensions of theater is irrational, for each theatrical performance is as multiple as the people who watch it. Someone sitting in the first row sees movements, expressions, and emotions, and hears vocal tones that are all completely different from what someone sitting at the very back of the theater, or to the right or left of the stage, sees and hears. So with the arrival of each new audience member, who would naturally occupy a different seat from all the others, a play remains open to further plurality and division. This plurality goes on infinitely, which is valuable in and of itself. But academics, with their habit of twisting the truth, deal with each play from a singular view, and it is on this basis that they issue their judgments, criticisms, and interpretations. Last year, when we covered the front of the theater with a transparent crystal, we were referencing this affliction. In the near future, in an attempt to ease critics’ consciences and give ourselves some rest, we will be interrupting the performance for short intervals in which we will ask audience members to change seats so that they can enjoy a greater variety of plays and have a more pleasant experience. This should result in less criticism. The idea of acting, or characterization, is itself an irrational idea: for two hours an actor can wreak havoc in the world through his assumed character, before hurrying off the stage for a previously arranged appointment, a cinema date for instance. This irrationality is not something that we discovered; the very history of theater is built on it. The struggle between theater giants like [Bertolt] Brecht and [Konstantin] Stanislavsky reflect it, and a dialogue with them is quite possible. Let us start with Stanislavsky’s question, “How can affective memory be turned into deliberate action?” And can this be achieved in isolation from the thesis of transparency? Is there not a need—even a minor one—for a theater of telepathy, history, clairvoyance, psychiatry, or automatism?

Concerning the appeal to morphology (the science of form) to provide a futuristic solution to the problem of drama, we say that human morphology is a set of developmental cycles and multiple adaptations to ensure survival. We still maintain that it is the function that creates the organ and not the other way around. Furthermore, present morphology reflects that struggle that relates to the different capacities of an earlier age. Now that man has entered the technological age, present morphology has become almost a burden on him.

Poets

Transparency is a genuine current in poetry. What artist and poet William Blake said about man’s four-dimensional vision—the ability to see an entire world in a grain of sand—represents a cornerstone of Crystalist thought. Sufi poetry is also full of references to the reality of the crystal. Indeed, it takes the crystal to its furthest and most impenetrable extremes. This can be seen in the following translation of a poem by Asif Jatt Halabi:

The colors went to the sun I need neither colors Nor the absence of colors The suns died, devoid of space I need neither light Nor darkness

Children

The interest and intense joy that young children exhibit toward the crystal in its simple forms—like a soap bubble or a kaleidoscope, which consists of a lens and broken bits of glass—add to the crystal’s authenticity. Children’s interest in the crystal is a deeply complex matter, for children are the most complex of riddles.

Conclusion

We conclude by repeating that the crystal is nothing but the denial of the objectification of objects. It is infinite transparency. We painted the crystal, we thought about the crystal, and so the Crystalist vision came to be.

—“Bayān al-Madrasa al-Krīstāliyya,” al-Ayyām, January 21, 1976; repr. in Ṣalāḥ Ḥasan ʿAbd Allāh, Musāhamāt fī al-Adab al-Tashkīlī, 1974–86, 2nd ed. (Khartoum: Madarek, 2010), 311–22. Translated from Arabic by Nariman Youssef.

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