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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Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents is the first publication to provide comprehensive English translations of Pedrosa’s writings. Texts range from art and architectural criticism and theory to political writings as well as correspondence with his artistic and political interlocutors, among them such luminaries as André Breton, Alexander Calder, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Oscar Niemeyer, Hélio Oiticica, Pablo Picasso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Harald Szeeman, and Leon Trotsky.

The Vital Need for Art

In this landmark 1947 lecture, the legendary Brazilian critic and public intellectual Mário Pedrosa advocates a Universalist view of art that includes the creativity of children and the mentally ill. The text also outlines the importance for modernism of what was then called primitive art. Drawn from the recent publication Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, this lecture was given on the occasion of the closing of an exhibition of works by patients at the Hospital Dom Pedro II, a psychiatric center in the Engenho de Dentro district of Rio de Janeiro overseen by the Jungian psychiatrist Dr. Nise da Silveira. The artist Almir Mavignier helped establish an art studio at the center in which local abstract artists, such as Abraham Palatnik and Ivan Serpa, actively participated. Pedrosa was central to articulating the significance of the work undertaken by the studio, and he brought several critics like Albert Camus, Murilo Mendes, and Léon Degand to the center to broaden the intellectual appreciation of its activities.

The trouble with understanding the problem that brings us together here today is a conceptualization of art that centuries of bad tradition have implanted in our minds. The reality is that the world today does not know what art is. The public cannot discern what is fundamental about the artistic phenomenon.

To the public, visual art is the imitation of nature—the representation of reality according to certain canons that have been codified since the Renaissance. All so-called works of art are immediately subjected to this criterion and the public wishes to see this confirmed in them—this identification with external reality.

Hence the public’s incomprehension of so-called modern art. And its even greater incomprehension in light of an experiment such as the exhibition currently on view at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional.¹

It is no longer just the public that finds these paintings and drawings “strange.” Perplexity has even taken hold of the avant-garde, of the unfortunately still narrow circle of enthusiasts and connoisseurs of the visual arts in our educated circles. Where does this perplexity come from? It comes from the dregs of an intellectual prejudice with which the problem of art is approached. We are no longer talking about those who are unable to distinguish a work of art—a legitimate painting—from a lifeless academic imitation. We are referring to artists, critics, and consciously refined connoisseurs with academic backgrounds who nonetheless somehow retain an anachronistic notion of the matter. They are interested only in the result—that is, the finished work—the purpose of which is to be perpetually admired or worshipped in a new fetishism. They see only the masterpiece. To them, art has not yet lost its capital “A.” It continues to be a separate, exceptional activity, and the artist remains a mysterious being enveloped by some mystical or magical halo.

This is a highly—if I may be allowed an awful word—passé attitude, and it, too, is the product of academic mustiness. It derives from a concept crystalized from the Renaissance on: art as social glorification, as the veneration of great men; whether they are begirded by the warrior’s sword or wear the emperor’s crown; whether prince or tyrant, cardinal or saint, etc. From its purposes of glorification—after the disappearance of the glorified; that is, the object of glorification—it was the work of art, in turn, that became celebrated as a new fetish that possessed the additional advantage of reflecting the vanity of its worshippers.

Beginning as tailors who stitched together the glorious mantles of the potentates and heroes of the Renaissance, artists eventually transformed themselves into a closed brotherhood at the service of the aristocracy. And, like every brotherhood, it created for itself specialized interests and fixed regulations that segregated its members from the rest of mortals, keeping others at a careful remove from its secrets. In the absence of their genius, the ways of Renaissance artists were zealously amassed and codified by imitators and mediocre successors: for two centuries or more, academicism propagated itself parasitically upon the accomplishments of that fecund age. Isolated in certain countries, the few artists of genius remained misunderstood and systematically ignored (think of El Greco) by trendsetters, dictators of aesthetic laws, and the proprietors of the academic brotherhood.

The world, however, did not remain limited to the Mediterranean; it eventually came to include America, Africa, and the confines of Asia. New civilizations and their cultures were revealed, penetrating ancient Greco-Roman culture.

Archeology, scientific explorations of every order, whether geographical, anthropological, or sociological, have conquered new territories for human culture, and their discoveries exert an influence on art today at least as profound as the excavations and discoveries of ancient classical statues in the age of the Renaissance. Donatello would not have been Donatello without the revelation of Greek statuary. There has been an exploration of cultural expressions not only of Egypt and the pre-Biblical peoples of Asia Minor, but of India and its cultural ramifications. The West has finally embraced Chinese civilization and its refinements. But it is not only these advanced cultural expressions that end-of-the-century Europeans absorbed.

The Barbarian peoples of pre-Columbian America, of Oceania, of Africa are also considered worthy of interest and, with astonishment, cultured Mediterranean man realizes that they, too, possess art (which thus ceases to be the privilege of Western Europe’s superior races). Art is no longer solely the product of high intellectual and scientific cultures. Primitive peoples also make it. And since everything in art is judged by quality and since quality cannot be measured, these artistic products by primitive peoples are formally as legitimate and good as those of the super-refined civilizations of Greece or of France. Astonished by African, pre-Columbian, or Indonesian statuary, anthropologists and archeologists soon succeeded in convincing art historians and artists themselves as to the value of such revelations. It is, undoubtedly, a revelation of new formal organizations, pure, as pure as those who conceived the classic Western canons. Hence the profound revolutionary effect they have upon the sensibility of the best contemporary artists.

Simultaneously—and on its own—painting slowly arrived at a stalemate it was unable to overcome when, so as not to die by asphyxiation, it left the studio for the open air and came upon the open book of nature. Like a naughty child who runs away from home for the first time, Impressionism is dazzled by the miraculous properties of light. Hitherto apparently untouchable, the castle of academicism begins to crumble. Mandatory three-dimensionality is held in contempt. Young Impressionist painters feel happy because, now, they see before themselves an authentic new god to worship.

Psychology, in turn, as the youngest sister of the other sciences, is devoured by the ambition to expand the excessively timid horizons of classical or associationist routine. Like some new and unlimited continent, even richer and more mysterious than the American one, the Unconscious is discovered. Mechanical rationalism and its stunted fruit (abstract intellectualism) suffer a mortal blow. For the first time, then, the world of the arts is afforded the conditions to approach the preliminary albeit fundamental problem of its psychological origins, the subjective mechanicism of this activity before the finished work.

Even seemingly meaningless or unimportant acts that are practiced automatically—inconsequential movements, mistakes, scribbles, awkward drawings thoughtlessly made on paper—have become objects of interest and study. No gesture, word, or human act would ever again escape the field of psychological investigation. It was discovered that, beyond the express, apparently formal meaning of man’s actions and words there might be another, truer hidden meaning. The congenital unity of the human race was confirmed anew.

Surprisingly, a resemblance was noted between works by the coarse, anonymous men of one people and the simple folk of other peoples. A native ingenuity common to all these anonymous creators illuminated their works, whether of an artisanal nature or more disinterested or mystical, such as the representation of the image of an Indian god. This natural ingenuity was like an emotional password allowing entry into everywhere, because one felt in it an obvious manifestation of the poetic order (which is universal). Kinship between the arts of various primitive peoples and similar manifestations in children the world over have long been noted.

The newly born modern art movement, like a river at high tide that, throughout its tumultuous course, takes possession of all the objects and all the achievements that humanity has accumulated within the domain of disinterested expression, has lost its residual remains of abstract intellectualism in these latest universal acquisitions.

This marks the emergence of teams of so-called “moderns,” which have been succeeding one another for generations. Yet, even as they presented themselves to the public, they were received with a fierce hostility, with derision and hearty laughter, contempt and hatred. They were immediately identified as savages or madmen or simply pointed at as mystifiers. But their works came to speak for themselves; little by little they stood out to the eyes of a still-traumatized public, like echoes of intentionally ignored pre-Renaissance art, thanks to the reversal of aesthetic values that triumphant academicism imposed upon the world. Thus, they once again took up the great, true, living artistic vein that runs through the centuries and was interrupted by mannerism and post-Renaissance decadence. The result of all this was the elaboration of a new concept of art, which was nothing more than the rediscovery of artistic sentiment in its purity, so transparent in the work of the primitive anonymous artists.

This evolution or revolution of values is well expressed by André Lhote, who, aside from being a painter, is one of the soundest theoreticians in contemporary art. Among others, he was able to mark the difference in attitude of the modern artist compared to Impressionist, Renaissance, and primitive artists. In creating, the latter obeyed the sacred scriptures and their perspective; their order of things was supernatural, religious. They placed objects within a transcendental hierarchy that was in no way realistic. The Renaissance artist invented linear, geometric perspective, and—because he created within the exterior world—he came to organize it according to its optical illusions. The Impressionist constructs his world (rather, his detail of the world) according to an immediate, purely perceptual perspective as a consequence of light and color. Finally, the modern artist—who understands the trick of Italian perspective but no longer possesses the mystical simplicity of the primitive artist nor shows himself to be passive before the Impressionist’s play of natural light—refashions perspective. It is a new perspective, which Lhote calls affective in order to signify that it may no longer be reduced to any exterior formula, for the transformation that the creator artist imposes upon the natural relationship between objects obeys only—and must only obey—the rhythm of poetry, the rhythm of form.

To render even more sensitively and powerfully the contrast in attitude between an imitator of the Renaissance artist and that of the modern artist, it is useful to compare a definition of painting given by seventeenth-century French academicians with those of a Parisian modernist artist-theorist. In the seventeenth century, a painting was a “flat surface covered in lighter or darker hues that imitate the relief of objects and create the illusion of depth.” In Maurice Denis’s appropriation of the old Gothic formula of the primitives, a painting is “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”²

In 1672 the French Royal Academy’s notion of painting was thus defined by one of its academicians: “An art that, by means of forms and colors, imitates, upon a flat surface, all the objects that appear to the sense of sight.” In the following session of the same Academy, in the same year, another member replied: “I do not know, gentlemen, whether it is possible to believe that the painter should strive for any purpose other than the imitation of beautiful and perfect nature. Should he pursue something chimeric and invisible? It is clear that the painter’s most beautiful quality is to be the imitator of perfect nature, for it is impossible for man to go beyond this.”

Yet more than two hundred years later, [Paul] Gauguin, for instance, did not think so, and wrote: “God took a little clay in his hands and made every known thing. An artist, in turn (if he really wants to produce a work of divine creation), must not copy nature but take the natural elements and create a new element.”³ These conflicting concepts prove the impossibility of understanding artistic activity itself, let alone its intrinsic purpose, without brutally severing ties with the prejudices and conventions of academicism.

“I should be in despair if my figures were good,” wrote [Vincent] van Gogh, for “I don’t want them to be academically correct.”⁴ He declared emphatically, “I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well—a lie if you like—but truer than the literal truth.”⁵

Therefore, artistic activity is something that does not depend upon stratified laws, the fruit of experience of a single age in the history of art’s evolution. This activity extends to all human beings and is no longer the exclusive occupation of a specialized brotherhood that requires a diploma for access. Art’s will manifests itself in any man in our land, regardless of his meridian, be he Papuan or cafuzo,⁶ Brazilian or Russian, black or yellow, lettered or illiterate, balanced or unbalanced.

Artistic appeal is so irreducible that even [Charles] Baudelaire intuited that every child is an artist, or at least has the capacity to be a true poet or painter thanks to the freshness of his senses. “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and color. . . . The man of genius has sound nerves, while those of the child are weak. With the one, Reason has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”⁷ To the great poet, the artist of genius was “a man-child,” that is, “a man who is never for a moment without the genius of childhood.”⁸

Indeed, for Baudelaire—he who understood his his trade so well—genius is a state of childhood, and inspiration tends to intensify with spontaneous, vital, unconscious forces that accumulate—so to speak—in the tender, open pores of children. The discovery and exploration of the unconscious came as if to confirm the poet’s intuitions.

Thus man draws a little closer to the mysterious sources of artistic creation. Pictorial art is no longer a way to imitate nature, to represent external reality, or, as Monsieur Blanchard (the same French academician of 1672) would have it, to “bestow roundness to the bodies that are represented upon a flat surface.” This art is no longer the science of trompe l’oeil! In any form, whether large or small, profound or decorative, mere elementary sketch or formless blot, to be considered art is initially a matter of emotion and sensation or, in [Georges] Braque’s laconic formula, “sensation and revelation.”⁹ It is not only artists and poets such as Baudelaire and Van Gogh who have intuition or—rather—the so-to-speak physical sentiment of the unconscious process of creation.

Defining it in terms of his own experience, Van Gogh spoke of his “terrible lucidity at moments,” in which, according to his confession, “I am not conscious of myself anymore, and the pictures come to me as in a dream.”¹⁰ The more objective modern psychologists—not the followers of [Sigmund] Freud or [Carl] Jung, but the fervent followers of behavioral psychology such as Henri Wallon—arrived at identical conclusions. As a general observation, they admit that, “Whereas conscience is mistress of the terrain, vain are the efforts of wise men and men of letters to accomplish the work that consumes them.” According to them, consciousness must “abdicate,” “give in to forgetting,” that is, to the subconscious.

In all mental domains, therefore, the problem of creation would consist of freeing the creators, who would forget previously established mental associations, already chained automatically to certain formulas. Yet this does not explain why a child is freer from these tyrannical associations than an adult, and the mentally abnormal man more so than the average one. “Only when the creators free themselves from an individuality that rejects any new combination,” the same illustrious professor admits, “shall they be able to contribute to a new intuition” and (we would say) with much stronger reason to any new image.

The normal observer or scientist must keep to examination and to reflection in order to avoid consciousness from dispersing. In light of this, the objective psychologists sound the alarm and point to “the unstable subjects whose illness consists precisely in allowing consciousness to abandon itself to any and all impression that solicits it.” Now, this examination and reflection act precisely in the sense of rendering consciousness insensitive to what these psychologists call “aberrant stimuli”; on the contrary, the observer is incapable of following the course of his perceptions and thoughts.

But for the artist—neither an observer nor a scientist—the advice is no good; it is not up to him, according to the logic of true art, to follow, as an external observer, the course of his own perceptions and thoughts in order to control them. He is not an observer. He is a creator, a being with emotions that demand formal expression. Wherever he may be, his task is to seek out that new intuition of which the scientist spoke, the new image. Consequently, for the artist there are no aberrant stimuli (rather, there is the hackneyed “Aeolian harp” of rhetoric or old Hugo’s “sonorous echo”).

Still, for the same psychologist, “A sufficient adaptation to the environment allows us to perceive only the objective, conscious side of the life of the mind. As long as it exactly represents our intimate aspirations vis-à-vis the exterior world, this will suffice to eclipse them totally.”

Now there can be no manifestation of artistic nature—and much less any creative appeal—with these eclipsed or absorbed intimate apsirations that come out of a “sufficient adaptation to the environment.” However, if the “objective and conscious face of psychic life” is insufficient to contain or express the “intimate aspirations,” as “anomalies,” the various “perversions” according to the “needs of existence” (also according to the psychologist’s terminology), the influx “of subjective influences” necessarily reappears. These intimate aspirations are evidently impenetrable “to the objective and conscious face of psychological life”; rather, they constitute the other irreducible face of the same life, the one that never ceases to demand expression from us, just as, on another level, another face—the inscrutable side of the moon—never ceases to torment our eternal curiosity.

According to another teaching of this very psychology, “for every representation that flutters in our consciousness and pursues us, a tendency develops to externalize it, to place it before us, to find for it a subject outside of us.” Enfeebled consciousness tends to allow representations that obsessively inhabit the mind to escape. This is when that tendency to externalize emerges, setting these representations outside consciousness itself, as if they belonged to a foreign subject. In children, and above all in mentally disturbed personalities, this representation is profoundly internalized; for this very reason, the need to externalize may become unbearable. Even when it is simply therapeutic—as in the case of the artistic activity of the exhibitors Who currently interest us—this activity may lead the obsessions to be sublimated, just as one might vanquish an enemy—by giving them formal expression. Of the process of elaboration, the document of externalization remains liable to being isolated and appreciated as intrinsic artistic expression.

Baudelaire spoke of “congestion” to express his concept of inspiration; momentarily in the grip of a “terrible lucidity,” Van Gogh enters it like a dream and is no longer able to feel himself. According to Wallon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau finds himself in a similar state after a fainting spell. Describing his sensations, Rousseau wrote: “In that instant I was born into life, and it seemed to me as if I was filling all the things I saw with my frail existence.”¹¹Thus, the decline of conscious activity seems to lead parts of ourselves that we habitually forget are essentially ours to unmoor themselves from us. The body is therefore a sort of exterior field of sensations, which direct and organize themselves indpendently from us as if taking place at a regular distance from our very self. Consciousness is no longer able to oppose itself to these sensations, which are eventually mistaken with environmental reality itself. The same psychologist concluded that consciousness has lost the power of objectifying the representations that touch it.

This diffusion of states of consciousness in space comes about when there is a blurring of the lines, which the normal activity of consciousness never ceases to draw, between what distiguishes “I” from “not I,” between subject and object: it is more or less what occurs during a fainting spell.

The diffusion of consciousness in space . . .

Would such not be the case with these schizophrenics, these already entirely dissociated personalities such as that of D, in the exhibition catalogue, the author of these enigmatic watercolors to which he has given strange, invented names such as Flausi-Flausi, Feérica [Magical], etc.? They are adult beings enveloped by an insurmountable isolation, no longer possessing the power to coordinate the representations that touch consciousness itself or distinguish their sensations from the images and reflections of environmental reality.

He is no longer the creator of Flausi-Flausi; he is dispersed in air, in things, as it were; he is an object endowed with antennae, a strange living being that no longer inhabits this world of ours; a harp, a triangle of sound; these colored lines he weaves construct a sort of circuit between vegetable and animal, with the consistency of damp fibers like those of the trunk of a banana tree. The result is a mesh, a new framework for purposes as yet unclear; it might be the unfinished structure of a fantastical dirigible, the covering of which should have been swept away by the winds of space. Whether formless or uncoordinated, all this nevertheless possesses an oddly musical quality, an abstract counterpoint in which the melodic lines of the dissociated personality still cross one another yet are no longer coordinated, no longer fixed in a group with a beginning and an end. Some of them point to the idea of a star machine, a celestial body, a passing meteorite. None of this precludes the fact that, within the chaotic mesh, admirable details may reveal themselves to the attentive gaze, the sweetest of profiles may appear like precise hallucinations or vaguely suggested dreams and symbolic signs to satisfy the curiosity of the most implacable analyst.

In passing, it must be said that what is lacking in these embryonic samples of art that we have here—the emotional raw material of formal creation—is productive will; that terrible, almost inhuman will that vanquished inner chaos itself in Van Gogh, imposing a formal organization and disciplining its explosive forces, subordinating everything to the final cosmic order necessary to creation.

Even in the most artistic—in the technical sense—of these personalities now exhibited before us, we may notice the absence of this formal resistance, the soul of the composition; however, it is what most differentiates the drawing or painting of a psychopathic personality or a child from those of a still conscious artist. In them a subjective confidence, an explosion of the affected self and the child’s cosmic amazement before the eternally new spectacle, is predominant.

There is in these drawings and documents exhibited by the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional—which by so doing performs an inestmable service to Brazilian culture—a clear contrast between the joyous, spirited, playful minds evident in the images produced by the hands of minors, and the darker, more melancholy humor of those produced by the adults. Let us examine, for instance, Passeata [Protest March] or A’s cold Paisagem Abismal [Abismal landscape] and the minor D’s Cabritinho [Little goat] or Menino com o Bodoque [Boy with slingshot]; compare the bitter, hallucinated expression of Autin’s figures or the pungent, perverse, sickly romanticism of the author of the veritable drama in figures that is Minha Vida [My life] to the young O’s doodles or farmyard chicks and nativity scenes.

In the end, what is art, from the emotional point of view, other than the language of unconscious forces that act within us? In turn, might not the visual arts be reductions of sentiments and aspirations that, even if they might become conscious, cannot be translated into words, according to Maria Petrie, that admirable pedagogue of the soul and of aesthetics? It is upon exactly this that modern educators of her kind base themselves. What they propose is to make use of art as a means by which to arrive at the harmony of the subconscious and to a better organization of human emotions. They request that “this grammar of a language able to express such important and subtle things” be taught to whoever wishes to learn it, in order that it may cease to be “the secet code of an elite.” Without this, it would once again become the instrument of a brotherhood more cloistered than the academic one, and more dangerous still because it is affective and possesses strange powers.

It is through this language that we learn the unconscious work of the mind that manifests itself in inspiration, that is, through the sudden projection of some thing or message in the field of consciousness, according to the vivid definition of the English educator. According to Petrie’s definition, inspiration is knowledge, cognition by means of emotion rather than by means of intellect.

This is how we define the whole of one of the most signifcant branches of modern art, that of the family of subjective artists, the principal strain of which is represented by Surrealism. Let us not forget that one of the guiding principles of Surrealism is a condemnation of the external model (which is replaced by the incessant search for an interior model). Revelations could be found in dreams and in the symbolism of the unconscious, and the principal means of capturing subconscious images would be psychological automatism, whether of verbal expression, in poetry, or visual expression, in painting and sculpture.

Painting speaks a new language: through it new possibilities for contact with other beings are established—a contact that will take place precisely within those regions in which the spoken word cannot penetrate or cannot be called to intervene.

Thus by felicitous coincidence, as currently considered by psychologists and artists and in light of these primary, elementary manifestations—the inconsequential bleatings of a creation that shall never come to be—the artistic phenomenon must be understood in a broader sense than it has been. This broader sense will allow it to reach its extremes, to catch up with simple, disinterested, lucid activity, in other words, that of the game with various materials that technology provides.

In this sense, even the scribbles of children and the mentally diminished fundamentally possess the same nature as the works of the world’s great artists, conforming to an identical psychological process of creative elaboration. In all of these multiple and diverse manifestations, to greater or lesser degrees of intensity, what is essentially dealt with is nothing less than a bestowing of symbolic form (but form nonetheless) onto the feelings and images of the deep self.

Each individual is a separate psychological system, as well as a potentially malleable and formal orgnization. Psychological normality and abnormality are the conventional terms of quantitative science. In the domain of art, however, they cease to have any decisive meaning. Here, the boundaries between things are fainter, harder to precisely define than in any other domain of mental activity. The case of Van Gogh is conclusive: he was insane; yet some of his finest work was done while he was hospitalized. And do we not know other, equally illustrious cases in the field of literature such as those of [August] Strindberg and [Friedrich] Hölderlin? And, in England, at the beginning of the Victorian era, did we not have the pathetic case of the great medievalist William Blake? Doctors and psychiatrists tell us it is common to recognize accentuated manifestations and traits of schizophrenia and manic depression in so-called normal types.

From the perspective of the senses and the imagination, an intellectually disabled child or a mentally ill adolescent is, generally, quite normal; this is why they are able to produce authentic artistic manfestations and achievements. Their creative or imaginative appeal never disappears. On the contrary, they may oftentimes become more intense, urgent, and irrepressible, for that will be the only vehicle they trust to communicate with the exterior, for real communication, that is, from soul to soul.

In literary works, the creative process may be more rational because it does not dispense with but actually requires—to a certain degree—the contribution of intellectual concepts. Their dependency upon public participation is therefore greater. It is, however, less acessible to the child and the more mentally challenged.

For the mentally impaired and for children, for innocents of every sort, the art forms that require the least intellectual or conscious effort are the most accessible. This is not so much the case with music, in spite of the rhythmic element, which is instinctive, for children are not very sensitive to melody and harmony. In effect, these require a power of continuity and organization that escapes beings with a more hesitant control of consciousness.

Under these conditions, the visual arts are closest to the sensibility of children or the simple-minded. According to Petrie, they participate in the cosmic principles inherent to space, such as two- and three-dimensional form, volume, mass, weight; in those same principles inherent to light: color, shadows, hues; and they deal with matter that can be acted upon, such as clay, stone, wood, paper, charcoal, etc.

Creative activity essentially repeats unconsciously the ongoing re-creation of the miracle of life among organisms, and that is what gives such exultant power to the work of pure creation. Hence artist and educator Maria Petrie’s hypothesis that nature, in its attempt to lead our mental and psychological growth to develop harmoniously and in step with physical growth, has imposed its own laws upon actual artistic phenomena, so that men might finally recognize them and surrender to them. Thereby the same phenomena would take on the nature of a vital need, for it would be no more than a transposition onto the human plane of the laws of cosmic creation. This vitality, or form of vitality, is more urgent and irreducible when it identifies, defines, and expresses itself through those cosmic principles that rule things—“vitamins of the soul,” to use Petrie’s expression—that is, light, color, weight, rhythm, form, movement, and proportion. Art would be made according to the same principles that rule the incessant creation of the universe and its functional mechanism. It does not repeat or copy nature. Instead, it obeys the same rules; it transposes them to the plane of conscious (that is, human) creation. Thus, an artist is an individual who elevates himself to the category of universal architect, as the poor wretch Gauguin would have it.

At least in part, the discovery of the unconscious reveals to us the origins of artistic creation. The images and the life elaborated in it are the most genuine raw materials of the work of art. The latter manifests itself with or without the control of consciousness. It dispenses with the external contribution of the intellect. It belongs purely to the domain of the sensations that transmute themselves, by true miracle, into a harmony of formally structured emotions.

The visual arts may even dispense with those organs most indispensable to representation of the exterior world. Modeling may cease to be a visual art, given that through inner, haptic vision, the blind man, endowed with a sense of rhythm, is able to create plasticity.

To this end, it suffices that he combine the intuitions of touch with the divine sense of rhythm. Married to a sense of rhythm, this highly developed sense of touch allows a blind man to mold clay or mud and create inspired figures of profound formal visuality, of extraordinarily harmonic lines and planes. We already know of examples of these modelings through touch alone—the work of a blind man—which recall the formal organization of Lucas Cranach’s figures.

Thus we have proof that these arts have no need of external visual representation. Indeed, the less they are subjected to realistic conventions and intellectual prejudices the more profound they are. A pure creation of the mind, the work leaves the unconscious or nothingness with the heat of things that are born to life, exuding joy, pain, sensitivity, in a system of emotions that—in turn—revigorates men with its spiritual vitamins, touching them with the grace of comprehending and the emanations of the world of forms.

Painting and sculpture—the arts in general—are techniques that must be learned as one learns to read and write, to sew, to cook, to weave. Their effects can make themselves felt even upon the mentally ill, whether by curing them or giving them hope, or by enticing them to once more come outside into our brutal, ugly world with messages, occasionally decipherable, that shine, devastating and fleeting, like flashes. There are no barriers—nor could there be, in fact—to the enchanted world of forms; there is no standing in line to enter its arena, which belongs to no one and is common to all men without exception. Humanity is happy when all of them, initiated and without inhibitions, are able to penetrate this magical field! Entry is available to everyone.

The arts are surely not an unattainable exception. There is no education of the emotions, in the sense of an intellectual education, a social education, or education in other technqiues for living. The earliest manifestations of the emotions appear at a very young age, and they do not respect limits, obstacles, prejudices, regulations, or even “states of consciousness.”

Art begins with a child’s earliest doodles and is present wherever men make use of hand and eye—of their senses and their hearts simultaneously—to bestow form unto anything that is not for immediate use, moved by the simple pleasure of making something, or even merely to express unconscious impulses. This is the case of the less adapted, such as these highly sensitive children and adults who now surround us with their invisible presence. The only means still left to them for communicating with us in depth (which is to say humanly), for signaling to us, is through these modest emotional expressions transferred onto paper and which, being of an obviously artistic nature, have been the object of our present discussion.

“Arte, necessidade vital,” talk given at the closing conference of the exhibition organized by the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional, with support from the Associação dos Artistas Brasileiros at the ABI, March 31, 1947. In Correio da manhã (Rio de Janeiro), April 13 and 21, 1947.

Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica

This 1966 essay is renowned for its early use of the term “postmodern.” Unlike later theorizations, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa deploys the concept to discuss how immersive environments replace distanced visual perception in the artworks of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. New attention to the essay—where the text is interpreted as an alternate theoretical point of departure—has instigated a rethinking of the relationship between art and broader cultural shifts in the postwar period in Brazil and beyond.

Now that we have arrived at the end of what has been called “modern art,” inaugurated by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and inspired by the (then) recent discovery of African art, criteria for appreciation are no longer the same as the ones established since then, based as they were on the Cubist experiment. By now, we have entered another cycle, one that is no longer purely artistic, but cultural, radically different from the preceding one and begun (shall we say?) by Pop art. I would call this new cycle of antiart “postmodern art.”

(In passing, let us say that, this time around, Brazil participates not as a modest follower, but as a leader. In many regards, the young exponents of the old Concretism and especially of Neoconcretism (as led by Lygia Clark) have foreshadowed the Op and even Pop art movements. Hélio Oiticica was the youngest of the group.)

In the apprenticeship phase and in the exercise of “modern art,” the natural virtuality, the extreme plasticity of perception of the new being explored by the artists was subordinated, disciplined, and contained by the exaltation and the hegemony of intrinsically formal values. Nowadays, in this phase of art in the situation of antiart, of “postmodern art,” the reverse takes place: formal values per se tend to be absorbed by the malleability of perceptive and situational structures. As a psychological phenomenon, it is perfectly clear that the malleability of perception increases under the influence of emotion and affective states. Like the classical modernists, today’s avant-garde artists do not avoid this influence and certainly do not seek it out deliberately, as did the romantic subjectivists of “abstract” “or lyrical” Expressionism.” Expressiveness in itself is of no interest to the contemporary avant-garde. On the contrary, it fears hermetic individual subjectivism most of all—hence the inherent objectivity of Pop and Op art (in the United States). Even the “new figuration” (in which the remains of subjectivism have aligned themselves) aspires above all else to narrate or to spread a collective message about myth and, when the message is an individual one, to use humor.

As early as 1959, when throughout the world the romantic vogue for Art Informel and tachisme predominated, the young Oiticica, indifferent to fashion, had given up painting in order to forge his first unusual, violently and frankly monochromatic object—or relief—in space. Having naturally broken away from the gratuitousness of formal values that are rare among today’s avant-garde artists, he remains faithful to those values in the structural rigor of his objects, the discipline of his forms, the sumptuousness of his color and material combinations—in short, for the purity of his creations. He wants everything to be beautiful, impeccably pure, and intractably precious, like a Matisse in the splendor of his art of “luxury, calm, and voluptuousness.” The Baudelaire of Flowers of Evil may be the distant godfather of this aristocratic adolescent who is a passista¹² for the Mangueira¹³ [samba school]—albeit without the poéte maudit’s Christian sense of sin. His Concretist apprenticeship almost prevented him from reaching the vernal, ingenuous stage of the first experiment. His expression takes on an extremely individualist character and, at the same time, goes all the way to pure sensorial exaltation without, however, achieving the psychological threshold itself, where the transition to the image, to the sign, to emotion and to consciousness takes place. He cut this transition short. But his behavior suddenly changed: one day, he left his ivory tower—his studio—to become part of the Estação Primeira, where his painful and serious popular initiation took place at the foot of Mangueira Hill, a carioca myth. Even as he surrendered to a veritable rite of initiation, he nonetheless carried his unrepentant aesthetic nonconformity with him to the samba in the eternally hardcore spaces of Mangueira and environs.

He left at home the spatial reliefs and Núcleos [Nuclei], the continuation of an experiment with color he called Penetravél [Penetrable]—a construction in wood with sliding doors in which the subject might seclude himself inside color.

Color invaded him. He made physical contact with color; he pondered, touched, walked on, breathed color. As in Clark’s Bichos [Animals] experience, the spectator ceased to be a passive contemplator in order to become attracted to an action that lay within the artist’s cogitations rather than within the scope of his own conventional, everyday considerations, and participated in them, communicating through gesture and action. This is what the avant-garde artists of the world want nowadays and it is really the secret driving force behind “happenings.” The Núcleos are pierced structures, suspended panels of colored wood that trace a path beneath a quadrilateral, canopy-like ceiling. Color is no longer locked away; the surrounding space is aflame with violent yellow or orange color-substances that have been unloosed, seizing the environment and responding to one another in space, as flesh, too, is colored, and dresses and cloth are inflamed, and their reverberations touch things. The incandescent environment burns, the atmosphere is one of decorative over-refinement that is simultaneously aristocratic, slightly plebeian, and perverse. The violent color and light occasionally evoke van Gogh’s nocturnal billiards room, in which those colors that symbolized the “terrible passions of humanity”¹⁴ reverberated for him.

Oiticica called his art environmental. Indeed, that is what it is. Nothing about it is isolated. There is no single artwork that can be appreciated in itself, like a picture.

The sensorial perceptual whole dominates. Within it, the artist has created a “hierarchy of orders”—Relevos [Reliefs], Núcleos, Bólides¹⁵ (boxes), and capes, banners, tents (Parangolés)¹⁶ —“all directed toward the creation of an environmental world.” It was during his initiation in samba that the artist moved from the purity of visual experience to an experiment in touch, in movement, in the sensual fruition of materials in which the entire body—previously reduced in the distant aristocracy of visuality—makes its entrance as a total source of sensoriality. In the wooden boxes that open like pigeonholes from which an inner light hints at other impressions, opening up perspectives through movable panels, drawers that open to reveal earth or colored powder, etc., the transition from predominantly visual impressions to the domain of haptic or tactile ones becomes evident. The simultaneous contrast of colors moves on to successive contrasts of contact, of friction between solids and liquids, hot and cold, smooth and creased, rough and soft, porous and dense. Wrinkled colored mesh springs from within the boxes like entrails, drawers are filled with powders and then glass containers, the earliest of which contain reductions of color to pure pigment. A variety of materials succeed one another: crushed brick, red lead oxide, earth, pigments, plastic, mesh, coal, water, ani¬line, crushed seashells. Mirrors serve as bases for Nucléos or create further spatial dimensions within the boxes. Like artificial flowers, absurdly precious and lush yellow and green porous meshes emerge from the neck of a whimsically shaped bottle (of the type that belongs to a liqueur service) filled with transparent green liquid. It is an unconscious challenge to the refined taste of aesthetes. He has called this unusual decorative vase Homenagem a Mondrian Tribute to Mondrian. A flask sits upon a table amid boxes, glass containers, nuclei, and capes—a Louis XV-like pretense of luxury within a suburban interior. One of the most beautiful and astonishing boxes, its interior filled with variegated circumvolutions (meshes), is illuminated by neon light. There is enormous variety in these box and glass Bólides. No longer part of the macrocosm, everything now takes place inside these objects; it is as if they had been touched by some strange experience.

One might say that the artist transmits the message of rigor, luxury, and exaltation that vision once gave us into the occasionally gloved hands that grope and plunge into powder, into coal, into shells. Thus he has come full circle around the entire sensorial–tactile–motile spectrum. The ambiance is one of virtual, sensory saturation.

For the first time, the artist finds himself face to face with another reality—the world of awareness, of states of mind, the world of values. All things must now accommodate meaningful behavior. Indeed, the pure, raw sensorial totality so deliberately sought after and so decisively important to Oiticica’s art is finally exuded through transcendence into another environment. In it the artist—sensorial machine absolute—stumbles, vanquished by man, convulsively confined by the soiled passions of ego and the tragic dialectic of social encounter. The symbiosis of this extreme, radical aesthetic refinement therefore takes place with an extreme psychological radicalism that involves the entire personality. The Luciferian sin of aesthetic nonconformity and the individual sin of psychological nonconformity are fused. The mediator of this symbiosis of two Manichaean nonconformisms was the Mangueira samba school.

The expression of this absolute nonconformity is his “Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo” [Tribute to “Cara de Cavalo”], a veritable monument of authentically pathetic beauty in which formal values are finally not supreme. An open box without a lid, modestly covered by mesh that must be lifted to reveal the bottom, its inner walls are lined with reproductions of a photograph that appeared in the newspapers of the day; in them, [the outlaw] “Cara de Cavalo”¹⁷ appears lying on the ground, his face riddled with bullets, his arms open, as if crucified. What absorbs the artist here is emotional content, now unequivocally worded. In an earlier Bólide, thought and emotion had overflowed its (always-magnificent) decorative and sensorial carapace to become an explicit love poem hidden inside it upon a blue cushion. Beauty, sin, outrage, and love give this young man’s art an emphasis that is new to Brazilian art. There is no point in moral reprimands. If you are looking for a precedent, perhaps it is this: Hélio is the grandson of an anarchist.¹⁸

Originally published as “Arte ambiental, arte pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” Correio da manhã (Rio de Janeiro), June 26, 1966.

The New MAM Will Consist of Five Museums

In this 1978 text, the influential Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa lays out a plan for a museum of modern art that is very different from other institutions bearing that name. Acknowledging the relationships of modern art to folk art, indigenous art, African art, and art created by children and the mentally ill, he proposes a new museum called the Museum of Origins (Museum das Origens) to house all of these forms of expression within one institutional frame.

During a meeting of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the MAM [Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro] held yesterday at the Escola de Artes Visuais, in Parque Lage, art critic Mario Pedrosa suggested reorganizing the museum according to a new structure composed of five independent albeit organic museums: the Museum of Black People and the Museum of Folk Arts [sic].

He said: All modern art has been inspired by the art of peripheral peoples, so that nothing could be more appropriate than for the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro to display this art we possess in abundance alongside a collection of contemporary Brazilian and Latin American art.

In his proposition, Mario Pedrosa gives a succinct explanation regarding the founding of the Museum of Origins:

As a result of the MAM’s total destruction by fire,¹⁹ it is imperative that some logical conclusion be drawn from the catastrophe: the MAM is gone. With Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt²⁰ leading the group that so generously applied itself to the work of creating it is no longer in any condition to start the task anew. The situation has changed; the times have changed; the philosophy, even the ideology that inspired those who made the museum more than twenty years ago has changed; hence the need to summon others and the State to create a congeneric establishment with other purposes. The time of purely private patronage has passed. Even in the United States, New York’s Museum of Modern Art itself already resorts to substantial assistance from the state. Therefore we propose that the reconstruction be undertaken with the state’s assistance and collaboration. We propose that a public or semipublic foundation be constructed, but that, along the lines of others that exist in this country, it should retain its full autonomy. Specialists in the subject guarantee its full viability.

What follows is the text read by Mario Pedrosa:

The founding of the Museum of Origins anticipates the establishment of five museums: the Museum of the Indian; the Museum of Virgin Art (Museum of the Unconscious); the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Black People; and the Museum of Folk Arts.

These museums are all related although they are independent from one another. The Museum of the Indian already possesses its own structure, its own organization, certain resources, and an important collection, albeit no appropriate location.

The Museum of the Unconscious also has its own structure, organization, resources, and an excellent collection. Yet its installations are in precarious condition and even somewhat threatened. It is crucial that they be secured for the good of Brazilian and global culture. The Museum of Modern Art possesses magnificent headquarters and a location that can house the others, but only a small collection of works left over from the fire.

The foundation should be of a public or semi-public nature to ensure its permanence and solidity, particularly with regard to resources, although it should dispose of an autonomous organizational structure to guarantee a cultural and artistic orientation that is not only coherent and homogeneous but not subject to changes of orientation and administration, a consequence of extemporaneous and bureaucratic political interventions that are not wholly advisable.

A committee of competent, active professionals and a board of directors made up of eminent and representative personalities whose respectability is well-recognized in society will be responsible for the cultural and artistic orientation of the foundation and an efficient, trustworthy, and authorized administration.

The Museum of Modern Art must rebuild a collection that is first and foremost representative of Brazilian art, from the early Impressionism of [Eliseu] Visconti to generations that followed, with artists such as [Vitor] Brecheret, [Lasar] Segall, Tarsila [do Amaral], Anita Malfatti, [Emiliano] Di Cavalcanti, [Cândido] Portinari, [Alfredo] Volpi, [Osvaldo] Goeldi, and Lívio Abramo, and on to the younger artists of today. It should also contain Latin American rooms, with work by the Uruguayan [Joaquín] Torres Garcia and artists from Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba, etc., as well as European rooms and North American rooms. There will be a room dedicated to Concrete art, one that corresponds to the MAM’s modern origins in Europe, in Brazil and in Argentina. A room dedicated to the Neo-Concrete art of Brazil, in addition to rooms for temporary exhibitions.

The Museum of Black People’s collection will be based on pieces brought from Africa and others made here in Brazil, especially for religious use.

The Museum of Folk Arts collection shall be made up of pieces collected throughout Brazil’s various regions, in the various types of artifacts such as pottery, wood, iron, tin, straw, etc.

Body of theoretical courses and practical apprenticeship at the MAM: visual arts, music, film, video tape, photography lab, graphic arts workshop, printmaking studio, joinery [cabinet-making], Moviola, etc.), and a few general subjects such as art history, cultural anthropology, as well as specialized sections on urban culture, rural communities, tribal communities, urban festivals, and Carnival.

Financial sources: a) state-owned companies; b) federal, state, or municipal budgets; c) private donations.

The MAM will generate income through its graphic arts workshop, joinery and printmaking studios, photography lab, editing room (Moviola), slides, silkscreen, etc.

Member contributions will be needed in order to maintain the foundation’s democratic and popular organization, along with public and private donations of permanent, temporary, and specialized natures.

Originally published as “O novo MAM terá cinco museus. É a proposta de Mario Pedrosa,” Jornal do Brasil, September 15, 1978.

The Machine, Calder, Léger, and Others

In this 1948 essay, available in English for the first time, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa considers the machine, the quintessential industrial object, in dialectical relation to the modern work of art. Finding precedents in “primitive” and Byzantine arts, Pedrosa goes on to consider how the machine is stylized, repurposed, and mastered in the work of Fernand Léger and Alexander Calder. He declares the latter to be the preeminent American artist for his keen understanding of mechanical functions, which he applies towards the creation of artworks that for Pedrosa signify freedom from a functionalist, profit-driven culture. Pedrosa, who was a close friend of Calder and authored several texts devoted to his practice, first became taken with the artist’s work during a visit to the artist’s monographic exhibition at MoMA in 1943. The last in a series of essays by Pedrosa published on post, this text is the only one that is not included in Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (2015), which collects the key writings of the legendary Brazilian critic.

Were there any doubt that an aesthetic sense—or a sense of beauty, if you will—is an acquired thing, or was acquired as far back as the primitive ages through protracted intimacy with the instruments and tools of human labor, [Alexander] Calder would help us to dispel that doubt.

Indeed, he made use of the instruments and mechanical objects, of the gadgets that are so important to the everyday lives of Americans, in order to provide them with an unexpected fate.

First and foremost, he added to them a decorative sense that they did not already possess. By this utilitarian use of industrial tools, he ultimately follows the ancient procedure according to which all the artistic activities of the past originated.

The primitive almost never separates the everyday objects that he builds from their primarily utilitarian purpose. Yet when the savage, little by little—as he repeatedly embellished the form of his bow or of his oar, emphasizing a curve here or polishing a surface there—wound up making the instrument a work of art, one may conclude: the artist begins to emerge from the craftsman’s leftovers, which maintains itself within the strict limits of functionality.

Driven by the decorative instinct, the craftsman-savage oftentimes exceeds the utilitarian purpose and, through the formal elegance that he gives the bow or any other utensil, he renders it impractical for work. At this extreme point, either the craftsman retreats so as not to disrespect the fixed boundaries of functionality, or he engages in a different activity, the central concern of which will thenceforth be the creation of a new object that will be sufficient unto itself—abstract.

The craftsman becomes an artist.

Like so many other modern artists, Calder resorts to craftwork and makes use of modern industrial instruments. However, from the outset he gives them seemingly inconsequential purposes. Thus he imparts to mechanics a gratuitousness that it does not have, nor belongs to its nature. In so doing he transcends the very utilitarian civilization from which it comes.

In the foundry where he works, Calder naturally does not follow primitive man’s artisanal logic. On the contrary, in adopting the Surrealist procedure, he redirects the object from its specific or conventional destiny. The difference is that, with this, Sandy is not seeking out the anodyne, the bizarre, or the romantic, but simply creating a new object, a new form.

Calder the artificer, who soon lost his way, seduced as he was by the fleeting beauties of Abstraction, was condemned to be the most terrible violator of functional mechanics. In dialectical opposition to American civilization, based on business for the sake of business, on profit, he is, for this very reason, the artist most representative of the United States, as is—in the field of architecture—[Frank Lloyd] Wright who, in his old age and in spite of his glory, became the prototype of the artist who rebelled against the social milieu. It is precisely such an opposition that makes Calder an exponent of that culture, revealing what may be sane and liable to development within it.

When Calder discovered the disembodied beauty of “volumes, vectors and densities,”²¹ the Constructivist movement was in full bloom. Artists the world over were seduced by new mechnical forms; new sources of nontraditional materials were discovered: steel, glass, celluloid, and plastics. Even before the War, Brancusi had revealed the beauty of modulation in polished metal surfaces.

Also circa 1927, Norman Bel Geddes opened a studio in New York to redesign stoves, refrigerators, automobiles, and other serially produced objects. Aerodynamic trains belong more or less to the same period. In Germany, the Bauhaus reeducated the new generation in the severe taste of pure lines and associated style and comfort for the first time—an essentially modern accomplishment. These everyday objects of modern life, their clear and shiny, abstract and comfortable formal personality already discovered, undoubtedly constitute one of the greatest formal and aesthetic revolutions in the history of civilization.

The denaturalization of structure, and every mechanical invention in every new object, conforms to a gradual process on the march to a form of pure objectivity, in the course of which the originally Impressionist character of invention is lost. The initial form is one of naturalist inspiration, the final one is abstract.

When any new object is constructed, it borrows outlines and designs from another one. Usually that other is the one most akin or closest to it. Only after this entire process of formal gestation does the perfect integration between the final abstract structure and the fully developed functionality of the new object or invention take place. It then ceases to “resemble” this or that thing in order to resemble itself alone. This march of the natural to the formally abstract is a constant of our civilization, the mark of one of modern culture’s deepest traits. Thanks to it, the art of today has been able to influence—as possibly only the art of the Renaissance was able to before it—the industrial production of its time.

In no one more than in Calder—and in this he may have been the most faithful of the Constructivists—the dividing line between artistic creation and industrial design is less marked. His art is without inhibition in resorting to the principles of engineering and industrial design. Without the slightest ceremony, he swipes not only the materials but even the instruments and processes of mechanics in order to express himself. And he boldly avails himself of wheels, gears, levers, stems, pistons, sheets of metal, glass, and wire. No one in the realm of the visual arts has ever made use of these acquisitions with greater spontaneity, exuberance, and imagination than he. And without the slightest vestige of doctrinaire intentionalism or concern with belonging to any school. For this very reason his studio is no longer a studio but a combined blacksmith/cabinetmaker/spinner/mechanic/locksmith/ welder/devil’s workshop.

The machine is one of the modern world’s most fearful hobgoblins. Many of today’s artists still haven’t freed themselves from it. In order to rid themselves of their terror or obsession, they seek to exorcize it, like the savage before the incomprehension of the exterior world. The machine is still to these artists as nature was to prehistoric man, who perpetually yearned to fix something perennial, something permanent in geometric terms, in response to the disconcerting fluidity of the natural phenomena that struck them as terrifying, capricious, and incongruent.

Calder does not share this obsession. For him the machine is not an enchanted, magical, fascinating thing—albeit one that is mysteriously dangerous in its transformative miracles—nor is it something misunderstood. Even for him, it has lost its power as fetish. In itself it is no longer worthy of adoration. He knows it from within. He learned early on how to disassemble it. He long ago digested the mechanical subjects that are conjoined in it. And because of this he knows of what this modern deity is made. Hence his familiar treatment of her. For some time his “works of art” have had “volumes, vectors and densities.”

However, next to Calder, let us examine the attitude of another artist—a great artist called [Fernand] Léger who, in fact, belongs to the same spiritual Family as the American.

The latter finds himself dominated by the machine to such an extent that he cannot forget it. He once wrote: “Speed is the law of the day. It rolls over us and dominates us.”²² The great French painter thus confesses himself to be a slave to speed, that is to say, of mechanics. To him, the machine is beautiful but strange and inhuman.

In distributing volumes, masses, or even pieces that, together, would recompose the total unity of the machine, Léger does so only to exhibit them, simultaneously, upon a single plane. He outlines them on the canvas or paper with a fetishism that recalls that of prehistoric man carving his drives and obsessions upon stones or cave walls and transforming them into signs for exorcizing impenetrable nature. His way of revealing the secret of the machine is also symbolic. The painter of Paris sees in his figures and objects symbols of all that is powerful, impersonal, intense, and superhuman in the modern mechanical creation supreme. These figures, masses, and volumes reflect the machine’s inhuman nature.

This symbolism gives Léger’s work an element of stylization quite similar to that of Byzantine art, meaning that even when his symbols signify elements of the human body his motives indeed constitute inorganic forms intentionally distorted in the exclusive interest of rhythm. All the ancient stylizations conceal an already faint symbolic background, like worn-out currency. Behind this symbolic background hides a dominant, single, absorbing category—a god, a sacred animal, a taboo—a machine, a machine out of time and of space.

It is this that gives the whole—the drawing—a certain symmetrical rigidity. One feels in its composition the absolute empire of proportion and of harmonic relationship—characteristics of the arts of stylization of the past.

In contrast, Calder neither represents nor abstracts nor “stylizes” the machine. None of his structures is made up of purely geometric forms and volumes, analytically presented. His drawings and compositions are pure forms, converging toward an organic whole. His objects are machines, but . . . of poetry and improvisations. His stabiles and mobiles create fanciful, arbitrary, non-mechanized relationships. Occasionally monsters (or what one might call prehistoric animals), contemplative or timid vegetables, or new, ironic insects with a diabolical air issue from these geometric constructions. Yet all are alive and carry within themselves their realization and purpose.

In Calder’s hands the machine becomes volatile, gaining in virtualities that transcend functional contingencies, ceasing, for this very reason, to be a machine. Even in the motorized mobiles, the inspiration is not the machine’s reflex but its dynamic element, motion framed at the service of formal relationships and of colors, that is, of painting. Inside these panels what we see are spirals that swirl in a tortured ascension; cylinders rotating rhythmically like dancers; colors, and prisms that evolve rhythmically, unrestrained and with the grace of a bird. These pieces are mechanical extras in a scene, showing themselves off to us men.

In the non-motor-driven mobiles, then, he laughs at the machine, for he has already tamed it and left it behind. It is no longer its contained and controlled energy that is of interest to him. Rather it is the apprehension of the uncontrolled forces of the cosmos, the irreducible movement that feeds the motor of the universe, the eternal flow of forms in space.

Indeed, he seeks to capture—for it would be impossible to discipline them— within a painting that he himself set up and, in limited time, all the formal virtualities liable to be drawn in space, moved by whatever may be—by a man’s panting breath, by a gust of air, by some vibration or tremor, by chance, or even by a shove of the foot. He puts one in mind of a butterfly hunter. His objects are instruments for hunting down all the possibilities of formal beauty that the unstable balance of things can offer us in a moment.

Calder subordinates his art to a kind of automatism. However the latter is determined by a large formal plane chosen by the constructor himself. Like a boy who sets his cage upon the branch of a tree to attract a little bird, he puts his mobile in the window or in the garden outside to wait for winds that will entangle and hold them prisoner in the stems, branches, leaves, and balls of his objects that will then become animated—dancing, singing, and seized with plenitude.

Calderian automatism is controlled by experience, unlike the psychological automatism of the Surrealists. Whereas for the Surrealists the individual is a prisoner of his ego, of unconscious mechanisms, for Calder the individual feels free and rational for the first time in the face of life and the world. And—to his aesthetic whims—he toys like a god with the laws that rule the universe. The mechanism that ultimately gives rise to artistic expression is no longer unconscious or subjective but armed objectively from without.

The machine’s automatic perfection is a perennial source of enchantment for every contemporary artist. It was not only Léger who felt the weight of its fascination. In him, however, this enchantment revealed itself with particular strength. Hence the fact that his reaction to that perfection was most typical of the modern sensibility.

Léger transposes the machine’s volumes and lines statically, in search of their still perfection, devoid of virtuality. Machine and mechanical perfection are defined by the sensation of force, speed, and precision that they arouse. Isolating their forms from one another, he draws the machine’s final synthesis from them in exchange for a purely analytic presentation. In Calder, objects are the effective result of experience before this very mechanical perfection, and they assert themselves with the machine’s same synthetic autonomy.

Its ruthless placidity no longer terrifies the Calderian soul. The speed, the power, and the inhuman precision of the mechanical system do not overpower him.

Calder grew up with the machine and, for this reason, he already gazes at it from above. Today, he finds the scary, fascinating animal of the beginning of the century amusing. Holding it by the rein, he slaps the monster’s hind quarters with ironic and cordial joy, inviting all men to the same liberation.

We know well that Léger never intended to copy the machine. As he explains, he intended only to invent images of machines, just as others have invented landscapes. He uses it as others have used the nude or the still life. He seeks to express its inherent sense of strength and power. Through this path a reverse neo-academicism is forged: the machine is its model, rather than the body. Thus the world is limited to its dimension, to the effects of its perfect, adjusted strength.

However, Calder transcendentalizes and overcomes the machine. In it he seeks the only thing it cannot give—creative energy. For the machine does everything but it creates nothing. The only thing about it that interests him is the inspiration that forged it. He extracts motive power, the secret of its model behavior from the highly material, objective, fierce, and immediately utilitarian animal. The power that breathes life into it no longer represents anything supernatural to him, just as the wind or storm “machine” that frightened the savage did not either. The artist is enchanted by this only for its power of acting upon the things that surround it, its ability to trasmit and transform.

However, machine fetishism has not yet been overcome by all the artists of our time. At the end of World War I, Dada’s iconoclastic mechanism itself was unable to tame it. Desperate, [Marcel] Duchamp and [Francis] Picabia—the enfants terribles of Dadaism—wanted at least to identify themselves (similing, jesting, without solemnity or piteousness) to the victorious monster. With the usual whistling, they pretended they did not fear the dark night. In order to remain men, to preserve the human, they degraded themselves, and that is why the humor of Dada was derision above all else.

At last, it was later verified by André Breton that, unlike man, the machine could neither build nor fix itself, neither perfect nor destroy itself. Whoever possesses the power to destroy himself has the power to reconstruct and perfect himself. And thus has the power to create. Man once again felt relieved and superior to the machine. And a new humor succeeded that of Dada in modern art—a dark humor, a black humor. It was that of Calder, among others.

Humor in Picabia and Duchamp was black and despairing. When Dada emerged in Europe—and how far away those times are!—it was an explosion. It came to negate the object because it was unable to replace it with another. However, Calder’s humor is above the explosion, just as it is above despair and conventional optimism. He reconciles himself with poetry and makes it his companion in the extraodinary adventures of everyday life. Furthermore, Calderian humor is an individual result; it arises from the artist who is not separated from man’s direct and immediate reaction (from the human, simple artist) to the academic solemnity of inaccessible Art, excellently represented by the reigning climate of the paternal home.

The humor of the European Dadaists was of a general, collective nature, the expression of an entire generation that had arrived at a dead end; it was therefore largely social in origin. Hence the differences of humor: despair and nihilist revolt in the former; mockery and childish pranks in the latter.

Above all, Europeans sought to defend the already threatened self, to render it invulnerable to external reality; this humor came from [Sigmund] Freud. Calder’s was an affirmation of the independence of personality; it may have come from [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and resolved itself at the aesthetic level. It was this humor that led him to take art down from its pedestal without, however, making it bitter, as in the case of European Dadaism. He did away with its capital letter, its particle of nobility, and took it everywhere, from the New York subway to the corner drugstore. He Americanized it, so to speak.

This made Calder a representative of the art of America, or of the future, a notion with which many pretend to confuse that geographic entity.

His art feels at ease in any climate but, especially, before whatever social and technological transformations that may present themselves. It is at ease amid machines and forests of chimneys. Whereas Léger’s requires an effort to adapt itself to today’s mechanical universe, Calder’s blossoms and thrives within it. It needed it in order to sprout.

Not in vain is the former a Frenchman and the latter an American. Calder was born with his foot on the gas pedal; he already belonged to the age when children could point to the bird in the sky and call it an airplane. That is why he grew accustomed to seeing in the machine domestic animals such as a dog or a cat. He pets it or plays with it, as one might throw a ball for a kitten to pounce upon or a stick for a faithful dog to retrieve.

The majority of the more modern artists may still be far from this detachment, from this unconscious self-control before natural mechanical forces, that is to say, which belong to this second nature that envelops us all in the twentieth century of us. In this sense representing the majority, Léger is still grappling with the new mechanical world. It was not until much later that he learned to drive an automobile . . .

This Calderian art does not reflect societies, nor does it sublimate subjective nightmares. Rather, it is a door to the future. It is already the stance of one who, scornful of the present day—dark as it may seem to us—makes out from where he stands the distant horizons of utopia, of the utopia he is forever laying out before us. Yet it is not a vehicle for the artist to escape spiritually, to isolate himself within society, without vital contact with the latter, surrendering fully to the expression of his own extreme and hermetic subjectivism after having given up all hope of communicability. As far as communication is concerned, he communicates only with men of future generations, for they may ultimately have enough energy for the effort needed to integrate art and life itself.

Moreover, upon such an effort—as Herbert Read would have it—the permanence among men of the very principle of freedom depends. And without it, man will not survive. The machine will have won the game. A desert will cover the Earth as an epilogue to the history of the human race upon the globe.

Text published on the occasion of Calder’s exhibitions at the recently inaugurated Palácio Gustavo Capanema, seat of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Rio de Janeiro (where Pedrosa gave a lecture titled “Calder e a música dos ritmos visuais” [“Calder and the Music of Visual Rhythms”]), and at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Originally published as “A Máquina, Calder, Léger e outros,” Política e letras (Rio de Janeiro), September 16, 1948.

Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents is the latest volume in MoMA’s Primary Documents publication series, which is devoted to making source materials related to the visual arts of specific countries, historical moments, disciplines, and themes available to English-language readers for the first time. Mário Pedrosa is the first publication to provide comprehensive English translations of Pedrosa’s writings, which are indispensable to understanding Brazilian art of the twentieth century.

The post Selections from Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents appeared first on post.

Ediciones La Cocina, begun in the late 1970s by artists Yani Pecanins and Gabriel Macotela, was the most developed of the small publishers that proliferated around this time and it featured extended collaborations with artists and writers. La Cocina, or “the kitchen,” referred to the homemade quality of their books and publications, but also evokes a domain typically associated with women—not coincidentally, gender discourse and personal obsession figured prominently in many of their artists’ books. Pecanins studied bookbinding and printmaking, linotype in particular, in Barcelona and her books are influenced by her affinity for collecting small objects. Many of her books are object-driven, employing various materials, such as handkerchiefs on embroidery hoops (Miedo, 1990), irons (Humo, 1991), and boxes.

In 1985 Pecanins, Macotela, and artist and museographer Armando Saenz Carillo founded El Archivero (the Archive or Filing Cabinet), an almost decade-long project that became a major center for artists’ books in Mexico by effectively operating as a publisher, gallery, bookstore, and collection that promoted and sought markets for this alternative art form.

Un viaje en Zeppelin (Voyage in a Zeppelin) is one of Yani Pecanins’s most complex handmade books and exists in an edition of one hundred. This work came to MoMA’s artist’s book collection through the former library director Clive Phillpot, who had a passionate interest in artists’ books. The book is a personal and intimate history of the 1937 Hindenburg accident. Members of Pecanins’s father’s family, Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Doehner and three of their children who were prominent members of the German colony in Mexico City, were aboard the Hindenburg when it exploded at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, as it was completing a voyage that had begun in Germany. Mr. Doehner and his sixteen-year-old daughter perished, while Pecanins’s grandmother and the Doehners’s two sons, Walte and Werner, survived.

Begun in May 1987 and finished in March 1988, the book is a constructed cardboard box that contains a poetic visual journey made up of twenty-two individual loose pages, printed by hand and including mimeographs, photocopies, and rubber stamps. It also includes cutouts of a zeppelin and a paper suitcase with postcards inside. Folded maps, and diagrams of the zeppelin’s structure and components are inserted amid copies of family photographs, articles from newspapers about the accident, and handwritten and stamped letters by Pecanins; the pages are supplemented by wax and foil seals, stamped envelopes, string, paper tags, glassine bags, staples, matches, and black ash. Together, they produce an imaginative array of variations that tells a story that unfolds poetically, page by page and object by object, in a tactile, intimate, and personal way. It evokes the experience of coming across an assorted family history composed of photos, documents, and leftover matter, although these materials are beautifully coordinated in a sequence of small envelopes and suitcases that can be opened and explored.

Selected pages from Un viaje en Zeppelin (Voyage in a Zeppelin) in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library are included here.

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Colombian contemporary art has been notably characterized since the beginning of the twenty-first century by a renewal of the practice of drawing, that is, by an expansion of drawing, which has coincided with the exhaustion of a major civic and military conflict occurring in Colombia since the early twentieth century. By vindicating the operative minuteness and restraint of drawing as a way to imagine alternate worlds within a world of chaos, emerging Colombian artists have contributed to an entire renovation of their local art scene, stressing in countless ways the possibility of addressing the public realm in a context where public life is compromised by violence and illegitimate appropriation.

This conflation of the collective and the geopolitical with the minute intimacy of drawing is characterized by tactics of artistic production in which everyday practice and communal initiatives are privileged over conventional representations of history and heroism, the silence of mourning is privileged over the rhetorics of monuments and monumentalization, voyeuristic strategies are privileged over spectacularity, and, in general, a politics of small gestures that is materialized through artistic endeavors that reject overwhelming scale and grandeur. Nicolás Paris (born Bogotá, 1977) counts among the most significant protagonists of this renewal of drawing in Colombia. For Paris, a drawing is a tool to create a space of knowledge rather than a finished and finely crafted object—a field for the management of the uncertain, a coordinate for encounter, and a potential setting for transactional experiences and collective dialogue. His strategy takes place on an educational stage, as a pedagogical setting with the explicit aim of deconstructing the place of authority in order to put forward communal, horizontal, and mutual learning experiences.

Since the mid-2000s I have been in conversation with Paris in order to materialize a representative acquisition of his work. Knowing that the very foundation of his practice is a series of sixty-six folding and transformative drawings titled Doble Faz (Twofold), we aimed to get this work to MoMA. As the series really requires the programming of activities around it, and not only its flat exhibition, we were able to bring Paris to the Museum for a series of workshops in collaboration with the C-MAP initiative.

Paris began work on Doble Faz in 2000, when he was invited to produce a new version of a teacher’s guide for a public school in La Macarena, a remote region in the Colombian southwest that was, at the time, controlled by guerrilla and paramilitary armies. His exchanges with this community continued for eight years and resulted in this core work, which launched Paris’s unique voice as an artist. Conceived to be shown on a horizontal surface, the series consists of sixty-six small masterworks, each of which includes a front and a back that enter into a relationship when manipulated by hand. The work can thus be understood as sixty-six minimal depictions of time passing or as 132 drawings strikingly devoid of signature or manner—as if they were the result of printmaking, or an absolute, controlled, and cold hand. Here, the neutrality of the drawings conceal their mastery, giving way to their manipulation and to their transitional function in a collective exchange. Each drawing depicts a minimal event—a slow, minimal temporality that also features in every transformation, in the trace of the folding, and, ultimately, in the very special expansion of the work that happens when a viewer interacts with it.

In MoMA’s collection, Doble Faz joins other works by emerging Colombian artists, including José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Bernardo Ortiz Campo, Johanna Calle, Mateo López, and Gabriel Sierra.

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Striptease is a small, handmade album. Its intimate scale, and the cover’s floral fabric and closeup portrait of the artist, suggest a diary or keepsake book. Within the volume’s pages Švecová recorded and reflected on her work, which ranges from pasted photographs and typed descriptions of Aktual group activities to a decorated comb and hand-stitched statements conveying her interest in clothing design and fashion (“Be a tailor for yourself”). The title, Striptease—which, I should note, is a title that was later given the book based on what Švecová wrote on the opening page and therefore may not represent the artist’s intentions—is derived from her performance at the 2nd Manifestation of Aktual Art, in May 1965, during which, for the event’s closing activity, she disrobed in front of a bonfire, around which participants and onlookers sang national songs. A photograph of the work is included in the book, opposite a page featuring a cutout red-felt silhouette of a female figure, thereby juxtaposing a generalized “type” with the artist’s own form.

The various texts and statements in the book are in English, rather than in Czech, suggesting that it was created for export. Švecová and Knížák made a number of contacts with international artists associated with Fluxus, especially following the Fluxus festival that was organized in 1966 in Prague. Americans Jeff Berner, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles were there, as were French artists Serge Oldenburg and Ben Vautier. By this time, mail correspondence with George Maciunas in New York and Willem de Ridder in Amsterdam had further broadened the network. This book, for example, was part of an extensive series of correspondences begun in 1967 between Švecová and Knížák and the California-based artist Ken Friedman, who was associated with Fluxus and particularly interested in bringing Aktual to the West Coast. At a time when mailed materials ran the risk of being controlled, censored, or destroyed, the three artists kept each other informed about recent activities by sending small paintings, photographs, sketches, and various books and printed flyers via post. Much of this correspondence is today housed in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives at The Museum of Modern Art, offering a fascinating window into these important exchanges.

The post Sonia Švecová’s “Striptease” and International Artistic Networks appeared first on post.

post is releasing a series of primary documents drawn from the writing of Chinese artists, which presents the original sources in Chinese along with first-time English translations. These distinctive readings of Western art are an extension of an earlier MoMA project, published in 2010 as Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. The materials offer insight into interactions in art that transcend time and place.

Edited by Yu-Chieh Li

Source contents

Duchamp Stripped Bare by the Chinese, Even: Rewriting Example No. 5 or A Discussion of the Duchamp Phenomenon

By Huang Yong Ping 黄永砯, 2007 (Written in 1988)

Publication: ’85 New Wave Archives II
Publisher: Beijing Shiji Wenjing Publishing House
Language: Chinese

In light of the death of the old earl, the youngster comes into inheritance; however, this is not the whole truth. In history, a pause is created, and the agent steps into nothingness. —Anonymous ¹

Duchamp died in 1968; I am writing this article in 1988. Even twenty years after his death, Duchamp is still frequently mentioned; in a sense, he is still alive. Would it be at all possible for us not to mention him any longer—to let him truly fade away? Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn’t; in any case, my reason for writing this essay is to prevent myself from mentioning him in the future. So that Duchamp can be written off our books, just as many others have been. However, this cannot guarantee that Duchamp will be truly put behind us. There is one way to deal with this issue, and that is by killing all of Duchamp’s disciples. Then he will finally die. This is our mission today but that might not suffice. We must also kill all of his opponents to prevent his name from ever being mentioned again. People will only cease to write or comment on him when all those who want to hear about him are dead. Many fictional figures (who have names) found in history books are often mentioned in today’s publications because they are used as counterexamples, as if they truly existed. Having said that, the example we are concerned with here [Duchamp] is real. There are two interpretations of the two characters in the name Du Xiang, which is the Chinese translation of Duchamp. The first character, du, generally has two meanings. First of all, it might be a family name. The family name comes before the given name in Chinese and thus resembles a prefix. Its second meaning is “obstruction” or “prohibition”; it also refers to something that is fictional. Here, of course, it is the first meaning that applies. “Xiang” could mean “elephant,” “image,” or “form.” It also means “copying” or imitating. “Hao xiang” also means “seem” and is an equivocal expression that Duchamp liked to use:

“I don’t ascribe to the artist the sort of social role in which it seems like he is indebted to society and so he feels obligated to achieve something. This is a horrifying perspective.” (p. 79)

Why do we “pull out” Duchamp instead of a dead horse? Getting the horse onto the road might help nurture our brains. In today’s literature, all sorts of characters get pulled out and cited: Dong Qichang, Dong Cunrui, Zengjiasso, Bi Guofan, Laoni, Tzschezi, and so on. We pull them out in order to be able to insert them. In a way, pulling out and inserting are one and the same thing; this corresponds to what a text needs: if you don’t pull out some names, then at least quote some sentences. Hence, people today, whether rich or poor, can barely be considered alive without being placed in relation to the dead. “Those who do not want to be in the company of the dead are condemned to die.” This is a rephrasing of Santayana’s “Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Rejecting parents as a system.

“Question: ‘As far as I know, your mother was also an artist. She painted still lifes, didn’t she?’ Answer: ‘She even wanted to cook them, too, but in her seventy years of life, she was never really in touch with art. She did some Strasbourgs on paper. It never went any further.’” (p. 11)²

“That is correct.” (p. 51)

52.³ A kind of stored heat or kinetic energy
53. Duplicating a flyswatter
54. The celostomia singing technique
55. Unreliable modification
56. Ways of opening a door
57. The inner model
58. Creating art in a lying-down position
59. Family tree 60. Weighing the weight
61. Liquid solidifying quickly
62. Heating and duplicating
63. Machinery that opens things up
64. Making a mannequin (anatomy)
65. Squeezing out a new path
66. Difficulty recognizing left from right
67. A fast knot
68. To annul ( )
69. Leaning against the mirror and looking into it
70. Checking the drawers
71. The opening of an envelope
72. Pasting paper onto the wall

“Right, Breton once planned to open up a Surrealist office, to offer people ideas. What I was doing was similar to this.” (p. 73)

The back: The consequence of getting out of a crisis or a difficult situation is to end up becoming a hunchback; thus, having a hunched back enables one to escape from a predicament—idea number one. Watering, dust, food, water, wind, time, and austerity are helpful to people—idea number two. No talking—idea number three. Walk straight northeast—idea number four. Lie down or sit directly on the ground without relying on a cushion or a piece of paper—idea number five. Swallow the ashes of the medical prescription form—idea number six. Sit, stand, or lie down to pass time—idea number seven. Stand on tiptoe under the fierce summer sun; bonfires should surround you in four directions (north, south, east, west)—idea number eight. Art can cure inflation—idea number nine. Put on wet clothes in winter and stand outdoors in the northeast corner—idea number ten. Beg for food; begging is a way to survive—idea number eleven. Stand upright with your right foot in front of the left and do three moves: first advance the left foot and place it in front of your right foot; second, bring up the right foot and place it in front of your left foot; third, advance the left foot and again place it in front of your right foot; these three steps equal a distance of seven meters—idea number twelve. Here the possibilities that stem from “sub-sorcery” and “sub-performances” are the most crucial. Sorcery enables you to avoid originality and concentrate on duplication and transmission, whereas sub-performances constitute threatening behavior.

“Surely, in all the discussions about paintings, Manet’s name comes up more often than not. And Cézanne, to most people, is just a piece of meat in a pot of stew.” (p.13)

Conversing—tactics, eating—consuming; before we articulate those many names we must undergo a process of consuming them first. This is what our throat does. On the one hand, it has the esophagus; on the other, it has the articulation of language. More often than not, we exhale more than what we inhale.

“It is just that the old habits keep them on the track of making one painting each and every month, all this. . . . They think that it is as if they owe society an artwork each month or each year.” (p. 100)

“Later on Picasso became a pioneer of a kind. We often need such a character, be it Picasso, Einstein, or anybody else—and the crowd often speaks for half of the whole truth.” (p. 17)

“Many people feel as if they are being constrained by something. If not by some literary movement, then by some woman, but in the end, it’s all the same feeling.” (p. 104)

“Politicians imagine that they are doing something extraordinary! It’s a little like a notary, or like my father; politicians and notaries have similar styles. I remember my father’s documents, the language was ridiculous. American lawyers employ such language as well, and I must say I dislike politics.” (p. 57)

“The are six siblings in my family. When it came to inheritance, my father did a remarkable job, so good that everyone who heard about it was amused. My father split the inheritance into six portions, just like a notary would, and had everything written in ink on paper, along with warnings for us all.” (p. 27) Nowadays everything goes through a notary. A diploma needs to be certified by a notary, getting married—the marital relationship—also needs to be certified by a notary; this is what we all go through if we ever have such experiences. In fact, the notarial profession existed long ago but disappeared for a long time until it came back to existence.

Parents’ veto power is something that our social system has passed down from generation to generation. However, the same system has given us the chance to train teachers, doctors, officers, guards, drillmasters, and foremen, who play the role of father figures for students, patients, soldiers, and workers, respectively. We can draw up a comparative list as follows: oncology clinics—the department of sculpture—the faculty of chemistry—arsenal factory; dermatology clinics—the department of oil painting—the department of Chinese literature—latex workshop; pediatric clinics—the department of ink painting—the faculty of mathematics—cookie factory; stomatology clinics—department of art history—department of foreign languages—shoe and hat factory.

“No, one must live on; I am penniless, and I must earn my living. A man has got to eat, and that is different from painting for the sake of painting. One can certainly pursue both doings at the same time without any conflict.” (p. 72) Dieting or simply eating less can help stimulate the digestive system, and this is very important—recommendation number thirteen—in any case, eating nothing in order to follow the Daoist practice of fasting requires a certain amount of training. By practicing the Daoist breathing method, one reaches a state of “embryonic respiration” (the breathing of a child in its mother’s womb). This is suggestion number fourteen: “eating air” or “drinking water.”

“I firmly believe in artists being a medium. An artist creates art hoping that one day it may be recognized by the world, leaving his name on a page in history. This is why we say that the value of an artwork depends on both the creator and the audience.” (p. 68)

“Any masterpiece is only a masterpiece because the audience says so.” (p. 69)

“Not believing in status, not believing in oneself, makes belief a misnomer.” (p. 89)

“Exhibitions are horrific places.” (p. 80)

“I don’t agree that artists bear social responsibility, as if they owe something to society and must take on the duty of creating something. This is a horrifying idea.” (p. 79)

“The word ‘judgment’ is such a terrible idea. It’s weak and problematic. That a society wields the power and right to decide whether to accept certain works, and then to select a few of them to send to the Louvre. . . . I don’t believe at all in such a thing as absolute judgment.” (p. 69)

Duchamp will never be a fan of Picasso. Here are some examples. Three terrible words: “belief,” “judgment,” and “obligation.” Further frightful words include “intelligence,” “creation,” “innovation,” “perfection,” “absoluteness,” “purity,” “totality,” “thoroughness,” “independence,” and so on—these all represent the terror of totalitarianism. There is also the word “author.” There is something about the nature of an “author” that can be observed at an auction. We all know what an auction is: there are, for example, clothes auctions and idea auctions. Sellers yell, “Shorts? Underpants?” Besides, “bold” and “impudent” both mean “audacious.” When we compliment someone by saying, “You are bold,” we are actually implying “You are imprudent.” The word “dictation” is also frightful for people who have to record words—all dictators are people who dictate. In addition, “dictionary,” “dictum,” “dictation,” and “dictate” have the same prefix: “dict.” “Neo” is a prefix used with great care: “Neo-Expressionism,” “Neo-Kantism,” “Neo-Duchampism.” Of course, there is also the prefix “post.” “Neo,” or “new,” means that something is being used for the very first time: new clothes, a new house, a newlywed woman; the fact that a bride is no longer a virgin could cause a difficult situation. Neo-Expressionism is not the earliest form of Expressionism; this is another difficult situation. Of all the words we have, the most frightful must be “preface,” which starts with the prefix “pre.” A preface is the start of something, such as opening remarks; it is “premier,” “predominant,” “preferment”; it is similar to the status of a university “president”; it is the “premise” of all and is “predictable,” predetermined,” “predecessor,” “preclude,” “prepuce”; it is like a “premature” baby is “precocious”; it is also a “prescribed,” “premarital,” “preconceived,” “precast,” and can be “prejudicial.” All prefixes and prepositions are horrible.

“Picasso is like a powerful lighthouse. He satisfies the audience’s need for a celebrity, and as long as he can keep up that energy, it might as well be good.” (p. 94)

“Question: ‘When Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, were you aware of the revolutionary milestone that painting was going to mark?’ Answer: ‘Not at all. We never saw Les Demoiselles. It was not on display until several years later. As for myself, I discovered Cubism when I happened to visit some gallery.’” (p.16)

Generally speaking, people tend to ask for what they do not possess; if they ask for a child, it suggests they don’t have a child. Therefore, a fortune-teller can safely assume that the person who asks is the one in need. And those who seek or ask are often anxious. So if an old widow seeks a second marriage, her children might be unfilial.

“I realized that there are a lot of things people shouldn’t burden their lives with, such as busywork, a wife, vacation houses, new cars, and such. And I came to this realization early in my own life, which is why I stayed single for a very long time, so that I could avoid such mundane, everyday problems.” (p. 6)

“In 1916, when Michael Knoedler came to New York and saw Nude Descending a Staircase, he offered me $10,000 per year in advance for my future works, but I refused. It wasn’t that I was affluent, in fact I could actually have used the money—$10,000 a year—but no, somehow I felt a threat, a kind of danger that I had been avoiding up to that point. By 1916 I was already twenty-nine years old, old enough to protect myself.” (p. 109)

“When I wrote about Picasso, I said that each and every time in history, the crowd always needs a superstar, be it Einstein in the world of physics or Picasso in the world of art. Crowds and audiences bear such quality.” (p. 83)

“Moreover, I have never really strived to create or felt desperate to push myself to express anything; I’ve never had such a need to paint and create relentlessly from morning to afternoon to night.” (p. 6)

“Anti-art. Basically, it means questioning the artist’s behavior. Feeling as if his technique and some traditional things are absurd.” (p. 51)

There is also the problem of rewriting. The act of rewriting can be comparable to the form of adoption in which a child is transferred from one family to another. “If you don’t possess a stick, I’ll take it away. If you possess a stick, I’ll give you another” (an example found in Chan Buddhism). One way to rewrite this is, “If you have art, I’ll give you art. If you don’t have art, I’ll take it away.” Another example: “Art is a type of politics with colors” (by anonymous) can be rewritten as “Non-art is a type of politics without colors.” One more example: “Art is dead. Dead, but still moving forward; still moving forward, but dead” (by anonymous) can be changed to “Our late father is still with us; he is still with us but dead” (Donald Barthelme).

“Any masterpiece is only a masterpiece because the audience says so.” (p. 69)

“I firmly believe in artists being a medium. An artist creates art hoping that one day it may be recognized by the world, leaving his name on a page in history. This is why we say that the value of an artwork depends on both the creator and the audience.” (p. 68)

In order to destroy art, the audience needs to be annihilated first; an artist or a work of art without an audience is like a street beggar who begs for affection. So why interview Duchamp?—I mean the critic who wrote that book—and why do I want to write this article?—I mean myself. The spectator, translator, and commentator rely on Duchamp for earning remuneration. Thus, it is not that artists only benefit from spectators and critics. It is also unlike what Duchamp said: “Why would you pursue it? You can’t make money from it.” (p. 36).

“I signed Mutt’s name on it to avoid any personal connection.” (p. 49)

The abbreviation for antes de comer, a.c., which is used in medical prescriptions, means that such medicine should be taken before a meal. The handwriting of doctors is always illegible when they write out prescriptions and sign their names, as if the purpose were to prevent the patient from understanding anything from a non-doctor’s point of view. The doctor’s sloppy handwriting on the prescription form actually suggests how proficient he is in his job because he has done it so many times and also implies how such proficiency in this profession is not easy to attain. Being familiar with one’s job and carelessness are both the “child” and the “midwife” of customs. A signature represents “the person himself,” but an original work does not represent “the person himself.” Therefore, an original work cannot be attributed to the person who inscribes the signature, but rather to the person whose name is written there, because the person who signs the name can be separated from the name that is signed.

Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was finished between 1915 and 1923. In 1960 in London, the publication of Richard Hamilton’s book The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even⁴—marked a fourth instance of rewriting.

It was only twenty-one years [after the death of Duchamp] that by chance I had an opportunity to visit the homeland of the creator of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.⁵ ”

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann and Yu-Chieh Li, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li. Read Huang Yong Ping’s manuscript to the Chinese text here.

“甚至，杜象被汉人剥得精光” 改写例子5或杜象现象研究

By Huang Yong Ping 黄永砯, 2007 (Written in 1988)

Publication: ’85 新潮档案 II
Publisher: 北京世纪文景文化传播有限公司
Language: 中文

These are images of Huang Yong Ping’s manuscript to the text. Image courtesy of Huang Yong Ping and Fei Dawei.

Read the english translation here.

On Andy Warhol: Perhaps Simplicity Outshines Complexity

By Wang Guangyi 王广义, October 9, 2013, Narrated by Wang Guangyi, Compiled by Li Jianya. Translated by Lina Dann and edited by post editors.

Publisher: www.bjnews.com.cn
Language: Chinese
Links: http://epaper.bjnews.com.cn/html/2013-10/09/content_469676.htm?d

Andy Warhol Makes the Ordinary Even More Ordinary

Back in college, I came across Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys almost simultaneously. The first work of Andy Warhol I ever saw was his Marilyn Monroe. It was so simple and so untouched by artificiality, without any trace of “painting.” It was in a sense perplexing, but still, I knew that the adoration I felt for Marilyn Monroe had arisen from the bottom of my heart.

The first time I ever saw a Beuys was in an imported magazine that included illustrations of some of his works. Of course, I could not understand the text because it was in a foreign language, but the pictures were genuinely alluring; to me they seemed less like works of art than like works of what I call “alchemy.”

Appreciating the works of Warhol and Beuys was challenging and puzzling; I was indeed bewildered. It was almost like reading Kant’s books, when often I found myself perplexed by words. But these were words that, despite being baffling, were also fascinating. In my pursuit of art, these two artists have influenced me greatly. To this day, they remain my favorite artists.

Beuys is what I call an “alchemist”; he is an artist who creates enigmas, as he has always created layers and layers of “mist.” For instance, in his performance piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, it isn’t particularly clear what ideas he is trying to bring to the table. “To explain art to a dead hare” is indeed a difficult task. And the degree of such difficulty is perhaps beyond Beuys’s own grasp. All this mystic sense that he presents in his works is what makes me so fond of him. At times it feels as if he is giving serious thought to certain questions, and yet all of these questions are somehow so detached from, or even devoid of, reality. He seems to be discussing art from a metaphysical standpoint. He practically puts himself in a position where neither truth nor falsehood can ever be proven.

As for Warhol, he makes the ordinary even more ordinary—he lives in the light of day. When people tried to discuss his art with him, they would ask, “Is this what you meant?” Then even to the most obvious or foolish questions, he would usually answer, “Yes, that is exactly what I meant.” There is a particularly famous interview with Warhol where, during the whole thing, he answered questions with either “Yes” or “No.” These were his only answers. In the end, all that the media could report about the art was what they inferred or interpreted from his one-word responses.

This is actually related to the essence of Warhol’s works, for he eliminated from them all traces of individuality or personality. You see them as by-products of industrialization, of mass production, and so on. This is exactly where his greatest contribution lies—in industrializing artworks. He chooses meaningless images, transmits these meaningless images in meaningless fashion, and convinces everyone that they are actually meaningful.

Danto Gave Warhol’s Works Their Transcendental Value

The German art critic Klaus Honnef once made a very accurate remark about Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. He said that they are like “the palm and the back of a hand.” From what I see, Warhol’s work only reveals its true greatness when it is appreciated alongside Beuys’s work. The two exist on the same level; without Warhol, Beuys’s art loses its sense, and without Beuys, Warhol’s becomes boringly mundane.

If we look at Warhol and Warhol only, art would seem to be so lacking and superficial. But if we place Beuys next to Warhol, we see that contemporary art has its true aura. Beuys is concerned with politics and even involved himself in political activities, such as those of the German Green Party. But from my point of view, these are not important. What Beuys does is to use politics as a means of doing. From the same viewpoint, Warhol’s art is a means of removing the so-called aura of art.

Yet does this mean that Warhol’s works do not have an artistic aura? Not really. For instance, Warhol has a piece in which he used silkscreen printing to depict numerous pairs of high heels. High heels are are objects that are charged with highly subjective meanings; when you use them in your art, there is always something attached to them. This is the allure of the aura of contemporary art. You inevitably think of the aura, of its reason for being there and of all that is around it or beneath it; otherwise, how would you explain the high heels in the painting?

Perhaps Warhol wasn’t giving much thought to all of this when he created his works. After all, Warhol’s ideas for his works are based on industrialization. Most of today’s high heels are the products of mass production. Warhol’s silkscreen printing technique is also an industrial method. In fact, none of us can claim to genuinely know what Warhol’s true ideas were, but the person who bestowed the aura upon Warhol’s works was the philosopher and art historian Arthur C. Danto. In April 1964 Warhol exhibited Brillo boxes in the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan. Danto went and saw those works, and he was the one who gave Warhol’s art its transcendental value.

We all know that Warhol rarely ever answered questions directly and, of course, we may say that this is how some artists choose to represent themselves, that is, by letting others speak for them, letting others bestow meaning on their art. Thus, if it were not for Danto, who gave transcendental descriptions of those works, Andy Warhol would not be the Andy Warhol we know today.

The simplest and perhaps the most truthful explanation we can give of Pop art is that Pop artists take what is easily found in the everyday world and reinvent or represent it in a particular way. On the surface, this idea seems banal and commonplace. But if this were all there was to Pop art, then it would be meaningless and would have no artistic aura. So in this regard, we must thank Arthur Danto, because not only did he give Warhol his significance, he also gave Pop art its significance. Before Danto, many writers had critiqued and commented on Pop art, but no one had given it a sense of transcendence.

The Connection between the Great Criticism Series and Political Pop Art is a Matter of Historical and Political Circumstance

Whatever Beuys and I have or don’t have in common is pretty noticeable, and the differences between us can probably be explained by looking at Warhol. Warhol’s works are direct and clear; his art comes to us easily—what he shows us is exactly what we see. But this is also the problem with his art: it seems superficial. However, when I try to look beneath this superficiality—while I cannot say I see something deep and profound, I can certainly vouch for the existence of some kind of wisdom.

Warhol’s aesthetic lies in the “beauty” of the ordinary, in the “beauty” of the mass culture. His works are actually technically very artful, well executed, smooth, and abundantly layered. Yet given the conditions at the time—a time when Expressionism and abstraction were dominant, a time when peculiar brushstrokes and bizarre materials were fashionable—Warhol’s values were apparently considered counter to the mainstream. His aesthetics arose from the mass culture, but in my view, this is different than if they had arisen from the people.

The concept of “the people” is a political concept, one that under most circumstances refers to the lower class and is associated with industriousness, hardship, and dedication. The concept of “the masses,” on the other hand, seems to me to be more related to the idea of “citizens”—of people in a society who are more concerned with materialism, consumption, and pleasure. My art refers to the concept of “the people,” and not “the masses.” This is the understanding I bring to Political Pop art.

Li Xianting was the first person to connect my Great Criticism Series with Political Pop art.⁶ Back then I was working on the idea of using newspapers published during the Cultural Revolution⁷ in my work but hadn’t yet figured out the details. Later on, Zhang Peili gave me a book about newspapers from the time of the Cultural Revolution, which eventually helped to launch the Great Criticism Series.

In the collection Zhang gave me, I found campaign posters addressed to workers, peasants, and soldiers.⁸ I used a grid to enlarge and transfer those pictures onto canvas because I wanted to retain the rudimentary, clumsy feeling of the original images. I incidentally included a Coca-Cola logo in a painting and I found it interesting, and so I kept it. This is how I came to create the first piece in my Great Criticism Series, Great Criticism: Coca-Cola.

In the latter half of 1990, I took photos of the five works in my Great Criticism Series and sent them to Li Xianting. Old Li responded by letter and noted the connection between my works and Political Pop art. His remarks were justified back then, given the historical and political situation. Nonetheless, if nowadays the media still sees me as nothing but a Political Pop artist, then they will have overlooked some even more important things.

In Warhol, I See What Society Expects of Me

Frankly speaking, Andy Warhol and I are very different because we come from different backgrounds. In Warhol’s works, you see great quantities of Western, commercialized objects. In my art, you will not find images that have been produced through the manipulation of photographs or advertisements; I build my art via the strength of “the people.”

Western logos are complex to me because they carry a sense of fetishism. In the Great Criticism Series, I tried my best to maintain a neutral stance in presenting the two ways in which I believe human beings operate. One reflects a utopian attitude, the other a fetishistic leaning. I placed both of these things into the same frame. The combination of these two disparate tendencies is one of the things that draws peoples’ attention to the Great Criticism Series.

Comparatively speaking, Andy Warhol’s works are simple, and mine are complex. More often than not, simplicity outshines complexity. Warhol impels the masses to give meaning to meaningless images. Even in response to the silliest or most naïve questions, his response is always, “Yes, that is exactly what I meant.”

But I am different from Warhol. My education and background prevent me from being as extremely simple as Warhol can be. So, when it comes to ideas and concepts, Beuys has a greater influence over me, which is why, when I try to explain my own works, I am more willing to use ambiguous words to interpret them. In me you will see some very complicated, unorthodox things, especially when it comes to ideas—I enjoy a way of thinking that allows for uncertainty, obscurity, ambiguity, and even a twisting of the facts. After all, Conceptual art has ambiguous boundaries, just like ideas—things we cannot touch and cannot see—do when we speak of them.

As for Andy Warhol, his influence on me is mainly in how I see myself when it comes to what society expects of me. On a deeper level, I admire Beuys’s work, but as an artist who bears societal self-expectations, I also relate closely to Warhol. From a popular view, people might be more easily attracted to Warhol’s work because its outward appearance is very worldly and easily understood—even though we might not know what it actually means.

For the original Chinese text, see The Beijing News, October 9, 2013.
The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann and annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images have been added by post editors.

My Soul Mate Magritte

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚

Publication: 《艺术世界》[Art World]: no. 5 (2001): 72–73.
Language: Chinese

The first time I learned of René Magritte was a little after I started painting. My mentor had lent me a copy of The History of Modern Western Art, hoping that I would “sharpen my artistic perception.” It was one of those archaic books printed before Liberation,⁹ with Traditional Chinese characters, vertical typesetting, and black-and-white illustrations, on old yellowed pages that were flipped from right to left.¹⁰ I seem to recall that it started out by introducing French Realists like Gustave Courbet and François Millet, and ended abruptly with the Surrealists and Dadaists on the last few pages. To a seventeen-year-old youngster first entering the world of painting, they [the works of the Surrealists and Dadaists] were certainly puzzling and not easy to appreciate—and much less enticing than the work of Peredvizhniki [Russian Realist painters] like Ilya Repin and Vasily Surikov. I asked my teacher, “Why do modernists portray people in such an ugly way?” The teacher said, “Forget about them; they are simply a bunch of idle people. Now go and work on your still-life paintings!” Nonetheless, a few big names stuck in my head, and one of them was this “humorous” Magritte—perhaps because he drew a pipe and wrote on it, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe [see fig. 1]). What does that even mean? This question bothered me for more than a decade.

As I graduated from college and continued sharpening “my artistic perception,” I found myself growing fonder and fonder of Surrealism, and even mimicking Surrealist artworks and thriving on it during the ’85 New Wave.¹¹ Magritte has since become one of the greatest masters I admire to this day.

Like many of my fellow artists, I started studying art through printed works. This means that when you come across a masterpiece that is poorly printed, not only must you rely on reading and studying related information to understand the background from which the artwork emerged, but also you must develop a good sense of imagination in order to picture the original piece of art. For instance, when I read Van Gogh’s biography¹² back then, I completely believed that this Dutch painter, who spontaneously started a painting career, was an amateur who basically just randomly stirred the yellow paint with the blue and threw it onto the canvas, and then left and walked to a cheap bar where he would have melodramatic affairs with prostitutes—and this is, indeed, the story of a “genius’s tragedy” that has stirred the lives of so many young Chinese artists stepping into art. It wasn’t until one day, when Armand Hammer, who was in the oil business, brought his art collection to China for a museum exhibition,¹³ and I saw paintings that Van Gogh had done during his time in a mental hospital, that I realized the story that I had believed in was completely fallacious. Van Gogh certainly mastered the layering of colors, creating melodious lines on canvas, and so much more. What words can do to art when it comes to distortion and exaggeration can sometimes be truly cruel. To prove the existence of that fine line between genius and insanity, I later paid a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands. When I came out and sat on the stone steps in front of the museum, I was overwhelmed by great awe and gratification. I need not elaborate on the awe, but the gratification was mixed with a sense of relief: I finally saw that I need not belong with those artists who paint on the edge of borders—this approach to art led many Chinese artists to possess a seemingly rich background knowledge of the literature of art, but at the same time to misread or misinterpret it and, interestingly, to form thoughts or appreciations of their own. This is why some say today that the reason why Chinese contemporary art is drawing international attention is because it is relatively closed and self-contained. And yet, while all this apparent energy that comes from being closed might shine now, how long can it last? It’s truly doubtful that it will.

Back to Magritte. Similarly, all those legends or rumors about him (including his fondness for painting on restroom doors, going alone to detective movies, or playing chess with random elders on the street) had me imagine how he handled the oil paints with great delicacy, how he made good use of his solid sketching technique and layered until thickness and firmness were reached.

In early 1992, I finally had a chance to travel to Europe,¹⁴ and when I was faced with Magritte’s original works, firsthand for the first time, including those that I had and hadn’t seen before, I thought to myself, “I can’t believe painting could be done this way!” He had reduced his colors, shapes, and even painting techniques to the least possible, almost as if he “couldn’t paint.” It is thus fair to say that his accomplishment in surpassing traditional art is, in my opinion, beyond what any of his contemporaries had ever achieved. Using a painting language that is simple, subtle, and plain, he rearranges different scenes and objects, placing them in a set-up space, creating a certain sense of dislocation and illusion. Through the painting, we are brought to this dreamlike space of thoughts, where we ponder the art’s multiple meanings and multifaceted spirituality. No wonder he wrote on his painting, “This is not a pipe!”—or better, “This is not merely a pipe!”

He magnifies a bouquet of pink flowers or a green apple and places it in a narrow space (see figs. 2 and 4); sends a roaring train running out from the fireplace (see fig. 5). Magritte even depicts humans as objects, bringing forth a peculiar change in the relationship between humans and reality—humans are no longer users of a space, but instead objects that shares the illusional, set-up space we see with so many other objects. With this manipulation, it is hard not to stir up sensations within the heart of the viewer. It is not hard to imagine that, in an epoch like Magritte’s, artists like himself, who used unusual approaches to challenge what was established in tradition and explored the connection between art, psychology, and philosophy through visual arts, must have faced harsh critiques. Meanwhile, they have brought the history of visual arts into a whole new page, and had a deep impact on up-and-coming artists (including most Chinese artists).

Cool but irrational, imaginative but restrained, realistic and terrifying but at the same time alienating, using visible objects to bring thoughts into an invisible tunnel, depicting an indescribable, mysterious philosophy and pessimistic humor—this charisma of Magritte’s has enchanted me all these years. It has also become the standard to which I hold my art and the state that I hope I will some day achieve. In all these years, something Magritte once said has had unexpected impact on my mentality: “If the spectator finds that my paintings are a kind of defiance of ‘common sense,’ he realizes something obvious. I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.”

I think that in an artist’s path of growth, over and over again, he encounters a master with whom he becomes infatuated but must later bid painful good-bye to, as he moves on to encounter other forerunners with whom to connect and communicate. On this never-ending path of recognition and substantiation, those who eventually become “soul mates” turn up rarely, and even more so down the road. Magritte and Italy’s de Chirico are alike in that both their magic realism was of great influence and inspiration to me. It was through them that I learned how to “keep a distance” when examining our heavy history or facing our ever-changing reality. Meanwhile, I strive to depict our lives through an internalized language, to mind those souls that are so often neglected, and to create a “Kingdom of Illusion,” where our souls can rest within—if only temporarily.

Note: For the original Chinese text, see《艺术世界》[Art World]: no. 5 (2001): 72–73; He Xiangning Art Museum, ed., Image is Power (Hunan: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002) p. 269 [in Chinese].

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images are added by post editors.

[Chinese version follows]

我的知己——马格利特

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚

Publication: 《艺术世界》: no. 5 (2001): 72–73.
Language: 中文

第一次知道马格利特是在刚刚开始学画不久，我的启蒙教师为了让我“增加艺术修养”，特地借给我一本解放前出版的《西方现代艺术史》，竖排版、繁体字、发黄的纸张、黑白插图、从右翻到左的那种老书。记得好像是从法国现实主义的库尔贝、米勒开始谈起，到了最后几页迅速地以超现实主义，达达主义结束。对一个初学画画的十七岁青年来说，自然是看得云里雾里的，远不如俄罗斯巡回画派的列宾、苏里柯夫来得激动。去问老师，那些现代派为什么要把人画得如此丑陋？老师说，别管他们，他们是一群颓废的人。你现在好好地画静物去吧！尽管如此，但是当时却无意中记住了几位大师的名字，其中之一便有这位“爱开玩笑的”马格利特——可能是他画了一个烟斗，而且写上“这不是烟斗” (图1) 那是什么呢？这个问题困惑了我起码十年。

随着大学毕业，逐步增长的“艺术休养”，开始对超现实主义从接触到发自内心的喜爱，直至以模仿超现实主义风格的作品在85新潮中混迹江湖，马格利特成为了我至今仍非常崇仰的大师之一。

我和许多同行一样，都是从印刷品开始学习艺术的，这意味着当你面对一张印刷得很差的大师作品时，除了通过阅读相关的知识去理解那些杰作产生的背景之外，还得对作品的原貌有充分的想象力。比如当时看《凡高传》，完全相信了这个半途出家的荷兰画家，基本上就是把黄颜色和蓝颜色胡乱搅拌之后甩到画布上，然后就去小酒馆喝劣质的酒、对妓女滥发真情——这便是搅乱了多少初学艺术的中国青年艺术家生活的“天才的悲剧”。直至有一天，卖石油的哈默老先生把自己的艺术藏品拿到中国美术馆来展出，当我看到凡高在疯人院里画的油画时，才发现原本不是那么一回事。凡高实际上非常懂得如何一层一层上颜色，懂得如何经营线条在画布上的旋律感等等。可见文字对艺术的某种过分地渲染和曲解，有时真够残酷的。为了证明天才和疯狂的分界线，后来我还专门去荷兰参拜了凡高博物馆，看完出来之后，坐在博物馆门前的石台阶上，心里真是说不出的崇敬和庆幸——崇敬自不必多说，庆幸的是自己终于发现我不属于这类需要在临界边缘作画的画家——这种学习艺术的结果，曾使许多中国艺术家对西方艺术除了对其文本的背景有深刻的认识外，同时也因为这种种的误读反而在其中摸索出自己的感觉。所以有人会说，中国当代艺术之所以在今天能够引起国际上的关注，其中一个原因恰恰是因为相对封闭的结果。当然，这种由于闭塞而产生的某种程度的鲜活力，究竟能维持多久，值得怀疑。

回到马格利特来。同样面对他的种种传说（诸如他喜欢在卫生间的门口作画；喜欢一个人去看侦探电影；喜欢和街上的老头下棋等等），同样地开始想象他的油画色彩处理得如何如何微妙，他如何运用“坚实的素描基础”，通过反复地描绘达到造型的厚度感和坚实感等等。

直到1992年初，终于有了一次去欧洲的机会，第一次面对大量的见过和没见过的马格利特原作，才发现原来还可以“这样画画的”！他把色彩、造型，以至描绘手段都降低到几乎“不会画画”的地步了。换句话说，他对传统艺术的超越，我认为远远超过了他的同时代的画家。平涂，简洁而又含蓄的绘画语言，将现实中的各种场景、物体重新组合，置放在一个虚设的空间之中，产生出某种心理上的特定的错位感和虚幻感。从而使人通过绘画进入一个梦境般的思维空间，再回头面对视觉艺术的多重含义和多角度的精神指向。如次种种，都曾使我在惊诧之后敬佩不已。难怪他要在画布上写上“这不是烟斗！”或者“这不仅仅

他可以把一束粉红色的鲜花，或者一个绿色的苹果放大，置放于一个狭小的空间之中 (图2, 4)； 将一列火车从壁炉中呼啸着开了出来 (图5) 。马格利特甚至将人作为某种物体来进行描述，使人与现实的关系由此发生了奇异的变化——人不再是一个空间的使用者，它与其他物体共同分享了我们所见到的那个迷幻的虚设空间。这样的处理方式，使人看后难免不为之心理上产生某种异样的悸动。可以想象，在那个时代，像他们这样的艺术家，用如此怪诞的手段去挑战传统的习惯，通过视觉艺术的方式，探索艺术与心理学、哲学的关系，一定引来许多莫名的诽议，同时，也将视觉艺术史带入了一个崭新的艺术领域，对下一代艺术家（包括大部分的中国艺术家）产生了深远的影响。

冷静而又非理性；充满幻想而又保持住应有的节制；真实恐怖却又令人感到陌生；利用可见的物体，使人的思维跨入不可见的隐秘隧道，呈现出某种神秘的哲理和灰色的幽默——马格利特的这种魅力使我长久的着迷。同时也成为我长期以来对自己艺术的某种价值判断和境界追求。许多年来，马格利特说过的一句话，始终在我的潜意识中起着意想不到的作用：“如果观赏者发现我的绘画是一种对‘平常感觉’的挑战，他就意识到了某种特殊的东西。然而，我要说明，在我看来，这个世界就是对平常感觉的挑战。” 我想，一个艺术家在他的成长过程中，总是不断的要与一些曾经迷恋的大师忍痛告别，然后又重新的认识另外一些与之沟通的前辈。在这条不断认知不断验证自己的道路上，最后能成为“知己”的，发现已越来越少。马格利特与意大利的德·契里柯一样，他们的“魔幻现实主义”作品，始终对我产生着深远的影响和启迪。正是通过他们，使我学会了如何“有距离”地去体验我们的深重的历史，以及我们所面临的多变的现实。与此同时，通过使用“内心化”的语言方式去描述我们的生活，去关注那些常常被忽略的心灵，去营造一个使我们的灵魂能够得以暂且栖身的“虚幻王国”。

October 18, Xiaogang’s Letter to Lü Peng

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 1990, first published in 2010

Publication: Amnesia and Memory—Zhang Xiaogang Letters (1981–1996)
Publisher: Peking University Press
Language: Chinese

Hello, Lü Peng!¹⁵

I apologize for taking so long to gather the slides and for sending them out to you only today. After I returned to Huangjueping¹⁶ from Chengdu,¹⁷ I kept up my good spirits from Chengdu and made another five oil paintings, again in black and white (see figs. 1–5). I used undiluted and unblended paints, laying them on the canvas with painting knives; on the canvas I created a collage of cloths of different textures and colors (black, red, brown), but the overall figures were more squared than what I did in Chengdu, each resembling a cagelike frame. The heads that smile and ponder live freely in the painting; they are human heads and faces, or wolf heads and lamb heads. Grinning, with their ice-brick teeth. But make no mistake—they are not making faces that express emotions to the world (like Expressionist works). Surely my works do carry a hint of Expressionism, like those demons I painted in 1984, but I know in my heart that I disdain Expressionism and don’t belong in Realism. After finishing the fifth painting, I forced myself to stop and undergo some cleansing. On reviewing the history of Western art and observing contemporary Expressionists domestic and foreign, I once again found myself most fond of artists like El Greco, Hieronymous Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, James Ensor, René Magritte, and others along this line, like Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Balthasar Klossowski, who all belong in the same class. And, of course, there is Odilon Redon. Of all the Neo-Expressionists, Germany’s Anselm Kiefer and Italy’s Mimmo Paladino are my favorites. I think what I am trying to express in my art is a concern for the state of our existence as human beings in the modern world (that is, expressing a certain fear of death and the genuine experience of exploring what lies beneath the appearances of things) and our spiritual journeys as well as intuitions concerning life and death. It is a gloomy passage holding both life and death, heading between reality and illusion. Both the realistic (such as early Expressionism and Pop art) and the purely “illusional” (such as the “reverie” explicitly created by Dalí) seem inaccessibly alien to me. There’s simply no affinity between purely rational material and me, or Conceptual art or abstract art and me. As Max Beckmann once proclaimed, “That is hidden behind so-called reality. . . .To make the invisible visible through reality.”¹⁸ Kabbalah’s occultism and China’s Zen also explore this path. De Chirico and Magritte are especially worth noting; de Chirico’s dusky streets contain gloomy, mysterious, long shadows that divide time and space into halves, where the defining lines of ancient monuments and sculptures or human characters are blurred, and we vividly feel the intense power of the reality that is hidden beneath. As for Magritte, to classify him as a Surrealist would be a superficial judgment. His painting The Listening Chamber is beyond what Dalí can achieve or embrace. And Bacon, a fine artist who captures reality through illusion, if looked at closely, reveals how different he is from the Expressionists.

China’s modern art, especially after the May Fourth Movement¹⁹ and Lu Xun’s²⁰ advocacy of “Art for life’s sake” (not to mention Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942), has been wavering between being “instrumental” and “recreational.” The New Wave Movement accomplished its mission of destruction, and afterward along came the motif of rebellion in the so-called New Academic Art and New Ink Painting Movement—a sense of escape from the feudal literati. The materialism in Shanghai, Wang Guangyi’s rational spirit and cultural introspection, all these might seem frigid, but unlike the two “new,” corrupt literati, at least they strive to explore and bring art to a deeper level with a constructive spirit. Rational art isn’t threatened by the dilemma between traditional culture and social reality. If not for its constructive spirit, it might have been at risk of reducing itself to an instrument or a hobby. Sichuan artists love to talk about “feelings,” but I feel that we should elevate that to “sensitivity.” The other day we were all wisecracking together, and I joked that if the southwestern artists continued “feeling” their way, eventually they won’t make their way in “history” and they won’t make it in the “economy” either, ultimately becoming just some “neither-nor community.” And this is what essentially constitutes the lower part of the pyramid—a bunch of recreational artists. But then again, the concept of a pyramid might not suit modern society anymore. In the recent American market, Russia’s long-suppressed avant-garde art and Latin America’s regionally colored art have been very well received; perhaps China’s art will one day travel the same path? To make use of its unique political circumstances or to make use of regional features and express them in an international language in hopes of earning international recognition? Well, this is unless China undergoes an earth-shattering revolution in the next decade or so and builds a whole new picture, like what Spain has been doing. Lü Peng, frankly speaking, at times I think of these “big issues” and my heart is overwhelmed with emptiness. Leaving my country to pursue art abroad was a path I had to resort to—but a desolate one. That being said, what needs to be done has to be done, otherwise all could have been worse.

Zou sent me a copy of The Artist, and I went through the pieces Yi Dan and you wrote on Damao.²¹ I honestly think they are some of the best reviews The Artist has published in a while; I wonder how Damao feels about them. Too bad the reproductions from his slides are awful.

Anyway, these are some thoughts I have had in my mind in the past few months, and I have elaborated a great deal, and so forgive me if they are somewhat unpolished; I hope I’m not making a fool of myself before a critic. How have you been lately? When will the first issue of Art Market be published? Chengdu might be a decayed city, but it sure is so much better than this dreary Huangjueping. I wish I didn’t have to stay!

Give my regards to Xaiohu and Lu Jing!

Xiaogang, October 18, 1990

Note: read the original Chinese text here. This translation is based on the letter published (in Chinese) in Lü Peng, ed., Amnesia and Memory—Zhang Xiaogang Letters (1981–1996) (Beijing: Peking University Press: 2010), pp.158–161.

The text is translated from the Chinese by Lina Dann, annotated by Yu-Chieh Li and Lina Dann. All images are added by post editors.

[Chinese version follows]

10月18日张晓刚致吕澎的信

By Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 1990, 2010 出版

Publication: 《失忆与记忆：张晓刚书信集》
Publisher: 北京大学出版社
Language: 中文

请原谅直到今天才把反转片整理出来给你寄去。从成都回到黄桷坪后，我又接着成都的那口气, 画了五幅油画 (图1-5), 仍是以黑白为主。将未经稀释和调和的厚颜料用画刀堆砌在画布上， 画面上也仍是用几种不同质地和色彩 (黑、红、褐) 的布拼贴， 只是整个的图形比之在成都画的更呈方形， 犹如一个个牢笼般的框架。 那些在微笑和沉思的头颅在其中自在地生存着，它们或是人形的头颅、脸面，或是狼、羊形的头颅。龇着冰砖般的牙齿。但是它们并非在做着某种表情面向人们展示某种情绪 (如表现主义的作品那样)。的确，我的作品也许有了某种表现主义的倾向，就像我1984年画的那些魔鬼，但我知道我是不属于表现主义的，更非现实主义的。画完第五幅之后，我强迫自己停下来，进行一番清理。 纵向地翻阅西方艺术史和横向地观察国内外的表现主义画家们，我再次发现自己喜欢的艺术家，仍然是像格列科、布什、契里柯、恩索、马格丽特，这条线下来的人物，如贾克梅蒂、培根、巴尔丢斯也属此类。当然，还有雷东。新表现主义画家群中，德国的基弗尔，意大利的帕纳迪诺是我最喜爱的。可以说，我所试图通过艺术来表达的是一种我对当代人的存在状态的关注(简而言之，表达某种对死亡的恐惧和对事物表面之下的内部真实的体验) ，以及对生命与死亡的心灵体验和感应。这是一条通往现实与幻觉之间，包容着生与死的幽暗通道。不论是现实的 (如早期表现主义，波普艺术) 还是纯“幻觉”的(如达利所刻意制造的“梦幻”)都给我一种堵塞的陌生感。纯理性的材料，概念艺术，包括抽象艺术与我更是无缘。如贝克曼所言: “表现在所谓的现实背后隐藏的东西。从‘可见的’通向‘不可见的’。卡伯莱神秘哲学和中国的禅宗正是这条道上的发掘者。尤其值得一提的是契里柯和玛格丽特，契的昏暗街道上那忧郁而神秘的长长黑影，把时空分裂成了两半，在那里，古建筑及雕像与人物的基本定义模糊了，使人震颤地惑受到那内部的真实世界的强大力量。而把马格丽特归为超现实主义不免显得表面，其《收听室》远非达利能企及包容的。还有培根，一位极好地通过幻觉的形式把握现实的优秀画冢，仔细对比，即可看出他与表现主义画家的极大差异。

中国现代艺术，自“五四”之后特别是鲁迅提出“为人生而艺术” (当然 《讲话》就更不用说了) ，就总是在工具与游戏之间徘徊，新潮艺术完成了破坏的使命後，跟着就要出现那些什么“新学院派”，“新文人画”的逆反心理——封建士大夫的逃避意识。上海的纯物质、王广义等的理性精神、文化反思，虽然觉得冷漠，但较之两个“新”的堕落文人来说，毕竟是一种把艺术向纵深发展的建构精神，而非理性艺术也同样面临着传统文化和社会现实的巨大压力，如果不具备建构精神，也有沦为工具和游戏的危险。四川画家爱说的“感觉”一词，的确应当上升为“感性” 了。前几天，大家在一起吹牛，我开玩笑说，如果西南艺术家再这样“感觉”下去，就将成为既进人不了“历史”又进人不了“经济”的“两不如分子”。而这种人正是构成金宇塔最底层的大量游戏画家。 当然，金字塔的概念也许巳不适合今日之时代了。最近在美国市场，苏联被压抑多年的先峰派艺术和拉美充满地域特点的艺术同样走红，也许中国现代艺术将来的命运也会如此，以政治背景的特殊或者以用国际语言表达的地域特征来取得国际艺坛的青睐? 除非在这最后的十年里中国来个翻天覆地的大变化，另立一个山头起来，如目前西班牙所干的那样。吕澎，说实话，有时侯想到这些“大问题”，不由得一片虚无。出国求生存更是我等的凄凉之道。当然，话虽如此说，但还是得干活路，否则情况更糟。

好了, 提笔写了这么多，都是我近几个月来的一些断想，不免肤浅粗糙，还望理论家多多包涵，见笑了。你近来如何?《艺术.市场》何时开张?成都虽然腐朽，比起凄凉的黄桷坪来仍然好多了，我真不想再呆在这儿了。

代问小胡、吕静!

晓剛 1990年10月18日

— An English version of this text is available here as “October 18, Xiaogang’s Letter to Lü Peng.”

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