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I am starting with 98weeks a reasearch on arabic/ Lebanese culture and arts magazines, published from the 50s on. The idea is to collect and present these books in the Bidoun Library in April 2010. I have found this little kitab book that I really like. It was published in Egypt in the 50s.
I have just read out loud Benjamin’s essay on book collecting, Unpacking my Library.His essay arose a couple of interesting thoughts in relation to archiving, the public and the private.
I first was slightly disturbed by the overtly passionate description of collecting and the atmosphere that accompanies it; an infinite quantity of dusty and chaotic crates containing books with each a singular history and memory. Benjamin moves on to describe the chaos implied in a collection (which is also associated with a chaos of feelings and affect; one could kill to have a book), to the precarious order of classifying and arranging these books. As I have understood it, one does not goe without the other (and indeed if there is a counterpart to the confusion of the library, it is the order of the catalogue” ).
Passions for book collecting also do not go without a particular economy, the one of property, or more precisely of possession. How does a collector acquire his books and how does his relation to books determine the act of collecting?
A collector is a book borrower that does not return the books; his act of purchasing must also be accompanied by the ritual of it; meaning that to acquire books in a conventional bookstore won’t do. His acquisitions are linked to particular cities and journeys that comes with memories of hidden bookshops. An enterprise that is similar to a quest that resolves itself in an encounter between the book and the collector. In this encounter, something is brought back to life. Factors such as previous belongings, the edition, the printing press ect… are also crucial parameters in this encounter.
The particularity of acquisition activates an economy of loss since the property of the object is material but also shares a border with life. It is an intimate property rather than a private one. This is the reason why, when a collection becomes public, it looses what made it a collection, mainly its collector. The collection seems to be the impossible relation between life and the object.
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I (after a conversation with Fares)
This is the diagram that Plato brings a slave boy to draw in his dialogue with Meno. Plato asks Meno how to double the surface of a square that is composed of 4 little squares. Meno’s first move is the double the side of the square, but the side is not a surface; by doubling the side, we end up with 16 sub squares, not the desired 8 ones. Plato says to Meno that in order to reach the double of the first square, he has to think in surfaces and that he can’t deduce the surface from the sides. For Socrate, one has not to forget what one is seeking during the calculations (Meno forgot that he was looking for a surface). We can reach knowledge if we do not forget while we are seeking. Another interesting point in this demonstration is that Plato beging with a large surface from which he has to deduce the resulting double square, meaning that he proceeds by subtracting (on a surface of 16 squares, I will find the surface of 8 squares which is already contained in the larger surface).Plato proceeds by subtraction, not by addition. The final act is to delimit, not to find. To trace the line will make the answer visible but the answer is already contained in the question. If it is not , I will never see it. The paradox is that we reach the unknown from what is already know.
II
I have been thinking about this for a while now, gathering some feelings of discontent on a couple of issues pertaining to the relation between research, art and the art system.
I started thinking about it when a couple of artists whom I know have expressed the same concerns in regards to their research. The artists had received great attention on their projects by established institutions, an attention which resumed in an immediate almost frantic desire to appropriate the research and place it under their label, wing or support. Coincidentally, but maybe not, the artists were working with archival material and carrying a research on Lebanon’s past history, although in a rather oblique manner.
One of the artist reported that he first mentioned his project to another artist, who told him “ you have a great treasure here”… The artist received attention from different organizations that resembled a sort of competitive race towards. What is the race towards or against and how does it condition the nature of the knowledge pertaining to the work and its research?
If knowledge is a race for information (who is the first to know) and then a property (a knowledge that is placed under a certain program or institutional name or copyright) knowledge is to be understood as piece; quantifiable and consumable. The more you have information, the more powerful you have because the more marketable it makes you on the art scene. The question, what is it that you know, remains.
I remember an animated debate that took place at the BAC between a gallerist and a curator; the curator was accusing the gallerist of “possessing” an archive and a collection of great value and of withholding it form the public as to capitalize on it.
The dynamics of what is at stake is linked to who possesses what and how, what forces are at play in that possession and what power game is being played; local heritage against global market, local institutions against global institutions, the market against the non profit etc. These antagonisms maybe due to the lack of public body or institutions to safeguard knowledge and research from private enterprise (which is also linked to private initiatives).
Another question that imposes itself and render this competition all the more problematic is; how does it affect this knowledge in its particular relation to history and the archive. What is the role of the archive in producing knowledge ? Is it to know that something happened or is it the power that resides in constituting a narrative on a historical episode. The paradox in the knowledge/ history/ artistic practices is that the narrative is intrinsically linked to the artist’s reading of this material and remains an individual enterprise.
The paradox is that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and interpretation.” (Archive Fever, Derrida )
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-why not start writing about the little girl ?
-now that I have time, what will I do ? waste it ? or what ?
-what will bring me back if I lie ?
-what makes me do what I do
-literature is like fresh air
- what did Marguerite Duras said about writing
-I love Tropical ,when I see a coconut tree it makes me happy
-how many detours are needed
-01 444 227 is the phone number I need to call to have tampax delivered
-she still didn’t solve the problem
-all the conditions are there and nice
-in sex in the city , when Carry is depressed after her failed wedding with Big, she asks when she will laugh again. Samantha or Miranda answer when a joke is really funny
-he said that I thought badly, how can that be ?
-she has left me with too much energy
-explaining is “sortir de soi” just like that scream
This is an old post on being exhausted. What is scary is that I still have these fluctuations, from being breathless to being too excited to sustain anything. Fares said two things that I like; a quote from Lacan that I am probably misquoting here ” La vie n’a pas assez de valeur pour faire un lache” and that I have to start to “travailler la matiere”.
The blog has changed since I moved back. It is certainly not as spontaneous as it use to be, maybe because the platform where it emerged is not there anymore. There are questions, sentences, issues that are of interest of course, but they never find the time, space or even desire to make it through the screen. Thoughts come without ever materializing like a repetitive exercise or a fold of the mind that prevents any new shape or direction to be taken. It’s not the thoughts in themselves, but more the exhausting temporal lapse between having them and experiencing what they can do, provoke. Need some brain moist. The more I let go, the more the distance is intimidating, the more my voice resonates through some shrill echoes.
It is maybe a question of adjustment and rhythm, finding a right entry point and take it from there. Drinking more water. Maybe it is about starting to read novels again or watch more French films or American mafia movies. Maybe it is about just doing it, again and again, that is what L. said. You become this or that , once you decide to do it. Since I have decided to do it, things have gotten more complicated. Maybe it is about becoming a “professional” and this is probably what is most violent since it excludes so many things (like the mosquito that is sucking my blood in this very moment) by working in given set of coordinates; a space, a schedule, a language, an outcome, having responsibility ? Pushing boundaries has never been so physical and my energy economy is simply crashing and in desperate need of pure speculation, imaginative inputs, exciting stuff. a routine.
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While discussing with Fares A. Zaatari’s work after the screening and discussion of his two films at BAC, “All is Well on the Boarder” and “In this house”, I came to realize a couple of things on the relation between artistic research and its translation into a final form, an art piece.
The screenings were programmed within the framework of Akram’s simultaneous exhibitions at Sfeir Semler and at BAC. Among the pieces on show, a series of blown up and aestheticized photographs representing contested landscapes, objects and letters. Photograph portraying his 15 years research, the objects he had unearthed and the people who became part of his work.
Akram compares his practice to the one of an archaeologist, digging and excavating in a process involving a physical/romantic relation to the earth (“earth of endless secrets”). Historiography, contrarily to Raad’s project (and I think that he is always making an implicit point in distinguishing his work from his peer’s), is not an articulated concern; he is not convulsing over the truth/ fiction boundary but more focused on getting the job done (filmed and photographed).
The problem was, again, the gallery’s all sucking gigantic white cube and the visible commercial operation of the show; the pressure of the space, of the market and of recognition tints everything differently, bugging the relation between the artist and his/her research, like a short circuit no longer able to convey the problematic of translation and image making. Letters of prisoners were blown up and framed. The frame remained particularly present as an after image, consecrating the letters as posthumous objects.
Questions can be raised; what is Akram adding to the material besides the frames? What is his relation to the prisoners he is working on/ with? Are his subject merely models for “nature mortes” where to project bourgeois and homoerotic fantasies? Is Akram “their” translator because they can’t express their experience? (I am quoting here the prisoner Nabih Awada who intervened at the end of Akram’s discussion). Who is translating Akram?
When Nabih Awad spoke ,everybody turned towards him, electricity filled the room, the current was on again and amplified. Fares, in his philosophical reading of almost everything, identified the prisoner as the “voice of the truth”; as a hypothesis, Akram might have made the films, research, question the nature of images, worked hard on the editing but the prisoner was something else, which we could not yet identify or name: he is not the audience, nor the filmmaker, nor the critic, so who the fuck is Alice? Mirene who is always critical about everything, said he is the subject, I say that he is maybe the model, the Fidel Castro of the interview, or what? Anyway he provoked a special attention when he spoke.
Was it the theatricality of the situation, when Akram, following an audience’s question on the nature of his relation with the prisoner, asked if Nabih Awada wanted to add something. Was it the fact of bringing to the contemporary art community, in a contemporary art center, a person with a whole different experience and background, in the tradition of a never exhausted exoticism?
I still don’t know how to understand the real prisoner’s role. If he was an actor in the script, his role was with no doubt different then the one of the actors reciting prisoners’ testimony in Akram’s earlier film, “All is Well on the Border”. This live intervention somehow undid the script, the script of the gallery, of the commercial show, of the research’s weight. It testified for a particular relation between him and Akram.
I came to realize that you (the artists, the researcher) can have sustained and grounded relations with the people that you re/present in your work, the people you work through, the people that give you information, testimony, time, while simultaneously producing products (these two entities, where traditionally and I don’t know if logically separated for me).
That there is always exploitation and economies at work in human relations but that it doesn’t prevent engagement, although it also does not imply it. This is why I thought Akram was “nice” and that became somehow important as a position that could be attributed a certain value, beyond personal character. I do think that the economy between Akram and the prisoner is a surplus one. This surplus sometimes materializes in his work, making drawing of flowers actually smell like flowers ( Nabih Awada’s said that through Akram’s work, he was able to smell the flowers of his own drawings).
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Shortly following e-flux’s automatic reply, I received an answer from Brian Kuan Wood a while ag0 (12 of December 2009 !). I am not going to elaborate on my belated posting. I got t meet him recently in Venice, very nice person it seems. Here is his answer.
Dear Mirene,
Thanks very much for your email.
My best explanation for the distance between our last editorial and the bombings in Gaza
can only be that it did not set out to deal with them directly. This un-mention of Gaza was not a conscious omission, but was a result of our having written on another topic.
In general, our intention with the editorial introduction is not necessarily to address political issues as such, but to place certain dynamics into perspective, usually with some relation to topics addressed in the current issue of the journal.
But perhaps this approach is not close enough for you to the urgent political matters that need to be addressed. I would agree that it is important to always question this distance, and I would be interested in knowing more of your thoughts, how you might propose that art take an approach with a closer proximity to political events.
Thanks again, and with best wishes,
Brian Kuan Wood
I was surprised by Katy’s email letter addressed to the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, denouncing the Danish position in the actual Gaza conflict. She told me that she had previously sent a letter during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, and received and answer 5 min later by the Minister’s secretary. While she was writing her mail (asking me how to spell “appel” in Danish), I was depressingly and disgustingly browsing through all the news websites reporting the Gaza massacre, thinking about what could be done and from what perspective. Working in an art association, this question became all the more disturbing and a bit ridiculous. But, it was still there.
In my mail, a link to the e-flux on line journal. It might have been the whole situation, but the editorial got on my nerves, so while Katy was writing to the government, I wrote to the e-flux contact address
“I know it is probably not the role of an art journal to discuss the news, and I am thinking here particularly of Gaza. Reading the editorial, however, the absence of the war on Gaza stroke me, and probably not inasmuch as it was not mentioned at all, but because it was not mentioned in relation to what I was reading. ” Beyond the issue of governance, these circumstances beg the deeper question of the potential for simply inhabiting existing spaces, for properly addressing important questions that have already been asked before seeking the questions of the future” “How then do we begin to use or inhabit these possibilities?”. etc
The aim here is not to oppose, once again, speculation, deferral, layered temporalities and what not, to urgent political matters, but to question the nature of these very speculations and artistic reflections. How far are they from what is happening right now?
The question here is not about the role, impact and position art can have in relation to these issues, but for the least, question its distance from it.”
For the moment, I got an E-flux automatic reply wishing me the best for 2009, I don’t think Katy got her reply yet.
This is the review I wrote for Walid Raad’s exhibition at Sfeir Semler Gallery , “A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art”. Another version of this review can be found in Bidoun’s current issue, Kids. The review is a bit long and needed to be shorten, some paragrahps are a bit dense as well, but I still think that there are some passages in this review that are important, and do not appear in the published one.
Such as the title, “There is too much love between us”.
There is still no official news nor any rumors concerning the participation of the Lebanese pavilion at the next Venice Biennale planned for June 2009. A silence that confirms its exceptional first participation in 2007 and openly puts into question the nature of a national pavilion in a country still undergoing a vivid process of nation building.
In 2005, The Sfeir Semler gallery now hosting Raad’s recent exhibition in Beirut, A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art_Part 1_Chapter 1: Beirut 1992-2005, attempted to launch the first national pavilion. A venture that never went through due to the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Raffic Harriri in 2005.
If the development of Lebanese modern and contemporary art is deeply intertwined with the history of modern Lebanon, Raad, with this new exhibition takes the cultural and artistic sphere as a stage where to look at the way Lebanon’s recent history traumatically affects its present. This visibility resides in the awareness of the impossibility to see, speak or represent things that have been irretrievably lost due to a “surpassing disaster” (in this case the Lebanese protracted civil war). A notion inspired by the artist and writer Jalal Toufic’s concept on the “withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster”.
The challenge in the creation of an artistic stage allowing for this paradoxical visibility is to keep it from withdrawing into the establishment of an art system and its market. A challenge that Raad addresses frontally since his new project is also about exploring the spaces, names, institutions and relations that make the “art world”. In particular how these have come to form a narrative for what accounts to be “contemporary Lebanese art”.
A narrative that closely involves Raad’s persona and his artistic peers.
This first exhibition chapter on modern and contemporary Arab art is an attempt to process and translate how historical perspective is created; what distance can you see and write from, how far or how close are we in the making of this history and how to “show” it. In order to translate information and material, Raad, in his usual fashion, adopts a classifying system by creating different sections as subparts of his chapter. These sections unfold in the gallery space like pages of a missing art history book, occupying each a separate room along a central wall– Preface: Title 23, Appendix XVIII: Plates, The Atlas Group (1989-2994), Museums, Walid Sadek’s Love is Blind (Modern Art, Oxford, U.K.), Index XXVI: Artists.
Along the central spine, the show divides into two main parts. On the one hand, more sculptural works having each a separate room, on the other side of the wall, a large room containing a series of equal size large color prints, Appendix XVIII: Plates. An important part of the research carried by Raad is translated in these plates; the information he gathered on the creation of a national pavilion, a series of indexes taken from international art magazine and catalogue dedicated to contemporary Lebanese art, an archive on modern Lebanese artists belonging to the researcher Kristen Scheid. The information conveyed is hardly decipherable; some plates seemed to be magnified to the point of abstraction, in other plates (such as with the archive), the material is simply not legible. Importance is drawn towards the layout, the typography, the colors used as background. The effort made to grasp what is presented moves the viewer back and forth in a game of abstraction and physical involvement. While the colors and the size of the prints are immersive, the limits encountered in accessing the information and the mirror image sent back by the large reflective surfaces, can’t but remind the viewer of his/her physical presence in he space.
The same goes for some more sculptural works. In the section, The Atlas Group (1989-2004), an impressively executed mock up of the Atlas’ group retrospective held at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The poetic detournement of the Operator # 17, who, every day would redirect, his surveillance camera monitoring Beirut’s sea side promenade to videotape the sunsets is screened in miniature as part of the mock up. Although the viewer has to bend his head to have a glimpse the work, its position in relation to the rest of the show is clearly visible and conceals the choices behind the layout of an exhibition. The mock up of a show, a device often used in museum’s to visualize the final outcome of an exhibition, is presented as the open graveyard of the Atlas Group and religiously demands the attention of the viewer trying to identify some works he/she might already knows. Following museum fashion, a note on the wall of the gallery written in Arabic and in English, “do not touch”.
Similar to the system of a Russian doll game, the mock up echoes the gallery space we are standing and raises some questions such as, how is the space in the mock up, different from the one we are in? Rather than collapsing local and international settings- a white cube in Beirut, or a Museum in Berlin, Raad seems to want to highlight the asymmetry of these experiences: what meaning would such a show have in another context, can you translate a name?
A series of 150 white vinyl names written in Arabic mounted on the white wall of the room dedicated to Section 79: Index XXVI: Artists, keep appearing and disappearing. The names belong to artists who lived and worked in Beirut over the past 100 years, who belonged (and still belongs since some are still alive) to other circuits, living rooms, and histories. No narration has, up to now bridged the gap between the scene that emerged in Beirut in the post war area and the scene active in the pre-war years. In this particular piece, the oscillating distance, physical and historical, creates an experience of the gap and this not only by pointing to its inaccessibility. Questions can then be raised in relation to how the disappearing/appearing act takes place; if any ghost is to come back, it also needs a voice that can break through and create a rupture. Although used in a very astute way, the accomplice white walls of the gallery might not be the right stage for this encounter.
The private gallery space, in fact, with its limits and possibilities, has major role in the way the works are developed. As the press release announces it, the gallery is presenting the “first solo exhibition of Walid Raad in the Middle East”. Although Raad has performed and shown his works in Beirut on several other occasions such as the Homeworks forum or the former Ayloul Festival, it is the first time that his works develops exclusively in relation to this specific setting and takes the development of the art system as a topic in itself.
The performative- and potentially transformative- aspects of his multifaceted practice usually including talks and presentations, shifted for this particular exhibition to a more sculptural, object based works (this also considering the tremendous amount of research that Raad has carried in order to collect the information and whose process remains invisible). If the viewer through the work is always reminded of his/her presence, the silent echo of Raad’s missing voice also inevitably resonates. Self-references and the continuous deferral, reflective surfaces, physical limits, the impossibility to access can certainly provoke a reaction but does not allow much space for any type of transformative response or “hysterical symptoms”.
Instead of opening up a space for reflection, the endless play of deferral and the many critical questions raised, closes possible roads for the understanding and experience of cultural and art in Lebanon, their future possibilities if not their present conditions and past histories. In that sense, the closure in Raad’s show paradoxically acts a first document concealing a silent and powerful voice.
Creating a document, a legacy, an institution in the cultural sphere leads us to formulate a question pertinent to the their absence in the Lebanese context; does Lebanon need a national pavilion when the nation state is a problematic and questionable form of organization? Are institutions and documents need first to be established in order to be contested? These questions, although impossible to answer, must be kept open, and maybe this through the utopian “desire to meet the masses once again”.
Filed under: 98 weeks research project, Beirut notes, Learn me how to read
C. “don’t think about it to much”.
As things move on, at a pace that does not really allow any clear understanding of where we are heading and how , the dialectic between what has been done /is still in the doing, and the questioning of these actions or projects questioning their very projection, is not that clear in fact. When are we thinking and how do we think about what we do ? When does it become clear, a name becomes an action, and finally, you’ve got something, or you found something, you are into something .
M. “that’s because she hasn’t found anything yet”
Is there a way to get there that is more efficient than another, or does it take a long long detour to finally have that feeling of precarious lover’s communion between you and the world. Some would say that there is no separation anyways, that there is no distance.
Navigating all this can then become a process of stripping off all that has been added and getting to reactivate what has, in a way, always been there, the child perhaps.
The thinking, maybe paradoxically, has to be effected in that sense, working the way to something vital, a pulsating beat. (the heartbeat of contingency). Listening then may be more appropriate.
Not to fall again, withing the classical binary of thoughts and emotions, I’d rather see that process as a choreography, writing, undoing, shaking and dancing. ( “an unrehearsed pas de deux” as S. would say? ).
