by Surti Singh
Today, every phenomenon of culture, even if a model of
integrity, is liable to be suffocated in the cultivation of kitsch. Yet
paradoxically in the same epoch it is to works of art that has fallen the
burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred to politics. Adorno,
“Commitment”
Over the past three years, Egyptian street art has become an
iconic symbol of protest. It has appeared and reappeared with the same
lightening speed as the rapid shifts in the political climate, directly
participating in the events that transpired under the regimes of Hosni Mubarak,
Mohammed Morsi, and Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. In the hands of Egyptian street
artists, art was a powerful revolutionary weapon. Now, in an atmosphere of
repression, where many of the signs and symbols of the revolution have been
painted over and protest has been outlawed, a new set of questions is
crystallizing about the role of art in contemporary Egypt.
Can art still preserve the revolutionary spirit that spilled
out in the graffiti and murals that covered Egypt’s streets? Should this even
be art’s focus? In thinking through these questions, one is reminded of the
debates that ensued about art and politics among members of the Frankfurt
School in the early part of the twentieth century. In this spirit, one can ask:
should art be committed?
In a recent article in the Cairo Review of Global Affairs,
one of Egypt’s leading artists working under the pseudonym Ganzeer affirmed
art’s continuing political potential in Egypt today. Ganzeer advocates for art
that is intimately tied to Egyptian reality and observes a new form of
political art emerging in post-revolution Egypt. He calls it “Concept Pop,” a
heady blend of Pop Art and Conceptual Art. Ganzeer argues that the artists who
are most relevant, engaged, and revolutionary today are those whose works,
often without knowing it themselves, embody the qualities of Concept Pop.
For Ganzeer, Concept Pop maintains the revolutionary spirit
of Egyptian street art because it is void of the artist’s ego and because it
takes up the concerns of the average Egyptian. Like street art, Concept Pop
provides an immediate and unequivocal message, one that “your average Egyptian
can instantly ‘get’ and relate to.” Composed of objects taken from our everyday
environment, works of Concept Pop are self-explanatory. There is no need for a
curator or a museum label; the objects themselves lead us to a concept. Ganzeer
positively notes that knowledge of the history of art is not a precondition for
grasping the concept; the viewer need only be of the same environment from
which the artwork is produced.
Ganzeer analyzes key exhibitions in 2013 signifying the
emergence of Concept Pop—notably Hany Rashed’s Toys at Mashrabia Gallery, Huda
Lutfi’s Cut and Paste at the Townhouse Gallery, and Ahmed Hefnawy’s
contribution to the Revolution Museum at the abandoned Viennoise Hotel. All of
these exhibitions were shown in downtown Cairo in close radius to one another,
near abandoned hotels and cafes, amid a political environment of clampdown on
dissent and a strongman rising to power, and only a five minute walk from
Tahrir with its now faded scenes of protest.
When discussing Rashed’s distorted plastic objects Ganzeer
writes, “I get it. I understand that the artist is telling me that the world we
live in is fake and unreal.” Ganzeer’s analysis of Hefnawy’s immersive tear-gas
installation is his most striking example—a recreation of a familiar, real-life
scenario that many Egyptians experienced. Ganzeer writes:
I was there in Tahrir Square when the first tear gas
canister was shot into the air. Everyone present paused for a split second in
an attempt to understand what that thing was. It wasn’t long before crowds were
running all over the place without being given the opportunity to understand
the situation. Hefnawy gave his audience the opportunity to examine that moment
in one’s own time, an opportunity to be saddened and hurt by it, exemplified by
the tears in the eyes of many viewers at the art show. An art show that
gathered hundreds of viewers on its opening night, many of whom confessed they
had never been to an art show before.
In recreating specific events, such as a shot-gun ejecting a
tear-gas canister, Hefnawy’s exhibition freezes an historical moment in time,
such that the actual participants in the historical event can have time to
reflect. In Ganzeer’s description, art offers a therapeutic moment, an
opportunity for the audience to release emotions from a safe distance.
Collectively, the audience can mourn their experience.
Not surprisingly, Ganzeer’s argument provoked criticism.
Adham Selim, a Cairo-based architect and researcher, published a response a few
weeks later in Mada Masr. Selim accuses Ganzeer of reading the role of art
metaphorically and therefore reductively. He believes Ganzeer’s idea of Concept
Pop falls somewhere between kitsch and Socialist Realism. The issue, for Selim,
is that we cannot make the distinction that Ganzeer wants to draw between those
who are engaged and those who are not, for we are all part of the same event
that is unfolding. It is impossible, according to Selim, to not be politically
engaged with the moment in which one is involved. The same goes for art.
Furthermore, Selim views Ganzeer’s emphasis on the message that art conveys as
obscuring art’s aesthetic experience rooted in its sensory qualities. In other
words, in demanding that art convey a message or lead us to a concept, art’s status
as art is ignored.
While pointing to some of the potential weaknesses in
Ganzeer’s view of art, Selim does not fully engage with the notion of Concept
Pop. Let me take this opportunity to weigh in on the debate. Though Ganzeer’s
analysis is tied to the immediate Egyptian context, where Egyptian artists and
Egyptian audiences share the same historical moment and communicate about and
reflect upon real events through art, Concept Pop has wider implications. It
revives the debates about whether art should be committed or autonomous.
In his essay “Commitment,” Theodor W. Adorno distinguished
between committed and autonomous art; a distinction that can shed light on
Ganzeer’s and Selim’s views. For Adorno, committed art attempts to involve the
audience in a particular historical moment, to cultivate a political
consciousness, and to engage with historical atrocities and suffering.
Commitment implies that art should convey a certain political message; it is
not difficult to see in Ganzeer’s Concept Pop a similar desire for art to be
active and participatory in the politics of the time. Ganzeer draws a direct
contrast between art produced by active participants in the current historical
moment and those who are merely passive spectators.
Conversely, Selim wants to uphold the autonomy of art from
politics but falls into a vindication of l'art pour l'art or art for art’s
sake. Selim writes:
You can’t ask a music producer about the political statement
in their beats, or how their bass line, for example, contributes to the current
state of affairs. You usually enjoy music for what it is, not for what it
stands for. You don’t put an extra effort into trying to communicate the
meaning of the beats to the musically-uneducated masses.
Selim wants to rescue art from its reduction to a political
tool. But is the choice only to subordinate art to politics or to place art
outside of politics? Looking more closely at Ganzeer, Concept Pop reveals
another option that Adorno’s concept of autonomous art can help to flesh out.
For Adorno, autonomous art is devoid of political ends, but it is not
apolitical. Its critical potential emerges from being a part of society and yet
standing apart from it. Autonomous art is ideological and it is emancipatory.
Reading Ganzeer’s Concept Pop charitably reveals a desire
for art that is not simply a commodity, or a reproduction of the dominant
logic, and not simply art for art’s sake, or a retreat into the avant-garde.
This is the more valuable question that the notion of Concept Pop poses. In the
current climate, how can art resist simply becoming one commodity among others,
or abdicating politics all together?
Ganzeer proposes a mediation between Pop Art and Conceptual
Art. He views the former as succumbing to the commodity form and the latter as
pervaded by intellectual vacuity. As Selim rightly points out, Ganzeer hastily
dismisses the historical value of both movements in order to edify his view of
Concept Pop. Selim attempts to fill in this gap by discussing the way both Pop
Art and Conceptual Art exceed Ganzeer’s descriptions. According to Selim, Pop
Art cannot simply be the repackaging of commodities for elite consumption as
Ganzeer imagines, since this reading ignores Pop Art’s celebration of mass
consumption. At the same time, Selim admonishes Ganzeer for not taking into
account the anti-establishment effect that Duchamp’s work of Conceptual
Art—“Fountain” (1917)—had on the art institution of his time. While Selim’s
reading prompts the reader to think in a more complex way about the history of
art, there is another key moment that resonates much more strongly for Concept
Pop.
Ganzeer’s description of Concept Pop has similarities with
Neo-Dada, a movement that emerged in the 1950s exemplified by the work of
artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein. Neo-Dada was
a bridge between the Conceptual Art exemplified by Marcel Duchamp and the
emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Like Concept Pop, Neo-Dada emphasized
the viewer’s response to the artwork over the artists’ ego, and its “junk
aesthetic” was based on mass media and found objects. Neo-Dada prompted the
viewer to think about everyday reality, and this conceptual dimension persisted
into Pop Art. The broader issue is whether we can neatly separate out the
conceptual from the pop aesthetic; the debates about whether Pop Art merely
affirmed consumer culture or produced its critique are still not settled, and
this a dimension that eludes Ganzeer’s formulation of Concept Pop.
Ganzeer’s notion of Concept Pop ekes out a new and vital
political role for art at this particular moment in Egyptian history, a moment
suffering from an absence of politics. At the same time, Concept Pop is
vulnerable to the pitfalls of committed art. It is not without reason that
Adorno was highly critical of committed art. He saw in his own time with
figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht that committed art often inadvertently
worked against its purported aims. Instead of political liberation, committed
art frequently became a mouthpiece for the status quo; instead of remembering
suffering, committed art risked aestheticizing suffering into an object for
enjoyment or pleasure.
This is what potentially troubles me about Concept Pop—if it
is only portrayed as another version of committed art, it risks embracing an
overly simplistic equation of aesthetics with politics. For example, Ganzeer’s
descriptions of Concept Pop are very affirmative. Individuals view the work of
art, identify with what they see, and feel that their experiences are
validated. In this sense, art is an affirmation of the reality in which people
live and the political events that they have undergone. It facilitates
identification between the viewer and the artwork.
Why is identification problematic? Perhaps identification
can work as a salve for historical trauma as Ganzeer theorizes, but it does not
facilitate critical reflection within the subject. For both Ganzeer and Selim,
art is a positive experience for the viewer. While Ganzeer focuses on the role
of the artwork in generating a conceptual understanding of historical events,
his view of the subject as simply seeking confirmation of its experience in art
remains static. Similarly, while Selim wants to protect art from its reduction
to a political tool, his view of the subject that simply enjoys art without
concern for politics is equally superficial. Both Ganzeer and Selim neglect the
role art can play in transforming the subject instead of simply appeasing it.
If Ganzeer’s notion of Concept Pop could expand beyond the
requirement of affirmation and identification, it could more adequately
theorize certain trends in contemporary Egyptian art. For example, the
‘message’ of Rashed’s exhibition may be that the world is fake and unreal. But
we can also read Rashed’s exhibition in another way, as a work of autonomous
art.
Rashed’s exhibition initially grew from an interest in
plastic as a material, without any direct political motivation. In an interview
with Medrar TV, Rashed notes that he always begins with the materials first and
then creates the work itself. He spent much time experimenting with
plastic—heating it, stretching it, and casting it—using photographs of street
images and models. In a review of his exhibition Toys in Mada Masr, Rashed
reported that he showed the melted figure to Ganzeer, who described it as a
toy. With inspiration from Ganzeer, Rashed went on repeated trips to Cairo’s
Attaba market, collecting the mass-produced commodities sold there, which
became the basis for Rashed’s reproductions.
If Rashed’s art is a work of Concept Pop, I would argue that
its political import is in the distorted form of the artwork itself, a form
that is created from and is part of this particular historical moment and yet
rebels against it. Attaching a blatant political message to the exhibition
obscures the more complex layers that gave rise to the work of art. It is the
absence of politics in Rashed’s useless objects, distorted ‘toys’ that have no
function enclosed in clear plastic bags—made from the same material that
produces the endless, cheap commodities infiltrating Cairo’s streets—that
conveys the most potent political message. It is a microcosm for the paralysis
of politics in Cairo today. While Rashed’s exhibition could have become kitsch,
the melted, stretched out forms reflect art’s confluence with the commodity
form and at the same time its critique.
It is not so much that Ganzeer’s notion of Concept Pop
obscures the political potential of art today; rather its idea can reflect a
different understanding of politics than one that relies on a direct message to
the audience. This must be the starting point for understanding the political
role of contemporary Egyptian art: Instead of affirming the audience’s
experience, how does it provoke and unsettle the subject? How does it cause the
subject to shudder at its concrete historical reality? By refusing rather than
promoting reconciliation with a false reality, works associated with Concept
Pop can provoke the subject to think beyond it.
