metropolis m

(This article is featured in Metropolis M nr. 4 2011)

Art has blossomed in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak’s regime. There is freedom of expression now – or so it is claimed. Clare Davies, a critic and curator who lives part of the time in Cairo, sketches a more nuanced picture.

Let a hundred revolution-kitsch exhibitions blossom. The first season of this much-predicted bumper crop of ‘revolution art’ seems to be winding down in Cairo. Almost every commercial gallery in the city took the bait. However, Picasso Gallery deserves special recognition in this category for its oil paintings by Farid Fadel, which combine portrayals of Mary, Jesus, and, in one instance, an Egyptian soldier cradling a baby, to produce bawdy-coloured, gold-painted, Christian-themed allegories of the revolution. Another work depicts a middle-class youth of the so-called Facebook generation holding aloft the flag of Egypt. The young man is captured in a heroic pose framed by three white doves and a burst of sunshine from the upper left corner that clashes with his trendy pageboy cap.

The Zamalek Art Gallery took a more neutral tack, hosting a group-show entitled ‘Masr al-Umm’ (Egypt, the Mother, or Mother Egypt) with proceeds promised to go to the support of ‘the Egyptian Economy’ via a donation to a specially designated account at the Egyptian Central Bank: politically speaking, an entirely safe choice of beneficiary. However, given the incongruous combination of works and their uneven quality, the gesture towards an uprising that doubtless unsettled some of the gallery’s most important patrons appeared rather half-hearted.

While many artists have no interest in participating in this discourse, both commercial and state-sponsored art production in Egypt have historically favoured representations celebrating national ‘authenticity’ and prowess: concepts that may well have gained renewed momentum in the wake of this apparent triumph of popular will. The danger is that patrons and gallerists will continue to demand that artists produce ‘the nation as spectacle’: an image to be manipulated locally and exported abroad, short-circuiting, as a result, more substantial reflexive, critical or open-ended responses.

The source of this demand is not only local. Certainly, international collectors have been known to reward artists who depict their country’s exotic cultural or political dynamics for easy consumption. This play around the status of the image in relation to various iterations of nationhood informs cultural politics in Egypt in an important sense. The above examples might seem hyperbolic, yet the reflex they reflect is hardly marginal; often it manifests in rather subtle and seductive terms. And while a number of artists and curators are engaged in an extremely sophisticated debate around these axes of the politics of representation, this discussion remains largely invisible to wider audiences.

Ultimately, the urgency of confronting the relationship of the image to art-making lies in the policies of the former regime. Most often these sought to undermine initiatives directed at substantial change or, more mundanely, the day-to-day workings and institutions of civil society through the insertion of images and fronts that present an altered surface, a veneer, of ‘progress’ or ‘transparency’ or ‘modernization’ while preserving the rotten substructure below. For instance, while the machinery of a political system superficially seemed to exist, it had for some time been hollowed out by way of insidious corruption and blatant vote-rigging. The state policy of painting only the facades of ramshackle buildings facing public thoroughfares while allowing the structures’ aging infrastructure to sag, rust and cave offered a rather obvious metaphor for this seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon. This situation demanded that people suspend their disbelief and tamely accept the heroic images of a glorified nation and a strong public sector while living with a system that flaunted its obvious dysfunction and dishonesty every day.

Given the current situation it seems relevant to ask: What would real structural change, if such a thing exists, look like? Must the facades decay or be torn down before those old, seemingly interminable bonds, ties, and top-down networks animating even the most neglected museum corner or office disappear? This dynamic and its centrality to the operation of the political sphere can be understood as mirrored in the cultural sector. Isn’t this the time to end the long-standing substitution of images as a means of scuttling real engagement, not only in the most obvious political arenas but in the field of artistic production as well?

It is not clear how this should be accomplished. One customary strategy has been to avoid participating in the production of images that are too easily co-opted. Thus, most of the artists I have spoken with recently are wary of ‘signposting’ or even engaging the revolution in their own practices. Many are pursuing projects initiated before January 25, 2011. This is not to say that such projects are not relevant or timely. If the content of those images served up as stand-ins for a nation has changed, individual artists’ interests and concerns, as well as the structural issues that animated the pre-revolutionary context of art-making, remain pertinent today. To ignore this is to encourage the production of works that provide images for the art world gristmill, which must be understood as a historically loaded and politically questionable gesture of adhering to the surface at the expense of a more profound whole.

In part, affecting real change must entail an attention precisely to the continuities between the pre-revolutionary past and an uncertain present wherein the implications of recent events remain unclear. As before, artists are often engaged as activists, critics, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, educators and/or curators. Of course, the parameters of this engagement have shifted to accommodate the new circumstances. Likewise, many of the debates accelerating today have been around for a long time. How ‘a public’ might be defined in relation to individual and institutional practices is an old issue. Yet, its newly-obvious political resonances make it more clearly a point of intersection between the cultural sphere and other sectors currently in flux.

Various new groups, such as the I’tlaf al-Thaqafa al-Mustaqila (previously translated as the Independent Arts Coalition) which regularly organizes multimedia art events in public spaces under the name al-Fan Midan (Art is a Square), have sprung up with serious ambitions to propel forward changes to state cultural institutions. In other cases, individuals have come together to put pressure on specific institutions, such as the Artists’ Syndicate.

The continuities between past and present, and between politics of governance and cultural politics, are clear if one starts from the vantage point of the dynamics and discourses motivating the art sphere’s recent history. Already, a very nuanced understanding exists of how easily images and works of art can be co-opted and instrumentalized. There is a threat that the pressures to produce images of change instead of real change in the cultural sector will remain, and that art works oriented to papering over difficult questions will continue to be celebrated above more critically-engaged and open-ended works. Today the potential for real structural change seems tantalizingly real. More aggressive forms of activism and expressions of artistic agency that would have been impossible or problematic before are currently more evident. Ultimately, what happens within these spheres of possibility shall inform how the image will be taken up again in both the political and the cultural contexts. However, at this point, nothing seems clear.

Clare Davies is a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She lives in Cairo.