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Build Kindness not Walls—More Art Ed Nonsense

January 30, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / 10 Comments

Leafing recently through a back issue of Arts & Activities (which bills itself as “the Nation’s Leading Art Education Magazine”), I was struck by yet another instance of the foolish injection of political issues into art education.1 An article entitled “Design Thinkers” featured the following photo:

Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, “Build Kindness not Walls,” New York City, March 15, 2016.

The project shown had been carried out in 2016. But its mention in the March 2018 issue of Arts & Activities was prompted by a glowing account of the 2017 Design Thinkers Conference—at which “perhaps the most entertaining and inspirational talk” was given by Timothy Goodman, one of the project’s two designers.

According to the Arts & Activities contributing editor who penned the account, the project

reflected the design community’s response to the Trump administration’s promise to build a wall on the U.S/Mexican frontier. [This] brilliant creative wall . . . [was] an example of the potential artists have to inform the public and make our leaders at least reconsider their decisions.

What’s wrong with that claim? Never mind that at the time the project was executed there was no “Trump administration”; there was only the Trump presidential campaign. Of more substantive importance for art education, the claim ignores the utterly pedestrian (in more ways than one) quality of the project’s design—which naively promotes a dubious political agenda.

As an example of design, the project’s lineup of volunteers holding nondescript placards spelling out the project’s political message was anything but “brilliant.” Its only claim to distinction lay in the community organization involved in assembling the bearers of the placards. True, it had “earned considerable media attention,” including sympathetic coverage in the New York Times (“A Pitch for Kindness Outside Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan”). Yet that, too, was due not to any brilliance of visual design, but rather to the political message that was conveyed.

Kindness to Whom?

Still worse than the project’s design was the political content of its message—exacerbated by its being alleged to reflect the views of the presumably entire “design community.” To begin with, the implied opposition of “kindness” vs. “walls” is inane. As was the comment of a visual arts student who opined: “History tells us that walls never do any good” (quoted, without comment, by the Times). Tell that to the citizens of Israel, where walls have contributed to a substantial reduction in both terrorist attacks and illegal immigration.

Walls may seem unkind to people trying to cross them illegally, but they can be very kind to the people they protect. As in so much of the immigration debate, however, the “kindness” plea is biased in favor of would-be immigrants. It ignores the needs of legal residents whose lives may be adversely affected by illegal immigrants.Consider the family of Officer Ronil Singh, for example. Would a wall on our southern border not seem an act of kindness to them if it could have kept out the illegal immigrant who so tragically murdered him?

Of even greater concern is a much broader question. Rarely touched on in debates about immigration, it applies to legal as well as illegal immigrants. Are the numbers of new arrivals per year exceeding the rate at which they can be effectively assimilated into American life? I am reminded of this every time I visit a doctor’s office or receive mail from my health insurance indicating assistance available in more than 20 foreign languages.

Moreover, should major businesses and government agencies continue, as a matter of course, to provide Spanish and other language options?2 Or does such a practice impede assimilation? Still worse, the very idea of assimilation—the long-vaunted principle that America is a cultural melting pot—has become anathema among the “politically correct.” Can a viable society be long maintained under such conditions? I doubt it. And if it cannot, are the very qualities that draw immigrants here in danger of erosion?

According to the Center for Immigration Studies,

The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker.

Such complexities are of course overlooked in feel-good projects like “Build Kindness not Walls.” All the more reason to steer clear of such projects in art education, where they are unlikely to receive the critical scrutiny they merit, yet add fuel to an ill-informed emotional response to the complex political issues involved.

Notes

  1. For others I’ve commented on, see “The Political Assault on Art Education,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010; and “If you see something, say something,” For Piero’s Sake, December 7, 2015; also the section entitled “‘Social Justice’ Activism and Art Education” in “Art Education or Miseducation? From Koons to Herring,” Aristos, August 2017. ↩
  2. Astonishingly, even an agency such as the New York City Board of Elections posts notices in multiple languages!—which means that fluency in English is not required in order to vote. ↩
2017 Design Thinkers Conference, Arts & Activities magazine, politicization of art education, Timothy Goodman

My Contrarian View of Contemporary Art

December 18, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / About 'Who Says That's Art?', Contemporary art / 15 Comments

“Conversations in Contemporary Art,” Barnard Magazine, Summer 2018.

Contemporary pseudo art’s stranglehold on the culture is reinforced by countless prestigious institutions—among others, my alma mater Barnard College.  Since 2011, Barnard has been offering alumnae and friends a “lifelong learning” course entitled “Conversations in Contemporary Art” [more], aiming to demystify such work through an insider view of the artworld.

Taught by art historian Kathleen Madden ’92, the program was initiated by Diana Vagelos ’55, a generous supporter of the college, and Joan Snitzer, director of the college’s visual arts program. Vagelos (who also collects art with her husband, Roy) says of the course: “It helps people overcome ignorance of what’s happing in modern art, which is so different from what most have been brought up with.” Indeed!

An article praising the program in the Summer 2018 Barnard Magazine prompted me to pen the following letter to the editor:

The view of today’s art espoused by Kathleen Madden ‘92 [in “Conversations in Contemporary Art”] is one that many art lovers question. We do not think that visual art made in our own time, in a familiar cultural context, should require expert intervention to be appreciated. Nor do we consider the primary role of art to be getting us “to talk about the issues of the day.”

As I argue in Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, the primary role of art was always to embody important values in a directly graspable and emotionally compelling way. Today’s “conceptual art” requiring expert explanation grew out of the explicitly “anti-art” gestures of the 1960s. It was not art then, and it should not be considered art now. Programs such as Barnard’s “Conversations” sadly perpetuate its false claim.

I’m happy to report that the letter was published in the Fall 2018 issue of the magazine. Judging from a discernible uptick in sales of Who Says That’s Art?, I suspect that at least a few of my fellow alumnae were responsive to my contrarian view—as was a classmate who had posted a class note in the Winter 2018 issue about the book’s “highly critical view of much of contemporary art.”

Any chance that Snitzer, as director of Barnard’s visual arts program, might be curious enough about my Commonsense View of the Visual Arts to search for a copy of the book in the Columbia University Libraries catalog and inform her students about it? My guess is (to borrow the immortal words of Eliza Doolittle) not bloody likely—given the sort of paintings Snitzer herself produces, pictured here.

Barnard College, contemporary art

An Open Letter to the Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 5, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art, General / 5 Comments

The following letter was mailed to Daniel Brodsky, Chairman of the Met Museum’s board of trustees, on September 3rd. (I insert relevant links here.) In lieu of a response from him, I received a platitudinous letter from Jessica Hirschey, the museum’s Deputy Chief Membership Officer, dated September 17. That letter is appended below, along with my response to it. Readers who share my views should write to both Brodsky and Hirschey. Update: Also appended is the vacuously anodyne letter I subsequently received from Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president and CEO.

Dear Mr. Brodsky:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees. In that role, you have the future of one of the world’s great cultural institutions in your hands.

Merriam-Webster defines a museum as “an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value” (emphasis added). But in recent years, the Met has devoted increasing attention to presumably avant-garde work, which has not yet stood the test of time. And it has done so at great financial cost, necessitating a more restrictive admission policy. Moreover, the selection of Max Hollein as the museum’s new director is likely to accelerate that regrettable trend.

Still worse, for many serious art lovers, what now passes for art in the eyes of the cultural establishment (not least Mr. Hollein’s) is at best a pitiable failure and at worst a travesty. A case in point is the Met’s current rooftop installation, Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace—which I have just returned from seeing.1

In Who Says That’s Art? (a copy of which is enclosed), I argue that the postmodernist genres favored by contemporary curators and critics—though not by much of the art-loving public—is in essence anti-art. In that connection, Mr. Hollein’s plan to exhibit such work alongside the Met’s treasures from the past is especially troubling.

Met trustees are free to select whatever contemporary work they like for their own personal collections. But their responsibility as trustees requires them to take a longer view. They should not be complicit in urging the public to believe that today’s “cutting-edge” work truly merits comparison with the genuine masterpieces of other times—unless it were to demonstrate its utter poverty.

If the argument and evidence offered for this position in Who Says That’s Art? warrants further consideration in your view, I’d be happy to provide copies for each of the Met’s trustees.

Sincerely,

Michelle Marder Kamhi


Reply from Jessica Hirschey

My response to Hirschey

Reply from Daniel H. Weiss


Notes

  1. For other examples, see “Met Rooftop Folly: Cornelia Parker’s ‘PsychoBarn’,” For Piero’s Sake, April 26, 2016; “An Urgent Letter to Aristos Readers,” Aristos, December 2013; and “The Apotheosis of Andy Warhol,” Aristos, December 2012. ↩
contemporary art, Max Hollein, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Devotion to Drawing

August 7, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Exhibitions / 5 Comments
Delacroix, Drunken Silenus after Rubens

Delacroix, Drunken Silenus after Peter Paul Rubens (detail), 1840. Graphite on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.

A legendary rivalry existed between the two megastars of nineteenth-century French painting: the arch-Romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)—the subject of an exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum, through November 12—and the inveterate classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).1 But on one thing they agreed: Drawing is the essential foundation of art.

As Ingres famously declared, “Drawing is the probity of art.”2 Delacroix’s verbal acknowledgment of that central fact was less direct. “Colour always occupies me,” he once confided, “but drawing preoccupies me.” His conviction regarding the fundamentality of drawing to his art was evident in practice, however, as the Met’s show demonstrates.

Entitled Devotion to Drawing, the exhibition presents 130 drawings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection. The collection (promised as a gift to the museum) includes diverse examples of Delacroix’s lifelong and wide-ranging engagement with graphic art.

Often Surprising Models

There is nothing remarkable about the exhibition’s first image—a typically academic male nude drawn from life by the young Delacroix as a student under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.

Delacroix - Drawings after Raphael

Delacroix, Figures from Raphael’s Vatican Loggia, ca. 1833–35. Pen and iron gall ink. Metropolitan Museum of Art, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.

What is surprising is that the artist frequently turned to classical models in later years, even after his own much freer style had evolved. He made drawings not only of antique sculptures and coins but also after prints of ancient reliefs. And while he had the greatest stylistic affinity with the baroque master Rubens—in whose work he saw “expression carried to the utmost limit” (as in The Drunken Silenus and the Adoration of the Magi)—he also admired the classical “perfection of drawing, grace, and composition” he found in Raphael, as attested by several drawings after prints of the latter’s work. In his copying, Delacroix rarely drew entire compositions. In the example shown here, he selected three male figures and a group of women and children from four different Raphael frescoes for the Vatican. Using reproductive prints as his direct source, he copied freely, adapting the engraving into his own drawing style. In the curator’s view, the isolation of these figures from their context suggests he was mainly interested in their various poses.

Delacroix, Hamlet Reproaches His Mother, ca. 1834. Preparatory pencil sketch for lithograph. Metropolitan Museum, gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.

More fuel for Delacroix’s fertile imagination came from drawings based on countless other sources, ranging from English caricatures and medieval arms and tomb effigies to wild animals at the zoo, picturesque scenes from his travels, and flayed cadavers. In addition, he continually used drawings as the basis for important commissions and projects, from works of religious art to ambitious series of lithographs illustrating literary classics such as Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

All in all, Delacroix’s example merits emulation by today’s would-be artists and art teachers, too many of whom have forgotten that drawing is indeed the foundation of visual art. A notorious example is Damien Hirst—one of today’s leading “artists”—who declared in an interview with talk show host Charlie Rose that the one thing he regretted being unable to do in his work is “represent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface.” Nonetheless, he has the chutzpah to call himself an artist, and the artworld lionizes him as such—along with unthinking journalists like Rose, who fawningly follow suit. Would that this exhibition might prompt some rethinking on that score!

Delacroix, Normandy Sketchbook, 1829.
Graphite and watercolor. Metropolitan Museum, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.

Notes

  1. See “Ingres vs Delacroix: An artistic rivalry spills over at a party,” The Artstor Blog, June 17, 2012. ↩
  2. Significantly, Ingres added: “To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling.” Probité, the French term used by him, could also be translated as “integrity” or “truth.” ↩
Damien Hirst, Delacroix, drawing, Ingres, Metropolitan Museum, Raphael, Rubens

Old and New Art — Continuity vs. Rupture

June 7, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Contemporary art / 13 Comments

Colleen Barry, Black Hat, 2018.

For today’s art establishment (including once-conservative institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library), contemporary art must be radically “new”—the more unprecedented or deskilled in form and transgressive or inscrutable in content the better.1 An intrepid group of dedicated contemporary artists begs to differ, however. They are the largely neglected painters and sculptors known as Classical Realists. Devoted to continuing in the grand tradition of Western art since the Renaissance, they spend years honing their craft, striving to be worthy of the estimable predecessors who inspire them.2

The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters [online catalogue], a modest exhibition at the Robert Simon Fine Art gallery (a stone’s throw from the Met) through June 8, begins to give them their belated due at last. As the title implies, it juxtaposes work (mostly portraits and still lifes) by faculty and recent graduates of the Grand Central Atelier with pre-modernist paintings and drawings from the gallery. (GCA is one of the many ateliers that have been created in recent decades to provide the sort of classical training generally missing from academic BFA and MFA programs these days.) The juxtaposition demonstrates that these relatively young artists clearly hold their own alongside the Renaissance and Baroque work Robert Simon specializes in.

Simon, by the way, is the art historian who discovered and identified the lost Salvatore Mundi by Leonardo that sold for a record-breaking sum last year. So he knows a thing or two about the finer points of “fine” art. The idea for this unprecedented exhibition came to him after he had enrolled as a student at Grand Central to improve his understanding of the technical side of painting, a peripheral aspect of his training as an art historian. The quality of the work he saw at GCA so impressed him that he proposed this show, which he curated with two GCA artist-instructors—Colleen Barry and Anthony Baus (both b. 1981). Barry and Baus selected works from the atelier, which Simon then paired with “sympathetically similar” images from his stock.

These Comparisons Are Not Odious

Justin Wood - Sea Bass

Justin Wood, Sea Bass, 2018.

An especially apt pairing was of Sea Bass by Justin Wood (b. 1982)—at the right—with A Still-Life “Pronk” by Joris van Son (b. 1623). For me, the recent work loses nothing by the comparison, and is even more appealing in its relative simplicity—as good as anything by the still-life master Chardin. Though I’ve never been a fan of dead-fish paintings, Wood’s sea bass is compelling in its plump iridescence, as is the huge brass pot standing ready to receive it. Two other still lifes by Wood in the show are also of impressive quality.

A more unexpected juxtaposition placed David—an unpretentiously secular contemporary portrait by Jacob Collins (b. 1964), GCA’s founding force—next to Christ Blessing by Vittore Carpaccio (b. ca. 1465-70). Notwithstanding the works’ vastly different significance, they demonstrate the riveting power of a direct frontal gaze.

Baus - Study for an allegory

Anthony Baus, Study for an Allegory, 2018.

Mastery of the human figure is evident in two drawings by Baus—Nude in attitude of defeat and Study for an allegory—alongside seventeenth-century drawings by Benedetto Luti and Francesco Monti, respectively.

But the strongest suit of the show is portraiture. Especially fine are the examples by Barry—most notably, Black Hat and Portrait of the Artist’s Mother—sensitive depictions of pensive youth and somewhat worn and wary age. Also striking are Portrait of a Young Woman by Rachel Li (b. 1995) and an untitled portrait by Will St. John (b. 1980), side by side with a similarly toned seventeenth-century Bolognese Portrait of a Boy.

Despite their evident similarities with earlier art, each of the new works is a unique take on aspects of humanity or things we value. Most significantly in today’s context, each subject is endowed with a degree of gravitas. Moreover, these paintings and drawings are as fresh and important now as the comparable works from the past were in their day. Only the foolish modernist insistence on originality at all costs would prompt the dismissive judgment “It’s been done” regarding such contemporary work in a traditional vein.

Can it be a hopeful sign that curators from the Metropolitan Museum were spotted in the crowd at the show’s opening? Might they have carried word back to their esteemed institution suggesting that its view of “contemporary art” needs revising?

The Establishment View of Contemporary Art

As one might expect, the establishment view—in sharp contrast with the work shown at Robert Simon—is widely shared by art critics, including members of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), to which I was recently admitted. Last month I attended the annual meeting of AICA’s U.S. section, at the offices of The Brooklyn Rail. I alternated between feeling like Daniel in the lion’s den and the fox in the henhouse.

On the way to the meeting from the subway station, a longtime AICA member, Suzaan Boettger, struck up a conversation with me. An art historian who teaches at Bergen Community College, she specializes in “environmental art,” having written the book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties—regarded as the “definitive history” of such work by the New York Times Book Review. I, on the other hand, consider “earthworks” to be one of the sixties’ anti-art phenomena, a topic for sociology perhaps but not for “art history.”

Other AICA members I met included Kaoru Yanase, visiting from Japan, where she serves as chief curator of the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection. On its website, Haring’s work is said to embody “the importance and preciousness of life, containing strong themes of peace, freedom, hopes, and dreams of humanity.” Nothing is said of the extent to which Haring’s schematic, cartoonish, street-art style undercuts the seriousness of such themes, however.

Another member, by chance seated near me at the group’s business meeting, was Norman Kleeblatt, who served for many years as a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. As it happens, I had commented critically on a 2002 exhibition organized by him featuring “conceptual art” (Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art). My article was entitled “Anti-Art Is Not Art” (What Art Is Online, June 2002).

Also telling was the cover of the latest issue of the Rail, depicting a minimalist installation by the German sculptor Wolfgang Laib. Inspired by Eastern religions and philosophy, his work is at the inscrutable end of the contemporary art spectrum.

But perhaps the most unsettling indication of the artworld’s prevailing inclinations is the work of the two painters featured in a panel discussion on art writing at the AICA meeting, which was moderated by the Rail’s co-founder Phong Bui.

David Salle -To be Titled #2, 1998

David Salle, To be Titled #2, 1998. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 90.5 x 180.5 in. Hall Collection. © David Salle.

Carroll Dunham - Untitled (July-30-2014)

Carroll Dunham, Untitled (July-30-2014), 2014.

They were David Salle, “who helped define postmodern sensibility,” and Carroll Dunham, whose paintings even the Los Angeles Times has considered “vulgar beyond belief.”

That prompts me to ask whose work should be more highly regarded—David Salle’s “conceptual” painting featuring dead fish, say, or Justin Wood’s still life of the same subject? Carroll Dunham’s vision of humanity or that of Anthony Baus? My answer is too obvious to need stating.

Notes

  1. Regarding the Morgan’s break with tradition, see “Cy Twombly in Mr. Morgan’s House?” and “Folded Paper and Other Modern ‘Drawings’.” On the Metropolitan, see “The Apotheosis of Andy Warhol” (Aristos, December 2012); “Met Rooftop Folly: Cornelia Parker’s ‘PsychoBarn’”; and “An Urgent Letter to Aristos Readers.” ↩
  2. Unlike Damien Hirst—who once lamented never having learned to represent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface—these artists have mastered that foundational skill. For more on Classical Realism, see “The New Dawn of Painting” by Louis Torres (Aristos, March 1986), my “R.H. Ives Gammell” (Aristos, May 1990), “The Legacy of Richard Lack” by Louis Torres (Aristos, December 2006), and “Reflections on ‘Classical Realism’” by Jacob Collins (Aristos, November 2007). ↩
AICA, Anthony Baus, Carroll Dunham, Colleen Barry, David Salle, Grand Central Atelier, International Association of Art Critics, Jacob Collins, Jewish Museum, Justin Wood, Keith Haring, Metropolitan Museum, Morgan Library, Norman Kleeblatt, Phong Bui, Rachel Li, Robert Simon Fine Art, Suzaan Boettger, The Brooklyn Rail, Will St. John, Wolfgang Laib

Whither Saudi Art?

April 16, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Contemporary art / 1 Comment
Ahmed Mater - Waqf Illumination III

Ahmed Mater, Waqf Illumination III, 2009. Gold leaf, tea, pomegranate, Dupont Chinese ink, and offset X-Ray film print on paper. 155 x 105 cm. Beauchamp Club Collection.

The founding and activities of Saudi Arabia’s MiSK Art Institute ought to be good news for art lovers. As the first institute of its kind in the formerly arch-conservative Saudi kingdom, it aims to support emerging Saudi artists and increase their interaction and visibility both within and beyond the kingdom. Operating under the auspices of the non-profit MiSK Foundation established by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it is part of his bold plan to bring Saudi Arabia into the 21st century by educating its youth and fostering their creative potential. Who could quarrel with such a laudable project?

The problem, as in many laudable projects, lies in the execution. Sadly, the MiSK’s nascent efforts mainly reveal the stranglehold that postmodernist pseudo art—and the confused thinking behind it—has on the global artworld.

The Work of Ahmed Mater

Not surprisingly, the person chosen to head the institute is the Saudi who has probably gotten the most attention in the international artworld, Ahmed Mater [more]—an exhibition of whose work is now at the Brooklyn Museum (Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys). Trained as a physician, not an artist, Mater combines elements of both spheres in his work. One of his most acclaimed pieces is his Illuminations series, a part of which is pictured above.

A website featuring Mater’s Illuminations XI & XII bills itself as a platform “for significant works from some of the world’s most engaging and challenging contemporary artists,” which allows each work “to speak boldly for itself.” But do Mater’s Illuminations—consisting of human X-ray images framed by traditional Arabic decorative and calligraphic motifs inspired by Qur’anic manuscripts—really speak for themselves? Or do we need the dense verbal explanations provided by Mater and others to understand his intention? Of his X-Ray – Talisman 3 (acquired by the British Museum in 2009), for example, curator Venetia Porter concludes:

through these works, Mater illuminates Islamic tradition to show its close relationship to the faith-driven and spiritual, making manifest a dynamic complexity that has been diminished and negated by the strictures of contemporary religious systems.

Really? Such verbiage cannot dispel my spontaneous response to the works themselves. I’m simply repelled by the jarring juxtaposition of its disparate visual elements, and have no desire to linger long enough to find out what they are supposed to mean. On that count, they have failed what is for me the first test of a successful work of art: to capture and hold one’s attention on its own terms, without the crutch of verbal explanation.

Writing about Mater’s X-Ray 2003 (the first of his X-ray pieces), Linda Komaroff, curator of Islamic art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, tellingly declares that “it may be up to future generations of art historians to determine which heading or label to apply to [Mater’s] art.” Yet she maintains that he “demonstrates the very special ability to speak in a universal voice.” Speaking in a “universal voice” implies communicating on its own in purely visual terms, however. Owing in part to his failure to do that, I for one art historian would place Mater’s work in the category of postmodernist pseudo art.

Another high-profile piece that I’d place in the same category is Mater’s Evolution of Man series. As described on his website: “A silhouetted gas pump mutates into a human X-ray, a gun to its head, before morphing back again.” It is “a succinct, urgent warning against an over-reliance on the petrodollar, a destructive addiction Mater [has] witnessed in Saudi Arabia.”

Ahmed Mater, Evolution of Man.

Ahmed Mater, Evolution of Man, 2010.

Indeed it is, and unlike the Illuminations series, its meaning could probably be guessed by most viewers, without instruction. But like other “conceptual” pieces, the generic idea matters more than its particular manner of execution. Although the New York Times  has suggested that the X-ray is of Mater himself, the viewer cannot know that directly from the image. It is dehumanized and impersonal in its effect. An X-ray of anyone else would have served the idea as well. As a warning sign, I get it. But it appeals to my intellect, not to my heart. To that extent, it fails as art (not to mention the non-artistic nature of the X-ray images themselves).

Yet another “conceptual” piece by Mater that, however clever, suffers from similar shortcomings in my view is Magnetism. Anyone who knows of the Kaaba (Islam’s holiest site, which draws millions of pilgrims during the annual Hajj) is likely to guess the significance of the work’s magnetic black cube surrounded by concentric circles of iron filings. But the piece’s abstract, mechanical nature gives no access in personal human terms to the nature of that experience, and therefore (unlike a work of genuine art) offers no reason to contemplate it further once the idea has been grasped.

Recent Exhibition in New York

In conjunction with the Crown Prince’s recent visit to the U.S., the MiSK Institute sponsored a small Contemporary Saudi Art exhibition in New York for four days late last month at the prestigious Phillips auction house on Park Avenue—preceded by one on March 21st at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In my view, the works shown largely suffered from the same deficiencies as those noted above. With two exceptions, they were all in the spurious postmodernist vein of “conceptual art.”1

Ahmed Mater - Digital Spirituality

Amr Alngmah, Digital Spirituality.

Amr Alngmah’s Digital Spirituality— an installation in which a central cube is surrounded by concentric circles of electronic components—echoed the theme of  Mater’s Magnetism,  in an equally depersonalized manner.

Rashed Al Shashai - Beep Beep

Rashed Al Shashai, Beep Beep, 2015. Acrylic light box.

 

 

 

Another work, Rashed Al Shashai’s Beep Beep diptych, set the Looney Tunes cartoon characters Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner against a traditional pattern of Arabic latticework. A provocative juxtaposition, but its point eluded me. Was it an ironic allusion to the universal rat race? Whatever its intent, can it have any but a fleeting effect?

Al Shashai’s Heaven’s Door also combined decorative with “conceptual” elements. At a distance it is a colorful and visually appealing installation of five arches. On closer examination, however, one sees that it is an assemblage of banal food and sink strainers. It was meant, we were told, to say something about the filter through which one enters heaven. But once again, a metaphor conveyed through such gimmicky means functions, at best, on a superficial intellectual level, not at all on a deeply emotional one.

Ahmad Angawi’s Street Pulse was a wholly “conceptual” piece which had no visual appeal at all. A meteor-like large sphere made up of microphones, it is described as

an ongoing interactive piece that will evolve with the contribution of different people, whose voices will be recorded from different locations in the Arab world. . . . The microphones offer an opportunity to speak and express oneself. The aim? ‘Evolution, not revolution’. . . . The project acts as an electrocardiogram machine, which instead of measuring the vitals of the body, would measure the pulse of the street.

A commendable social aim, but electrocardiogram machines are medical devices, not works of art.

The website from which the description of Angawi’s piece is taken belongs to Edge of Arabia— a non-profit collaborative founded in 2003 to foster dialogue and exchange between the Middle East and the West through free exhibitions, publications, and public programming. One of its co-founders is the British artist Stephen Stapleton (not to be confused with Steven Peter Stapleton), who is also engaged in communications for the MiSK Art Institute. In a TEDx talk about Edge of Arabia, Stapleton has avowed his belief in art’s “power as a universal language instrumental in bringing about change in the world.” What he apparently fails to see, however, is that the universal language of visual art consists of cross-culturally meaningful imagery—not postmodernist “conceptual” pieces that require verbal commentary to be understood.

Saudi Women’s Art and Islamic Aniconism

A highly commendable aspect of recent developments in Saudi art is the effort to give women a more active role. As it happens, the two pieces that I found most visually striking in the New York exhibition were by women working in the Al-Qatt tradition [more] of domestic interior decoration, from the Asir region of southwestern Arabia. They were Our Mother’s House and this large collaborative mural:

Al-Qatt Mural

Al-Qatt Mural, Contemporary Saudi Art exhibition, New York, March 2018.

Their intricate multi-colored patterns of geometric shapes gave the eye something to delight in.

For the women who create them, we were told, Al-Qatt decorations can encode personally meaningful references. According to one account, Al-Qatt

expresses a long relationship between people and their natural environment, showing complex scenes that narrate the stories of their family, culture, environment, rituals and agriculture.

Turkish miniature - Fables of Bidpai

Turkish miniature illustrating one of the Fables of Bidpai, ca. 1589. British Museum, Add. 15153, f.114.

In the absence of imagery, however, such references are entirely inaccessible to outside viewers. In that respect, the Al-Qatt tradition contrasts sharply with works of narrative visual art in other regions of the Islamic world. See, for example, the Turkish miniature at the right, illustrating one of the Fables of Bidpai.

Persia had an especially rich history of narrative art, as exemplified by this image depicting an event in the early life of the Emperor Akbar:

Persian miniature - Baby Akbar

Persian miniature – The Baby Akbar and His Mother Hamidah Banu Maryam Makani. Artists: Sanvalah and Narsingh. British Museum, Or.12988, f. 22r

 

 

 

 

The fundamental difference between decorative and pictorial art of course raises the thorny issue of Islamic aniconism. In Saudi Arabia, the dominant Sunni tradition has until recently maintained a strict ban on figurative representation (based not on the Qur’an itself but on related hadith), whereas no such prohibition was observed by the Shi’a in Persia or even by the Hanafi branch of Sunni Islam found in Turkey.

In recent years, the Saudi ban on imagery has begun to be relaxed, however—primarily through photographic media. A featured work in the New York exhibition, for example, was a “performance art” piece entitled I Went Away and Forgot You, by Dana Awartani. In the preparatory phase of the work, Awartani creates a meticulous floor installation of sand she has hand-dyed with local pigments and arranged in a geometric pattern resembling traditional floor tiles once common in Arabic homes. The second part of the work is a video showing her sweeping away one of her floor pieces.

Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You (still from video).

When a version of the work was exhibited at the 2017 Jakarta Biennale, it was described as “a call to celebrate the beauty of traditional Islamic design and architecture” and an implicit criticism of the wealthy Saudis who discarded that native aesthetic for more modern, Western modes of interior decoration, “leaving no trace of their cultural identity.”

Awartani was said to be “celebrating and preserving the timeless language of geometric aesthetics as a universal language of beauty and harmony.” Here again, however, the essential nature of the decorative/design arts is misconstrued. While geometric designs can indeed create a sense of abstract “beauty and harmony,” they do not signify something particular in the way pictorial art can, and therefore do not constitute a “timeless language,” properly speaking.

Awartani’s video raises a related question regarding figurative representation. Remarkably, given the traditional conservatism of Saudi society, it shows her with her face uncovered and her long dark tresses freely flowing (though she is modestly garbed in a long black dress). If such freedom can be permitted in a video, why hasn’t it occurred in Saudi painting? One obvious answer is that, unlike photography and video, figurative art requires a long-honed skill that has been totally absent in Saudi Arabia, owing to its strict aniconism.

The Future of Saudi Art

In a panel discussion at the Phillips in connection with the New York exhibition, Saudi artists lamented the lack of visual art education, and noted that steps are being taken to fill that need. In fact, the artists themselves have been raising funds to teach art in Saudi schools. The crucial question then is, What will such education consist of? Will future Saudi artists learn to represent the natural world in painting and sculpture, as visual artists have done around the world since time immemorial? Or will they continue to emulate the contemporary artworld’s pursuit of postmodernist pseudo art?

Tellingly, when I asked Stephen Stapleton why there was virtually no figurative art in the exhibition (the one exception being the cartoon-inspired Beep Beep), he replied that some Saudi artists are doing figurative work but the exhibition’s organizers wanted to be considered “contemporary.” As to why figurative painting and sculpture are not considered “contemporary,” he had no answer.

Such, dear reader, is the stranglehold of postmodernism. Will the Saudis be strong enough to free themselves from it? Not likely, I fear, given the power of the artworld juggernaut.

Notes

  1. On the spurious nature of “conceptual art,” see “What Is ‘Conceptual Art’?,” in Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, 89–92. ↩
Ahmad Angawi, Ahmed Mater, Al-Qatt, Amr Alngmah, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Dana Awartani, Edge of Arabia, Islamic art, Misk Art Institute, Rashed Al Shashei, Saudi art, Stephen Stapleton
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