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ART AND POLITICAL DISSENT IN POSTWAR LEBANON: WALID SADEK'S FI ANNANI AKBAR MIN BIKASU [BIGGER THAN PICASSO]

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Abstract

Taking Walid Sadek's fi annani akbar min bikasu [bigger than picasso] as its starting point, this article examines relations of art and politics in post-civil war Lebanon. A tiny and inexpensive paperback related to Picasso unfolds into a work of art that raises questions about the place of art and political dissent. After situating bigger than picasso in the context of contemporary book art and artistic practices of the postwar generation in Lebanon, the article focuses on the juxtaposition of text and image. By placing narratives of art vandalism next to the image of a monument dedicated to the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad, bigger than picasso playfully and provocatively breaks with political taboos at a time when the silence about the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and about Lebanese-Syrian relations was met with increasing anxiety. At the same time, the work makes room for aesthetic inquiries, exploring new possibilities of art at the margins of cultural production. The article concludes that bigger than picasso brings to the fore the discrepancy between public monumentality and artistic practices, which in finding ways around political violence and censorship have recourse to ephemeral and private spheres, and holds unexpected meanings in ever-changing political circumstances.

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Articles
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the BRISMES (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) annual conference, London School of Economics, 26–28 March 2012, the first international conference hosted by AMCA (Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey) at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, 8–11 December 2010, and the German Orient Institute Beirut, 23 November 2010. I thank the discussants and audiences for their insightful feedback. I also thank IJMES editors Beth Baron and Sara Pursley for their interest in the article and the four anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments and suggestions. Last but not least, I thank Walid Sadek for his generous help in acquiring some of the visual material.

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3 D.G., “«Bigger than Picasso», apparemment inoffensif,” L'Orient Le Jour, 8 September 1999, 6.

4 The massacre triggered an international outcry and two major investigations, one led by a group of Western jurists, academics, and public figures, the other by the Israeli government. See Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon (London: Ithaca, 1983); and The Beirut Massacre: The Complete Kahan Commission Report (Princeton, N.J.: Karz-Cohl, 1983). For a more humane testimony, see Genet, Jean, “Four Hours in Shatila,” trans. Daniel R. Dupecher and Martha Perrigaud, Journal of Palestine Studies 12 (1983): 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Husein Ali, Zahra A., “Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan,” Criticism 51 (2010): 589621CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 2526Google Scholar.

7 Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, xvii, 1–19.

8 See ibid., 21–24; and Strachan, W.J., The Artist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre d'Artiste (London: Peter Owen, 1969)Google Scholar.

9 See Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, 72.

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16 See Mejcher-Atassi, Sonja, “Contemporary Book Art in the Middle East: The Book as Document in Iraq,” Art History 35 (2012): 816–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Hafiz al-Asad was heavily criticized for the Syrian army's involvement in Tel al-Zaatar. On the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976, see Donati, Caroline, L'Exception Syrienne: Entre modernization et résistance (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 109–26Google Scholar; Kassir, Samir, La Guerre du Liban: De la dissension national au conflit régional (Paris: CERMOC/Khartala, 1994), 218–28Google Scholar; Hanf, Theodor, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in association with I. B. Tauris), 210–26Google Scholar, 231–34, 237–40; and Seale, Patrick, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 267–89Google Scholar. A number of Syrian intellectuals and artists, among them Farouk Mardam Bey, Saadallah Wannous, and Youssef Abdelke, signed a petition in 1976 to voice their opposition to the Syrian intervention, published in the Arabic daily al-Hayat.

18 Azzawi may have been inspired by the late Iraqi artist Jawad Salim, who was a major influence on Iraqi artists. His Monument of Freedom (Nasb al-Hurriyya), unveiled to the public in Tahrir Square Baghdad in 1961, where it remains today, celebrates the Iraqi Revolution of 1958. It reads like a line of Arabic text from right to left, consisting of fourteen bronze sculptures inserted onto a travertine wall. While referring back to Mesopotamian bas-relief, it is steeped in modern artistic practices worldwide, quoting Picasso's Guernica in many of its figures, including the horse on the far right.

19 It is common practice in Lebanon to refer to the civil war as “the events,” without attributing responsibility or pointing to internal or external players.

20 Sadek, Walid, “The Impregnated Witness; Notes on the Event Within,” in The Road to Peace: Painting in Times of War 1975–1991, ed. Barakat, Saleh (Beirut: Alarm Editions, 2009), 57Google Scholar.

21 Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: Duke University Press, 1993), 171Google Scholar.

22 See Rogers, Sarah, “Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut,” Art Journal 66 (2007): 820CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Some criticism has been voiced regarding this “new” interest in installation art. See esp. Abdelke, Youssef, “ʿAqd min al-Qarn al-Jadid fi Thaqafatina: Fann bila Hudud,” al-Safir, no. 11480, 29 December 2009Google Scholar; and Yves Gonzales, “Un art sans frontièrs? L'art arabe face au marché global,” http://cpa.hypotheses.org/2037 and http://cpa.hypothese.org.2052 (accessed 28 November 2012).

24 On the growing interest in contemporary art in the Middle East, especially since 9/11, see Winegar, Jessica, “The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror,” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008): 651–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Sadek, conversation with the author, Beirut, 29 June 2010.

26 See Rogers, “Out of History,” 11; Toukan, Hanan, “On Being the Other in Post-Civil War Lebanon: Aid and the Politics of Art in Processes of Contemporary Cultural Production,” Arab Studies Quarterly 18 (2010): 118–60Google Scholar.

27 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 255–86.

28 Rogers, “Out of History,” 11.

29 Cotter, Suzanne, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari,” in Contemporary Art in the Middle East, ed. Sloman, Paul (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009), 5051Google Scholar.

30 See, for example, Enwezor, Okwui, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008)Google Scholar; and Merewether, Charles, ed., The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

31 On Pierre Sadek, see Maasri, Zeina, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 46Google Scholar.

32 Sadek, Walid, “Min al-Tanqib ila al-ʿAhan: Fi Tartibat Fann al-Tajhiz,” al-Adab 49 (2001): 112–16Google Scholar.

33 Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, “Walid Sadek,” Artforum 48 (2010): 270–71Google Scholar.

34 See http://www.lebtivity.com/event/opening-of-the-new-space-of-galerie-tanit-with-walid-sadek-exhibition (accessed 28 November 2012). See also Sadek, Walid and Fattouh, Mayysa, “Tranquility Is Made in Pictures,” FILLIP 17 (2012): 5663Google Scholar, 151.

35 Raad, Walid, The Atlas Group (Berlin/Seattle/Arles: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Konig/Henry Art Gallery/Les Rencontres d'Arles, 2007)Google Scholar, 3:9.

36 Hubert and Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading, 8.

37 Winegar, “The Humanity Game,” 674, 677.

38 Raad, Walid, “‘Oh God,’ He Said, Talking to a Tree: A Fresh-Off-the-Boat, Throat-Clearing Preamble about the Recent Events in Lebanon. And a Question to Walid Sadek,” Artforum 45 (2006): 244Google Scholar.

39 The listed sources are “1 - Dr. Saleebi, Sameer, Khalil Saleebi (Publications of the Lebanese University, 1986)Google Scholar. 2 - Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art (Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. 3 - Rubin, James H., Courbet (Phaidon Press Limited, 1997)Google Scholar. 4 - Lavin, Marylin Aronberg, Piero Della Francesca (1992)Google Scholar.”

40 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 17–18.

41 Quoted in The British Lebanese Association, ed., Lebanon—The Artist's View: 200 Years of Lebanese Painting (London: Quartet Books, 1989), 157. See also Fani, Michel, Dictionnaire de la peinture au Liban (Beirut: Éditions de l'Escalier, 1998), 237Google Scholar.

42 See Cardinal, Philippe and Makram-Ebeid, Hoda, eds., Le Corps découvert (Paris: HAZAN/Institut du monde arabe, 2012)Google Scholar. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q86xn#- (accessed 28 November 2012).

43 Whereas the beginnings of modern art in the region have long been looked at as a phase of adaptation, following Western models, more recent studies have questioned this assumption, drawing attention instead to local experiences and representations of modernity and their interconnectedness with Western, and indeed colonial, practices of cultural production, or as Kirsten Scheid writes, “the agencies that have produced ‘modernity’ as a universal force.” Scheid, Kirsten, “Nescessary Nudes: Ḥadātha and Muʿāṣira in the Lives of Modern Lebanese,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 226Google Scholar. See also Shabout, Nada and Bahrani, Zainab, eds., Modernism and Iraq (New York: Columbia University/Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2009)Google Scholar. On the idea of adaptation, see, for example, Naef, Silvia, À la recherche d'une modernité arabe: L'évolution des arts plastiques en Égypte, au Liban et en Irak (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 111–73Google Scholar.

44 For reviews of these exhibitions, see Demos, T. J., “Living Contradictions,” Artforum 45 (2006): 235–38Google Scholar; and Wilson-Goldie, “Walid Sadek,” 270–71.

46 Heffernan, James A. W., Museums of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3Google Scholar. Heffernan's definition is also applied by Mitchell, W. J. T., “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 151–81Google Scholar.

47 See, for example, Reid, Donald Malcom, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (London: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

48 Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (London: University of California Press), 33Google Scholar.

49 Sadek, conversation with the author, Beirut, 29 June 2010.

50 See Wedeen, Lisa, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (London: University of Chicago Press), 1Google Scholar.

51 Israel withdrew from South Lebanon in May 2000. However, the Shebaa Farms—which Israel claims as part of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory it occupied in the 1967 war, but Lebanon and Syria regard as Lebanese territory—remain occupied.

52 See Haugbolle, Sune, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6495CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Makarem, Amal, ed., Mémoire pour l'avenir, Dhākira lil-ghad, Memory for the Future: actes du colloques tenu à la maison des Nations Unies, ESCWA (Beyrouth) (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002)Google Scholar. On the larger political context of more or less successful postwar recovery, see Leenders, Reinoud, Spoils of Truth: Corruption and State Building in Postwar Lebanon (London: Cornell University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 See al-Haj Saleh, Yassin, “L'univers des anciens prisonniers politiques en Syrie,” in La Syrie au quotidien: cultures et pratiques du changement, ed. Chiffoleau, Sylvia, REMM (Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée) 115–16 (2006)Google Scholar: 249–65; and Haugbolle, Sune, “The Victim's Tale in Syria: Imprisonment, Individualism and Liberalism,” in Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion, ed. Khalili, Laleh and Schwedler, Jilian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 223–40Google Scholar.

54 See cooke, miriam, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (London: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; George, Alain, Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2003)Google Scholar; and Ghalioun, Burhan and Mardam-Bey, Farouk, eds., “Un printemps syrien,” Confluences Méditeranée 44 (2002–2003)Google Scholar, special issue.

55 See esp. Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination. See also Élizabeth Picard, “Construire un État, dominer une nation,” in Damas: Miroir brisé d'un Orient arabe, ed. Anne-Marie Bianquis and Élizabeth Picard (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1993), 146–53; Seale, Asad, 339–40, 350; and Ma'oz, Moshe, Asad: The Sphinx of Damascus: A Political Biography (New York: Grove Weidenfels, 1988), 4245Google Scholar.

56 Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 76.

57 Ibid., 77.

58 On the Arab Image Foundation, see http://www.fai.org.lb/home.aspx (accessed 28 November 2012).

59 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 25–26.

60 See Donati, L'Exception Syrienne, 130–37; and Riad Turk, “Je n'irai pas voter pour Bachar El Assad,” interview by Gilles Paris, Le Monde, 28 June 2000.

61 See cooke, Dissident Syria, 142–44. For a firsthand journalistic account of this change in U.S. policy toward Syria, see Tabler, Andrew, In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2011)Google Scholar.

62 See http://www.un.org/News/dh/docs/mehlisreport/ (accessed 28 November 2012).

63 See http://www.stl-tsl.org/en/the-cases (accessed 28 November 2012).

64 The 14 March alliance led by Hariri's son Saad al-Hariri referred to the demonstrations as the “Cedar Revolution” or the “Lebanese Independence Intifada,” controversial terms that the pro-Syrian 8 March alliance, among others, calls into question. The split into these alliances, named after their respective mass demonstrations in downtown Beirut in 2005, has marked the political and social life in Lebanon since then, as Wissam Charaf's documentary It's All In Lebanon (..né.a Beyrouth/UMAM Productions, 2012) critically and humorously brings to the fore.

65 This is well expressed in the documentary Rajul al-Hidhaʾ al-Dhahabi (The Man with the Golden Soles) (ARTE France—AMIP, 2000) by the Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay (1944–2011). On Amiralay, see Salti, Rasha, ed., Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New York: ArteEast, 2006), 95117Google Scholar, 182–83.

66 Relatively little has been written on public monuments in Beirut. Cf. Larkin, Craig, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remaking and Forgetting the Past (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar; Volk, Lucia, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar; and Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon, 161–93. However, none of these mention the monument under consideration. Whereas Haugbolle points to the sectarian character of postwar monuments (p. 162), Volk, focusing her study on memorials of martyrdom, shows how such memorials are “creating narratives of Muslim and Christian parity” (p. 23). A greater number of studies can be found on Iraq, which allow for comparison of the Baʿth parties’ rule as well as the personality cults of Saddam Husayn and Hafiz al-Asad in Iraq and Syria. See esp. Samir al-Khalil [Kanan Makiya], The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (London: University of California Press, 1991), to which Gamboni refers in his chapter “Outside the First World,” in The Destruction of Art, 107–16.

67 Volk, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon, 2.

68 See Atassi, Mohammad Ali, “What the People Want . . .,” Perspectives: Political Analysis and Commentary from the Middle East 2 (2011): 2834Google Scholar.

69 See Ronak Husni, “The Role of the Poet and Poetry in the Arab Spring,” paper presented at the BRISMES annual conference, LSE, 26–28 March 2012; and Gaelle Raphael, “Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi,” jadaliyya, 2 May 2011, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1381/al-shabbis-the-will-to-life. On al-Shabbi, see also Husni, Ronak, “al-Shābbī and His Nature Poetry: Romantic or Revolutionary?,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1995): 8192CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Speight, R. Marston, “A Modern Tunisian Poet: Abû al-Qâsim al-Shâbbî (1909–1934),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 178–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGJpZj1Tlbw (accessed 28 November 2012).

72 Taking the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan, and the televised spectacle of the fall of Saddam Husayn's statue in Baghdad brought about by U.S. soldiers as examples, Mitchell argues that “iconoclasm is more than just the destruction of images; it is a ‘creative destruction,’ in which a secondary image of defacement or annihilation is created at the same moment that the ‘target’ image is attacked.” Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 18Google Scholar.

73 These are gaining increased interest, especially in Western media. See, for example, Yaqoob, Tahira, “The Syrian Artists Using Their Medium as a Weapon,” The National, 7 March 2013,Google Scholarhttp://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/the-syrian-artists-using-their-medium-as-a-weapon?; Ian Black, “Smuggled Out of Syria to Show London, the Art of War,” The Guardian, 23 November 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/23/smuggled-syria-london-art-war; Donatella Della Ratta, “Syrian Hands Raised: User Generated Creativity between Citizenship and Dissent,” jadaliyya, 31 October 2012, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8125/syrian-hands-raised_user-generated-creativity-betw; Layla Al-Zubaidi, “Syria's Creative Resistance,” jadaliyya, 8 June 2012, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5920/syrias-creative-resistance; Jacques Mandelbaum, “Syrie, l'art en armes,” Le Monde, 21 February 2012, http://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2012/02/21/syrie-l-art-en-armes_1644497_3210.html; and Neil MacFarquhar, “In Uprising, Syrians Find Spark of Creativity,” New York Times, 16 December 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/middleeast/in-uprising-syrians-find-spark-of-creativity.html?_r=1&ref=neilmacfarquhar.

74 This has been the case of many monuments in Germany after the fall of the wall. As Gamboni points out, their “elimination” in most cases was out of the question; rather, heated debates took place as to what to do with them, and in addition to destroying them there were many options, such as selling, storing, studying, or exhibiting them. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 69.

75 Sadek, conversation with the author, Beirut, 29 June 2010.

76 Stewart, On Longing, 38.

77 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah, trans. Zorn, Harry (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–44Google Scholar.

78 Ibid., 235.