Toward an art that hides nothing behind

Adham Selim
August, 2014
A few weeks ago the Cairo Review, a journal brought out by the
American University in Cairo, published an article by the
acclaimed Egyptian artist Ganzeer, in which he explores what he
describes as concept pop.
In the first few paragraphs Ganzeer clearly differentiates between
art that is actively about something, particularly a socio-political
cause, and art that isnt. He uses words such as message,
representation and depiction to describe his relationship to the
first type of art, while using a metaphorical allegory about
someone gazing from behind the window and not taking part in
whats happening outside to refer to other, less participatory art.
He implicitly criticizes the latter for being passively cocooned and
not dealing with the immediate struggles and concerns of the
audience.
When I read Ganzeers metaphor for the first time I remembered
the late writer Susan Sontags notion that all discourse about
totalities starts with a metaphor, and metaphors mislead.
Ganzeers metaphor imagines the world as a spectacle, something
that you can choose either to gaze at or participate in. I think it is
more to the point to imagine the world as an event that were all
the time part of. Nobody has the luxury of only gazing without
participating; in other words, there is no window to gaze from
behind, and even the most exclusionary art is still participatory, as
its still part of the event.
Metaphors, particularly misleading ones, are recurrent in visual
arts. Artists often speak metaphorically about what lies behind
the work.
The spatial metaphor places the critic as well as the things he
regards, explained the late architect Robin Evans. Whatever he
talks about, he faces, and by a trick of anthropomorphization the
subject faces him [...] the phenomena which are presented to us
through our senses are presented as frontages, facades, things that
signify what they stand in front of.
This metaphorical understanding of art is misleading not only
because it reduces art to a frontage standing in front of something
else in this case a concept, message, depiction or representation
that if we do not see, we risk missing the link between art and the
struggles of the audience but also because it reduces the
audience into helpless self-congratulating subjects trying to sort
out what the art puzzle is about. Ganzeer praises the recent work of
artist Hany Rashed because he could understand the concept
behind it without any text or guidance from a curator. From this

standpoint, Rasheds objects are only as significant in so far as

they can lead us to a concept; the objects themselves, the
particularities of their aesthetics, are apparently frivolous
contingencies.
Ganzeer mentions a number of other interesting examples of recent
works of art that he sees as falling under what he calls concept pop.
According to him, they are all characterized by incorporating
mass-produced wares, recuperating easily communicable visuals
from mass culture yet still using them in the service of a very
particular concept, through which objects of art become
meaningful. The description of his experiences with these
artworks reveals a habit of obscuring the art itself behind what art
is about perhaps with the exception of his discussion of the
beautifully crafted, time-frozen tear gas trails in Ahmed Hefnawys
work.
Viewing the art itself as a secondary category reflects a tendency
to believe that art should be about something else outside art itself.
This aboutness is a dangerous practice because it ditches the
sensory, experiential aspect of art in favor of hermeneutics, that is:
instead of fully experiencing art, indulging our senses in the
erotics, humor or playfulness of artistic expression, were turned
into the poor subjects trying to outsmart each other fathoming the
depth of the work.
Thus Ganzeers interpretation mistakes the grace of Mahmoud
Khaleds work MKMAEL for being a contemporary take on
romance stories for the digital age. This post-rationalization is an
attempt to intellectually frame the immediate primordial tension,
worry, fear and anticipation of the unorthodox desire portrayed in
the work in favor of elitism rather than pop. It sees art as a form of
a high culture that needs political, cultural, social and sometimes
ethical contemplation to be communicated to the masses. It praises
art as an alternative form of sociopolitical commentary, and in
turn, praises the artist as a fatherly figure who makes concepts
accessible to the masses.
I believe concept pop, as Ganzeer defines it, falls somewhere
between kitsch and Socialist Realism. The Socialist Realists
dismissed any possible intrinsic value in art itself in favor of a
teleological understanding that holds art as a political tool, only
explicable through the agency of the purpose it serves in this
case the Russian revolution. They saw history as an inevitable
linear progression that art had to be either with or against, and thus
they saw art as either pro- or anti-revolutionary. This binary logic
is quite similar to what Ganzeer is offering us when he dismisses
other forms of art as having no place in Egypt's revolutionary
climate.

This view of art lends itself to another simplistic view of history,

also evident in the article. Ganzeer leads us through a quick
critique of Marcel Duchamp and pop art that culminates in a
parallel drawn with some Egyptian artists whom he claims to
produce meaningless, anti-revolutionary, West-aligned pop art out
of an urge to appeal to art institutions in Europe and the US.
Although history of art is not the primary intent of this article, its
worth pointing out that while Ganzeer describes pop art as
repackaging the masses commodities into objects of art for elite
consumption, it was, among other things, a celebration of the postwar graphic cacophony of commercial mass-consumption. Equally,
his appraisal of Duchamps Fountain(1917) overlooks the fact
that it was a fierce statement against the art institution at the time,
which of course refused to exhibit it. The original was never
exhibited, never sold to an art patron, and only gained fame in the
late 1960s, in the form of replicas, shortly before Duchamps
death.
This part of Ganzeers article reveals many facets of an
undernourished understanding of the history of art, but also raises
ethical questions about the limitations of the authorship of the
artist. The artist cannot be someone else other than himself, beyond
himself, or more than himself. The artist cannot stand for others,
cannot fully speak for their agony or joy, cannot put on their
struggles and pretend they are solely his. Placing claims about
whether one form of art is more revolutionary than others is to
miss the difference between art and political commentary.
Similarly, speaking of an art that is politically aligned with the
West misses this difference.
I always ask students and friends to check their generalizations
about art by building parallel arguments about sound. Sound is less
susceptible to interpretation than image, and thus harder to make
political. You cant 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 dont put an extra
effort into trying to communicate the meaning of the beats to the
musically-uneducated masses.
I cant imagine these days any concrete argument about sound
artists gazing from the window, about anti-revolutionary sound art,
or about sound art aligned with the West.