Discarded, 2012, by Huda Lutfi. Barry Iverson
July 06, 2014
We are all the protagonists of our own lives.
Everything we do is in the first person. But how many of us are active
participants in these lives of ours? I think it’s fair to say that most of us don’t
really do much other than look out the
window. We let the world around us write our scripts for us rather than the
other way around.
A relatively established artist friend of mine once advised me to stop
making work about the Egyptian revolution, stating that it is way too early for
that kind of work, that we need to wait forty years before being able to do
this sort of work. This to me signifies the mindset of your typical window
gazer; someone who spends their life watching and commenting rather than
participating. In terms of art, it signifies art that delivers commentary from
a safe distance, as opposed to the kind of art that is very participatory. Not
in the sense of the audience participating in the creation of the art, but
rather art that participates in dealing with the immediate struggles and
concerns of the audience.
The minute I
walked into Hany Rashed’s exhibition Toys at Mashrabia Gallery, the words “concept pop” zapped themselves into my
brain. The gallery on Champollion Street in downtown Cairo—which is mainly
associated with showing art of a relatively traditional nature—was filled with
what look like plastic depictions of things from our real world: two guys
sitting on a public bench; a kid popping a wheelie on a motorcycle; a potato chip
company’s delivery truck. These objects have very little in common with the
meaningless yet very well-made action figures of the artist known as Sucklord.
Unlike Sucklord’s figures, you can’t really play with Hany Rashed’s toys, which
are mainly illustrations on plastic attached to cardboard after being subjected
to heat, stretched out, and distorted. Also unlike Sucklord’s work, Hany
Rashed’s objects come with meaning.
The minute you walk into this exhibition space littered with these toy-like
objects, you get the message right away. The entire space is some kind of
representation of the world we live in, except everything is made of plastic.
Some come in packages, while others stand freely. What they all have in common
though is that they are plastic and they are distorted. There’s something about
seeing an accurate depiction of a public bus, except with the proportions all
distorted and weird. Without needing walls of text to spoon-feed me the
artist’s concept, without the curators giving me a special tour of the work, I
get it. I understand that the artist is telling me that the world we live in is
fake and unreal. While Sucklord focuses only on taking characters from pop
culture, mainly Star Wars, and reducing them into action
figures for no other reason than some kind of fanboy fixation, Hany Rashed
creates toy-like objects of real life things, and in doing so, delivers his
audience a message concerning their real world lives. Sucklord’s work is
meaningless Pop Art. Hany Rashed’s work on the other hand uses Pop Art
aesthetics in service of a very particular concept. He creates Concept Pop.
Fame and Perversity
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Did he just
call Pop Art meaningless? asks a disgruntled reader. Yes, yes I did, Mr.
Reader. Although Pop Art is sometimes cited as an art movement that has managed
to bring art to the masses, that could not be further from the truth. In
reality, what it has really done is take the commodities and aesthetics of the
masses, repackage them, and sell them as fine art to elites existing in a small
art-buying bubble. At the 1960s peak of celebrity fixation, heightened
consumerism, and comic book sales in the millions, it might have made sense for
artists in gallery circles to ride the wave with Pop Art. In today’s world
however, where there is a backlash against the dominance of corporations, and
more young people are eager to find their brand-less goods and organic
products, where social media networks have made more relevant celebrities out
of our friends and friends of friends, Pop Art—as we’ve known it—has no place.
Neither does
so-called Conceptual Art, an art form that tends to be described as one in
which the ideas take precedence over the aesthetics, but in reality tends to
suffer from a lack of ideas as well. The end result being something that
doesn’t necessarily look interesting, and nor is it really about anything.
Marcel Duchamp’s commentary on his ridiculously famous Fountain urinal affirms that more than ever: “My idea was to
choose an object that wouldn’t attract me, either by its beauty or by its
ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.”
It is entirely
perverse for the guy who took a urinal and uselessly hung it upside down in an
art gallery to be far more famous than the guy who actually invented the urinal
for its very functional purpose, one that is in fact useful to billions of
people the world over. It is equally perverse for most major art institutions
around the world today to treat this so-called art form as something avant-garde
and cutting edge when it is in fact something that was officially introduced to
this world back in 1917. What is most perverse of all is that there are a bunch
of thirty-something artists in Egypt today who think of themselves as cutting
edge for adopting a 1917 art form that most Egyptians do not relate to—they
adopt it anyway out of an urge to appeal to art institutions centered in Europe
and the USA.
Such an art form has no place in Egypt’s revolutionary climate. Although
many Westerners may want to believe that Egyptians revolted against our regime
out of a desire to adopt more “Western” values—or Western products, as was
suggested by French author Guy Sorman in a public debate with me in 2011—in
fact Egyptians were revolting against a bad regime that had taken much of its
legitimacy from other world powers while simultaneously revolting against the
conformist traditions of older generations. What the Egyptian people sought was
independence in its truest form. Although Egyptians have obviously failed badly
at achieving that (for now), it does not mean that the effects of the
revolution should not find their way into art and culture. Conceptual Art in
Egypt, with its compass oriented to point north-west, proves itself to be a
rather anti-revolutionary art form. Which could very well explain the rise of
Concept Pop.
Huda Lutfi’s Cut and Paste exhibition in 2013 at the Townhouse Gallery is worth
discussing in this regard. The show was massive, occupying the gallery’s entire
Factory space and included everything from installations to video to
traditional collages; you name it, it was all there. And there was a lot of it.
Two of Lutfi’s pieces, however, stood out as powerful works of Concept Pop: Discarded and Fool’s Journal. Discarded, an installation of hundreds of eyes staring back at you from the insides
of soda-pop caps fixed on a red wall in circular formations, very poignantly
comments on the nonchalant eye-snipering of protestors during the clashes on
Mohammed Mahmoud Street. Clashes that have been taking place in a cyclical
fashion since they first broke out on November 19, 2011.
With Fool’s Journal, Lutfi managed to create something that relates to
the aesthetics of international contemporary art practices while having very
particular cultural connotations in the Egyptian context: a number of
cone-shaped hats made out of a collage of Egyptian newspapers. Cone-shaped hats
in Egypt are known to be hats for fools. In wanting to say that Egyptian media
is making fools out of people, Lutfi managed to pull it off smoothly without
any kind of mucking around. The installation had the clean minimalism
associated with contemporary art shows today, while delivering something that
your average Egyptian can instantly “get” and relate to.
Lutfi has been
making art for over twenty years. A lot of her work has been in the vicinity of
your average collage work or your usual contemporary-art-styled installation
that is difficult to decipher without additional wall text. For this artist to
make the move to Concept Pop tells us something about this unique moment we’re
living in and why a change in art practice today is absolutely vital.
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Ever since the
revolution began in 2011, mainstream media has focused on the rise of street
art in its very superficial sense: art on the street protesting the regime. At
the same time, it has overlooked the qualities that are very specific to
Egyptian street art: void of the artist’s ego and tackling concerns of your
average Egyptian. It is these qualities that are finding their way into the
works of conceptual artists and resulting in this new thing called Concept Pop.
Naturally, most people creating Concept Pop don’t even know they’re
creating Concept Pop. Like early Punk Rock musicians who thought they were
making rock ‘n’ roll. Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone is quoted as saying, “In its
initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting.
Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the
likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went
nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no
bullshit rock ‘n’ roll.” Little did he know that he was one of the people
laying the groundwork for an entirely new genre of music altogether.
In 2013, Ahmed
Hefnawy built one of the most immersive art installations in modern Egyptian
history. On a December night at the abandoned Viennoise Hotel in downtown Cairo
owned by Ismailia Real Estate Company, a trail of tear gas, suspended in the
air, made its way across one of the rooms, bouncing off the walls multiple
times until it hit the floor and spiraled in place. At the end of the trail was
one of Hefnawy’s “tear gas canisters” made from juice cans. This was a
recreation of a real-life scene many Egyptians have become all too familiar
with. In real life though, when a tear gas canister is sent flying in the air,
you can’t help but panic and run for your life. Or perhaps the hero inside
comes to life and you rush toward the canister just to hurl it back at the
security forces.
In Hefnawy’s
installation, however, you had the opportunity to examine and contemplate the
moment. You could get as close to his sculpture as you wanted. You could touch
it or feel it. Another one of Hefnawy’s pieces froze the moment of a canister
ejecting from a shotgun inside a museum-style glass box. 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.
The following days would witness crowds of young folk waiting outside the
doors of the space before opening hours, eager to see what all the fuss was
about. This was, by the way, during the last week of December, a period seen as
box office poison by the gallery circles, as most regular art enthusiasts are
typically off on vacation. Hany Rashed, who is used to holding exhibitions at
Mashrabia Gallery just down the street from the abandoned Viennoise Hotel, was
most surprised. “I’ve never seen this much enthusiasm or attendance for my art
openings at Mashrabia Gallery, even during what are considered peak seasons,
even though Mashrabia and the Viennoise are in pretty much the same location.”
He told me this while drinking real juice out of one of the canisters, which
Hefnawy had made available in a glass-door fridge, like the ones commercially
used by soda companies. Many visitors of the exhibition were downing their
tear-gas juice while examining the work, a symbolic challenge to assault by the
state.
Outside the Bubble
It’s not like
it’s necessary for a work of Concept Pop to be revolution-themed. One powerful
work of Concept Pop was created by Alexandrian artist Mahmoud Khaled back in
2007, four years prior to the #Jan25 revolution. In MKMAEL Stories—an
Image Passionate, Khaled
published a little storybook aesthetically akin to cheap romance novellas sold
on the sidewalks of Egyptian cities. In it, Khaled printed an online chat
archive between himself and another man. Throughout the chat, a strong tension
could be felt, a tension between wanting to get closer to someone and needing
to remain unattainable. The result is a contemporary take on romance stories
for the digital age, one that brings about emotions that are as piercing as any
classic romance story. It is a work that Khaled exhibits in his white cube
gallery openings, but it is one that utilizes a visual language common to the
average Egyptian—the romance novella and the online chat format—in favor of a
very particular concept. Although it is a personal story, it has the power of
communicating to an average person, one who is not used to visiting art
galleries, the similarities between homosexual and heterosexual romance. The
work is about something concerning more than just those operating within the
limited gallery bubble, while incorporating techniques that would be considered
Conceptual as well as Pop. It is undeniably a great work of Concept Pop.
Mahmoud Khaled,
Ahmed Hefnawy, and Huda Lutfi probably don’t even know that they’ve created
Concept Pop. The same way the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and the Kinks
thought they were making some form of rock ‘n’ roll, many Concept Pop artists
will think they’re making either a work of Conceptual Art, Pop Art, or Street
Art. There will be plenty of nay-sayers out there; traditionalists who will
refer to works of Concept Pop as too direct or not real art. But before they
know it, Concept Pop will be the thing, and much like Punk, it will change everything.
Ganzeer is the pseudonym of an Egyptian
artist. He is not an author, comic artist, installation artist, painter,
speaker, street artist, or videographer, though he has assumed these roles in a
number of places around the world. His art has been shown in Bahrain, Belgium,
Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Jordan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United
Arab Emirates, and the United States, as well as in myriad Cairo galleries. Art in America has referred to
Ganzeer’s work as “New Realism,” and the Huffington
Post ranked him among the “25 Street Artists from Around the World who
are Shaking Up Public Art,” but Ganzeer rejects both labels. He regards Bidoun magazine’s description of him
as a “contingency artist” as probably the most accurate. More information about his work is available
at ganzeer.com. On Twitter: @Ganzeer.