Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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