[First published in Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, Shabout, Nada, Wassan Khudhairi and Deena Chalabi, eds. Skira Rizzoli, Milan, 2010.]
Articulating Mathaf: Arab + Museum + Modern + Art
“What matters a great deal more than the stable identity kept current in official
discourse is the contestatory force of an interpretative method whose material
is the disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping
streams of historical experience.”
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
What does it mean to be an Arab Museum of Modern Art? I have asked this question many times since joining Mathaf two years ago. In light of commonplace conceptions of these terms in isolation—of what it means to be Arab, or a museum, or for art to be modern—the idea of a museum of modern art with an Arab perspective can seem like a paradox.
When I was first introduced to the Mathaf collection, I was immediately struck by the aesthetic power and the historical significance of the work, and even as a neophyte I saw the tremendous discursive potential of the project. From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, by artists with families and studios from the Maghreb to the Gulf, attending art schools from Paris to Moscow via Cairo and Baghdad, and with a vast span of geographical and historical influences, the collected artworks broaden and deepen perspectives, both of Arab cultural and social identities and of global art production.
But in general, since its creation, modern art has not found a substantial place in terms of public awareness, global art history or in a wider world of ideas. Most collections of art from the modern era in the Arab world are in private hands, except for a small number of national galleries and museums, primarily in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq (before the looting in 2003). More recently, as modern works have begun to appear at auctions and have begun to generate interest in the market place, there have been a handful of dedicated public exhibitions devoted to highlighting key artists, but the lack of an institutional context with a commitment to foster historical research has prevented the discussion of their significance from moving forward.
The role of Mathaf is to invite new ways of looking that bring together our seemingly disparate components into conversation: to examine the supposed irreconcilability of modern art with Arab history, and of Arab modernism both with the contemporary art world, and with the Arab political present. Our role is to point out the points of intersection, and to ask pertinent questions. Even if the official discourses exclude these artists, the very existence of these individuals and their work demands that we revisit our facile assumptions. But so far the international exhibitions and discussions about (mostly contemporary) art in the Middle East in the last few years have created a lot of interest, but not much room for reflection.
As Mathaf’s significant collection goes public, we’d like to slow down and create room for closer observation of the art itself in a decommodified space, and thus create more possibilities for discussing the place of Arab artists in a wider context. Beginning with the art, we also aim to look more broadly at the historical and contemporary factors that influence artistic production and knowledge production: theory, criticism, and different kinds of institutions and the market—all of which affect and are affected by the existing power distribution within the art ecology.
This museum emerges into the public sphere to display and promote art that is not already widely celebrated. It is unfortunate but generally true that artists from former colonies are noticeably absent from textbooks about modern art, and there is often a distinct lack of collective memory that such artists were producing work at all. The increased visibility of artists with Arab backgrounds in international biennials and galleries and at auctions has not yet had much effect on the twin issues of invisibility and amnesia that affect the fine-arts traditions from Arab countries over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not to mention other non-Western art practices during the same period.1
In 1929 Alfred Barr opened his new Museum of Modern Art as which he saw as laboratory for ideas, experiments, and public participation.2 Our mission to be an interactive and participatory space is uncannily similar to Barr’s invitation, but our context today is very different. Unlike MoMA at its beginning, we are not attempting to propose a linear narrative with one story of the development of modern art—far from it. But thanks first to Barr, we are aware of the potential power of an institution to shape discourse, while also inviting an open dialogue. In the early days of the Centre Pompidou, exhibitions challenged the Barr narrative by demonstrating a more complex history of modernism, with a wider range of readings, informed by European social and political factors and interdisciplinary fertilization.3 The Pompidou set the standard for later museums to develop their own perspectives, and at Mathaf we take on that challenge, suggesting that these institutional equations of modernism with European and American formations need revisiting once more.4 The contemporary globalized moment is inclusive of multiple geographies, but wary of history. Despite the engagement with postcolonial concepts among contemporary artists, and unlike the field of literature, for example, the interdependent relationship of modernism and colonialism has yet to be explored in great depth in the context of visual art, perhaps to an extent because of the limitations in terms of public resources available for research.
With a few exceptions, museums in the Arab world often house and promote a specific sense of national identity: a single coherent narrative told through the display of their objects, about each country and its history. Public museums of modern art in the region are few, but also tend towards collective expressions of national pride, rather than emphasizing individual creations within wider artistic and social frameworks. The buildings and their physical contents often function as containers of memory, with limited opportunities for creating new intellectual assets, or for looking critically at the work and presenting a variety of perspectives.
Mathaf plans to take a different approach, and to reflect more accurately the hybrid ways that culture is actually experienced and practiced in the region, with its constant negotiations of geographies and representations.5 We are much more interested in uncovering and clarifying a web of relationships that have long existed—among practitioners in the region and beyond it. In order to understand the specific cosmopolitan nature of the artistic experiments and lived experiences of each of the artists on display from the collection, or to effectively and in detail reconsider the theoretical parameters of modernism, first in an Arab and then a global context, there is an urgent need to reclaim, write, and engage with history—material, social, and intellectual. We plan to begin by focusing on opportunities for researching the art objects themselves, but also to investigate the role of archives and documentation, since so much of the region’s art history is in the form of ephemera: from exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings and brochures, to websites, YouTube videos, and oral histories of artists and other practitioners still to be collected.
In addition to the urgent need for definitive publications on the artists, we also recognize the potential for other, interdisciplinary projects. I imagine, for example, Mathaf exhibitions that could examine the role of the poet Adonis and his conception of a cross-temporal modernity, a key literary figure in the Arab world who inspired and collaborated with many artists in our collection; or an exhibition that explores the relationship between Surrealism in the European and the Egyptian contexts. A more ambitious research project could examine the changing semiotic implications of the role of the Arabic language in art production in different countries over time; or the relationship between the fine arts and the burgeoning field of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, and how together they affected ways of seeing in the Arab world.
Furthermore, at Mathaf we hope eventually to become a hub for art from the non-West, emphasizing linkages, temporal and geographical between the Arab experience and other postcolonial art contexts. We believe that in order to have the most substantive and critically aware conversations, we ultimately need to look at other parts of the globe, and be open to understanding how different artists dealt with similar conditions and issues of representation. During HomeWorks 5 in Beirut in April this year, curator and critic Okwui Enwezor expressed concern at the lack of engagement with other parts of the geopolitical South during several discussions, and warned of the dangers of historical narcissism. By simply relating ourselves to Western models and Eurocentric arguments, we continually rehash old colonial dialectics.
The role of our institution at the beginning of the twenty-first century is still to be determined, but we look forward to opening up new avenues. In the
words of international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, in turn quoting English social historian Eric Hobsbawm, at Mathaf we see ourselves poised to play an active role in a larger “protest against forgetting.” And ours is not simply a plea to remember and value the existence of modern art in the Arab world and its varied contexts. It is also an appeal to remember that the theoretical frameworks we often use are not universal, and might not always be applicable. In light of new evidence, we might just have to reconsider our paradigms.
In a keynote address given at a Tate conference in 1999 entitled “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” Stuart Hall proposed that we
could learn a great deal from reversing all the terms in the conference title, and reminded us:
Firstly we should be aware that histories are narratives and that accordingly we have histories rather than a singular history. These narratives are a discursive imposition of beginnings, middles and, indeed, endings on to histories which do not naturally produce themselves in this convenient form. Therefore, we are not talking about the history of art, but about how we have chosen to narrate the identity of the histories of art to ourselves; the notion of narrative has interrupted and deflected the purity of the historical impulse.6
At Mathaf we are aware that for our artists there are many histories to reclaim and to write. We have a long way to go in exploring different historical
traces, and to begin to map out what Kobena Mercer has called “critical pathways” between past and present.7 It is by engaging with these many less official histories that we can help to prevent easy essentialism or abstract pronouncements, and as opportunities for scholarship develop, possibilities open up for reevaluating the other definitions and concepts that we often take for granted. It is with this perspective in mind that Mathaf can be seen as an intriguing composite, in constant dialogue with each of its terms, as they are in dialogue with each other. Before his assassination in 2005, Lebanese journalist and historian Samir Kassir wrote a stirring critique of the intellectual stagnation, rigidity and trenchant despair he saw as endemic in the contemporary Arab world. But Kassir also identified several signs of hope, the same phenomena that inspire us at Mathaf in 2010, and which we believe will be crucial to the success and development of the institution.
The growth of a unified and yet plural field of Arab culture, with now many varied centers of cultural production in different cities, from North Africa to the Gulf is taking place at the same time as the Arab cultural field is beginning to be globally integrated. The emigration of artists to all kinds of cities in the last twenty years have led to creative exchanges, with cross-cultural institutional support and financing of projects. The global cultural market is taking an interest in the Arab world, in terms of its art, its music, its film, and electronic media have allowed for the explicit situation of visual and informational culture from the Arab world into a global composite.8 This is what we at Mathaf hope to promote, both in terms of exploring and interpreting past connections, encouraging those in the present and provoking new iterations and articulations in the future.
1 Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (inIVA, 2005), p. 8.
2 See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
(MIT Press, 2003).
3 Karsten Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum concept from the French
Revolution to the Present (One-Off Press, 2000), pp. 65–6
4 Kobena Mercer, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (inIVA, 2005), p. 21.
5 As discussed often by Edward Said, Gilane Tawadros and others.
6 Stuart Hall, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” in Changing States: Contemporary
Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalization (inIVA, 2004).
7 Kobena Mercer, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (inIVA, 2005), p. 8.
8 Samir Kassir, Being Arab (Verso, 2006), pp. 87–91.