Place at Last: On the Afterlife of Civil War (a work in progress)
by Walid Sadek

I. Here and Elsewhere

It is believed demeaning for the Mikado to walk the ground beneath him. That is why he is seen carried on shoulders whenever his wish is to go somewhere. Equally demeaning is for his sacred person to be exposed to the open air. Also, unworthy is for the sun to shine on him. This sacralization of the Emperor pervades his whole physical body so as not to have his hair and beard cut or his nails trimmed. And yet, to keep his appearance clean, grooming him is allowed while he sleeps... The Mikado had to endure sitting completely still for hours each day wearing the crown on his head. And remain as such, still as a statue, without moving his feet, hands and head or even eyes nor any other part of his body. For it was believed that in such stillness he would maintain the safety and tranquility of the Empire... Later they discovered that the Imperial crown itself is the guarantee, which can, because of its solidity, keep the Empire safe. Since then, they deemed it better to relieve his Imperial majesty of this toilsome task and relegate him to a life of pleasure and idleness. And so they now place the crown on the throne for a few hours each day.

-Godelier, Maurice, Loughz Al Hiba (L’Enigme du Don) (1)

Limbs frozen, eyelids held open, the Emperor’s body is deferred: Fixed for the well being of the Empire, the Emperor is pure power. He is absent and present simultaneously. On the throne, the Emperor, says: I am elsewhere. But when replaced by the crown he is then relegated to a life of “pleasure and idleness” and is forced to abdicate: No longer able to say I am elsewhere, the Emperor, dethroned, is all here. But can the crown, when enthroned claim the same and say: ‘I am elsewhere’? It seems to me that the appearance of the crown signals an end. For the crown is an edifice free of interiority: Finally a monument to replace the liability of simultaneous presence and absence, the liability of saying ‘I am elsewhere’. The appearance of the crown on the throne is the replacement of the emperor with fixedness and signals therefore the end of representation.

This story of the Mikado, the crown and the throne can reclaim representation. For it reinstates the disquiet that haunts the representational act. It reminds us that beside the well-rehearsed argument which posits representation as an act of formation and deformation, namely an act which involves “an assumption of authority in the process of segregation, accumulation, selection and confinement”, representation seeks also, if not primarily, the management of matter (2). J.L. Borges’ story of the Chinese encyclopedia is often used as an allegory, which exposes the formative limits of representation. The wonderment of that Chinese encyclopedia in which animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, etc., is in Foucault’s assessment, both “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” (3) Accordingly, the example of the Chinese encyclopedia promises a dispersal of the seamless and natural unto an open field of disparate registers. Or in the least, it exposes, perhaps scandalously, the arbitrariness of every representational and classificatory endeavor. Yet, if the will to represent is arbitrary in the sense suggested by the Borges tale, it is on the contrary consistent in its desire to evacuate the world from its physical matter. Accordingly, representation is not only an organization of what is, it is also a summoning of what is to absence. Representation is the will to make an object manifest and intelligible while simultaneously suspending that same object in immateriality. The story of the enthroned Mikado is then an evocative example of a representational endeavor to re-organize the facts of a physical body and so to suspend it: Fixing the pulse of blood, the blink of eyes and the itch of skin is a performance in which the uncontrollable events of our physics are manipulated and fixed like abstract information. The body of the Mikado, the stuff of real and physical organicism, is sent elsewhere. The body must be elsewhere. And although we cannot ascertain where it is at, it nevertheless cannot be that which is sitting there on the throne. Accordingly, representation when successful rides a necessary liability without which it is replaced by the monument; dead in fixedness. This liability is inscribed in the suspension of physical matter; in the effort of iterating incessantly: I am elsewhere.

In one of the least noticed but retrospectively most eloquent pieces installed in the Sanayeh Public Garden in Beirut and exhibited during The First Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting (1995), Bassam Kahwagi literally re-drew one section of the garden.(4) By joining a series of 4X4X200cm wood-bars, he transliterated what the garden already contained in terms of benches, trees, walkways, flowerbeds and trash-bins. Placing the wood-bars in front of these garden objects, his structure - following strictly the limited formal vocabulary of straight lines and 90 degree angles - traced the outlines of these objects and functioned accordingly as a rational and therefore reliable scaffold for a material presence transferred and represented in terms of fixed and manageable information. His entry in the exhibition catalogue is an understated and telling description:

Tuesday 26th of September, the Sanayeh Garden, the second path to the left of the entrance is 13.8 meters long and 6 meters wide. On each corner a palm tree, around each of the tree-trunks a metal trash-bin. Northward and in the middle of the path a wood and metal bench 189 cm long, 70 cm wide and 86 cm high, southward two similar benches at two thirds of the distance... (5)

The garden in Kahwagi’s text is depicted as a predictable place. And his installation aims to perform what the text describes. Thus the bend of a tree trunk, the skew of a bench, the drop of a trash-bin unhinged, the slant of a walk-way; all the shifting imperfections of a material presence avoided in the catalogue entry, the installation attempts to suspend as well in a strict and angular visual vocabulary. The garden as physical weight and as a possible landscape of memories retreats only to advance as a disembodied idea. And although applied only to one small section of the garden, Kahwagi’s contribution is emblematic in that it calls the whole of the garden to an animate stillness, not unlike that of the above mentioned enthroned emperor. And in doing so it performs the liability which lives at the heart of the representational endeavor: to repeat incessantly that I am elsewhere without relinquishing the exhausting effort of having to deny that I am all here.

My reading of Kahwagi’s work and my interest in the inconstant foundation of the representational endeavor were triggered by a more recent installation by Marwan Rechmaoui entitled Beirut Caoutchouc, exhibited in the spring of 2003 as part of that year’s annual forum Home Works.(6) Rechmaoui’s work, although shown within the space of an art gallery, led me to reconsider the minutes of a long and protracted ‘reluctance’ manifested in some artworks and concomitant debates occurring within the structures of two public art events organized by Ashkal Alwan (The Lebanese Association of Visual Arts): The First Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting (1995) and The Hamra Street Project (2000). What I call reluctance is what appeared to me first when connecting together a few memorable incidences and artworks, which disputed, in various ways, the very invitation to participate in these public events. What Rechmaoui’s piece allowed me to do is find a link which sets the issue of representation at the core of this reluctance and consequently at the core of the debate surrounding urban public spaces.

Rechmaoui displayed a 6.75x8.25 meter floor map of Beirut made of a lusterless black rubber. The map, 3.25 centimeters thick, was etched with grooves delineating the different roads and highways that demarcate the real estate plots of the city. Without a change in the surface features, the topography of the city was leveled so that no “little mountain” was left to admire or a lower Basta to pick out. (7) By wielding the lure of all maps, the city in Rechmaoui’s work was flattened for us to oversee and apprehend as one entity. Yet it was also large enough to be walked on and precise enough to offer the curious ambulator the location of a street, a neighborhood or a building block. And soon after the exhibition’s opening, the map laid on the floor marked with the striated dust-prints of walking shoes and looking as familiar as a used doormat. By straddling the two shores of representational signs and of theatrical lure (absorption), Rechmaoui’s work seemed to approach the ambivalence of map and terrain so wittily delivered by Lewis Carroll:

-There is another thing we’ve learned from your Nation, said Mein Herr, map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?
-About six inches to the mile.
-Only six inches! exclaimed Mein Herr. We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!
-Have you used it much? I enquired.
-It has never been spread out, yet, said Mein Herr: the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. (8)

Like all representational maps, Rechmaoui’s summons the terrain of the city with signs - in this case that of cut black rubber and demarcation grooves. But unlike all representational maps, it provides the ambulator with a terrain that “does nearly as well.” In this sense, it fails to accomplish what the rhetoric of pure representation promises to do: It fails to replace the [entity] it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance with an absence (9). For unlike other maps, whether abstract or photographic and aerial, this map does not accomplish the spectralization of the body of the perceiver in order to represent the city as a series of complete utterances. On that map, the perceiver is not suspended in the dark recesses of monocular seeing: He is not elsewhere. Rather, perception remains embodied, a beholding accompanied by tangible residues in the midst of what should have been “a space of reason”. (10) The perceiver ambulates in search of a plot of real estate or a crossroad and finds it. As if on that rubber underneath his feet the whole of a city does exist and is therefore not quite a representation. Consequently, that lusterless rubber map sets up a situation of incompleteness. It maintains itself adolescent: Namely, and following the etyme of the term, it maintains itself in a kindling almost burning stage, in which the map as a representation is still being made; a stage during which the physical residues of the city are still being evacuated. This adolescence or what Foucault has termed “pure felicity” is the continued presence of the model in the image. (11) And it is precisely what holds that particular map from offering itself as representation in its pure form.

What the works of Kahwagi and Rechmaoui do is perform the liability lurking at the very center of the representational act. That is, they succumb to the inarticulate persuasiveness of matter without reneging on their stated task to suspend the weight of the world. Their inability to achieve pure representation is not a failure but rather the mark of an adolescence - in itself a reluctance - traceable in Beirut art starting with the mid-nineties. How some artworks maintain this reluctance is, I argue, by dragging onto the ‘throne of pure representation’ and consequently into the highly estimable notion of a public space the liability of physical matter, be it the blemish, the corpse or geography.

II. The Generosity of the Blemished

Reading again through some of the statements published in an improvised newsletter distributed during The Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting (1995) entitled Dakhaltou Marral Jounainah (Once I Entered Little Heaven), a pressing concern arises out of those few pages of sophomoric prose and didactic criticism: How to resume what has been interrupted? (12) This question, unevenly articulated in the aforementioned publication, tells nevertheless that the invitation to enter the garden and represent the self in its post-war status allowed some artists to set up an exacerbated analogy between the garden and the nation as well as between the artist and the citizen. The invitation to enter that public garden was made equivalent to entering a space emancipated from the placements of sectarian warring and politics. Not that the possibility of resuming what had been interrupted by the civil war was proffered, but rather the possibility of initiating a clean start, now that the civil war has been arrested. In other words, the garden had to be understood and accepted as an impartial space. For a participant like Ziad Abillama such an offer was apprehended as impossible. Both his entry in the exhibition catalogue as well as his aborted project for the garden present a vehement, if not altogether coherent articulation of a reluctance to join the festivities of that event.

In the catalogue, Abillama deploys a number of quotes, statements, truncated dialogues and a ‘blemished’ self-portrait all through which he retains and endures an inability to speak the language of belongingness. He writes:

Something has happened on the inside, in the dwelling, at the heart and therefore to the fence in general: There is a blemish in the picture, something that is in it and yet exceeds it. An impossible dreg…Sticky, opaque, it hinders the eye from seeing through, the "I" from acting, from actualizing itself happily. (13)

For Abillama, the invitation to enter the garden is an embarrassment. For were he to try, he would do so dragging an "impossible dreg", a blemish, that will rob him of his directive sight. And although the suggestion is that this "dreg" turns homewardness into waywardness, it is nevertheless unclear what the blemish actually is. When searching the nervous mise-en-page of his catalogue entry for clues, one finds allusions to emigration, the inability to speak Arabic, an exhortation to become a national artist and a wariness of idealism:

- Lama: Speak Ziad and I will write.
- Ziad: I have difficulty speaking in Arabic.
- Lama: Why this difficulty?
- Ziad: Because of an emigration on which this country was founded.
- Sois artiste! Sois souverain! Sois Libanais! (Be artist! Be sovereign! Be Lebanese!)
- Your moment of inspiration is an unsettled debt, which makes me return as a Living dead. (14)

No matter the possible veracity of these statements if and when read within the purview of the artist’s own biography and no matter the probable hidden coherence of his scrabbled catalogue entry, it is nevertheless noticeable that all the statements are marked by a tone of finality. One might say they are exaggerated. For the artist appears not as an individual but rather as the discursive ground on which the destiny of a nation is carved. The self-portrait he includes strongly illustrates this posture of exaggeration: We apprehend a black and white photograph of his face frontally marred by a blackened map of Lebanon covering diagonally the middle of the forehead, the bridge of the nose, slicing the right pupil in half and ending with its southern tip over the right jaw-bone concealing most of his right cheek. A portrait of bathos: One man’s face stained by the emblem of a whole nation; a portrait sufficiently portentous to be the image of martyrdom and mysterious enough to carry the trace of an epiphany. In either case, the blemish, it seems, is too complex to be specific and extra-personal to be elucidated. It is not, I think, that Abillama is feigning an ambiguity, so often encountered in art. Rather, I would suggest, he does not know what the blemish really stands for, or more precisely what it really is - and so in keeping with the logic of blemishes which can be defined as the visible clumsiness of an immaterial sign. Yet it is here, on his face. A blemish landed, without an inventory; excess from a past he did not experience. Moreover, it is an anachronism in the midst of the exhibition’s chosen moment, a present moment when all the participating artists are exhorted to start anew. In following the lead of Abillama’s catalogue entry, the impossibility in what the exhibition calls for lies not in the exhortation to resume what has been interrupted but rather in the expectation to capitulate on such an attempt and start instead again now that the war has been arrested. Enter and be artist, or as Abillama alludes to in his text: "l’artiste moderne est un nom propre..." (The modern artist is a proper name). (15) And if Abillama is reluctant to join and assume a proper name, it is precisely out of an insistence to speak at the outer limits of the garden space, from the breaches of its frontiers, where, he insists, is tangible the unemployed matter that weighs every interruption with an unspeakable load, matter that drags along all the way from an underworld about which we know little and remember almost nothing.

In Hassan Daoud’s novel Maquiajoun Khafifoun Le Hathehellayla (Light
Make-up for Tonight), Wadad, the protagonist, awakes after three years of coma to be informed that she has lost her husband in an accident and that the two surviving children whom she does not recognize are hers. (16) Her recovery is depicted as an attempt to resume what has been interrupted. She limps, her movements are sluggish and a scar carves her front from behind the right ear lobe down her chest like the roughened metallic teeth of an enlarged zipper. To reassemble whatever remains of her life and the few shreds that she remembers of her past, she decides to train her body and hone its movements. The one thing she surrenders to and decides to flaunt is her scar, her marking: "Here comes the one with the scar." (17) Wadad’s insistence on exposing her scar makes for evidence that those three years lost in dreamless sleep did happen and are as of now her own. And although she has no stories to tell of those lost years, she evidently carries their physical weight, their blemishing accumulation. But what is most interesting in Daoud’s novel- and is relevant to Abillama’s work- is Wadad’s constant search for her portrait. Aversely included in a film project said to recount her life, all the while seeking an encounter with a painter, Wadad searches for images of herself and so she says: "... to find out how I am seen by other eyes." (18) I would argue that such a search for how one is seen by others is that which can replace the search for an inventorial past. To be seen by another allows one the license to place one’s face as currency in a field of social and ‘facial’ exchange. It is not a license to resume what has been interrupted. For a resumption supposes that the recent past is a mere interruption of a more distant past of which a knowledge persists uninterrupted. Nor is it an initiation of a clean start, a springing forth with no inhibitions. Rather, it is a making of a portrait, a face multiplied and thickened through the eyes of others in a process of a reversed ramification where the face is without a trunk and can never take root in a rubbled landscape over which it constantly roams.

It was in the scandal that surrounded his proposal for the garden exhibit that Abillama attempted to extend an indeterminate set of reluctances onto the limited public of artists and organizers and come to recognize how he is seen by other eyes. In the days leading to the opening of that exhibition, he distributed a questionnaire asking the participants if they would allow a volume of 30 cubic centimeters for him to occupy within the space allotted to each one of them and exhibit within it whatever he considered appropriate. He assured them all that if accorded his request he would then act: "Without transgressing the given limits of this cube." (19) The responses of the majority of the artists were marked by a tone of suspicion. Abillama’s request was flatly refused. What he was asking for was deemed vandalic, an act that could possibly impede the autonomy of artworks produced by a loose constellation of artists seeking appearance during the first locally organized public art manifestation to be held in Beirut after the war. The categorical dismissal of Abillama and the utter rejection of his request by some of the other participants were a protest against the possibility of loading their art with an unrecognizable and possibly unspeakable lacunas. And yet, in all of his maneuvers and in the thicket of his critical and tortured verbosity, Abillama was beckoning others not only to see him but also to reckon themselves in the act of seeing him. His proposal to occupy a part of their allotted space was a search for a mutual recognition, a maculate reciprocity, brewed thick with accumulated blemishes for which there is no cure. In other words, having come forth, disclosing his blemished face, he urgently called on others to see him. To survive the monstrosity that is his face, he sought to be incorporated in the sight of others. Ziad Abillama’s generosity lies precisely in that he made himself dependent: Instead of a willful act of pure representation, he mourned.

NOTES:
1. Maurice Godelier, Loughz Al Hiba (L’Enigme du Don), Arabic trans. Dr. Radwan Zaza (Al Mada, 1998), 250. (English translation mine).
2. Brian Wallis, "What’s Wrong with This Picture? An Introduction" in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), XV.
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), XV.
4. The First Sanayeh Garden art meeting is the first event organized by Ashkal Alwan (The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts) in the Sanayeh Garden in Beirut during the summer of 1995.
5. Bassam Kahwagi, entry in catalogue for The First Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan,1995), np.
6. Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region is held every 18 months in Beirut and curated by Ms. Christine Tohme, director of Ashkal Alwan.
7. In reference to the hill of the Ashrafieh district in Beirut as denoted in Elias Khoury’s 1977 novel, Little Mountain.
8. Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno Concluded" in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Modern Library 1936), 616-17.
9. Foucault 16.
10. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 41.
11. Foucault 16. The model here is precisely that which the map aims to resemble, namely Beirut and s/he in whose eyes the map is only a resemblance, namely the viewer.
12. Dakhaltou Marral Jounainah (Once I entered Little Heaven), photocopied newsletter, 6 pages, 1995.
13. Ziad Abillama, catalogue entry in The First Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan, 1995), np (translation mine).
14. Ibid np.
15. Ibid np.
16. Daoud, Hassan, Maquiajoun Khafifoun Le Hathehellayla (Light Make-up for Tonight) (Riad El Rayyes Books, 2003).
17. bid 19.
18. Ibid 36.
19. From the questionnaire by Ziad Abillama distributed during the days leading to the opening of The First Sanayeh Garden Art Meeting, 1995. (Translation mine).

Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. As an artist he has exhibited Les Autres, 2001, Al Kassal (Indolence), 1999, with writer Bilal Khebeiz, Bigger than Picasso, 1999, and Karaoke, 1998. His essays have been published in magazines such as Parachute, Zehar, Al Adab, and in the volumes of Tamass: Contemporary Arab Representations (2001), Territoire Mediterranee (2005) and Documenta (2006). He has also published a collection of essays entitled Jane-Loyse Tissier (2003). Sadek is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.