Moataz Nasr
or the Evidence of Things not Seen
by Simon Njami
Moataz
Nasr is Egyptian. In Senegal in 2002, at the Dakar Biennale,
he discovered that he was also African. Of course he was aware
of this before, but the physical experience of being in the
darker side of the Sahara desert made him appreciate fully,
for the first time, the indelible familiarity that exists
between the different countries of the African continent.
Regardless of – or perhaps because of – their
history and regardless of their different influences and priorities
shaped by different geopolitical and cultural climates, he
could not help becoming aware that all those countries face
the same questions. Any attempt to decipher the essence of
Nasr’s work has to make this realisation its starting
point. An Africa suffering for lack of self-determination
and for want of a dream. An Africa robbed of its dreams by
the constraints of economic and political necessity. An Africa
shackled by insoluble contradictions that prevent it from
writing its own history.
Hence
Nasr’s Egypt is only a metaphor for a web of issues
that reach far beyond the strictly local confines of his country.
The work presented here is the product of fifty years of independence
echoing questions posed throughout the continent, and beyond
this, perhaps even echoing the basic questions posed by existentialist
philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre.
What is freedom? What is initiative? How should we view ourselves
within a context that is both specific and invasive? How should
we view ourselves outside this context? And finally, who are
we exactly when we say ‘I’? Is this ‘I’
simply the echo of a history of which we are at once the inheritors
and the destroyers? Does this ‘I’ represent a
specific and unique entity, genuinely and intrinsically free
to seek fulfillment? Or are we rather condemned to play our
part in a collective story, the dénouement of which
was predetermined way back in the mists of time? A story of
which we can never become the author, as our deeds, our gestures
and our most private thoughts have already been formulated
for us? What does this ‘I’ represent, ultimately,
if not an aborted dream? A useful dream, such as the illusion
of pan-Africanism which never came to pass or the illusion
of independence movements which happened to become nothing
but failures and disappointments? The answer is complex and
presupposes an in-depth analysis of the postcolonial phenomenon
that has helped to shape the essence of contemporary Africa.
However, artistic creativity, providing a magnified reflection
of the societies that have forged it, none the less offers
us a few sketchy outlines of an answer. It does so through
the work of people who owe it to themselves to play a part
in the making of history.
Born
of historical upheavals, these artists carry the germ of the
ideas that could enable us to decode a phenomenon that affects
the entire planet. They are more or less the same age as the
independent states of Africa. This produces responsibilities
that are difficult to shrug off. It opens up inexorably the
path that leads to searching self-analysis, which in turn
triggers the questioning of invalid assumptions. For unlike
their Old World contemporaries, the children of this generation
have every right to assume a familiarity with countries that
they view as their equals.
Nasr
is Egyptian, as we were saying, but by labelling him, we do
not mean in any way to diminish the scope of his thinking
or his aims. On the contrary, our view of the world is conditioned
by what we are and by the unique experience that has made
us thus. And if this experience may be transformed into something
shared by humanity as a whole – according to Immanuel
Kant’s words, “Le beau est ce qui est représenté
sans concept comme objet d’une satisfaction universelle”1–
it none the less keeps its specific social and historical
context. For example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in
Rome, painted for the glory of a religion at a particular
historic moment, can now be seen just as an art masterpiece;
one can appreciate its beauty without knowing the inspiration
that created it. The very nature of that inspiration comprises
what I call our unique experience, or, in this specific case,
Michelangelo’s unique experience. This is echoed by
the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s observations on globalisation,
or on universalism and its perverse effects: “As for
hybridity, the hybridisation of cultures, as of now, is to
me more of a conjecture than a reality. I do not buy the idea
of a universal culture. Every culture has its essence which,
like the soul of man, you cannot change or infect easily.…
Unless a culture has strength, it cannot contribute effectively
to a universal, or multiversal, dispensation, and that, perhaps,
is why it is dangerous for an artist easily to throw away
his cultural heirloom and superficially take on an alien one.”2
The question of identity – which clearly goes beyond
the limits of nationality – is therefore central and
fundamental to any movement towards freedom, because it is
by knowing who we are and where we come from that we can share
with the Other. And this very freedom is the identity claimed
by Nasr. Multiple and singular. He will never leave his country,
as he feels he has both rights and responsibilities there.
He would not be who he is were it not for the legitimacy conferred
on him by this mass of land. Abstract debates concerning the
role of the artist – constantly rehashed over recent
decades to take account of changing tastes and preoccupations
– do not concern him. He is no campaigner for a popular
art, a social art developed in the street, for the people
and by the people.
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The
Water, installation, 2002 |
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Nasr
is a true artist in that the fundamental question posed
by his work has nothing to do with its usefulness, but
rather forms part of the very essence of his personal
experience: the air he breathes, his childhood memories,
or – to use a word that is sometimes bandied about
rather too easily – his ‘roots’. It
is this humanity that dictates his choices, not some
popularist determination to democratize the act of artistic
creation. The boundary between the private space of
his studio and the public space in which the work is
delivered up to the world is clear and precise in general.
The agora, the collective space of the museum or social
meeting place, represents a discrete stage in the life
of the work and one that is quite distinct from the
act of creation.
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In Nasr’s case, this does
not suggest a return to the myth of the artist in his
ivory tower, in splendid isolation from the world. The
truth is the very opposite. The studio is the space to
which the artist invites his street, his country, his
continent and the world. The encounter that takes place
there involves him, but as a protagonist in that world,
in a necessary form of schizophrenia. An observer and
commentator in the outside world, an anonymous constituent
in the great mass of the people, once back in his state
of solitude, he dissolves in the midst of those whom hitherto
he had regarded as an alien body. In the silence of his
studio he deconstructs the feelings and intuitions, the
reflections and observations that he has brought back
with him from the world outside. It is also within this
privileged space that the osmotic process – transforming
the self into the ‘observed’ – takes
place. In this context, the word ‘studio’
should not be taken to mean the cloistered space occupied
by artists in nineteenth-century Europe, however.Rather,
it simply expresses the notion of a private space, reserved
for the artist. It conveys that ineffable moment when
all the fragments of a complex tapestry suddenly come
alive and arrange themselves around a specific framework.
The notion of the studio or workshop should be experienced
as a metaphor for a specific moment, a time of unique
lucidity. For him, artistic commitment is not just an
empty phrase. He has a part to play, like any other citizen,
in his country’s development. But this commitment
should not be confused with the will to produce ‘useful
art’, as championed by intellectuals such as Cheikh
Anta Diop: a didactic form of education for the masses
which can be summed up as fragmented and contextualised
readings of the artistic project. The freedom that is
implicit in all forms of creativity cannot be made subservient
t o the political aims of a Marxistinspired philosophy,
which itself obeys the revolutionary blueprint adopted
by those who have fought for the independence of African
countries and which envisaged the subjugation of the individual
to the collective. This is a form of commitment concerned
more with selfanalysis; with the suggestion, through the
feeling conjured up by an image, of a sound or gesture;
with sowing the seeds within the spectator of a reflection
that is the only route to gaining awareness. Nasr’s
commitment corresponds to the quest contained in every
artistic act, as defined by André Gide when he
claimed that art is nothing but a political and social
commitment.
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Nasr’s
earlier works, many of which use video, also display this
constant impulse to toy with the spectator’s emotions
and feelings. Video images are never used in isolation, but
are invariably set within a precise architectural framework.
In Ears (2001), the spectator is overwhelmed by a looming
wall of ears which seem to both hear and see, a scary scenario
which plunges us into a waking nightmare. The screen at the
end of the wall acts as a counterpoint. The piece as a whole
is an image of the totalitarian power of an omnipresent state
and could easily be subtitled ‘walls have ears’.
In Wheelchairs (2001), we find ourselves in a sort of cinema
auditorium, in which the audience – in the form of empty
wheelchairs – gazes at the screen, evoking the metaphor
of a sick society watching its life unfold before its very
eyes. But rather than hammering his message home like a television
evangelist, Nasr allows us our freedom. The forms are there
to articulate those things that cannot be expressed. He leaves
us free to see whatever we want to see in the wheelchairs.
In this way, a metaphor that has its origins in a commentary
on Egyptian society proves equally valid in Paris, Dakar or
New York. The finger is pointed at this state of impotent
passivity to which we are all condemned at some time or other
and each of us is free to fill the empty spaces according
to our own individual conscience. We find this passivity again
in a work such as Water (2002). Whereas in
Wheelchairs we may act as both protagonists and spectators,
in Water we are definitively condemned to watch and are denied
any power to act. Like the waters of the Red Sea before they
parted to let the Jewish people pass, the water that stretches
out before the spectator seems to pose an insurmountable barrier.
And we are forced to stand and watch, powerless to act, as
a man appears to drown on a screen at the far side.
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Tabla, installation, 2003 |
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Powerlessness
and frustration seem also to form the foundations of
Moataz Nasr’s latest project, Tabla
(2003). The tabla is a small drum and, in African culture,
the drum has traditionally been used to create not only
sounds but also meanings, using a precise and established
syntax to communicate and set up dialogues. Here, in
a new play on the Hegelian paradox of master and slave,
Nasr creates an opposition between the Drum and drums,
the individual and the masses. Here again, social commentary
is never far away. Returning to a scenario which he
has used in other works and which sets up a dialogue
between installation and video, he places some four
hundred drums in front of a screen. Immediately, we
are reminded of an orchestra and its conductor, which
is further reinforced by the appearance on the screen
of a musician whose face is hidden from us. We see only
his hands, pounding the taut skin. The drum on the screen
is elaborate, while those in the space in which the
viewers stand are common or crude. Here Nasr brings
the drama of power back to centre stage. As I write
these words, with Eastern and Western nations vying
in the clamorous rhetoric that presages war, it is impossible
not to project oneself beyond the national frontiers
of Egypt.
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This
work is not merely about the impossibility of dialogue between
a particular leader and a particular people. The clamour of
these drums, this cacophony orchestrated by the conductor
according to his whim summons us back to the cacophony presently
spreading before our eyes, from New York to Baghdad. Will
the peoples of this world always be condemned to follow leaders
whose legitimacy is not set in stone? What freedom and what
choice do people have, save to follow their leaders’
commands with blind obedience? While Nasr offers no definitive
answer to these questions, he nevertheless allows us a glimpse
of what James Baldwin described as “the evidence of
things not seen”.3
The truth, if it exists, is more complex than it appears.
But it requires that we should be constantly questioning,
incessantly challenging the established order of things. Our
voices, like those of these crude drums, are no less important
than those of our leaders.
Moataz
Nasr appears to have made it his mission to decode ideas that
have been accepted with too much haste. He seeks to train
the spotlight of his rigorous approach on the contradictions
that we are expected to accept as theorems, on the aberrant
courses of action that are sold to us as views of the future.
He is not motivated by any political activism, nor by any
messianic zeal to replace the old truths with new ones. Nasr
seeks simply to safeguard for art the elements required for
its own contradictions. For him, art and life are inseparable,
as observed by Pierre Restany twenty years ago: “Art
is a phenomenon of language, and only that. Language, the
expression of men’s thoughts, is a living thing. There
are times when the oscillating movements of art become locked
or stuck, when art appears to have lost the internal factors
necessary for its own counter-arguments, when it seems to
be cut off from life.”4
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Notes
1.‘Beauty
is that which is represented without concept, as the subject
of universal gratification.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique
de la Faculté de Juger (Kritic der Urteilskraft),
Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1986.
2.
El Anatsui, ‘Conversation with Olu Oguibe’,
in Third Text, no. 23, summer 1993, p. 49.
3.
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1985.
4.
Pierre Restany, l’Avant-garde au XXe siècle,
Paris: Balland, 1969.Critique de la Faculté de Juger
(Kritic der Urteilskraft), Paris: Librairie Philosophique
J. Vrin, 1986. |
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