Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref el-Rayess

Natasha Gasparian

Description

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondences and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The Exhibition; 2. The Artist; 3. The Reception; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography.

Sujets

• Arts
• History of art
• Painting
• Middle East
• Technique
• ART
• Peinture

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785274640
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess
ANTHEM MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE ARAB WORLD, IRAN AND TURKEY
The Anthem Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey series publishes scholarly biographies of art works from the region. Each publication traces the historical trajectory of an individual art work, from the circumstances of production (including artist’s biography and sociocultural context of place) through its exhibition history with collectors and museums. This series is published in collaboration with The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA).
Series Editor

Sarah Rogers—AMCA & Independent Scholar, USA
Nada Shabout—AMCA & University of North Texas, USA
Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess
The Changing of Horses
Natasha Gasparian
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Natasha Gasparian 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-462-6 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-462-7 (Pbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Exhibition
2. The Artist
3. The Reception
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
FIGURES
I.1 Aref El-Rayess, Tapis Volants (Flying Carpets) series, 1965
I.2 Aref El-Rayess, Ila Ruh Martin Luther King (To the Spirit of Martin Luther King), 1968
1.1 Aref El-Rayess, 5 Huzayran / Tabdil al-Ahsina ( The 5th of June/ The Changing of Horses ), 1967
1.2 Aref El-Rayess, Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya, Aley , May 1968
1.3 Blood and Freedom Visitors at Salle de L’Orient , 1968
1.4 Henri Seyrig and Victor Hakim at Blood and Freedom Opening in Salle de L’Orient , 1968
1.5 Al-Tariq, al-Fann wa-l-Thawra (Art and Revolution) issue, February 1974
2.1 Aref El-Rayess in Fidāʾī Training Camp , c. 1970s
2.2 Aref El-Rayess in Fidāʾī Training Camp , c. 1970s
2.3 Aref El-Rayess and Waddah Faris, The Palestinian , 1968
2.4 Aref El-Rayess at Home with The Changing of Horses , 1967
2.5 Aref El-Rayess, Samia Osseirane and Maurice Sakr at Le 5 Juin conference in Dar El-Fan wa-l-Adab , 1968
2.6 Wahib Bteddini, Harvesting/Picking Apples in the Mountains , 1966
3.1 Yousuf Karsh, King Faisal , 1945
3.2 Aref El-Rayess, Ila al-Raʾis de Gaulle (To President de Gaulle), 1968
3.3 Vladimir Tamari, Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya Guestbook (detail), 1968
C.1 Aref El-Rayess, Ruʾus wa Aqdam (Heads and Feet) series, 1970
C.2 Studio Starko Aley, Aley Festival for the Arts , 1978
Acknowledgments
The guidance and encouragement of many people and multiple institutions made this publication possible. I am especially grateful to Hala El-Rayess for her enduring trust and generosity, and for her friendship. I also wish to extend my thanks to Simon Tidd and Alyaa Fouani at the Aref El-Rayess Foundation who, along with Hala, graciously welcomed me into their space and walked me through the artist’s gargantuan archive.
I am indebted to Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout, the series editors of this publication, for supporting my research on Aref El-Rayess and enabling me to redefine the structure of my work; to Megan Grieving at Anthem Press for her patience; to the curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, from whom I learned a great deal about the organization of archival material while working on the first iteration of the Saradar Collection’s digital projects, Perspective #1 ; and to Lina Kiryakos and Sandra Dagher at the Saradar Collection for their practical, monetary and moral support. It is thanks to Lina and Sandra that this publication’s titular artwork, The Changing of Horses , is printed within these pages in color. I am grateful to Rowina Bou Harb, an accomplice at the Sursock Museum; to the obliging librarians at the Archives and Special Collections at the American University of Beirut (AUB); to everyone in the department of Fine Arts and Art History at AUB (my laboratory and home since 2014); and to Saleh Barakat who introduced me to an abundance of magnificent and strange paintings, and shared tips, contacts and materials.
All my efforts would be in vain if not for Angela Harutyunyan’s years of guidance and criticism and the many activities she spearheaded and supported. Many thanks are due to Angela and to the other members of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR)—Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Sami Khatib and Ghalya Saadawi—for their mentorship and camaraderie; to Joshua D. Gonsalves for stimulating discussions on “Arabstraction” and the avant-garde; and especially, to my friends and peers at AUB—Francesco Anselmetti, Milia Ayache, Abdallah al-Ayache, Andrea Comair, Nadim Haidar, Lama Khatib, Raed Khelifi, Nare Sahakyan and Karen Vestergaard—who injected my year of writing (a year of local financial meltdown and global pandemic) with humor, tension, and spirit(s). Thanks to my friends Javier Aparicio Lorente, Biana Tamimi and Carine Lemyre for being present from afar; to my parents, siblings, cousins, Yayou and Tatty for helping me to forget and to Dex for keeping me sane. My deepest love and appreciation go to Ziad Kiblawi, my companion in life and in thought.
INTRODUCTION
Aref El-Rayess (1928–2005) is a notoriously difficult artist to write about. The art critics who followed the trials and tribulations of his practice throughout the years knew as much. Joseph Tarrab, for instance, characterized the artist in a pithy blurb in 1973 as:

The most mobile and versatile of our artists, one who rushes from one extreme to another without a break, as if he were looking for his own center of gravity which is always escaping him. He is constant only in his fidelity to change. He always seems to be running the risks of artistic adventure from scratch, denying his achievements to assert himself unceasingly as other than himself. It seems that a fundamental incredulity pushes him to always seek, through his works, a new approval of himself. 1
Tarrab’s remark apprehends constant flux and transformation as central to El-Rayess’s practice. Written after the turning point in the artist’s career in 1967, this blurb intimates that Aref El-Rayess is impossible to pin down—to give a name. He deployed a gamut of styles, forms and ideologies, both synchronically and diachronically over the span of his career. Ideologically, he was neither strictly a nationalist nor a socialist; neither a mystic nor an atheist; neither an idealist nor a materialist. At various moments throughout his lifetime, his practice was delimited and superseded by all these characterizations. For instance, in 1964, he produced a monumental metal sculpture of a Phoenician soldier—an emblem of Christian nationalism—for the Lebanese pavilion at the World Fair in New York, as well as a tapestry whose subject matter was the Greek myth of the Phoenician prince, Cadmus. 2 However, the specter of Phoenicianism in his work came and went like a flash, and his subsequent allegiance to the cause of Arab nationalism diminished with the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War. 3
Tarrab was correct in diagnosing the nonidentical character of El-Rayess’s practice—to put it plainly, that his work is not always recognizable as his ⁠ —but the political and aesthetic shift signaled in his 1968 Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) exhibition, in which The 5th of June/The Changing of Horses (hereafter, The Changing of Horses ) 4 first appeared as its central painting, was determinate for his practice. 5 El-Rayess repeatedly revisited his past styles after 1967, but he did so only through the prism of his political commitments. In a later article published in 1975 in the English-language weekly magazine, Monday Morning , Tarrab claimed that “behind the apparent contradictions, a deep coherence asserts itself in Aref’s ever-changing aesthetics: all these years he has been developing his original themes in accordance with inner necessities and the vicissitudes of his unpredictable relationship with the outside world.” 6 While it is not my intention to follow Tarrab in offering a psychobiographical account of the artist and his work, I dwell on his two statements here, which he only articulated in the 1970s, for they at once speak to the internal contradictions in his paintings after the June War, as well as to the consistency in El-Rayess’s motifs and forms over the years. 7 To grapple with the coherent, yet contradictory character of El-Rayess’s artwork, it is my contention that one has to begin from the perspective of his committed practice. The Changing of Horses —as the first painti