Objectively considered, icons should not be
celebrated as either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Still, Siobhán Shilton finds
them problematic because—she thinks—they are reductive of how revolutions and
resistances unfold in practice. Such is the premise of Shilton's impressive
volume on art in the context of the Arab uprising. This revolutionary movement
started in Tunisia in December 2010 but swept to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain,
and Yemen in the following months and years. Even when this movement, otherwise
known as the Arab Spring, toppled long-reigning dictators, it has not so far
led to a smooth transition or translation of the revolutionaries' aspirations.
Hence, the role of artists is traced in this book as they accommodate the
social explosions and change.
Given
the usual channels of sense-making, famous among which is iconography, "The
significance of the uneven phenomenon which has often been named the 'Arab
Spring' is still not fully understood." (p. 1) because iconography often,
if not always, falls into either black or white portrayals and binary
stratifications. Art is, thus, supposed to encourage an informed and nuanced
engagement with the events. And icons fall short of this prerequisite for all
intents and purposes. In this volume, Shilton asks a pertinent set of
questions: How "…photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video, and
installation—forges a way between internal and external cliches? How does it
invent new aesthetics? How do these works call for alternative critical
approaches?" all for propagating an art that does not subscribe to
propaganda. Irrespective of how we look at icons, they essentialize what is
usually considered a fluid phenomenon, "…places these revolutions outside
history and sets up Arabs as apolitical" (p. 2). hence, the call for an
aesthetic form that exceeds the iconizing—Bouazizi's iconography, a single act
that unseats a dictator! Therefore, "My focus, by contrast, is on art that
negotiates a way between a range of icons, including these revolutionary
(or anti-revolutionary) bodies or objects; that is, art that reveals the
unsaid, the unheard, or the unseen of 'revolution'…." (p. 11) By exceeding
icons, Shilton means those artistic works that
target the senses instead of the merely visual. She seems to be sharing Slavoj Zizek's
concern about the post-euphoria phase or the next day of the revolution. That
is why she addresses only those pieces whose preoccupation is the " 'reordering'
space, [as they] challenge sites of power through elements such as framing, camerawork,
editing, and corporeal movement." (21)
The work
lies in four chapters, each extensively addressing one form. The first two zoom-on
pieces are exhibited in museums and galleries. Galleries do not restrict the
second two as they have been displayed to the wider public through social
media. The first one addresses a technique founded by Marcel Duchamp
(1887-1968) known as the "Infra-thin Critique": Shilton brings Duchamp's
technique to enable art goers to distinguish and, at a second level, negotiate
the relationship between the visible and invisible. The chapter elaborates on
distinctions that resist essentialization by exploring Nicène Kossentini's
video, "Le Printemps arabe" (2011), and later versions of this work,
among other works by other artists. Shilton zooms in on what she labels the 'poetics
of absence' as instantiated through the layering of colours or sculptural 'casts'
along with transparent materials. Other than encouraging a transnational
outlook, Shilton finds that reworking modernist themes and techniques can be an
opening for "…the transhistorical and multidirectional." (p. 32)
In the
second chapter, "Contingency and Resistance: Exceeding Icons through
Matter and Motion Chance Aesthetics", Shilton insists that contingency is
anti-iconic par excellence, hence its value in resisting essentialization. Aïcha
Filali's sculpture pieces: Bourgeons en palabres (Buds in Discussion)
and Bourgeons d'i (n)vers (Opposing Buds). Similar works by other
Tunisian and Syrian artists are studied too. Decomposing portraits of deposed
dictators (and other icons) such as Ben Ali's are meant to communicate the
limitations of power.
Chapter
three follows on Contingent Encounters as the pieces considered encourage
comparisons with revolutionary situations elsewhere. Shilton calls these
situations: transnational practices of resisting through social media. Unlike
how participatory art is classically viewed, Shilton insists on those pieces
that reiterate artisans' work (weavers) with an artist in a collective ensemble,
such as Majd Abdel Hamid's mural titled: Mohammed Bouazizi (2011). The
second part addresses how spectators reorder space through the generation of
alternative iconography. Mouna Jemal Siala and Wadi Mhiri's Parti Facelook /
Parti Facelike (2012-13).
To
further challenge iconography, chapter four addresses the interface of bodies
as they can be ambivalent and defy easy categorizations. The interface, in a
nutshell, is based on a collage of various images or scripts, even icons, so
that they start evoking alternative meanings and stories in contradistinctions
with the ones specified by orthodox narratives of the uprisings as celebrated
in media or by politicians. Among several examples, Shilton studies Lalla Essaydi's
Bullets and Bullets Revisited (2012) along with Majida Khattari's Liberté, j’écrirai ton nom
(Freedom, I Will Write Your Name) (2012). A dancing performance occurs in
markets, transportation junctions, and the least expected spaces of downtown
Tunis. Unused to confusing spectacles, crowds react differently to the phenomenon.
Espousing
the ultra-conservative, if a not reactionary journalist, Rami G. Khouri,
particularly when the latter claims that "There is no single, unifying
theme to the Arab Uprising", as a rationale for her approach to the book
epiphenomenon (The Arab Uprisings), one wonders why Shilton trust certain
renderings and choose to overlook diametrically-opposite others, hence, how the
book does not answer the criteria for its selection of the impressive body of
artistic works. Why not, for the sake of example, Mohamed Mounir's song "Ezay"
(2011) or "Ragg'een" by the group, Eskenderalla, knowing that,
along with several works, they do not hinge their message on icons and do not
cheaply excite listeners as they address the sense, perhaps more than the ones
Shilton select. This leads us to observe that every work which pretends to
connect with the Arab Uprisings, even when it dialectically opposes these
uprisings' destiny, is chosen and extensively commented on. Khattari's
allegedly ambivalent dance spectacles aim to distract and confuse, not to
invite and discuss. Not for nothing, the dancing spectacle starts and closes in
markets, with an eye on smoothing everyday shopping and transactions regardless
of the crisis and distracting people from tracing the causes and drawing the
essential consequences, which are how counterrevolution answers through hyperinflation.
Meanwhile, non-spectacular and truly
subversive works are ephemerally mentioned and never studied. It is not until
the end that Siobhan's work is seen as a field of testing/experimentation of
the infra-thin, chance aesthetics, participatory art, and corporeal images. The
author is less interested in how the selected works communicate the revolution's
strongest or weakest and more engulfed in how the expressive techniques
deployed in each artistic piece advance the infra-thin and other aesthetic
formulations. And here lies the problem of projection, the presumption that theory
exists in a realm separate from history's real movement. Other than a
depressive narcissism, readers cannot seize the benefit(s), if any, from seeing
Marcel Duchamp, Michelangelo, or any other celebrity artist reproduced in the
streets or the galleries of Tunis, Cairo, or Damascus.
The book
is overly technical to the point that it is disorienting in its technicality. Does
one wonder what is behind its penchant for reproducing the revolution at its
weakest? That is producing those situations when disagreements between
revolutionaries emerge. Has anyone told you that Gaddafi's two-scores rule
ended with a tsunami or that Bouteflika's bid for a fifth mandate was reversed
by his democratic inclination, not an incendiary revolution? The antinomy
against icons and iconicity, which is how the book is premised, is motivated by
a stigma against division and diversity. But division and diversity, even
polarity of opinions, are the natural consequences of defunct regimes and decades-old
orders. The real motive for dispositions against icons is how icons facilitate the
historical transmission of past struggles and victories. Similarly, what if the
divergent opinions stem from historical outlooks, that is, between those radical
elements of society against those who are reformists and desire only applying
some make-up for the unjust and enslaving order?
Art, in
a nutshell, expresses the reversal of the reversal, the alienating world order
that corrupts the senses and which needs to be ultimately abolished for the
process of emancipation to set in. Shilton reclaims those works of art she
thinks are more revolutionary than abolishing them, mostly to celebrate them
and develop an identitarian affiliation with fetishistic outlooks that keep
alienation in place. While the select works of art variably criticize the dictatorial
powers, commodity fetishism remains intact because it is never questioned.
Similarly, portraying the Arab Spring as a movement of a population stuck
between modernity and tradition is a classical veering into the culturalist
approaches, which are anti-historical and counterrevolutionary.
Overlooking
the author's disposition against icons even when knowing it is icons that
galvanize action and sharpen intentions, the celebration of the transnational
is the most bothersome. Transnational, as conceived under the current global
order, not only does not but never propagate toward the universal.
Transnational is a celebration of parochialism and enclosures—a process similar
to international cocktails or Parisian banlieues that facilitates the
circulation of goods and capital. Transnational is revolutionary only because it
seeks the explosion/forced openings of national markets and cultures to give leverage
for multinationals to exhort profit from previously protected markets. A true revolutionary
work of art, however, targets the fetishization of interiorities through
culturalist approaches. Culturalists target the few remaining defence
mechanisms, opening the way for the vassalization by capital with the same
vehemence culturalists fetishize icons under the pretext of exotism. Transhistorical
outlooks are anti-historical. Being the privileged weapon in the arsenal of
capital, a transhistorical subject is forced to scorn intergenerational history
and its legacy of resistance so that capital forces flood the few remaining
vestiges of defence.
Fouad Mami
Université d’Adrar (Algeria)
