The Daily Star (Lebanon)
March 10, 2012 Saturday
Art that’s intriguing enough to steal
by Jim Quilty
BEIRUT: Imitation, someone once claimed, is the sincerest [form] of
flattery. If that’s so, what can be said of theft?
In 1985, it seems Alfred Junior Kettaneh (born 1937) went missing and
was never heard from again, a victim of the kidnaps that were not
unusual in Beirut in those days. One trace of Kettaneh that remains is
a 3-minute Super-8mm film he made.
A loop of the film, entitled “Lasting Images” (2003), is nowadays
playing on a television monitor at the Beirut Exhibition Center. As
the film had been neglected, the clarity of the images had degraded,
so the first minute of the film is an indistinct haze.
After a spell, discernable images momentarily emerge – a flash of
mountainside, a crane mounted on a barge, sea waves. The picture fades
again, to resolve upon two young couples, arrayed in mod outfits,
hanging out on Beirut’s seaside Corniche. They seem oblivious at
first, until one young fellow theatrically removes his jacket and
tam-o’-shanter for the camera. Then the images again grow indistinct.
“Lasting Images” is part of “How Soon is Now?” – the solo exhibition
of the Lebanese artist-filmmaking team Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil
Joreige, their first in their hometown. Though not a retrospective
show, it still gives Beirut residents an opportunity to catch up with
the artists’ formally restless, intellectually challenging oeuvre.
Much of the show consists of visual media ranging from c-print
photographs and video to audio-visual installation. There are objects
of an impressive girth.
Elevated atop a dais, the 555×295 cm handmade rug, “A Carpet” (2013),
is the latest work to emerge from Joreige and Hadjithomas’ ongoing
project “Lebanese Rocket Society: Elements for a Monument,” which has
so far generated a bouquet of works in various media – several of them
included in this show – and, later this year, a feature film.
“A Carpet” recreates on a monumental scale the commemorative
10-piastre stamp designed to honor the work of the Lebanese Rocket
Society – a scientific organization active in the ’60s.
Nearby, the hall’s south wall is dominated by “The President’s Album”
(2011), an installation comprised of 32 digital prints, 800×120 cm
each, folded and mounted on wood. If unfurled, each of these 32
components would reproduce Al-Arz 4, the most sophisticated device
that the LRS built and launched. Each discrete piece reveals a
different stage of the rocket, so that to look at them from an oblique
angle is to create the illusion of reassembling the thing.
The BEC’s space is expansive enough for an exhibition of these pieces,
one that allows individual works to breathe while also allowing them
to communicate with each other. Seen from a distance, “180 Seconds of
Lasting Images” (2006), a 408×268 cm work comprised of 4,500 4×6 cm
photograms, doesn’t look like much of anything. But as it is arrayed
alongside “A Carpet,” it takes on rug-like motifs.
Individual exhibits also invite observers to interact with them. The
limited-edition artist book “Latent Images/Diary of a Photographer”
(2010) is the latest work to have grown from the artists’
collaboration with photographer Abdallah Farah – who at one point in
the Civil War began to write descriptions of the things he’s shot on
his rolls of film rather than actually develop the film into photos.
This 1,312-page tome is inconspicuously displayed alongside prints of
some of his undeveloped film rolls (complete with descriptions).
Sitting on a table, the book is flanked by a postcard exchange between
Hadjithomas-Joreige and Farah explaining the origins of his
photographic practice and a gilt letter-opener. Many of the book’s
leaves have yet to be separated; the letter-opener stands as an
invitation to do so, and participate in uncovering Abdallah’s work.
It appears one visitor took the generosity of the photographer’s diary
too literally, when she stole two pieces of Alfred Junior Kettaneh’s
film legacy.
The fact that the degraded medium of Kettaneh’s film is at times more
present than its content makes “Lasting Images” a moving contemplation
of the ephemeral nature of the recorded image, one whose beauty
resides in the brevity of the recollection and the mundane nature of
the recorded incident.
The piece is redolent with the tentative nature of memory itself, the
fragility of the filmed image being a pervasive metaphor for memory,
and – thanks to the sliver of biographical information the artists
share about the original author of this seaside recollection – human
frailty.
Mounted on the wall alongside “Lasting Images,” the 4,500 components
of “180 Seconds of Lasting Images” represent hard copies of every
individual frame of Kettaneh’s film.
The photos are arranged chronologically to form a large rectangle,
with the frames from the visually indistinct start of the film
providing a sort of frame for the work, while the visually vague final
moments of the movie occupy the center. Between the edge and center of
the rectangle, Kettaneh’s figures emerge ephemeral from the past.
This is an art of mimesis and – since the 2006 work abuts the 2004
film (which is itself both a rendering of an incident and the document
that inspired the later work) – a transparent one.
This can be seen as a motif of “How Soon is Now?” Just as the two
works derived from Kettaneh’s film sit alongside one another, so too
is “A Carpet” enclosed by a series of photos and documents from the
1920s that recount the history of Lebanon’s one-and-only handmade
carpet factory.
The factory was the off-shoot of an orphanage that housed 1,400 girls
(refugees of the Armenian genocide), founded by a Swiss missionary and
supported by an American aid agency. As an expression of thanks, the
girls made 6×4-meter carpet for then-President Calvin Coolidge, which
is said to still reside somewhere in the White House.
Among other things, the works in “How Soon is Now?” elaborate upon an
interrogation of the image that has been evident in much of the
artists’ previous work (most obviously their 2008 feature film “Je
Veux Voir”) – both its strengths and shortcomings as a means of
conveying information as well as its possibilities in making art.
Among the videos looping in the hall, for instance, is “Barmeh/Rounds”
(2001) in which the artists’ sometime collaborator Rabih Mroue is
captured from various angles as he drives about Beirut complaining
about all the things he dislikes about what he sees. Naturally, the
image has been toyed with in such a way that rather than scenes from
Beirut, the viewer sees only a hostile glare.
Inadvertently “How Soon is Now?” may have also become a workshop for
future work. The afternoon before the artists met to discuss the
exhibition with this hack, it seems a young woman approached “180
Seconds of Lasting Images,” removed two of the 4×6 cm photos and took
them home with her.
It may be interesting (if not surprising) to note that she purloined
photos that bore relatively distinct images of the two seaside
couples, rather than taking photos of film damage.
Though they don’t yet know the identity of the woman who so loved
their work that she felt compelled to take pieces of it home with her,
the artists say they know she’s a woman because her theft was
digitally recorded. This raises the intriguing possibilities.
“The young lady … can come at night and give back the pieces and
it’ll be OK,” Hadjithomas smiled. “If not, she’ll be the victim of the
next art work.”
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s “How Soon is Now?” is up at the
BEC until April 20. For more information see
http://www.beirutexhibitioncenter.com.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Art/2012/Mar-10/166126-art-thats-intriguing-enough-to-steal.ashx#axzz1okKZIoRr