GUILTY: MOUNIR FATMI

Martina Corgnati
     

GUILTY: written in cubical characters, yet nonetheless not inelegant, this powerful word stands out on a white wall (in point of fact, “guilty”), all the more ambiguous and threatening because of the lack of specific references: who is guilty? Nearby, in the same room, are two perfectly equal tables, but upside down, one above the other. On top of them, which in one case means on top of an upside down table, is the skyline of Dubai, as in an architectural sketch. Here is Dubai then, its skyscrapers straight and upside down, as if someone is guilty of having done it, of having struck and overturned them. It is not by coincidence that more than a few of the visitors who have come to this room reserved to this work in the last Sharjah Biennale have interpreted the presence of this epithet as a direct accusation against them, and the profile of the city as that of New York.

“We are not guilty of 9/11, Arabs are not guilty of the aggression against the West, it is not true that this is an act against civility,” would be the argument of Samuel P. Huntington (this Harvard professor who in an early article postulated that a “clash of civilizations” would happen in 1993, then re-conceived the article for a more exhaustive contribution entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, 1996).
Self-defense precedes the attack and ignores information that could have come from a more attentive and less emotionally involved observer. But the work of Mounir Fatmi (born in Tangiers in 1970, now working between Tangiers and Paris) consists precisely and fundamentally in the construction of visceral, spatial and conceptual traps which tend to expose a “ bride” (it is still Maria, in the nude) constituted today principally by ideology and political-religious prejudices, sustained by desire, fear, doubts, insecurity.

To paraphrase Lacan, Fatmi brings back the phantasm of the unacceptable, capable of inducing paralysis, in other words a state of crisis as present in the West as in the East, in everyone who identifies, defensively, with either of these positions, understood as shields, schemes, ideological barriers. As Tarek El Haik wrote in 2003, the artist foregrounds in his own interventions all of the too well known paradoxes of denomination and belonging, giving place to a sort of pedagogy of the frame, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze, in which one can recognize a faraway heir of the Socratic dialectic, at least in intentions.

Nobody is excluded a priori from the game, nobody, to say this in other words, is innocent, either as producer of politics and ideology, or, more fundamentally, as a human subject grounded in language, that is, in the other. In Group Therapy, for example, a video made in France in 2003, Mounir Fatmi showed images of protestors who were protesting violently some political event relative to Arab or Muslim nations: the Gulf war, the Palestinian question, the war in Afghanistan, the embargo in Iraq; and put these connections into common practice in the course of group psychotherapy, “when individuals manage to overcome their mental blocks thanks to the support and complicity of the other demonstrators,” wrote the artist. In other words, the power of a symbolically strong “we“, as Žižek puts it, responds to the impotent catastrophe of the I (I am thinking of a recent pampthlet, Politically Incorrect Observations on Metropolitan Violence, Forum, Udine, 2007).

Even more effectively in the video-installation, A Man without a Horse, presented in Messina in 2005 in the context of a South East exhibit, curated by myself, Fatmi contrasted with violence the gratifying dynamic and aesthetically pleasing images of a horse-knight pair, involved in a horse race, with the frustrating and bizarre image of a knight equipped with everything, but deprived of shoes, and hence ridiculously condemned to go around by foot with an expression of devastated impotence on his face.

The crowning feature is the only sentence written directly on the walls: “My Father has lost his teeth; now I can bite him”, which can be attributed to a particularly self-conscious and clearheaded Oedipus, but in reality puts in the place of the father whatever we hold momentarily (or subjectively) to be necessary, the sportive quality, the West and its values, the Arab passion for horses, the dead ideology of this finished postmodern Don Quixote who does not even need to be crazy, who is literally running towards madness, to exhibit his own ridiculous being out out of place.

It is remarkable to note the lightness with which Mounir Fatmi works and which he succeeds in using as a versatile working instrument: the lightness, for example, which has allowed him to use simply the shadow of an ensemble of speakers and strategically ordered boxes to represent the skyline of New York. Indeed, recently, at the occasion of the last Biennale of Venice (in a project which derived from a preceding project in 2003, entitled Save Manhattan 01), the shadow falls on himself, a shadow from a bookshelf full of books. In both of his Save Manhattan works, the Twin Towers are still present and dominate the panorama of the city, or rather its simulacrum. The software is more important and dominates the hardware, which is forgotten and hence put aside.

This is the perennial truth of the “Pygmalion effect”, analyzed by Giorgio Agamben, the tense epiphany of the real that inspires the sculptor to fall in love easily with his own statue and all of us to superimpose the phantasm of preconceptions or interpretation on whatever real object with which we can come in contact.
Mounir Fatmi makes lightness a cipher, a strategy which permits him to embrace the inevitable “result” more easily, inevitable perhaps because of human knowledge and potentially tragic twists. These are the Twin Towers: it is a denunciation, an act of love, a declaration of guilt. Or no, it is a bookshelf. From the stereo speakers, we can listen to music.

 
 
     
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