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Introduction and Overview
The image in feature film and advertising managed to modulate and modify the behavior of the average Middle East citizen towards self and society in just few decades. Since the early days of cinema the criteria of the "icon of the day" were in continuous evolution and metamorphosis. Simple ambitions were traded for the continuous search of more sophisticated patterns of life that would approach her/him to silver screen heroes.
Like in Western societies, in the forties and fifties, besides the struggle for independence, this citizen followed his/her icons to the dance floors. In the sixties neckties and suits were taken off, following the May 1968 movements in the West, that had equal echoes in the Middle East, with socio-political changes, political adventure, experimenting along the way with a whole spectrum of ideologies from right to left and vice versa.
In the seventies, after the defeat of 1967 (also known in western literature as the 6-days Arab-Israeli war), the collapse of the Pan-Arab ideologies and the rise of the extreme religious right wing was penetrated by an alternative stream of thought in Middle East societies in closed communities; those streams, mostly secular, were characterized by nihilistic traits that led to behaviors in a direction to copycat "deeds", from Clockwork Orange to Saturday Night Fever.
Today, and after three decades of effervescent seventies, the effect of the parabolic satellite culture dominated by Western/American media and advertising in the last two decades is undeniably omnipresent today in the everyday behavior of societies of the Middle East. (1)
The new ferocious audio-visual material of the budding consumer goods mass culture propelled the previously slowly-progressive societies of the Middle East into a global visual culture that led to a dramatic confusion of identities, especially among the young, and a state of cultural ambivalence of love-hate towards the West. (i)
Contrary to the gloomy picture described in a media dominated by a massive imagery of new “war aesthetics” and now-taken-for-granted “aesthetics of violence”, the confrontation/juxtaposition between the established, near-sacred, values and the newly “penetrating” consumer goods behavior change resulted not only in terms like “collision of cultures”, but also a new and interesting artistic expression by the local artists, carrying an amalgam of East-West visual alphabets of a strong hybrid nature that attempts to probe new values of visual nature capable of bridging and understanding the other.
The look of today's icons diffused through satellite imaging and other printed or aired media has dramatically changed. Icons and their "accessories" like cars, fancy attire, sunglasses, cigarettes, handguns, cell phones and other gadgets became marketed as paradigm of trendy life. Everyone living in the world today is born during the "kinetic image age", most of the world's inhabitants have been exposed one day or the other to a diffused image, and be it TV, cinema, or satellite. (2).
The power of the image is manifested through the behavior of children and adolescents. Some images mature and over-exist to become after a while a déjà vu phenomenon, and that is when the image is most powerful.
Stories created by images assume a more serious responsibility when they become a prototype or a case study, where simple laymen adopt certain behaviors and reactions in I-have-seen-it-somewhere reaction.
"Model answers" or "perfect solutions" are stored as references in the memory of humans.
At some point of history such model answers or ideal solutions came right out of the bible or Quran or other holy sources. Today with decades of cumulative social and political effervescence, and the subsequent change of values, model answers come from film, and from whoever has a louder voice, be it a right wing religious platform, or a nationalist body.
Even the most sacred became marketable: tapes and catalogues of preachers speeches are packaged and sold alongside belly dance VCDs and VHSs and pop singers cassettes, in grand surface commercial outlets as well as in simple cassette kiosks in the corner of downtown Cairo streets. (3)
A Historical Present Not Like Any Other
Many Arab artists working today spent their childhood, adolescence and adulthood surrounded by stress: military confrontations, unexpected political landmarks, and the subsequent effervescent socioeconomic consequences that lead to civil strife, migration and immigration.
The Arab society was reshaped according to continuous changes since the mid-seventies, losing in the way some of its Orient character, and acquiring instead other traits, some of which are part of the globalization process, others are simply deviations towards the consumer goods culture. The impact of the rather rapid change can be seen and felt in the works of artists living and working today in the region.
More and more artists today lost interest in issues like the local authentic versus the contemporary, or the intellectual versus the aesthetic. Most of the contemporary artists who lead progressive international careers tackle more challenging issues, in practices that involve documentation, experimentation and docu-fiction, in art projects that raise questions more than they provide answers, forcing the viewer to get entangled in along process of self-questioning.
Come September 11, 2001 and the whole world became concerned by issues of East – West conflict, reasons for gaps and how to bridge; artists of the Middle East who always claimed negligence by Western art systems came to light with the opportunity to express and be heard.
We are able to see clearly the art produced by artists working today in the Middle East as influenced by commercial images which are omnipresent in the newly formed consumer goods-oriented Arab societies. Artists use extensively interdisciplinary art combinations of painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation performance and sound.
Symbols and icons imposed by the image culture are more and more used extensively in the artworks, a fact that can be directly compared to the art of the sixties in the West, particularly the Pop Art and post- Fluxus trends.
Performance is mingled with photography and back-drop projections using experimental sound, reminiscent of John Cage , Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono’s collaborative fluxus happenings, while painting and collage techniques of Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Kitaj, or Kurt Schwitters are found in part or in whole of one work or the other of an artist or groups of artists who may or may not be aware of these “big names”.
Observations to Probe
Many of the Middle East artists who lead international careers and fit into the international art systems today use interdisciplinary visual approaches; many of those use the image in all its forms, kinetic or still, to attain required effects; the images are a combination of documentary, fiction, film and amateur footage, all mingled in experimentation to create certain individual specificities; text is used sometimes in separate frames or dissolved over images. It is difficult to categorize such works: film, experimental film, video art, experimental video or other.
The effect of such practices on concepts like truth, fiction and memory is immediate. Laura U Marks, theorist and curator of independent and experimental media, sheds some light on the matter in her book The Skin of the Film: intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses, arguing that "intercultural cinema is characterized by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge. (4)
As a result, such films "draw on many cultural traditions, many ways of representing memory and experience, and synthesize them with contemporary Western cinematic practices", Marks continues (4).
The aim of this research is to probe and question such observation in the practices of two working artists from the Middle East region, namely Akram Zaatary (Lebanon) and Mounir Fatmi (Morocco).
Case One: Akram Zaatari
Filmmaker and film curator Samirah El-Kassim believes that Zaatari’s video works move beyond the preoccupations with history and memory that predominated documentary discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, and that his works continually pose questions about constructions of truth, reality, fiction and subjectivity, on both the formal and conceptual levels. (5)
This question of categories persistently occurs with Zaatari’s work, who categorically insist that he is not a video artist, and that his work is not even experimental.
The depiction of personal testimonies, often the substance of filmic attempts to reconstruct the past, are themselves subverted, and their mechanisms of fabrication peeled away and exposed.
Zaatari attempts to reconstruct a relationship with the past, nasty past like the Lebanese war’s aftermath or a glamorous past nostalgic in nature. In several of his works, Zaatari juxtaposes the glamorous days of Egypt and Lebanon, both Arab Hollywoods at a certain station of history: this relationship is manifested by the presence of Egyptian film stars and singers, their photographs, voices and songs in many of Zaataris projects.
Zaatari's background and involvement in photography, television and the art world have led to his becoming a sort of collector and exhibitor, a time travelling archivist. This is most apparent in the films Her and Him: Van Leo (1997) and This Day (2003), in which Zaatari explores the utterances of the photographic image, while at the same time drawing attention to the capacity of film and stock footage as a mechanism able to manipulate, reconstruct, and examine the past (5).
At once exposing what has conventionally been a matter of social shame and private concealment, the figure of the grandmother whose nude photograph was taken by Van Leo, the Egyptian photographer of Armenian heritage, in 1959, also mediates the temporal lapse between the real, documentary images filmed by Zaatari of Van Leo the photographer, and Van Leo's own self portraits, taken when he was much younger.
Zaatari uses text frames in the video, as if he is creating chapters in a book, or to close a mood to take us to another. Stock images from Van Leo’s archive
As numerous theorists on the subject of photography have pointed out, one can contemplate at length the ways in which photography preserves and captures a moment in time. Perhaps it is through film that photography ages (5).
Zaatari’s starting point is to understand sight/vision/scene, literally, as a means and instrument of communication; hence his interest in those who use vision and visual communication to produce images, those who are responsible for the making of advertising and television programs: today, reporters, cameramen and directors, website designers and online communication managers and, in the past, studio and street photographers (6).
It is perhaps for this reason that Zaatari dedicated considerable energy (and artistic efforts) to documentary publications and video projects about historical documentare photographers, such as the Lebanese Hashem El Madani and Armenian Egyptian Van Leo, the subject of the docu-fiction video, Her , Him: Van Leo (2001) (6).
It is in All is Well on the Border (1997) on the other hand, that questions of space, so easily transgressed in Van Leo and This Day, that Zaatari practices self-reflective documentary filmmaking, and a tribute to French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1977) (6).
Demonstrating an alternative form of imagination and storytelling, Zaatari depicts, here in direct reference to Godard, a young boy reciting poetry of resistance. Children too construct that imaginary space in the past, gathering stories from elders and drawing images of elsewhere, of home. Interspersed with three accounts of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, a voiceover reads letters written by an 18-year-old named Neruda to his mother. Only at the end does Zaatari peel away the layers to reveal the characters being guided in rehearsals with their lines, or reading from the autocue used by TV news announcers to help them look to the camera while reading.
Stock images and stock footage plus the use of still photography enrich the overall effect and enhances the visuals, while the story is completed and framed by the actual reading of the protagonist.
Many of Zaatary’s stories have an unmistakable documentary form (6).
In This Day, the stock shots of Syrian desert are juxtaposed with images of modern-day Beirut, personal stock images and diary notes of the civil war, stock images of planes and cable cars either taken by Zaatari himself or by others, archival photographs, footage and sound bites from the internet and television all brought into the mix to create the narrative of this work.
The amalgum of stock still images, sound and stock footage with the colorful post-production work creates a powerful effect that leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.
In a 2006 interview with Tim Welfare (6), Zaatari speaks of his complex creative / filmmaking process: “from the beginning i wanted this work to sum up my relation to different groups of images and sound and video recordings that i had been collecting and studying. From the beginning i knew it would end up a heterogenous work, where these collections are tied with different threads. I conceived the video as a container for them. I was inhabited by these images and sounds” (6).
By saying that he had conceived the video as a container for his stock recordings of video, sound and stock images “I do not mean that the work was pre-scripted, on the contrari, i was opening up axes, heading in different directions pursuing elements of study. I delayed even thinking of binding everything together until post-production. I would say the film took shape while editing, not because it is a collage, but because writing this film was like doing lab work, waiting to go through a synthesis phase” (6).
To Zaatari and in his own expression, he had always found sound and images two distinct practices in the past; a perception that changed dramatically for This Day and the videos that followed. After all, he always believed that films get written, or re-written during editing, in the sense that there is always an unpredictable shift that takes the film somwhere else (6).
The mix of text frames, stock images, sound and footage helped Zaatari in projects like This Day to perceive a “formation of an iconographic landscape that can testify to conflicts” (6). In his own words: “I find interest in analyzing images circulating on the net; images of mobilization, commercials and anti-commercials, to say that in situations of war the images that tend to circulate are images of mobilization” (6).
Perhaps one of the most successful synthesis of the polyvalent complexity of the flux of history that Zaatari researches can be found in the 2003 feature, This Day. It is indeed difficult to describe the subject of this video: stock documentary images taken by the anthropologist and historian Jibrail Jabbur in the Syrian desert, are juxtaposed to another series of still shots from a new trip to Syria taken by the artist on the scene of the crime. The particular narrative then takes a sudden spatial shift and an instantaneous return to a Beirut with water and ships almost suspended in the horizon, the war hovering in the background, the past and present conflict somewhere nearby, all merged and confused by a repetition of textual continual email messages (7).
The computer screen shows stratified images in the background of a local landscape composed of a few objects, a table and some items placed on the table. The landscape is anything but static; in it (the landscape) time stays still in contrast with the fast sequence of images and text messages/frames that pass in the monitor window. In another shot an envelope falls in the water of a glass receptacle and the camera stops and does a slow take in a virtuoso move, on waves of color that compose, decompose and recompose like fibrous traces of an abstract watercolor portrait. At the end, a new equilibrium of color appears, as if the the beginning of a new fragment of open and unconcluded history (8).
Conclusive thoughts On Zaatari practice
Akram Zaatari has always lived in lebanon and his work is about private versus public time in post war (and iter-war) Lebanon.
Detailed practice of Akram Zaatari where script and filming are mingled with text, stock images and stock media footage is a conspicuous example of personal contemporary practices; both technique and concept are interrelated and influence each other in every step of the process / making of the art work.
In Zaatari’s projects, the shot footage is evidently not sufficient for the artist to deliver his message; he enhances the visual impact of his videos by adding text, stock footage and images to create a personal narrative; through his personal recipe of mixed visual practice, be it text, still image or media stock, he succeeds in accentuating the drama of his film sequence through undeniable taints of sarcasm and irony; a clear message is identified and confirmed by the textual frames added to the moving image.
Case two: Mounir Fatmi
Born in Morocco in 1970, Mounir Fatmi shares his life between Paris and Tangiers.
Fatmi's work can be of political nature while sustaining attractive aesthetic visuals. The question of "the other", an external being, is a permanent element of his creation.
Having started as a painter in the late eighties, and moving later exclusively to the mediums of video and video- installation, Fatmi can be regarded to belong to a category of Arab artists who maintain a balance between the experimental concept and established film aesthetics.
Like Zaatari and other Middle East artists who work in video and film, Fatmi lived the early years of the satellite parabolic culture, and the massive impact of advertising and media / visual communication. A phenomenon studied by notorious philosophers in the past thirty years.
Many works from Jean Baudrillard to Marie-Josée Mondzain, Susan Sontag, Edward Said or Eric Michaud, have highlighted the strong selective and manipulative capacity of images used in propaganda, art, and publicity, and also the scandalous commonplace and indecent virtualization of violence and death through mediatization.
We are constantly abused by information, truncated and falsified through multiple manipulations of which some are obviously voluntary, resulting from a purely political, economical, or cultural cynicism, whereas others would seem to arise from the distraction or incompetence of the broadcasters (9).
Fatmi’s use of text to enhance the video narrative in text video-frames is juxtaposed with statements on the walls in several of his video-installations.
"My father has lost all his teeth, now I can bite him” was the wall-phrase that greets the viewer in a couple of venues where his video-installation was shown: in Mescina, Scicily with Martina Corgnati’s Mediterranean Encounters (10), and in the Africa Remix exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, both shows in 2005.
The public is forced to pass through the bars of the sculptural installation, and several obstacles on the floor, in order to see the video room.
For the viewer, the problem is no longer how to see an artwork, but how to leave it. Thus one begins to understand that despite its aesthetic side, the work of Mounir Fatmi with its texts, archival imagery and sometimes layered sound often functions like a trap (11).
The “architects" in the title alludes to such forces in our society as religion/God, politicians and the role reality and simulacra play in our lives. Several questions are posed: how to resist the fascination that lies within the machine of spectacle and accept “true reality”? who are these architects who construct our environment and can change our perception of everyday life? (11)
Upon entering the gallery one is immediately confronted by Obstacles, a sculpture made out of wood poles usually used as bars in horse jumps. Their placement within the space forces the visitor to navigate around them in order to enter the gallery.
In many ways Fatmi’s obstacles can be read as “conversation starters or props for opening dialogue”. They were presented in different institutional venues in recent years and under different configurations, becoming a recurrent theme in Fatmi’s work (11).
Skyline (2007) is a reflection of such modern cities as Tokyo, New York, Dubai and Johannesburg, which the artist has visited over the years.
Using blank VHS tapes to literally build up his fictitious cityscape, Fatmi’s Skyline becomes a poetic frieze of recent urban histories. Voided of details, the minimalist aesthetic of this sculpture captures the homogenous nature of contemporary mega-cities that are becoming copies of one another. The black tape that is pulled out and streams beneath the VHS cassettes becomes their forgotten memories and their history in flux.
Fatmi’s sculptures speak about the fear of failure and the pressure of the society over its individuals. The texts on the wall resonate and echo the same texts on the video screen, literally smothering the viewer with messages, reminiscent of the new visual consumer goods culture inflicted, and propagated by contemporary film, media, advertising, and news gears.
In his 2007 video installation Out of History (or History of History) Fatmi asks: What happens to an icon when divorced from the moment of history that made him that icon?
The icon in Out of History is David Hilliard, a founding member and Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
Back in the 1960s, in their day, the Black Panthers represented for revolutionaries around the world the ideal of contesting an established power system, revolting against segregation, discrepancies of wealth and power, and the total mess the American society were going through after the Kennedy assassination (JFK’s): political assassinations, segregation, traffic of power, corruption, mafia, military industrial complex, Vietnam war, political lies of the entirety of the American foreign policy.
Fatmi is not as interested in the history of the movement as he is in uncovering what Black Panther revolutionaries have become forty years later. In Fatmi's video, David Hilliard has aged but remains tied to his place in American history (12).
Apart from the video screen loaded with authentic documents, typed texts, all superimposed on the image, and an original music score made for the video, the video-installation room itself is papered on the outside with documents, many censored, collected from the U.S. Government through the Freedom of Information Act. Photographs from the 60s, provided by the Huey P. Newton Foundation in Oakland, California provide further context. He then takes Hilliard 'out of history’ inside the installation space (12).
Fatmi uses text, stock archival images, TV film footage as well as the predecessor of camcorders: the-now digitized 8 mm footage, to construct visual spaces that aim to free the viewers from their preconceptions of politics and religion, and allows them to contemplate the subject in his particular and very individual way. His practice is representative of many video artists working today in the Arab Middle East who are influenced by film, advertising and new media. (13)
Conclusive thoughts on Fatmi’s practice
Fatmi currently lives in Paris; his recent work refers mostly to people in diaspora, immigrants, relation between people in the same timeframe but who have different past and dramatically different destiny.
Much of the work is about power. Nearly always we notice that the textual frames in the videos of Mounir Fatmi play an indispensable role in the story line of each work; it is suggested that the artists believes that the shot footage is not sufficient to express the communicated message, or perhaps not sufficiently confirmed; the addition of texts and stock footage supports the delivered message and confirms the context of the creative concept. Like in silent movies, Fatmi, uses textual frames to insinuate or confirm an idea with the viewer.
Fatmi takes one step ahead and takes his illustrative texts to the gallery walls to guide the viewer to the creative concept.
The added stock footage plays two roles: to confirm the idea insinuated, and to add to the drama of the timeline narrative.
Manuscript Conclusion and proposed solutions
In this research we attempt to study the technical practice of two Arab Middle East artists who in their work adopt the use of texts, stock images, film and media footage to enhance and accentuate the visual message.
The two artists researched in this essay, Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) and Mounir Fatmi (morocco), both live and work between the Middle East and the West and both combine in their practices Eastern and Western influences and concepts. Both are inspired at one point in time by Middle East film industry, and both are influenced by contemporary advertising, new media visual effects, the product of the newly formed cultures of globalization.
In their practices, both artists use stock images, archival images, stock footage and sound to enhance the narrative of their video / film projects. Their works comment upon social conditions, while challenging conventional forms of viewing.
The video practices and narrative of both artists are both unique and has a definite experimental taste that defies the regular classification of genre due to their combination of visual communication elements, especially texts and stock material.
While Zaatari, an artist who belongs to a generation of artists who have matured in what is often termed postwar Lebanon is driven in his practice by war, memory and nostalgia, Fatmi, an artist who started moving out of his Morocco over a decade ago is driven by memory, identity and migration.
The objectives of this manuscript is to study the sufficiency of the video shoot alone versus the complementary use of additional text and stock material to support the visual message, as well as to compare various results for the use of additional material to the shot footage, and finally to study the various ways by which the use of additional stock material can enhance (or dilute) the visual message.
In the silent movie years, the use of text was indispensable to enhance the narrative; today after 100 years of universal film, we think that we may still need sometimes some text or supportive visual material to direct us to more complex and non-traditional pieces of film, especially those structured around personal experiences of war, identity and migration.
Akram Zaatari has always lived in lebanon and his work is about private versus public time in post war (and iter-war) Lebanon.
Fatmi currently lives in Paris; his recent work refers mostly to people in diaspora, immigrants, relation between people in the same timeframe but who have different past and dramatically different destiny.
Much of the work is about power.
Fatmi’s use of text is deeply ironic, like an out of sight voice suggesting solutions to the audience, while Zaatari’s use of text is narrative; something like a loop, sacrificing the visual narrative to introduce another more direct and straight forward verbal one.
Through analysis of both practices we claim to have identified some reasons behind their combined use of visual communication material, very much reminiscent of silent movies culture: textual frames between shot film footage are used for one to three functions: to identify, to clarify or to extend/accentuate; to identify the idea on screen, or to clarify a thought or a situation, and to extend the dramatic effect and express suspense, irony or sarcasm to frame the delivered visual material.
We think that both artists studied in this essay propose an alternative visual formula that is equal to, perhaps sometimes more powerful than the regular standard recipe of filmmaking.
We claim that the artists’ use of a combination of text/image adopted by both artists succeeds in complementing their narrative of the videos/film.
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* Khaled Hafez is a Cairo-based visual artist; International group shows include: Gwangzhou Tiennale, Guandong Museum of Art, China, 2008; Cairo Scapes, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, 2008; Neighbours in Dialogue, Collegium Artisticum Gallery, Skenderija Centre, Sarajevo, Bosnia, 2008; Om Kalsoum la quatrième pyramide, Institut du Mode Arabe, Paris, France, 2008; Collectiepresentatie XXI, MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, 2008; Trilogie Méditerranéenne: from Athens to Marseille to Cairo, Palais des Arts, Marseille, France, 2008; Italia: Arab Artists Between Italy & the Mediterranean, Italian Cultural Institute, Damascus, Beirut & Cairo, 2008; Gates of the Mediterranean, Palazzo Piozzo, Rivoli,Turin, Italy, 2008; Contact Zone, Bamako Museum of Art, Bamako, Mali 2007; The Present Out of the Past Millennia: Contemporary Art of Egypt, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany, 2007; Recognize, Contemporary Platform, London, UK, 2007; This Day, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2007; Sharjah Biennale, UAE, 2007; Without Title, MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, 2007; Neighbours in Dialogue, Istanbul, Turkey, 2007; Singapore Biennale, Singapore 2006; Dakar Biennale, Senegal 2006; Images of the Middle East, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2006; Mediterranean Encounters, Messina, Italy 2005; Dakar Biennale, Senegal, 2004, (Francophonie Prize); Cairo Modern Art in Holland, Fortiscircus Theater, Den Haag, Holland, 2001.
www.khaledhafez.net
khaledhafez@gmail.com
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