There is a certain impossibility scripted in writing about Lebanon, more specifically about Beirut. The term »Lebanisation«, indicating a »tearing apart from within«, has entered political discourse as a generic term marking civil war and blind violence. Yet trying to construct a narrative of impressions or perform a cultural analysis after a three-week curatorial visit to Beirut confronts me with a »Lebanisation« of meaning: the semantic fabric that endows value and meaning is ruptured and torn apart at the seams. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in the case of Beirut it is all too easy and seductive to resort to the cliché pitfalls: the lamented former glory of the pearl/cultural heart/Paris of the Middle East and the atrocities of a 15-year war-torn hell on earth. In between these two extremes there seems to be a huge void which induces a semantic paralysis in the poor ajnabi (foreigner) desperately trying to make sense of it all. By corollary this results in an analytical hyperactivity on the part of the wayward traveller, which Beirut as a city, a cultural construct, a historic wound, seems to defy and resist. For every narrative there seems to be a counter-narrative; for every interrogation of history, questions seem to accumulate instead being answered; for every bullet-ridden building reconstructed or torn down there seems to be a spectre haunting it; for every political discussion drawing to a close, there is a new one beginning. It is against this backdrop that I am trying to compress my observations of cultural praxis taking place in Beirut. By default my impressions only brush upon a surface level, capturing only a few fleeting observations, yet as is the case with Beirut, there is a continuous tension between surface and what lies beneath the surface. Many will claim that post-war Beirut is only surface, with its newly rebuilt downtown area and funky bars and restaurants in Gemmayzeh and Monot Street. But perhaps it is precisely in between surface and depth that meanings can be found. Many of the contemporary artists seem to have incorporated a strategy of surface excavation within their work, from the mundane to the profound. Their practices attempt to scratch at a collective cultural and historical amnesia, which is not unusual for societies in a phase of post-trauma.
I arrive in Beirut exactly one day after the funeral of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri , and am greeted by a city dressed in mourning: photographs, posters, banners sporting Hariri’s countenance are everywhere. People are still in a state of shock and grief: after more than a decade of relative calm, this assassination has for many conjured memories of the Civil War. Memories they have been trying to suppress. I feel a chill down my spine when driving past a sign spelling »Shatila« when entering the city. Earlier, at the airport exchange office, I am puzzled by the fact that US dollars are just as widely used as a currency as Lebanese pounds. My bewilderment increases when I notice that the Arabic spoken is interlaced with French and English, and the French interlaced with Arabic and English, and the English with French and Arabic. The Lebanese modality appears to operate by proxy, whether it is linguistic or economical. Unfortunately the political system adheres to this sentiment as well: it is often claimed that Lebanese soil has always been the battle ground for proxy wars fought by foreign forces, including the civil war which devastated the country from 1975 to 1990 . How then – within a context where signifiers are so easily switched, resulting in a semantic laissez-faire, can we talk about aesthetics and the situated convergences of the latter with socio-politics? Nathalie Fallaha, a graphic designer and professor at the Lebanese American University (L.A.U.), shows in her project »A Typographical Journey into Multi-Lingualism« (1999) how the performance of particular speech acts either in Arabic, French or English are closely intertwined with identitarian issues (read sectarian alignment). Fallaha conducted interviews with prominent intellectuals and politicians, and queried their relation to language. She then developed a linguo-typographical visualisation which expresses a linguistic (identity) portrait of each interviewee. These kinds of exercises in mapping are strategic tools for reflection in a society that has been – and still is – deeply divided over confessionalist issues. A more tactical approach to territorial mapping is to be found in Marwan Rechmaoui's installation »Beirut Caoutchouc« (2003), a huge map of Beirut manufactured from car tires, on which the audience is invited to walk. Hopping within seconds from one part of the city to the other, the installation recalls how, during the war, crossing from the Western part (primarily Muslim) to the East (primarily Christian) and vice versa was an arduous and risky endeavor comprising long waits at checkpoints and sniper gunfire. Even now the easiest and fastest way of getting from one part of the city to the other involves car rides over connecting bridges. What Rechmaoui’s rubber map also does, in contradistinction to regular city maps, is that its monochromatic grayness, devoid of any markers (hotels, banks, mosques, churches, tourist attractions, etc.), wipes out the city’s fragmented demeanor pertaining to class, religion, and ethnicity. You can literally stand with one foot in East Beirut and the other foot in West Beirut, leaving your footprint with equal weight on both city parts.
Trying to trace my steps to downtown Beirut - or Beirut Central District as it is officially known - becomes a quotidian routine as I make my way to Martyrs’ Square to join the daily demonstrations. The »Cedar Revolution« , as it is dubbed by the foreign press, or the »Gucci Revolution«, as it is nicknamed by local sceptics, saw many well-heeled Beirutis – who are often accused of political phlegmaticness – take to the streets carrying the national flag, chanting »Syria Out«, »Freedom, Sovereignty, Independence«, and »Truth, Freedom, National Unity«. Stickers were dispensed and banners were raised demanding »The Truth« about Hariri’s killing. Concepts such as »the truth« and its subsequent fabrication and mediation acquire a bitter taste in a country which has experienced first-hand how pliable absolute notions become in a context of conflict. It is exactly the inadequacy of media to convey the greater humanistic values - so to speak - that concerns video and performance artist Rabih Mroué. In his critically acclaimed piece »Looking for a Missing Employee«, Mroué makes the disappearance of an employee from the Ministry of Finance his subject. The vehicle for his performance are a series of notebooks wherein Mroué collected every possible newspaper article about the case of the missing Mr. Suleiman, who allegedly also stole billions of LBP from the Ministry. The audience views a three-channel projection. The first shows the drawing board of an artist sitting amidst the audience, who is sketching live diagrams of the fluctuation of information in the various newspaper articles. The latter quantifies and visualises how relative »the truth« is. The second projection shows Mroué sitting in the back and reading to the audience from the newspaper articles, whilst the third projection consists of a close-up of the notebooks. The set-up signifies a triptych of mediation. As the performance unfolds, and as facts are presented and contested over and over again, the absurdity of looking for the missing employee and, by corollary, the truth, becomes apparent. A stark critique of journalistic practices, corruption, mediation and communication, this play is a case in point that »between the truth and a lie, there is but a hair«. In a similar vein, his video »Face A/Face B« (2001) takes as its base a cassette recording of 1978, sent to his brother studying in the USSR. Whilst using a fragment of personal history, the work also deconstructs the medium (video) that Mroué is currently using, whilst highlighting the limitations or the merits of having sound without images or images without sound. It is clear that any medium used to convey intimacy is inadequate.
Scepticism aside, the side effect of the massive turnout of protesters and student sit-ins at Martyrs’ Square was a reclaiming of the downtown area as public space. Sitting on the former Green Line dividing East and West, Martyrs’ Square (the pre-war heart of the city) and its surroundings were reduced to a wasteland, until after the war Rafiq Hariri and his Solidere construction company embarked on what Saree Makdisi has termed »one of the largest urban development projects in the post-modern world« : Solidere aimed to »reconstruct« and »restore« the city centre to its »original« state, but what it does de facto is impose a nostalgic narrative that never was, spiced up with global capitalism. A stroll through Beirut Central District amounts to a surreal, if not Disneyfied, experience: the buildings are too artificially slick, the colours too bright, the scars of war covered and bandaged by too much paint and plaster, yet most telling of all is the utter lack of people in the streets. Beirut CD is one of the most »controlled«areas of the city, sanitised of all undesirables human, historical, and architectural. Resorting again to a material metaphor , one can state that a »Lebanisation«of architecture has occurred: buildings are literally gutted from the inside out, leaving empty skeleton shells which are stripped of their pasts. History is not being reproduced; on the contrary, it is maimed or, even worse, effaced. Downtown Beirut has the semblance of a plastic surgery experiment gone awry: artificial, plastic and too much make-up to cover up the bruises. Lamia Joreige’s documentary and installation »Objects of War< (2000 and 2003) is a work that certainly makes no attempt at covering up the bruises of the civil war, yet at the same time shows how in situations of extreme violence and deterioration of values people can find comfort, strength, or even a source of stubborn resistance in everyday objects. Joreige asks her interviewees to identify an object that reminds them of the war; she films them in their houses and lets them tell their stories, using the objects as vehicles for carrying their memories of war: a beer can wrapped in Kleenex when alcohol became socially condoned in West Beirut, a pack of cards to pass time in the shelters, a jerry can for water, a flashlight, batteries for the radio, etc. Joreige shows that every war is always an individual tragedy, and that each and every narrative will be different and personalised. Nevertheless, she underlines the necessity of telling and repeating the stories in an attempt to decode, to understand. Repetition without closure is a theme that dominates her video installation »Replay« (2000): based on real photos from a book on the civil war published in 1979 depicting a man being shot and a woman fleeing, Joreige asked actors to re-enact (replay) the scene. Caught in a loop of a three-channel installation, the spectator is confronted with the unintelligibility of cycles of violence, and how repetition eventually numbs perception. Created a decade after the Ta’if accords , some will argue that the war did not bring any closure to the communal tensions in Lebanon, and that on a micro-level the latter are still replayed over and over again.
It would be wrong from my side to purport the view that contemporary Lebanese artists are predominantly concerned with an archaeology of the past and its re-articulation within the present. Yet, with a new generation of artists that grew up during the civil war coming of age, many questions remain unanswered, many issues unaddressed. It would be presumptuous to expect artists to distance themselves from their realities and the places they live in. Within the complex textures and fissures of today’s world, how can one but not produce a responsible aesthetics that is relational and situated. Even when venturing into the abstractions of electronic music and free improvisation, as is done for example by the pioneering musicians Charbel Haber (Scrambled Eggs), and Mazen Kerbaj , the mode of production, performance and distribution is still firmly rooted within a Lebanese context. Their noise performances negotiate a sonic space which intersects with the din of the hustle and bustle of contemporary Beirut.
Performing approximate readings definitely cuts as a two-way sword: there is merit and retribution in it. The merit being that approximation carries a detached voyeuristic pleasure which extends the margins of interpretation. The retribution being that the impossibility of real intimacy and closeness to the subject ends up being frustrating on a level of understanding. Christine Tohmé, the director and curator of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, recently expressed during a talk in Amsterdam her weariness of using art as a social tool for salvation and redemption, but also added quickly that in a region where political turmoil is an inherent part of societal structure, this might be the only way. In a similar vein, reading Beirut against the lures of feigned proximity and installed detachment might also be the only way.
Translated by Timothy Jones