Chant Avedissian: A Contemporary Artist of Egypt.

National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. November 19, 2000-February 19, 2001

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE CONTEMPORARY

National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. January 7, 2001-January 6, 2002

As mainstream art magazines are recognizing the diversity and breadth of contemporary African art, two recent exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, "Chant Avedissian: A Contemporary Artist of Egypt: and "Encounters with the Contemporary," offered insight into how to present such work to a museum audience and how to create a discourse about and an experience of it. "Chant Avedissian" focused on three large multipaneled works by an artist who, though born in Cairo, has Armenian roots. Avedissian, then, is more than an Egyptian artist; he is a transnational artist, and one who is sensitive to the power inhering in cultural images, icons, and signs. After studying fine art in Montreal and applied arts in Paris, he returned to Egypt in 1980, where he began experimenting with photography as well as costume and textile design to gain an understanding of local artistic practices. His work during this period with Hassan Fathy, an architect known for his involvement with rural community development and his use of the country's craft traditions, led Avedissian to use local recycled materials as he searched for an Egyptian aesthetic.

Upon entering the gallery, we found that wall texts and photographs were just as important to the exhibition as the artwork. There was a photograph of The Big Wall (1998), a painting that documents Avedissian's visit to China's Great Wall. Like a snapshot, this image has the artist posing, off center, as a tourist in sunglasses before the wall with what appears to be Chinese calligraphy and stamps overlaying the center bottom of the painting, just above his stenciled signature. While revealing an affinity with Asian painting, the work remains linked with Western modernism in the flat depictions of artist, wall, and background layered in pastel pinks, oranges, and browns. The presentation of a photograph rather than the actual painting led us to contemplate this display on two levels. First, it served as a documentary image (almost a snapshot of a snapshot). Second, it was an illustration, an adjunct to the accompanying wall text.

Other photographs, Artist's View of Studio and 3 Tatomi Space, 2000, were more straightforward as documents of Avedissian's design sense and overall aesthetic approach, depicted here in his living room and studio space. The artist was quoted in a wall text as asserting that "anything that is not traditional Japanese, or close to its spirit, is pure barbarism." His aesthetic approach reflects this Asian influence along with the "Arab values of desert life" as revealed in the types of furniture and their arrangement. While this anthropological examination of the artist's habitat helped to frame his aesthetic approach, Avedissian's photographs of cafes and building fronts in Cairo disclosed more. Paintings of popular figures like the famous Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum were juxtaposed with a variety of other images and symbols applied directly to the actual facades. These ranged from transportation images, such as a man on a camel or an airplane, to Arabic script.

This introduction led to three large assemblies of panels hung on the three adjoining walls at the back of the gallery. The Sites, The Nasser Era and Om Kalsoum (two multipaneled works displayed as one), and The Dogs, all created in 1994, are part of a series that now totals some 200 paintings. Avedissian began the series in 1991, at the outset of the Persian Gulf War, in reaction to what he saw as the potential devastation of Egypt's heritage. These works represent his attempt to recover and document its richness and complexity, from the grand dynasties of the Pharaohs to the revolutionary changes in the modern Arab identity and way of life that began with Gamel Abdel al-Nasser's rule in 1952. This process of recovery and documentation was also important to artists in other parts of the continent as the colonial powers began to withdraw in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Avedissian commingles any number of symbols and images of tradition and modernity in these works, whose meaning he seeks to augment through his modes of representation. These modes--the application of paint by stencil and by hand, and the interchangeability of the panels themselves--do indeed, as stated in a nearby wall text, undercut "Western concepts of originality and uniqueness." More important, they document the reconstruction of the cultural and political identity of the artist's native country, which is made relevant in this postmodern era by the way the artist bridges the traditional and the modern through technique and content while also assimilating the West.

For example, in The Sites, Avedissian addresses the creation of cultural identity through architecture by depicting sites of Fathy's architecture with other important traditional and modern Egyptian landmarks. These images, given importance by being in the central panel, are flanked in the outer panels by images from popular culture and everyday life, :including a cat, a gas tank, and a woman strolling with her baby carriage. Thus, architecture is not just a work of space and form but a vital place that gains meaning through its interaction with the life that exists in and around it.

In The Nasser Era, Avedissian combines images of the Egyptian president and popular cultural figures such as Yakan, a 1950s soccer star, and Nazem el Ghazali, a famous Iraqi singer, with various other symbols and popular consumer objects. These include a transistor radio, which was well known as the president's favorite mode of communicating propaganda, and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Om Kalsoum, the center-left panel in this work, has numerous portrayals of Egypt's famous diva, a major supporter of Nasser. The combined portraits, words, and script related to politics and culture become icons of Egypt's transformation during the time of the East-West struggle.

The Dogs includes a depiction of Anubis, the ancient Egyptian mortuary deity with a jackal's head. In this work Avedissian reflects upon how the heritage of his country is relayed through its oral culture: he includes hieroglyphic icons along with scenes from Egyptian stories that were told in popular movies of their day.

Stenciling these images onto panels of corrugated cardboard and cloth in grays, ochres, umbers, and sienna with touches of primary colors gives these works the appearance of commercial billboards, a source upon which the artist deliberately drew. Further, the works seem constructed to evoke the interchangeable picture cycles, hieroglyphs, representations, and inscriptions of dynastic period art. Closer inspection reveals that a number of images as well as the background of several panels are handpainted. Avedissian's technique is visually complex because he breaks through the picture plane while also conceding to it. Such complexity is also reflected in the content: he exposes the mutability of cultural images and icons as a visual language of tradition and modernity. This synergy of surface and content can be linked to the transitory status of the artist himself, most pointedly represented in the artist's signature, "Chant Avedissian--Le Caire," stenciled onto the lower half of each work; it recalls a stamp on a passport. Avedissian thus succeeds in creating a contemporary aesthetic that utilizes the visual history and memory of his country, which sits at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East.

While "Chant Avedissian" focused on the aesthetic endeavor of a single artist, "Encounters with the Contemporary" pulled the lens back for a broader overview of contemporary art from the entire continent. Drawn from the museum's collection, this exhibition was presented in the Sylvia Williams Gallery, which is specifically dedicated to contemporary art. It sought to encompass, as stated in the wall text, "where we have been" and to provide a "preview of things to come." Further, "Encounters" sought to supplement recent scholarship on art of the colonial and postcolonial periods by showing only a "small portion" of work by artists who have received "little attention."

However, we read that these artists are firmly within the contemporary art world by being "well-traveled, well-educated and conversant in discussions of modernism and contemporary global artistic expressions." They comprehend the "multiple, shifting and constantly expanding understandings of their identity and artistry." The stated goal, which can be linked to the recent hiring of the institution's first curator of contemporary art, was to "usher in an era in which contemporary African art acquires a greater permanence in our galleries." To accomplish this, "Encounters" presented paintings, prints, sculptures, and photographs in three phases (January-April 2001, May-August 2001, September 2001-January 2002), with new works introduced for each phase. First- and second-generation artists from the contemporary artistic centers of Sudan, Ethiopia, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, among others, were represented. This "encounter," then, reflected the museum's attempt to expand and elucidate the discourse on contemporary African art for its public.

The first work encountered at the entrance to the galleries during the first phase was aptly titled Tapestry. Made by Papa Ibra Tall (Senegal) in 1964, this large black textile has strikingly colored threads woven into abstract designs with figural elements reminiscent of tradition African sculpture. Installed among the prints mounted in the second gallery was Nigerian-born Sokari Douglas Camp's Small Iriabo (Clapping Girl) (1987), an intricate figural construction of painted metal and wood that announces its presence on the half hour.

The prints in this exhibition were easily some of its most powerful and moving works. The etchings by Sudanese artist Mohammad Omer Khalil, Tombstone Blues and Tangled Up in Blue, both dated 1986, are from a series inspired by Bob Dylan's music. Each has a two-sided composition: one half contains delicate open patterns, designs, scratches, stripes, and latticework and is counterpoised with a darker, more heavily worked half that implies more hidden within. In The Blind (1969), an etching by Cyprian Shilakoe (South Africa), line is blended with aquatinted areas in subtle blacks and grays. This work portrays a man who leans wearily on a cane in a moment of poignant reflection about his circumstances and possibly those of his country. Two pieces by Bruce Onobrakpeya (Nigeria) from 1980--Tortuous Ascent of Mugabe's Star and Puppets--are illustrations from a book of poems titled Africa: On Her Schedule Is Written a Change (Barbara Haeger, Ibadan, 1981). They address the complexities raised by colonialism's end and the resulting reinvention during the postindependence era. Onobrakpeya's mastery of etching was epitomized by Puppets. Here African kings, whose forms are solidly created through crosshatch shading enveloped by heavy outline, stand before an ornate background. Upon closer examination this background gradually revealed colonial figures holding strings that are attached to these seemingly independent rulers.

The next gallery displayed two paintings, one by Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian (Ethiopia) and the other by Durant Sihlahi (South Africa), along a wall facing the interior section that contained several ceramic pieces by Magdalene Odundo (Kenya) and Mohammed Ahmed Abdalla (Sudan). In Spring Scrolls (1983-84), Boghossian portrays, through color and movement, the vibrant nature of Ethiopian parchment scrolls, which are seen swaying in a breeze as they hang on wooden dowels. They interact visually with a background composed of abstract patterns in grayed hues, which echo the scrolls graphically and coloristically. Sihlahi's Graffiti Signatures (1997-98), intricately constructed by applying dyed paper pulp to handmade paper, is covered with vividly colored lines, circles, crosses, and arrows on a white background bordered by equally vivid color This work recalls the graffiti found in the urban areas of the artist's native South Africa, what he characterizes as a form of "urban literature."

Odundo reveals her sophisticated craftsmanship in the remarkably quiet, almost conservative, coloring and shape of Untitled #1 (1994) as well as her playfulness in the placement of rings and other protrusions at various points on Reduced Angled Spouted Black Piece (1990) and Reduced Mixed-Color Symmetrical Piece (1990). Abdalla's smaller ceramics are more expressive in their coloring than in their shape: the glazes and the designs on the surface of his undated Vase recall the early abstract compositions of Kandinsky.

A highlight was Garth Erasmus's The Muse 3 (1995), a work that represents this exhibition in the museum's publications. Two similar profiles, both black, which were taken from photographs, face each other in seeming communication and are collaged against a blue background. Below the profiles, a painted orange hand reaches from left to right. Though the heads are similar, the artist heavily worked over the one on the right by painting on white hair and adding emphatic hatch marks to its face and eyes. Each profile stares at the other, while at the same time both seem to come together visually into a single face that stares out at the viewer. The communication, shown here, across the racial divide in Erasmus's native South Africa, thus suggests the possibility of reconciliation.

This hopeful end reflected the National Museum of African Art's effort to construct a coherent art historical and critical discourse about contemporary African art and to place it among other contemporary productions throughout the world. Both exhibitions revealed how such artists are making works that bring together their own country's artistic heritage, with its distinctive traditions, and modernity, with its internal advancements and external assimilation of the West, thereby creating a new global aesthetic. Globalization has led scholars and critics to consider the broad range of contemporary production on the international stage, and these exhibitions also engaged that stance. At the same time, they showed that just validating these artists' rightful place on that stage is not enough: "Chant Avedissian" and "Encounters with the Contemporary" also offered an opportunity to see how such artworks gain further meaning when each one is contemplated as a singular expression, which is the lifeblood of the experience of art.

MARK D'AMATO, currently a doctoral candidate in contemporary art and theory at Virginia Commonwealth University, was the associate curator at the Museum for African Art in New York, where he co-curated the museum's traveling exhibition "Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa" (1999-2002); he also co-edited the associated catalogue (MAA and Prestel, 1999).