Out of Beirut.

From the perspective of an art magazine published in New York, the conflict that erupted this summer between Lebanon and Israel is at once near and far--a geopolitical situation of enormous gravity, wrenchingly and unremittingly conveyed in the global press yet difficult to plumb, perhaps by virtue of that very mediation. Artforum has, of course, neither the expertise nor the hubris to pretend to offer any corrective or comprehensive analysis. But we could not simply ignore the crisis.

As it happened, art historian and critic T. J. Demos had already begun work for us on a review of Modern Art Oxford's "Out of Beirut," an exhibition showcasing a generation of Lebanese artists, architects, and filmmakers whose work since the official conclusion of their country's civil war in 1991 has dwelled on pivotal questions of memory and the experience of history. As Demos prepared his essay for publication, history overtook us, and we sought to expand and deepen, even rethink, our consideration of Beirut's remarkable cultural resurgence of the past fifteen years. We turned to five individuals involved in the show--Lamia Joreige, Bernard Khoury, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, and Christine Tohme--and asked them to reflect on the Lebanese crisis and its implications for their practices and for the culture at large.

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Living Contradiction

THE EXHIBITION "OUT OF BEIRUT" opened innocently enough last spring. Organized by Modern Art Oxford curator Suzanne Cotter in collaboration with Christine Tohme, director of Ashkal Alwan, the Beirut-based arts organization, the survey promised an exciting profile of contemporary Lebanese art and another chapter in the story of its growing international reputation. The work of fifteen artists and the anonymous collective Heartland would be on view for two months, accompanied by a program of seven films and symposia featuring prominent speakers such as curator Catherine David and architect Bernard Khoury, whose work is also included in the show. As part of a veritable cultural renaissance taking place in Beirut following the country's fifteen-year civil war, Lebanese artists have generated an influential array of work that reconsiders the nature of photographic documentation and the projected image, with critical insights arising largely in their conceptual examinations of traumatic memory and the workings of the archive. Many of these artistic engagements reflect on the continuing legacy of the civil war--an umbrella term that includes battles between the country's competing sectarian militias, successive Israeli invasions and occupations, and Syrian meddling--and, indeed, this was the case for nearly every work on view at Oxford. At the time of the show's opening, no one could have foreseen that the gravity of these investigations would soon be dramatically underscored by contemporaneous events: On July 12, four days before the exhibition's conclusion, Hezbollah militants killed three and seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, sparking a monthlong, full-fledged military conflict followed by a tenuous cease-fire (still in effect at press time). If it had seemed the work on display in "Out of Beirut" was concerned with exposing and examining the psychic aftershocks and uncanny mimicries that had become fixtures of everyday life in post-civil war Lebanon, one was now led to surmise (perhaps accurately) that these artists had in fact been suggesting all along that the terrible conflict had never actually ended.

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One of the most poignant commentaries in the exhibition was Lamia Joreige's Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003, a video exposing the persistence of war memories even while stressing their volatility. "Do you know of anyone who was kidnapped around here during the war?" asks the artist as she comes across pedestrians while retracing the Green Line that divided western and eastern Beirut during the civil war. (Joreige uses archival photographs to locate the sites of former militia checkpoints along the line, where thousands were abducted. The video intercuts those black-and-white images with contemporary footage, underscoring the physical transformation of the city that took place once the fighting ended.) Some interviewees are suspicious of Joreige's inquiries, reluctant--even afraid--to delve into the past, but others encourage full disclosure: "If you know anything ... you should talk," one man urges another. Many freely share their stories before Joreige's camera. An older man tells movingly of losing a son in 1985 and shows the scars from his open-heart surgery--an operation undertaken to cure a disease caused, he believes, by grief and exacerbated by the unknown and perhaps unknowable circumstances of his son's disappearance. The father's psychic injury is still obviously raw, evidenced by his emotional accounting, which, within the context of Joreige's work, suggests that the effects of the violence--not quite so safely distant as some had thought--are far from processed in the culture at large. This desire to reopen the wounds inflicted by the tragedy of Lebanon's brutal past through direct documentary representation, and to remedy shock with comprehension, reveals one powerful approach to history in "Out of Beirut."

A nagging paradox, however, follows from Joreige's contention that comprehension depends on the awareness that our relationship to the past--or to the "facts"--is uncertain at best. And, in fact, the testimonials in her video belie the transparency of documentary evidence. (One man she approaches, for instance, refuses to provide further stories, explaining that "they may be true and they may not.... They won't give you the answer you're looking for.") Joreige is not alone in this quandary: If she invites communication, and thereby elicits its blind spots, Walid Sadek baldly confronts us with its absence. His Love Is Blind, 2006, invokes Beirut's once picturesque settings by reproducing just the informational labels for paintings by Mustafa Farroukh, a prominent Lebanese artist in the '30s and '40s who depicted idyllic scenes of the city and the surrounding landscape in the style of academic European art. Sadek's conceptual installation left ghostly white expanses where the paintings should have hung, the distance between two lines of additional wall text (composed by Sadek) corresponding to the dimensions of Farroukh's missing canvases. While the pictorial absences double the destruction of those geographical sites--not only has the geography changed but also the very culture that Farroukh's practice inhabited--Sadek's act of negation also implicitly questions the ability of visual language to convey loss. In Cotter's perceptive catalogue essay, she refers rightly to the "mistrust of the image as reliable document of history" among the artists in "Out of Beirut." Such a mistrust informs Sadek's pointed refusal to show what has been lost to the past, as if its representation would only repeat the violence by objectifying it, or would further offend by pretending to grasp some essential truth--even while his work, like Joreige's, still attempts to come to terms with destruction's lasting effects.

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Other works similarly challenged any notion that language, whether visual or textual, might be used to convey the experience of war with uninterrupted continuity, rendering the idea of direct expression impossible while overtly manifesting injuries to representation. In Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1998-2006, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige present a display of brightly colored postcards of touristy Beirut "appropriated" from the work of a Lebanese commercial photographer named Abdallah Farah. In fact an imaginary figure created by the two artists, Farah is said to have originally published these postcards in 1968, only to burn the negatives carefully seven years later when the war began, so that the images--scarred with gruesomely charred areas and twisted searings, punished nearly to the point of abstraction--would correlate with their actual damaged counterparts. As a text accompanying the work explains, "He imitated the destructions of the buildings he saw gradually disappearing because of bombings and street battles." Interestingly, the fictional construction recalls Sadek's deployment of Farroukh as a kind of elusive, intermediary figure, as a cipher to problematize representation. Indeed, Farah even keeps a notebook description of every photograph he has taken since the war but refuses to develop, which brings to mind Sadek's empty walls.

The photographer's pyromania also implies a therapeutic compulsion to work through a brutalized reality by castigating its falsifying and outdated representations, but the sometimes stunning visual results betray a perverted, parallel strategy of trumping violence through its aestheticization. Tapping into a similar set of underlying tensions was Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre's Summer '88, 2006, which asserts the impossibility of representing destruction neutrally, rendering even finer the line between objective documentation and subjective viewpoint. Yacoub accompanied a photojournalist around bombed-out Beirut in 1988, taking her own black-and-white pictures of the carnage. Reprinted now in high contrast, the images of rubble-strewn wastelands populated only by the hulking concrete skeletons of bombed-out buildings appear ghostly and sketchy. These documents of war are shot through with the dread of their visualization.

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Provocative moments were created in the exhibition's physical installation when the fictional and factual were juxtaposed (if not in seeming opposition), yielding complex interactions where the qualities of one ended up not so easily distinguished from the other's. For example, Akram Zaatari's Saida, June 6, 1982, 2003-2006, a photograph that documents the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when the artist was sixteen years old, faced Walid Raad's large-scale photographic cycle We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, 2006, composed of mostly white surfaces with nearly illegible fragments of text at the bottom, culled from an investigation that Raad and two collaborators conducted into a 1986 car-bomb explosion. Zaatari, like Lamia Joreige, plays the artist-as-reporter, seeming to scout out hard information to prove what cannot be easily understood (indeed, his photograph showing a number of explosive bursts on a hilltop could convincingly substitute for news images of recent Israeli rocket attacks). Raad, akin to Sadek, clearly signals his doubt that such "factual" documentation is possible, utilizing material from a partly fictional archive of contemporary Lebanese history maintained as part of his fourteen-year project, The Atlas Group. By mixing fact and fiction, Raad conveys psychological truths that escape "official" transcriptions of events. At this point, dry information is peripheral to the subjective consequences of violence in language--the lacunae, stuttering, and displacements that are Raad's true subject. Yet any seeming dichotomy between his work and that of Lamia Joreige and Zaatari is hardly pat: For just as Joreige's documentary embraces multiple fragmented stories, rendering the idea of a unique truth impossible and testifying to the inevitable dance between memory, forgetfulness, and invention that determines any historical account, so Zaatari's photograph is actually a digital composite that assembles several images captured at different times into a constructed event, the entirety of which a straight documentary photograph could never have depicted.

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The documentary impulse of Joreige and Zaatari here converges with the critique of representation by Raad and Sadek, suggesting that all the work in the exhibition in some sense counters the fictions that are commonly presented as objective "facts" in the mass media, especially in relation to mainstream accounts of the Middle East. But the convergence also points to the most compelling aspects of "Out of Beirut," where individual works joined documentary reportage with aesthetic consideration, drawing the two into a critical and mutually informing relationship. Consider, for example, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's single-channel video projection Distracted Bullets, Symptomatic Video Number 1, 2005, which shows five different nighttime views of Beirut during holidays, political celebrations, and religious festivals between 2003 and 2005. On each occasion, residents set off fireworks and discharge rifles, unleashing a mesmerizing sound and light display that creates a kind of sociopolitical map, as the locations of the explosions reveal neighborhoods' different affiliations and religious makeup. The short, staccato bursts of gunfire and plumes of light also echo battles not far in the past. And indeed, casualties resulting from errant bullets are not rare, intimating that one result of prolonged hostility is the unshakable habit of death. The video's undeniably dark humor suggests one possible survival strategy. Unfortunately, this ghostly reminder now seems a harbinger of what was to come.

Perhaps it was unsurprising that this work, and several other strong projects in the show, was tied to the realm of architecture, where aesthetics meets everyday life in urban planning--a particularly strained discipline in contemporary Beirut, given the antagonistic forces of reconstruction and remembrance as well as of private and public interests. An inclusion that stood out in this regard was B018, 1998, a nine-and-a-half-minute video by architect Bernard Khoury of the eponymous nightclub that he designed on the location of a former refugee camp and site of a violent 1976 militia attack. (The club remains intact, though the architect's Bank of Beirut Building in Chtaura was recently damaged by Israeli rocket attacks.) Khoury has long been a vocal critic of the "naive amnesia" of the Lebanese government's postwar rebuilding efforts, as seen in the false nostalgia of the designs favored by Solidere, Beirut's leading development corporation, which selectively reference the colonial architecture of the '20s and '30s--conducting what artist and writer Jalal Toufic, also included in "Out of Beirut," terms a "war on the traces of war." And yet, what could be more dubious than to promote historical awareness through the construction of a vogue discotheque? Khoury met the challenge brilliantly by casting the club as an underground bunker, with a severe, hard-edged atmosphere of slick black surfaces flanked by velvety red curtains that evokes both gothic minimalism and funerary chic. It achieves a morbid commemoration through stylish interior design, wherein architecture internalizes the historical conditions of its site. The video documentation on view at Oxford was shot in infrared--mimicking military night vision--and shows a descent past bouncers and fashionable young denizens, the camera moving toward the bar's bunkerlike pit, where flashing lights, grinding music, and convulsive bodies express a bizarre translation of the phenomenology of warfare. Dancing offers a mode of therapeutic expression--in fact, some survivors reportedly gather in melancholy tribute in this spot where relatives met their end--but, as significantly, Khoury reinserts the potential oblivion of the nightclub setting within the living contradictions of Beirut.

One significant achievement of "Out of Beirut" was its ability to linger on such living contradictions. The art demonstrated that documentation is never fully truthful and, correlatively, that the deepest encounters with reality necessarily entail a flight into imagination, personal and cultural alike. Indeed, "Out of Beirut" proposed through its fictional figures and ancillary narratives that art's most provocative function is to allow the reality of war--what increasingly seems a perpetual condition--to emerge at the level of representation, debunking the complacency and illusory consensus of official myths. Far from being solely responsive to its local context, the exhibition consequently offered a microcosm of concerns that are paramount in contemporary art around the world today. A sad irony was that if the art on view proposed that the civil war had never really ended, the hypothesis was confirmed all too tragically.

T. J. DEMOS IS A LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON.

T. J. DEMOS

Waking Reality

ABOUT WHAT WAS DEMOLISHED

I recently spoke with a journalist who, commenting on how the situation may have changed in Beirut after this last war, concluded by saying, "Too bad that everything you accomplished in the past fifteen years has been destroyed." I thought about this for a few seconds, and I realized how wrong he was: In fact, while things might seem different from a distance, you have to understand that what have been portrayed as the major reconstruction efforts during the past fifteen years--the small sector of the Beirut Central District, the very few institutional projects that were built essentially within selected sections of the capital--were left basically untouched by this round of battles. In fact, most construction projects that were accomplished by the successive governments in the postwar period--that is, since the early 1990s--were not directly affected by this last conflict at all.

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THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS AND MY LITTLE WORLD

As for the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were actually hit hard during the conflict, I visited them for an afternoon right after the cease-fire was declared. The destruction is impressive. Nevertheless, I left the sector at the end of my visit, and it took seven minutes of driving to get back to our design studio, which had remained operational throughout the war--and I realized we were worlds apart. Beirut, like the rest of the region, is a small but complex environment where different forces have built up, independent of one another. At some point one radical project collides with another, and the implications are explosive. This was the case in 1958, in 1967, in 1973, in 1975, in 1982. It is the story of all our wars, and the story repeats itself. You have heard of Beirut as the wonderful tourist destination; the prosperous financial hub for banking; the revolutionary city for some intellectuals of the '70s; the city of complicated wars, of hostages and terrorism; and maybe you have also heard about its refugees and the displaced. There are too many stories and none of them simple. I often take visitors to Beirut on a tour of the Central District to show them the wonderfully manicured chunk of city created there in the last ten years or so. Most interesting is how we cross the district's border and immediately encounter the radically different realities of the rest of the city, literally just beyond the district's limits.

THE RECONSTRUCTION

Most of the country will certainly be affected economically by the latest events, making unclear the implications of this last war for the various factions that constitute our political scene. Because of these complex political factors, it is also very difficult to foresee the mechanisms behind the reconstruction of what was demolished. In the early '90s, I remember, there were great expectations for the rebuilding of the nation. As a student at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in 1991, I was concerned about the rapid and systematic knocking down of war-damaged buildings in what would become the new Central District. And so I worked on a scheme for Beirut, called Evolving Scars, proposing a public installation that would make the demolition of the ruins itself an architectural act. Evolving Scars, like many other projects, remained on paper. In the meantime, a substantial layer of the city was wiped out, along with its references to our immediate past; the new master plan approved by a governmental decree was driven by a clear political agenda aiming to sterilize this sector of Beirut. When I finally came back to Beirut in 1993, I had, like many other young architects of my generation, naively believed that I could be one of the many soldiers who would take part in a collective reconstruction effort to rebuild our cities. It took me a few years, too much paper architecture, and many aborted projects to realize I was operating on the wrong front. The reconstruction project I was expecting never happened.

PLAN B

It was time for a plan B, which was to work for the private sector. My clients today are involved in private ventures driven by finance and commerce, and this is where I operate: Simply put, I build for the rich. I don't do social housing; I don't do governmental projects; I don't build schools or museums, and I probably never will. I believe there is much to accomplish in the private sphere. Cities are built by the private sector through projects driven primarily by financial profit. This is the reality in Beirut, and this is the reality of every developing city everywhere. Denying this reality prevents us from taking part in the making of our cities. Relevant architecture should not be limited to exceptional programs such as schools, corporate headquarters of international companies, museums, and public libraries. In fact, most of what the architectural press and beautiful design books cover in polished and well-written articles does not affect me. The kind of environment I operate in, and the realities I am interested in, become very clear when you consider that I started my career working for the entertainment industry--with projects such as B018, which appears in "Out of Beirut"--and that my second wave of projects came from the banking sector. Today, we have more than twenty-five projects in the pipeline, many of which are located in the Gulf region. I find pleasure in the complexity and the difficulties I encounter in the contexts I work in. Sometimes the picture is not so pretty, but this is where I choose to be, and I don't want to be anywhere else. You never go to sleep in Beirut. It is a city that keeps you awake.

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CONTEXT

I once described a commission of mine, the design of a building to exclusively house a restaurant called Yabani, as a project aimed at a "fraction of a society living in marvelous denial." I was not being cynical or moralistic in my assessment, but rather recognizing obvious political and social realities in Beirut. The site of the restaurant, a sushi bar, is a plot that was literally side by side with the ruin of a building in which refugees squatted, living without running water or even windows. Yabani was a difficult mission to accept--difficult because of the impossibility that such a highly visible entertainment destination, intended for the wealthy few, should exist in that location. But it was with such impossibility that the project took shape. To explain: If you look at Beirut, most buildings contribute to a continuous cacophony; their structures are most often just literal interpretations of archaic building codes, such that architecture becomes almost totally irrelevant as a practice. Add to this the fact that a building is rarely erected just to house a restaurant, and you grasp the importance of addressing the absurd presence of Yabani where it exists--the impossibility of its existence. So we exaggerated that aspect by making an uninhibited gesture. In the continuous and loud architectural cacophony of the surroundings, we planted something that didn't respond to the logic of construction generating all the buildings around it. We made an overly pretentious gesture, something almost glorifying its futile program: It is not an opera house or a palace of justice, but rather a sushi bar put where it doesn't belong. You penetrate the building through a tall, circular vitrine, which moves you down vertically one floor below street level. Once you're dining downstairs, you're completely removed from your surroundings. You have no contact with your immediate environment; your only contact with the outside world is the ceiling windows, through which you see nothing but the sky. Yet on the other side of the perimeter walls of the dining hall is a completely different world, another social reality.

This experience is somehow similar to my recent visit to the southern suburbs and their proximity to my little world; it's somehow the same thing. Of course, in this and my other projects I didn't bring the southern suburbs to the city center, or take the city center to the southern suburbs. But the act cannot be as simple as that. My entertainment projects in Beirut--the Yabani project on the former demarcation line, the B018 project in the Quarantaine, and the Centrale restaurant at the edge of the Beirut Central District--are about recognizing and confronting different social realities and trying to make these issues visible. In that sense these projects are very contextual. I don't see my work as representational, mind you. I am concerned about the very specificity of every single situation. My projects are not about the past, and they are not about the future. They are about specific instances existing in my present.

TEMPORALITY 

My three entertainment projects, the first I built, were undertaken with a predetermined and limited life span. They are temporary buildings. Their life spans were already fixed before construction began, which is an odd experience for an architect, and perhaps a little saddening--to know while designing your project that it will be bulldozed at a specific date in the near future. The nightclub B018, for example, was built in 1998 on a plot rented for only five years (although it has managed to stay operational until today, which, it turns out, is also the case with the other two entertainment projects). The temporality of these works is a result of the short-term nature of entertainment ventures. Entertainment venues can be frivolous and I will not be accountable for my architectural frivolity in such circumstances. I accept the liability for the short-term and temporary nature of my projects. All three entertainment projects are located in areas that were, at the time of their construction, still in postwar convalescence. What is possible during such periods of recovery is often not possible later. I would have liked to see this kind of spontaneous recovery happen in the reconstruction of the Beirut Central District project, which was initiated in the early '90s. This did not happen. As for the recovery of our southern villages and the southern suburbs of Beirut, I am afraid it will be too spontaneous.

BERNARD KHOURY IS AN ARCHITECT BASED IN BEIRUT. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

BERNARD KHOURY

Object Lessons

HISTORY CONTINUALLY ESCAPES US; we have only its fragments, captured in words, images, and memories. My work of the past ten years has been an attempt to come to grips with this elusiveness and how our rearrangements and reinterpretations of these fragments border on fiction. I collect, erase, invent, capture, miss, and divert, always pointing to the gaps and possible losses in what is remembered--individually, collectively, officially.

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Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003, the fifty-four-minute video included in "Out of Beirut," is a good example: a compilation of narratives offered by people I met along what used to be the dividing line between East and West Beirut. On each occasion, I asked if the person knew anyone who had been kidnapped near where we were standing. These people simply happened to be at the sites of former checkpoints, where many kidnappings occurred; they were there by chance when I arrived. Given that they did not necessarily have any specialized knowledge of the site, what emerges instead is a sense of individual relationships to history.

This subjectivity is also significant in a continuing series I started in 1999, called "Objects of War." Here video interviews are paired with objects that people have chosen from their belongings--totems that serve as starting points for memory. For example, Akram, an artist and filmmaker, recalls his teenage years in Saida, in the south of Lebanon, when he refused to join the militia. The trigger for this reflection is an audiotape he made in 1982, which intermingles radio programs, songs by the Bee Gees, and the sounds of gunshots he recorded from the streets outside. Another artist, named Nesrine, chose playing cards, which remind her of the games she played in the shelter during the war; in her spoken reminiscences, she recalls the eerie quiet between shellings. By seeking out such personal stories, I give voice to those who have been ignored, to the stories that have been concealed. It is the role of the artist to testify, to raise untimely questions; it is the role of the artist to propose an alternative critical discourse on history, to supplement those produced by politicians, journalists, and historians. However, I do not hope to discover the truth. I want to point out the impossibility of such a thing.

I was in the midst of making a new video for "Objects of War" when the latest Israeli bombings began. On July 13, at about four in the morning, I was awakened by the sound of planes flying over the city. I heard the first bomb fall, and all the previous wars rose in my throat. I asked myself if I should continue a project on a war that had ended fifteen years ago, given what was happening today. Should I pursue a project on the present war instead? Caught in a bind, I put my camera down: I am not a reporter but an artist, I thought, and I need distance in order to create. But life continues during wartime, and soon I picked up my camera again. The act of filming and writing became a way for me to overcome my sense of anxiety and powerlessness. I slowly started documenting everyday life: the hum and drone of Israeli planes at night; a television broadcast interrupted by the sound of bombs; the darkness of the streets without electricity; the emptiness of the avenues. And now I have begun to record more interviews for "Objects of War," dealing with the events of last summer. These are my first works to deal with contemporary events instead of with the past.

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Still, it's strange to look at my practice in light of the past few months--especially my most recent work, A Journey, which I completed in June, intending to give a sort of closure to my interrogations of a war I thought had become remote. The video begins with my grandmother looking at photos of Palestine: Born there in 1910, she left for Beirut in 1930 to marry; when the State of Israel was created in 1948, the rest of her family took refuge with her in Lebanon. The video continues as I drive along the coastline to the border of Lebanon and Israel, tracing her journey. In voice-over I describe the "just liberated and still-unknown south," finally asking: What has been left to me of this war that is fading day by day--images of boat departures, the impressive sound of repeated shelling, fear of checkpoints, my grandmother praying day and night ...? Watching A Journey today, I can't help but talk back at my own voice. The south is no longer liberated; it has been destroyed. The similarity between the present situation and events decades ago--and the sense of one war beginning without the previous one ending--shakes my understanding of history, as well as my relationship to it. The war continues, the images and sounds have returned. But my grandmothers are dead, and there is no one to pray.

LAMIA JOREIGE IS AN ARTIST LIVING IN BEIRUT.

LAMIA JOREIGE

"Oh God," He Said, Talking to a Tree: A Fresh-Off-the Boat, (1) Throat-Clearing Preamble About the Recent Events In Lebanon. And a Question to Walid Sadek

I. This, too, must be repeated, even if it has become today the dominant abstraction disseminated in the Western and Arab popular press: Between July 12 and August 13, 2006, the so-called beginning and end of this most recent and ongoing Middle Eastern crisis, more than one thousand civilians died. Hundreds of soldiers died. Thousands of civilians were injured. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Millions were scared. Countless were traumatized. Billions of dollars were lost. Billions of dollars were made.

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Lebanon yet again in the summer of '06, echoing the spring of '96, the summer of '93, the never-to-be-forgotten summer of '82, and every other invasion, skirmish, clash, incursion, and battle between Israel and Lebanon over the past sixty years.

Surely we have all realized by now that while Lebanese blood is cheaper in the eyes of North American, European, Asian, and Arab policy makers than Israeli blood, it remains significantly more valuable than Palestinian blood, which itself is seemingly more valuable than Iraqi blood, which is itself seemingly more valuable than Afghan blood, which is itself seemingly more valuable than Somali blood, which is itself seemingly more valuable than the blood of millions of Arabs and Africans who have yet to be endowed by these policy makers with faces, veins, psychic lives, languages, feelings, names, memories, histories, and traditions. (2)

II. "Equally evil," I heard a progressive-or-was-it-conservative acquaintance say of Hezbollah and the Israeli Army. Equally evil: the killing of 1,187 Lebanese civilians and the killing of 43 Israeli civilians. Equally evil: the killing of between 80 and 530 Hezbollah soldiers and the killing of 119 Israeli soldiers. Equally evil: the destruction of hundreds of cars, dozens of roads, thousands of trees, 2,000 homes and other properties in Israel (3) and the destruction of 15,000 houses and homes in Dahiya alone (and 30,000 throughout Lebanon), 400 miles of roads, 150 bridges and interchanges (1 in 4 in the country), (4) all national airports, electrical power plants, food-industry factories, warehouses, dams, television and radio stations, hospitals, ambulances, civil defense centers, schools, mosques, churches, communication networks, and 85 miles of seacoast after 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil spilled onto Lebanon's coast when Israel bombed the Jiyeh power station, causing the worst ecological crisis in Lebanon's history. (5) Equally evil: a Katyusha rocket filled with hundreds of tiny metal ball bearings and carrying a 22-220-pound warhead, and Popeyes, Nimrods, Delilahs, Spices, NTDs, MSOVs, and other devices with their 22-5,000-pound warheads. (While we are on the topic, did the same attentive analysts who counted and broadcast to the world the exact number of Katyushas hitting Israel every day also count and broadcast the exact number of explosive items dropped daily by Israel on Lebanon? Four thousand, in case you were wondering.) (6) As my friend Lucien remarked, surely Anderson Cooper, who on CNN bravely disassembled Syrian- or Iranian-supplied Katyushas to reveal the deadly metal ball bearings inside, (7) could have taken the time to disassemble American-supplied M483A1 Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions, or the American-supplied M26 cluster bombs to reveal the 644 M77 submunitions packed inside that devastated the Lebanese village of Blida on July 19, 2006.

III. Please try to understand me when I say this is not a call for evenhandedness. I am not asking that the American, European, or Arab mainstream press report in an impartial manner on this Middle Eastern knot. I have long ago disabused myself of this dominant fiction of impartiality, even as I thanklessly catalogue bias in this or that article, this or that statement, this or that clip; even as I continue to unpack ideological interest in everything spoken, written, imaged, and believed; even as I risk dying from laughter as I force myself (every time for the last time) to listen to NPR and the BBC, not to mention all the major American, French, British, and Arab networks, let alone CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, LBC, New TV, Al-Manar, or Al Jazeera. I almost did die from laughter in the past few weeks listening to Olmert, Peretz, Livni, Nasrallah, Seniora, Bush, Rice, Annan, Putin, Chirac, and to shameless Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and other Arab leaders. This near-death experience reminded me of the essayist and artist Jalal Toufic, who writes:

  All I ask of this world, to which I have already given three books, is
  that it become less laughable, so that I would be able to laugh again
  without dying of it. And that it does this soon, before my somberness
  becomes second nature. This era has made me somber not only through
  all the barbarisms and genocides it has perpetuated, but also through
  being so laughable. Even in this period of the utmost sadness for an
  Arab in general, and an Iraqi in specific, I fear dying of laughter
  more than of melancholic suicide, and thus I am more prone to
  relinquish my guard when it comes to being sad than to laughing at
  laughable phenomena. (8)

IV. Surely the Lebanese brought this upon themselves, I heard the same progressive-or-was-it-conservative voice say. Israel was only obliging, doing for the Lebanese what they would not do themselves: kill, decapitate, obliterate, incapacitate, cripple, destroy, neutralize, weaken, restrict, contain (I lost track of every verb used by Olmert, Peretz, Livni, Bush, Blair, and Rice and their generals to characterize this operation's impact) Hezbollah. As if Hezbollah were some mole to be surgically removed from the Lebanese body. As if Hezbollah was not part and parcel of Lebanon's political, social, cultural, and economic life. As if Hezbollah does not represent a million of Lebanon's residents. For anyone still confused about this, please revisit the massive March 8, 2005, demonstration in downtown Beirut by Hezbollah and its allies (to be countered by the even larger crowd of March 14, 2005) that clearly demonstrated for anyone who still doubted it that Hezbollah, like its Lebanese counterparts, is also a vital political organ. Remove it and the whole body collapses. You cannot wish a million people away. Or can you? Oh yes, I almost forgot what many of us still suppose: that they, the Shiites of Lebanon--these men and women with dubious national allegiance--must all be ideological dupes, fooled by Iran and Syria, their judgment clouded by socioeconomic incentives, or better yet, by otherworldly considerations (that classic and weighty model of ideology that has yet to be abandoned by progressives and conservatives alike). Yes, that is right. That must be it.

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V. A few of the false choices some of us face:

Unequivocal and publicly expressed support of the National Islamic Resistance.

or

Unequivocal and publicly expressed support of the National Islamic Resistance with reservations expressed privately, among those attuned to the complexity of Lebanese political life. (This category--those attuned to the complexity of Lebanese political life--remains without definition; or rather, its definitions are always postponed, altered arbitrarily it seems, given the class, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, language, and fashion sense of those seeking membership.)

or

Publicly expressed support of the National Islamic Resistance with reservations expressed publicly about the timing and motives of Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers, and the party's unilateral decision to drag the country into a war it was not prepared for.

or

Publicly expressed support of the National Islamic Resistance, with reservations expressed publicly about the loss of Lebanese and Israeli civilian life, even as one does not privately give a damn about Israeli civilians given that they are all right-wing, or left-wing-on-every-other-issue-except-Palestine, racists-nouveaux-riches-Soviet-Union-fleeing, single-party-voting, trees-in-Israel-buying-Brooklyn-born-and-residing, Palestinian-baby-killers, nuke-'em-all-chanting, messianic, holier-than-thou, intent-on-ruling-the-world-expansionist-settler-Zionists anyway.

or

Unequivocal and publicly expressed support for Israel.

or

Unequivocal and publicly expressed support of Israel with reservations expressed privately, among those attuned to the complexity of Israeli political life and Jewish life in general. (This category--those attuned to the complexity of Israeli political life and Jewish life in general--remains without definition; or rather, its definitions are always postponed, altered arbitrarily it seems, given the class, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, language, and fashion sense of those seeking membership.)

or

Unequivocal and publicly expressed support of Israel with reservations expressed publicly about Israel's continued occupation of Lebanese and Palestinian land, the root cause of much of this nonsense, and an Israeli policy hijacked by generals' overconfidence in Israeli military might.

or

Publicly expressed support for Israel with reservations expressed publicly about the high price paid by civilians in this conflict, even as privately one does not give a damn about Lebanese civilians since every Lebanese (with the exception of fine-cultured, Western-leaning, skiing-in-the-morning-swimming-in-the-afternoon, late-night-partying, designer-clad, Paris-New York-Berlin-London-Sao Paolo-hopping, French-speaking-middle-class, upper-middle-class, upper-class, and obscenely wealthy Christians, Sunnis, and Druze), every resident of south Lebanon and the southern suburbs is a martyr-at-heart, a Saddam-lovin'-al-Qaeda-financing, seeker-of-virgins-in-heaven, Holocaust-denier, Ahmadinejad-lovin', rabbitlike breeder of yet more anti-Semitic terrorists, suicide bombers, Hizbozos who all deserve to die anyway.

VI. I again follow Toufic, who writes:

  While social scientists, whether sociologists, economists, etc., can
  provide us with more or less convincing reasons, and mystifiers can
  grossly nonplus us, valid literature and art provide us with
  intelligent and subtle incomprehension. One of the main troubles with
  the world is that, unlike art and literature, it allows only for the
  gross alternative: understanding/incomprehension. Contrariwise, art
  and literature do not provide us with the illusion of comprehending,
  of grasping, but allow us to keenly not understand, intimating to us
  that the alternative is not between comprehension and incomprehension,
  but between incomprehension in a gross manner and while expecting
  comprehension; and incomprehension in an intelligent and subtle
  manner. (9)

Given what I have written so far, I suppose that I can benefit from reading this quotation one more time, and from heeding its call for "incomprehension in an intelligent and subtle manner."

VII. Hot wars and cold wars. What had some artists, scholars, and writers, among others, noted time and again in their works of the past fifteen years? Had they not insisted--despite the officially sanctioned endings of the wars in Lebanon in the early '90s, despite the celebratory rebuilding of downtown Beirut, despite the hundreds of gushing articles proclaiming Lebanon's phoenixlike rise and cosmopolitanism--that Lebanon was in fact in the grip of a cold war? Did they not speak of a militarized south, north, east, and west? Of the rhetoric and logic of the hot wars as still shaping every aspect of contemporary life? Of evident and potentially explosive contradictions everywhere in Lebanon's political, cultural, economic, and social landscape?

Why were so many visual artists, filmmakers, and writers speaking of, writing about, imaging, and performing surpassing disasters, latency, hysterical symptoms, sloth, the repressed, and the withdrawn? (10) Did they not already produce the images of cities and villages in ruins even when those cities and villages had been rebuilt? Did they not already speak of, write about, image, and perform the destruction evident today in Haret Hreik, Dahiya, Khiyam, Ainata, Srifa, Qana, Aita al-Shaab, and Rmeish?

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Or maybe we can also say that these artists, writers, sociologists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, writers, and architects have seen nothing in Haret Hreik, Khiyam, Aita al-Shaab, Rmeish, Tyre, Sidon, Ainata, Srifa, Qana, Marjayoun, and dozens of villages in south Lebanon. Surely we can say this, so long as this "I have seen nothing" is consistent with the Japanese man's insistence in the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour that his well-meaning and well-informed French lover had seen nothing in Hiroshima, despite the museums and monuments she had visited there, despite the books and films she had consulted, despite the testimonies she had heard. (11)

VIII. A Question to Walid Sadek

The last few weeks of summer brought to mind a work by Walid Sadek in which the artist is represented in the arms of Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, tightly clutched to the leader's body. It is not clear whether the larger-than-life Nasrallah is hugging or strangling the smaller-than-life Sadek; it is not clear whether Sadek relishes this rapprochement or whether he is suffocating as a result. (The image's name, Better Left Untitled, 2000, is of no help in this regard.) As much as the work appears to be expressive and prognostic, eerily foreshadowing the unfolding political events of the past few years, I am reluctant to read it allegorically, and I am tempted instead to read it literally, as a real-life enlarged photograph of a fan in the arms of his idol--an impossible proposition that is made all the more evident by the crude digital insertion of Sadek into Nasrallah's arms.

This past August, I asked Sadek to reflect again on some of the ideas, forms, feelings, and experiences that motivated the work's production. Sadek replied:

I agree with your reluctance to read it allegorically and would like to propose it as an image that wishes itself to be read metonymically. In other words, it is an image made of contiguity. This is true at the level of visual construction as well as at the level of the desire that motivated its making. As I recall, this image was exhibited a few months after Hezbollah succeeded in forcing the occupying Israeli army to retreat from south Lebanon, an event that many, myself included, regarded with mixed feelings. For although it was a remarkable accomplishment against a feared Israeli army, I questioned, even doubted, the ability if not the willingness of Hezbollah to promote the liberation of south Lebanon as a key moment, an event that would begin the implementation of the Taif accord and thus the construction of the deferred second Lebanese Republic. I do recognize that Hezbollah cannot be solely blamed for that deferral. The other political and sectarian factions in Lebanon were certainly not so eager, at the time, to embark on a project of nation-state building. (It would also be historically incorrect not to mention the role played by the Syrian Baath regime in frustrating any fledgling attempt in this regard.) Nevertheless, the victory of Hezbollah marked a moment when it seemed that the party and its Shiite constituency were at last capable of negotiating their role and taking active part in an inter-Lebanese settlement that might beget, in turn, a central state and a common national imaginary, however fragile and discontinuous.

To return to this image six years after its making is to recognize it as a contribution to a national imagery, and by extension, imaginary. And yet because that imaginary could not be summoned unaffected by real social and political problems, this image can be said to perform rather than represent the contiguity of an uneasy embrace. If I may quickly recall the work of Roman Jakobson, the metonymic pole in the construction of language employs combination and contexture. (12) As I view that image again, it is quite obvious that its visual construction wishes for the gestures of combination and contexture. It is a visual concoction of what I had wished to be a possible group portrait.

Stated in nonformal terms, this image wishes for an approach, my approach, to what had seemed until then to be a hermetic party structure and ideology and an urban sprawl, known generically as the southern suburb of Beirut, already organized and managed by Hezbollah as a self-sufficient enclave, not to say ghetto. That southern suburb was always presented by its inhabitants as proud and was seen as threateningly expansive by those living outside it. In both respects it stood as the obverse of the expansive openness of the reconstructed central district of Beirut locally known, after the private contracting company hired for the task of reconstruction, as Solidere. The liberation of the south on May 25, 2000, must have seemed then like an opportunity to open the gates of that urban and ideological enclave from within. Certainly the image under consideration entertained that possibility, if only as of clumsy (and perhaps slapstick) but necessary contiguity. (13)

That was then. The southern suburb is today in ruin. One would like to approach and mourn, to stand next to flattened buildings and insist that they were, not long ago, apartments with addresses and telephone numbers. And although the work of mourning proceeds in devious ways, it is nevertheless noticeable that this suburb is preoccupied with the promise of vengeance. Large red banners, printed with statements naming the United States as Israel's weapons provider and implicating it in the surrounding devastation, hang over the remains of neighborhoods. It is an accusation accepted as axiomatic by most Lebanese. Yet the pride and legitimate anger that fuels those banners notwithstanding, it must be said that they also tax the internal Lebanese sociality, which is already strained by the war. These banners postpone mourning. They even demean grieving. They claim that in the face of a murderous Israeli war machine, we cannot shed tears, for that would be a form of capitulation. What these banners also do is colonize the southern suburb. They once again foreground the silence of the enclave before the hum of solacing. They insist on the unification of speech acts and look dubiously upon the digressions of grief. In other words, these banners make contiguity impossible.

WALID RAAD IS A NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST AND AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF ART AT COOPER UNION, NEW YORK. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

WALID SADEK IS AN ARTIST AND WRITER BASED IN BEIRUT.

WALID RAAD

NOTES

1. On July 21, 2006, after spending a few weeks in Lebanon as part of our annual summer stay, and as a consequence of the worsening situation there, my family and I were evacuated on board the USS Nashville.

2. With regard to Iraq, an average of 110 Iraqis died every day in the month of July 2006. See Edward Wong and Damien Cave, "Number of Civilian Deaths Highest in July, Iraqis Say," the New York Times, August 16, 2006.

3. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Assessing the Environmental Costs of the War in the North," August 27, 2006, http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa.

4. Karby Leggett, "Fractured Land: Vast Rebuilding Job Looms in Lebanon; It, Too, Is Political," the Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2006.

5. See Thanassis Cambanis and Rana Fil, "Weeks of Bombing Leave Nation in Ruins," Boston Globe, August 5, 2006. See also Lauren Frayer, "Lebanon's Month-Old Oil Slick Stinks," the Washington Post, August 22, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082200921.html.

6. Neil MacDonald, "Unexploded Bombs Add to Lebanese Woes," Financial Times, August 16, 2006.

7. "Getting Personal with Katyusha Rockets," Anderson Cooper, 360[degrees] Blog, July 26, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/07/getting-personal-with-katyusha-rockets.html. See also Human Rights Watch, "Israeli Cluster Munitions Hit Civilians in Lebanon," http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/24/isrlpa13798.htm.

8. Jalal Toufic, "If You Prick Us Do We Not Bleed? No," Forthcoming, Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2000: 44.

9. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, "Interview with Jalal Toufic," in Towards a Foreign Likeness Bent: Translation, Sausalito, CA: Duration Press, 2005, http://durationpress.com/poetics/translation.pdf, p. 92.

10. I am thinking here of, among others, Ziad Abillama, Fadi Abdullah, Tony Chakar, Khalil Joreige, Lamia Joreige, Joana Hadjithomas, Bilal Khbeiz, Michel Lasserre, Rabih Mroueh, Marwan Richmaoui, Ghassan Salhab, Walid Sadek, Lina Saneh, Jalal Toufic, Paola Yacoub, and Akram Zaatari. It seems that visions of 1982 had been in the air lately: Zaatari recently revisited the 1982 invasion in his works This Day, 2003, and Saida, June 6, 1982, 2004. What had he anticipated as he took another look at diary entries and photographs produced in 1982, during another Israeli invasion of Lebanon? Did the six plumes of smoke represented in his composite photograph foreshadow the intensity of the 2006 bombing campaign? No. Were they meant to signify a city haunted by such past explosions? No, again. Why did Zaatari's 1982 photograph take twenty-four years to develop?

11. Toufic has written extensively on this "you have seen nothing in Hiroshima." Please consult his "Forthcoming," Forthcoming, pp. 46-75.

12. Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," in Selected Writings II, Word and Language, Mouton, The Hague, 1971.

13. I suppose that this clumsiness must be said to stand on one level as an index of my sectarian and ideological heritage, which, although I have persistently analyzed and defamiliarized it in my work, is never completely shed--at least not within the Lebanon-scape of political and sectarian forced belongingness. But I suppose as well that contiguity is that which is never made available to us within this Lebanon-scape, for it might incur the unforeseeable incidences born of contiguity and, perhaps, of overlapping.

Under the Volcano

I DON'T THINK WE'VE EVER lived through a postwar period. There is no "postwar" in Lebanon, only pauses. I don't think artists have reached a notion of time and space where they can get past the civil war.

There was the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, the Israeli invasion in 1982, and then the "Grapes of Wrath" campaign in 1996. The effects of this ongoing state of conflict are seen in the history of Ashkal Alwan, the nonprofit arts organization I direct, and in its projects. The Home Works Forum on Cultural Practices--a conference with performances and exhibitions attended by artists, curators, critics, and gallerists from around the world--has taken place three times and has been postponed on each occasion. The first time, in 2001, it was postponed because of the outbreak of the second intifada; in 2003 because of the war in Iraq; and in 2005 because of the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. The violence has assumed a predictable pattern, making us feel as if we are living by a volcano, and that every now and then it must erupt in order for us to live again. Art is created here in a state of constant instability, complete unpredictability, and continual interruption, yet the focal point of the artists' work does not change. The core is the same, only with different articulations.

Today the art of Beirut is internationally visible. But as recently as the early 1990s the city had no cultural institutions outside the commercial gallery system to support contemporary artists, organize projects, or build international relationships. Ashkal Alwan was created as an informal initiative with this in mind in 1994, a few years after the end of the civil war; it was founded by artist Marwan Rechmaoui, graphic designer Rania Tabbara, cultural activist Mustapha Yamout, writer Leila Mroueh, and me. (Now the board includes artist and filmmaker Joana Hadjithomas, artist and filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, artist Lina Saneh, and Masha Refka.) With no office at first, I worked out of cafes and my car. Our first project, in 1995, was a weeklong exhibition of twenty artists in the Sanayeh Garden, which dates back to the Ottoman period. But the "Hamra Street Project," 2000, was a turning point in our work: a multidisciplinary effort involving video, photography, installations, and publications. The prominence of video is significant because only two decades ago there was no video scene in Beirut at all. It developed only in the late '80s with Mohamed Soueid, one of its pioneers. Then, artists like Akram Zaatari and Soueid worked for television, and they used that experience as a tool in their art. Video art developed and flourished because it was accessible and immediate.

It's worthwhile to note that because of the lack of designated cultural spaces in Beirut, public space is an important sphere of artistic activity; in the absence of formal networks, artists have created their own associations and collaborations. Ashkal Alwan works within this scenario, but we have created an infrastructure, albeit one that is loose, nonlinear, and necessarily flexible. We're not alone, either. Among other groups that have formed since we started is the Arab Image Foundation, which was established in 1996 by Zaatari, photographer and filmmaker Fouad Elkoury, and photographer Samer Mohdad with the objective of preserving and promoting photography in the Middle East and North Africa. Beirut DC was founded in 1999 by a group of filmmakers and advocates; it produces independent films and holds film festivals and workshops.

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At the start of this most recent crisis, Ashkal Alwan successfully raised funds for refugee relief. But soon I felt frustrated, needing to return to my work as a curator. (In part, I was feeling that the city's whole population consisted of nothing but the displaced and those assisting the displaced.) And so I set out to find funding for artists to produce work about the current situation. I decided these should be two-year projects, so people have time to reflect and to obtain some critical distance. I have approached numerous artists already, including Salhab, Soueid, Wael Noureddine, Ziad Antar, and Rania Stephan. In addition, ten young artists, most of them recent university graduates, came to me with a proposal, asking Ashkal Alwan to use its network to spread the word about their work. I decided to take on their project and help them with funding. I immediately started sending e-mails, making calls. The Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development has provided a grant so each of the artists can create a nine-minute video; all ten works will be presented together. These are the voices I want to hear--individual voices, not cliched or stereotyped. I don't want to see the war through the eyes of mainstream media propaganda anymore; it has become completely pornographic and dangerous. I am not pitting artistic documents against the media; I am just saying that this is not my game.

We have a lot to do now. What is the meaning of cease-fire? Of truce? Did the war stop? During the bombardment, I had no sense of time; I had only a sense of space. My home, my office--these were my two reference points. I lost everything else, as if it were erased from my memory. So now it's as if I am excavating my memory again. Resistance, for me, is not a new term. In this region, you resist from the time you are born, from day one. I've been doing this in my work for thirteen years. And everybody is doing this: the carpenter, the journalist, the curator--everybody. This is not new. Every time you lose everything, you build it again, and every time it turns out to be much more solid. It is an accumulation.--AS TOLD TO KAELEN WILSON-GOLDIE

CHRISTINE TOHME IS AN INDEPENDENT CURATOR AND DIRECTOR OF ASHKAL ALWAN. THE LEBANESE ASSOCIATION FOR THE PLASTIC ARTS, BASED IN BEIRUT.

KAELEN WILSON-GOLDIE IS THE ARTS AND CULTURE EDITOR FOR THE DAILY STAR NEWSPAPER IN BEIRUT.

CHRISTING TOHME