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This house which is almost gone. Which still has the lines and weight of a house, yet it could very well be called landscape. This house which is a set of floors engraved with memories that no one you know could ever read. Things, as people, come and go, yet we believe them to be different, we invest what is left of our faith in this space or that. It’s what you think as you move the objects around, pretty damn self-conscious, pretty certain that this armchair in this place is pure iconoclasm.
You’d rather it were a farm. You would prefer it to be pragmatic, and you would strive for it to be pure function, eliminating any sentiment, oiling the squeaking doors so the sound doesn’t leave traces, cleaning the floor so there are no signatures. No time travels.
Then you picture this farm, and somehow it’s not so proper, the weather is muddy, or maybe that’s the way it always looks, there are traces everywhere, things have a rhythm they will never ever retain, things have a rhythm they will never ever give up. It is your wildest dream, and this land is full of you, it does not allow you to leave. You seem to have been here long before you’ve ever pictured this place.
You move back, trying not to stare, so as not to keep any of this. Then you see the roof, its perfectly symmetrical form (it is not symmetric, but that is how you see it), its blissful abstraction. The way this alien form remains here. Now, yes, you can leave. You exit the picture, you go back to the house where the armchair is elsewhere, you walk out through the garden, and you take your hard-earned sight to another nest.
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| Nicholas McLeod, The Farm (2010) |
It began with a story in Sunset Magazine on a new style of modular home that is compact, energy efficient and eco-friendly.
“When it is not windy, I love it,” my friend told me recently. Asked to name a special view, it was the same as mine- fog filling the estuarial valley. “When there is a low creeping fog, you can see above it, so you feel like you are on an island,” she said.
In 1989, a close friend and extraordinary artist, Alex Fournier, told me to take in a show at the IBM Gallery of Art and Science in Manhattan. “Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is an incredible painter,” Alex told me. I happened to be in NYC shortly thereafter, a rainy cold winter mid-week day, and recalled my friend’s suggestion. I don’t remember what I thought before I entered the Gallery, but the paintings I saw that day changed my life. I was literally high on color, light, the mastery of a great master. I bought every book that I could get my hands on and that summer fortuitously went to Spain on a planned family vacation to seek out Sorolla’s work in person. As luck would have it, Sorolla’s home in Madrid is a museum of his work. He also painted murals in the Spanish Institute in NYC. However, it was in Spain that I could have an inkling of the light under which Sorolla painted to create his impressionistic “luministic” (as Henri Rochefort described the paintings) masterpieces. And throughout the experiences I had that year, the name Anders Zorn kept popping up. Sorolla and Zorn were friends (and friendly with John Singer Sargent, as well) as well as colleagues who sought to capture their worlds in Spain and in Sweden, respectively, using light, color and the impressions that they garnered from their environments.
Managed to avoid the excess heat of the Dubai summer this year by spending much of July and August contemplating the infinite shades of grey and green in a very wet Europe. Got back to Dubai to find that I no longer have a job!
As you entered the gallery, Palestinian Layla Shawwa’s ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ was a striking start. The huge slingshot complete with large stone sitting on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor is an immediately recognisable symbol of military asymmetry and moral triumph. The piece and its ironic title acknowledge this standard interpretation but Layla Shawwa’s point is more complex. In the absence of any forward movement, the symbol now stands as an impotent victim of its own mythology. It becomes a memory around which an uneasy internal dialogue revolves rather than being the external symbol of strength that it once was.
Fouad El Khoury documents a month of his life in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Beirut came under serious bombardment following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The technique is a series of prints that show his diary page for each day. Sometimes the whole page is situated inside his house surrounded by the normalcy of household items. Other times the text is superimposed on events taking place outside the house, sometimes images familiar from news reports during that period. At the same time as news of what is happening in the nation is reported in his diary, a parallel tragedy is unfolding in his personal life as a relationship fails which makes a nice if obvious juxtaposition of the personal and the political. The whole photo series covers an entire wall of the gallery and makes an impact as both visual and emotional archive.
A very different approach is taken by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige whose multi part project ‘Wonder Beirut’ documents the earlier civil war period using the ‘Story of the Pyromaniac Photographer’. This was Abdallah Farah, a photographer commissioned by the Lebanese tourist board to take postcard images of Beirut in the late 1960s. With the onset of the civil war in 1975, he systematically burned or altered the slides and negatives he used for the postcards to reflect the damage of battle. This results in some fantastic images with parts melted and blackened but retaining postcard colour intensity at the same time. Others such as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ show sequences of the same postcard image gradually being destroyed.
