1/30/2017
Everything living also grows | Arts & Ent , Culture | THE DAILY STAR
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Everything living also grows
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Jan. 30, 2017 | 12:02 AM
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Kirsten Scheid
| The Daily Star
BEIRUT: “Everything living grows.” Saloua Raouda Choucair’s words inaugurated her
first public sculpture at Ramlet al­Baida in June 1983, as army helicopters whirred
overhead and rose petals floated to the ground.
Towering up from a roundabout, the sculpture engaged the eyes of passers­by in a
riddle of reason, because it had no figurative referent. A six­unit work that had been
commissioned for an urban beautification and reunification project, Choucair’s
sculpture could grow by the addition of elements following the same subtle formula
as the extant units. Six units now, it could become eight, or 10, or many more.
The work’s life was inherent not in its molecular composition but in the formal
dynamics of its curves, angles, masses and voids. Because it could inspire new
interactions limitlessly, its life was endless. Because it could prompt curiosity and
wonder in viewers, its life was boundless.
Choucair added that (though the commission came from a political party with whom
she was clearly uncomfortable) she agreed to the installation because she recognized
that her work shared the commissioners’ interest in reconstruction and optimism for
life.
This was 1983 in Beirut, at a roundabout where the PSP and Amal still often clashed.
Choucair’s inaugural assertion reminds us that everything living also dies. Her work is
vulnerable to human interaction in ways more conventional art escape. Later that year
the sculpture mysteriously disappeared, wrest under unknown circumstances from the
public sphere. Though rumored to still be in Lebanon, it is now dead to public life:
interacting with no public, inspiring no one.
In June 1983 Choucair erected a challenge to common notions of history, time,
objectivity, and art. She defied the idea that art is inert, or that it is limited to an
original maker’s intention. Her challenge has been recognized locally, regionally, and
internationally for its originality and integrity. Her challenge could end the limitations
that art historians, critics, and curators bring to a widespread understanding of art as
an object fixed in space and time, or as the product or even possession of a unique
individual.
That challenge remains despite the absence of her seminal sculpture.
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Everything living also grows | Arts & Ent , Culture | THE DAILY STAR
This week, at age 100, Saloua Raouda Choucair died. This end is the chance for a
beginning. As her physical presence departs, whisked serenely away in a silk­covered
coffin, her metaphysical presence swells.
Choucair devoted her life to finding in art the key to surpassing individual, temporal
and spatial boundaries. Her work in stone, wood, polyurethane, glass, water, fiber
and paint offers us the key she found. The guardian is gone. The key now rests in the
hands of all her admirers and poses the question: Will they use the key or simply put
it on a museum shelf?
One of Choucair’s earliest public artistic acts was to organize art lectures for the Arab
Cultural Club (1947­48). She presented her audience of college students, young
politicians and feda’yeen with art from different cultures, teaching them how it
related to a culture’s “personality” – whether ancient Egyptian, Greek, American, or
Arab – and insisting that each be taken on its own terms.
No narrative of progress could account for a culture’s visual language or rank its
achievements but if Choucair severed the tie between time and progress, it was to
repoliticize it. She was not interested in defining actions as complete or ongoing but
rather in identifying their means of generation and from there, holding people of the
present accountable for what they make of their lives.
As in her writing, so in her art. Choucair produced her compositions by fiddling
through a variety of material, often starting with sketches of two­dimensional shapes
and then expanding them into small clay maquettes that could be “conceptual”
pieces for execution later in wood, stone, metal, or fiberglass.
She did not work through ideas as series, responding directly to current events or
building progressively from one project to the next. Rather, she continually recycled
materials and revisited ideas, discovering them from new angles, in new media, under
new conditions, in new dimensions. Artist and critics have called the generative units
featured in Choucair’s art “patterns,” “equations,” “geometrics,” “poetic meters”
and “genes.” These terms suggest the work is non­figurative and does not fade upon
recognition into something the viewer has seen elsewhere.
We might call Choucair’s works “plastic elixirs” for how they encapsulate growth
processes by setting forms into interaction and then inviting the audience to interact
with them. For example, “DNA Section” (circa 1980­3), spirals up from a square base
in a thin rectangle of wood that is smooth when seen from one side yet rippling on its
opposite side. The geometric shape reveals, from another angle, undulating lines that
undo it.
This stark physical contrast generates different reflections of light, which stimulate an
experience of imbalance, the smoothness of the one side strongly suggesting that the
rippling side awaits its completion in another, unseen but viscerally experienced,
component.
Audience is crucial to the play of Choucair’s art, yet the audience called into being
cannot rely on what it already knows to make sense of the art. Rather it must become
aware of itself as a sense­making entity. I call this “mindful sightedness.”
If the works are “plastic elixirs,” the experience of them should revitalize people who
may have slipped into narratives about how they live, relying on a notion of the march
of time or some cultural conformity. Choucair crafted a realm in which audiences may
recognize their responsibility for what they see. With her art one can realize that the
world exists in as much as you receive its existence.
If art has no meaning before interaction with an audience, there is no end to the
meaning produced – from what Jacques al­Aswad has called a “suspended ending.”
Whether a monument overseeing traffic at a roundabout, a rug welcoming dinner
guests, or ring gracing a hand extended in greeting, Choucair’s art seeks to stimulate
audiences’ self­awareness of their viewing experiences.
How do we respond to Choucair’s challenge today, now that this singular person has
left us?
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Everything living also grows | Arts & Ent , Culture | THE DAILY STAR
There is a kind of hypocrisy among patrons who would appreciate Choucair’s work as
an “historic” incidence of Modernism in the Arab world. In this I too am culpable,
having curated an exhibition called “Historical Modernisms,” which featured
Choucair’s work.
In forcing Choucair into history, I refused to believe that her art could prompt a world
without chronological time – a world of “endlessness,” as Laura Metzler put it.
We may know how to relate Choucair’s work back to the Mandate era, in which she
was trained, or the modernist era – her innovative mix of science, philosophy,
linguistics and bricolage contributed to Paris’ post­World War II art scene – or the
international abstract art of the ’70s. Yet how ought this work relate to the present?
More crucially, can we learn about the potential of life from it?
Rather than looking away from Choucair’s art and relating it to some source or intent,
we need to learn to look with it at our world. In this time of proliferating cultural
institutions, let Choucair’s work be our guide for rethinking the role of the institution.
That role cannot be to “museum­ize” cultural heritage, to consecrate the evolutionist
thought that engendered imperialism and cultural ranking. Her artwork teaches us
different notions of space and time, so let us revamp institutions accordingly. Her art
teaches us that there is no meaning except through interaction, so interaction is a risk
that must be pursued.
For art that is fundamentally about the experimentation of plastic conditions for
generation, to limit it to its current state, whether a clay maquette or a gouache
painting, is to deny its existence. It is to hold on the corpse in the coffin and blind
oneself to the life she set into motion. Now the challenge is to be activated by the
“suspended ending” Choucair has set into play.
A professor in AUB’s anthropology department, Kirsten Scheid researches and writes
about modern and contemporary art in the Arab world, and has curated and co­
curated a number of exhibitions related to this subject.
Copyrights 2017, The Daily Star ­ All Rights Reserved
30/01/2017
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