“I fear […] new blood.”
(Ounsi El-Hajj, “Lann,” 1960)
Several art historians and philosophers of aesthetics distinguish between two distinct periods, “the age of taste” and “the age of emotion,” the former referring to a time before the development of aesthetics at the hands of Immanuel Kant (d. 1804). This kind of distinction can be easily assimilated into Arabic, particularly the notion of “taste” (dhawq), which, along with its derivative terms, refers to the link between the senses and the arts while “tasting” (tadhawwuq) refers to the human act by which one judges works of art and aesthetic practices.
The verb “to taste” (dhaqa) in Arabic etymologically denotes the sensory consumption of a substance, in this case food placed on the tongue. The term later expanded to include the experience of psychological states, as when one says, “he tasted pain,” “he tasted suffering,” or “he tasted calamity.” What the various meanings and denotations of the term point to are situations whose “taste” (madhaqiha) can be experienced and verified only when one suffers through or undergoes them; only then can one judge them agreeable or disagreeable, painful, beautiful, etc.
What is so interesting about languages, and cultures for that matter, is the manner in which they often converge on a similar understanding independently and without any prior contact. For example, the etymological root of the French word goût and its derivative terms correspond in many ways to the Arabic. In French it refers to the act of perceiving through the senses, specifically the tongue, often including the nose, and it can also be applied to aesthetic judgments. Similarly the English word “taste,” along with its derivative terms, implies all of the above-mentioned meanings.
If the convergence of meaning in these three languages is certain and obvious in regard to the term “taste,” the same cannot be said about the other term we are addressing here: “emotion” (French, émotion). It requires a searching inquiry into the meanings and denotations of the term to understand what conceptual shifts the term underwent at the hands of Kant, who placed “emotion” or feeling at the heart of the aesthetic experience. Human beings “judge” what they see or “taste” but this judgment is born of this “emotion” or feeling.
These cursory movements through languages and cultures reveal definite dialogues between them but they also refer to what the artist passionately lives through and knows when he creates, and what the “taster” of art—either the critic or the proprietor of art—passionately lives through and knows when he “receives” the work of art: the former responds emotionally in order to create while the latter responds emotionally when he receives.
Kant established this link between the senses and cognition as an epistemological principle in aesthetics. He did not separate the “tasting” of seafood, the art of garden design, and the art of conversation from the art of painting. Many other artists and philosophers after him did precisely that. Several modern art movements, especially of the past five decades, have severed the art of the painting from sensation or experience and have reduced the artistic process to mere execution, usually performed by the artist’s assistant. The artistic process has therefore lost the passionate involvement with materiality and all its meanings.
A Three-Way Dialogue
I could not have begun discussing the work of the artist Abed Al Kadiri without this brief introduction because I found in his work a striking expression and renewal of this relation between art and emotion—a relation often neglected or abandoned. Furthermore, the artist chose to combine the most intensely burning moments of the present with moments [of Al Wasiti’s Maqamat] that are old, past, and cold so to speak.
The material image of the painting tightly affixed to a wooden frame resembles the manner in which the artistic process for him is likewise tightly framed by several aspects that define his work: the painting for him builds a “dialogue,” as it were, with Al Wasiti’s illustrations of Maqamat al-Hariri on the one hand and the rich artistic heritage of Mesopotamia on the other, a heritage that has been pillaged and destroyed over the past three decades and with particular intensity in the last few years. What do all these elements have in common? What is thereby produced?
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[Abed Al Kadiri, Homage to Yaha Al Wasiti (2014-2015), Image copyright and courtesy of the artist.]
To begin, one must bear in mind the elements of this three-way relation: the artist’s moment, Al Wasiti’s illustrated book, and the material heritage of Mesopotamia in particular. These are elements that meet on the surface of the material medium, in as much as they are the result of the choices the artist made and the reasons he gave for creating his oil paintings. I will highlight some of these through a series of investigative probes of his latest works.
I would like to start by inquiring into the relation between the canvas and the paper that is both present and absent in his work. The observer should have no doubt that what he sees is a canvas on a large scale executed using oil colors and charcoal sticks. The common practice among oil painters for centuries has been to first use a base coat(s) over the canvas then paint over the base coat. This technique provides multiple layers: the material medium or the canvas, the base coat, and the painted surface. This is what bound the art of painting to the art of representation—the art of representing living things and objects— for the artist wants the observer to see only the represented image and not the base coat or canvas backgrounds.
However, Al Kadiri’s work is somewhat different for he invalidates the above-mentioned relation. Though he represents on a canvas, he does not establish a base coat for his painting, as his predecessors did; rather he engages it directly like a calligrapher or decorator in traditional Arab-Islamic art, who used to plunge immediately into the production of the artwork on paper (in its various forms) without an intermediary mediating between the artistic tool and material medium. This is what the observer notices when he sees the color of the paper visible in the background of these [traditional] works. The calligraphic lines and images appear on the surface of the material medium as if they have descended upon the material medium with great difficulty for they seem sliced up or forced into the composition. The calligraphic lines appear as if they were exercises on sketching paper while the figurative images appear like cutout figurines used in shadow theatres.
This is what appears in the paintings of Al Kadiri more intensely. For he resorts to the use of charcoal sticks, which were not commonly used by later artists but were quite commonly used by classical artists and apprentices (such as anatomical sketches in workbooks). This sudden and curious return of the charcoal stick at the hands of a young artist allows him to perform several moves with a single stroke of the stick: there is the violent stroke, instead of the cautious stroke of the calligrapher’s reed; there is the stroke that blackens [the canvas], highlighting the gloomy subject matter; and the stroke that blackens with varied textures (where the artist may manually apply the black charcoal onto the canvas), allowing different possibilities and color shades as oil pastels.
[Abed Al Kadiri, Al Maqama (2014). Image copyright and courtesy of the artist.]
However, this stroke possesses a more fundamental meaning: it is the stroke of a [charcoal] stick, a pen of sorts, which captures a moment; it is the pen of deep feeling and emotion.
Between the Pen and the Brush
Al Kadiri combines, on the surface of his painting, the pen and the brush, which symbolizes the meeting of two artistic traditions with all their meanings, similarities, and differences. He paints with the pen and the brush, and writes with them too, which refers yet to another symbolic process. The charcoal stick or pen is a tool for representation, and is a tool for writing (Al Kadiri writes several Arabic sentences in one of his paintings). Therefore, he draws with his charcoal pen and colors (black and its tones) while the brush represents and writes simultaneously. In some of his paintings the artist has clearly reserved the use of the charcoal stick for one aspect of the work while he uses the brush for another aspect. Indeed the paintings often appear to have a dual structure and a strict divide: a part that is black executed by ink and charcoal; the other is yellow executed by oil paint.
What draws one’s attention, beyond the material aspect of the painting, is the relation that is established between the artist’s hand and the representational surface. It is a tense relation that is somewhat restless. For if the calligrapher [patiently] cuts [and sharpens] the reed from which he makes his pen [and creates his art with measured gestures], Al Kadiri appears, from his works, as if his hand had [impatiently] "descended" onto the representational surface quite violently after it had "sharpened" its emotional response. The strokes of the charcoal stick or the brush do not settle upon the canvas easily, gently, or even quietly, but rather they are angled, jerked, incised strokes that seem to recoil upon one another; the gloominess of the [dark] color adds to the violence of these strokes, some of which are visible and others still latent.
The strokes appear like the incisions of a sharpened knife or successive powerful slaps in which the receiver is left unable to know whether the artist is describing or avenging: Is he describing the blows that destroyed the historic monuments or is he avenging them? What helps answer the question is the fact that the artist inserts into the artistic process several layers: he avenges as much as he describes and in all cases he is “purified” of the destruction that has befallen the historic monuments. It is as if the artistic process resembles the “theatrical” enacting of an event, [in this case the destruction of historic monuments], and, in the process of re-enacting it, is liberated from its effects and consequences, particularly the psychological effects. One can go even further and claim that the artist’s enacting of an event removes it from its context and “elevates” it to the level of art, to the level of beauty, and, in the process, the blood of history turns to color and its shattered fragments into lines.
Between the Painting and Time
What strengthens the relation of the artist to the event is based on yet another relation, a strong relation between his paintings and the illustrations of Al Wasiti. How can we describe this relationship? Is it the relation of a young artist influenced by an illustrious artist whose art many consider to be the crowning achievement of pre-modern Arab-Islamic art?
Abed AlKadiri does not mimic Al Wasiti’s art rather he reclaims, over the surface of the canvas, many of the compositional elements and figurative shapes that define Al Wasiti’s illustrations on paper. Al Kadiri “pays homage” to Al Wasiti in that he “discovers” him and ascertains the foundational depths of the artist’s experience, for Al Kadiri implicitly alludes to the fact that, like Al Wasiti before him, he is establishing a living and dynamic relation with his own times. If this relation is both obvious and necessary between the artist and his times today, it was not so between Al Wasiti and his times.
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[Abed Al Kadiri, Al Maqama (2014). Image copyright and courtesy of the artist.]
This is what I tried to explore and explain in more than one of my lectures and books. I concluded that the manuscript illustrations should not be called “miniatures” (as Bishr Faris suggested in the 1950s and was uncritically accepted in Arabic texts). Bishr’s point of departure was the European (or Italian) term “miniatura” for which he gave the Arabic equivalent “munamnima,” which means a “small” line. This term is misleading as long as it combines both manuscript illustration and the art of “miniatures,” for the Islamic tradition did not know this type of art. In addition, the art of manuscript illustration is not based on “reductions in size” at all. Indeed some of Al Wasiti’s illustrations cover entire pages.
I have also defended the idea that Al Wasiti’s illustrations do not resemble the type of art that floats in an ethereal space outside of time and history. I have demonstrated elsewhere how Al Wasiti establishes a dynamic relation between the texts [of Maqamat al-Hariri] and his figurative imagination. In addition to what he found in the Maqamat, he often “added" to the illustrations many elements that were not to be found in the Maqamat themselves; what he “added" is derived from his social, historical, and visual imaginary. I also pointed out that Al Wasiti did not paint different and unrelated illustrations but rather he was dedicated to the art of a book [i.e. a single book, the Maqamat], which parallels the art of narration of the Maqamat. Indeed, just as the Maqamat have a narrator, likewise the Maqamat of Al Wasiti have a [visual] narrator in the form of shapes, colors, and figures.
This is what Al Kadiri discovered in the folds of some of his paintings, for he creates out of them a scene that has visual, historical, and social references. This means that Al Kadiri, like Al Wasiti, establishes a dynamic relation with his times. This belies the claim that pre-modern Islamic art was cold, decorative and stylistically static. This is why one can say that what Abed Al Kadiri has done in the scope of his paintings is a process of deep emotional engagement and that what is still latent and concealed is much stronger than what is announced, revealed, and suggested. He watches the news reports on television that explode with images of destruction and human suffering or peruses through the latest print edition of Al Wasiti’s original illustrations (preserved in the Bibliotheque National in Paris and published by the Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi) and suddenly his contemporary culture [that is suffused with violent events] fuses with his peripheral vision [that has caught Al Wasiti’s exquisite illustrations] and he responds passionately. In this, he proves that an art like his creates inasmuch as the artist is “situated” in the dialectic of the living moment. Therein is a subtle critique of contemporary art: the artist reclaims the relation between event and image (evident in many of his previous works and exhibitions), a relation almost absent from contemporary art. He also reclaims the relation between literature and the image, a relation that has been reduced in some contemporary Arabic illustrations to no more than an art of colorful and playful decoration.
[Abed Al Kadiri, Al Maqama (2014). Image copyright and courtesy of the artist.]
Some of this emotional engagement emerges from fear no doubt, but presupposes also the banishment of all fear during the artistic process, like purified “new blood.”
Translated from the Arabic by Samir Mahmoud
Abed Al Kadiri’s exhibition, Al Maqāma 2014, opens 18 October at Dar Al Funoon Gallery, Kuwait City