The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse

Forget about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that’s way too dignified for the petty bourgeois grievances that manifested themselves in the Big Tantrum of 09 on the streets of the City of London this past week. The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse is a more apt moniker to describe those lost souls gathered outside the halls of the G20 proceedings, as opposed to their equally confused counterparts who had the pleasure of experiencing the event from within. The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse beautifully sums up the equal measures of banality and doom-mongering that fuelled this middle class tantrum, and as luck would have it, Newsnight assembled three guests on the evening of that most insignificant of demonstrations, each representing one wing of the White Middle Class Anger and Doom-Mongering apparatus. For the duration of their chat with Jeremy Paxman, they faithfully re-enacted the antics of the original Three Stooges, although too much less humorous results. Like a bird with three wings, this is a freak of nature that didn’t fly far.
Our Three Stooges of the Apocalypse for the night were Barbara Stocking, the Director of Oxfam, or White Woman Knows What is Best for Africa, Mark King, from the Camp for Climate Action , or White Man Knows What is Best for the Planet, and the comedian Mark Thomas, or White Man Knows What is Best. (In some circles he is known as the least funny comedian in the universe, perhaps he should be investigated by the Trading Standards Agency).
Paxo was atypically restrained, focusing most of his characteristic ire on the International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, the boy-wonder of New Labour, and gently sheltering his fellow members in The White Middle Class Liberal Club. Paxo gently prodded The Three Stooges, what’s their wish list for G20 decisions? Barbara Stocking: Financial Stimulus for poorer nations, presumably to be distributed through Oxfam and like-minded Neo-colonialists so that they can prepare poor African farmers for the challenges of goat-herding in the 21st century and shelter them from the nasty syndromes of development that the west is suffering from, such as clean drinking water and functioning public transport systems. Mark Thomas: Get rid of tax havens! For a self-described radical, Thomas is certainly tame, managing to agree with Angela Merkel and Nicola Sarkozy, perhaps the most conservative politicians in Europe today, and the two who have absolutely no clue about what to do except to appear to be challenging the US and the UK without actually doing so. Thomas thought that tax havens, where most hedge funds are based, are what caused the crisis. Forget about the de-industrialisation of the West and the lack of productivity in paper economies that produce very little but consume more than anyone else, and let’s demonise the faceless hedge funds. Mark King (ponytail? Seriously, dude?): Climate Change! (Surprise, Surprise!) He even came prepared with a sound byte, the climate doesn’t do bailouts! The greens are definitely getting better script writers these days, but you have to agree with Obama, put lipstick on a pig… (or even a ponytail).
Mark King doesn’t like the dinosaur that is high-carbon industry. But he and his fellow greens don’t like low-carbon industry either. They hate industry full stop. Why are they focusing on aviation, which is one of the smallest producers of carbon emissions? The Greens have consistently opposed any technological solutions for Climate Change preferring to reduce consumption and smother demand, and solve the problem at is root. Kill aspiration and progress, but save the planet. How do they square the circle between their demands for caps on CO2 emissions which would lead to more economic problems by reducing productivity, God only knows. Or Gaia.
Yet, it was entertaining to see The Three Stooges do their act and expose how little they know, and how little they understand the world we live in, and the real reasons for the economic slump. (I think the sound of the recession happening sounds somewhat like slummmmp.) The solution is more industry, in the West and the Rest, more productivity, more investment in real infra-structure as opposed to meaningless subsidies for inefficient energy technologies such as solar panels on flats in London. And while we’re at it, let’s not politicise the energy question, and release from the confines of the climate change discussion. The real energy question is how we can get more energy, way more energy, cheaper, cleaner and more available, everywhere. So that we can fly more, produce more, and have more. So that one, every family in Africa can have a large house, two cars, and take a holiday in Europe every year. (They can go somewhere else if they want, it’s merely a suggestion).
To The Stooges of The Apocalypse, the world is passing you by, you are holding centre-stage now, but you are irrelevant. The media’s obsession with your every little action or utterance does not mean anything in the real world, and your mates from Cambridge or Oxford will not dictate the course of events in the long run. One day, the workers in this country will wake up, and then your antics will be over. Think of your next show.

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Thoughts on the Satanic Verses Affair

I watched The Satanic Verses Affair late last night on the BBC, and thought it was really good. Salman Rushdie isn't the perfect hero of free speech, but who is? It's a great reminder that people's real character emerge through their conflict with the world, and their ideas are shaped by this encounters, life is not a Hollywood film. Rushdie made a lot of concessions, re-converted to Islam, issued apologies, and then announced that his experiment with Islam was over and admitted that he hadn't converted out of conviction.

Hanif Kureishi came across as a more heroic figure, dismissing Rushdie's enemies as the 'bearded ones', but he didn't have to go through what Rushdie experienced. The real hero to me was Frances D'Souza entirely committed to the cause of defending Rushdie's right to free speech without compromise, she was very convincing in her defense of the principled stance that drove her and her colleagues to form the International Committee for the defence of Rushdie.

The other notable contributor to the program was Inayat Bunglawala, one of the Islamic activists who were shaped by the Rushdie affair and took their first steps in politics through the campaigns to ban the book. At the end of the program, Bunglawala admitted that they were wrong in calling for the book to be banned and for supporting the Fatwa against Rushdie. Instead, he said, they should have fought it on 'the plain of ideas'. It's an amazing admission, and shows that at least some people did learn from the whole episode.

If Islamic 'fundamentalists' manage to learn the value of free speech, perhaps the environmental 'movement' should take notice that its tactics of intimidation and accusing people of denial do not serve its cause. Who's more reactionary today, an Islamist whose willing to discuss his most sacred ideas publicly or an environmentalist who goes out of his or her way to silence opponents?

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Lame Cultural Ideas -No.1- No Statue for Charlie Chaplin

I hope this will become an online archive for lame ideas that come about because of the obsession with cultural identity. No 1 comes today from India, where Hindu activists are upset by a proposal for a 20m tall statue of Charlie Chaplin, because he was a Christian. The activists have actually succeeded in preventing the statue from being built, however I don't agree with the Times' assessment that they are 'extremists'. This label is applied too easily these days.

When cultural identity takes the place of politics, this is the kind of excess that you can expect. Such protests are motivated less by bigotry than by a sense of insecurity and a fragile identity. All over the world there are examples of how cultural identity is distorting politics and producing more examples of these lame protests. Please send in your examples to this post.

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Pubs should return to the centre of public life

It's not everyday that I find myself agreeing with Tristram Hunt, reading his column in the Times today about controls on drinking was a pleasant surprise, until I got to the end and Hunt shows his true colours. Hunt argues that pubs should take their place at the heart of public life in Britain, and criticises measures like the smoking ban for driving people away from pubs. All very true, until Hunt says that the "...ban on smoking in public places has driven drinking back into the home, where social safeguards are absent".

Hunt is not arguing for the freedom of drinkers, he wants them to drink in public where they can be monitored and controlled, by each other and by the state. It's another version of the 'eye on the street' that institutionalises suspicion between citizens, and is abhorred by what they might get up to in the privacy of their homes. Hunt has used a similar logic in the past to argue against suburbs, again blaming them for moral degeneracy.

Hunt is not a campaigner for freedom, he's a pragmatic authoritarian who thinks it's better to monitor drinkers in public than attempting to limit their consumption of alcohol through punitive measure, simply because they haven't worked in the past. What a truly miserable view of humanity.

On a similar subject, I am trying to oppose the proposal to turn the area around the Arsenal Emirates Stadium into a Controlled Drinking Zone, a measure that the metropolitan police has asked Islington Council to consider. Very few people know what CDZs are, and what they actually mean. Effectively, this gives the police extra powers to stop you and confiscate drinks you are carrying, even if they are unopened. Either the police have developed psychic skills, or as I am more inclined to believe, they would use these powers to make their lives easier, and in the process making everyone walking with a drink a suspect.

The proposal is calculated and worded to create tension between the residents and the Arsenal fans, the fans are not being consulted only the residents are. What I found to my surprise, is that some Arsenal fans actually support this measure because they blame the away fans for bad behaviour. This is exactly the type of suspicion that such policies promote, and we should fight it.I agree with Hunt, let's put the pub at the centre of public life again, but let's remove all the constraints that have been imposed by the government and councils on public drinking to enable that.

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ManTowNHuman: The Fountainhead Rewritten by Jeremy Clarkson

Best description I ever heard of our manifesto: "The Fountainhead re-written by Jeremy Clarkson." Thanks to Charles Holland, the director of FAT, for that. I couldn't have thought of a better way of putting it myself. Second prize goes to Justin McGuirk in the Architects' Journal, who described ManTowNHuman as the "anti-sustainability manifesto". No link for that, you'll have to buy your own copy of the AJ for the pleasure.
Holland meant it as a critique, of course, but it's still a brilliant line. Back in October, I spoke on a panel with Holland's colleague from FAT, Sean Griffiths and I actually thought he was quite good as a speaker and he stood up for the freedom of architects. Admittedly, their stuff is a bit flippant, but those aren't heroic times. Perhaps the recession will sort that out, someone will realize that we will need genuine development and big ideas instead of messing around the edges.
Holland got everything else about us wrong. I don't think I've ever been called a conservative before, but there's a first time for everything. His grasp of politics is very shallow, but you can't expect nice white middle class boys to be Renaissance Men, that would be too old fashioned. Still, thank for the quote, Charlie Boy.

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'Help' Lebanese Film and Freedom of Expression, or Christians Learn from Khomeini

‘HELP! was pasted all over Beirut in February on bright blue posters advertising the new Lebanese film addressing sex, prostitution, drugs and homelessness. But anticipation for the movie, which cost over $200,000 to make, came to nothing. The film's directors told NOW that the Censorship Department in the General Security withdrew permission for a planned screening on February 16.’ (NOW Lebanon)

With Nadine Labaki's 'Caramel', it appeared that Lebanese cinema was taking a new direction. For starters, it was refreshing to see a film that addressed the contemporary reality of Beirut and moving away from the subject matter of the civil war that had for long occupied Lebanese filmmakers. Also, the film tackled, ever so gently, some of the 'taboos' in Lebanese society, such as homosexuality, virginity, and extra-marital affairs. Lebanese audiences were waiting for the release of Marc Abi Rached's film 'Help' which was expected to be more daring in dealing with such social issues, however this was not meant to be. As Pierre Abi Saab reports today in Al-Akhbar, the Lebanese film censoring authority has withdrawn a license that it had previously issued, meaning that the film has effectively been banned.

There has been speculation since the license for the film was revoked about the reasons for this decision. One theory was that the officer in charge of the licensing the film was replaced, a bit flimsy in my opinion. Others said it was because of the nudity in the film, especially that the actress involved is the daughter of a Lebanese MP. But Abi Rached said in an interview that he stayed well within the limit allowed by Lebanese Law on nudity. The organization Skeyes, the Centre for Defending Media and Cultural Freedoms founded in memory of murdered Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, claimed that a Catholic organization had a role in the decision to ban Abi Rached’s film.

On the Lebanese Forces discussion forum, (don't ask) the contributors were in favour of showing the film, and someone suggested that it was because 'our southern Iranian neighbours don't like nudity'. (A not-so-subtle reference to the Shiite community). According to Abi Saab's piece in Al-Akhbar today, it appears that they are in for a surprise. Abi Saab attributes the decision to withdraw the license to a 'protest' made by the 'Centre Catholique d’Information', the mouthpiece of the Maronite church in Lebanon. Abi Saab does not cite any sources for his claim, but he is a good critic and a trustworthy journalist, and I would have no reason to doubt his claim.

The film apparently describes the experiences of some of the ‘marginal’ characters of Beirut, a young prostitute, a homeless teenager, and an overtly camp gay character. Abi Saab thinks that it is this character in particular that seems to have offended the church authorities most, and he might be right. Such subjects have certainly been addressed by Lebanese filmmakers in the past, such in Mohammed Soueid’s 'Cinema Fouad' and Akram Zaatari’s 'Majnounak', but those were short ‘documentary’ style films, shown mostly to small audiences. With Help, Abi Rached was preparing to take those subjects to a mass audience in a feature-length format, which might still make it to Europe before it will be seen by Lebanese audiences.

Like 'Caramel' before it, 'Help' appears to be influenced by Almodovar’s work, and certainly from the trailer available online appears to be ‘polished’ technically. It was boldly advertised through a ‘teaser’ campaign, the aforementioned Help signs did not mention the film until sometime later. All of this is significant. Whereas Zaatari’s and Soueid’s work took advantage of the small ‘art house’ context to push the limits, it is high time that the wider audience gets the benefit of a similar experience. I have no idea if Help is any good, but I would have liked to have the opportunity to judge for myself.

What is interesting about the whole episode is the extent to which the language of cultural sensitivity is being deployed nowadays. Those who argue that the Satanic Verses saga was about Islam, and its incompatibility with the modern world, are entirely wrong. It wasn’t Islamists that came up with the idea that speech hurts, in fact it was a by-product of feminism that found its way into the mainstream. Once feminism was dissociated from a wider idea of liberation and started arguing in favour of a particular experience that is distinct from the universal, it inevitably started dabbling with restrictions on speech and expression. That lesson has been learned by everyone, from cultural groups to religious organisations to gay rights campaigners, who all compete nowadays in what they see as defending their constituents from offense.

In that sense, the Catholic Information Centre is not being an outdated religious institution, but a thoroughly postmodern one. Even if it turns out that it was not behind this particular decision to ban 'Help', it has certainly led campaigns in the past against some films and books that it considered offensive, such as The Da Vinci Code. The response should be not to blame religion, but to insist that there is no right not to be offended. This is even more important when the film in question is not an imported one, but someone holding a mirror to the society he lives in, as Abi Rached is trying to do. Let’s find out for ourselves whether we can see our reflection in that mirror.

For more articles on film, see:
http://www.karlsharro.co.uk/Imagining%20the%20City.htm
http://www.karlsharro.co.uk/syriana.html
http://www.karlsharro.co.uk/architecture_film.html

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Unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery: Middle Eastern Art

Unveiled: New Art From The Middle East is an exhibition which claims little beyond its title. There is no obvious reason why this particular group of artists should be brought together in the same exhibition, to claim that somehow they represent art practices in the Middle East would be misleading, there are no obvious stylistic connections or over-riding concerns among the various artists on show. Paradoxically, this liberates the exhibition and allows the visitors to relate more to the individual works on display. This show does what it says on the tin, and does it successfully.
In contrast to Catherine David's Contemporary Arab Representations, a series of exhibitions that ran for several years since 2001 in various cities, Unveiled does not assume the burden of representation, and does not expect the artists to give an insight into Arab culture, cultural ambassadors they are not. What they do is give us free-standing art works that can (mostly) speak for themselves. This was a breath of fresh air.
Take for example the two works by Marwan Rechmaoui Beirut, Caoutchouc and Spectre, previously exhibited as part of Contemporary Arab Representations. It's the first time that I've seen his work shown outside of that context and liberated from the company of Deleuzian texts and yet another grainy video of someone's aunt, and it was like seeing the artworks for the first time. Caoutchouc is a large scale map of Beirut reproduced in black rubber in relief, that represents the city in a surprisingly novel way. Common to the work of most Lebanese artists of his generation, the problem of knowing the city is a central theme in Rechmaoui's work, yet his take on it is very personal and specific. The abstract conventions of map-making are subtly manipulated, allowing us to look beyond the physical city.
In Spectre (The Yacoubian Building, Beirut) Rechmaoui creates a scaled-down version of an iconic modernist building in Beirut in concrete and glass. The building is depicted at a specific point in its history, after it was evacuated during the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006, and bearing the traces of its decades of existence in a troubled city. The artist faithfully depicts the smallest details, such as the heavy metal doors that become common during the civil war, but this is far from a process of pure documentation. The tension between the building's abstract repetitive form and the little details that Rechmaoui chooses to highlight, the story of the decline of a city and the fate of its inhabitants is being told cleverly and sensitively.
Rechmaoui's works are representations of his unique and personal way of looking at the city, and his ability to translate that into material form without excessive expressionism but with the subtle hints that allow us to see the city through his eyes. Isn't this the unique skill of the artist? By contrast, Diana Al-Hadid's works take expressionism to a new high, vigorously melting the symbols of modernity into twisted lumps of plastic. If Rechmaoui's works are masterpieces in under-statement, Al-Hadid's works are loud and garrulous. Curiously, they seem to be less personal precisely because of this quality.
The Tower of Infinite Problems and the other pieces on display by Al-Hadid, are large shards of metal and plastic, constantly at odds with gravity and at various stages of collapse and ruin, some of have completely surrendered waiting, presumably, for the inevitable crawl of green that is the fate of all ruins. The works are masterfully produced, but that has long ago ceased to be a quality to be praised in art. What is genuinely disturbing about the shattered towers is not Al-Hadid's unique vision in as much as that images of catastrophe have become so common today to arouse any interest, in me at least. Rather than seeing an artist struggling with the world around her, all I could see is yet another Virilio inspired take on modernity and the implications of taking technology to an extreme.
Al-Hadid as a Syrian-American artist is trying to give expression to the two cultures that she belongs to and on the way highlight issues such as cultural conflict. But the impression that I get, and perhaps this is the one fault line that can be traced in the entire exhibition, is that this is someone who have accepted those categories such as culture uncritically, and her work becomes less personal because of that. To a certain extent, this is the main difference between the works of the artists who live in the Middle East and those who live in the west. The first group don't have the luxury of thinking of their context in terms of abstract categories; it is above all a lived reality that they have to struggle with on a daily basis. The second group seem to have escaped the confines of that reality, but it's a false liberation that gives their work that abstract distant quality.
This is particularly true of the paintings of Nadia Ayari. The catalogue says of her: "Ayari didn't start working with her Middle Eastern subject matter until she’d moved to America and notions of cultural heritage and identity came to the fore." And it shows. Only someone far removed from the lived reality of the Middle East can attempt to sum it up in such a collection of visual clichés. This is Orientalism for the 21st century, rehabilitated by the fact that it is being committed by a native. All the more cause for concern. The struggle of the people of Palestine and Iraq today is not so much to get recognition for their misery, but to stop the west from constantly portraying them as perpetual victims, and in the case of Ayari's paintings, literally in such a flat manner.
Flatness, that old paradox of painting, has been revisited by two of the Iranian artists in the exhibition, Ramin Haerizadeh and Ahmad Morshedloo. Not so crassly, of course, but with thought and sophistication that re-asserts the notion that are is truly universal, and an experiment began by a French artists a hundred years ago could be picked up again by someone in Iran today. Not as a distraction from life, but as a unique way of dealing with it and sharing that vision with others.
Haerizadeh's collages are powerful in combining the conventions of collage with traditional Persian painting and crafts, using mostly his body as raw material. The effect is astonishing, producing intriguing works that on closer inspection reveal the manipulation and distortion involved in re-packaging his severed limbs and his chubby face to produce hyper-real bodies suitable for our age where the body has lost its integrity and has been appropriated by various institutions.
Morshedloo's work is particularly powerful, not only because it declares that painting is not dead as an art form, but because of the insistence that his subjects caught in a moment of daily life are not the vacuous abstractions we have to expect from depictions of that part of the world, but are subjects in their own right regardless of how much their attire hides or reveals of them. The contrast between the naked men and over-clad women does nothing to distract from that, these are living breathing subjects. We are made even more aware, paradoxically, through Morshedloo's unique perspectives and foreshortening effects. This is not crass realism, but painting at its best. The less said the better.
Finally, the last piece which attracted the most attention from the visitors is Kader Attia's Ghost. The aluminium-foil empty shells that represent Muslim women in prayer, a hundred or more of them perhaps, are very powerful visually. Though to me personally the effect is not particularly due to Attia's social 'comment' in as much as it is the representation of the hollow body in that most fragile and transient of materials, aluminium foil. For all I care, they could have been a group of Jedi warriors looking for their contact lenses, the effect would have been the same. There is something about the power of visual depictions that we seem to have abandoned in favour of art with a message, and perhaps that is too much of a burden. Attia's work is an example of the power of that form of visual exploration that used to be called sculpture.
The last room in the exhibition is dedicated to old masters from the Middle East, and it suitably takes me to my conclusion. In societies where visual art was not an established tradition, those early masters embarked on what seemed to their contemporaries an alien endeavour, a career and a life in art. They did that for two reasons, one to create their own modernity in countries that were still ambivalent about it, and secondly, to become full-fledged individuals in societies where the concept was struggling to emerge against the tyranny of older institutions. In Unveiled, we see that struggle continue. There are artists who have to live in countries that find their activities superfluous, but in their struggle to assert their individualism they are producing thoughtful and engaging works of art. On the other hand, there are those who seem to have surrendered their individuality in favour of a formulaic and self-indulgent art that is obsessed with identity. It's a fine line, but this exhibition will allow discerning viewers to judge for themselves.

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