by Jerome du Bois
I. A note about why this piece is late, and different.
In my previous post, you can see by the date where I broke my promise to write a timely answer to the question, "What kind of art can be exhibited under shari'a?" Here's my explanation, and a newer, wiser review. (And longer: 2500 words.)
The review I was almost finished with had covered what I thought about the artworks at the Sixth Sharjah Biennial, because I had been interested in finding out what kind of art one can, and cannot, show under strict Islamic law; and the director, the daughter of the emir, was supposed to be on the cutting edge: Sheika Hoor, age 23, London's Royal Academy of Arts graduate. Grady Turner's original article in the New York Times [May 4th issue;pay site] was titled "Regime Change Takes Effect at a Persian Gulf Biennial." His other, longer review, which is in the November Art in America, is titled "Fast Forward on the Persian Gulf." The exhibition itself was called "Art in a Changing Horizon: Globalization and New Aesthetic Practice." So I thought there might be some tension. There was none -- at least, not between Ms. Hoor and the law council.
My tension chimed when I found out more about Sharjah -- demographically -- because I had run across some disconcerting facts:
1. At least 80 percent of the population of this city-state consists of foreign, non-Muslim workers. (In the whole UAE it's an astounding 98 percent.) What do you think they're busy doing there by the sea for the Emirian Muslim 20 percent who run the show?
2. And I ran across another phrase, one that I've heard before as a racial slur but now I know as a humiliating and dangerous job: camel jockey -- a little boy, usually abducted or sold voluntarily from the Indian subcontinent, who races camels, and often gets hurt doing so.
3. And I discovered the connection between Islamic law and dhimmitude -- that is, if an observant Muslim meets me, a non-Muslim, he or she considers me an inferior human being. Islamic law formalizes this relationship in many ways, some reminiscent of the original U.S. Constitution's unfortunate "three-fifths of a person" concept.
Add those three together and they spell shariah, which is only one letter away from Sharjah. A clunky comparison, but that's how closely Sharjah, one of the most conservative wealthy Islamic principalities anywhere, wants to adhere to shariah: to the point of identity.
My level of ignorance about shariah was still woefully high, and the two reviews by Grady Turner didn't help. (More on Turner's whitewashing spin below.) Neither did the review by Antonia Carver on Universes-in-Universe. But the more I read about shariah, the more dismayed I became at my own review: how myopic, gullible, and tame it was! I had stepped right into the frame.
From a recent report at freedomhouse.org:
Foreign nationals, who make up a staggering 98 percent of the private workforce, are subject to abuse and nonpayment of wages by employers. While labor law offers some protection, most abuse goes unreported. In June 2002, the UAE press reported that an Asian worker died and 15 fell ill at a labor camp , where workers lived in sweltering heat without water or electricity for several days because their Dubai-based employer had not paid the utility bills. In September, the government criminalized the hiring of camel jockeys under the age of 15.
I didn't in the first place, and don't want to now, tell you about shariah in Sharjah or anyplace else, but I won't be hornswoggled either. This is an underhanded art exhibition trying to finesse itself into legitimacy. So I'll let readers follow the source of the quote above (there's plenty, and there's Robert Spencer, and there's more from the U.S. State Department here) on the effects of shariah.
Instead, I'm going to concentrate on how this whole Sharjah Biennial business is a made-to-order sham to further polish the pearl of a serene but inhumane regime. And I'll give you the punchline before the jump: all 116+ artists -- including a dozen from the United States -- collaborated with a racist, apartheid society run by a self-indulgent historian manqué, who himself indulges his own artist manqué daughter's every desire.
II. The Shameful Sham.
Actually, my original piece was anything but tame. I excoriated the curator (Sheika Hoor) and director (Peter Lewis of Goldsmiths) for the hypocrisy of using the word "international" while ostentatiously excluding Israel and Israeli Jews. To quote my previous self:
Because the other obvious taboo [other than sex and alcohol] was Israel, and everything it implies, including the U.S.A. The United Arab Emirates doesn't recognize Israel's existence, so no Israeli artist was allowed. Still, Israel managed to be the scapegoat in the middle of the room anyway, its absent presence amplified by the prohibition against any art that criticized Arab politics or life.
For example, three artists -- Kai Wiedenhofer of Germany, and the Palestinains Rula Halawani and Rashid Masharawi -- made declarations or included statements with their exhibited art which repeated the usual Palestinian litanies; the video (by Mashawari) which was commissioned especially for the show, and which won an award, lingers on an Israeli flag. Pakistan's Zain Mustafa's kurtas were inscribed by antiwar protestors in New York, then hung on a clothesline in Sharjah. (Meanwhile, as they fluttered there, the coalition freed Iraq.) And, in a kind of silent affirmation of lunatic conspiracies, Wolfgang Staehle's famous live-feed Postmasters Gallery video of lower Manhattan on 9/11, with its one-minute intervals of that dolorous day, "was prominently displayed on the museum's main floor, replaying the terrible images in real time" (according to Turner in AiA, page 89).
(Was that endlessly-shown smoky skyline the Changing Horizon of Ms. Hoor's and Mr. Lewis's title?)
So the political art was mostly anti-Israel and/or anti-American, and the rest of the art was neutrally clever, or craft-derived, or thinly conceptual. All very low-key, even for the several censored artists. One of them, Chen Lingyang of China, serves as a good example of the hypocritical game-playing everyone -- artist, curator, director, attendees, writers, editors, publishers -- went along with.
Ms. Chen's main shtick is an imaginary persona called Chen Lingyang No. 2,
with whom she has a somewhat competitive relationship. Posters in English and Mandarin exhort "Don't buy Chen Lingyang's works! Just buy Chen Lingyang's works!"[That concept thin enough for you?] The posters were displayed without question, but Lingyang was asked to remove a series in which she photographed her torso and vagina as she menstruated. It was no surprise that the organizers took issue with these images. Still, they allowed Lingyang to protest the omission of the photographs. The offensive images were included in the galleries with the posters, albeit locked in a trunk marked in chalk with this phrase written by the artist in English and Mandarin: "The way to allow the works of Chen Lingyang [which? 1? or 2?]to be exhibited in the Biennial is by locking them up in this Arabic traditional case." (Turner, AiA, page 88.)
I know it's hard to hear with all the mutual backslapping going on -- she won one of the awards -- but as it settles down you can sort out how almost all the actors here get to feel good -- especially the shariah council, whose power Ms. Chen graciously and submissively embodied by handily providing that suffocating trunk. But then if you (and she) leaned close and lingered over that worn old wood, you would have heard the faint murmurs of thousands of her compatriots all across the UAE, quietly complaining to each other about capricious deportation, or about paying the skull tax to people their ancestors used to call barbarians.
(I wonder if any of the non-Muslim or the American artists reflected on their roles in this stepinfetchit shuffle, their carefully-elided kaffir status? Mr. Staehle, for example, or Liz-n-Val [it's true!], Christo & Jeanne-Claude [I'm not surprised], or Howard McCalebb, who provides some unintentionally rueful humor with Leonardo's Vitruvian Man sporting a large black circle over his "midriff area.") Did they know they were effectively in old South Africa, or Rhodesia?
Where did this Biennial come from, anyway? What is it doing in the world? Piecing Turner's two articles together, along with information about Dr. Sheik Sultan -- the emir -- what emerges is a twisted fairy tale built on the backs of the disadvantaged. And a lot of artists, and the art world in general, couldn't care less, as long as there's legitimacy, cachet, fame, introductions, or money in it.
Once upon a time, Sheika Hoor, rich daughter of the ruler of an emirate by the sea, and worldly London art student, complained to her daddy about the provincialism of their previous five Art Biennials. Daddy was stung -- as the author of a number of crappy novels and bizarre quasi-histories, he fancied himself a cultured man -- so he told her to do something about it. Segué to Turner:
The real challenge was to represent current international art practices without running afoul of Shariah, the Islamic code that governs most aspects of daily life here, and the local censorship council that enforces it. Of the seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, including Dubai with its glittering hotels and shopping malls, Sharjah is among the most conservative. Business and errands are conducted around calls to prayer, and practices tolerated elsewhere in the country -- like the sale of alcohol -- are forbidden here. Many images commonplace in art magazines simply would not play well in Sharjah.
As she spoke about the biennial, Sheikha Hoor fidgeted with the headscarf of her burka. ''I'm afraid I'm out of the habit of wearing these,'' she said apologetically, in a British accent. She was sitting in the Sharjah Art Museum's new cafe, created [by whom? with whose sweat?] at her behest for the exhibition.
Some things were uncreated at her behest as well:
''At first, I was made a member of the biennial's organizing committee,'' she said. ''I was much younger than the rest, and the only woman, so my voice was not really heard. Then I was made head of the committee, but still, I was not heard. Finally, the committee was dissolved, and I was named director.''(From NYT article.) Why did her father even bother with the committee?
Her father has also had his modern-day dhimmi-coolies build a luxurious art college at the American University, to be administered in conjunction with the Royal College of Arts, Ms. Hoor's alma mater -- how neat. Also, as she pursues her graduate studies back in England, her father will convert (without lifting a finger himself, of course) an old power station into a contemporary art museum, using the cut-rate labor of thousands of his effectively-indentured servants.
Everything is in place. The Sheika is poised for the Seventh Sharjah International Biennial, which she and the culturally clueless fool Mr. Lewis are even now organizing. And what do you bet the artists' submissions are flying to London quicker than Sean Penn to Baghdad?
As far as I've researched, no art or culture blogger, and no art magazine, has called attention to this situation. Antonia Carver's review concludes:
Sharjah is now on the world stage when it comes to contemporary art. Artists, and the few curators and gallerists that made the trip, agreed that the exhibition competed easily with more established biennials, and that showing their work in Sharjah was an enriching experience.
And Mr. Turner, though he took note of the Israeli situation, and presented some balance, still spoke about "regime change" and "risk-taking" and "cutting-edge" and a "global retinue of artists." And he misrepresented the exhibition:
Aspiring to the models provided by Venice and Documenta, yet hemmed in by the realities of sharia, the organizers opted for a middle road. They selected work that avoided offense, and in some cases enlisted artists in the alteration of their own projects to meet local standards.
So another cheap false gaudy fruit flourishes in the Oasis of Islamic Values -- Sharjah -- watered by the blood and sweat of exploited Asians, Indians, and Pakistanis, and consumed with relish and without hesitation by the greedy and amoral of the art world.
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Coda: Speaking of the greedy and amoral, Maria Finn, in Sunday's New York Times, covers the Eighth Havana Biennial. It's a pretty cynical and exploitative picture all around. (Hint: don't pity the artists one bit. There's another review here, with lots of photos.) And let's not forget the context:
The theme of the 2003 biennial, "El Arte con la Vida" or "Art With Life," foreshadowed the event itself, as the Prince Claus Foundation, a Dutch cultural fund that supported the biennial in the past, withheld its $100,000 pledge in protest against the imprisonment, in April, of 75 dissidents — primarily librarians, journalists and organizers of a referendum calling for democratic reforms like freedom of association and expression — sentenced to up to 28 years in jail by the Cuban government.
I'm sure we here in Phoenix will get to see what bling-bling the ASU fat cats bring back from there, now that the curtain might fall on the goodies:
This year, people headed to the biennial, held from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15, with a heightened sense of urgency. After Jan. 1, very few cultural licenses will be renewed by the Treasury Department.
In the meantime, I predict Cuban art, once spiky and magical because made from nothing -- real "Art With Life" -- will soon sport the smooth dull sheen of the slick path to hell.
Posted by Jerome at November 23, 2003 01:36 PM | TrackBack