Chic Point (Video, 7:00 min., 2003) by Sharif Waked.
Sharif Waked’s seven-minute video, Chic Point: Fashion For Israeli Checkpoints has solicited a bevy of artistic and critical responses and unleashed strong reverberations throughout intellectual and artistic circles. In 2007, Andalus Publishing House released a book about Waked’s video work and its implications. The trilingual book (Arabic, English, and Hebrew) contains a DVD of the short film, still photography from the set, and five essays about and inspired by the film. The book includes the contributions of Elia Suleiman, Nicole Brenez, Sherene Seikaly, Ariella Azoulay, and Jack Persekian. Sharif Waked has offered permission to publish excerpts from the critical essays on the video together with a couple of minutes from the video. The following segments are excerpts from the essays by Sherene Seikaly and Ariella Azoulay
All thaat is Chic: Geography and Desire
Sherene Seikaly
A heavy beat, a black backdrop. Curiosity and temptation will overwhelm you from the initial moment. Fashion for Israeli checkpoints?
One beautiful man after another strolls with stern determination down a catwalk. Let the music and haute fashion provoke sensations of sight and sound. Laze yourself in a decadent orgy of fashion and feast your eyes…Enjoy the relentless challenge to viewing and perception. Peel one layer after the next. You will not miss the display of beauty.
Chic Point is a vitrine; it embodies the haunting desire of beauty and immortality. It is an iteration of the unattainable aesthetic—the pleasure of appearance that is immediately anachronistic at the moment of acquisition.
… In engaging desire, Sharif Waked makes public a hidden fabric of the everyday. The story of the “Palestinian” is not only, or simply, one of a lone figure, facing a seemingly inevitable extinction—disrobed and naked to the brute forces of state power.
This short (but lasting) video bears more than naked flesh; it exposes how desire—to be young, to be beautiful, to be hip—functions to sustain capitalism’s topography and the individual’s role within it. The desire to become is, indeed, an eternal state of becoming that can never be fully realized. Desire thus emerges as a critical but rarely recognized structure of feeling through which the individual creates meaning, and by which power reproduces itself—all under the guise of free choice and democracy.
Your brief tryst with fashion ends and you are taken to a different platform of perversity. Image after image from 2000 to 2003 capture instances of exposed flesh. To a background of stirring silence, Chic Pont displays Palestinian men lifting shirt and exposing stomachs, backs, and shoulders to a coterie of attentive Israeli soldiers. Men- young and old—of all shapes and sizes, are subjected to compulsory flashing under gunpoint.
Determined at Will
Ariella Azoulay
Sharif Waked’s video, Chic-Point, offers a glimpse into the new visual field born at the checkpoints, a visual field in which the sovereign’s junior proxy looks at, examines, and does as he sees it with the Palestinian subject. Waked accomplishes this in an indirect manner, which prepares the spectator awaiting him towards the end of the video with the crude raw material of the gaze at the checkpoint. The video opens up with a view of a young, stylish man walking towards the spectator. Elegantly dressed, his gaze sharply focused, he approaches the camera until suddenly, just when he appears about to pass the limits of the screen, he stops. Puffing out his chest and gesturing slightly with his hand, he shows the spectator his clothes: a tailored suit, its upper segment shorter than usual. The spectator thus all at once comes face to face with the model’s exposed belly. Thrust at him in a gesture of charming defiance. After a brief hesitation, which gives the spectator time to take in and examine not just his clothes but the exposed bit of flesh as well, the man turns right and left like a fashion model on a walkway. The spectator can improve his view, being also afforded recourse to the model’s profile, right and left, which he duly proffers to the spectator’s gaze for a wink of an eye before vanishing from the screen. As he disappears a second young man appears and also steps resolutely down exactly the same course. He is followed by another model, and another and another. One after the other they expose their chests, ribs, stomach muscles, upper and lower backs. Sometimes the model appears already exposed; sometimes he slowly bares himself in front of the camera.
… Waked’s fashion show, which at first glance appears to be like any other, manages to place the spectator in a position that slowly reveals itself as a paraphrase of the gaze at the checkpoint… the check point marks the Palestinian body; Waked’s fashion line transfers the marking from the body to the apparel, and to the ensuing playful possibilities inherent in the relationship between the clothes and those who are wearing and removing them.
… At any given moment the sovereign’s junior proxy can demand the Palestinian’s body be exposed. At any moment he can set up a small kangaroo court, a mobile kit for passing judgment and sealing fates… The Palestinian’s body, wherever he might be, serves as a pretext for drawing a border from which he may be observed. The Palestinian’s body is the carrier of truth, which he would either deny or conceal. The truth is in his body, but he frustrates its appearance…
For more information about the artist, the video, and the book:
The video can also be viewed HERE.
Andalus Publishing
PO Box 53036, Tel Aviv
Bios:
Sherene Seikaly is a PhD candidate in the Departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and Co-Editor of the Arab Studies Journal.
Ariella Azoulay is a writer, filmmaker, and curator. She teaches Visual Culture and contemporary philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
