Of color and texture, Choucair has demanded near complete neutrality whereby each of her works could theoretically be executed, enlarged or reduced, either at the level of a trinket or easel-painting or at that of sky-scrapers and vast plazas, without losing any of its artistic values, because the issue of execution (the artist’s “hand”), in line with the principle of anti-transparency which she followed from her start, is completely non-existent in her art. The artwork that must not reveal its objective referent, must not reveal its subjective referent either. This is one of the points of convergence, or connection, between Choucair and Islamic art. The latter is not anonymous as canon, influenced by the hegemony of Western individualism, would have it. Indeed, there were always outstanding personalities (whether history remembers them with their ripples of influence or not) behind some of the noteworthy stylistic contributions or variations in the art of Islamic painting and architecture, but personal contribution in this case was not considered such unless it transcended the personal or psychological level and reached the compositional level governed by age-old precepts unshakeable by mere release of a unique state of mind. Not at all! We hasten overly much if we define the artist by his temperament, as is common in some criticism following the expressionist outbreak: temperament is not a style.
Thus, Choucair does not deny her individuality but maintains her difference from what she calls the Superman individuality dominant in the West. How else can she explain this non-subjective individuality where all that reveals the personality of the artist, his moods, the circumstances of his work, and so on is banned? The individuality that she seeks is that of a knowledge achieved like a scientific discovery from “equations” that govern the relationship of one sign to another or to the totality of signs. Scientific precision, however, is the first thing lost in any color scale. [35] Some of the values or significations that are given to color are based mostly on a natural iconic referent (the blue of the sky and sea, the green of grass and leaves, the yellow of the sun or sand, the black of night or closed spaces, the white of snow, and so on) that might be linked to sensual associations (heat and cold, anxiety and security, etc.) and possibly circumstantial ones (shedding of blood, reddening of the cheeks)…. Even critical writings on the most non-representational experiments give in to the temptation of resorting to such analogies.
The dependency of the plastic sign color on the iconic, so rampant in our cultural customs, is no greater, however, than that of texture. There is no need for an exhaustive treatment of popular proverbs for us to “feel” the common confusion, for example, between roughness of expression and the expression of roughness, between the swiftness of close brushstrokes often expressing some sort of agitation or rashness and the studied, sometimes even very slow, work that led to such an appearance. Therefore, we can understand how an artist who was seeking the clarity and precision of mathematical equations had to drop from her sight consideration of those two plastic signs. [36] Indeed, she did not pick up a pencil consequently except to sketch out, in black and white, preliminary studies for sculptures or series of sculptures. What I argue here is that this refusal of iconic dependency was the most important reason for her complete switch to sculpture, an art in which she could, in her way, disregard as unintended and therefore insignificant elements, all signs but form.
Form (including the position of one compositional element in relation to others and to the work space as a whole), had to be geometric, according to Choucair’s understanding of the pure visual sign, because were it not, it would inevitably refer back to something from reality, regardless of intention. Even then, she was adamant that this form not seem to be a transformation of some pre-extant reality: Do we not see the circle as a picture of something round or the square as a picture of something square, and so on? Was not this what led Kasimir Malevitch to repeatedly paint his white square on a white background seeking to reach that point of absolute whiteness of which he dreamed? Why did he not stop at the first painting? Where is the lacuna in the theory of complete non-referentiality that he wanted to achieve? The true lacuna, as Choucair will discover by early intuition, is precisely in the background-figure relationship. It is a relationship that need only be perceived for the call to non-figuration to be annulled, because each form, no matter how primary, can refer back to a preceding reality. [37] Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Choucair’s art (what we could call, borrowing from the romantic discourse, “her genius”) is that she found, in what resembles patent spontaneity, a solution to what remains among the most perplexing problems in spatio-plastic arts.
Non-Objective Art was another name for Abstraction. Few are those who grasped as did she, in practice especially, and not just theory, that non-objectivism does not mean mere absence of referents in reality, but abolition of the background-figure dichotomy, by rendering it non-determinant of the artwork’s signs. Choucair was not a semiologist. Yet, in opposition to the artistic thing and the art of things, she fled logically from the integral geometric forms which in our cultural customs are symbolically-loaded and enable iconic reduction as stated above. The formal wholeness of geometric forms was, all the same, necessary in order to create a compositional dynamism independent of the representation of the dynamic object. In this way she relied, in the works which I believe represent her first truly personal style, upon a simple architectural form which she divides, most often with a wandering line, into two halves, [38] and using each as a pictorial module. [39] Eventually the work’s surface is covered entirely with copies of these two halves, so that the diversity of distances and positionings relating the complementary parts gives rise to ever-active fields of energy, whether the viewer has understood the device or not. The difference between the two situations is that whoever understands the device is like he who has been given the final answer to a mathematical problem but, like he who has not been told the answer, must still seek the equations that lead to this answer. Neither truly knows why he sees these forms to have a deep, vital concomitance, why he sees them to be firmly equipoised and at the same time highly dynamic as if they are striving for yet greater equilibrium…. Each shape here finds its resemblance or compliment in another shape near or far. Polyvalent identities, nay polyvalence as identity, that is what one is led to by contemplating the works of Choucair.
In all Choucair’s sculptures’ parts where undulations mark in negative the absence of a complementary form and especially in her modules, the lines are always closed, but closed against the lack that turns the artwork into a reflection, not of a superceded reality but of one of the states of energy that defines the reality beyond all pictures. The lines’ closing is an interiorization of this energy through the call for, or the implication of, complementary forms. “And so on and so forth…” incessantly…at the very edge of unending equations, whose completion is left open: that which gives meaning to the sign is not given. [40]
Non-objectivism, according to Choucair, is the abolition of the object as a mere physical entity. The object, in this way, is not abolished by the cancellation of the background for the figure or plinth for the sculpture but by a steady rotation through which each form becomes a background and a figure, a plinth and a sculpture. This is why the ESCWA sculpture lost “its meaning” when its “verses” were distributed on the green lawn and appeared “scattered” due to the grass’s assigning fixed backgrounds or bases to it. Covering the curves that touch the ground is not in the case of this work like screening off the feet of a colossal statue of another part of its base that is quantitatively negligible in the final reckoning. Rather, it is like an obstruction on a road or the blocking of the veins: stoppage of the circulation of meaning. This is precisely what distances the works of Choucair from monumental or proverbial thought no matter how much they strike us, whether enlarged or not, as stately as monuments, as luminous as wisdom. For what must be seen or “understood” in her work is not a focal point for reminiscences or an end-goal for thought but an inner road.
“Within the Soul” is the title that Choucair chose before settling on a formalistic one (“Inside the Square” or “Inside the Shape”) for a series of sculptures whose interiors have been hollowed out while preserving the original cube or parallelepiped mass. The reasons that led her to change the title were the very ones that caused the misunderstanding hounding her throughout her career. Let us try to comprehend them: certainly the problem here is the word “soul.” Out of fear of ecstatic extrapolation tinged with Sufism? In an effort to avoid the redundancy implicit in “Inside the inside” or “The Spirit of the Spirit”? I would suggest the case was both together, due to the essential difference between her notion of the soul or inside and another, archaeological one, which is more prevalent. Unlike the ancient notion of the soul or the inside as a monument laden with meaning, whose explanation is a recuperation of a world and construction of an knowledge, there is a cartographic vision of the (internal) world in which each sign is a crossing-point not to be taken for itself but for the extensive and intensive energies that cross it, as in the case of Kurt Lewin’s hodological and vectoral fields. [41] Is it to this vision that we may relate Choucair’s sculpted and painted works, especially those from the period of hollowed-out parallelepiped interiors.
The closest examples of this cartographic handling of field were, sculpturally, in Giacometti’s two cages periods and, pictorially, in Francis Bacon’s oeuvre. Of the cages, the latter said, “They confine the model in order to capture it better.” Indeed, this compositional mode inscribes the grasping or apprehension in the “action” of the tableau or sculpture. It even seems – and here the abstraction of the Arab artist (paradoxically?) sheds light on the figuralism of her European predecessors – that the compositional mode is the “action” of the artwork. If we stick to the most basic observation, then what is sculpted here, the real “topic” of the sculpture, is both the form and the space. The affinity of the “space” sign and the “form” sign makes of the whole work a “hodological field” stretched towards the presence of the “picture” or the “meaning,” an absolute visual presence which we do not see in the tableau or sculpture except through the signs of its summoning.
From “al-nammat” (pattern) that is the method, manner, variety, category, or type, the Arabs of yore had a denominative verb: (“tanmit”) to pattern. They used to say, “nammata lahu `ala al-shi’” (he patterned for him toward something) which meant “he guide him to it.” If we were to make this verb transitive, then al-namat (the pattern) would be preferable to “al-qaalib al-taswiri” [pictorial mold] for what Choucair called in French “module,” for it would allow us to see the “tanmit” (modulation) in the work, in other words the commutating, adjusting, and “inflecting” of the field, that is at once its hodological orientation.
The signified of the plastic sign, apart from all iconic or symbolic reduction, is the set of the relationships that arise between it and others and then between it and the virtual unity of all possible relationships among signs. This virtual unity lying on the horizon of each sign is what makes possible the sufic “ecstatic” extrapolation in some of what I described. The Pakistani short-story writer Fahmida Riyadh compared the position of unrequited love to the position of the mystic, or the yogi who fixes his sights on a candle. In truth, every perfect love, no matter how mutual, is love from one side because he who loves with all his entity finds in his love this relationship to incommensurable total love, the great question mark and its answer that however “given” it seems to be, remains out of grasp.
In the least secure direction – the direction of ecstatic extrapolation – Choucair is able to find her true precursors. As for the comparison of a large segment of her oeuvre to early Arabic poetry, its usefulness, purely anecdotal or didactic, is much less than its harmfulness. In this comparison, which she defended her whole life long (even though a critic once angered her by comparing the imbrication of the parts of these very same sculptures to the articulation of bones), I can see no more than a tribute to Arabic poetry, her sincere love of which I do not doubt. Research in light of this comparison, on the other hand, into what unifies a work composed of completely independent parts, leads to results that are no less mechanical than the osteal metaphor. And that is what the artist herself perceived when she attempted, at my instigation, to hoard together all the examples of what she calls the influence of Arabic poetry on her, until she found herself floundering in endless metrical and grammatical entanglements. She did not continue her quest, of course, and I expect that she will not.
What unifies the work and gives it its plastic “meaning,” is, as Choucair learned from sufic thought, the unity of Being not the unity of beings. The quest for this unity among beings is the quest in them for a sign of their longing for the One who created them, a sign that would make them participants, each in the special cadence which is its own way of returning to itself, in the great chorus where this multifarious return is sung as hymns to the One. This return is the object of wonderment by all Creation, it is that before which is said, “Praise the Lord.” As the artist who chose the most rational path in art said to me, [42] “It all goes back to Praise the Lord!”
Notes:
1. The translator would like to thank Samah Idriss for his insightful assistance and, also, the author for his many useful comments.
2. In the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
3. It may be objected that selection juries included invited foreign critics. However, the Western critic, basing his judgments on his Western cultural education – where the battle then was fought not between abstract and figurative but between the two main branches of abstraction, geometrism on one hand and on the other the avatars of abstract expressionism, called lyric abstraction, tachism or art informel, etc.- most often sought to preserve the particularism of the invitation’s locale and those extending it. The testimony of the French critic Pierre Restany about his experience serving as judge for the Tehran Third Bienniale may give an idea in the absence of proper local documentation about the impact of the presence of a foreign juror on the orientations of the jury: “The committee tried, in distributing the rewards, to reach a middle-ground solution between the internalization of styles and remanences of national tradition.” (Cimaise, 1962, #59, p.82)
4. That was in the following years: 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1973.
5. “Thus verily the man experienced at speech-making rarely needs, in order to form opinions, to sit and listen carefully; a quick glance suffices him.” (Cicero, Brutus, LIV, 200)
6. A Belgian artist (1901-1999), historian, theorist of abstract art, novelist, and poet. He launched in Paris (1930) the Cercle et Carré movement, and composed with Michel Ragon one of the most encompassing and most respected reference works about abstract art up to the late 1960s and early 1970s.
7. In particular Islamic architecture, as we will see. As S. R. Choucair often repeated to me and others, had she not pursued painting and sculpture, she would have gone into architecture. Architects, in their turn, were, I often noticed, the people most accepting of her art and swiftest to appreciate the visual thinking actualized in her work.
8. “Utopia” was compounded by Sir Thomas More from the Greek words for “not” (ou) and “place” (topos) to mean “nowhere.”
9. “… [A]t the vanguard of today’s national artists, and certain to occupy a lofty position in the hearts and homes of the sons of this country are Moustapha Farroukh and Omar Onsi, , pioneers of Art. The pioneer is true to his kin, as he is true to his ingenious art. Charming landscapes, calm or imposing, are precious and plenty in their tableaux, just as the tableaux’s intentions are precious and generous. Between their lilies and their boulders, inspiration is faithful to the two artists, so they deliver their message truthfully.” This concentration on truthfulness in Amin al-Rihani’s essay, published on the occasion of the “Art Exhibition” held in Beirut in 1940, and re-printed in the ninth volume of “The Complete Arabic Works” (The Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing, 1983) is not innocent. “Truthfulness” here is the moral, even subjective, alternative to the Truth that remains beyond attainment, so that all that is left is for one to approximate it and reflect its echo, according to the aesthetics of the era out of which al-Rihani grew. Thus he continues in the same essay seemingly to moderate this judgment: “The three principles of eternal art are: 1) the artist must see the external appearance and the innermost core of the topic; 2) the artist must grasp what in his innermost core communicates with the innermost core of his topic; 3) the artist must join, in the artistic manner that he chooses, the reality and the spirit. I do not mean that Farroukh and Onsi always reach this apogee of art, but they do approach it, and they reflect its echo and inspiration in their outstanding oil and watercolor paintings…”
10. Having become acquainted with the artist only recently, I allow myself to offer this anecdote so expressive of the modernity in her predilections that could in no way be the result of that inurement of taste known as “an artistic education.” I noticed during my frequent visits to her atelier and home a kind of plastic art asceticism/otherworldly devotion to the plastic arts, so much so that next to the television set that I do not think she ever watched except to indulge her husband, the only modern media device she had was a radio from the early twentieth century, one that worked on tubes….and how amazed I would be, when playing for her a variety of music from different eras and styles, by her astonishing speed in detecting those whose musical propositions must be considered the analogues of the difficult artistic propositions to which she dedicated her life. For instance, she preferred without any explanation modern to classical or romantic music. Likewise, after one of the most difficult passages from Arnold Schoenberg for example, or the one which made Antoine Webren famous for its meteoric velocity, so fast that even the trained ear required repeated listening to “catch” its expressive power which arose from its uneasily grasped compositional specificity and not from its striking some sensitive chord, she would ask me, “Who was that?” and after my giving her the name which I suspect she had not heard from anyone else, she would say in that simplicity of hers that melts all defenses, “I like it.” I assume that her visual tuition had a role in her appreciation of this music whose difficulty has been said to arise from its “spatial” composition.
11. Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace Littéraire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) p.67.
12. Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) p.140.
13. Quoted in Mulhaq al-Nahar, Saturday, September 23, 1995, p.10.
14. The leaders of geometric abstraction, and especially the group associated with L’Atelier d’Art Abstrait.
15. From the introduction to the booklet for her Retrospective at Dar al-Nadwa, June, 1993.
16. In the summer of 1949 I visited Italy out of a compulsion to complete my artistic education. I began from Milan and went to Genoa. I visited all the artistic sights in Italy, no matter where they were, in tiny villages or big cities: Verona, Assisi, Ravenna, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Genoa. In this tour, I was eager to record in a notebook the relationship between the plastic art of each historical epoch and its architectural component.
17. Guillaume Apollonaire, in an article in 1913, says of Picasso that he did not add to the reality of the used material he stuck onto his canvases any pictorial element. Then he continues that this used material “might have been imbued with humanity previously, a long time ago.” As if the role of the painting or the sculpture for Apollonaire and his followers was the humanizing of things. Humanization that comes from use adds a value that balances in their eyes what is required of the artist…. Therefore, too, we read of the Mona Lisa’s smile, of the personality of the living model whom Leonardo drew, more than we read about the painting as a painting, in other words, as a combination of lines, colors, and touches organized in a particular way. If Saloua Raouda Choucair asked with a humility that does not accept compromise, “Who can say why the Mona Lisa is important to this degree?” the intent is that art history needs re-writing from a purely formal perspective.
18. Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Art
19. Donald Burgy, Art Press, #17, Paris, 1996, p. 39.
20. The American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, most famous for his geodesic dome – designed in 1927, a house suspended by steel wires from a central pole – which he called Dymaction (dynamic + extreme action). Saloua Raouda Choucair was not among the few who has seen even a picture of this house when she later heard from an architect interested in her rocking model made of disc-shaped stainless steel links joined by wires about a principle attributed to the American architect which she saw fit to take as the name for one of her works: Calm/Settled Dynamism.
21. I do not know if this paradoxical epithet was the result of a distortion by Choucair or if it resulted from her admiration for the principle of “dymaction,” expressive as it was of the desire to attain extreme dynamism and agency at the least (material) cost possible. It applies, however, to most of her sculpture. (We shall see that this does not contradict, despite appearances to the contrary, with her distance, as indicated in the first section, from extreme dynamism.)
22. Only that the economy that concerns the artist unlike the architect is that of aesthetics in her artwork…
23. Idemitsu Art Museum, Tokyo
24. For example, as indicated above, the organization of plastic signs so that their co-presence crystallizes into iconic reference or signifier.
25. For example, where the square, triangle, and circle (the Japanese civilizational context here leaves no room for doubt) is not taken up solely for its geometrical particularity. Throughout her career Choucair would avoid these complete geometrical, “intellectualized” forms that she immediately reads as symbols.
26. Some of what the newspapers published about her thereafter, in interviews or articles, repeats this position, for example, in an article that I published on the occasion of her retrospective, in Mulhaq al-Nahar on June 5, 1993 (#65), and in what follows I will permit myself to recap some of its contents by way of clarification and rectification.
27. Let us read, for example, one of the declarations propagated in most interviews she gave: “The way I organized my sculptural poems, for example, was inspired by Arabic poetry. I wanted rhythm like the poetic meter, to be at once more independent and interlinked, and to have lines like meanings, but plastic meanings.” (Mulhaq al-Nahar, Sept. 23, 1995, p.10) Indeed, the reader will find it strange to accept this comparison coming from an artist who refused all connection to reality, and the fact that this comparison, despite all its ramifications, is based on compositional elements, does not diminish from the sense of strangeness. Still a distinction must be drawn between an “external” comparison, dealing with the relationship of the work or one of its parts to reality, and an “internal” comparison that interrelates the various elements of the work. If Choucair objected to the former, the existence of the latter in her work renders it an axel or pole for that which we could call plastic rhetoric, with all the meaning that rhetoric carries. Are not the comparisons and contradictions found between the various elements of the work all that we can objectively judge of its existence? We do not exaggerate if we find, especially by way of comparisons, that the plastic signs have an origin or motivation in rhetoric.
28. Translator’s note: the use of the word “cradle” is meant to indicate “not a starting place but a starting structure, not a beginning but a principle,” in the author’s words.
29. The general name for this category of sculptures, as the reader will find is “thina’iyaat” (binarisms). Some of the titles of specific pieces, such as “The Rapture of Revelation” provide yet a further reason, beyond the “metrical” analogy, for the Sufic referent pointed to by the word “muthanawis” (couplets). In his style of knowledge, Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, the visionary who in the thirteenth century declared that the splitting a atom would reveal a sun (nucleus) with planets (ions) rotating around it, is the closest to being a predecessor for Choucair. The binarism of lover/beloved – the first degree of multiplicity through which, or rather in which, the vision of “oneness” was one of the most important fomenters of Sufic thought, and in the view of most researchers like that of the artist, was the greatest fomenter for Islamic art – found its artistic expression (and solution) in the mystical concerts to which mawlana gave the well-known form of Dervish dancing immediately upon his losing Shams ad-Din Tabriz and his discovering that the true beloved is God who will be found only in his self. This elegiac wooing, moved by the longing for the unity of the created [being] with its creator, is disseminated throughout Choucair’s art works.
30. Translator’s note: this phrase refers to the prophet’s midnight trip from Jerusalem to the seven heavens on the back of Al-Bouraq now celebrated annually by Muslims as the Night of Fate.
31. Yves Bonnefoy, “Preface”, in Stéphane Mallarmé: Igitur, Divgations, Un Coup de dés, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p.40.
32. Mulhaq al-Nahar, #65 (Sept. 23, 1995), p.10.
33. I would like to hear the verb “to give” in this context through the ear of Jacques Derrida who pointed in his book Donner le temps (Galilée, 1991) to a phrase such as “es gibt Sein…es gibt Zeit” form Martin Heideigger that can be translated as “there exists a being…there exists a time” whereas Heideigger meant for us to understand it literally “a being is given…a time is given.” The giving of meaning, as we will see in the case of Choucair, is the thing given with neither a giver nor a given to it.
34. “Let us remember, also, the newer academies that appeared in Paris in the 50s, at the moment when it was believed that geometric abstraction was the nec plus ultra of the avant-garde. A period of pontification for the likes of Jean Dewasne or Edgard Pillet at the L’Atelier d’Art Abstrait, receiving their support from [the magazines] Art Today and Architecture Today. Let us, also, recall the immediate reaction of many artists and critics (Julian Alvard, for example, and above all Michel Tapié [in his book] Un Autre Art,) to denounce them.” Antoni Tàpies, L’Art contre l’esthétique, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1978, p.50.
35. There is of course another, dispositional, reason, that being her preference for superior precision or correctness (the phrases “correct” or “more properly speaking” and their opposite are the most repeated vocabulary in her personal interviews) and along with that her aversion to all that is approximate or cloudy.
36. An eraser larger than her gnarled hands – how I would like for it, so expressive is it of her exceedingly demanding artistic behavior and of her intense desire for purity and precision, to be the first item of display in a museum devoted to her, alongside her other tools, some of them hand-made and some of them store-bought. Are not the artist’s tools, starting with his hands, also “expressive,” of his way of working with things? Is it possible to imagine the beginning of sculpture except by first considering how homo faber made his tools.
37. The primary colors are, statistically speaking, not those that a human psychologically grasps as such. Isaac Newton, to whom we owe the first analysis of colors according to the spectrum, first named five to which he later added orange and indigo. Everything suggests that he did so in order to match the number of notes in the musical scale!
38. She will, certainly, color some of her earthenware, but this does not constitute an exception: for color here is nothing but the denial of color. The only exception, on the level of texture, deserves a pause: the slow work involved I some of her sculptures, in applying layer over layer of melted polyester, so that this industrial material relatively homogenous when poured in a single flow, resembles more closely, in its way of absorbing or reflecting light, the metamorphic stones whose formation takes thousands of years: a labyrinthine method of apprehending a temporality that surpasses all apprehension.
39. Standing before Malevitch’s black square in the Futurist’s final exhibition, in Petrograd, 1915, the art critic Alexandre Benois wrote, “What is before us now is not futurism but the new icon of the square, all that was to us sacred or protected, all that we loved and that justified our lives has disappeared.”(my emphasis) Maybe Malevitch had gone beyond “degree zero,” which he said he was seeking, and with his square, (black and then white) presented, just as did Rodtchenko after him in his three single-colored paintings (matching the number of primary colors), an eloquent picture of the end of figurative art, yet with his gesture in the final analysis remaining critical. The formal and chromatic end of the figurative is still, like the negative icons that announced it, within the bounds of figuration.
40. It was said of the square Malevitch divided in half with a sloping line, whether black or white, as part of the décor for the 1913 play “Victory over the Sun,” that it was “an unconscious beginning” of what would become, two years later, his non-objective art, and that by thus dividing the square he made the two halves each other’s object and background. However, Malevitch’s research did not continue in this direction, and some saw in the aforementioned work a representation of the eclipsed sun!
41. In order to avoid preempting a coming analysis, this is how, for the time being, I would like to translate what she called in French borrowing from the language of architecture “modules.” Edgard Pillet, who used the same technique, called his pictorial molds “patrons.”
42. See, also, footnote 30 above.
43. Pierre Kaufmann and Kurt Lewin, Une théorie du champ dans les sciences de l’homme, (Paris: Vrin Editions, 1968) p.170-173.
44. Mulhaq al-Nahar, September 23, 1995, p. 11.
