The Duties of Art and Its Work: The Rivulets and the Spring
“The spring is not a sign.”
–André Du Boucher
The art of architecture was not for Choucair merely a polemical argument against whomever faulted non-figurative art for its lack of humanity or, as was once said to her, for its lack of femininity! We have grasped already that architecture was at the base of her artistic vocation. In fact, some of her works, and I don’t mean only those with titles such as “The Architecture of Tomorrow,” are closer to miniature maquettes for buildings or urban environments …places in which it might please you to live or work. It is fine if some of her works have practical duties to which humanistic expressions can be put. Indeed, a stone bench of her design was executed for the Riyadh al-Solh garden, in downtown Beirut, and she often designed and had executed jewelry, rugs, water-fountains and pools.
“Some prospectors sought gold dust in the bubbling currents of upstream waters; others preferred to search in the muddy waters of estuaries….” [19] This image, extracted from a conceptual artist’s discussion of “Avant-Gardes and the end of the [past] century,” could well be the basis for categorizing all artistic activity according to its closeness to or remoteness from the source. Applying this categorization, epistemologically not historically, to what Choucair has presented over the course of more than half a century, produces a potentially confusing result: Here we are in front of an artist who seeks her gold in the spring’s source and finds it everywhere because the only thing distinguishing one picture of hers from another is one’s having been executed in gouache or oil on paper, or wood, or canvas while another was woven as a rug. The “expression” stemming from the function, as Schapiro chose to put it, could be either one of the outlets or one of the rivulets leading to the outlet of an art that is understood and applied according to a communicative point of view.
Thus abandoning the representation of reality was, for Choucair, a return to absolute optics inasmuch as the latter was the sole refuge for an art that sought to distinguish itself in the first place from the communicational arts. Does not the latter in fact make all expression, even if only in terms of determining the function, a false outlet? Art’s work is not on the view but on the possibilities of vision. Forget about the function that turned this model into a ring or a platter: do you not discover in it the same monumental values that you discovered in a sculpture designed to make you move your whole body around it, in rhythmic response to the play of its surfaces, streamlined here, rough there, lyric and yet alert, foolhardy and yet strictly calculated? Filling the eye and all its wonderment is a work of art so small that in an instant a finger could fill it or pass over it for a raisin.
“Equations, this is what I have, this is what I am: equations.”
Precise and powerful at once, like a balance so sensitive a feather makes it tremble even as it weighs mountains. If Choucair theoretically placed the work of art “above” the expression arising from its function, that is not necessarily a judgment of value, and it cannot possibly result from faith in the hierarchy of fine art over applied art, a hierarchy that her natural humbleness as well as Arab-Islamic culture taught her to not admit. Above expression: apart from it. The function that gives a work its human expression creates the illusion that equations have provided their solution whereas in fact we should or could press further “and so forth, and so on…” lest the signifying function occult the true “signified” of the work, that which we (should) see if we do not directly see beyond the work to its iconic, symbolic, or utilitarian signified. Expression is a veil.
The “Savant” Visual Art
A natural tendency reinforced by a coherent theoretical position distanced Choucair at the outset from the drumbeats and trumpets of Expressionism, just as it distanced her from the excessive dynamic temptations that, for many of her predecessor and successors on the difficult road to Abstraction, were the “polite” aesthetic or aestheticist alternative to expressionism. Thus, more radical than the position outlined by Schapiro in the above-quoted passage, Choucair’s take on the traditional critique of [her] geometric abstraction as lacking humanity or femininity was a refusal of justification and a refusal of reconciliation between her road and the road of those for whom plastic art remained one of the communicational arts. When I asked Choucair about the existence of a sensual aspect to her architectural or geometrical work, she said, “…if I put an eye and a nose and a mouth on this abstract picture, would that then have [ability to] sense?” And when one person said to her that her work lacks femininity, she asked him if his understanding of femininity would apply to the works of Paul Klee. He replied, “Yes,” so she said, “I’ve made my point!” Her irony in each example indicates that values such as humanism or femininity are not measurements of an art whose maker pulls it towards the desire for knowledge and the not towards the desire for communication. Whoever demands such values of the art-maker, is like he who demands that a physicist, for example, make her scientific discoveries humane or feminine while for the art-maker, the pleasure in art, like that in knowledge – call it dry, call it complicated – is in its discoveries and inventions, not in its way of expression or function.
If architecture in general, and Arab-Islamic architecture in particular, is the source of Choucair’s first inspiration and a mirror in which she willingly continued to see herself, that is not because of what it gives rise to through its function and/or ornamentation in the way of meaning or beauty. What attracts her to architecture is the creation of new forms and ways for building and inhabiting. What attracts her is the work of an engineer who is able, from the builders of the pyramids to Gustaf Eiffel (1832-1923), or to Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), not simply to make possible the application of a set of unexpected ideas but to make possible one’s figuring out a set of unexpected applications. Fuller once said, “Any truly great artist is a scientist, and any truly great scientist is an artist. Both are inventors.” [20] It is a crazy and isolating ambition, like every adventure beyond the known and conventional, for an artist to demand of his art what the scientist-inventor demands of his science: opening experiment to that which changes the conditions of all experience.
The history of art is replete with names whose “contributions” did not exceed the individuality of their personal performance. Few are those who inspired the venerable feeling that what happened to their art happened to Art with a capital “A.” Perhaps this gamble of “everything or nothing” was in line with Choucair’s extremist personality, but what I prefer to see in her resemblance to scientists (a resemblance which in one way or another is unceasing in her modernism) is something comparable to the French appellation “musique savante.” The term was first used for serious European music (baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary), and later used for its peers in other world traditions, distinguishing this music from popular or folkloric types: the former is said to “create” while the latter are said to “express.” Between them lies the distance separating precise science from its partial applications. Thus, given that Choucair wished her art to be “savant,” inevitably she had to seek the particularity of its signs and to be bound to it, far from the temptations of other semantic planes to which the transportation of these signs becomes, like an inevitable result, an application of an art that still needs “inventiveness” or even its very invention.
Given that her nationalist (or national-religious) belonging, as I said, was one of the conscious psychological motivations that tinged her research in its beginning, Choucair could have adopted from Arab-Islamic art this most abridged (in terms of its visual language) reference to two plastic signs: the straight line and the arc. She could have restricted herself to them as others were to with more or less success and inspiration, making an inventory of the natural elements at hand. Indeed, following the path of the Japanese painter Sengai (1751-1832) who likewise reduced the universe to three signs – the rectangle, the triangle, and the circle [21] – she could have condensed all creation, in her turn, to the arc and the straight line and, thus, proved (is not it an admissible claim?) the superiority of Arab-Islamic civilization. However, she did not tarry in such expressive potentialities. Claude Levi-Strauss once said, “The scientist is not he who supplies the right answers but he who poses the right questions.” Choucair was the first among Arab artists, perhaps even the only, who seriously posed in her practice, unparalleled in her commitment except by a few artists in the world, the question of the plastic sign. Can we possibly attribute to the pure plastic signifier (form, color, or texture) an appropriate signified without resorting to the iconic reference [22] or the extra-visual symbol? [23]
Preambulant Conclusions: Towards the Particularism of the Plastic Signified
Choucair once shocked a poet by declaring her preference for the gnomic tradition in Arabic poetry. “Yes, in poetry a word should weigh a ton!” she said to him, stressing the need for meaning and formal integrity in a way that might have seemed to some poets and critics to be a threat to the unity of the poem, that first formal gain for Arab modernism. [24] The question of signification as I formulated it at the end of the previous section cannot be separated completely from the question of composition which I will pose first in the following form: how can the part be a totality? And subsequently, how can the totality be one when it is composed of independent parts? For sake of methodology only, let us start with the compositional issue.
There is no doubt that traditional Arab poetry is one of the cultural sources nourishing and occupying Choucair’s thought. The compositional particularity that attracted her to it is the antagonism between the gnomic completeness confined to the single verse, on the one hand, and the unification of the verses into the single poem, on the other. Indeed, Choucair gave expression to her admiration by giving to some of the sculptures she “composed” from “complete” independent pieces into layers or sequences (especially in the 1960s), the name of Qasa’id and, occasionally, Mu’allaqat (odes). In fact, she even went so far in likening her work to poetry as to name the component parts of such sculpture “verses,” to the delight of those who like to see stories behind the artwork, and she declared convincingly (or seeking conviction?) that Arabic poetry was a referent for her doing so. [25] Hence many aspects permit seeing works from this first period as based on a single, extra-plastic likeness that blocks the road inasmuch as it unifies it.
The contemporary French sculptor Vincent Barré named one of his works “Le chemin est terminé, le voyage est commencé” (The road is ended, the journey begun). True journeys do not begin until after the end of the road. Rather than suffocate in the closed cradle [26] of the austere poetics to which she committed herself peerlessly, Choucair was able to strike the majestic tempo for this advance after every road’s end, an act of transcendency with every step, not as a beginning but as a principle. In this sense we should understand the artist’s gamble on the spirituality of Arab-Islamic ornament as a source of true inspiration irreducible to the craftsmanship of applied arts. The stereotypy [found in Arab-Islamic] ornament is both a constraint and a longing. Its foundation is not in the geometry of simplification but in the geometry of connection. It finds in this connective origin its life, its organicity, and its “meaning.” The feminine dance of meanders present in Choucair’s sculpture is the plastic equivalent of the complete intermeshing of fertility and unity rites that was achieved by sufic dance.
The “verses” increased in number [of components] to a degree recalling Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” However, the more important development, as is usually the case with an artist who seeks the most significant minimum, led to her bilobed sculptures for which I suggest a name based on Jalalu’ddin al-Rumi’s title, Choucair’s mathnawis (couplets). [27] The two lobes of the sculpture intertwine, interpenetrate, and fuse so that their connection constitutes an absolute embrace, verging on the erotic, at once coitional and uterine. Yet the constraint reverts to longing when the distance lying between the two intertwining complementary parts is increased; then the labyrinthine lines delineate a lack, and the lack becomes points of sky in the body. The bodies that were humanized by their embrace carry in their lineaments flowing streams of sky evolving from a need for the other’s complementary to a demand for the absolute complement or the joining of the two as Sufic poetry joined Allah and the beloved. The unlimited is manifested at the level of human deficiency. On the wound of God the sufi twists his wound. Choucair’s mathnawis reveal to us that all longing and all union are like a midnight ascension to heaven. [28] As celestial as sensual [is] “the rapture of [this] revelation.”
I wrote this description with “an eye to meaning” logically imposed by the fact that the described is man-made and governed by intentionality regardless of how much it conceals the intent. Every “ecstatic” extrapolation here must have found its justification or its “referent” in the compositional relationship between the part and the whole, the convex and the concave, the simple and the complex, the lacking and the completed, and so on. Just as the artist envisioned and exhibited her mathnawis in pairs or separately, in such a variety of compositional forms that it seemed that, so long as the two “hemistiches” of the sculpture appear in the same field of vision, the game could continue infinitely, so, too, did she give a variety of forms to her qasa’id, even allowing visitors to her exhibitions or atelier “to play” at disassembling and reassembling the parts according to whim. I reminded her of that when I saw her protest the “scattered” display of a sculpture from this series in the public garden facing the ESCWA building in downtown Beirut. She had said that the way it was strewn about rendered it “meaningless.” Truth be told, the landscapist’s organization of the sculpture’s pieces was neither more “scattered” than what the maker herself had executed in my presence, and probably in his, nor more so than what she let me do before her approving looks with that sculpture or others like it. So what on earth happened to change things? In this theoretically infinite series of readings, how did a false reading occur, one stripping the sculpture of its integrity and making it seem to its maker to be “scattered”? And how does that relate to the understanding of austere aesthetics adopted by the artist? We will leave here the sculpture and its questions with the hope of returning to them after careful attention to the semantic issue.
The French poet Yves Bonnefoy once said that the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé records the end of the ontological era and announces the new era of the sign…or it carries those two intuitions to their limits, or to the point at least, where a choice must be made. [29] Work on the signifier, under direct influence from the linguistics triumphant in the mid-twentieth century, was a must for the modernist Arab poets whom Choucair reproved for “neglecting meaning.” [30] Behind this “negligence” was a warped application – one much more generalized than what was on the artist’s mind when she criticized the poets – of Mallarmé’s famous aphorism that the material worked by the poet is words not ideas: he may have refused to give words to meanings, but he certainly did not refuse to give meanings to words! [31] If our semiotic translation of this aphorism would be that the signifier is sought no matter how far the referent is banished, then we would enter the heart of the pure visual art that was rarely in the history of art defended as authentically and coherently as by Choucair.
Antoni Tàpies mentions the Atelier of Abstract Art, immediately after the Bauhaus school, as an example of the avant-garde who began in revolt against dominant academicism and ended up in the rigor mortis of new kind of academicism. [32] Choucair had participated during her brief but decisive Parisian sojourn in the activities of the Atelier of Abstract Art. Although Choucair’s position was more unyielding in its defense of the purity of plastics signs against all figurative restitution or symbolic motivation, it cannot possibly be deemed as austere as was deemed the position of this avant-garde, whether inside or outside the Atelier, even though their predilection for geometrical abstraction did not prevent them, in practice, theory, debate, or criticism, from a dangerous inclination towards acceptance of an iconic referent or a symbolic signified for the geometrical sign. For just as life suffocates from over-protection, unyieldingness comes tumbling down when the means imitate the end-goal and gradually take its place.
Between the indigestible cuisine of the materièrists and the expressionists on the one hand and the famishing cuisine of pure geometricism on the other, Choucair staked out her middle-ground where she realized the meeting of extreme simplicity and excellent “nourishment.” Thus, her cuisine, in art and life, had the concentration and power of medicine. A concentrate of ideas and emotions that by composition alone have been made significant without passing through an image or a symbol, that is what she wishes for her painting and (later) sculpture to be. Geometry in her aesthetics was, thus, only a choice dictated by the necessity of keeping to plastic signs. [33] Although the plastic signs are three in number (form, color, and texture) the owner of the biggest eraser I ever saw [34] will attempt to reduce them to a sole element, form.
