Synopsis
Can One Man Save The (Art) World? Preceded by "Ayman Baalbaki's Mythological City" By Pr. Nayla Tamraz. Art is the way to approach performatively the illusion of individual decisive agency. The coming to the fact that decisions made and actions taken are never one s doing but are always in advance to one s awareness, should be called authenticity . This witnessing stance gives the necessary participassion to the happening of authenticity in art and opens the way to what can be called authentifying, meaning the authentication through testifying. Engaging in the performative modality of criticism, the text follows a comet-like elliptical encounter with the son of Adham al Aamili, a Lebanese artist and activist. And through the question of postmodernism and individual agency, the theoretical text paves the way for a fly-by encounter with the singularity of Ayman Baalbaki s work. Here, myth and history are flattened out vertically, shedding a differential light to the contemporary context of a territory for which the globalization appellation has been invented where the deconstruction of the competing universalities at play and their common Abrahamic legacy is an open-air collective entreprise.
Review
BEIRUT: "To become authentic, you must let go the idea that you're in control of your actions," says George Rabbath, as virtual pastries float above a three-dimensional projection of an iftar feast. "I really believe that once you accept this, it engenders a fundamental shift in your life." A conversation with the genial, mischievous Rabbath - who references Derrida, Barthes and Foucault with alarming regularity, and who navigates the treacherous terminology of postmodernism and post-structuralism with flippant ease - is a mind-bending exercise. Rabbath's argument is premised on the fact that there is no such thing as "individual decisive agency." In other words, there is no such thing as a freely-made decision. "Poststructuralist theory shows that actions are totally determined by context," Rabbath opined at Agial. "Once meaning is defined for you, your actions follow, and context determines meaning." In his book, Rabbath uses evidence from neuroscientists to demonstrate that the sense of a distinct self is a social construct. "Mentally simulating an action in a first-person way," writes Rabbath, "and looking at someone with the intention of imitating his movement, share important cerebral as well as phenomenological properties." This is certainly not an un-contentious philosophical position to take, but Rabbath's inferences from this standpoint are thought-provoking. The reader is taken on a whistle-stop tour of art history since Marcel Duchamp, looking at how artists, critics and curators have responded to the bursting of the illusion, as Rabbath sees it, of individual decisive agency. Duchamp, and later the conceptual artists of the 1960s, tried to do away with individual style, making the art object an endlessly reproducible commodity. But, according to Rabbath, the price to be paid for this maneuver was a lack of artistic authenticity. He quotes Benjamin Buchloh, who says, "The demolition of authorship produces instant brand names and identifiable products." The disappearance of the artist from the art work, Rabbath recounts, meant that the producers of the value and meaning became "the entire set of agents engaged in the field" - the artists, the critics, the viewing public and, of course, the curators. Since the conception of conceptual art, the curatorial star rose. A celebrity curator became as much an indicator of "important" art as the artists themselves. For Rabbath, the phenomenon of the super-curator was just a shifting of the bump in the carpet. "One can consider the figure of the curator as the latest - and hopefully the last - shelter for the illusion of individual decisive agency." So, assuming that Derrida and Company quashed the myth of individual decisive agency, how should an artist proceed? Rabbath believes the key lies in reconciling oneself to the idea that one does not have control over anything. It is only this acceptance, Rabbath asserts, that leads to the crucial quality of authenticity. Indeed, this is precisely how he chooses to define the slippery notion. Rabbath describes Lebanon's history as an "ongoing open-air deconstruction exercise of the many binarisms left unchecked." Oppositional concepts such as East and West, country and territory, majority and minority, left unexplored in other countries due to a dominant orthodoxy, are continually questioned here in Lebanon. "Despite the endless war and turmoil, no community has managed to destroy the other," said Rabbath. "We are condemned to become better people." Matthew Mosley --So you imagine that you have a distinct self? G.H. Rabbath muses upon what it means to be an art critic in postmodern world. Daily Star Lebanon Review by Matthew Mosley (sept 25, 2009)
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