An art scene divided

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

• Last Updated: June 26. 2008 1:23PM UAE / June 26. 2008 9:23AM GMT

Perhaps because it ­recognises 18 different religions and runs its affairs on a system of ­governance calibrated to represent them all, Lebanon can sometimes overplay its plurality. To get the gist of the day’s news – which tends to be, shall we say, eventful – requires watching four television channels, reading three newspapers and balancing the contradictory claims of competing online news services.

The contemporary art scene in Beirut might seem, at times, like a refuge from politics, a safe space for the open contemplation and contestation of ideas and a hotbed of critical and aesthetic innovation. But in reality, it is just as bitterly divisive. The fact that artists tend to cohere around associations – which are necessary entities in a state that boasts no real infrastructure for culture – only makes matters worse.

The art scene sometimes seems ruefully reminiscent of the splinter factions of the Palestinian political landscape in the 1970s, with, say, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts and the Lebanese Artists Association-Painters and Sculptors standing in for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the PFLP-GC (for General Command).

So it was that the month-long exhibition Lebanon Now: New Media Art opened last week at a gallery space in Verdun run by the Lebanese Artists Association (LAA). Not to be confused with Art Now in Lebanon, which was curated by Andree Sfeir-Semler and featured several artists more commonly tied to the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Lebanon Now is the brainchild of Chaouki Chamoun, an artist, professor and the newly named director of the LAA.

Until recently, the LAA was an all but moribund organisation known for “the old age, outdated ideas, bad works and bad taste” of its members, explains Ricardo Mbarkho, one of the participating artists in Lebanon Now, who contributed substantially to the overall scope of the exhibition.

If Beirut’s art scene could be ­polarized, like Lebanon’s political class, into the governing majority and the opposition, its leading figures would be Ashkal Alwan’s Christine Tohme on one side and Mbarkho on the other. One could be tempted to take things further and claim that Tohme’s camp is situated on the left and Mbarkho’s on the right. But such divisions never work out in practice, and in this case – though Mbarkho terms Lebanon Now a quintessentially capitalist endeavour that owes its existence to funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – they detract from the otherwise playful works on view.

Lebanon Now includes seven artists’ projects that articulate “positions that are shaped by the use of new technology”, Mbarkho says. “You need the positions before the technology,” he adds, “and you reach them by questioning your environment and your sociopolitical sphere.”

Shawki Youssef’s contribution is an online, interactive game that asks viewers to piece Lebanon together like a jigsaw puzzle. There is the remotest of possibilities that you will win the game, but most likely you will lose, triggering hilarious on-screen messages that connect your failure to the seemingly unrelated pronouncements of politicians in local newspapers.

Mansour El-Habre’s piece is an experimental website that delves into the mystery of how a man lost his middle finger, a riddle that has no clear answer but uncovers many unpleasantries about Lebanon’s civil war in the process.

Rabih Khalil’s work is an internet search engine titled Lebanon Everywhere that endlessly composes the word “Lebanon” from the text of any given website, a comment, perhaps, on the tendency among the Lebanese to see themselves at the centre of every plot, conspiracy theory and complicated conundrum in the world.

Mbarkho’s contribution is a series of digital “paintings” that translate key agreements in Lebanon’s history, from the Constitution and the National Pact to the recently brokered Doha Accord, from texts to RGB image files.

But in the end, does funding from USAID compromise the show, as many Beiruti artists might argue? “We’re not buying arms with it,” Mbarkho quips. “I’ll take money from anyone for culture. In Lebanon, you can be sure that anything you do will be taken for what it is, and its ­opposite.”