Khaled
Hafez: All Time Idlers
Text for the artist’s solo at Galleria San Carlo, Milan, February
2006
Martina Corgnati
In an interior dominated by deep reddish lights, two men with Arabic or
Middle Eastern facial features stand facing each other, though each pointedly
ignores the other. The camera captures them from below, insisting on the
effect achieved by aiming against the light, which scatters reflections
and spreads shadows on their faces. One of them, a cigarette gripped between
his lips, has the air of a man with a very clear idea of what he is doing,
as he handles a big Colt.
The other, thin, shaven-headed and bare from the waist up, cradles a bottle
of whisky in his arms. Hanging on the wall behind them are not the usual
pictures, but a collection of firearms. As the going gets tough, the tension
gets palpable. Jenny Holzer’s well-known statement, protect me from
I want, is written on the wall in the background. Oh, so these are not
international terrorists, but artists: in fact, this is a sequence from
Idlers’ Logic, the video by Khaled Hafez that won an award at last
year’s Dakar Biennale.
Khaled Hafez: among contemporary artists, one of those most generously
supplied with irony, a quality now lamentably rare in a contemporary art
system dominated by nebulous exploits and catch-phrases chosen for their
media impact, but bereft of any real meaning, as well as by traumas, tautologies
and unpleasant experiences (also aesthetically and technically speaking:
by which I mean downright badly made).
Instead of which, the work of this Egyptian artist – and I refer
in particular to his video production – goes right to the heart
of the problem: these are Arabs, a name that already implies a whole programme
of mass media bombardment, of danger, of fanaticism, of human and civil
degradation.
Khaled Hafez focuses mainly on staging their frustration and passiveness,
in the sense of their inevitable conformity to the western idea of “as
you want me” – although the sign is always negative.
They are always smoking – Virginia tobacco – and they shoot,
drink whisky and coffee, don’t work, produce nothing, waste time
beating out a rhythm on jars and tambourines; they strike a pose, also
as potential objects of extremely ambiguous desire; they chant long Oriental
dirges (at least that is what they always risk sounding like to our western
ears). And they watch television, or maybe they don’t watch it directly,
but the artist is unbearably attracted to a collage of all kinds, traditional
and hi tech, so he sticks one image on after another; scenes of kisses,
in particular: long, fifties-style kisses, with the only variant of a
comment – which in this case is not romantic, but sounds like something
out of a football commentary.
Maybe it’s worthwhile: we have already seen this film, comments
Khaled Hafez, it’s an old one, its comic-book plot is a cliché
(someone always ends up saying “I love you, woman” at some
stage) and the kiss is ultimately all that really interests us; all the
more so now that Puritanism is making such an effervescent comeback (there,
in the Arabian countries).
The game of combinations used by the artist to generate a fair proportion
of his sometimes irresistible comedy is blatant: the face is always the
face of President Bush, but the voice that is supposed to be coming from
his mouth is feminine and is describing (in Arabic) all the many and varied
wonders of a cucumber-based face mask; altogether, the soundtrack is distinctly
Oriental, but “our heroes” (or “theirs”: it depends
on whose side we decide to be on) dream about the West, although they
probably do so in conflicting terms. As a matter of fact, they tend to
identify with action film stars, with movie gangsters, police or secret
agents, especially with Al Pacino in Taxi Driver.
In the first video he made, which was produced in 2001 with the title
Visions of a Cheeseburger Memory (a work that I believe deserves more
limelight than it has had to date), the game of combinations was even
more blatant and, to a certain extent, autobiographical: framed in a horizontal
stripe set between two red bands (like a cheeseburger), the squashed,
compressed image combines rapidly alternating fragments of different films,
from Clockwork Orange, which acts as a sort of link, to fights between
Chinese mafia gangs in New York and frames taken from the artist’s
own films, showing him shooting at something or someone, rather clumsily
and above all slowly compared to his heroes, but still quite convincingly.
Apart from any ideological or descriptive value or claim to value, the
sheer pleasure of the collage functions for its own sake. An implacable
activist in the cutting room, where he is more intense and remorseless
than on any other occasion, Khaled Hafez generates meaning by layering,
by targeted zapping, the speed of his movements, the peremptoriness of
his cuts.
That is the cheeseburger: all-inclusive cultural consumerism, narrative
conditioning; it is a way of thinking, of seeing, even of creating, our
way. A sandwich, practically any sandwich: a mass-produced, industrial
sandwich. A Macdonald’s sandwich;
Hafez is hopelessly in love with the movies: in Idlers’ Logic, where
a fiction ambition predominates over the collage and the ready-made, his
alert directing hints at unexpected links between the environment surrounding
the Middle-Eastern ne’er-do-wells and the room where the action
takes place between the stars of Last tango in Paris: for example in the
light that is always cast from behind the actors, so that the camera sees
them as covered with shadows, reflections and signs.
Above all, Khaled Hafez is in love with cross-fertilizations, or perhaps
it would be better to say he is convinced that they constitute the condition
– and the secret – of our everyday life and our age. In and
out of the cinema, “I belong to a generation of artists who spent
their childhood, adolescence and adulthood surrounded by stress”,
he explained years ago: “military confrontations, unexpected political
landmarks and the subsequent effervescent socio-economic consequences”.
Of course, Hafez is talking about Egypt, the country where he was born,
grew up and still lives today, with the exception of a long period spent
in Paris, for training (and cross-fertilization). His is a country that
is socio-culturally quite contaminated: to the untrained eye, Cairo, now
a megalopolis with about sixteen million inhabitants, looks like a series
of layered elements from different origins, piled up or squashed one on
top of another with no regard for their nature or origins, no care for
the indispensable times of transition, so with no possibility to be recomposed
harmoniously. “Egyptian society has been reshaped by continuous
changes since the mid-seventies, losing some of its Oriental character
on the way and acquiring other traits instead, some of which are part
of the globalisation process” (which affects Egypt too, of course),
“others simply deviations towards the consumer goods culture.”
It is no coincidence that this accumulation of different situations, apparently
always on the point of reaching critical mass and exploding, has been
transformed in recent years into a fertile humus for a great many artists,
who nearly all work more or less consciously on dimensions and through
languages that are markedly and programmatically hybrid, no less than
those used by those of their compatriots who moved to Europe or the USA
some time ago.
Of all of these, Khaled Hafez is one of the more interesting, cultured
and lucid: decidedly battle-hardened in analytical and theoretical terms,
extremely alert to the processes of transformation taking place in his
environment, but also conscious of the “deep currents” of
cultural belonging and individual identity that continue to nourish his
imagery in such original ways, the artist who, is a brilliant film-maker,
has also learned over the years how to develop a strongly distinctive
painterly style, recognisable and personal. He actually started out as
a painter – a painter who sees painting as an excellent, favoured
place for unfurling meaning (a decipherable meaning), which should also
be taken to mean not a unitary, homogenous factor, but a multiple, polyvalent
configuration, not without contradictions and subject to continuous internal
transformations.
Khaled Hafez is no artist – and no man – to resort to subterfuge,
to the excessively easy short cuts that are so endemic these days (Gillo
Dorfles was already talking several years ago about “easily copied
fashions”, a definition that is still up to date for apparently
different objects all the time) in the artistic institutions and in so
many curators’ à la page compilations.
I refer, for example, to all those little war games that are infesting
exhibitions, biennials and museums with increasingly scholastic, predictable
and hurried productions, with no ambitions whatsoever except for the all-too-obvious
one of being something more than a mere tautology and to win their five
minutes of media glory, as Warhol used to say.
No: such pseudo-aggressive exercises, nearly always no more than rhetorical
(with due exceptions, of course), have never really seduced Khaled Hafez,
who thinks like a contemporary man when he is in front of a canvas, too.
In other words, he thinks in layers, in simultaneous presences, in partial
horizons, in cross-fertilizations and in terms of polyvalent complexities
instead of in apparently effective but in reality derogatory simplifications.
And to do so he helps himself with both hands and complete awareness to
the language of Pop, transforming it into a sort of Egyptian ethno-Pop,
based on ancient Pharaonic gods accompanied in their wanderings on both
sides of the canvas by ultra-modern pin-ups and cartoon heroes.
At first glance, the association is surprising, but even the most cursory
second look reveals that it is anything but gratuitous or purely aesthetically
inclined: this artist has actually spent years in a quest for recurrences,
in other words for forms or icons and symbolic functions that reverberate
from east to west and from past to present, fundamentally unchanged or
in any case in such terms as to constitute veritable traits d’union:
“One day, I was looking at a small stone model of Anubis and a Warner
Brothers model of Batman of almost the same size: I discovered that both
figures are identical from the front view and from the back view; the
only difference is from the profile view. It is a bit astounding that
both super-heroes of past and of present have, beside their morphological
resemblance, an identical function of protection against evil forces”.
So the reliefs on ancient Egyptian tombs, with all the bulky baggage of
narrative content and their tendency to stereotyping and repetition, turn
out to be the real ancestors of modern comics, also from the standpoint
of morphological and structural organisation.
I find this interpretation convincing: ultimately, man is always rather
similar to himself and, although the sacred quality of the ancient icons
has been replaced by the commercial connotation of their contemporary
counterparts (a situation already clearly intuited by Walter Benjamin),
images and their contents are bound to the same symbolic requirements,
the same anxieties and the same existential and aesthetic questions.
As he says himself, Khaled Hafez wants his work to be intelligent rather
than just pleasant, so he invests curiosity and method in exploring the
non-random recurrences that offer themselves up as lines of the profound
continuity of our human imagery: “Today, here or there, universal
icons follow us, even at home: top-models (there) or theology monopolists
of science-and-faith (here), filthy-rich tycoons and unqualified politicians
(here and there).
From universal icons I weave my legend”. His adhesive is the language
of Pop: maybe the strongest, most influential determinant of today’s
visual culture, though if you like the least original, because the most
commonly shared, whether we like it or not – and not only within
the confined terrain of the visual arts as such. But it is surprising
that in his blatant, multiple assumption of codes and – as though
that were not enough – in his claim to imbue intelligence into his
work that does nothing to simplify things from a strictly painterly viewpoint
(he once wrote: “My initial worry before starting a project is trying
to create an intelligent work, not an aesthetic one. Visual illusions
provide an interesting outcome many times”); Khaled Hafez has achieved
a Style with a capital S over the years: personal, recognisable, defined,
sometimes peremptory for the presence of heterogeneous, dissimilar fragments
and the capacity to transform them into parts complementary to one and
the same symbolic and visual construction.
The method is ultimately no different from the one applied by the artist
to his video work: cutting, editing, rhythm, interruptions and pauses
summarise his ready-made and, without betraying it or changing its nature,
make it something different from what it was. In painting, the importance
and significance, not to say the weight, of the theoretical propositions
and of the elaboration that Khaled Hafez always puts before or at least
connects to concrete facts do not block the creation of powerful, instantly
convincing images. In this rare case, words and thought are not afraid
of descending into one of the world’s (at least of the western world’s)
most ancient and powerfully traditional languages and using it with decisiveness
and pregnancy, inventing new icons by transliteration, deformation or
metamorphosis (such as the bridge woman, overbearingly stretched to stitch
different parts of the image together); while painting, for its part,
is not afraid of becoming something mental, as Leonardo Da Vinci already
foresaw and aspired to.
To tell the truth, we have all become desperately dependent on visual
culture, on the images that aid us overcome our continuous mental voids,
the floods of words that overpower us, in our moments of forgetfulness
and our hypertensions, in our excesses of cholesterol and our latent shortcomings
of meaning. We need images to help us think, sleep, dream and pass the
day.
Our age cannot expect too much concentration, too much attention, too
much knowledge from us, as Benjamin – once again Benjamin –
suspected (or concentration, attention and knowledge of a certain kind,
theoretical, doctrinaire and slow).
That is why Khaled Hafez, like every true artist, makes the right choice
for today; with regard both to the dosage and to the method of application
of this substance called art and called thought. A substance that is destined
to become increasingly popular and necessary in this greedy, icon-obsessed
society, maybe more than pop music and other mass amusements. Luckily,
also in future there will be no shortage of generous, well-intentioned
idlers, ready to provide us with what we need.
Martina Corgnati
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