Urban Myths
Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks.” These lines from Zadie Smith’s multitudinously populated debut novel, White Teeth (2000), are among the most striking invocations of city life in the language.
The streets that simultaneously intersect and interact with each other comprise not only the epic metanarrative of the book — and so are not solely a blueprint for the modern urban landscape — but also provide a space in which emergent identifications of its people are played out. It is here that the perplexity of living in our time is most acutely experienced.
In Modern Art Oxford’s latest exhibition, Out of Beirut, this concept of the ever-evolving city becomes a fertile ground for the sprouting of ripe thought, of innovative and challenging art.
The varied media in which the investigations take place — visual arts, performance and architecture — attest to the prominent role of art and artists within changing urban societies, and the ways in which artistic expression born out of specific contexts can speak of broader realities with which we all might identify. Beirut, then, since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, is substituted in this show as the ultimate prototype for urbania today.
And it is the sculptures of Ziad Abillama that perform the city’s greatest contradiction most imaginatively from among this assembled series of artists. Abillama’s angular pieces — sculpted in cut, bent and curved metal — provoke puzzlement, wariness and a slow, creeping sensation of terror. “My work now is part of an amnesia,” says Abillama, who speaks of it as if he is unpacking a series of small boxes, one incrementally more complicated thought at a time.
“I started from basics but I felt frustrated. There was a fear I hadn’t planned for. My work is a way of making hysterical the modern metropolitan apparatus.” Here, the knowledge that everything could be contingent on faulty memory — the very foundation of these buildings, their bricks, stone and mortar, the criss-cross grid of the slim, dusty Beirut streets — paradoxically lends Abillama’s sculptures their weight and gives plausibility to the exhibition.
Elsewhere in the gallery, the collaboration between filmmaker Rabih Mroué and actress Lina Saneh, entitled Biokhraphia (2002), plays out the city’s polygonal poses in real time. The schizophrenic character of the urban sprawl is probed via a series of personifications.
Faced with an extraordinary conversation framed by a fictitious interview on video, the audience of Biokhraphia find themselves bewildered by who is who among the artist’s three selves on display (Saneh, audio and video), or indeed whom they are in the process of representing. The social, private and artistic selves, although exchange their bodies throughout the sequence, can seemingly never escape the murky boundaries of politics, in particular the shadow of the civil war.
Urban myth subsequently takes on a whole new guise. The reconstruction, then, of the public and private spheres within the context of globalisation is fundamental to one’s comprehension of Out of Beirut as an exhibition. Yet it is the more pertinent, wide-ranging contradiction of past memory with present identity that defines the contemporary city experience for the majority of us. And with this comes the idea of the continously-crawling cityscape.
Its detractors have argued that sprawl is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally damaging, and ugly. Sprawl, they assert, is a prime factor in everything from obesity in suburbanites to global warming. They also believe that sprawl is a recent phenomenon, peculiarly American, driven by excessive car usage and the result of poor public policies. Still none of these citations are grounded in experience. They comprise nothing more than a theory list.
The notion that sprawl necessarily brings with it higher energy usage, increased car travel, and more traffic and pollution, for example, is difficult to sustain. If this were true, commuting times would be shortest in the densest cities and longest in the most sprawling ones. In fact, the reverse is closer to reality: with the most efficient of these cities being in the United States. There is no irony here.
I am a firm advocator for the belief that the most beautiful things in life — the moments that comprise our most profoundly pleasurable experiences — are to be found in the visual sphere of reference. And if we trace back this Ariadne’s thread through the stages of beauty — the literal line of beauty — it will forever return us to the city. For me, that halcyon place will always be London.
Be it the sudden rush of lush, Hyde Park greens from behind the white porticos of Bayswater Road, the clash and clang of Smithfield Market, or a snatched glance from inside a speeding black cab of two lovers embracing against the railings at Waterloo Bridge — the urban sprawl giving way behind them for miles around — the city is its own greatest advocate.
Its finest artistic representations find their peak potency in the dialogue between the city’s two façades: the grand guignol and the mundane. Without the two, as the artists of Beirut have demonstrated, there is no possibility for common ground, for shared, mutable experience. The city is, after all, for all of us to keep.
11th May 2006