Chant Avedissian: A Contemporary Artist of Egypt

African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Mark D'Amato

National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. November 19, 2000-February 19, 2001

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE CONTEMPORARY

National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. January 7, 2001-January 6, 2002

As mainstream art magazines are recognizing the diversity and breadth of contemporary African art, two recent exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, "Chant Avedissian: A Contemporary Artist of Egypt: and "Encounters with the Contemporary," offered insight into how to present such work to a museum audience and how to create a discourse about and an experience of it. "Chant Avedissian" focused on three large multipaneled works by an artist who, though born in Cairo, has Armenian roots. Avedissian, then, is more than an Egyptian artist; he is a transnational artist, and one who is sensitive to the power inhering in cultural images, icons, and signs. After studying fine art in Montreal and applied arts in Paris, he returned to Egypt in 1980, where he began experimenting with photography as well as costume and textile design to gain an understanding of local artistic practices. His work during this period with Hassan Fathy, an architect known for his involvement with rural community development and his use of the country's craft traditions, led Avedissian to use local recycled materials as he searched for an Egyptian aesthetic.

Upon entering the gallery, we found that wall texts and photographs were just as important to the exhibition as the artwork. There was a photograph of The Big Wall (1998), a painting that documents Avedissian's visit to China's Great Wall. Like a snapshot, this image has the artist posing, off center, as a tourist in sunglasses before the wall with what appears to be Chinese calligraphy and stamps overlaying the center bottom of the painting, just above his stenciled signature. While revealing an affinity with Asian painting, the work remains linked with Western modernism in the flat depictions of artist, wall, and background layered in pastel pinks, oranges, and browns. The presentation of a photograph rather than the actual painting led us to contemplate this display on two levels. First, it served as a documentary image (almost a snapshot of a snapshot). Second, it was an illustration, an adjunct to the accompanying wall text.

Other photographs, Artist's View of Studio and 3 Tatomi Space, 2000, were more straightforward as documents of Avedissian's design sense and overall aesthetic approach, depicted here in his living room and studio space. The artist was quoted in a wall text as asserting that "anything that is not traditional Japanese, or close to its spirit, is pure barbarism." His aesthetic approach reflects this Asian influence along with the "Arab values of desert life" as revealed in the types of furniture and their arrangement. While this anthropological examination of the artist's habitat helped to frame his aesthetic approach, Avedissian's photographs of cafes and building fronts in Cairo disclosed more. Paintings of popular figures like the famous Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum were juxtaposed with a variety of other images and symbols applied directly to the actual facades. These ranged from transportation images, such as a man on a camel or an airplane, to Arabic script.

This introduction led to three large assemblies of panels hung on the three adjoining walls at the back of the gallery. The Sites, The Nasser Era and Om Kalsoum (two multipaneled works displayed as one), and The Dogs, all created in 1994, are part of a series that now totals some 200 paintings. Avedissian began the series in 1991, at the outset of the Persian Gulf War, in reaction to what he saw as the potential devastation of Egypt's heritage. These works represent his attempt to recover and document its richness and complexity, from the grand dynasties of the Pharaohs to the revolutionary changes in the modern Arab identity and way of life that began with Gamel Abdel al-Nasser's rule in 1952. This process of recovery and documentation was also important to artists in other parts of the continent as the colonial powers began to withdraw in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Avedissian commingles any number of symbols and images of tradition and modernity in these works, whose meaning he seeks to augment through his modes of representation. These modes--the application of paint by stencil and by hand, and the interchangeability of the panels themselves--do indeed, as stated in a nearby wall text, undercut "Western concepts of originality and uniqueness." More important, they document the reconstruction of the cultural and political identity of the artist's native country, which is made relevant in this postmodern era by the way the artist bridges the traditional and the modern through technique and content while also assimilating the West.

For example, in The Sites, Avedissian addresses the creation of cultural identity through architecture by depicting sites of Fathy's architecture with other important traditional and modern Egyptian landmarks. These images, given importance by being in the central panel, are flanked in the outer panels by images from popular culture and everyday life, :including a cat, a gas tank, and a woman strolling with her baby carriage. Thus, architecture is not just a work of space and form but a vital place that gains meaning through its interaction with the life that exists in and around it.