Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess: The Changing of Horses

By Natasha Gasparian

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondences and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785274640

Book preview

Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess

ANTHEM MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE ARAB WORLD, IRAN AND TURKEY

The Anthem Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey series publishes scholarly biographies of art works from the region. Each publication traces the historical trajectory of an individual art work, from the circumstances of production (including artist’s biography and sociocultural context of place) through its exhibition history with collectors and museums. This series is published in collaboration with The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA).

Series Editor

Sarah Rogers—AMCA & Independent Scholar, USA

Nada Shabout—AMCA & University of North Texas, USA

Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess

The Changing of Horses

Natasha Gasparian

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Natasha Gasparian 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-462-6 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-462-7 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Exhibition

2. The Artist

3. The Reception

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

FIGURES

I.1Aref El-Rayess, Tapis Volants (Flying Carpets) series, 1965

I.2Aref El-Rayess, Ila Ruh Martin Luther King (To the Spirit of Martin Luther King), 1968

1.1Aref El-Rayess, 5 Huzayran/Tabdil al-Ahsina (The 5th of June/ The Changing of Horses), 1967

1.2Aref El-Rayess, Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya, Aley, May 1968

1.3Blood and Freedom Visitors at Salle de L’Orient, 1968

1.4Henri Seyrig and Victor Hakim at Blood and Freedom Opening in Salle de L’Orient, 1968

1.5Al-Tariq, al-Fann wa-l-Thawra (Art and Revolution) issue, February 1974

2.1Aref El-Rayess in Fidāʾī Training Camp, c. 1970s

2.2Aref El-Rayess in Fidāʾī Training Camp, c. 1970s

2.3Aref El-Rayess and Waddah Faris, The Palestinian, 1968

2.4Aref El-Rayess at Home with The Changing of Horses, 1967

2.5Aref El-Rayess, Samia Osseirane and Maurice Sakr at Le 5 Juin conference in Dar El-Fan wa-l-Adab, 1968

2.6Wahib Bteddini, Harvesting/Picking Apples in the Mountains, 1966

3.1Yousuf Karsh, King Faisal, 1945

3.2Aref El-Rayess, Ila al-Raʾis de Gaulle (To President de Gaulle), 1968

3.3Vladimir Tamari, Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya Guestbook (detail), 1968

C.1Aref El-Rayess, Ruʾus wa Aqdam (Heads and Feet) series, 1970

C.2Studio Starko Aley, Aley Festival for the Arts, 1978

Acknowledgments

The guidance and encouragement of many people and multiple institutions made this publication possible. I am especially grateful to Hala El-Rayess for her enduring trust and generosity, and for her friendship. I also wish to extend my thanks to Simon Tidd and Alyaa Fouani at the Aref El-Rayess Foundation who, along with Hala, graciously welcomed me into their space and walked me through the artist’s gargantuan archive.

I am indebted to Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout, the series editors of this publication, for supporting my research on Aref El-Rayess and enabling me to redefine the structure of my work; to Megan Grieving at Anthem Press for her patience; to the curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, from whom I learned a great deal about the organization of archival material while working on the first iteration of the Saradar Collection’s digital projects, Perspective #1; and to Lina Kiryakos and Sandra Dagher at the Saradar Collection for their practical, monetary and moral support. It is thanks to Lina and Sandra that this publication’s titular artwork, The Changing of Horses, is printed within these pages in color. I am grateful to Rowina Bou Harb, an accomplice at the Sursock Museum; to the obliging librarians at the Archives and Special Collections at the American University of Beirut (AUB); to everyone in the department of Fine Arts and Art History at AUB (my laboratory and home since 2014); and to Saleh Barakat who introduced me to an abundance of magnificent and strange paintings, and shared tips, contacts and materials.

All my efforts would be in vain if not for Angela Harutyunyan’s years of guidance and criticism and the many activities she spearheaded and supported. Many thanks are due to Angela and to the other members of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR)—Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Sami Khatib and Ghalya Saadawi—for their mentorship and camaraderie; to Joshua D. Gonsalves for stimulating discussions on Arabstraction and the avant-garde; and especially, to my friends and peers at AUB—Francesco Anselmetti, Milia Ayache, Abdallah al-Ayache, Andrea Comair, Nadim Haidar, Lama Khatib, Raed Khelifi, Nare Sahakyan and Karen Vestergaard—who injected my year of writing (a year of local financial meltdown and global pandemic) with humor, tension, and spirit(s). Thanks to my friends Javier Aparicio Lorente, Biana Tamimi and Carine Lemyre for being present from afar; to my parents, siblings, cousins, Yayou and Tatty for helping me to forget and to Dex for keeping me sane. My deepest love and appreciation go to Ziad Kiblawi, my companion in life and in thought.

INTRODUCTION

Aref El-Rayess (1928–2005) is a notoriously difficult artist to write about. The art critics who followed the trials and tribulations of his practice throughout the years knew as much. Joseph Tarrab, for instance, characterized the artist in a pithy blurb in 1973 as:

The most mobile and versatile of our artists, one who rushes from one extreme to another without a break, as if he were looking for his own center of gravity which is always escaping him. He is constant only in his fidelity to change. He always seems to be running the risks of artistic adventure from scratch, denying his achievements to assert himself unceasingly as other than himself. It seems that a fundamental incredulity pushes him to always seek, through his works, a new approval of himself.¹

Tarrab’s remark apprehends constant flux and transformation as central to El-Rayess’s practice. Written after the turning point in the artist’s career in 1967, this blurb intimates that Aref El-Rayess is impossible to pin down—to give a name. He deployed a gamut of styles, forms and ideologies, both synchronically and diachronically over the span of his career. Ideologically, he was neither strictly a nationalist nor a socialist; neither a mystic nor an atheist; neither an idealist nor a materialist. At various moments throughout his lifetime, his practice was delimited and superseded by all these characterizations. For instance, in 1964, he produced a monumental metal sculpture of a Phoenician soldier—an emblem of Christian nationalism—for the Lebanese pavilion at the World Fair in New York, as well as a tapestry whose subject matter was the Greek myth of the Phoenician prince, Cadmus.² However, the specter of Phoenicianism in his work came and went like a flash, and his subsequent allegiance to the cause of Arab nationalism diminished with the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War.³

Tarrab