To find oneself gathering critical, ethnographic perspectives that reflect the contemporary realities of Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman today is a rich and lucky endeavor. Building on the pillars of work released in the 2000s, held up as a then-emergent group of Arab cultural studies, a slate of newly published monographs on the Arab world, and specifically the Mashriq, has brought to the fore nearly a dozen new voices in theoretically sophisticated, interdisciplinary research that holds space for nuanced conversations about the cultural and intellectual lineages of these capitals and the political and aesthetic futures imagined by their denizens. Hanan Toukan's The Politics of Art is a welcome, central tome in this cadre of recent work.
Situated at the intersection of art history, intellectual history, contemporary art theory, the anthropology of art, international politics and relations, and critical political economy, Toukan presents a series of connected case studies that ultimately work to set aside the tired, binary formulation of interpreting artistic interventions as either in service of the status quo or opposed to it. Specifically, her study explores “the political meaning and social function” (5) of art practices of the post-1990 generation of multidisciplinary artists in Beirut, Amman, and Ramallah; the transnational network of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NPOs, NGOs) that host and commission them; the international networks of funds and capital that finance the latter; and the globalized flows of ideas, people, and publications that have influenced the affect, aesthetics, and politics of these artists’ work. By drawing contrast with the transnational networks of belonging and international flows of political ideas and aesthetics that animated the post-1967 generation of artists and intellectuals in the Mashriq, Toukan suggests that the ways in which the post-1990 artists respond to and are interpellated by the transnational circulation of ideas concerning political subjectivity, aesthetics, and the shape of critique present different avenues by which to interpret the politics of their work. With this proposal, Toukan bypasses both the blanket presumption of counter-hegemonic critique for contemporary art practice in the region and the dismissal of a young avant-garde that is in service of neoliberal capital. Instead, Toukan borrows from Gabriel Rockhill to assert the “politicity” of artworks is to be located in the manner of their “inscription in the social field.” (8)
What that means for Toukan is a consideration of the “processes by which works come into being, circulate, and then get framed and discussed, even when they seem most resistant to power.” (6) Her point is less a Foucauldian assertion of the totality of power and the impossibility of critique than it is a material examination of the ways in which the post–Cold War tendency of instrumentalizing art funding as cultural diplomacy has contributed to “shaping cultural actors’ understanding of contemporary art's relationship to the political” (7). That is, it is not that the Ford Foundation's millennial support for alternative cultural organizations like Beirut's Ashkal Alwan, Amman's Makan, or Ramallah's International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) should be interpreted politically as the same as State Department–funded efforts to infiltrate or impose ideology on a postcolonial audience. Rather, it is that the flows of ideas, people, and aesthetics that this cultural diplomacy sustains and enables significantly influences the orientation of this generation of artists (toward a global, cosmopolitan audience), the terms of reference they mobilize in their work (a pantheon of post-structural and postcolonial frameworks on identity, memory, the archive), and the political frames they come to propose for the works themselves.
The book, as indeed, Toukan argues, the question of foreign funding in the international support of local arts funding in the region writ large, begins with and is haunted by the example of Hiwar, the 1970s literary journal edited by Tawfiq Sayigh, eventually revealed to be secretly funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency. But Toukan argues that the transnational flows of influence attached to international arts funding in the period of post–Lebanese Civil War, post–Oslo Accords, and economic liberalization under Jordan's King Abdullah present different configurations in which to analyze the politics of foreign funding in the millennial period and the associations, affinities, and identifications with it.
Toukan emphasizes the way local and global dimensions of contemporary art interface with each other, specifically through engagements that require “travel, translation, framing, and representation” (10). She builds a reading of “the political” in art, drawing from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière and the emphasis of both thinkers on antagonism and dissensus and the struggle for power. She places prominence on the “structural inequalities of the political economy of postcolonial societies” and how these dictate the construction of “identities, class affiliations, and beliefs” (12). Toukan traces these structural inequalities through the accrual of cultural capital that circulates in international art circuits and alternative arts funding and that, she argues, often manifests itself in the articulation of a certain discourse about resistance, subversion, and critique.
In contrast to a regional, nationalist pan-Arabist or a Marxist framework of internationalist solidarity, Toukan identifies an orientation shared by the post-1990s artists that is located both toward cosmopolitan capitals like Dubai, London, Berlin, and New York, but also relationally as “South-South” exchanges, which influences what kind of exposure and opportunities artists’ deem desirable or as success for their work. The terms of reference used to ascribe meaning to these interventions, in addition to overwhelmingly relying on English, presume a fluency with the work of a handful of US and continental thinkers, prominent among them Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière. As a result, Toukan draws the reader's attention to the ways in which frameworks of critique proposed by these artists and artworks, because of the very “processes by which works come into being, circulate, and then get framed and discussed” (6), often end up being a part of the very thing they critique. Ultimately her argument centers on how the widespread understanding of art in the service of social and political change influences cultural actors’ perception of artistic production's relationship to the political, especially its capacity for embodying the counter-hegemonic.
Toukan addresses a range of artists and art pieces, performances, and interventions. She identifies Jessica Winegar, Zeina Halabi, Zeina Maasri, and Najat Rahman's recent tomes as central inspirations and interlocutors. Anthropologists and art scholars in the region, Kirsten Scheid, Jillian Schwedler, and Aseel Sawalha, appear in conversation in different cities. Her analysis is not prescriptive; that is, she does not presuppose that it is impossible to offer commentary, subvert, or resist the neoliberal, globalized conditions she highlights. Rather, she discusses works that she suggests were able to offer critiques and commentary on the very system in which they participated, but that were ultimately unappreciated, such as Ziad Abillama's disruption of Ashkal Alwan's group exhibition exploring public space in the Sanayeh Gardens of Beirut in 1995. The Dictaphone Group's The Sea Is Mine (2012), a performance that is universally celebrated in the academic literature but which, by nature of its intervention—the artists hosted an audience on a fishing boat—was only open to a handful of participants, is another that she highlights for its capacity to step outside the logic she identifies and critiques. Toukan spends much more time analyzing those very prominent pieces that, although they were seen as critiques or subversions, ultimately can be read to reinscribe the patterns they supposedly resist—like the IAAP's Picasso in Palestine (2011). Seeing both kinds of examples is crucial to being able to trace and carry through the implications of her argument.
Early on, Toukan distances her analysis from a commercial market of art sales, focusing instead on those avant-garde artists deemed to be counter-hegemonic in part because of their distance from financial art markets. Although that decision is understandable, the more commercially oriented angle still seems like an important, unaddressed vector in the work. How do forays from otherwise experimental artists into the commercial art, fashion, or design industries further complicate how to read the accumulation of cultural capital: not instead of or opposed to financial profit off of their work, but alongside it? In my own research on experimental musicians in these three cities over approximately the same time period, for example, recent positive attention to “making it” (commercially) among musicians is taking up more space than was permitted even a decade ago without, it appears, detracting from an artist's perceived cultural capital—as authenticity, as creative genius, as political voice. Much more salient seems to be where one moves geographically or positions oneself aesthetically to achieve commercial success. Are multidisciplinary artists making similar negotiations and what does that mean about the inseparability of cultural and financial capital?
Having attempted to teach this kind of nuance of the possible political resonances for artworks in classrooms myself, it is unclear how well or how easily the undergraduate student will take to these chapters, so deep is the binary entrenchment of hegemonic/counter-hegemonic in a collective imagination that Toukan so deftly addresses. But that is not a reason not to teach her book, nor to withhold assigning it to graduate students studying art, performance, media, diplomacy, or a range of other cultural and political questions. It is rather a testimony to how badly needed are perspectives that identify and disrupt the expectation that for art to be political it must be “resistance” and that all creatively invested youth in the wide Arabic-speaking world must be itching to resist, critique, or subvert something in their work. The Politics of Art is, in short, a path-clearing work that should point the way for a new generation of art, performance, and music researchers to propose other formulations of the political by which to read, appreciate, and be in conversation with their performing and multidisciplinary artist contemporaries in the Mashriq. We, fellow researchers on politics and artistic expression in these cities, should count ourselves lucky, and the book a very big success, should we find ourselves returning to the text at some time in the future to find it dated and its proposals obvious. This is a future reality I hope very much to be around to see.
