Camberwell College of Art

THE DEATH OF THE SHAYKHA

a eulogy for Louise Bourgeois

While I was drawing in my studio in the early hours of June 1 2010 with the radio on, the last item on the news stopped me in my tracks. It said that on the day before 31 May 2010 the great – and oldest – artist Louise Bourgeois, had departed life peacefully in her sleep from a heart attack. And before I knew it, the newsreader finished his paragraph by saying that Louise Bourgeois was an inspirational figure for feminism and feminist art.

I felt a bit upset for two reasons, firstly and mainly of course, the fact that Louise Bourgeois was dead, I would not draw for half an hour, or I didn’t want to. I felt personally that the death of Louise Bourgeois deserves that we all put down our pens and brushes and bow our heads for a few minutes.

The other thing that upset me slightly was that final statement about Louise Bourgeois and “Feminist” art and “feminism”. Louise Bourgeois herself refused to accept the label in her lifetime. As well, I felt that the statement somehow denied me (and other male artists) Louise Bourgeois’s influence. I also felt offended for Louise Bourgeois, when the BBC managed to reduce her 98 years of life and work into an “ism” that came into being so late in her lifetime.

What made the whole thing much more painful came later on the 10 pm news. In reporting the death, the BBC decided to choose Tracy Emin to mourn Louise Bourgeois, despite the existence of many female and male artists whose life and works could actually be related to that of Louise Bourgeois. Artists such as Paula Rego, or the sculptors Nicola Hicks or Cornelia Parker to name a few….

Yet out of all British artists they picked Tracy Emin. Now I personally know 3 things about Tracy Emin: I know what her bed looks like, I know the names of some people she slept with and I know that she’s one of the most artistically talentless individuals in this business, yet who has been pumped up by 21^st century media branding.

Actually, I digress; I don’t want to talk about Tracy Emin.

To be honest with you I hate the notion of art associated with any type or sect. Terms like “feminist” art, “Black art”, gay art etc – what do they actually mean (and by the way, I write this as someone who is not “white”) ? To me art is art and there are only two kinds: art, and bullshit passed as art.

Art is one of those things where the identity of the artist and the identity of the audience really is totally irrelevant. Do we really when we look at a Bacon or a Michelangelo, think “How gay or straight is that art work?” Even though sure, we know that both artists were gay.

The power of artists such as Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, James Brown and Stevie Wonder is that they made people from different colours dance together in the same room, defying the social segregation that existed at the time. But it was their work that did it; it was powerful enough to move people.

But enough of that; I really want to talk about Louise Bourgeois. On the night Louise Bourgeois died, I found myself jumping to Google images and typing “ Louise Bourgeois”. I found enormous numbers of pictures ranging from a very young Louise Bourgeois in her early years of studying, copying a classical Graeco-Roman head, right through to portraits of Louise Bourgeois the shaykha, the Witch-In-Chief, the woman with the scary eyes that only someone like Picasso had. Eyes that say “I know it all; I’ve seen it all; I’ve done it all. And you will never know what I know, unless you work as much as I’ve worked, and live as long as I’ve lived.” I did a right click and saved this picture as my desktop background.

– continued in Part 2 below

Part 2

I just called Louise Bourgeois a “shaykha .” What is that? In the part of the world where I come from, it’s a word coming from the root “shaikukha” which means “old age.” It’s an Arabic word used to mean the eldest member of whatever social group, a person that all the community highly respected. It’s part of a broad “eastern” tradition of elder wisdom that stretches all the way to Japan. It’s not associated to either religion or gender. The shaykh of the fishermen is the eldest of the fishermen, etc. The main thing that makes the expertise of the shaykha special is that they have seen too much; if you make it to 90 for example you’ve witnessed several whole generations – that’s a lot of wisdom.

Officially, Louise Bourgeois was the shaykha for all artists on the planet.

This morning my partner about the subject and she started to tell me her memories of seeing Louise Bourgeois at the Tate. Unfortunately I wasn’t in London at the time. I’ll bet that seeing an artist like Louise Bourgeois filling the Tate was such an inspirational and life changing experience to any artist. Even more, knowing that the work on show was much of it produced by a woman in her 90s would make any decent artist feel a mixture of aspiration, humility, jealousy and shame. The same kind of feeling you get when you see Michelangelo’s David and you learn that he made that when he was just 26 years old.

She said: “I didn’t go the show because Louise Bourgeois was female, I went because she’s a great artist, but yes I was fascinated by her explorations of the female world and female point of view. I also saw that she struggled with this and its relevant dichotomies throughout her life and that’s something I can relate to.

“ I loved the most her perfect marbles, the infinitely smooth works that she polished and polished until they became something celestial, yet they were all sculptures connected to the body, to life in all its messiness. Such a wonderful transformational of stone to flesh and back again.

I was particularly interested on one piece, called Fillette. At first I saw that it was a penis and balls and I thought, ‘Oh no, not dicks’ since I had seen that done to death – either laughing at penises or execrating them – and was frankly sick of it and I thought ‘when will women grow up?’ but then I looked again and it was marvellous. Monumental yet fragile; proud yet vulnerable. Then I read the accompanying text (I rarely do this but was glad I did) Bourgeois talks about how she considered “the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate; they’re objects that the woman, thus myself, must protect.” She also noted that “everything I loved had the shape of the things around me – the shape of my husband, the shape of the children [all sons]. So when I wanted to represent something I loved, I obviously represented a little penis.”( Bourgeois, Tate catalogue 2007) It’s amazing but this piece is the “other half” of all the “phallic” architectures and attitudes that we see around us. It’s the “other half. Bourgeois understood Jung’s idea of the anima and animus and her work really explores that.”

She also noted that at all the Louise Bourgeois shows, the widest gathering of the public was there. Louise Bourgeois, like Picasso, brings everybody regardless of race, age and lifestyle. Everybody is there, paying a ticket. Unlike the narrow slices of “arty” audience you see in most galleries, especially in London.

That’s because real art is like water. You need it. It’s not elitist anymore than water is elitist. It’s needed by everybody, all humans. Culture is not elitist. Elites can use it, and abuse it, but art itself is not elitist.

Louise Bourgeois could be an inspiration to a lot of women, feminist or not. But she’s an artist who is inspirational full stop – inspirational to everybody regardless of gender.

An artist is always an open potential, right up until the artist dies. So now we have been handed a sealed and complete portfolio with the face of Louise Bourgeois on the cover pointing at us and saying “Which one of you, man or woman, can match THAT?”

Anarchy in the UK

This morning on my way to college suddenly there came on my pod player one Sex Pistols song. As soon as I heard the first line “I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist” I went to the menu and pressed “repeat track.” I kept this song on for the whole day.

By time I arrived at my studio, I took the player off my head and plugged it into my speakers and got on with my painting.

I’d heard of punk rock for the first time about ten years ago, on a sunny day in beautiful Alexandria. My English friend put the Sex Pistols on and although I regarded myself most of my life as a hard rock fan, I had never heard anything like that. No single punk rock track had ever entered the Egyptian market. And as a guy that always thought British music meant Pink Floyd, Sabbath, Motorhead, I freaked out. It was terrible.

Now, as a British citizen and a student at a British art college, and right now, after half a day of the Sex Pistols looping on the speakers echoing in my room as I paint, I admitted to myself that, now, I LOVE the Sex Pistols. Now, and only now, their music makes sense to me.

British art schools often have produced radical bands and radical musicians. Only by studying art here I started to get the point. I often feel a sense that all around me are emotionally disengaged, from each other and from the art that we’re all supposed to be making. But now I understand – making this kind of music was the answer of people who couldn’t do this noise with art.

But I don’t really understand why. I understand that the art students-turned-musicians wanted to take their work to the working class. I want to take my work to the working class too. But why does it have to be music to go to the working class?

“I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.”

I wanted to produce a painting that captures the Johnny Rotten energy. I dealt with this painting differently than I usually do: I splashed dirt on it; I spat on it; I hammered it with dry old brushes and I mopped it with the broom that the cleaner left in the corner of the studio.

If I want to be as loud as Rotten, the performance of my painting has to have the same spirit: physical, aggressive, loud and carrying within it total disregard for what’s acceptable, especially for the London audience.

7:30 pm and there seemed to be nobody left in the building. The middle-aged always-angry security guard came to lock up the studios. He walked in to my space as Rotten was still screaming. He looked at my painting. “I love that, man” he said. And he pointed at the speakers with a big smile. “This is the sort of stuff I grew up listening to,” he said. He looked at me and he said “Good man” with a big smile. “I’m here to lock up seeing as what you’re doing I’ll leave you here for a bit.”

Just before leaving the room he looked into the corridor and pointed as though he wanted me to come and look. His smile was gone and the angry, middle aged look was back on his face.I left my painting and went to see what he was pointing out. I found two of the students putting an enormous cardboard box in the middle of the corridor. It was full of garbage and they were arranging it.

“Do you think that’s enough, or should we put more rubbish?” one of them asked. Her friend said warmly, “No, it’s fantastic like this.”

The security guard and I looked at one another wordlessly.

It was time for me to leave. I switched Johnny Rotten off.

On the bus home I felt like I could do with a less angry song to help me on my trip home, and that’s when I discovered that, in my shock at the cardboard box, I had forgotten my headphones in the studio.

God save the Queen.

PRECIOUS

While I am was hanging my first paintings on the wall, I asked one of my colleagues to help me, which she did. We stretched the large paper on the wall and I started to nail it using my powerful German staple-gun.

“What I like about you is that you’re not precious about your work,” she said.

I didn’t now what to say at the time, though we talked awhile, for almost half an hour before she left.

But her comment didn’t leave me. What she likes about me is that I am “Not Precious” about my work.

I was troubled about that, because I, and every single person who really knows me, would know that there is nothing more precious to me than my work. But I understand what she meant, when she saw me hammering my painting to the wall with a big piece of German steel.

But let’s think about that for a minute. Painting was a spiritual, sacrificial act much earlier than recognising “art” as a concept. What we regard as “art” is a concept that more or less wasn’t really established before Aristotle. And if you look a the “primitive” practices in which art was rooted you will understand what I mean. Take for example something like the “voodoo-type” doll known in Egypt since the ancient Egyptians as “Fasokha.”

You’ll find that the creation of the fasokha doll is not any Aristotelian mimetic representation, nor is it a manifestation of beauty. The doll is always a representation of a negative, an evil eye, an evil person, evil spirits. And although making the doll involves effort and some level of craft, and takes place within ceremonies, yet it is not an object for preservation. It will be poked with pins and needles and set on fire. Because the whole ritual is about either healing the self or healing others. This includes both the process of making and the process of breaking.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m going to set my work on fire like a fasokha doll, or a Wicker Man. What I am saying is, that my work is often a representation of the dark corners of the soul, and for the soul to heal, this dark corner has got to be exposed to the light.

And the evil or the negative elements that were once lurking within have got to come out into the light and – like the ancient classic vampire story – by exposing it to the light you finish it, and then you get on with living.

That’s what I think Art was meant to do. But my dear colleague and most others in this contemporary art world, was talking about art as a commodity product and the artist as a commercial enterprise. And so then I think that my answer would have to be, “No, I’m not precious.”

CONCERTINA BOOKS

During the last 2 months I have become really involved with book art; I’m really excited about that; it’s like finding a totally new outlet for drawing

I can’t say much about it now as usually I find it really difficult talking about work that I’m still trying to configure

Last week I produced 2 concertina books, which is a really exciting thing for me. I feel that there is a great range of possibilities to what I can do with that.

I don’t know, take a look and tell me

• 
• 
•