Written by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Do we as individuals have free will
and singular agency? Are we the authors of our actions and can we make
choices, or are human actions determined by external causes, conditions,
divine intervention or fate?
I will discuss this question by looking at Wael Shawky's trilogy of video films Cabaret Crusades,
premiered in 2010, 2012 and 2015. Through the play of marionettes,
elaborate scenography, classical Arabic speech, electronic music and
traditional chanting, they depict great pain, suffering and acts of
violence, including stabbing, beheading, cannibalism and scenes of dogs
eating a dead body. There is a sharp contrast between this violence and
the magical realism and beauty of the scenography, of the marionettes
and their clothing, the crisp photography and the seductive music.
While referring to the Middle Ages (the period between the first crusade in the 11th
century up to 1204, when Constantinople, a primarily Christian city,
was overrun and pillaged by Crusaders in the fourth crusade), these
films cannot but make us think about our own times and about the
increasing number of deaths (nearly 200,000 in Syria since the first
rebellion uprising in 2011 to today's civil war) and the lives lost in
the US-Iraq Gulf wars during the 1990s and 2000s, the Lebanese civil
wars in the 1970s and 1980s, the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948, the
colonial partitioning of Arab lands of the former Ottoman empire in the
1920s, the Ottoman empire and its internal struggles, and events dating
further and further back.
I repeat: do we as individuals have singular agency, or are human actions determined by external causes, conditions or fate?
The
works of Wael Shawky seem to intimate that the supreme agency we might
achieve is nothing more than the ability to submit to a fundamentally
unknown authority within ourselves, through commitment to the task at
hand, whatever that task may be, and through precision, whatever that
may be focused upon. Primarily a draughtsman, Shawky uses no shading,
but is dedicated to the line. In speaking about his drawing, he told
me: "It's never really something I know in advance. It can turn into an
animal that is really connected to a city, for example. I have no idea
at first what it is. What I want from the work is that in the end it has
enough precision in its detail to ensure that you cannot criticize its
parts anymore, because it looks as if it exists in reality, somewhere.
The landscape, the shape is there, an animal with four legs. It's
exactly the way I made all the marionettes through precision. The
marionettes are made by blowing and shaping glass, but it's not about
blowing, it's about how something can become precise enough so that you
believe there's something in reality, that it has a purpose, a
function."1
Shawky adopts the role of a teacher and
educator in his work and his life (in 2010 he transformed his studio
into MASS Alexandria, an alternative school for contemporary art). He
has admired Joseph Beuys' shamanistic and anticonsumer culture practice
for having developed the notion of the social sculpture since 1971 (the
shaping of a community as a form of sculpture through dialogue and
discussion), while at the same time having an alchemical outlook on
materials as carriers of energy in a constant process of transformation,
and thus of vitality and life.2 The Cabaret Crusades are
educational tools, visual hooks to provoke viewers to study the stories
recounted. His vocation is to raise the level of public discourse
through educating and inspiring the pursuit of happiness, justice and a
contemplative life. Without believing in any one truthful historical
account, he does, however use exact quotations from historiographical
texts and primary sources: "I don't believe in history; I still try to
use the source of written history to analyse this history. I'm
criticising history by being very accurate and using exact phrases and
sayings."3
Most of the videos and films made by Shawky
are also installations, so that visitors are not detached viewers, but
characters inside a set. This sense of embodied spectatorship is
amplified by the digitally recorded films, which offer sufficient crisp
detail to suggest a subjective experience of tactility in viewers
through mirror-touch strategies. The contrast of different textures and
colours of materials, hard and shiny versus soft and velvety, for
example, as well as close-ups and blurred backgrounds trigger a
synaesthetic experience.
The development of the film installation
by artists such as Chantal Ackerman and Jean-Luc Godard in the 1980s was
in part a reaction to the rise of the news media and satellite
television. These video-installations often had a documentary style and
also a denunciatory tone and content, as if their role were to
supplement biased news reports in the official media with alternative
information or counterinformation, in the name of world justice and of a
more truthful history. Shawky's works, although beginning partly within
this genre (as in The Cave, 2005 and Bent Jbeil,
2007) moved towards magical realism with a strong focus on mixed-media
installation. Shawky is of a later generation that has an experience of
film and moving images also on the internet, as on YouTube, and his
concerns therefore shift away from the documentary towards both
historical early films and personal home movies. Although maintaining a
close connection with historical sources in terms of dates, events and
locations, the Cabaret Crusades shifts away from the conceptual
documentary film installation of the 1990s and 2000s.
This is due
to the fact that in the digital era saturated by information, it seems
impossible to produce knowledge through a documentary practice only:
there are too many facts, and so 'truth' becomes constructed through the
pointing out and documenting of facts meaning that any truth can be
validated through selection and editing processes. Therefore, Shawky
operates on a declared level of fiction, through set design and the use
of marionettes, which are allegorical, human-animal characters. He never
looses track of the story, however, due to the faithfulness with which
he chronicles history on the basis of primary sources, including the
texts of Usama Ibn Munqidh and Ibn Al-Qalanisi.
In a recent essay,
Jessica Morgan situates Shawky's work within the legacy of artworks
that reenact events of the past. She speaks about "retracing our steps
in the hope of discovering another way forward'", adding that
"Despite—or because of—the speed of the flow of information and images,
our attention is drawn to the past in a continual loop of repetition".4
She points out that the reason why we attempt to reenact has to do with
a sense of uncertainty regarding the 'reliability and truth of
historical documentation. What has emerged is an entire genre of art
making that is concerned with dissecting the role of media imagery and
the use of imaging in all aspects of our society, with particular
attention paid to its role in war and politics.' That said, she notes
that it is difficult to categorise Shawky's work within this line (which
I presume would include artists such as Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad),
even though his work is based on Amin Maloof's The Crusades through Arab
Eyes (1983) and the accounts of Arab historians made closer to the
times in question. Using marionettes allows Shawky to speak in more
general terms, and on the level of a tale, of characters and types, and
of greed and inhumanity. Morgan uses Brecht's theories of Verfremdung
(theatrical alienation) to explain Shawky's choice of technique: "The
process of alienation from the source material and subject at the heart
of the project allows the viewer to approach the loaded subject from an
unfamiliar perspective."5
This helps us not only to see
the Crusades from an Arab perspective and also from the perspective of
historical skepticism—or skepticism towards historical narratives
generally, I would add—but it also allows us to see the events as
metaphors of historical repetition and thus to see the conflict in the
Middle East that we are witnessing today as a repetition of those same
forms of competition over resources and other forms of power.
In many of Shawky's works, children appear instead of puppets. In the four-channel video Asphalt Quarter
(2003), for example, Bedouin children build a runway in the desert in a
day. They speak in a heavily accented English, a language that they do
not understand. Telematch Sadat (2007, from the Telematch Series,
2007–09) is the recreation of the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981
during the October Parade, reenacted by Bedouin children, who have no
knowledge or understanding of what they are doing. Morgan notes the
relation between the use of children and the use of puppets in Cabaret Crusades
(2010–15), since, like puppets, 'children do not display an overt
awareness or self-consciousness in their actions.'6 She states that this
reorientation of a documentary approach suggests the farcical and
absurd nature of historical repetition, as if the world never learns
from past deeds.
Morgan rightly points out that the Cabaret Crusades
are characterised by the use of filmic rather than theatrical
techniques: "His videos differ from traditional puppetry in so far as
the scenes are choreographed in a manner that employs elaborate set
designs, lighting, and special effects from a cinematic rather than a
'marionette' tradition."7
While in agreement with this I
would argue the opposite is also true: by using marionettes and a set,
Shawky pulls the cinematic back to its earliest stages when it was
closest to theatre, by predominantly using frontal or at least limited
camera work and a proscenium stage, and shifting away from today's
hi-tech digital editing and processing. Thus he sets an apparent
contradiction into dynamic play between the use of marionettes and the
use of film. While film imitates real life by simulating movement
through time using a rapidly changing succession of frames, puppetry is
based on the symbolic universe of objects that are fundamentally
inanimate unless manipulated by a puppeteer.
The Horror Show File (2010), the first of the Cabaret Crusades
trilogy, was made during a residency at Michelangelo Pistoletto's
foundation in Biella, Piedmont, through which Shawky was able to borrow
the 18th century wooden marionettes of Daniele Lupi's collection in
Turin. Thirty-two minutes long, it tells the story of the first crusade,
starting from 1095 till 1099, when Jerusalem fell. While the faces of
the puppets are inanimate and rigid, the events they perform are
extremely violent, animated actions. This recalls the extreme violence
in traditional Punch and Judy puppet shows in the Western tradition, but
the closest analogy is with the Sicilian Opera dei Pupi, a tradition of
telling romance stories through puppets such as Ludovico Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1516). Codified at a
time when there was much borrowing from Arabic culture, they were
inspired by the Hakawati—the storyteller in Arab lands—whose nested
tales have hundreds of episodes, like those of Scheherazade, the
legendary Arabic queen and storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.
The Path to Cairo
(2012), the longer, second film in the trilogy, recounts the story of
the Middle East between the end of the first crusade in 1099 and the
second crusade of 1146–49. Here, Shawky uses puppets specially crafted
from ceramic, whose eyelids and mouths open and close, making a
high-pitched sound. Sound is important in this second film, combining
voices, songs, drums and instruments with lyrics sung by Bahraini
pearl-fishers whom Shawky engaged specifically for this artwork, as well
as children and religious Shia storytellers.
In The Secrets of Karbala
(2015), the third film, the puppets are made of glass—a material even
more fragile than ceramic. Inspired by the humanity and frailty of José
Saramago's Jesus in his censored novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Shawky had begun to think about using glass to indicate the fragility of the body containing the soul8.
A very high external pitch causes the glass to shatter—when the glass
eyes of the marionettes open and shut, they reverberate longer than
those made of ceramic. This suggests a feeling of the sublime. Like
bells, it evokes an echoic environment, making space itself perceivable.
We hear space.
To return to the initial question posed by this
paper, whether we have free will or live in a deterministic universe is
not, as it may appear at first, a question of contemporary
individualistic Western thought versus a more communitarian Eastern
thought, since it is a Shakespearian question, too. In Act V, Scene V of
Macbeth, a messenger comes to let Macbeth know that he has
seen the forest moving towards the castle, but at first he can only
say:"I should report that which I say I saw, But know not how to do it."
His
remark concerns the reporting of events, and how such reporting can
take place if the author of the story is unable to interpret events
causally, according to a sequence of acts of free will. And thus it is a
question of historiography, its capacities and its purpose.
Arab
historiography is 'annalistic' in structure, based on annals, dates, and
ordered by years. Most Arab historians were court chroniclers, thus
telling the history that the ruler preferred. But Ibn Khaldun, in his
1377 al-muqaddimah, proposed a sociological reading of history
and attempted to understand relations between landscape, agriculture and
humans. He spoke of temperate areas, not too far north or south,
creating well-proportioned things: "The sciences, the arts, clothing,
food, fruits, even animals and every other thing that is produced in the
three median zones, are distinguished on the basis of their temperate
well-proportioned character."9
In fact, Arabian Mecca
is not in the dry, hot Bedouin areas, but in an oasis of Hijaz, near the
hills above the Red Sea. In the 500s and 600s many nomadic Bedouins
immigrated to the area.
The move from Mecca to Medina saw a
society in transition. Immigration changed the society; religion and the
building of cities unified and stabilised it. Khaldun states
that: "Decadence of society is a consequence of instability."10
This
social view of the development of history according to certain repeated
patterns of migration, development into sedentary communities with the
building of new cities, followed by the inevitable decadence and decline
of civilisations, seems to be accepted in Shawky's world view, since he
often refers to this thesis. It is interesting to note that this view
of migration as a part of transformation in societies also belongs to
the Islamic founding parables such as the move from Mecca to Medina as
part of a necessary migration for the worthy to develop. Shawky often
tells the story of his own migration from Alexandria to Mecca as a child
with his family and his witnessing the co-presence of modernity and
society. He has suggested that the Bedouin culture of the Gulf region
seems to adapt better to the nomadic nature of global financial capital
and the structure of society in the age of the Internet.
In the chapter 'The Concept of History' in Between Past and Future
(1954), Hannah Arendt reminds usthat in Ancient Greece nature was
thought to beimmortal, due to its continuous cyclical repetitionand
rebirth.11 That cyclical immortality was contrastedin the
Greek view with the mortality of humans,who, striving to achieve some
form of immortality aswell, pursued the invention of history: through
thehistorical retelling of the deeds and words of previoushuman lives,
the muse of memory, Mnemosyne, couldcreate a form of immortality for
humans.
Poetry and history writing were placed in the same
category by Aristotle, because they were both dedicated to making
something last through memory. This occurs through the transformation of
the singular event into history by the retelling of it, and thus
through a form of imitating action. Thucydides (460– 400 BC), with The
History of the Peloponnesian War, created norms for historiography based
on the need for documentation and evidence. He tells the story of the
war as a grand movement of history.
A great cultural shift
occurred when the monotheistic religions, including Islam, introduced
the notion that the only lasting thing was the soul and spirit of the
human, in contrast with a transient natural world, which included the
human body. Today, and ever since Romanticism and the carbon fossil-fuel
age, the notion that nature is transient and can perish is considered
generally more true than that it is immortal, as the ancients believed.
Modern
Western historiography emerged in the late 18th century, with Kant and
Hegel, followed by Marx. What was important was a sense of teleology, a
movement or progress of mankind through history. Through writing
history, it was believed, we could see this process, not as a series of
single, outstanding events; we could look beyond single acts with short
term goals, to see the higher goals of which individuals are not aware, a
sort of universal human spirit. History becomes the identification of
this process, and its understanding. For Marx, this was a movement and
process towards a classless society, a sort of paradise on Earth.
Furthermore,
in the 19th century, an opposition between the sciences of nature, as
purely objective, and the historical sciences was posed, which we know
today to be fallacious, because both achieve results based on the
questions being asked, as well as being observer-dependant. The
historian was to be objective and base his study on documents and facts,
without judging or blaming. But to choose which documents was always an
interference, and thus such a teleological viewpoint was already
fragile.
Arendt, writing in the 1950s, with great premonition,
stated that the problem in the technological age of modernity is that
humans encounter only themselves in such a world. Even in the so-called
natural world, all is potentially man-made, so the world is alienated
from us through our smothering of it. Arendt suggested in her 1954
essay, that in such an age there is no history, no process to be
identified. That was only a few decades before the Internet was
invented, and today it seems even more true.
How does that connect to today? Are we puppets or do we have agency?
Heinrich Von Kleist, in On the Marionette Theatre
(1810), tells the story of meeting a renowned dancer who often stopped
at a marionette theatre to entertain the common folk in the market
square and discuss the qualities of the marionettes' dance as opposed to
most live dancers: "Each marionette has a focal point in movement, a
centre of gravity, and when the centre is moved, the limbs follow
without any additional handling… these movements of the centre are very
simple. Every time the centre of gravity is guided in a straight line,
the limbs describe curves that complement and extend the basically
simple movement. Many times when the marionettes are merely shaken
arbitrarily, they are transformed into a kind of rhythmic movement that
in itself is very similar to the dance… the marionette would never slip
into affectation."12
Thus the centre of gravity is the
only part of the body of the doll that is moved by the puppeteer, and it
moves with an elliptical motion, while the limbs achieve graceful
movement as a consequence, which one could not achieve through their
intentional control.
Perhaps Von Kleist was in favour of automatic
gestures, not intentionality. They achieve more grace, while conscious
action brings inauthenticity. They are not weighed down by gravity, but
act in a reverse relation with the space above them, where the
puppeteers are moving their hands. They are freer, more angelic beings,
not forced by the laws of the Earth.
Kleist seems to say that free
will inhibits grace of behaviour and spontaneous life. Is it more
lively, therefore, not to have free will? He makes it a metaphysical
question concerning truth and beauty, the maximum of grace being either
in the infinite consciousness (the divine) or in the absolute lack of
consciousness (the puppet).
Shawky's story telling is neither one
of metaphysical truths, nor of rational teleological truths, but of
factual truths. In history, even today, facts seem to occur
mechanically, via action and reaction. Thus the puppet is more truthful,
he suggests. His puppets are beautiful, and excluding consciousness,
they show history on a mechanical level. There is no explanation for
history. There are only small descriptive dialogues.
Shawky makes
puppets enact history through an omniscient narrator, external to them,
who has an observing but detached gaze onto history. Events are not
interpreted explicitly, nor ordered within an interpretative structure
that highlights some over others. They are either included or not, and
once included they are on the same plane as all the others, scene after
scene.
Shawky does not create a biographical history, a heroic
subject or an individual-based tale wher e he follows one character
through different events and locations, like a history of Julius Caesar.
Nor does he focus on the underlying economic structur es of
exploitation and means of production and their distribution, as a social
history. His narrative is event-based, like in traditional history, but
also shows the back stage of these ev ents, the intrigues in the
palaces, the small events and conversations of daily life. There is no
Marxist or teleological perspective, no social history or other history
that identifies deep causes and hidden connections.
Shawky uses
marionettes because his is a history without conscious protagonists,
without external causes or reasons or intentions. He takes no scientific
view of history, unlike Marx, who finds deterministic laws. All that
occurs are facts and events, where each individual plays one small part,
like a marionette in a system that is produced without a puppeteer. His
is the opposite of conspiracy theory: the strings are not all held by
anyone. It is an automatic history, a cyber history where chronology and
geography mark the sequences from one city or centre to the next over
time. It is a history that is horizontally structured, and even that is
not a straight line, but a winding, curved line, drawn with no shadows.
This
same concern about history, and automatisms, lies at the heart of
Gerhard Richter's paintings, whose precision Shawky greatly admires.13
In the age of the mechanical reproduction of images, Richter does not
paint a painting, does not attempt Wael Shawky: Crusades and Other
Stories 38 39 to compete with the mechanical or technological or
mediated for authenticity and self-expression in his art, but rather
submits to the technically reproduced image. He began after World War
II, after emigrating from Eastern to Western Germany, and became a
copyist fundamentally. The poetry and power of his works laying in the
ability not to be self-expressive but a human translator of a
mechanically reproduced image.
Shawky's dedication to the line
possesses both precision and a child-like fantasy: drawings are made of
at once intentional and automatic lines that move through time. They
provide a sense of the temporary, the immediate and the preparatory.
They are sketches done without prior planning, and their wavy ondulating
irregular line moves around the page or sheet of paper as if it were
drawing a line on a map that does not yet exist. Slowly a line can
become something more figurative, through associations, an animal or a
tower, a character or a hill, and different planes of space and spatial
relationships can coexist in the state of the endlessly propositional
space of visual projection. The line is traced singularly, precisely and
self-consciously, but Shawky—the draughtsman—follows the line until it
becomes a universe on a plane.
"I think it has something to do
with the Surrealism of Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst. I feel that there's a
connection to the way they tried to deal with all the details in a way
that's very precise… The point is to make these details really detailed
enough to convince people that this massive totality they make up all
together exists. So that you don't start to doubt."14
