By looking at Choucair’s fifty year-long troubled career, that which she has experienced as a “lack” of art in Lebanon, one can study what art as a category has meant for a Lebanon that has transformed in that time from a French Mandatory possession to a territorial state, from a largely feudal-agricultural economy to a cosmopolitan import-export one.īy seeking to engage the conception of art that artists and their viewers acted upon when interacting with art objects, we can revisit Choucair’s objects with contextualized eyes. Such a focus leads to an interest in “cultural possibilities” where culture is not assumed to be shared but contested. My interest in the stack of articles stored in Choucair’s studio whose counterparts lie in the homes of so many other locally active artists, is inspired by feminist theory that foregrounds the paradoxes of socio-cultural systems. The same objects have been viewed at different points in history as “traditional,” “European,” “Islamic,” and “modern.” It is in part the reason why so much of the art produced seems to exist simultaneously on the verge of categories as diverse as trash and fine art. During the past fifty years of interpreting art in Lebanon, “traditional,” “European,” “Arab,” “universal,” “Ottoman,” “modern,” “Islamic,” “nationalist,” and “individual” notions of art were called upon by different actors to promote various projects designed to transform society. These texts become very important keys for understanding the social life of art and the possibilities of its making especially in situations where not a single but multiple, even conflicting, conceptions are in play, and indeed counterposed. Either way, the reviews worked their way into the artists’ corpuses and careers. Likewise, they sought to counter reviews they found incorrect. They regularly preserved and propagated reviews of their work that sought to impose the standards of value they deemed correct. Artists and gallerists in Beirut’s art world knew this for a fact. As Howard Becker found in his study Art Worlds, writing about art can reform standards for valuing art by “revealing” previously unconsidered aspects of the artwork or by recasting earlier standards as too narrow. In those early years of journalistic art-writing, an exhibition report could be front-page news, and though it gradually moved deeper inside the papers in the following decades, special staff were eventually hired by Beiruti papers just for writing about “arts and culture.” What the art-writers produced could have great impact on an artist’s access to audiences, commissions, and awards. With press reports of exhibitions were disseminated the ideas that (even if they did not) people should enter special areas for seeing art, develop special ways of relating to art, and apply those experiences for reinterpreting their roles in society. A definitive distinction between Beirut-based art-making prior to the 1930s and after is the way it came to be taken up in the local press (which was developing contemporaneously) and publicized for a wider audience then would ever enter an art gallery. One of the most important things that could be done to the art I studied in Beirut was the press report.

Sharing her personally gathered press dossier was the first thing that Choucair did when I informed the eighty year-old sculptor that I would like to focus my study on her career. Her favorites were at the top of the stack below were the more objectionable ones, which she had scribbled over, sometimes in several different pens, crossing out “wrong” phrases and correcting “misinterpretations.” Interspersed were numerous photocopies which I, like other writers who had come before, could have to help me in my writing about her, along with copies of her own published writings. She pulled out of it press reviews of her work and interviews conducted with her over the past forty years. A clear plastic bag bursting with papers of various yellows and grays – this is what Saloua Raouda Choucair reached for in the cupboard next to her bed.

Trim dossier meaning