How was your involvement in Supporters of the nude it happens ?
When I began my ethnographic work in Lebanon in 1997, studying the relationship between contemporary art and national reconstruction projects, many people actively involved in the visual arts – gallerists, collectors, even artists themselves – spoke to me. were told to go back to New York. New York, they said, has art; Beirut, no. I was perplexed: we were in the middle of many works of art, with gallery openings every two weeks. People helped me understand that, from their point of view, all this activity was new and not local, “because as Arabs, as people from the Middle East, they could not rely on a local art history, which begins with life. drawing.” Telling me that nudes “have always been banned in their region”, they describe their current artistic creativity as exceptional.
This exception made sense to me: all the artists I had heard at Columbia had been remembered for their exception, in one way or another. What made no sense were the painted or sculpted nudes that I kept encountering in people’s homes and, especially, in newspapers published decades earlier. I chose to study the history of this non-history, of this art absent or absent from itself, and the nudes constituted an important chapter. Many families descended from artists helped me direct this research in Lebanon. Later, research expanded, with the help of many colleagues in art history and anthropology, to examine gender in other modern Arab countries, to investigate the importance of the nude in defining of “Arabness”, between the end of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 and the founding of the new Arab nation-states that we know today.
The name of the exhibition, Supporters of the nude, comes from the name of a nudist movement that Palestinians, Lebanese, and Turks embraced in the 1930s. Studying this work introduced me to a deeply interconnected set of intellectual, aesthetic, and political projects. For example, proponents of nudism recommended viewing nudes on public display to practice moral transparency, self-awareness, self-reliance, and candor deemed necessary to combat corruption and old customs. The work of art is also linked to a kind of literature, al-adab al-`uryit was said to be just as invigorating.
Every time I share this material, I learn more. My new book, Fantastic objects: art and sociality of Lebanon, 1920-1950, devotes a chapter to nudes. The four-dimensional format of an exhibition, however, allows the public to encounter the nude genre on a real scale, to experience its visceral reactions and to wonder why they could be content to only look at large French nudes.
