The Formation of the Artist within a Contested Terrain: The Politics of Artistic Production in Mubarak's Egypt

Scholarship within the Western academy on Middle Eastern artistic and cultural production is fairly sparse. Much of what does exist is informed by a teleological approach that privileges the traditional Eurocentric narrative of art history. In response to the shortcomings of this narrative, Jessica Winegar's Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt presents a significant intervention in the field. By conducting an "ethnographic exploration of the art world in Egypt" that focuses predominately on the Mubarak years, and more specifically on fieldwork conducted between 1996 and 2004, Winegar attempts a reading of cultural production in Egypt that favors "a nonteleological, nonuniversalist, nontotalizing way of understanding the relationship between the totalizing forces in the world and the fragmentary, detailed, and particular struggles against them" (17). In doing so, Winegar is interested in redirecting our attention to the numerous possibilities for agency that exist and are informed by the ways in which different players involved in artistic production in Egypt understand and relate to their present situation. Creative Reckonings ultimately posits the nation (and its various articulations) as the main "classificatory scheme" and "cognitive frame" motivating artistic production in Egypt and suggests that rather than dismissing the validity of this paradigm, we instead grapple with the implications, productive or otherwise, of these assertions for those engaged with them. While Winegar's methodological approach begins to address some of the previously existing problems. it does at times further perpetuate certain universalisms.

Creative Reckonings is a work of neither art history nor art criticism. Indeed the author circumvents such methodological approaches whenever possible. Given the role of the "object" and the problematic ways in which it has been addressed in scholarship on non-Western contexts, Winegar deliberately shifts her focus instead to those she refers to as "art interlocutors," namely the different players involved in the production and consumption of modern and contemporary art in Egypt. The result is therefore a study that engages with previous ethnographies of cultural production in Egypt, of which Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt and Walter Armbrust's Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt are but two examples. In a similar vein, Winegar places questions of national culture and modernity (and the intersection between the two) at the crux of her investigation. "In sum, we learn how Egyptian modernism involves the selective adoption and repudiation of certain concepts of European modernity ... but always through a process of translation that produces 'difference"' (7). It is this difference that preoccupies Winegar throughout.

At the heart of Winegar's theoretical paradigm stands Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of the need to "provincialize" European thought and challenge the position of universality that it continues to occupy Most often this challenge involves interrogating the various theoretical models and disciplinary tactics through which artistic production at large has been approached, and questioning the extent to which these frameworks are useful outside a European context. For example, Pierre Bourdieu's understandings of cultural capital and the field of cultural production feature repeatedly as useful yet limited readings when applied to the case of contemporary Egypt because they depend on a particular understanding of what it is to be an artist.

Winegar tackles this central question from a number of angles, each of which becomes the focus of the six main chapters of Creative Reckonings. Chapter 1 attempts to understand what it means to practitioners to be Egyptian artists by examining the development and role of art education in Egypt, asserting that the issues faced by both students and faculty are symptomatic of larger questions that art interlocutors must grapple with. The preoccupation with the notion of asala or "authenticity"--which Winegar comes to identify as one of the most fundamental concerns in discourses on Egyptian artistic production--is introduced as an issue within the context of curricula. Art education, in its current institutional framework, was first introduced in Egypt during European colonial occupation, as in numerous former colonies. The tensions of such beginnings continue to be felt at different levels, particularly given that the curriculum of art schools is concerned with producing national subjects, artists who are productive members of society. Winegar extensively discusses the dilemma that many students feel as a result of receiving a training that is almost entirely based on a Western model but that stresses the importance of producing work authentically Egyptian.

Chapter 2 further explores this notion of authenticity and the anxiety it induces in art interlocutors vis-a-vis Egyptian modernism. Winegar argues that "artistic production and consumption were primarily motivated and shaped by discourses of authenticity," but one that differs from "the ideal of authenticity common to some Enlightenment-based ideologies of the artistic life, which insist on the individual being 'true' to her- or himself despite social mores (the rebel artist)" (91). In the Egyptian context this concept emphasized "the link, rather than the rupture, between the individual and society" (91).