The Jedareyat Debacle
I was amused by the flood of receptivity and reposts relating to the removal of Jedareyat’s mural by the so called National Council for Culture, Arts and Literature. In Kuwait, the NCCAL acts as a bureaucratic entity that supposedly encourages the arts and creatives, while also managing a portfolio of buildings and facades with cultural and historic significance. In this short piece, I will not be analyzing the mural behind the controversy titled ‘Hamour’ by Lebanese artist Jad El Khoury — which is strategically facing the financial special interest group known as the Chamber of Commerce. I will not comment on the general public’s frustration that was channeled into the hasty, unexamined and uncounciled removal of the art. Nor will I remark on a society of arm chair activists that are just talk and both deaf and mute on bigger issues that are way above their pay grade, vision and fear threshold.
Instead I will draw on historic parallels that we should read into, so we don’t repeat past mistakes that the progressive world has already learned from.
People often forget that Hitler’s rise to power was through his elected party in a manipulative democracy, but what’s less known is that before Hitler was totalitarian Hitler, he was an 18-year-old struggling painter in Vienna. The psychological origins of the Hitler that’s in the collective psyche can be traced back to wrong turns made after his foray with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Hitler’s teenage dream was to become a world-class artist, but he was frustrated and demotivated by the denunciation and humiliation at the behest of the Academy. Living in poverty, rejection and labeled ‘unsatisfactory’ as an artist without apprenticeship or a future in the field, he turned his focus to politics.
That is when he became obsessed with ‘national identity’ and railed against the Jews that he felt wronged him in his failed formable years — while trying to make a name for himself in Vienna. His early anger and resentment at the bourgeoisie manifested into the darkest reign in German history and consequently World War II.
Even at the pinnacle of his power, Hitler still took personal interest in art and architecture, going as far as commissioning a Nazi style of architecture with ideological overtones and elements. When he wasn’t plotting world domination, he raided art collectors’ homes for his personal loot under the Nazi party. What’s peculiar for a dictator of his stature, is that he went a step further and personally judged pieces he deemed ‘degenerate art’ — as was once done to him when he had no power or influence. With this move, Hitler waged war not only against the Allied powers but also against modern art and artists. Hitler organized book burnings, confiscated works he considered ‘offensive’ and ‘degenerate’ then displayed them in the Degenerate Art Exhibition — as an example of modern works that threatened the German identity. Personal vendetta’s die hard if you’re an autocrat with an empire.
If modern artists were censored and prosecuted we wouldn’t have Banksy’s mischievous critiques on modern culture. We also wouldn’t have Picasso’s famous anti-war painting Guernica, whose tapestry copy used to hang in the United Nations Security Council room in New York. Guernica is the epitome of political art and is recognized internationally for its not so cryptic symbolism. It used to hang as a reminder of the barbarism of war but that didn’t stop diplomats from covering it up during a press conference that presented the case of the US invasion against Iraq.
Creatives and artists need to feel, experience and express. But in a place where feeling is haram, experiencing is policed and natural expression (or Tweets) are a punishable offense or censored, how can societal growth happen? No amount of spending on brainwash ‘education’ can substitute innate curiosity and first person experience, which result in creative arts and innovative business ventures. Governments never learn that suppressing expression and curating society creates alienation and negative vacuums, which historically has (literally) exploded in their faces. Without entertainment outlets, functional sports federations and a healthy art sphere, demotivation, pessimism, and a heavy psychogeography is the norm.
Let’s hypothetically say some entitled sociopaths in power, humiliate a few egomaniacal psychopaths not in power, those miscalculations may come back to haunt society. It only takes a few curser clicks to find in depth analyses of the horrors that the West and Far East have unleashed upon themselves — due to decades of: human rights abuses, human trafficking, ethnic cleansing, religious indoctrination, financial fraud, resource inequality, media propaganda and mindless imperial wars. Art is a subjective medium though which national trauma, generational frustration and social commentary can be channeled in a non-agressive and safe way. But when too many rules, guidelines and limits are imposed, artists get slowly driven underground — as with most things that are considered normal human behavior but socially suppressed in our region.
This is not an article dedicated for solutions but an alarm. If unheeded, the creatively and scientifically backward baby boomer generation (and their appointees) will sink the globe, culturally, politically and economically. For Kuwait, 2020 has been a year riddled with across-the-board injustice, corruption and losses of all kinds — but it’s not too late to turn the ship around. If we focus on ourselves and invest in our collective culture and shared economy we can empower the kind of governance that builds on the achievements of predecessors instead of systematically erasing heritage of the past.
Historically, Kuwait was a settlement town of immigrants from Arabia, Iran, Iraq and India. Which makes the statement released by the NCCAL yesterday factually and historically incorrect. I would go further and say that their statement is inherently xenophobic and rooted in illusions of self-demolished nostalgia. Like the Viennese Academy, they think they are the first and final authority on what constitutes art — in accordance to their political leanings and not according to the actual direction of creatives and artists. Which is why important themes of the human condition are completely absent in the Kuwait art scene, curtesy of an overactive censorship thought police.
From the social media perspective, what was most saddening to me were the hundreds of accounts that reposted quotes overlaid on the repainted mural, sourced from politicians and opportunists. Clearly there was a public emotional response to the NCCAL — whether the removal was for a personal agenda or for another mural doesn’t matter — but what was obvious was the wave of social involvement and attention that was swiftly hijacked by political agendas. We should always investigate whether the source of a viral post is coming from an authentic place or leveraging the naïve for future economic and political gains.
References:
- Jedareyat: On a Mission to Beautify Kuwait’s Cityscape
- Jedareyat: Website
- Legitimizing the Illegitimate: A Case for Kuwait’s Forgotten Modernity by Farah Al-Nakib
- Psychogeography by Guy Debord
- Paintings by Adolf Hitler
- Where the Nazis Hid $3.5 Billion of Stolen Art
- Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures by Susan Ronald
