by M. Longpre
At LACMA, Egyptian-born artist Yousseff Nabil has a show called I Saved My Belly Dancer. It includes a film, accompanying photos and mock movie posters. They all look the same: they look like hand-colorized black-and white photos from a bygone era—and they are supposed to. That is about it.
To be sure, there is an airtight conceptual alibi here: Nabil grew up on the romantic cinema of midcentury Egypt. It is perfectly reasonable, according to the current rules of contemporary art, to interrogate the psychology of the self through childhood experiences. Added to that, Cairo isn’t in Western Europe or the US and Nabil isn’t white so doing this counts as interrogating the fantasy life and self-image of an under-investigated culture. So far so good. Also some of the pictures have Selma Hayek in them, so wow yeah. With all that going for it, the photos don’t even have to be good.
Is it a problem that they aren’t? Is it a problem that exactly nothing surprising, no eccentric detail, no disconcerting juxtaposition or serendipitous visual discovery attends these images? As Conceptual art, perhaps not, as photography and cinema, hell yeah. They seek a certain style and achieve it—no more no less. It turns out the Egyptian photographer’s romantic mid-‘50s view of Egypt looks exactly like a Westerner’s. We are handed a man with a mustache in a robe embracing a woman in traditional gold underwear barely concealed by flowing fabric in the desert in front of a sunset—there are Marlboro Man ads that stray further from cliché.
It is undeniable that there are insights and intimations to be discovered among the contact sheets and memorabilia of this distant time and place—what work Nabil is bringing to that effort is unclear. One of Nabil’s great inspirations, Armenian-Egyptian studio photographer Van Leo, had a show at the Hammer not many years ago—and in it, all the richness and variety of Cairo life came through—via the floodlit sweat beads, imperfect make-up and blemished complexity of dozens of Egyptian faces—as well as the true strangeness of Leo himself as evidenced by his letters, belongings and costumed self-portraits. Next to the world he attempts to evoke, Nabil’s work here appears as the shallowest form of pastiche.
Image: Courtesy LACMA