Looking at Pyramids
The pyramid has become the primary symbol of a nation. But is it possible to discover Egypt through looking at its pyramids? Maha Maamoun’s art film Domestic Tourism II is one of many that portrays the ancient symbol, but she does this in ways that challenge common conceptions of national identity and cultural authenticity
We experience the world through our senses, the sight arguably being our primary provider of information. But the ways in which that information is processed are complex and sometimes deceiving. This is something that the Cairo-based artist Maha Maamoun (b. 1972) is highly aware of. Watching her art piece Domestic Tourism II (2008) I am struck by the way she captures the many layers of our observation. The piece is an hour-long film composed by a selection of scenes from Egyptian cinema shot in the last half of the 20th century. The scenes all have the pyramids at Giza as their backdrop, and the protagonists are Egyptian women and men. We are witnessing their encounters with these magnificent architectural objects, remnants from a distant time. However, these encounters are not undisturbed, neither by the social circumstances of their present, nor by the traces of a history marked by years and years of imperialist interests and tourism. And as beholders our perspective is even further obscured – we see these encounters through the lens of Egyptian moviegoers, which again is viewed through Maamoun’s own artistic lens. Thus, we do not only look at pyramids. We look at a contemporary Egyptian artist looking at Egyptian moviegoers looking at Egyptians looking at foreigners looking at pyramids.
In this essay I will explore how contemporary Egyptian artists relate to the notion of Egyptianness through engaging with Maamoun’s Domestic Tourism II. I will also consider the artistic possibilities of working with specific media, and the implications of contemporary artists’ turn away from traditional painting towards working with other media such as video and photography. Domestic Tourism II is a work of art that provides vistas of Egyptian pyramids through the moving image. But is it possible to accurately represent the pyramid, a symbol shaped by so many different defining forces? I will explore the question of whether Maamoun in her engagement with the loaded symbol of the pyramid attempts to, and if so if she manages to, renegotiate and reclaim some form of Egyptianness, and I will discuss whether the film format provides an opportunity for setting about such a difficult mission.
Egypt and the world
Maha Maamoun and other contemporary Egyptian artists have inherited an art scene where questions of cultural authenticity have long dominated the discourse. While the older generation of Egyptian artists has strived to create artistic expressions that are specifically Egyptian, the younger generation is often accused by the older generation of imitation or Western influence. This has created a generational conflict. In her account of the socio-political conditions of the Egyptian art world, Jessica Winegar traces the ways in which notions of Egyptianness have been discussed among Egyptian artists. She writes that “to attain authenticity, artists in these art worlds have (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) negotiated a set of seemingly dichotomous concepts formed through the colonial encounter: Eastern and Western, local and international, traditional and modern, backward and progressive, and authentic and imported”. This has created a limited framework for artistic practice. And since the answers to the questions of what constitutes a culturally authentic artistic practice have been manifold, it has been difficult for young artists to address such topics.
In the late 1990s the debate over cultural authenticity shifted. There was an intensified focus on the idea that there had never existed an unadulterated nation or culture of “Egypt”, and as a result any attempt to define and express Egyptianness became open to criticism from some angle. This has made many artists of the younger generation reluctant to engage with any subject matter that addresses cultural authenticity whatsoever, which again has created the
generational conflict discussed above. Yet the pressure of engaging with questions of Egyptianness directed towards contemporary artists is not only coming from the older generation of Egyptian artists. Basim Magdy, an artist of the same generation as Maamoun, has written the essay “Walk Like an Egyptian” where he expresses his concern about what he considers to be an increasingly compromising curatorial practice on the international art scene. He argues that “most Western curators find themselves fascinated only by Egyptian artwork that deals specifically with socio-political issues, dismissing diverse aesthetic interests as ones that do not relate to any immediate local reality”. This has also been an important reason for the younger generation’s unwillingness to engage with specifically Egyptian subject matter.
How are we to interpret the subject matter of Domestic Tourism II in relation to the generational conflict discussed above? Maamoun’s engagement with the pyramids in the context of Egyptian cinema could reveal that she is stuck in the older generation’s view of art as something that should express some form of Egyptianness. Or she might be succumbing to a globalized curatorial practice. Her work is surely concerned with specifically Egyptian subject matter, but does that mean that she is trying to discover some core Egyptianness through her work? Maamoun’s work could clearly be facing accusations from colleagues such as Basim Magdy – her engagement with Egyptian identity issues might be perceived as a response to the specific demands of a Western curatorial practice that favors art with local socio-political content. But does that mean that Maamoun is letting yet another foreign force define Egyptianness?
Pyramids, photography, and film
The generational conflict in the Egyptian art world is not only one based on questions of subject matter – it is also based on questions of media specificity. Whereas the older generation mainly works with painting, sculpture and ceramics, the younger generation tend to use industrial materials, they are more influenced by painterly abstraction, and they experiment with assemblage, video, and installation. Maamoun is no exception to her generation in this matter; she mainly uses photography and video found in mainstream culture in her works. While this shift hardly is unique for the Egyptian art world, it has some specific implications for Maamoun and other contemporary artists engaging with Egyptian subject matter. Media such as photography and film provides a different approach to exploring Egyptian heritage and history than more traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, creating new perspectives on the debate on cultural authenticity.
Even though Egyptian artists until very recently have tended to work with painting, Egyptian photography has a long and rich history. This history goes hand in hand with the history of tourism in the country, something Maria Golia writes about in her book Photography and Egypt. She argues that “the interplay between photography, archaeology and tourism, co-emerging phenomena in the mid-nineteenth century, helped establish an enduring visual vocabulary that the name of Egypt immediately calls to mind”. Photography was introduced in Egypt at a very early stage. When the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, it was quickly realized that photography should have a role in preserving a record of civilization’s past, and the first photographers traveled to Egypt within just a few months. The photograph’s seeming authenticity appealed to the growing imperialist interests and demand for knowledge of the world. However, even though the country was changing rapidly at the time, with ongoing projects of modernization, this was not a subject matter favored by photographers. Instead, they were interested in capturing Egypt’s seeming changelessness, and the ancient pharaonic pyramids and temples called “houses of eternity” thus became defining of Egypt’s perceived characteristics.
Maha Maamoun, Domestic Tourism II, 2005, single channel video, 62 min. Image courtesy of the artist and Gypsum.
Similarly to the advent of Egyptian photography, film also found its way to Egypt and its pharaonic monuments at an early stage. As Michael Allan writes in his essay “Deserted Histories: The Lumière Brothers, the Pyramids and Early Film Form”, Alexandre Promio, a representative of the Lumière Brothers’ film company, traveled to Egypt with his film camera as early as 1897. One of his over thirty films shot during this journey was a film of the pyramids and the Sphinx titled Les Pyramides (vue générale). In his essay, Allan argues that the early film format offers a view of the Great Pyramid quite contrary to that of an eternal object of mythological significance. Instead, film makes thinkable Egypt in an entirely new manner; the timeless Great Pyramid is transformed by the immediacy of film, collapsing the mythological status into the spectacle of duration. The Great Pyramid as a mythological monument with a seemingly eternal history is thereby transformed by the element of time. It seizes to be a singular object, and is instead scattered into a manifold of objects, based on a manifold scattering of the “here and now”.
Gazing through time
Like Promio’s Les Pyramids (vue générale), Maamoun’s Domestic Tourism II also visualizes the paradox of the pharaonic monument. It plays with the pyramid simultaneously having the status of a symbol of eternity and being a continuing presence serving as the backdrop for countless events in people’s lives. Maamoun has said herself that the scenes in her film engage with how the pyramids are perceived as a constant against which the present is brought into focus. She plays with these opposing views in the way she has arranged the film scenes in a chronological pyramidal structure, working its way from the present, back in time, and then towards the present again. The timeline is: 2000’s - 90’s - 80’s - 70’s - 60’s - 50’s - 60’s - 70’s - 80’s - 90’s - 2000’s. To me her timeline seems to be an ironic attempt to create cohesiveness in a world of constant change, and it only works to emphasize the impossibility of such an attempt. The film scenes, revealing the many different eyes through which the pyramids are observed, make visible the variety of experiences that Egyptians have with them. They make visible the many different conceptions of pyramids. The film has scattered the pyramid into a manifold of different pyramids, and an attempt to put the pieces together would never result in a perfect mathematical shape. Maamoun plays with the paradox of the cinematic pyramid – it both recalls photography’s central position in creating the «eternalness» of Egypt, and at the same time it destroys this illusion by thematizing the element of time.
Even though Promio’s Les Pyramides (vue générale) and Domestic Tourism II both envision the pyramid seen through the spectrum of time, it is important to note that the two films were produced in contexts separated by a timeframe of 100 years. These 100 years did not only change the world depicted; they also changed the medium of film itself. For with the development of narrative film, with mainstream cinema, and with Hollywood, film was shaped by the ideological structures of our sight. Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the cinematic gaze uncovers that it has been shaped by our patriarchal society. Through engaging with classic Hollywood movies, she discovers that the cinematic gaze is explicitly male – something that involves the woman being objectified by the camera lens, and the male protagonist being the active force who moves the story forward.
In Domestic Tourism II the pyramids at Giza are presented through an array of cinematic images, and the viewer sees them through the eyes of the different characters acting on screen. Many of the scenes features a man and a woman where the man is active, leading the way, and showing the pyramid to the passive woman. These characters are typical examples of the effects of the cinematic male gaze, where the woman is the objectified image and the man is the bearer of the look. Here the woman’s view of the pyramid is obscured. She only has access to the pyramid through the eyes of the man. Similarly, the imperialist gaze also has such an obscuring effect. In a society shaped by the power imbalance between man and woman, orient and occident, the cinematic gaze has become not only male, but also Western. Through the powerful and invasive imperial quest for knowledge, begun in the early 19th century and heavily aided by photography and film, the West has gained the power of definition over Egypt and its pyramids. The West has gained control of the gaze, objectifying both Egypt and Egyptians, leaving Egyptians incapable of seeing the eternal pyramid without the aid of Western eyes.
Looking for pyramids
Is it possible for Egyptians to regain and reclaim the pyramids as their own? Can they remove the blindfold imposed by Westerners and define the pyramid on their own terms? In Domestic Tourism II this seems to be a recurring question. In one scene an Egyptian tourist guide pass out when encountering the Sphinx, and a voice from above calls out: “Truth. Light. Wisdom. Power. Here. Look into yourself. Look into yourself. Egypt is eternal. Egypt is eternal”. The film is full of such scenes where Egyptians are looking for pyramids, but it seems to be a difficult task. The truth is hard to uncover, and what is left are deceiving images. In one scene the pyramid is not even there – a news reporter announces that the Great pyramid of Cheops has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. They believe it has been stolen.
In Domestic Tourism II, no “essence” of Egyptianness is uncovered. Maha Maamoun has found no one true pyramid behind all those layers of observation. Instead she has managed to destroy an illusion, and in doing so her work becomes thoroughly anti-colonialist. This is also in tune with Maamoun’s generation’s disbelief in a possibility of a culturally authentic artistic practice. The unadulterated pyramid does not exist. The film is a lamentation of the lost pyramid, but at the same time it is also a catharsis. Maamoun tackles the problem at its roots – through decomposing the national symbol of the pyramid, with all its colonialist dirt, she presents a hopeful vista. Because in between all the bits and pieces of the scattered pyramid she discovers what the eternal pyramid has been hiding in its shadows – it has been hiding the very Egyptians it was supposed to represent.
Works Cited
Allan, Michael. “Deserted Histories: The Lumière Brothers, the Pyramids and Early Film Form.” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2008): 159-170. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460650802150416.
Golia, Maria. Photography and Egypt. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.
Gypsum Gallery. “About.” Accessed May 14, 2020. http://gypsumgallery.com/about-gypsum.
Gypsum Gallery. “Bio: Maha Maamoun.” Accessed May 14, 2020. http://gypsumgallery.com/bio-maha-maamoun.
Maamoun, Maha. “Maha Maamoun: Domestic tourism II.” Universes in Universe, September, 2009. https://universes.art/en/nafas/articles/2009/mahamaamoun.
Magdy, Basim. “Walk like an Egyptian.” Basim Magdy’s artist website. 2003. http://www.basimmagdy.com/walk-like-an-egyptian--basim-magdy-749ce.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Diane Price Herndl, 432-442. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
Winegar, Jessica. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006.