Ghada Amer.

Weil, Harry Jacob

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum NY February 16 * October 19, 2008

The Brooklyn Museum may seem a bit off the beaten path for those who swear by Manhattan's Upper East Side. Yet a visit to "Ghada Amer: Love Has No End" is definitely worth the effort. Over the past few years the museum has received a major facelift, its galleries redesigned, and more contemporary shows scheduled. There's a whole lot more to see and enjoy. But while the recent Murakami blockbuster has garnered a fair amount of media attention for its shameless commercial appeal, the intimate scale of Amer's exhibition lends itself to a more thoughtful exploration of the artistic medium.

"Love Has No End," Amer's first U.S. survey, features some 50 pieces that demonstrate the artist's enormous versatility for such a short career, encompassing painting, sculpture, graphic design, photography, landscaping, and installation art. But it is her embroidered abstract canvases that have won Amer the most recognition. And while plenty of these erotic paintings are included in the limited space of the Elizabeth A. Sackler gallery, there's a lot more besides to satisfy even the most fastidious visitor. In addition to several past and current projects dealing with the cultural politics of Islam, generally speaking her work attempts to undermine traditional modes of representation by and for women, encompassing what the press release describes as "the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty."

The most compelling works in the show are three C-prints from 1991, I [love] Paris. Dressing herself and two friends in full burqas (the ones typically worn by women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan), the artist proceeds to make amateurish, run-of-the-mill tourist photographs of famous Paris landmarks. In one, three women stand huddled together--as does any tour group visiting the famed city of love--at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The camera is pointed upward in an effort to include the summit of the famed monument. Yet what is missing here are the goofy smiles, excited expressions, or even the odd closed eyelids. Instead, Amer's women are rendered void, their black veils obliterating their faces and emotions, with only their silhouetted forms starkly posed against the tourist icon. Presenting the dichotomy between viewing and being viewed, between outsider and insider, between Western-style commodity culture and Islamic fundamentalism, the artist demonstrates that seeing this great symbol of European cultural prowess (and early seat of Orientalism) through a black mesh veil is as limiting as non-Islamic persons attempting to understand Islamic historical autonomy, neatly situating the "postcolonial subject" as a double blindness.

Amer claims allegiance to several cultures. Now based in New York, having been born in Egypt in 1963 and having lived in France for over 20 years, she visually endorses her status as an insider outsider. While never denying her Muslim heritage, she does little to encourage such convenient labels. This reluctance is most evident in such hand-embroidered paintings as Red Diagonales (2000), whose repetitive patterns of meticulously crafted erotic figures, although superficially reminiscent of a poor Jackson Pollock knockoff, are actually in mockery of abstract expressionist machismo. Amer even tips her hat to Joseph Albers in The New Albers (2002), refusing modernity its patriarchal superiority without once falling victim to "institutional feminist" claims. In fact, Amer sees Western art history as a readymade zone for disruption and stimulation. More importantly, her work's continuing refusal to be branded as one thing or the other is ultimately what enables it to be an irritant in the side of the art world.

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