In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess's Dima? wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L'Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition's centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist's writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondences and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics' and audiences' inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

eBook - ePub
Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref el-Rayess
The Changing of Horses
- 78 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Information
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Exhibition
- Chapter 2 The Artist
- Chapter 3 The Reception
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
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Yes, you can access Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref el-Rayess by Natasha Gasparian in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Arte & Arte generale. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.