| Ghada Amer
By Julie L. Belcove
Hollywood stars aren’t the only ones who get typecast. The way Ghada Amer tells it, internationally acclaimed artists can also wind up feeling boxed into a role for the simple but frustrating reason that they played it so well before.
In Amer’s case, it was her canvases of female nudes, “painted” with embroidered thread, boldly political and pulsing with sexuality, that were hotly in demand. “I love my work, but I don’t want to do only this,” the Egyptian-born Amer says on a dark and rainy January afternoon in her Harlem studio. “People tend to want me to do only this.”
By “people,” Amer means not only collectors but certain dealers, among others. One reason she left Gagosian Gallery after seven years and joined Cheim & Read in 2009, she says, was the perceived lack of interest at Gagosian in her other work, which ranges from film to outdoor installations. Conversely, when John Cheim paid a studio visit last TK to see a commissioned sculpture then in progress, 100 Words of LoveITALICS, he suggested she show it at the gallery as well. Says Amer, “I thought I was going to pass out.” The current exhibition, which runs through February 12 and features the single, compelling piece, marks the first time in 10 years that a New York gallery has exhibited Amer’s sculpture.
Standing just five feet tall, with a head of wild black curls and a near-constant smile, Amer, 47, is cheerful and chatty as the radiator in her studio, a warren of small rooms in an apartment building, rattles and steams so loudly that it feels like we’re on a subway platform. The title and concept for 100 Words of LoveITALICS, she says, comes from an Arabic book. Made of cast resin, the piece is an imperfect sphere formed by all 100 Arabic terms written in calligraphy and interconnected, creating a lattice-like effect. It is lit so that the words are cast in shadow on the wall. “Arabs are obsessed with love, actually,” Amer says, noting that Egyptian pop culture is rife with sentimental romance. The sculpture, though, “is more of a political statement. In the Arab world, especially in the media, it’s all about violence and hatred. We have one hundred words of love. Just use them.”
The message is aimed in both directions: East and West. “It made sense to make this piece at this moment — and to show it there and here,” Amer says. “There” is Qatar, the emirate that has been making a well-financed push to be the cultural center of the Middle East. For the inaugural exhibition of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the museum commissioned new works from Amer and 22 other Arab artists.
When she was first approached, Amer says, she knew she did not want to make a painting, and she knew she did not want to use embroidery. She also was realistic about the prospects of anything erotic. “My work is not ‘presentable,’” she says, making quote marks in the air. Amer says one curator told her, “I will not censor you, but if the conversation is all about nudity, people will not even look at your art. Do whatever you want. Do something you’ve never done before.”
Amer reveled in that latter brand of freedom. She is also quick to note that Muslims don’t have a monopoly on conservatism. As much as she admires New York’s tolerance, she has found American Puritanism still running strong. Magazines, for example, shy away from publishing her drawings, which tend to be more anatomically overt than her paintings, and one textual work that was under consideration for a public space was rejected after being deemed too racy. “That’s why I don’t do women who look all veiled, Arab,” she says. “Don’t finger-point.”
Her women are white, lifted from porn, and, though not veiled in the vernacular sense, their self-pleasuring acts are obscured by Amer’s tangles of thread. That type of veiling, she concedes, references fantasies induced by burka-wearing women. “It’s about how your body is seen even though it’s not seen,” Amer explains. “It’s all about your body.”
Amer laughs off suggestions that porn subjugates women. “These women are paid. They choose to do this,” she says, adding that she does not believe porn is for the male gaze alone. Her use of erotica, she explains, comes of her own desire to break free of sexual repression. “It is mainly for myself. I grew up in a very uptight, religious family,” she says. “Showing your body was bad; sex before marriage was bad. You start to hate your body. I prefer someone uses what they have instead of killing it.”
Asked if she is ever concerned that her works’ sharp politics will, as the Qatar curator suggested, overshadow their artfulness, Amer is blunt. “My art is political. If you don’t understand that…,” she says, before adding that she’s not interested in abstract “forms and shapes. Just a square doesn’t do it for me.”
The TK of four daughters, Amer had a privileged childhood in North Africa. Her father was a diplomat, her mother an engineer. The family moved to France when she was 11 so that both parents could earn Ph.D.s. Amer suffered a serious depression as a teenager and recovered with the help of art. She then entered art school in Nice, where the first two years she devoted herself to life drawing. She became so accomplished at it — to the exclusion of all else — that in her third year the school banned her from life drawing altogether. At the time, she says, “it was like punishment,” though in retrospect she understands her teachers wanted her to try thinking about other things. Their method worked: Soon Amer began to consider themes such as love and women’s role in the world that continue to guide her art today.
While Amer was in art school, she visited one of her sisters, who was studying at Yale. Naturally Amer wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art. “The first thing I saw was Rothko,” she remembers. Having seen only reproductions of his work in the past, she had never been a fan. In person, however, “I was, ‘Ohhhhh.’ It was physical.” Her visceral reaction led her to other Abstract Expressionists, who still loom large in her work; her threads are often compared to drips or other gestural marks. Only lately, in fact, has she gotten over her childhood dread of art pre-Picasso and Matisse. (She recalls sightseeing in “boring churches with boring paintings” on family vacations in Italy.)
Back in France she was determined to find a way to “paint” with thread, so associated with denigrated women’s crafts. Her initial stabs were straightforward works of women doing humdrum domestic chores. But she deemed them too submissive. Then she hit upon porn, a tack that still mortifies her mother. Amer’s parents, who have returned to Cairo, never attend her exhibitions, she says, though her very intellectual father reads everything written about her.
In 2004 Amer bought a house in Harlem. A wreck, it took her three years to renovate. Now, she says, “it’s gorgeous, like a museum.” She does not work there, though there is ample room. “I wanted a home,” she says simply. The house includes a separate apartment for Reza Farkhondeh, but the two friends keep the door open between. They met in art school in 1988, moved to New York together in 1996 and are now frequent collaborators. “He’s basically my family,” she says.
They have just shipped their work — some solo, some collaborative — to Johannesburg for an exhibition opening in February. Amer will show 100 Words of LoveITALICS and four paintings, two inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies and two of Disney villains: Ursula the Sea Witch and Cruella de Vil (she’s already done the princesses). Only in the last couple of years, she says, has she felt that she has mastered painting with thread. “This is a question I am starting as well to ask myself: Can I do a painting now without embroidery?”
Amer states clearly that New York is home, but when she starts feeling depressed again, she finds a strange solace in returning to Cairo. “It makes me feel angry but much better,” she says. “Nobody gives a shit about the art world. Your problems are ridiculous.”
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