Tous droits réservés.

Wit is now the wild card in a well-developed conceptual tradition. The line that ran from Duchamp and Dada into Surrealism came to a head in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the point at which wit became an intellectual device integrated into installation strategies and institutional (i.e. the gallery and its white cube spaces) critique. Duchampian wit thus re-emerged as a cool, conceptual mordancy in the theatrical strategies of Minimalism and in the stutter of serial reproduction that became one of the hallmarks of the art of that era. Linguistic puzzles and verbal themes were also explored. We’re now forty or fifty years after the fact, but some of our up-and-coming artists such as Zeke Moores are still feeding off the sportive humour and the deconstructive wiles of the likes of Jasper Johns, Mel Bochner, or the N.E. Thing Co..

The locus of Moores’ wit is the object and its art-historical associations. This object is usually a sculpture that replicates the appliances of our commercial and industrial worlds. Recently, Moores put up an eight-foot stack of cast-aluminium storage coolers (the portable kind that people load into their cars and take on trips) in an area adjacent to the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario. A visitor who knows the story of modern sculpture will grin immediately at what stands before her. Moores’ coolers are intended to elicit a knowing chuckle as they recall Brancusi’s « Endless Column » of the 1920s and ’30s.

The work grew out of a walk in downtown Chatham in the summer of 2007. Moores saw a large group of people fishing in the Thames. Their equipment included the cheap, flimsy styrofoam cooler, which Moores quickly realized could serve his commission for an outdoor installation at the Thames Gallery. Moores cast the coolers and produced their faux-styrofoam exteriors through sandblasting. The coolers were then piled up in an alternating top-bottom/bottom-top order held in place by internal rods.

The standardized detailing on the original coolers now stood out as an acknowledgment of the architectural ornamentation along the roofline of the gallery building itself. An observant viewer will admire the sculptural eye-rhymes and congratulate Moores on his smarts. He was taking his bearings not only from crowds fishing in the Thames or the compact hilarities of modern and postmodern art history, but from a simple site-specific context that a lesser artist might have overlooked. If all these decisions, taken together, don’t convince viewers that Moores has impressed a perfectly calculated compression of postmodern wit onto the tradition of the readymade (Duchamp) and the ready-assemblable (Brancusi), then the title of the work is sure to do so.

What could one call such a sculpture but « Cooler Column »? A « no brainer » it would seem, but it makes for a wide-ranging joke that’s as closely-packed as an epigrammatic phrase from Alexander Pope. A mere utilitarian thing, a mass-produced commodity, has been elevated into something quasi-totemic and pseudo-dignified. The title wags its jest in our face and pairs up with the trompe-l’oeil finish to conflate a number of themes: the ontological duplicity presented by the Duchampian readymade; the question of the simulacrum as handed down by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes; the homage to Brancusi’s cast-iron obelisk of replicated, rhomboid folk motifs; and the ethos of many a party-hearty, beer-gorged « May 2-4″ fishing weekend.

Moores says that he « admire[s] the role of the working class, who are often pawns in the process of production » and that he is interested in « exploring hierarchical systems of value that exist within the objects that surround us. » Such concerns are backed up by a quotation from Foucault’s The Order of Things:

« [Why] are there things that men seek to exchange; why are some of them worth more than others, why do some of them, that have no utility, have a high value, whereas others, that are indispensable, have no value at all? »

Interesting anthropological questions these, with lots of implied economic moralism and social critique. But they really lead nowhere (or everywhere) unless the artist first addresses the beam in his own eye. It’s fine to have one’s art serve up considerations on the political economy and the sociological profile of the cooler, which is useful for storing fishing bait or beer containers. But one can just as simply hold a mirror up to oneself and ask why does a metal replica of a cooler or a plastic milk crate have « value » at all as fine art, and how does that make one an « artist »?
Moores is more invested in this latter question than he might assume. When the humble cooler, so low in the hierarchy of objects, perhaps lower on the utility scale than the plastic spoon, is raised to the level of an aesthetic artifact, we are folding Foucault’s questions onto a plane where postmodern wit is exercised. The specialized artifact becomes, in one and the same instant, a clever theoretical construct. Not everything that is postmodern possesses this wit, nor is every parent that casts their child’s baby shoes in bronze a postmodern artist.

Postmodern wit is not a stylistic principle or a structural device like the heroic couplet. Instead, we find it ‘in action’ when art surrenders some of its intellectual self-infatuation or steps back from grave ideological denunciations and outbursts of political righteousness. Intellectualismis still there, but it also manages to rise above its own solemnities. The artist positions himself in the gap between art and life. He plays the part of a trickster stranded between two worlds, two force fields: art’s specialized autonomy and the inroads being made into all areas of culture by commercial forces and industrial practices. His (or her) ironies, his cleverness, his humour, and his ingenuity—in short, his wit—are all good indicators of how he feels about the unique professional position that he occupies.

The all-important wit quotient in “Cooler Column” allows us to distinguish Moores’ approach from the kitsch of someone like Jeff Koons. Both Moores and Koons appropriate and refinish what’s out there in the culture, but Koons prefers to magnify consumer goods and sentimental bric-a-brac into something outlandish. He employs dozens of assistants and copies vinyl toy bunnies into perfect, stainless steel imitations or aims to turn vintage locomotives into colossal monuments. Yet for all that, his work remains emotionally earnest and humourless on the conceptual level.

Moores, by contrast, wants to be politically earnest after a left-wing fashion peculiar to the art world, but he succeeds rather better on other fronts. I admire his poetics of the working class vernacular object. But, as with some of his other sculptures (cast aluminium axes and milk crates, chrome and steel trash cans, bronze t.v. remotes on silver trays), I don’t think that the primary thrust of « Cooler Column » is a social critique of capitalism and working class entrapment or a celebration of populist leisure as against the grinding rationalism of the work day.

The real strength of his sculptures has to do with how he ratchets up the wit. Through meticulous workmanship and calculated choices of metal media he redeems rote objects and transvalues the world of industrial processing that lies behind them. This in itself wouldn’t be witty enough if it wasn’t also knowingly infused with a self-conscious postmodern posture. But the fusion happens, and quite flawlessly, in “Cooler Column.” The outcome is an installation that acclaims the fishing idylls of working folks while cleverly shifting our attention back onto itself and its own comic autonomy.

A Syn, « Not My Government » Oakland
Graffiti Street Art, 2007
Certains droits réservés.

Mr. Ali began his activism against capitalist hegemony and the U.S. imperium in the Vietnam and Lennon era, when he and the Beatle were fellow travelers in the protest culture. Like Lennon, Mr. Ali is also an artist in his own right. He has written a series of novels grouped together as “The Islam Quintet.” These look back to the cultural landmarks of Islamic history, particularly when Islam was itself hegemonic over parts of Europe. One such instance was the rich world of al-Andalus, or medieval Muslim Spain. The standard accounts claiming that the period was a tolerant, multicultural golden age for minority Jews and more numerous Christians has recently come under closer empirical scrutiny by Bat Ye’or and others. But Mr. Ali’s portrait of that time remains idyllic and appealing. As a novelist he has a sure and delicate touch, less acerbic than his comrade in belles-lettres and America-bashing, Gore Vidal.

Outside of their substantial literary merits, Mr. Ali’s novels belong to a politically correct philo-Orientalist genre that consorts well with a current taste for indigenous and diasporic voices. As one such voice, Mr. Ali is something of a unique case and yet also a very typical one: A Pakistani native from a well-to-do Communist family from Lahore whose religion ranged from the protocols of outward piety by the elders to the agnosticism and atheism of the young Tariq. Bourgeois communists are unique enough, whether found in Lahore, in Rome or Bologna, or in University English departments in Britain and America. What is typical, however, is that Mr. Ali can be a fierce critic of the corruption and opportunism of Musharraf, Karzai, or the Saudi royals, including their pandering to American interests; and he denounces Al Qaeda and the clerical regressiveness of the Tehran ayatollahs; but yet for all that he fails to locate the economic or political backwardness of these regimes in some of the core tenets of the Koranic world-view, instead preferring to hammer away at the larger evil of Western colonialism and interference.

While America has long been a “counter revolutionary state,” according to Mr. Ali, the “Washington Consensus” is more recent. It descended like a shroud in the 1990s following the fall of Communism. In the past two decades former socialists and left-oriented intellectuals have abandoned many of their convictions and signed on to neo-liberal economics and the fantasy of unipolar American military dominance. Christopher Hitchens is one such turncoat. The only righteous alternatives are found in forms of gringo rejectionism by Latin American leaders such as Chavez, Morales, Ortega, even Lula, and of course Castro—their ideological godfather.

None of these claims were surprising or totally off the mark. What did raise eyebrows, however, were two of Mr. Ali’s positions on the Middle East. First, he stated that Turkey is now run by an Islamist party but that this government can be reasonably compared to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. This raised my eyebrows and kept them high on my forehead when he followed up with the claim that under normal circumstances a Hamas administration or, should it happen, a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, would also be a parallel to European Christian Democrats. Somewhere in the course of such observations, which I take to be harmless only to the degree that they are broadly absurd, Mr. Ali said flatly that there are only two solutions to the Israel-Palestine conundrum: a two-state solution or a single state. These are common views and far from controversial. But Mr. Ali also stressed that the Palestinian people were part of the continuing outcome of Hitler’s genocide of the Jews of Europe. Once again, not an inaccurate thing to say according to many, but quite misleading in at least one historically significant way. Here Mr. Ali, the historian, finds himself in the same rhetorical camp as a politician whom he abhors ideologically: Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

Buj: We’re hearing a fair bit in North America about the coming of Islamic economics to the West and Sharia banking. Is such an economic vision a realistic alternative to capitalism or is it simply a disguise for another kind of capitalism? The other part of this question is that you have written about the Arab and Muslim world in the 1920s and ‘30s being caught between Enlightenment-inspired Marxism and reactionary populism as the only two alternatives for a political way forward, and yet having very little affinity for liberalism. Why would that be the case?

Ali: In my opinion, Islamic economics are largely fantasy. It’s part of a fantasy, which Muslim businessmen and the clerics who they are close to have because they want to give some alternative to the existing system. And so interest-free loans etc., which they talk about sound quite attractive but somehow it never works out like that because they always devise methods of getting the money back. Historically, that’s what they’ve done, and the big question is that [the] Islamic world is quite large and should be a perfect experimental territory for trying these things out; and then, if they work, say this is how good it is, but it’s never really been tried out in the world of Islam itself. So to be perfectly blunt with you, I don’t take any of this stuff too seriously. I mean the Koran itself, if you read it closely, is a document which could only have been produced in a society heavily involved in trade and commerce. There are many interesting things in it in relation to that, but I think there is a neo-liberal reading of the Koran as well: that it is totally in favour of free trade without any restrictions of any sort whatsoever, and it has astonished me that the neo-liberal geniuses who run today’s world haven’t made more use of this. I mean, for instance, if you ask Osama bin Laden “what would you do if you were running Saudi Arabia?”, he says we would privatize the oil, take it out of state control.

Buj: Historically, I see Islamic societies as having had consumption and not production economies. A lot of this was based on a slave economy, with African slaves coming out of sub-Saharan Africa into Muslim lands, and also the extraction of gold and war plunder, and the division of war spoils for which the Koran does make provisions. Is it fair to say that what’s important in Islam and what makes some forms of radical Islam attractive to the Western left is this idea that wealth is there to be redistributed? Capitalist countries actually produce wealth but other systems have not produced wealth as successfully as the West has in the last five hundred years under some of the same circumstances: slavery, plunder, and so on.

Ali: Well, in the first place, I don’t think that the bulk of Islamic societies were heavily dependent on slavery. Slavery existed and they took advantage of it, but I don’t think it can be argued that they were economically heavily dependent on it. The two big Muslim empires of the middle period, the Mughal empire in India and the Safavid empire in Iran or Persia, were not dependent on slavery at all. These were societies in which there was a strange sort of economic system, which was parasitic. It was parasitic in the following way: it was heavily dependent on the world of the peasants and the production of the peasants and the craftsmen in the cities, and trade. But at the same time the state never permitted the development of capitalism.

Buj: [You mean] private property?

Ali: Private property in land was permitted on a very tiny scale. It was the state that was the owner. This was also very noticeable in the Ottoman empire and of course people got around it, but by and large the state ownership of property prevented the development of capitalism or a proper feudalism in Islam as [opposed to what] you saw in Western Europe by and large where capitalism was born. That model didn’t exist in the Islamic world. But nor did it exist in Germany until the Meiji restoration [NOTE: I think Mr. Ali might have meant Japan instead of Germany] and nor did it exist in parts of Eastern Europe which were always run by absolutist regimes. So the actual birth of what we now call modern capitalism heavily depended on the irruption of feudalism and feudalism as a form of sovereignties. The feudal lords were very powerful and the king was agreed to by them. But it was these feudal sovereignties within which capitalism and crafts emerged and took advantage of the sovereignty that the feudal lords had enjoyed to fight for their own sovereignty within that system. That, you never got in Islam for a variety of reasons.

Buj: Because of the nature of religious law [i.e. and its primacy] in Islam?

Ali: I’m not so sure. I don’t think one can totally tie it to religion, because after all you had other parts of the world which were not Islamic but where capitalism never developed either. So I don’t think it is religion. I think the interesting question is why didn’t feudalism proper develop in these societies. There’s a big debate about that, with a massive literature. But why was it that the industrial revolution took place in Western Europe and not Eastern Europe? And, I don’t think religion had a part to play in it. I think it was essentially that the system that was set up by Islam—you know, one shouldn’t overestimate the actual originality of Islam. The fact that Islam grew so quickly and so massively in the first hundred years, unlike Christianity, is that it took a lot from the countries where it went. Islam in India took a hell of a lot of its property laws from pre-Islamic societies. Likewise in Persia and the Ottoman lands. None of these societies had feudalism in the proper sense of the word. And then Islam of course superimposed on that its own structure because they [i.e. Muslim conquerors] were largely people going from the outside and, therefore, they wanted to keep control and the way you keep control is you deny private property in land and you say it all belongs to God and the state or whatever, so I think it was for political reasons for which religion played a part as it did in every other society. (continued in Part II)

Daquella Manera, Jihad for Mayor, end
regentrification, 2006
Certains droits réservés.

Buj: What do you say to the idea that in Western Europe you had different kinds of legal jurisdictions? [i.e. that made economic/secular development possible] You had canon law, you had Roman law, you had local customary law. [i.e. In Islam the dialectic of jurisdictions is not possible because of the primacy of God’s law].

Ali: That is true, yeah, I think that is absolutely true that the domination of these [i.e. Islamic] societies by religion played a part without any doubt. I mean there are many examples of this from history. Every time you had a sultan who could think for himself and suggested why don’t we, look, the Europeans have invented the printing press, surely Islam doesn’t forbid the printing press, but they stopped it.

Buj: The Ottoman world didn’t permit the printing press until the nineteenth century, I believe.

Ali: Yes. So there were lots and lots of examples of where the religious, the clerics, in order to preserve their own particular privileges, the clerics refused to permit in the Ottoman lands, but I mean that was an ideological reason essentially. Even the system of rule in the Ottoman empire, which is very interesting in its own right, which was to run the state by a central bureaucracy under the control of the palace. The sultan was all-powerful and an aristocracy was not permitted. You know the only aristo[crat] was the sultan.

Buj: But a lot of civil servants.

Ali: A massive civil bureaucracy! And the civil bureaucracy was actually put in place by taking kids from all over the empire so they would go into—

Buj: The “devsirme” system.

Ali: Yeah, that system worked. It did create a bureaucracy that was almost above everything else because none of them—it was a clever operation—because they did not want a bureaucracy totally dominated by Anatolians, because this would privilege Anatolia, so they wanted a bureaucracy which reflected the needs of the empire. And not tied to a particular ethnic group or a tribe. It was quite interesting from my point of view.

Buj: The “devsirme” system is the so-called “tax” where you take one Balkan, Christian male youth [i.e. one per family] and ship him to Istanbul and convert him to Islam and train him and they become—

Ali: Yeah, they become governors and you know—

Buj: Ottoman soldiers—

Ali: Big wigs, I mean the guy who ran Egypt. Muhammad Ali, was an Albanian taken by this system. And he finally became a semi-independent ruler of Egypt. So it’s quite interesting.

Buj: I’d like to read you a quotation of yours. You wrote, “Contrary to common belief, the concept of jihad as ‘holy war’ has a limited pedigree. After the early victories of Islam it had been quietly dropped until as a mobilizing slogan until revived by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the early 1980s…on the Pakistan-Afghan border.” My question is, really? What [i.e. what about those early days of Islamic conquest and] were the Ottoman sultans using as their ideological rallying cry when they [attacked Byzantium]? And if Brzezinski could appeal to this, it must have some basis. I mean, in the index to The Clash of Fundamentalism the term “jihad” I don’t think even appears. It’s there on the title page but not in the Index.

Ali: Well, I mean, the thing is I don’t take this term too seriously because there are many debates that go on in the Islamic world about what jihad is, and there is a strong argument which is that “jihad” in Islamic discourse—a majority view is that “jihad” in Islamic discourse means “struggle to improve yourself.” But there’s that [other] side to it too. The “holy war” thing was taken by Islam largely during the crusades because the crusaders said it’s a holy war, and so the Muslims in the Arab East replied in kind, saying fine, you have your holy war and we have ours and our holy war is “jihad.” So if you actually look at the history behind it it’s quite an interesting phenomenon, and the Ottomans when they were taking the bulk of their eastern European empire very rarely used that word, I mean they barely even used “Islam.” It was just, “we have replaced”—

Buj: Byzantium.

Ali: Their thinking was we have replaced Byzantium and we are going to be a big empire like they were. It was an imperial move by the Osmanli family. It was not a religious one. Obviously, the religious difference [i.e. between Islam and Byzantine/Balkan Christians] played a big part. But if you look at Spain and the whole history of Al-Andalus from the ninth to the sixteenth century it is not the case that the two big communities, Islam and Christianity, which divided Spain, I mean the Jews the third and smallest community were with the Muslims mostly, but often you find in the struggles that were taking place there was a Muslim ruler aligned with a Christian ruler against another Muslim ruler and another Christian ruler. So all sorts of alliances took place. In fact, the great Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun wrote that one big problem with Islam is that it has not been able to build a solidarity. And you had Moses Findley a great, great Cambridge ancient historian now long dead saying that the big problem with Islam is they couldn’t develop—he doesn’t use the word “solidarity” but he comes close—they couldn’t unite themselves. They were driven by factional strife from the beginning, and that is why they didn’t take the Western empire, Findley argues. If they had been united there is no reason why Rome shouldn’t have fallen to them either, because it was in a total state of collapse. So I think that the actual history of what happened rather goes against the view that Islam or jihad, or holy war could unite them. It didn’t.

Buj: I ask because I’m aware of this meaning of “jihad” as “struggle” or “self-improvement,” but a sceptic can make the claim that jihad is a kind of sixth pillar of Islam and it can mutate from a term meaning personal struggle and personal effort to some kind of political supremacism.

Ali: Well, there is [that]. I mean these are sort of these born-again Muslims who do it. And there are many others who argue against them. This is certainly the view of Islamic fundamentalists. Political Islam takes that view up. But not every Muslim and in fact a large a majority of Muslims are not part of this process. It is a tiny, tiny minority within Islamic culture, and these arguments go on all the time actually. I mean, martyrdom is in some ways a more significant idea in Islamic discourse than jihad, and who is a martyr and who is not a martyr, and if two Muslim armies are fighting each other, who is the martyr? This causes massive problems as you can imagine for the theologians, as is happening today on the Afghan border.

Buj: I want to ask you about what you wrote about the [historic] mosque in Cordoba, the agnosticism or the atheism you proclaim, and then your preference for the emptiness of that mosque as opposed to the plenitude and the kitsch of the cathedral built there too.

Ali: Well, this is an aesthetic judgment. But I will say, I was in the Kurdish capital in eastern Turkey, Diyarbakir, where I saw some ancient churches really going a long way back and they were just stunning in the way that they had been built. I can appreciate the Jewish synagogue in Cochin in India, which just as much as the Cordoba mosque appeals to me as a work of architecture. And of course this [i.e. the Cordoba mosque] was the center of the most interesting and appealing period in Islamic history, which is why I started writing novels about it. So it has nothing to do with religion but a great deal to do with history and architecture and aesthetics. Even the king of Spain when he went to see that mosque he said to the monks you have destroyed something which is beautiful.

Buj: What is you reaction to Ahamdinejad’s recent visit to Columbia [University]?

Ali: I thought Bollinger behaved disgracefully. You invite a head of state and then you try to tell your students that this guy is a total schmuck and he really shouldn’t be here but I couldn’t disinvite [sic] him. Basically it’s like a judge giving a jury advice on how to find someone guilty. That’s what Bollinger did and it didn’t go down too well amongst his own community. There was a gigantic turnout at Columbia just to listen to a guy who is demonized. I mean, I don’t agree with this guy [i.e. Ahamdinejad] as you can imagine, but on the other hand many of the things he said were not totally wrong. And six Iranian vice chancellors have now sent ten questions to Bollinger saying why don’t you reply to these on the history of Iran. Very, very intelligent questions. I mean, just purely even from the point of view of tactics and politics it has made Ahamdinejad enormously popular back in Iran. His popularity was way down. Every time they [i.e. the West] behave like this, they say “screw you, he’s our boy when all is said and done.” Then the other question is why do you just do this to someone who the United States perceives as an enemy at the moment? You have the Pakistani military dictator and its kid gloves and how pleased we are to have General Musharraf here speaking to us. It’s the grotesqueness of the double standard that operates. I’m sure that if the king of Saudi Arabia went to speak at Columbia probably Bollinger and his chancellors would sort of fall on their knees hoping the Saudis would give them money to fund a new bloody department. So it shows how debased the culture has become that a senior academic could operate in this way.