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The Formation of the Artist within a Contested Terrain: The Politics of Artistic Production in Mubarak's Egypt.

Article Excerpt
Scholarship within the Western academy on Middle Eastern artistic and cultural production is fairly sparse. Much of what does exist is informed by a teleological approach that privileges the traditional Eurocentric narrative of art history. In response to the shortcomings of this narrative, Jessica Winegar's Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt presents a significant intervention in the field. By conducting an "ethnographic exploration of the art world in Egypt" that focuses predominately on the Mubarak years, and more specifically on fieldwork conducted between 1996 and 2004, Winegar attempts a reading of cultural production in Egypt that favors "a nonteleological, nonuniversalist, nontotalizing way of understanding the relationship between the totalizing forces in the world and the fragmentary, detailed, and particular struggles against them" (17). In doing so, Winegar is interested in redirecting our attention to the numerous possibilities for agency that exist and are informed by the ways in which different players involved in artistic production in Egypt understand and relate to their present situation. Creative Reckonings ultimately posits the nation (and its various articulations) as the main "classificatory scheme" and "cognitive frame" motivating artistic production in Egypt and suggests that rather than dismissing the validity of this paradigm, we instead grapple with the implications, productive or otherwise, of these assertions for those engaged with them. While Winegar's methodological approach begins to address some of the previously existing problems. it does at times further perpetuate certain universalisms.

Creative Reckonings is a work of neither art history nor art criticism. Indeed the author circumvents such methodological approaches whenever possible. Given the role of the "object" and the problematic ways in which it has been addressed in scholarship on non-Western contexts, Winegar deliberately shifts her focus instead to those she refers to as "art interlocutors," namely the different players involved in the production and consumption of modern and contemporary art in Egypt. The result is therefore a study that engages with previous ethnographies of cultural production in Egypt, of which Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of...

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