Octavian Esanu
American University of Beirut, FAAH, Faculty Member
Offers a short history of the MA program in Art History and Curating launched at the American University of Beirut in 2017.
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"Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards,... more
"Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards, Polaroid shots, and videos – which Salloum, a Canadian-born artist of Lebanese parentage, collected, made, or recorded during his time in the Middle East in the late 1980s and early 1990s – compose one large document, which we consider here as a record of the 1990s." -- Publisher's website.
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In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers' attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The... more
In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers' attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights some of the most conspicuous issues raised by the Stuckists. For more than a decade Stuckism has critiqued the mainstream contemporary art world, accusing it of being at the mercy of global speculative capital; Stuckism also questions the mainstream aesthetics of conceptualism and its insistence upon de-materialized artistic practices. Instead Stuckism calls for respect for traditional or fine arts media, providing in the meantime an example of forging global cooperation among artists from various countries, without or even in spite of a lack of corporate support.
Research Interests: Aesthetics, Art, Media Arts, Conversation, The Arts, and 3 moreConceptualism, Mainstream, and ARTMargins
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the... more
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumptioncalled "contemporary art"-emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon,
Research Interests: Contemporary Art, Political Science, Contemporary Asian art, Economic System, Modernization theory, and 5 moreContemporary Theory and Criticism, Eastern European Contemporary art, Contemporary art history and institutional history of museums, Curating contemporary art, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art
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This project focuses on a group of painters active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in certain parts of the Ottoman Middle East. And even though some of the paintings on display are well known, there has never been an... more
This project focuses on a group of painters active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in certain parts of the Ottoman Middle East. And even though some of the paintings on display are well known, there has never been an a!empt to exhibit them under one stylistic canopy, or as part of one painterly tradition.
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This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art... more
This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.
Research Interests: Art and ARTMargins
In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers' attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights... more
In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers' attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights some of the most conspicuous issues raised by the Stuckists. For more than a decade Stuckism has critiqued the mainstream contemporary art world, accusing it of being at the mercy of global speculative capital; Stuckism also questions the mainstream aesthetics of conceptualism and its insistence upon de-materialized artistic practices. Instead Stuckism calls for respect for traditional or fine arts media, providing in the meantime an example of forging global cooperation among artists from various countries, without or even in spite of a lack of corporate support.
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This exhibition familiarizes the public with a series of monochrome works produced by John Carswell: the art historian, artist, teacher, explorer, curator and scholar of Near, Middle, and Far Eastern art and culture. Carswell graduated in... more
This exhibition familiarizes the public with a series of monochrome works produced by John Carswell: the art historian, artist, teacher, explorer, curator and scholar of Near, Middle, and Far Eastern art and culture. Carswell graduated in 1951 from the Royal College of Art in London, and instead of setting out to conquer the British art world, ruled at the time by local social realists, he embarked on a steamboat and entered the Middle East through the port of Beirut. For almost six decades now, John Carswell has been studying this region, following on the heels of his lifelong source of inspiration, the medieval Islamic explorer Ibn Battuta. Instead of tracing the routes of the sacred hajj, however, Carswell has been closely observing the pilgrimage of artistic ideas, the circulation of cultural currents within and beyond an area that gave the world its earliest great civilizations. His interest in the art, culture and history of the Fertile Crescent has led him to various places and positions: from archaeological excavations in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine, to teaching fine arts at the American University of Beirut, to following in the footsteps of the first Western explorers of Central Asia, to becoming the Curator of the Oriental Institute and then Director of the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and later moving back to London to become the Director of the Islamic and South Asian Department of Sotheby’s, London. His passion for the Orient has taken various forms: from art works, graphics and design for various political activist campaigns and scholarly treatises, to curating exhibitions or writing scholarly books and articles. Carswell has written on such topics as Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in the Near East; Armenian architecture in seventeenth-century Isfahan; Kütahya tiles and pottery in the Cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem; Islamic book binding and book making; Arab seafaring; Coptic tattoo designs; metalworking in the streets of Beirut; painting in the Islamic world; and the history of Lebanese painting—to mention only a few.
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This exhibition is dedicated to a particular category of artists. They may not even be regarded as “real” artists—but when they are, art critics make sure to add one of the multiple qualifiers collected over the years to describe this... more
This exhibition is dedicated to a particular category of artists. They may not even be regarded as “real” artists—but when they are, art critics make sure to add one of the multiple qualifiers collected over the years to describe this specific group. The most commonly used descriptors for identifying these artists include: naïve, naïfs, faux-naïfs, faux-faux-naïfs, semi-naïfs, outsiders, faux-outsiders, and art brut. And here is a longer list collected from various sources:
… vernacular art, autodidact art, primitive art, maverick art, tribal art, isolate art, folk art, visionary art, inspired art, schizophrenic art, self-taught art, patient art, untutored art, idiosyncratic art, original art, psychotic art, introvert art, outlaw aesthetics, estranged art, anti-cultural art, unfettered art, the art of the artless, unmediated art, breakaway art, art without precedent, anti-cultural art, non-cultural art, desublimated art, asylum art, art of the insane, raw art, grassroots art, primitive art, autistic art, intuitive art, non-traditional folk art, mediumistic art, dilettante art, amateur art, marginal art, would-be faux-naïfs art, really-not-so-naïf art, eccentric art, rough art, l’autre art…
The most commonly accepted terms in art historiography have been art brut and outsider art. The former was introduced by the artist Jean Dubuffet in 1948 and has been primarily used within the French academic context, while the latter was more recently designated as the English equivalent of art brut (by Roger Cardinal in his celebrated 1972 book Outsider Art). For convenience, our exhibition often relies on these two terms, using them interchangeably to signify the concepts or to refer to modes of production deployed by the artists grouped under this umbrella.
… vernacular art, autodidact art, primitive art, maverick art, tribal art, isolate art, folk art, visionary art, inspired art, schizophrenic art, self-taught art, patient art, untutored art, idiosyncratic art, original art, psychotic art, introvert art, outlaw aesthetics, estranged art, anti-cultural art, unfettered art, the art of the artless, unmediated art, breakaway art, art without precedent, anti-cultural art, non-cultural art, desublimated art, asylum art, art of the insane, raw art, grassroots art, primitive art, autistic art, intuitive art, non-traditional folk art, mediumistic art, dilettante art, amateur art, marginal art, would-be faux-naïfs art, really-not-so-naïf art, eccentric art, rough art, l’autre art…
The most commonly accepted terms in art historiography have been art brut and outsider art. The former was introduced by the artist Jean Dubuffet in 1948 and has been primarily used within the French academic context, while the latter was more recently designated as the English equivalent of art brut (by Roger Cardinal in his celebrated 1972 book Outsider Art). For convenience, our exhibition often relies on these two terms, using them interchangeably to signify the concepts or to refer to modes of production deployed by the artists grouped under this umbrella.
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Modernizing Collaborations in West Beirut This project produced at AUB Art Galleries throws light on a collaboration between two artists: the Lebanese Farid Haddad and the American Jay Zerbe. It focuses on events taking place in West... more
Modernizing Collaborations in West Beirut This project produced at AUB Art Galleries throws light on a collaboration between two artists: the Lebanese Farid Haddad and the American Jay Zerbe. It focuses on events taking place in West Beirut in 1969-1970. One of these was an exhibition, in the form of a book titled Screens and Bugus, produced by Haddad and Zerbe (and with an introduction by Helen Khal). This book was presented to the public, along with original drawings, in the lobby of the Department of Fine and Performance Arts at the American University of Beirut (Nicely Hall) in January 1970. Drawing on the critical writing from that time, the text accompanying the PDF publication argues that Screens and Bugus can be seen as one of the earliest examples of "site-specificity" emerging in Lebanese art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Haddad and Zerbe proposed a new format of display for art, thus challenging the traditional venues: the studio, the white cube, the gallery, or the museum. The second event, titled "An Exhibition of Experimental and Emotional Drawings by Farid Haddad and Jay Zerbe," opened in Jafet Memorial Library Gallery on March 11, 1970. This time the exhibition displayed forty-five graphic works on paper-drawings of various sizes, listed in the exhibition brochure along with their prices. Today, the artists have been able to locate only seventeen drawings from that exhibition, along with several reviews published in the local press.
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In the language of contemporary labor processes and manufacturing equipment, a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment designated and programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are... more
In the language of contemporary labor processes and manufacturing equipment, a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment designated and programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are deployed as preventive maintenance measures to guard against equipment malfunctioning and the disruption of the production flow. The main goal of the critical machine is to inform the human operator about urgently required systemic adjustments.
We apply this machinic analogy to the world of contemporary art as a central motif, even a provocation, that might unsettle certain assumptions about the modes of production and the circulation of art today. Within the broader scheme of things, Critical Machines is about Critique. It is about a specifically modern attitude, which relies heavily on rationality and reason, enjoys questioning authority and accepted practices and seeks to determine – as Immanuel Kant did consecutively with his logical machines, the three Critiques – the conditions of possibility under which we may learn what we can know, what we ought to do, and what we may hope.
We apply this machinic analogy to the world of contemporary art as a central motif, even a provocation, that might unsettle certain assumptions about the modes of production and the circulation of art today. Within the broader scheme of things, Critical Machines is about Critique. It is about a specifically modern attitude, which relies heavily on rationality and reason, enjoys questioning authority and accepted practices and seeks to determine – as Immanuel Kant did consecutively with his logical machines, the three Critiques – the conditions of possibility under which we may learn what we can know, what we ought to do, and what we may hope.
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This exhibition examines the complex relation between art and labor. Its purpose is not to honor or celebrate labor as one of the activities essential to the human condition—the socialist realists have done this very well in the past.... more
This exhibition examines the complex relation between art and labor. Its purpose is not to honor or celebrate labor as one of the activities essential to the human condition—the socialist realists have done this very well in the past. Instead, we look at art itself as a form of production, inquiring what kinds of labor enter into its making—its birth.
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From the second half of the 1990s until the second week of September 2001, Samaha DJed on the top floors of one of the “Twin Towers" of the original World Trade Center (1973-2001). He was known on the upper floors of WTC's Tower One, or... more
From the second half of the 1990s until the second week of September 2001, Samaha DJed on the top floors of one of the “Twin Towers" of the original World Trade Center (1973-2001). He was known on the upper floors of WTC's Tower One, or the North Tower, as DJ MondoLucien, and sometimes as Lucien the Loungecore DJ. His parties ran every Wednesday night at a bar called the Greatest Bar on Earth, in the restaurant complex Windows on the World located on the 107th floor. The party was originally launched as “StratoLounge," but then in 1997 Samaha renamed it “Mondo-107" (Mondo was the DJ moniker adopted after a trip to a CD store in Roppongi, Tokyo which had a section called “Mondo Suburbia," and 107 was the floor number in the North Tower as well as an echo of “Agent 007"). Nightlife reviewers had mixed opinions about the Mondo-107 party, but regardless of the reviews, the fact remained that even though his party may or may not have been the “best" or “greatest" in New York, it was certainly the “highest," not only in the City but—at that time—on Earth. It was a “Party in the Sky," as Lucien once described it.
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Landscape—as a genre, medium, or form of representation, as uncultivated or cultivated, formed or farmed, or seen or shaped land—is the product of many contradictions. In politico-economic terms, landscape has to do with the necessity of... more
Landscape—as a genre, medium, or form of representation, as uncultivated or cultivated, formed or farmed, or seen or shaped land—is the product of many contradictions. In politico-economic terms, landscape has to do with the necessity of preserving humankind's relation to its environment (and the semi-fantastic origin of what today we call “nature”) and with an urge (or ploy) to conceal certain injustices, such as the appropriation of land and of agricultural rural labor. In terms of power, governance, and governmentality, landscape has served many masters with seemingly opposite ideological agendas, including both colonialism (the expansion and control of land beyond historical borders) and nationalism (a contraction or consolidation around a core identity, territorial sovereignty, or flag). Some of these oppositions can be translated into formal principles, by invoking the disparity between horizontality—which art history has often linked to landscape, connoting not only spatial expansion or sequential narration, but also traditional inertia or the maintenance of the status quo—and verticality, which in art has been associated with the figure (as in portraiture) or, in broader anthropological terms, with the triumph of the Spirit and the rise of Homo erectus above animal horizontality and the state of nature.
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The filmmaker, screenwriter, film theorist, artist, and political activist Adachi Masao (b. 1939) is considered—along with Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima—a leading figure in Japanese New Wave Cinema. Since the 1960s, Masao has produced... more
The filmmaker, screenwriter, film theorist, artist, and political activist Adachi Masao (b. 1939) is considered—along with Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima—a leading figure in Japanese New Wave Cinema. Since the 1960s, Masao has produced many experimental films and written film scripts on a range of political topics. In the 1970s, Masao joined Nihon Sekigun, the Japanese Red Army (a communist group founded by Fusako Shigenobu in Lebanon in 1971), for the purpose of supporting the Palestinian struggle. After a trip to the Cannes Film Festival, Masao and Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut to interview and film Palestinian fighters. Masao declared himself a militant for the World Revolution and the Arab cause. He then spent 27 years in the Middle East: for the most part in the Bekaa Valley and, after the withdrawal of the Red Army from Bekaa in 1997, in Beirut.
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The first known attempts to establish a permanent art collection at AUB came in the early 1970s. Several key works, including Farid Haddad’s Untitled (1971), Helen Khal’s Jacob’s Ladder (1969), and Jean Khalifeh’s The Singing American... more
The first known attempts to establish a permanent art collection at AUB came in the early 1970s. Several key works, including Farid Haddad’s Untitled (1971), Helen Khal’s Jacob’s Ladder (1969), and Jean Khalifeh’s The Singing American (1971), came together in 1971 as part of an initiative to establish the “Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art of the American University of Beirut.” The mission of the project was to encourage artists and collectors to donate or loan artworks to AUB, in order to make “the experience of art a living part of the educational process.
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"Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards,... more
"Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards, Polaroid shots, and videos – which Salloum, a Canadian-born artist of Lebanese parentage, collected, made, or recorded during his time in the Middle East in the late 1980s and early 1990s – compose one large document, which we consider here as a record of the 1990s." -- Publisher's website.
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Transcribed and edited from audio recordings taken by Octavian Esanu of the original seminar at Duke University, and re-produced with Jameson's endorsement, Mimesis, Expression, Construction recreates his 2003 seminar on Adorno's... more
Transcribed and edited from audio recordings taken by Octavian Esanu of the original seminar at Duke University, and re-produced with Jameson's endorsement, Mimesis, Expression, Construction recreates his 2003 seminar on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory - one of the most influential theories of modernist aesthetics. 780-page book published by Repeater (London)
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Philosophy, Film Studies, Marxism, Thomas Mann, and 15 morePerformance Art, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), History of Music Theory, Modernism (Art History), Serial Music, Theodor W. Adorno, MODERNIST FILM, Arnold Schoenberg, Eastern European Modernist and Postmodernist Art, Kantian aesthetics, Aethetics, Hegel's aesthetics, Modernist Art and Critical Theories, Theatrical Performance, and Modernist Music
This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the fine arts genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each... more
This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the fine arts genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each chapter provides a distinct perspective on the early days of the nude, as its author studies a particular aspect through analysis of artworks and historical documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume examines a rich body of reproductions of both primary documents and of works of art made by Lebanese, Egyptian, and Syrian artists or of anonymous book illustrations from nineteenth-century Ottoman erotic literature.
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The book intervenes in a wider conversation about “contemporary art” from the historical perspective of Eastern Europe. It revolves around a concrete case in which a network of twenty contemporary art centers was assembled on the debris... more
The book intervenes in a wider conversation about “contemporary art” from the historical perspective of Eastern Europe. It revolves around a concrete case in which a network of twenty contemporary art centers was assembled on the debris of the Berlin Wall by the American billionaire George Soros. Please see the TOC.
Research Interests: Contemporary Art, Postsocialism, Neoliberalisms and the Transformation of the Cultural Sphere, Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory, Contemporary Asian Art, Art and Globalization, Post-Colonialism, Curatorial Theory, and 12 moreEastern European Contemporary art, Curatorial Studies, Globalization and Contemporary Art, NGO Studies, Transition to Capitalism, Post-Soviet Art Market, Art Institutions In Contemporary Russia, Art In Russian Regions, Transition to Market Economy, Contemporary art, geopolitics and neoliberalism., Art and globalization, curatorial practice, Post-1989, art world and neoliberalism, and Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with... more
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumptioncalled "contemporary art"-emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon,
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A republication of Georges D. Corm’s 1966 Essai sur l’art et la civilisation de ce temps with Arabic and English translations and additional texts, accompanying the exhibition Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm: [1896-1971]... more
A republication of Georges D. Corm’s 1966 Essai sur l’art et la civilisation de ce temps with Arabic and English translations and additional texts, accompanying the exhibition Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm: [1896-1971] organized by AUB Art Gallery 2013.