The Materials Man of the Emirates
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Ethnic profiling is typical in the contemporary art market. Artists from outside the Euro- American sphere, if they want to be noticed, are required to a) present evidence of their origins, like a badge, in their work, and b) package that identity in forms, styles and images that the West can readily recognize.
The Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), who just had a sensational retrospective, “I Am the Single Work Artist,” at the Sharjah Art Foundation here on the edge of the Persian Gulf, was a born contrarian, making art that belongs to no locatable culture, or maybe to several.
Born in Iran, Sharif was raised in Dubai, which, before the 1960s oil boom, was a low-rise town that made money from harvesting pearls. His father was a baker, and Sharif speculated that his own interest in art began with watching his father make cakes.
A natural draftsman with, as he put it, “a sarcastic outlook,” he drew cartoons for magazines in the 1970s, criticizing the newly formed, oil-rich Emirates for their pursuit of consumerist modernization. At the same time, he had some of his Cubist-inflected studio paintings accepted in government-sponsored shows.
This earned him a scholarship to study art abroad, in England, where he gravitated toward Conceptualism. One of his art history heroes was Marcel Duchamp. Sharif’s scratchy abstract drawings from this time, generated by gamelike rules of logic, are among the earliest entries in the Sharjah show, along with photographs of performances that involved having conversations in toilets and stripping while walking up stairs.
Such work was radical in the Emirates, where, in 1983, he did another walking piece, this one an endurance trek in the desert outside Dubai. Two years later, in Sharjah, he exhibited abstract paintings in an outdoor market, with one picture lying on the ground, another laid flat on four upright water bottles. He was introducing, at home, a new idea of what could be art.
By then, Sharif had finished school and was back in the Gulf region for good. At first he spent most of his time in Sharjah, a half- hour drive from Dubai, where he made common cause with a small community of avant-garde artists, poets and thinkers who called themselves the Emirates Fine Arts Society.
In the Emirates at that time, the acceptable form of advanced contemporary Arabic work was calligraphic abstraction, which Sharif disdained, as he did all forms of “nationalist” art. Yet to an Emirati audience, his own art looked nationalist — Western — and met with rejection.
Sharif’s art had started to change in response to Emirati life. The materialism that he had mocked in his political cartoons had grown exponentially. Sharif commented on this not with direct statements — he dismissed his early cartoons as heavy handed — but through a series of sculptures, called “Urban Archaeology,” that took the market itself as raw material, and that would become his best-known work.
He fashioned the earliest examples from street trash, elaborately knotting lengths of ordinary rope, bundling broken- down cardboard boxes and braiding strips of recycled cloth. He soaked newspaper in water and glue, mashed it to a pulp, then kneaded the pulp the way his father had kneaded dough. He molded loaf- like cakes — some resembled phalluses or excrement — and displayed them in stacks and piles, like the baked goods in markets from his childhood.
His art didn’t come across as polemical. It was, first and foremost, visually delightful. And it was accessible in an I- could- do-that-too way.
His studio — including a beat-up desk scattered with pencils, pipe tobacco and notes-to-self — has been transferred to the Sharjah Foundation and installed in the show. It gives some sense of Sharif’s work habits: Basically, he never stopped. For him art- making seems to have been a form of existential busywork, part child’s play, part labor, part meditation.
Sharif, the social skeptic, viewed consumerism as addictive waste. But Sharif’s art insists that nothing is wasted if you make waste your creative source.