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MIDDLE-EASTERN MODERNISM
Thomas skelton-robinson

It's increasingly hectic and confusing out there in the giddy and inflationary world of contemporary arts and architecture; even the professional aesthete can lose his or her bearings in the culture wilderness. The sure days of cultural Bolshevism are gone when the MoMA could tour war-torn Europe and war-weary America telling people (with uncanny certainty) what to hang in their living rooms and which chairs to sit in. the world's a bigger and more complex place where luckily there's a lot more on offer. So whether you want to pull off your next dinner party or private viewing with verve, or you merely want to widen your meagre horizons, you're going to need to know more. Fortunately there is no lack of glossy and sophisticated magazines to help you orientate yourself, the best thing being that they're not just pointers but cultural icons in their own right. They look and even feel and smell good, and say a lot about you, especially when neatly stacked in your toilet. However, at some point in the evening's heady discussions you hear the disturbing echo of received ideas and it slowly dawns on you that the latest number of Wallpaper* or i-d or, in the most obtuse case, Vogue (or something even more abstruse) hit the news stands two days earlier and that everyone's heading off in the same direction using the same knackered compass and the same worn-out map (with the wrong scale and the outdated co-ordinates), yet again. Suddenly, as if you didn't know it already, the paint has peeled a little more on post-modernism's vaunted promises of pluralism, tolerance and diversity and you're back where you started. You simply need to know more.

Eager to break the impasse we traveled the world over for you (no, honestly!) and we've decided that this particular way-finder is probably worth your attention and perhaps even a year's subscription. Here's why. The Middle East is a huge and dauntingly complicated place and most of us, let's be honest, would be hard put to string the little we know, or think we know, into coherently articulated arguments. Forgetting the important finer nuances, most of us don't even have the political basics at our fingertips. Which Arab countries border Israel? How long has martial law been in force in Egypt? Have Afghanistan's heroin exports decreased or increased since the war? Were the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties friends or foes? None of this has been made any easier by the resuscitation of the Cold War with the West's military and cultural Jihad against the Muslim and Arab worlds. When James Baker talks of picking up anyone who's "wearing a diaper on their heads" or Oriana Fallaci claims that "Allah's sons" reproduce "like rats" we're tempted to dismiss such comments as the dumb rantings of lunatics. But when the burning of Mosques and schools in Holland after the murder of Theo van Gogh prompts loud calls for less tolerance we begin to have an uneasy feeling that something is horribly out of joint. Who are these people and who are we? Are we really so irreconcilably and implacably different?

The art and culture magazine Bidoun, the current issue of which is dedicated to the United Arab Emirates is something of an ointment for fevered times and troubled minds. We would expect any such publication to have the appropriate verbal and visual qualities, but the most rare thing to get for your money these days is the real meat of, dare we say it, ideals. Ostensibly Bidoun sets out to act as a "culture broker" for the Middle East, but it is wary of either boiling the region's culture down to a common stock or dissecting it into more parts than it necessarily has. This said, it is what it achieves surreptitiously that perhaps makes for the magazine's intriguing quality.

The first surprise is the feisty tone of most of the articles. Anyone initially glancing at the sumptuous photos and sophisticated lay out and suspects they've bought some plump puff for Arab art and the UAE will soon discover their mistake. The articles do not shy from tackling the cliches and kitsch, the social and political shortcomings and the paradoxes of the region. The authors write well, except perhaps for the architects for whom we appreciate writing isn't amongst their fortes. The art reviews are good and the features too; and there's even a sprinkling of Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin for those who so wish. We particularly enjoyed walking around Egypt's national museum to the October 1973 war with Yahia Lababidi, contemplating Tarek Al Ghoussein's art with Jack Persekian, understanding the Arab predilection for Baroque furniture with Tirdad Zolghadr and watching the UAE's top ten films with Antonia Carver. All in all we know a lot more about Middle-Eastern culture after a single sitting and most of it is eye-opening stuff.

The magazine's deeper fascination lies maybe more in its visual strategy, and this is probably because we've all become such image junkies. In its poorer places the magazine unfortunately satisfies this addiction at its most craven level, particularly the so-called "conceptual" architectural commissions. The projects "Bedouin Architecture" and "Tectonic Logos" are regurgitated collage concepts we've considered countless times before and they don't get any better with repetition. "Terminal City" and "Dubai Cultural Hubs" are more provocative. However interesting these theoretical exercises, though, they cannot compete with the bizarre social and architectural reality of Dubai captured by photographs of Armin Linke and Lara Baladi. It is in this vein that the magazine is at it's most thought provoking. There is something peculiar and unsettling about seeing "our" cultural values and images in "their" world.

This works on the reader in a number of ways. Firstly, the art the magazine illustrates shows that Middle Eastern artists both at home and in the diaspora are equally adept and sophisticated at using supposed "Western" techniques to express their own interests-a cultural assimilation that turns the ingrained idea of the West appropriating from the fringes on its head. Secondly, the selection of images reproduced in the magazine only deepens this unease. Dubai City appears gaudy, vulgar and sublimely surreal to the well-versed Western eye, and yet at the same time somehow strangely familiar. We slowly realise that in fact it has all the tawdriness of "our" modernism and the only thing unusual is that they've bought into it and transposed it to the desert sands of the Arab peninsular. It is this family likeness that unnerves us. The planned obsolescence is our planned obsolescence. And underneath the surface lie the same currents-the longing for material possession and comfort, provincialism and half-subsumed traditions, the sacred and the profane.

While the Western reader's daily life is saturated with consumer images that vainly and hypocritically try to break taboos, Bidoun agitates in a region where very real and profound social and religious prohibitions still exist. Whilst obviously respectful of the constrictions of good taste the magazine challenges these with a subtle force and a grace. Hopefully Bidoun also has a Middle Eastern public, but we recommend you get your hands on a copy too-it's a mirror that is worth holding up and peering into. In the meantime we wish the magazine the creative stamina to keep up the good work. ...Oh, and before we forget...No worries, it'll look great in your toilet.