Aesthetic Stasis, and My Pathways to a Living Culture

The Lebanese cultural landscape is a paradox of vibrant energy and profound stasis. It is a place where dazzling creativity coexists with a pervasive sense of being trapped, of an artistic conversation perpetually circling back to the same themes, forms, and unresolved tensions. As a Lebanese artist working from the United States, I live this paradox daily. To understand this condition—to explain why our aesthetics often feel "stuck in time"—I have had to embark on a multi-layered analysis, moving from the grand narratives of history and ideology down to the intimate choices of material and form in my own studio. By combining the macro-historical lens of Lorella Ventura's Hegel in the Arab World with the micro-perspective of my own practice, I can not only diagnose the root causes of this stagnation but also chart the methodological pathways I am taking toward a more dynamic, dialectical, and living cultural future

The Pima County Historic Courthouse

I. The Overarching Framework: An Anti-Hegelian National Narrative

The deepest roots of our aesthetic stasis are ideological, planted in the very foundation of our modern national identity. As Ventura’s research meticulously documents, the educational project of the French Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph (USJ) was instrumental in crafting a Lebanese national consciousness distinct from both Ottomanism and Arabism. This project, serving France's mission civilisatrice, actively promoted the "Phoenician myth"—the idea that modern Lebanon is the direct heir to an ancient, pre-Arab, Mediterranean civilization characterized by "wisdom and tranquillity."

This narrative was, as Ventura argues, fundamentally anti-Hegelian. For Hegel, history is a dynamic, dialectical process, a "progressive unfolding of the 'Spirit' (Geist) in its journey toward the consciousness of freedom." This progress is driven by conflict and synthesis; the truth of a people is found not in its origin but in its development. The USJ’s project, in contrast, was one of essentialization and purification. It sought to locate the true, eternal "Lebaneseness" in a frozen, mythical point in the ancient past, deliberately smoothing over the complex, interwoven, and often conflictual histories that constitute our actual reality.

The aesthetic correlate of this is a pervasive "nostalgia of the origin." Our national imagination becomes oriented toward preserving, resurrecting, and re-inhabiting a glorified past rather than engaging in the messy, transformative process of creating the new. This manifests in the sanitized, museum-like reconstruction of downtown Beirut by Solidere, which attempts to return to a purified, pre-war ideal, and in the ubiquitous, often superficial, recycling of nostalia symbols (ships, alphabets, cedars) in public art and commercial branding. These are aesthetics of citation, not of creation; they look backward for legitimacy rather than forward toward possibility. I feel this pressure as a constant pull, a gravitational force toward a past that is presented as our only source of value.

II. The Colonial Imprint: Entrenching a Hierarchical Gaze in My Formation

The Phoenician myth provided the ideological superstructure, but it was the colonial apparatus that built the institutional framework for its aesthetic enforcement. My own artistic formation is a testament to this process. The French Mandate (1920-1943), as I have learned, did more than exercise political control; it implemented a "spiritual empire" by molding Lebanon's cultural institutions.

A key instrument was L'Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), whose curriculum was a direct replica of the French École des Beaux-Arts. This imported a rigid hierarchy of values that systematically devalued certain materials and sensibilities. In my own education, I internalized this hierarchy: clay was dismissed as merely "preparatory", a craft subordinate to "noble" materials like marble or bronze. This was not an innocent artistic preference; it was a colonial prejudice that privileged the cerebral and monumental over the sensual, tactile, and ancestral, the very qualities I now find most vital.

This colonial gaze created a devastating double-bind for artists of my tradition, perfectly encapsulated by the experience of modernists like Saloua Raouda Choucair, whose work was marginalized for being both "too abstract" and "too Islamic." We were caught between a Western canon that demanded originality yet rejected forms that fell outside its narrow definitions of modernity, and a local market shaped by colonial tastes. The result, which I observe from both within and outside Lebanon, was the entrenchment of a specific "mid-century modern sensibility", elegant, refined, and abstracted from the human form without being fully abstract, epitomized by the polished bronze figures of artists like Michel and Alfred Basbous and many more.

This style became, and in many ways remains, the "safe" political, and recognizable aesthetic language, and remains marketable to a conservative local elite and corporate buyers who, from what i have seen, "favor recognizable symbols of culture and wealth over conceptual challenge." Thus, the colonial hierarchy was internalized and is now perpetuated by a self-sustaining system of institutional inertia and market forces, creating a powerful resistance to the aesthetic evolution I seek.

III. My Symptom: A Culture "Stuck" Between Worlds

The convergence of the anti-dialectical national myth and the entrenched colonial hierarchy produces the symptomatic feeling of being "stuck" that defines my artistic position. This manifests in several ways in my life:

1. The Ghost of Interrupted Modernism: I feel I have inherited a "Lebanese modernism violently interrupted by civil war." The pre-war project of building a "modern Beirut," as referenced through architect Bernard Khoury's father, remains "a container of unused potential" that haunts me. My cultural psyche is thus trapped between mourning this lost future and being unable to fully generate a new one on its terms, leading to a melancholic repetition of pre-war forms or a cynical, fragmented postmodernity that feels equally hollow.

   
   

2. The Tyranny of the Market vs. the Tyranny of Novelty: Domestically, I see how market conservatism reinforces the "stuck" mid-century style. Internationally, I face a different pressure: what I term the "tyranny of novelty" in the Western, particularly American, art world. This system demands constant, marketable innovation and often engages in "performative inclusivity" that can erase cultural specificity, as when a professor declared me now an "American artist," effectively dismissing my Lebanese core, or least that's how i perceived it while i was anxiously enduring my midterm critique. This pressure encourages what I see as "artistic bypass," using superficial fragmentation to avoid deep cultural complexity.

   
   

3. My Suspension and Displacement: My own position as a Lebanese artist in the United States embodies this stasis. I inhabit a "deliberate suspension," sending a "signal back to the culture that formed me, uncertain of its reception." This reflects my broader Lebanese condition of existing between worlds: an idealized pre-war past and an unformed future, between a restrictive local tradition and another cycle of homogenizing global markets, not through modernity this time but through social media algorhityms , without a dialectical process to synthesize these tensions into something new. My work wants to attempt the burden of bridging the chasm.

IV. My Methodological Pathways to Resolution: A Dialectical Practice

Diagnosing the problem is half my task. These combined insights from Ventura and my own practice point toward concrete methodological strategies I am testing to break the impasse. These are a set of interrelated practices that embrace the spirit of conflict, engagement, and synthesis.

1. My Material Decolonization: Reclaiming Ancestral Knowledge through Clay

My choice of material is my prime example of a methodological resolution. Given how involved a studio practice of a ceramic artist is, and i thank James Klein from KleinReid for bringing this to my attention and giving me the permission to make whatever the F i want to make, this choice of material is a deliberate act of resistance and in decolonization.

2. My Strategy: Incorporation, Instead of Pure Refusal

My resolution is not a naive return to a "pure" pre-colonial past, an impossibility that would itself be another form of stasis. Instead, I advocate for "strategic incorporation." This means I want to hold colonial influences at a critical distance while actively engaging with Arab and Levantine traditions. It should be a method of conscious, critical curation of my influences. I can use the technical skills I acquired from a Western-style education to explore themes and forms rooted in my lebanese culture. This seeks to create a tense, productive hybridity in my work that acknowledges the complexity of my history rather than fleeing from it.

3. My Culturally Sustaining Practice

This approach aligns with what educator Django Paris calls "culturally sustaining pedagogy", a practice I apply to my work. My goal is not to fossilize my culture but to "perpetuat[e] cultural pluralism for positive transformation." Methodologically, this means I must actively research, document, and engage with the full spectrum of Lebanese artistic production, not just the French-influenced modernists, but also many contemporary artists legacies, the political art of the civil war period, and contemporary digital and conceptual artists. I place these varied voices in dialogue within my own practice, creating the friction necessary for my own dialectical progress.

4. My Role in Building New Frameworks I recognize that the stagnation is maintained by existing institutions and market structures. Therefore, a key methodological pathway for me is to contribute, however modestly, to alternative platforms and spaces. This could mean:

• Teaching and Mentoring: Sharing my approach to materials and theory with younger artists, outside the confines of traditional academies.

• Engaging in Critical Writing: Using my voice to build the theoretical framework that can legitimize and explain art that operates outside the entrenched hierarchies.

• Digital Dialogue: Using technology to engage in and promote conversations that challenge the monolithic narrative, connecting with other artists in the diaspora and at home who are on similar paths.

5. Embracing the Dialectic of My Exile

My position of exile, while painful, is methodologically reframed in my practice as a site of potential. This distance provides me the critical perspective to see the "stuck" patterns of my home culture clearly. The "signal" I send back from the diaspora is not just an echo; it is intended as a critical intervention. I strive to act as a translator and mediator, making my "complex aesthetic languages legible across contexts" and introducing new influences back into the local scene, thus hoping to provoke the very dialectical engagement that is so sorely lacking.

Conclusion: From a Frozen to a Living Spirit

My journey has led me to understand that Lebanon’s aesthetic stasis is not a failure of talent but the logical outcome of a historical project designed to freeze a national identity in a mythologized past, reinforced by colonial hierarchies and perpetuated by market conservatism. The Hegelian framework reveals our problem as a refusal of the dialectic—a flight from the conflict and synthesis that drives historical and cultural evolution.

My way forward, therefore, lies not in finding a single, new "authentic" style, but in embracing a methodology of dialectical practice. It requires my courage to consciously dismantle the entrenched hierarchies I internalized, to reclaim suppressed materials and narratives, to sustain my cultural specificity without freezing it, and to use my work to host the necessary, productive conflicts from which a true synthesis can emerge. My goal is to shift my personal symbol from the Phoenix, which cyclically burns and returns to the same form, to the Hegelian Spirit, which moves forward through struggle, constantly overcoming its own contradictions to achieve new levels of consciousness and freedom. Through this practice, I hope that one day, my work can be a small part of helping the vibrant, chaotic, and brilliant culture of Lebanon cease to be a museum of its own past and become, once again, an active and fearless author of its future.