Of Exile: Grappling with Aesthetic Inheritance

Suspended Between Worlds

As a Lebanese artist living in the United States, I exist in a perpetual state of suspension. Like many in the diaspora, I continually negotiate between inherited aesthetic codes and the demands of a Western art market that prizes novelty. My work is shaped by displacement-a deliberate echo reaching back to the culture that formed me, uncertain if it will ever find its intended audience.

The Pima County Historic Courthouse

Colonial Shadows: The French Legacy in Lebanese Aesthetics

This echo resonates within a distinctly Lebanese artistic legacy, one profoundly marked by French colonial influence. Art education in Lebanon has its roots in the 19th-century imperial Ottoman era and the post-1920 colonial French mandate period. The end of the French Mandate in 1943 placed before Lebanese artists the challenging task of representing a national ideal in a territory characterized by ethnic, cultural, and sectarian diversity. Yet the colonial aesthetic frameworks established during this period continue to reverberate through the intellectual and artistic lives of many from the region.

The establishment of Lebanon's first formal art school, L'Académie Libanaise des beaux-arts (ALBA), in the 1930s (officially opening its doors in 1943 as the French Mandate ended) instituted a European pedagogical model that became the foundation for training artists locally. A few years later, the protestant American University of Beirut developed its own Department of Fine Arts based on American values of individual freedom of expression. These divergent approaches, French versus American, dedicated art school versus liberal arts education distinct aesthetic lineages that Lebanese artists continue to navigate today.

These inherited aesthetics are far more than mere stylistic choices - they carry hierarchies, philosophies, and judgments about what constitutes "art" and what remains outside its boundaries. In the French academic tradition that dominated Lebanese art education, clay is not considered a noble material. It is viewed as merely preparatory, inferior - useful only insofar as it prepares the way for marble or bronze. As an artist working primarily in clay, I feel this bias echoing still: a persistent relic of imposed standards that systematically devalue the sensual, the earthly, and the malleable.

Clay as Resistance: Reclaiming Material Heritage

Yet clay holds profound significance in many Arab traditions. The creation of life from clay appears throughout world religions and mythologies, including both biblical and Quranic cosmologies. In these traditions, clay represents an unformed, chaotic material that is shaped and given form through a disciplined creative process. The coastal city of Byblos in Lebanon yielded some of the earliest pottery items ever discovered, recognized as the ancestors of Lebanese-crafted ceramics.

Clay in these contexts is spiritual, intimate, and memory-laden. To reclaim clay, to elevate it not just as a means but as an end in itself, might become a form of resistance to colonial aesthetic hierarchies. This reclamation represents a refusal of the French legacy that stamped Arab modernity with perpetually derivative or primitive, always positioned just outside the gate of "true" modernism.

Decolonizing Aesthetics: Beyond the Oriental Frame

The discomfort I feel in addressing this legacy stems from the troubling implication that Arab and modern art are somehow fundamentally incompatible. As expressed in the recent exhibition "Arab Presences: Modern Art and Decolonization, Paris 1908-1988" at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, there exists an underlying assumption that modernity belongs exclusively to the West, while the East remains forever frozen in an Orientalist frame-picturesque, exotic, emotionally rich but intellectually secondary.

This exhibition highlighted a paradox: Paris served as a place of emancipation for Arab artists and the epicenter of the colonial empire that dominated them. Lebanese artists like Philippe Mourani, alongside artists from across the Arab world, arrived in Paris to train at French art schools, even as they challenged the rampant colonialism there. Their work represented a break with Arab Orientalism, where "a real aesthetic project was put in place during the 20th century, one that broke away from academic art, echoed the Western avant-gardes and was conceived within the framework of a specific national identity, without reverting to an Islamic art form".

These historical tensions have shaped how Lebanese art is consumed, judged, and valued within Lebanon. Many Lebanese people - particularly within the art establishment - have internalized the very colonial gaze that once sought to define them. The French aesthetic snobbism - an elitist attitude toward form, style, and the very concept of taste - persists in how art is discussed, collected, taught, and marketed in Lebanon. It encourages an attachment to the body only as a way to artistically bypass ethnonational frustrations, a suspicion of tactility, and a preference for cerebral abstraction over sensuous engagement.

Strategic Incorporation: Beyond Simple Rejection

My work frame resists these colonial legacies through outright rejection and strategic incorporation. I do not wish to sever the French aesthetic legacy completely - that would be both impossible and disingenuous given its historical embeddedness in Lebanese cultural institutions. Instead, I aim to use it consciously, and critically - as one tool among many in a more expansive aesthetic vocabulary.

To "shed" colonial aesthetics, then, is not to forget or deny them. It requires holding them at a sufficient distance to examine their contours, to decide when and how I can employ them. It means building a culturally sustaining practice that emerges from within Arab and Lebanese metaphysical traditions - traditions that honor the sensual, the sacred, and essentially, the lived experience - while acknowledging the complex historical realities that have shaped our artistic landscape.

Navigating the American Art World: Innovation vs. Tradition

In the United States, this process of negotiation becomes even more complex. The American art world operates under different assumptions and cultural frameworks. Its focus is on innovation, inclusivity in service of politics, and a personal expression that can promise liberation but it is deeply disorienting. The constant push for novelty - accelerated by market demands and institutional pressures - often leaves little room for sustained inquiry, refinement, or deep historical continuity let alone a curiosity for the non-Western methodologies of a foreign-born and raised artist and his methodology. In one of my critiques during my MFA at SUNY New Paltz, a professor that I highly admired refused to acknowledge that I am a Lebanese artist who is living and working in the U.S. For him, I was an American artist since my work and negotiated concepts were fleshed out in the U.S.

This push for novelty and claiming that novelty can only be American is particularly evident in the current post-COVID climate, where the market for original, high-end art has experienced significant volatility, and to many extents was sacrificed in favor of performative community engagement events since museums lost revenue and have been trying to see back museum visitors through their doors.

As Blake Gopnik noted in a recent interview, "The boom seems to be un-booming... Hot young artists who were selling for a ton are now selling for a third or a quarter of what they were getting just a few years ago". Within this unstable market ecosystem, there is often little patience for the long, slow unfolding of craft traditions or sustained aesthetic explorations. The urgency to produce something "new" became a form of artistic bypass - a way of coping with cultural confusion by reflecting that confusion into the world through de-skilled, fragmented work.

I do not reject innovation, but I remain wary of novelty pursued for its own sake. I am especially cautious of a market where everything is permitted but nothing is sacred, where everything is cool like everything else. In this context, my insistence on craft, tradition, and metaphysical depth can appear either stubborn or simply invisible. American viewers often find my work deliberately opaque, not because it is deliberately obscure, but because they might lack the cultural, historical, and spiritual frameworks needed to fully enter it. from fellow people of color in the arts, who insist on this opaqueness, the question then becomes a question of safety, their assumption, though equally dignifying is that I am venturing into abstraction as a means for self-preservation in a hostile society. Yes, as a Middle Eastern man, i do feel like I cannot express myself fully in America through, say, political art, however, I do experience the reality of a lack of curiosity in engaging me in further conversations where I might feel safe and genuinely welcomed to open up even more.

A One-Sided Conversation: Speaking Without Being Heard

I remain committed to this intricate dialogue. I insist on speaking from within my own aesthetic logic, even when my audience may not be ready-or able-to fully engage with it. My work is never a performance of “Arabness” staged for Western consumption or exotic appeal-a pitfall that many artists from my region encounter when seeking validation in the global art market. Instead, what I create is an ongoing correspondence: with my past, with Lebanon, with my future, and with those viewers who either share my cultural language or are open to learning it.

This leads me to consider the question of generational aesthetics and temporal displacement. Growing up in Lebanon, I inherited a visual culture shaped by the delayed reverberations of mid-century modernism, resulting in a layered and hybrid aesthetic landscape. Although I am 38, my visual sensibilities have also been influenced by the design languages of American baby boomers. This temporal lag-combined with the persistent shadow of French influence-has left me with a peculiar aesthetic inheritance. It is not wholly mine, yet it remains my most immediate resource as I continue to discover and define my own voice

Generational Aesthetics: Temporal Dislocations

Lebanon experienced its version of architectural and design modernism in the mid-20th century. As Bernard Khoury, a renowned Lebanese architect, has noted, there was "a modern Beirut in the making" during this period. His father, Khalil Khoury, exemplified this generation of Lebanese modernists who "saw themselves as part of the world... influenced by Le Corbusier but they also looked at what was already present". This generation was marked by "experimentation and emulation," creating a distinctly Lebanese form of modernism that was in dialogue with international movements while responding to local contexts.

Yet this modernist project was violently interrupted by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991), creating what Khoury describes as "a container of unused potential, rudely stunted by war and continued crisis". These ruptures and discontinuities have created a complex temporal relationship to modernism in Lebanon-one where the "void left behind in Lebanon's uninhabited buildings serve as material manifestations of gaps in collective memory, ever in limbo, even in anticipation of stasis".

In contrast, younger artists in the contemporary U.S. often embrace fluidity and hybridity without the burden of such historical traumas and dislocations. I think here of privilege, that their freedom can seem enviable though sometimes directionless or historically untethered. I feel very lucky to be around them at times, even when I have to spend an amount of subtle objection through inquiry. In my work, I attempt to reconcile the persistence of Lebanese traditions in me, to see what did stick after being away for 10 years - ritual, metaphor, sensual intimacy - with the unapologetic openness and aspirational multiplicity valued in contemporary American art that has been serving as an intellectual exercise and a semi-disciplined immersive anthropological study. I insist on holding both without diluting either...for now.

Holding Tension: A Practice of Creative Correspondence

In the end, my artistic practice is less about reaching a simple resolution than about holding generative tension. It exists in the charged space between two cultures, two temporal frameworks, and two systems of aesthetic value. It is a practice of asking and receiving, of remembering and refiguring, of remaining safe and taking risks... oftentimes, as my experience during grad school was, in isolation and through idealistic conversations with imaginary archetypes.

To hold tensions is an approach that resonates with what educational researchers have termed "culturally sustaining pedagogy" - an approach that "seeks to perpetuate and foster, to sustain linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation". While this concept emerged in educational contexts, it offers valuable insights for artistic practice as well. A culturally sustaining artistic practice would not only acknowledge cultural diversity but actively nurture it, creating spaces where multiple traditions can thrive without stagnant hierarchical ordering.

The big challenge lies in developing work that remains legible locally and internationally without compromising its complexity or performative specificity. This requires a delicate balance between accessibility and depth, between cultural particularity and universal resonance. It necessitates moving beyond both naive cultural essentialism and uncritical cosmopolitanism toward a more nuanced understanding of how artistic traditions evolve, intersect, and transform in response to changing historical conditions.

Questions for Deeper Exploration

To continue this exploration, I invite reflection on the following questions that might help fill gaps in my and our understanding:

1. What does a culturally sustaining artistic practice truly look like in exile? How might we develop frameworks that honor cultural specificity while allowing for growth and transformation?

2. How can Lebanese and other Arab artists develop aesthetic languages that are legible both locally and internationally without compromising complexity or authenticity? What strategies might help bridge these different contexts and audiences?

3. How might metaphysical sensibility - approaches to art that engage with spiritual, philosophical, and ontological questions - become a legitimate category of critique in the Western art world that often privileges formal, social, or conceptual frameworks?

4. What role do craft and material knowledge play in resisting the speed, disposability, and dematerialization increasingly prevalent in the global art market? How might we reframe technical mastery not as conservative or backward-looking but as a form of resistance?

5. How can we design art education systems that do not replicate colonial hierarchies of value while still providing students with diverse historical and cultural frameworks? What would a truly decolonized art curriculum look like in Lebanon today?

6. In what ways might the particular experience of Lebanese artists shaped by French colonialism, civil war, sectarian politics, and economic crisis offer unique insights into broader questions of cultural hybridity and aesthetic resistance?

7. How do we account for the significant contributions of Lebanese women artists like Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Saloua Rawda Choucair, and Bibi Zogbé in developing distinctly Lebanese approaches to modernism that challenged both Western artistic hegemony and local patriarchal structures?

8. What can the material history of clay in Lebanon teach us about alternative modernities and post-modernity that don't follow Western narratives? How might this history inform contemporary ceramic practices?

   
   

I believe that grappling with these questions can help me develop more nuanced approaches to the complex relationship between cultural inheritance, artistic innovation, and the lived experience of creating across borders, languages, and traditions.