Natasha Gasparian | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Books by Natasha Gasparian
Anthem Press, 2020
In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa H... more In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondence and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.
Book Chapters by Natasha Gasparian
Papers by Natasha Gasparian
Saradar, 2017
This essay engages with the problematic of landscape painting as an art historical genre in moder... more This essay engages with the problematic of landscape painting as an art historical genre in modern and contemporary Lebanese art, particularly in the works of Georges Daoud Corm, Boris Novikoff and Daniele Genadry represented in the Saradar Collection. In terms of the constitution of the landscape as a fine arts genre in Lebanon in the twentieth century, this essay situates its development as a belated response to the ideals of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment humanism and anti-Enlightenment Romanticism. By doing this, the essay considers the ways in which the genre acts as a conduit for topographically grounding the nation in modernity, belatedly, while at the same time articulating the nation form as an ahistorical and natural formation. Further, we trace the afterlife of the genre in the post-medium condition when painting is no longer a privileged medium and landscape is conceived as an empirical site that secures the ideal of the coherent and self-sufficient human(ist) subject. In art history, the advent of landscape painting as an independent genre is subject to diverging views of nature by the humanists and romantic counter-humanists of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods. While humanism and Romanticism establish conflicting conceptualizations of the world and nature, and are traditionally regarded to belong to separate periods (with the advent of humanism being attributed to the Renaissance; and Romanticism to post-Enlightenment), nonetheless they are complementary; Romanticism is inextricable from the Enlightenment's Janus-faced contradictions. For Enlightenment humanist painters and thinkers, the landscape figures as a representation of a purposeful nature-of an emphatic force of order, which cultivates human sensibilities and is identified with a concept of nature that is reshaped by, and transformed for, human needs. 1 1 In Philosophy, the most authoritative are Kant's three Critiques where the problematic of nature, cognition and presentation occupy a central role. The English tradition of the "picturesque" as theorized by William Gilpin (Observations on several parts of England, particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland : relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772. 1786) and Uvedale Price (Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794) in the late eighteenth century, views the landscape as a source of the cultivation of human sensibilities.
Anthem Press, 2020
In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa H... more In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondence and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.
Saradar, 2017
This essay engages with the problematic of landscape painting as an art historical genre in moder... more This essay engages with the problematic of landscape painting as an art historical genre in modern and contemporary Lebanese art, particularly in the works of Georges Daoud Corm, Boris Novikoff and Daniele Genadry represented in the Saradar Collection. In terms of the constitution of the landscape as a fine arts genre in Lebanon in the twentieth century, this essay situates its development as a belated response to the ideals of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment humanism and anti-Enlightenment Romanticism. By doing this, the essay considers the ways in which the genre acts as a conduit for topographically grounding the nation in modernity, belatedly, while at the same time articulating the nation form as an ahistorical and natural formation. Further, we trace the afterlife of the genre in the post-medium condition when painting is no longer a privileged medium and landscape is conceived as an empirical site that secures the ideal of the coherent and self-sufficient human(ist) subject. In art history, the advent of landscape painting as an independent genre is subject to diverging views of nature by the humanists and romantic counter-humanists of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods. While humanism and Romanticism establish conflicting conceptualizations of the world and nature, and are traditionally regarded to belong to separate periods (with the advent of humanism being attributed to the Renaissance; and Romanticism to post-Enlightenment), nonetheless they are complementary; Romanticism is inextricable from the Enlightenment's Janus-faced contradictions. For Enlightenment humanist painters and thinkers, the landscape figures as a representation of a purposeful nature-of an emphatic force of order, which cultivates human sensibilities and is identified with a concept of nature that is reshaped by, and transformed for, human needs. 1 1 In Philosophy, the most authoritative are Kant's three Critiques where the problematic of nature, cognition and presentation occupy a central role. The English tradition of the "picturesque" as theorized by William Gilpin (Observations on several parts of England, particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland : relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772. 1786) and Uvedale Price (Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794) in the late eighteenth century, views the landscape as a source of the cultivation of human sensibilities.