Bashir Makhoul’s Installation Enter Ghost,Exit Ghost : The Revenge of Images or Imaging

Background: Home, Nation, Politics, Art

Makhoul is a well-known contemporary British artist who received his higher education in England and currently heads the Winchester School of Arts at the University of Southampton. Although the training and position seem to have given him techniques from which to address politics from a specific vantage point, the artistic drive, emotion and objects that are the inner existence and structure of his art all come from his family, his life trajectory and the historical and cultural context that helped form his character.

Before he came to England, his nationality was defined as ‘Israeli Arab’ but not ‘Palestinian Arab’. Just as the Israelis used to own their land, the Palestinian Arabs also owned their land, the name of which was ‘Palestine’. But the name of this land was suddenly changed to ‘Israel’ on 14 May 1948. At that moment, the people originally living on this land were turned into ‘Israeli Arabs’. On this very day, the Zionists got back their land while the Palestinians lost their land, their homeland. From then on, paradoxically, they could only sojourn on their ancestral land as ‘guests’. To the Palestinian Makhoul, this means the loss of ‘identity’. He was no longer ‘Palestinian’ but ‘Israeli’, a member within the ‘Israeli community’. For this reason, it was not just the ‘theft’ of one’s identity (because the ‘theft’ still implies its existence as a whole, though elsewhere); Makhoul prefers to call his case the ‘appropriation’ of identity. The original identity has been transferred and integrated into another identity produced by force. He has elaborated this with an example. He said this identity is like a postcard on which a picture is printed: a typical Arabian food, a ‘falafel’, into the centre of which an Israeli flag is inserted. To us, this flag means occupation, and to Makhoul the falafel with the Israeli flag means occupied Palestine. The appropriated identity tries to reach back to the land to which it was originally attached, but to no avail, remaining a homeless ghost that drifts. To Makhoul, as a born Palestinian, ‘return’ seeks the recognition of and claim for this ‘identity’. This is the first meaning of the ‘return’.

If this identity is found but not attached to the land, it will continue to be like the ghost that usurps the ‘time of midnight’ (Shakespeare, 1982: 168) and has to leave before day-break. It cannot exist in the world under the light of the sun. In this sense, the second meaning of ‘return’ is to look for the land to sustain the ‘identity’. Unfortunately, however, on the second day of the foundation of Israel as a country, 15 May, about 700,000 Palestinians were either driven out of that land or fled for their lives. Makhoul’s parents were part of this group. With no transportation, his parents literally fled to Lebanon on foot. Unable to endure the harsh conditions of the refugee camps, his parents decided to return to the occupied land. But returning was no longer easy. The Zionists kept a close eye on the Lebanon border, and the Palestinians were only allowed to exit, not enter. Whoever violated the rule would be shot. The way to return was filled with hardships and fears. The most unforgettable experience for his mother was the darkness (for safety, they chose to travel at night), silence (also for safety, they did not talk to each other), and thirst (so thirsty that she even had hallucinations and saw mirages) throughout the whole journey back. This is not Makhoul’s experience, since he had not yet been born, but it has given him a strong and long-lasting shock, so ‘return’ has become the theme of his art.

But this does not mean that the ‘return’ to a Palestinian identity and the ‘return’ to the Palestinian land in Makhoul’s work can be separated as two independent themes. Quite the reverse, as they are interdependent themes supporting and relying on each other: ‘identity’ needs ‘land’ to inhabit, and ‘land’ also needs ‘identity’ to give it a name so as to become a country. ‘Land’ without ‘name’ has only a geographic sense, or does not exist for human thought made of discourses. Conversely, ‘name’ without ‘land’ is just memory, history or, in contrast to reality, it is a lonely and wild ‘ghost’. To Makhoul, the situation is neither ‘land’ without ‘name’, nor ‘name’ without ‘land’, but the original relationship of them broken. Getting back the ‘name’ and getting back the ‘land’ are two sides of one body. Generally speaking, these two sides are respectively ‘culture’ and ‘politics’. What needs to be added, however, is that ‘culture’ is just ‘politics’ which has political aspirations and needs ‘politics’ to realize it, while ‘politics’ also means ‘culture’: there is a popular saying that ‘politics’ means ‘interest’, which refers to economic interest most of the time, although there is also ‘cultural interest’ that cannot be ignored. To extend ‘interest’, it should include ‘spiritual interest’, ‘religious interest’, ‘emotional interest’ and all other non-materialistic interests.

Makhoul’s ‘politics’ certainly does not lack the dimension of material interests, but this is not to say that he has joined the struggle of the Palestinians for the right to live, to live safely, and to have a better life. His ‘politics’ in the sense of materiality is mainly manifested as being a spokesman of Palestinians whose survival cannot be guaranteed. This position as ‘spokesman’ unrelated to the material has given Makhoul the discursive dimension of ‘politics’ connected to the cultural dimension, which is the ‘ghost’ that has long haunted Makhoul.

Returning to the topic of ‘return’, the inseparable relationship between returning to land and returning to identity has been illustrated in Makhoul’s photographic exhibition In the Wake of, an installation featuring his grandmother. In this series, he juxtaposes two groups of his grandmother’s photos taken at different times. One is of his grandmother when a young, beautiful Palestinian girl; the other set is of her when an elderly woman whose face shows the vicissitudes of life, sadness, and helplessness. As Makhoul states, she has a Lebanese accent because of her long stay in Beirut. Thus, the meaning of the twofold returns comes out naturally: ‘return’ to ‘identity’ and to ‘homeland’. The artist indicated, while creating this series, that he thought ‘identity’ is not only related to ‘place’ but should also be associated with ‘ownership’:

Perhaps because, as somebody who grew up as a Palestinian in Israel, I was acutely aware of this place being my country and not my country at the same time. Palestinians in Israel are constantly reminded of the fact that they are not in a place called Palestine but somewhere called Israel, a place in which they are merely tolerated. My village was not on any Israeli maps; all of the Palestinian place names had been Hebrewised, and so on. As far as I was concerned, my feet were planted in a real place called Palestine, but everywhere I looked I saw this strange place called Israel. (Makhoul and Hon, 2012: 162)

According to Makhoul, ‘homeland’ is not just a ‘place’ in a geographical sense but, more importantly, it must have something to do with ‘ownership’, which means you must own it primarily in an immaterial fashion; thus, the ‘place’ in the pure geographical sense has the capacity to construct ‘identity’.

‘Ownership’, as with ‘property’, is regarded in the first instance as the right to life as well as some extended rights such as ‘freedom’ in liberal political philosophy, and it can also be the right of ‘subjectivity’: ‘what is a person?’ actually concerns one’s ‘identity’, the definition of which depends partially on what one owns. And what one owns, namely, ‘property’, can either constitute one’s innermost life, or his or her social position, social identity, and psychological identity. According to the Chinese philosopher Lao Zi, ‘ownership’ is nothing but a concept and it exists only as a concept. It is well-known that the nature of a concept is to ‘differentiate’ and that ‘differentiation’ may lead to social conflicts and turbulence. To Lao Zi, the ideal society would be a ‘small country with few people’ who can ‘enjoy sweet food, beautiful clothes, safe dwellings and easy customs’ although they do not have them as their property. In such a society people would live a natural life, with no ‘I’ and no ‘other’, so they would be capable of not ‘visiting each other till they die, even though they live so closely that they can see each other’s lands, and hear the barks of the dog and the crows of the rooster from each other’s sides’. In the terminology of Western philosophy, Lao Zi was opposing the epistemology that splits the subject and the object. Although the ‘ownership’ proposed by Makhoul is also conceptual, it is different from the state that Lao Zi described. It was not that one actually has but does not realize that he or she has (in the case of Lao Zi); it is that one actually has but is reminded of not having what one actually has (it must be supposed that the Israeli authorities allow the Palestinians to live on the land formerly called ‘Palestine’). What Makhoul has suffered is the trauma of ‘identity’ and ‘conception’: he could not conceptually have what he physically has. OPEN IN VIEWER

The concept of ‘homeland’, in this instance, is constituted by its absence. When people live in their own country, strictly speaking, that country does not have to be called a ‘homeland’ and its synonyms such as ‘motherland’, ‘hometown’, ‘home village’, etc. That Makhoul has his ‘homeland’ or ‘motherland’ means first that Makhoul migrated to Britain, and he was no longer a Palestinian but British in name. Thus ‘Palestine’ for him becomes a concept, a memory, or an imagination. Further, the concept of Palestine has been separated by the Zionists from the land it previously signified, and this implies for Makhoul that, in order to keep alive his own concept of Palestine, he has to fight with the re-conceptualization of Palestine by the Zionists. Makhoul has a ‘homeland’, which is a conceptual existence and therefore unstable, and again unstable because the name of his ‘homeland’ has been re-written. In either of these two senses, Makhoul’s ‘homeland’ is a ‘ghost’, an image.

Some may insist that ‘identity’ is not necessarily related to ‘land’. Indeed, there are many examples of owning ‘identity’ but not ‘land’, as is the case today, in most large countries, with many ethnic minorities. Take the USA for example. New York is called a kind of living ‘ethnographic museum’. Many residents there have left their motherland or homeland but still maintain their ethnic identities. To them, identity and land are separated. Take Israel as another example. In the long history of 2000 or so years (from the time when Jerusalem was occupied by the Roman army to the recent time when Israel founded its country), the Israeli identity did not depend on any land. However, an identity not sustained by or directly rooted in land is unstable psychologically, culturally, and in the gaining of practical interests, which is like drifting signifiers without reference to reality. This is the reason, among others, why the Israelis, who had long lost their land, were determined to return to it. Similarly, this is also the reason, though not the only reason, why the Palestinians, who recently lost their land, are determined to return it. It is asserted: ‘All societies and cultures feel that only by inhabiting the land belonging to themselves can people have a sense of security and identity. All human communities need a geographical region to secure their living and to represent their existence.’ With this account, it will not be difficult for us to understand why Makhoul connects the identity with the land of ownership. Missing one’s homeland and thinking to return to that homeland are very reasonable for people who live in exile, in a place other than their own land. This is the ‘phenomenology’ of Makhoul’s identity: if identity is an intentional construction, then there must be an ‘intentional object’, and if this ‘intentional object’ is not a pure subjective invention, then it must be the ideal representation of some real object. ‘Intention’ is a kind of ability; it cannot cook without grain. Although the ‘intentional object’ is not something real, the former definitely cannot exist without the latter. In the same way, in poststructuralism, the reason why the signifier is in the endless mobility of différance (with a double meaning of differing and deferral) is the very existence of an object that appeals but never lets us get close to it.

The Ghost Returns

Turning back to look at Makhoul’s ‘Ghost’ after getting to know his biographical trajectory and art, we can then understand its aesthetic politics or the subtle relationship between politics and aesthetics. Why did Makhoul borrow Shakespeare’s stage directions to entitle his art work? In other words, why ‘ghost’? In the most visible sense, the shifting or magically changing lenticular images seem to be ghostly, haunting from time to time. In order to enhance the airy effects of these ghost-like images, the artist did not use the photographs of real scenes alone but also the photographs of models, made of cardboard boxes. This is to say, the ‘ghost’ is not only illustrated by the image but also by the image of the ‘image’ that is made of the model; thus, the exhibition becomes more illusory and uncertain. One experience that can be shared: when the exhibition visit is over and one reads the exhibition catalogue, he or she will probably find the photographs printed in the book even more enchanting than those exhibited at the installation site. The printed ones bear more of the ‘ghost’, and the reason is that they are the images of an image, the illusions of illusion, and thus reality recedes farther away, blurring.

The Chinese scholar Zhongshu Qian quoted Leonardo da Vinci in his book On Art as follows: ‘Why does a painting seem better in a mirror than outside it?’ (Qian, 2011: 380). With this quote, Qian intends to reveal the nature of art as emptiness, and/or re-emptiness. He commented: ‘Da Vinci’s words are enough to alert those who talk about art but with a theory of reflection’ (Qian, 2011: 380). Art is always respecting ‘emptiness’ but not ‘reality’. Qian cited many poetic examples to prove his point: ‘To see the shadows of hills in the water is very common for poets’ (Qian, 2011: 380). ‘The shadows of hills in the water’ are natural pictures, and when reflected in poems, like Da Vinci’s painting in the mirror, they are the images of the image, quite distant from the ‘theory of reflection’ as Qian understood.

To explain Derrida’s ‘ghost’, Ryan Bishop asserts: ‘A ghost can only be a ghost through a return to the earthly sphere’ (Bishop, 2012: 239). But a ‘return’ perhaps only means the appearance, image and perceptive form of a ghost. And to make the earthly people or viewers aware of the ghost as image, not as real object, will also depend upon its disappearance, its retreat, from this world. In other words, ‘Enter Ghost’ is not a ghost that enters – nobody knows if it is just an image – but ‘Exit Ghost’ is a ghost that exits (leaves) for human beings. For this reason, we are more willing to say that only when it disappears does the ghost become a ghost compared with the real man. Those who only appear are the living while those who only retreat are the dead, but the ghost can both hide and appear. Ghost and image are connected or, simply put, the ghost is the image.

Why are we to call what these images present a ‘ghost’? The reason is simply that they no longer exist: the first is the non-existence in reality, which means lost Palestine. The land was really occupied and its owner changed. The second is the non-existence conceptually. The occupants were not able to move away the land of Palestinians, but they attempted, by way of renaming this land, to remove Palestinians’ memory of the land. ‘Ghost’ means the non-existence in reality, and the actual existence has changed as concepts. But this is not the whole story. On one side is the Palestinian concept while on the other side is that of the Israelis. Between the two concepts, as with what really happens, there arises a seesaw battle of occupation and resistance. Hence, to Makhoul, even the ‘identity’ and ‘former land’ existing conceptually have begun to swing and drift, like a shadowy ghost, because of the conceptualization from the opposing side.

Thus, ‘ghost’ will not be a smooth narrative without hindrance or one that bears the features of a happy logic; the ‘ghost’ is characteristically anti-narrative. Were there some narrative logic to it, it would be the logic of ‘cracks’ with no whys and hows answered. When the viewers move along the lanes or alleys of the exhibition, it is not a narrative progression of one step, one image – ‘enter’ this image, ‘exit’ that image. Rather, images overlap partially and then completely when they change. The overlapping of images cannot be understood as friendly interrelation and interchange; on the contrary, it is the denial and destruction of each other between the two images. As a consequence, the former image cannot ‘have a good end’ when it exits, while the latter cannot ‘have a good start’ when it enters. The sequence of time is broken and, according to Kant, this is the breaking of ‘Vernunft’s sequence’. The images that have lost reason will be disordered and scattered like a ‘ghost’.

The lenticular technology of image-overlapping was employed earlier in the work Return, where Makhoul discovered that the lenticulars ‘allow multiple images in the same field’ so that ‘the images overlapped and merged’ at ‘the surface and the points’. And what most appealed to him was the temporal disjuncture; as he confessed, ‘I preferred them when they didn’t work – when the transitions became stuck – and I was never interested in having a before and after image. I wanted the pictures to be stuck between before and after but to still change and shimmer’ (Makhoul and Hon, 2012: 191). The artist did this because the places reflected by the pictures were overloaded. These images and their meanings were all too familiar to himself and to media audiences; he had to de-familiarize them, with the aim to make each picture no longer be itself, no longer be the counterpart of the object it indicates, but to be changed by another picture and thus turn into partly itself and partly not. In fact, ‘de-familiarization’ does not aim to produce a totally different stranger; it just ‘de-familiarizes’ something already familiar to people, i.e. making what is familiar unfamiliar, but in the unfamiliar there is still something ‘familiar’ though transformed. ‘De-familiarization’ in the eye of the Russian formalists is the basic means to produce ‘literariness’, or broadly, ‘art-ness’. In his Return, Makhoul’s use of lenticular technology was just a result of his consideration for art’s sake: ‘de-familiarization’ could help him achieve the tension and dynamics between the familiar and the unfamiliar. But when it came to Ghost, although there was still the need for ‘de-familiarization’ for the art’s sake, what Makhoul considered further is that the technology of ‘de-familiarization’ will be most appropriate to express the theme of ‘return’: to return is not a reasonable project that can be implemented step by step but is wrapped by many layers of images with differently changing colors or lights, coming and going without leaving any link, just like a ghost. OPEN IN VIEWER

In Hamlet, the ‘ghost’ means ‘revenge’. Makhoul borrowed the word ‘ghost’ and certainly kept its implication of ‘revenge’. But what Makhoul made is art, not politics, although somewhat related to politics. Makhoul’s Ghost is an artistic representation of politics. The theme of return contained in it has something to do with ‘revenge’. Just as in the case of Hamlet, however, once ‘revenge’ is allied with the ‘ghost’, initiated by the ‘ghost’ or even urged by the ‘ghost’, it is no longer a decision, determination, and action. Rather, it is a hesitation, a delay, a setback, or even a being overwhelmed by fear. It is the restlessness confined in the inner world of the heart, and an action, if it can be called this, led by luck and one’s lot, i.e. by contingency. Apparently, Hamlet avenged his father but, strictly speaking, his revenge was not completed according to plan but was an accidental outcome. He stumbled along and encountered a chance for revenge. Hamlet’s ‘revenge’ is always wandering under the shadow of the ‘ghost’. To be (to act), or not to be (to act), that is the question that Hamlet could never actively answer but had to passively hand over to the ‘ghost’. However, the conversion of ‘revenge’ into a ghost or image does not mean that the revenge plan is cancelled: to Hamlet, it is the internalization and emotionalization of revenge; to Makhoul, it is the ‘de-familiarization’ of revenge as art. Suppose we were Makhoul or the exiled Palestinians: when the towns where we used to live and the lively scenes of our past happy life could only appear as images or ghosts, how much internal torment this would cause us. Makhoul has beautifully represented the former ‘land’, but the more ‘beautiful’ the land looks, the more we will miss it and the more painful the missing becomes. The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is a complicated political issue. Here is not the place to discuss it politically, and we are not able to do so, but the trauma this political issue has caused to Palestinians (as well as to Israelis I think) should be considered as an emotional element when politically solving the conflict. Hence, we can say that Makhoul has engaged himself in politics by means of art.

The Ghost Enters and Exits China

When looking at Makhoul’s works, one may easily associate them with Jameson’s definition of ‘third-world texts’. Jameson asserted that ‘All third world texts … are necessarily … allegorical’; to be more exact, they are ‘national allegories’ (Jameson, 1986: 69); ‘the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself’ (Jameson, 1986: 85–6). This view can surely be applied to Makhoul’s texts, which are allegorical and political, whether or not they may be properly categorized as ‘third-world texts’. However, using Jameson’s view to examine Makhoul’s texts should stop with that: when comparing third-world texts with first-world ones, he tried to reveal the distinctive features of these two kinds of texts by borrowing Hegel’s famous dialectics of master-slave; Jameson seemed to give the conceptualization and therefore a universality to the former, but to label the latter with the materialistic and specific that are suspicious of narrow-mindedness and utilitarianism. It is true that Makhoul’s art comes to a large extent from his personal experience, but he takes it a step further to connect it with the collective consciousness of the Palestinian people that he identifies with and belongs to. Even further than this, the experience he has represented not only belongs to himself or the collective but to all of humanity.

Living in Lebanon for so long, Makhoul’s grandmother acquired the local accent. This gave Makhoul pain. The tapes sent by his grandmother were then used for his artistic creation, but never has there come a time when he has finished it. The words in the tapes are filled with blood and tears. His heart breaks when listening to the tapes. A very similar case occurred in Kaifeng, the capital of the Song Dynasty (960–1127), and the most prosperous city in the world then. This city attracted a large group of Jewish people to conduct business and to settle there. Today, after more than a thousand years, they have become Chinese. Apart from certain ethnic features, they are no different from Chinese. They have Chinese names and observe Chinese customs. In a history of the Jewish diaspora, this is the only case of assimilation. A few years ago, an Israeli delegation came to Kaifeng looking for their lost compatriots. When they saw that the cultural identity of their compatriots had been ‘appropriated’ – even if peacefully – tears ran down their faces. This is perhaps a tragicomedy while Makhoul’s story constitutes a pure tragedy.

The cross-boundary and therefore universal significance of Makhoul, at least to China, lies in the fact that he has provided a good example of engaging politics by means of art. In traditional Chinese culture, there is a principle that ‘literature should be used to carry the great Dao’. Its degenerated contemporary form is that ‘Art serves politics’. Since both ‘Dao’ and ‘politics’ have been prescribed clearly, what is left for writers and artists will be the illustration and exemplification of them. Despite many political disasters in China, rarely has art been taken as a form of political ‘exploration’. There is little ‘artistic politics’ in China but too much ‘political art’, which is dominated and taught by politicians. Lu Xun, highly respected by Jameson, is a rare exception. Not as lucky as Lu Xun, Hu Feng, a student of Lu Xun, was prosecuted and jailed for more than 20 years for his individualistic theory of literature and art. In this context, that Makhoul reveals the emotional dimension of politics with his personal experience will be a valuable lesson for Chinese artists and politicians.

There are, of course, many more meanings of Makhoul’s exhibition and artwork for China. For instance, his sense of identity, tragedy and trauma is something that many Chinese artists lack. Due to the differences in culture, history, and politics, time will be needed for a full appreciation of Makhoul in China. Luckily, China is becoming a global country and has a relatively developed global perspective or mind. At the moment, it is working to go beyond the dualism of China and the West and it is learning to understand other cultures outside the dominant China-West perspectives. With such trends developing, Makhoul will definitely find an increasing number of close friends in China.