What is art? Opening Friday night at the dimly lit Arthropologie Gallery in Zamalek, a young addition to the art scene in Cairo, Noodle Soup drew many art enthusiasts to a rather satirical artistic endeavour Exhibiting 35 mixed media artworks lacking in aesthetic and conceptual value, or sense for that matter, architect and not artist Hatem Helmy makes a bold and clear statement: “Art means nothing.” “And I am not an artist,” he says with ardour. His engagement with the arts is purely for the sake of satire. Helmy attempts to make fun of art, artists, and the commercialism of it all, through creating bad art. Helmy dresses a grey cat up in a golden belly dancing costume, its tail caught mid-air in what appears to be a dance move. Another piece shows three consecutive out-of-focus shots of an old lady with large glasses, a shiny headscarf and pearls around her neck. Another canvas flaunts a beautiful lady's profile, her lips red and striking earrings dangling down her neck, with an elephant and a microbus. “Nothing means anything,” Helmy tells Ahram Online. The man walks around the gallery with an indignant smile; he knows the stuff on the wall does not belong there, but yet it is there. The short, plump, curly-haired Helmy speaks over the rowdy crowds rushing into the gallery, including many fellow young artists, and says Noodle Soup is “a satire of everything.” Creating unruly compositions that sometimes surprise you, at other times disgust you, Helmy shatters the rules of art to make a statement about how trivial they are. "What are aesthetics? How can you make up rules of what is art and what is not?” he asks defiantly. The anarchic pieces boast significantly disproportionate prices. Onlookers whisper in humour as they spotted the thousands requested for the canvases. “I produced rubbish art, and priced them ridiculously high,” says Helmy. However, the artist let slip that on Saturday, the artwork would be available at a 90 per cent discount. “It's a supermarket,” he says with a shrug. Helmy says he did not use a specific technique in creating the works exhibited — he made it up as he went along. “It just happened,” he says. Helmy has been working on Noodle Soup for a year and a half. Some visuals he pulled from his private collection and others from the web, a popular source of material for young artists today. Can we call Helmy an artist? “My target was to produce something terrible,” Helmy says. He has certainly succeeded. Maybe the world has got it all wrong. Our expectations are always high, not low, and our dreams big, not small. How about aiming for the gutter, rather than the stars? Maybe then we would achieve our goals, like Helmy has. Two oversized dolls typically spotted dancing at children's birthday parties, one of them Sponge Bob, were guests of honour at this art opening. “Enjoy the show,” Helmy said welcomingly to his guests as he gestured to them to enter the hall. In one of the inner rooms that usually house paintings, people were clustered around racks of posters. As if seeing one copy of the slightly unsettling works on the walls was not enough, you get a chance to buy an A4 copy of the pieces to hang on your own wall. Or use for whatever purpose. In any case, Helmy plugged logos of well-known companies such as Nike, Persil, Lay's and others on copies of his compositions, and sells them as advertisements for LE1 each. Surprisingly, people sifted through the copies and rushed to buy the experimental artwork — I mean work. “It's all random,” he keeps saying. Experimental art at its finest. Except it's not art. And this review probably does not belong in this section. What is it really? What is reality? Helmy's underlying conceptual framework, namely the effect of post-rationalist thought on Egyptian society, revolves around the notion of objective reality, and is reminiscent of modern cultural studies of the 1980s. For the artist tackles the construction of culture and fantasies of reality created by man. Helmy fights popular ideology through art. He attempts to break down the ideology that mediates an individual's relationship with his environment. Moreover, engraved into man's perception, ideology shapes society's worldviews and creates an underlying narrative. It is seldom explicit, nonetheless. “Ideology by definition thrives beneath the surface,” writes Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Maps of meaning and means through which to make sense of the world are laid down by dominant beliefs about reality and popular ideologies. Helmy strives to create a random world in his compositions, where nothing is as it seems, or as it is perceived. Like Helmy, contemporary social theorists have realised the effect of art and culture on perpetuating ideologies and worldviews. In an essay written in 1944 entitled,"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,"Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno suggest that today's culture has become commercialised to the extent that style and originality are perishing, as a flow of standardised products inundate society, dictating lifestyles and realities. Moreover, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness ... even the aesthetic manifestation of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm.” Horkheimer and Adornopresent rather interesting insights into the degradation of the value of art, and that the “culture industry” is to blame for that. The cultural products that infiltrate society today, while heavily consumed, are of poor quality. “Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimise the trash they intentionally produce,” they write. Helmy revolts against the popular principles of style and art, in protest against the constructions of reality in which people exist today. No, Helmy wants to create randomness, while shattering traditional ideas of art. What do you think Helmy would say if he saw a man or a woman gazing up at a painting, appreciating the colour, scrutinising the story between the colours, contemplating context and judging aesthetics, with watery eyes, transfixed in a gallery's spotlight? He would certainly not approve. But guess what art fans were doing at Arthropologie Friday night? Noodle Soup runs at Arthropologie from 29 June to 1 July from 10:00am to 3:00pm and from 6:00pm to 10:00pm. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/46524.aspx
