The Ministry of Culture's latest mini-museum finds Youssef Rakha hot and bothered, and in the company of a guard Click to view caption Summer outings and where better than the Garden Museum at the back of the Gezira Arts Centre? It seemed a peculiarly appropriate destination despite the heat. Opened last Saturday by Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, it is part of an ongoing and ambitious project to establish a series of "specialised", theme-oriented museums catering to the public, and as the first instalment of the project to occupy an open-air space the museum seemed especially promising for a city that is virtually starved of public parks. As with the recently inaugurated Umm Kulthoum and Abdel-Wahab Museums, however, the museum designation turned out to be problematic: you might reasonably expect a museum of modern sculpture to be both larger and more representative. The ministry's often haywire curatorial policy takes its toll as you realise that, except for Gamal El-Segginni (1917-1977), the oldest of the artists included was born in 1931. But is this a permanent collection? Perhaps the idea behind the Garden Museum is to rotate the very large number of sculptural pieces that must be in storage. In due course such a policy of rotating shows will allow the public access to the full range of sculpture that is undoubtedly held by the state. For the time being though -- and given that the inauguration occurred only last week we can safely assume that the present exhibition is thought by the organisers to be something of a show piece -- the centre's garden presents a bemusing sight. An intricate system of all-too- narrow pathways intersects the all-too-tiny lawn formation, in which the works of El-Sayed Abdu Selim, Ahmed Abdel-Wahab, Mahmoud Shukri, Mustafa El-Razzaz, Saleh Reda, Taha Hussein, Mohieddin Hussein, Ahmed El-Setouhi, Tarek El-Komi, Abdu Ramzi (who contributes four metal sculptures, two of which occupy northeastern and southern corners of the complex), Omar El-Nagdi and El-Seggini as well as the otherwise unidentified Spastian (b.1947) and Bruce Beasly (b.1939) are placed haphazardly, often too close together, and against the glaring sun. Many sculptures point away from the pathways and since one's instinct is not to step over the carefully trimmed hedging and onto the manicured grass -- such is the impact of so many of the city's supposedly public gardens having been turned into enclosures to which the public is not admitted but invited to look at from the outside, from beyond the railings -- these specimens present their own difficulties of display. On what basis were they selected and why are they placed together? How are they meant to interact, visually, with both the viewer and each other? The further along you amble, the more elusive seem the answers to such queries. I had barely stepped in, moreover, when I was accompanied by an eager-to-be-appeased police guard claiming that, since it was not quite opening time, I wasn't supposed to be there. The intrusion, though, proved welcome in the long run: as it turned out, as eager-to-please as he was eager-to-be-appeased, the guard offered to take over my notebook and write down the names of the sculptors, one by one, as I snapped away at their works. The incongruity of their being placed together aside, the sculptures do at least display a range of approaches to the intractable dilemma posed by the very nature of the genre post-Rodin. Ramzi's burnished metalwork is by far the most straightforward and, perhaps as a consequence, the most rewarding. A female fiddler, a pet dog, a small crocodile and a vulture with spread wings display a reductionist figuration alongside an understanding of geometry and distinct sense of natural form, certainly insofar as they can lend themselves to simplification. Hardly individualised, the animals prove amusing in the midst of so much abstraction: the vulture rests across a rusty chimney, while the dog coyly sticks its tongue out, its eyeless countenance pleading for affection. Elsewhere abstraction takes a stronger hold. El- Seggini's figure of a mother and child, for example, reduces the larger of the two figures to a series of voids and masses, hollowing out the central form, in which the child's head sits enclosed, on the palm of the mother's hand. The barrel of El-Razzaz's rifle extends further and further upward, insinuating a twig, only to curve, contorted, into the two-dimensional shape of a human head, shoulder and arm. Shukri reduces the female form to a pair of cones (presumably standing in for breasts) enclosed in an L-shaped structure that accommodates two tapering cylinders (the legs?), while Selim offers a conjunction of human figures in which two hexagons constructed from six human arms are placed parallel to one another at the centre of two anatomically impossible pairs of legs, feet facing inward, and quite definitely the wrong way. The strategy of this artist is to give the viewer enough clues to read the human form, only to subvert it with incoherent juxtapositions of the carefully described limbs. Others, like El-Setouhi, El-Komi and Hussein, opt for abstract constructions, the latter employing a bold blue for his two columns incorporating spheres, surfaces, various indistinct shapes and textures that suggest any number of figurative possibilities. Ambling further along it becomes difficult to concentrate on any one statue; the heat working on your senses, you simply merge into the garden atmosphere. You might glimpse El-Razzaz's human rifle in the shadow of a tall tree lying just outside the fence, for example, and for a moment it assumes a completely abstract quality; the marriage of art and nature that the garden theme implies seems palpable, recalling the Aswan Symposium's open-air museum in which the granite constructions of symposium participants stand amid the natural rock formations. On a cooler day, indeed, the feeling may be one of a rather lush serenity. Yet the overly declamatory "modern" character of many of the sculptures tends to be obtrusive. Abdel-Wahab's organic, totemic take on geometric forms, for example, makes for a particularly garish intrusion amid the greenery of the garden. Reda's hollowed out plinth is similarly distracting: one might have appreciated a more effective insinuation of a tree trunk or its bark; as it is the sculpture clashes hopelessly with the shrubbery. Among the shrubs and flowers most of the sculptures fit snugly into the garden theme. The Ceramics Museum building, the rear walls of which provide many of them with an impromptu backdrop, adds to the picturesque aspect of the experience. Many other buildings, including the Mariott Hotel and the Italian Cultural Centre, remain distractingly visible, however. Adding to the sense of restriction there is a feeling that the space is not large enough to be enclosed by quite so high a fence. In the end there turns out to be respite neither from the heat nor from the guard's unsolicited company. (Asked about his opinion of the works on offer he raises his shoulders in a gesture of resigned indifference, which may well be an informed critical commentary). There are no benches to sit on, no shaded spot in which to avoid the glare, no refreshments nor even a fountain on offer. Perhaps not the perfect culturally oriented outdoor summer venue, after all, but a step on the way to one.
