Gail Kurlansky

Through his paintings, Nabil Kanso demonstrated the institutional breakdown by exposing power structures, penetrating them and ultimately deconstructing them and revealing their impotence. In The Door, he introduces a "juridico-discursive" notion to power, which is based on the rigors of legal logic and death. The authority figure (judge) mounted on a horse in the upper center of the painting plays the role of legislator in whom the pure form of power resides. In a negative relation power can do nothing but say no, as is evidenced by the three decapitated men on the left who are literally an example of the conjunction of legalism and death. The executioner who stands in the doorway above the decapitated figures is the intermediary, and at first glance gives the impression that he carries out the law, when in effect when "confronted by a power that is the law, the subject who is constituted as subject – who is subjected – is he who obeys." Though the executioner too is subjected by his own obedience, the artist has revealed to us through the expression of horror on the executioner’s face that ultimately the juridico-discursive system of repression is not all-pervasive. The door in the painting is always an alternative and coupled with knowledge (the man clutching the book to the left of the executioner) is a schematic of power-knowledge relationship as incorporated in the book, which was at first a vehicle for religion and eventually a Bible for technology. Everywhere in the painting there is the dynamics of transformation, rather than static forms of distribution and knowledge.

The mounted horseman is the legislator, judge, sentencer an executioner; the man with the book is authority because he holds knowledge which alludes to a way other than the juridico-discursive system that depends on repression and negation; the horrified man with his hands thrown in the air is the executioner victim, the observer.

Warring Wings is certainly the artist’s grandest interrogation of power. In this painting he explores to the fullest extent the multiplicity of power and makes aware of its mobile relations. He achieves this by creating a center with no central figure, a contemporary grotto if you will, where four figures replace the notion of a center of power with the multiplicity of mobile relations. Relations of power are not in superstructual positions, that is they do not reside at the top and trickle down as binary relationships between rulers and rules, but rather they exist within the family, institutions, sexual relationships, and throughout the social body. In essence "power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations." The centrality breaks down and we become aware of the entire painting as we realize these figures around the center are the hegemonic symbols of all these forced relations in the painting. "Where there is power there is resistance" and this is evident throughout Warring Wings: the struggles and conflicts seems endless, every figure in the painting is engaged in struggle, they are either imposed upon or imposing, no one merges as the center of power because power does not result from the decision of an individual as it was once supposed in the law of the sovereign. The fact that power of consensus in society and the power of countervailing social forces have never been reconciled constitutes an avenue for the rise and fall and revelation of evil in modern life. This experience of evil puts in a different light the traditional problems of religion. This light is no longer metaphysical but rather direct and experiential as oppression and struggle. In this painting there are also four men mounted on horses, evenly distributed across the picture, above whom are placed four towers with masklike faces. These riders represent their accumulated wealth (i.e. corporations and corporate heads). In this painting there is no deity, no sovereign, no head of state, no center of power, but only the reminder of what history thought power was. Even the masks above the center of the painting by virtue of its placement, indicates there is only a notion of central authority as opposed to real central authority.

On the left side of Warring Wings death (one of the riders mentioned above) appears as a skeleton riding a horse and confronting a figure with raised arms and beard who is being speared at the chest. This figure alludes to the crucified Christ, as he too has the bleeding palms of the Messiah, reinforcing the lack of God and in the modern experience the vanishing of consensus at the center of power. The next breakdown in the center of the power theme is the shattering of the family that takes place below Christ: a gnarling man is leaning over and grasping a screaming woman and her child who are being pulled from what appears to be a man’s arm and part of a head. Themes of repression are acknowledged by the artist through mutilation of the body, as in the juridico-discursive notions of power. On the right side of the painting people are executed by hanging, but a ladder, like The Door, implies other possibilities. The remains of authority ride on horseback above various scenes of death, struggle and devastation. The entire painting is permeated by bodiless heads which represent the inconstancies, discontinuities, and elusiveness of power without consensus, for such power is a mobile force which these heads shelter and facilitate through silence and secrecy. These mobile forces continue in Naked Ghosts; however, the impotence of the repressive system in relation to the individual is delineated by man’s turning back on himself: in evidence is an act of cannibalism taking place in the upper right corner of the painting.

What can be said about death and its connection to power, the theme which so thoroughly permeates "The Split of Life" series? Death so far has been presented as the arm of law par excellence. A law that has reflected the law of the sovereign which in antiquity gave a master the right to take the title of his children or his slaves. As the social body enlarged, the sovereign became head of state and the slave became the soldier, and the sovereign power to kill became less direct. It manifested itself either in sending the soldier to war to defend land or possessions or through its judicial system as punishment. The relations of power and death in these paintings have so far been manifested as forms of reduction and repression, e.g. executions, punishment and war.

Doorways, empty centers, and ladders exist in all of Nabil Kanso’s canvases in this series. They carry with them a message of a change or a shift in the modes of power from a system which controls through repression and reduction connected to the law of the sovereign, to a positive system which aims to promote and execute life and whose connection is to the social body. This shift is most visible in Falling Shades, where the empty center is filled with light, the ladder moves from the center of the light toward the frontal plane and recedes up through a doorway where a leg and lower half of a body is seen disappearing "out." The crucifixion figure in "The Door" has been turned upside down and dives diagonally from the upper left corner toward the center of the picture but does not enter the lighted center. This figure has reached a new terminal point, one which considers death not in terms of the individual body and soul, but in terms of a species. This end of a species, I feel, is the "Split of Life." Man has arrived at a position in the world where he has the power to annihilate himself through his technology and if he fails at this he is faced with annihilation through disease for the first time in history. In this painting Kanso has presented us with a mass of bodies across the bottom looking up –these are not the bodies which reflect murderous splendor of the sovereign, but rather a species considering its fate.

Mankind’s fate is further confronted by the artist through his examination of the "symbolic of blood." In "Between the Walls" the entire canvas is dripping with blood, and like the black net which enfolds the series, the blood net is not accidental, it represents centuries of power. "Power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioner, and tortures; blood was a reality and with a symbolic function." Blood constituted a fundamental value, in the sense that it became a system of alliance in societies that controlled through families, caste systems and orders. It remains tightly connected to the law of the sovereign and is an expression pf the greatest gift (I will die for you), as well as the greatest punishment (you will die for sin).

In Between the Walls, blood is in most repressive state. The prison is constructed. Six crying children lean on a stone wall across the bottom of the painting, and across the top there are six bleeding doves who are trying to fly above the walls which enclose them. A brightly lit barred doorway, with black birds trying to fly in and out, fills the center. A ladder twists up the left side of the painting camouflaging the sixth child and connecting it to the sixth bird. Here humanity is surrounded by towers of powers (walls) and its soul is arrested in flight, despair emanates from the doorway, and everything seems submerged in sanguinity (the law). The repressive state is broken by the ladder, which at first appearance connects the body with the soul, but in reality leads to a row of bleeding brains flanking the top of the painting. Here the artist reminds us that there has been in some situations a break in the law and the power-knowledge complex has succeeded in the place. Man’s self-awareness as a species is acknowledged, and with self-awareness the possibility of split in knowledge as absolute harmony that is never quite reached by man and knowledge at the service of universal chaos and disharmony. The two knowledges ironically feed upon each other in spite of their opposition. The first is represented in the western tradition by Plato’s Republic and its sequels, the second by the totalitarian structures so prevalent in science fiction.

This "Split of Life" (power-knowledge/juridico-discursive) constitutes Kanso’s view of a paradox at the heart of Western civilization and colonialism. Wherever the West goes this paradox goes with it. The power-knowledge complex is viewed as a positive system, in which life is prompted rather than repressed; it employs regulation of species around the norm. The "law" is no longer the "law," rigid and repressive in its norm, but instead it is legislated and enforced around a norm for a "social body" rather than an individual and for the "good" of the social body. As Michel Foucault says, "a political ordering of life not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self." But body is also connected with the development of capitalism. Population control, demography, the "evaluation of the relationships between sources and inhabitants," all become issues. As Hanna Arendt has so clearly stated , the politics of advanced Western nations have become merely "kitchen politics." In essence "what might be called a society’s threshold of modernity has been reached when life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question."

The seriousness of the condition of mankind is frighteningly apparent in the folly of the "Masters Rhythm" The authority figure now issues his decrees from a piano. The light from the doorway now emanates from the center of a circle of bleeding brains. The heads which flanked the bottom of the Door and Warring Wings have metamorphosed from heads with no bodies to bodies with no brains. They dance hysterically on the right side of the canvas unable to unite with their bleeding brains, as the political processes have rendered them helpless, a role played by the maestro below them. Even biotechnology has been undermined in this painting.

The seriousness of the condition of man has become so apparent in the "Split of Life" that it seems important to reexamine the "sacred" and the "profane." Human techniques, such as pedagogy, medicine and most of all psychoanalysis have brought "the flesh down to the level of organism." They carry within themselves the same paradoxical split that results from the inseparability of suppression of life from the promotion of life. The new realms of the sacred and the profane must now be defined in terms of the ironic core of Western civilization: evil always enters into life in its effort to transcend itself. This idea was hidden in the harmonious structures of Western metaphysics, but the presence of evil at the very threshold of religion reappear with every direct reconstruction of experience – as non Western are forced today to undertake.

How the artist presents the human body is the most telling vehicle to a new sense of soul, and its transformation from the metaphysical to the communicative level. In Transgression, Kanso focuses on the process of transforming sexual desire into discourse and brings into focus the place of sex within techniques of communication and absence of communication as made explicit in pschoanalysis. The only clothed woman in the series of paintings is placed in the upper right of the center in Transgression. She is a heavily draped 15 ^th century Madonna who brings with her connotations of confession, spiritual exercise, asceticism and mysticism, all concepts closely related to psychoanalysis as a human technique. She is surrounded by unclothed women. Her clothing is what identifies her purity and virginity, and intensifies the other’s nudity and consequently sin. The large breasted women in this painting are the epitome of sensuality, and their sinfulness is demonstrated by positioning them outside the family unit. On the left side of this painting, mother, father and child all cling to one another and are symbols of secular sexuality, expressed and purified through the traditional symbol of the church. In this painting the manner in which sex is discussed and practiced is defined ecclesiastically; however, the family plays a dual role: it is also indicative of sex as human technique. The artist deflates his god-like image of man in the center of painting with his ladders. Kanso’s ladders are an unflagging reminder of the multiplicity of power.

Nabil Kanso has pointed to the serious issues confronting man. The artist is not in search of codes even though he points to economic, political, social and cosmological issues, which reside in the realm of cause and effect relations. He is interested in life in its reflective state as it is presented to him through his confrontation with the boundary situations of death, love, suffering and guilt. It is the organization of these boundary situations in their reflectiveness, which constitutes his poetics. It is also these boundary situations in their various and paradoxical form that have shaped Western civilization. Consequently, I reiterate – you cannot separate the painter from his paintings – to do so would be to deny him his communicative existence. This communicative existence seems at the same time intertwined with the tragic character of Western religion and ironically, still tragically connected with it. Thus his communicative poetics, much like the creative attitude of a non-Westerner, is predicated on a profound human kingship with the West and an amazed expectant detachment from it. From this circle he derives his extraordinary power of expression.