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DIFC, Reflections on Art in the U.A.E.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. 

In a recent article for Vanity Fair—now banned in the U.A.E.—A.A. Gill summed up the most tempting viewpoint (for the cynic, anyway) to espouse about Dubai. "Dubai," Gill writes, "suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest... [It] has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai." The problem is, I don't know anything about money. My Chinese server, Jake, at Gourmet Burger in the mall beneath one of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) buildings didn't know there were galleries across the street. And the DIFC behaves like a city in itself, oblivious of the larger city around it.

DIFC. Photo by Adam Levinson.

The DIFC—Dubai's "gateway for capital and investment"—houses several of the United Arab Emirates' leading art galleries—The Empty Quarter, Quadro, XVA, and others. On my first visit, I stared blankly at a few photographs, some urban art videos, and graphs, then spent three hours having coffee. My friend's brother's girlfriend, a gallery assistant at Cuadro, told a story about an Emirati patron who described his living room and furniture in an attempt to find the perfect $75,000 painting to match.

'1306 - 08' from Wounds. Ali Taptik. At Quadro.

As one digs deeper into the national character... one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Kevin McCoy, the resident artist at NYU Abu Dhabi, and his wife Jennifer had an installation at Postmasters gallery in New York called "Abu Dhabi is Love Forever" that received a great deal of press. When I was helping him set up his independent, apartment exhibition, "No Customs," during the Abu Dhabi Arts Fair, McCoy talked about what he saw as a "missing middle"—the poor students who drag themselves from wine cuppie to wine cuppie in Chelsea, the 'artsy' establishments, the galleries that sell pieces for under four figures, but my half-hearted Thursday in Chelsea this June suggested something else was missing, something more illusive. After my year in the U.A.E., all the iterations of the question "How long can this shitty party go on?" grew nauseating. And the answer at the bottom of every inquiry I'd been digging through the sand to reach was an hourglass. Give it time.

"I Press Help to Search for a Home" from I Command. Gita Meh. At Quadro.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion.*

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*All quotations taken from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America

Bob Holman, Nathalie Handal, and Christopher Merrill

read at a poetry event here. For a while I was worried we would have more sponsors than guests. The major players were the Iowa International Writing Program, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, and the Institute. The first two are sending poets and writers on global tours. The embassy brought them to us. The Institute paid for the pizza.

Chris Merrill

Christopher Merrill is the director of the Iowa International Writing Program.

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal edited two anthologies of contemporary Middle Eastern and Eastern poetry,

Chuck Close's daguerreotype of Bob Holman

and Bob Holman started the Bowery Poetry Club. They were escorted by two diplomats who arrived with "Forty Years of Friendship" banners that they erected before the reading.

After days of censorship, the poets were relieved—Handal was thrilled—to hear that they could read whatever material they liked. Merrill, the patron of the group, kicked off with a poem inspired by Jorie Graham. He opted for works that were very long, and his final poem, inspired by the line "Our last mojito in Havana," had a humid, tropical density. Merrill's soft-spoken, reserved reading style is so mellow it's lulling, but it doesn't conceal the energy the poems have on the page.

Handal treated us to a poem she described as "PG... but R here" and an a cappella rendition of a song inspired by Lorca and Leonard Cohen. She had a compelling energy. One student told me, "I loved thinking about whether she was having an affair with any of the other poets she was traveling with."

Holman is an actor who plays a garrulous, self-reflexively snobbish role—"You translated Pessoa!?"—which kept us laughing all night. He gesticulated from behind his buffalo horn glasses and read a poem about 14-year-old Picasso that ended "Every morning I wake up, give myself a big kiss, and paint a masterpiece. Then I have a coffee," but my favorite line was, "No more! No. More." (Listen to the whole poem below.)

Afterwards, I confessed to Merrill that I was accepted into the Workshop. This secured me an invitation to dinner at the Holiday Inn. (P's Pessoa translations had a similar effect.) In our group of ten, at least five ordered Osso Buco—poets hungry for marrow. P asked the U.S. diplomat—who had invited along his 300 lbs. (140 kg) Egyptian boyfriend, Hashish—if he had kids at home. It startled me that the view of the goings-on could be so different from across the table. On our end, the discussion centered around whether P should get a live-in nanny for his children, a housekeeper, or, in the extreme case, shoulder on as is. Between bites of beef tips, the diplomat and I talked of our mutual hometown: Erie, Pennsylvania.

Here's a full (though muffled) recording of the reading:

Buy Bob Holman's latest.
Buy Nathalie Handal's latest.
Buy Christopher Merrill's latest. 

FREE PIZZA

Ways of Seeing John Berger

The gaze of the ambassador is both aloof and weary.

I'm in front of you. I can see you.

Why are these pictures so vacuous and so perfunctory?

It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm 

to the man whom she imagines looking at her...

The sky has no surface and is intangible...

Dec. 26th 1864

May 1st 2009

"The toothpaste tube is growing thin. The contact solution ran out yesterday, and I cut my nails again: these are the markers of passing time. The semester is almost over. I've two papers to write, one to revise, and an exam, so today I finished Moby-Dick. It feels good to read a book again, a real book, a long book. I bought Nicole a mango, flowers, and a slice of cake. We ate the cake today; it's gone. The mango needs time to get ripe before she can eat it. The flowers will decay. All things that will vanish soon. Things that last cost more money."

Photo from about that time, used without the permission of Kaela Rae Jensen

Names to Avoid

Palindromes, like Hannah, Anna, Elle.

Male/Female doubles, like "Pat" or "Chris."

Foods: Clementine, Ginger, Olive.

Those with an abstract correlative: Destiny, Faith, Charity. 

Those with an objective correlative, such as Penny or Candy.

Those anglicized from a non-Latinate language: Sujin, Ingyin, Ye, etc.

Calendar months, though alluring for their temporal quality—April, June, August.

Same for days of the week: Wednesday.

Anything with a Biblical origin: Esther, Rachel, Ruth, Eve, etc.

Confederate states, like Virginia or Florida.

Cities in Europe: Florence, Verona, Paris.

Those which derive from astral bodies: Starette, Moonette, Sunshine.

Those with accents, whether grave or acute: Beyoncé or Marlènne

The overly simple: Jane, Ann, Jill, etc.

Any that end in an "ah" or "ee" sound, such as Christina, Amanda, Becky, Suzie, etc.

Those with diphthongs, like Louise. 

Two Ideas