2015 - The Traveller with Pen in Hand

The metaphor of the border can serve as a useful guide for the journey of writing about the Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui. This border would be the familiar one that we encounter on our own travels – a river, a sea, a valley, a mountain – or else an artificial line with a manned checkpoint separating two sides of a road extending between two countries.
          Mahdaoui’s experience is a vast physical and imaginative map that confirms the existence of natural and artificial borders within art itself and the arts as a whole. Journeying along this map, as through this book, tests the veracity of these boundaries and can establish them on solid foundations. These are the boundaries between calligraphy and drawing; drawing and painting; figurative painting and abstract painting; Arabic calligraphy and Japanese or Chinese calligraphy; line and form; and form and the structure of the artwork. These boundaries, and others, indicate points of contact and separation, similarity and dissimilarity.
            As with any expedition, this journey requires supplies, dictionaries, and expertise, particularly when the artist is able, with a single glance, to assemble diverse and distant scenes into the space of the canvas and, with a single stroke, extend a line between what is present and what is absent.

 

One can speak of “Mahdaoui’s corpus” – his body of work and the literature about it in several languages, Arabic and French in particular. These include studies by scholars, critics, artists and even texts by Mahdaoui himself, delivered at conferences or workshops. These shed a unique light and provide an internal perspective on his work. There are also several exhibition reviews, introductions to books in many languages, and his collaborations with artists from other fields and countries.

These help to provide a historical and artistic assessment of the transformation of his own experience and facilitate the study of the relationship between his art and the historical context on the one hand, and the aesthetic context on the other.

            Perhaps the most important of these references is Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui,1 a collection of writings that includes studies on Mahdaoui, his interviews, and his collaborations in Japan, Germany and elsewhere and is not restricted to his art alone, but also investigates his relationship to other arts, especially other traditions of calligraphy.

            Mahdaoui’s artworks number in the hundreds, “Even more!” as he tells me. The works are diverse, with different styles of execution, but they all share a huge passion for the various articulations of the Arabic letter. The artist did not leave a single medium, including experimentations with calligraphy on the human body. The works are of varying sizes: from the monumental – as on the fuselage of some airplanes of an international airline, on the façade of a building or on a tapestry in an airport reception pavilion – to the small and the very small, as in books, or on a camel’s bone and on a variety of papers ranging from ancient Egyptian papyrus to Japanese rice paper. The variety of media is breathtaking: canvas, vellum, papyrus, Arches paper, silkscreen, books, posters, design, aluminium, brass, melamine, drums, textiles, embroidery, tapestry, ceramic, wood, jewellery, stained glass, and architecture.

            Therefore, we could say that “Mahdaoui’s corpus” requires a roadmap that can guide us through his rich and open-ended experience. A document in the artist’s own archive reveals his internal classification, which divides the work into groups: Collages, Concrétions, Graphic studies, Gestuelle, Vibration, Parchment paper, Carré Rouge, Parchment, Calligrams, Blue and Sepia series, Bandera, Hidjaz I & II, Melamine, Ghubar, Papyrus, Labyrinth canvases, Ink on canvas, and Arches vellum paper.

           This list points to varied artistic experiences classified according to their experimental nature or period. It also becomes apparent that this classification depends on several criteria: the medium the artist experimented with, the varied colours of his works, or the expression of certain meanings through specific forms (such as Matahat or labyrinths), and others. These provide the first indication of his artistic processes and their many directions; processes that are visibly manifest in the formation of the line and his experimentations with it, depending on his medium, his tools, or intended goal.

           These classifications are merely indications, and are not sufficient to determine the outline of Mahdaoui’s artistic path, for they disconnect it from the artist’s own preoccupations and historical and aesthetic time.

           Mahdaoui’s first exhibition abroad was in Palermo, Italy, in 1966, before he completed his studies at the Accademia di Sant’Andrea in Rome in 1967 and before he enrolled in the École du Louvre in Paris in the Department of Oriental Antiquities. In Tunisia, he had already participated in several group exhibitions, the first of which was in 1961 at the Maison de la Culture Ibn Khaldoun in Tunis. In the wake of the pioneers of Tunisian art and the École de Tunis, which still had clear French influences, Mahdaoui’s early participations enriched the Tunisian art scene and took it in new directions.

           Although Mahdaoui’s early experiments require further documentation and study, the documents in his archive strongly suggest that what became the hallmark of his later work – a passion for the letter – had its decisive moment in the mid-1980s, a period rich with experimentation. Looking back at his work today we see that this period came to define his artistic output, even though he would go on to experiment in other directions. The artist himself clearly says, “My decision to embrace the letter was a personal decision of cultural politics. In the beginning it was a choice”.2

 

Mahdaoui calls one collection of his works Labyrinths, which is an appropriate description of his entire artistic experience. Indeed, his works seem easy and accessible, but interacting with them is like entering a labyrinth of endless meanderings and impasses that lead nowhere. However, his work is a dizzying array of theophanies of beauty. Whether produced in 1985 or 2013, in whichever year we choose to appreciate and study there is always the sense that we are encountering something familiar or being re-acquainted with something already known. This intimacy soon dissipates, however, on discovering that the line is no mere line, that the forms do not amount to a painting, and that colour may quickly dissolve in a multitude of shades, leaving nothing but the contrast between the white background and the black trail left by the pen.
           It is not just a labyrinthine journey in the realm of Mahdaoui, but also in the realm of art itself, for any scholar of his work is confronted by questions at the heart of contemporary artistic and aesthetic experience: What is the relationship between script and form? What is the relationship between form and painting? What is the relationship between painting and figurative painting? What is the relationship between script and colour? Does colour require the presence of black or another colour? Is it a single colour or many? What defines the need for it? This questioning can go even further in another direction: What is the locus of the art and its beauty? Is it there before our eyes, in the work waiting to be appreciated, or does its appreciation presuppose a specialized background knowledge or authority to decipher its meaning?
           There are other questions too: What is the relationship between these artworks and Arabic script? Are his Khutut (calligrams) related to the Aqlam of Arabic calligraphy (i.e. its historic styles) or are they unrelated and, if so, how? Do they diverge to constitute new Aqlam altogether or merely to depart from existing ones? If they depart, what do they achieve and how do we define them?
           What if I were to ask another kind of question? For example: In these works, what is the relationship between calligraphy on the one hand and form, figuration, European figurative art, and abstraction on the other? Can it be incorporated into them naturally? If not, can it be separated from them entirely? If so, why are Mahdaoui’s works exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo? Why are they taught in the same classes as Hebrew calligraphy?
           These are just a few of the questions that a reader, or scholar, can ask. These are questions provoked by the work itself, particularly the extraordinary pleasure it gives and the luminosity of its presence. However, the pleasure of appreciation propels the scholar to raise further questions. Indeed, thinking about the work produces a pleasure of its own to accompany the pleasure of the eye. Have these two pleasures always accompanied one another or are they specific to modern art?3
           This leads us to study the two sides of the artwork, like the two faces of the same coin: the first raises questions about what is configured on the canvas and the second explores what links it to its referent or source in the hope of answering the question: Does it recall the referent and abide by it, or does it adjust and transform it?
           Readers will notice that I borrow modern linguistic terms (and from the twentieth-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure specifically) such as “the two faces of the sign”, “the signifier”, “the signified”, and the “referent” to study Mahdaoui’s work. This is natural, given that it is based on the materia prima (the alchemist’s starting material) of language. These are the three basic units for the study of any language in modern scholarship, which prompts a new question: Are these notions adequate for the study of Mahdaoui’s work?
           Mahdaoui’s work is not innocent in the claims it makes on us. It is attractive and flirts with the eye, drawing it in, stimulating and provoking the mind, demanding the viewer as many multiple and open-ended interpretations as there are trajectories for its lines, which incessantly meander, twist, and turn. As such, Mahdaoui’s work invites a sense of familiarity and closeness, but this is just an illusion. Each of his works is a unique expression or statement consisting of assembled elements that require deconstruction. Where do I begin in this enchanting labyrinth?

 

Figurative artists choose their specific material based on its appropriateness for their subject. This applies equally to abstract artists who choose geometric forms or specific colours – black alone for Pierre Soulages, or the contrast between black and white for most calligraphers. The scholar will not find it difficult to identify the materials of Mahdaoui’s work. He never departs from the graphic form of the Arabic language itself. What changes is the background – for instance the sea in some works, especially those from the mid-1980s. Mahdaoui always returns to the same domain and explores the infinitely suggestive forms of the letters without monotony or repetition, like an inexhaustible font.
           However, the investigation becomes more complicated when we seek to identify the two linguistic “faces” of his work (the signifier and the signified). The sign (the lines of his work) always points to Arabic (its origin) without any doubt or hesitation, a fact recognized even by those unfamiliar with Arabic. It is an implicit rather than explicit recognition, though. The configuration of lines in his art does not produce Arabic letters per se but their similitudes, or traces of them.
           As soon as the letter strays off its familiar alphabetical form, the two faces are altered, for if the signifier has maintained any resemblance to the graphic form of the Arabic letter, the signified has already lost all capacity for signification. Indeed, we can recognize in the artist’s works the extended movements of the letters alif (like the letter a) or mim (m), the circular movements of nun (n), ba’ (b), or tha’ (th), or the isolated and double dots found above or below certain letters. We can even recognize the line that in Arabic moves from right to left, or the overlap between two adjacent letters. However, this familiarity is an illusion because their resemblance to real letters is deceptive. The alif is not an alif and the nun is not a nun, nor does the sentence spell anything meaningful.
           This overlap between two presences elicited by the graphic form of the Arabic letter, or the signifier, is absent in the signified. All the thousands of lines that the artist has derived from “his alphabet” of forms do not amount to anything linguistically meaningful. This is what led me to write in my book Al-Hurufiyya al-‘Arabiyya: Fann wa Hawiyya that “Nja Mahdaoui severs any link with meaning, with a long history of communication in which the letter has served the purpose of conveying meaning from times immemorial... his canvas is a language without a single letter”.4
           The result of our linguistic reading leads us to conclude that the artist disarms language, which raises the following question: What is the relation, then, between “his alphabet” and art? Does what has happened to the signifier and the signified on the one hand and signification on the other apply equally to art in general? What is the relation between “his alphabet” and the alphabet of script, particularly Arabic script? These are important questions, which stem from a need to study the relationship between the alphabet, its referent and what the artist produces in the language of art itself.
           These questions can be answered by investigating the relationship between Mahdaoui’s art and Arabic calligraphy. When we analyse examples of Arabic calligraphy in the mosque of Uqba ibn Nafi in Kairouan, Tunisia, in the Alhambra Palace in Granada, or in the main mosque of any Arab city, we notice a link between these calligraphies and Mahdaoui’s art. So, has the artist returned to the Aqlam of Arabic calligraphy, to its well-known styles developed at the hand of its great inventors?
           I like to use a new term when describing Mahdaoui’s work: the fragment (or Majzu, in Arabic). In Arabic this expression is used to describe a part of a whole, such as individual lines of a poetic verse. It can also be used in geometry and algebra, and I have found it adequate to describe the material or substance of the art I study, for this substance is a fragment of its source.
           This is what visitors to the artist’s exhibitions can notice, sensing a recognizable “atmosphere” of Arabic calligraphy, which invites further investigation and reference to the styles that inspired it. We see that his curving lines refer to the familiar Arabic script of Nasta‘liq, which is common in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India but not in Arab countries (even though this style, according to some scholars, is of Arab origin). Similarly, there are other obvious styles in his work, such as the variety of Kufic scripts, which can underline our point: the artist has sought to achieve something unconventional, and even when he does return to Arabic scripts he does so in a completely new way. For example, note the position of the line itself, which is supposed to be straight (except in the Nasta‘liq style). Even when Mahdaoui’s line does maintain its horizontality in some works, in most of the rest it becomes a vertical line (as in Chinese or Japanese calligraphy), a broken line, an inclined line or even turns upon itself in confusing ways, forcing the eye into a visual maze or spiral.
           Perhaps what needs further study is the relationship between the artist and the pen, for in many of his works he abandons handmade pens and resorts to industrial ones. However, these differences do not negate the fact that Mahdaoui’s point of departure is always the Arabic script. He is continually drawn to his country’s culture, which had a tradition of writing and scripts well before the Muslim invasion of North Africa. Tunisia has known the Phoenician script since the founding of Carthage in the tenth century BC, and traces of this language remain in the form of rock inscriptions. It is no surprise, then, that the first Tunisian Arabic calligraphy is the Kairouan Style, for this city became the basis for the Arab expansion into North Africa and Andalucía, and then became the capital of the Aghlabid Dynasty after its cessation from the Abbassid Caliphate. Tunisia was also exposed to the Andalucían and Córdoban styles, among others. Mahdaoui returned to using parchment paper just as his Kairouan forebears had done since Byzantine times (in the famous Kairouan Korans, for example), and we can find many derivations from the Kairouan Style and Tunisian Mushaf al-Hadina in his work.5
           Mahdaoui’s work is not only linked to calligraphy but also to medieval Arab-Islamic ornament. Some of his “fragments” are derived specifically from the kind of ornamental geometric decoration found above and below traditional calligraphy, which enhanced its beauty and splendour. Likewise some of his works rely on decorative patterns, especially those that use architectural forms to structure the composition. Some of these architectural forms are derived from Persian architecture, specifically the polychrome mosaics, while the structure of others is derived from the circle, at least from the configurations found in medieval ornament.
           Then there is the subject of Mahdaoui’s overall composition, which differs from work to work, particularly between one group of works and another. Sometimes these take the form of silkscreen, at others square or rectangular canvases, or the form of an old manuscript or burning letter, reminiscent of traditional paper-production techniques. It is also worth mentioning the relationship between the act of drawing and its background, for his stroke descends upon it like a line over pure white paper or else is configured over the material, like a brush over a pre-prepared canvas or painting. The measurements of the artworks also vary in appearance between the architectural, the paper-like, or the sculptural. In all cases, the work has a structure, or is divided into an internal structure, like a paper with two sides.

 

Calligraphers, particularly those of the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic traditions, have never accepted any similarity between their art and painting.
           When we consider the images found on the walls of cathedrals, churches, and monasteries, it is difficult to separate them from the material on which they were applied, particularly frescoes. The images constituted an open illustrated book from which the vast majority of illiterate believers could absorb a simple cultural and religious education. This is what Umberto Eco suggests when he describes the images of medieval cathedrals as “a TV programme of static images. It provided people with everything they needed to know for their daily life and eternal salvation”.6
           Historically, the distinction between regular writing and a specific script, in Islam and Christianity, was linked to the requirements of the court or clergy, which elevated writing above the image. Therefore, in addition to this popular culture of cathedral images, there was another culture, a knowledge culture based on the interpretation of manuscripts. This culture also applied to the ruling classes and educated members of society, who took great interest in calligraphy, which they were at pains to distinguish from painting. The medieval monks’ obsession with rare translations and manuscript illumination was vividly depicted by Umberto Eco in his novel The Name of the Rose.
           This historic separation between calligraphy and painting, in favour of the former, finds its most powerful expression in the Arabic-Islamic context. After all, the Islamic religion prohibited the image in the context of worship, thereby lowering its status while elevating the culture of reading and calligraphy. This was clearly evident during the Islamic Caliphate, when the specific religious and political need for a “book” upon which to base its nascent political authority gave calligraphy a historical and religious basis and in turn produced specific cultural and social experiences: the growth of courtly culture and scholarly and literary circles. This also applies to other older cultural experiences, such as the book culture and distinct calligraphic styles of the Buddhist tradition.
           Therefore, it can be said that the distinction between the various arts, particularly in previous eras, cannot be understood from a single perspective nor judged by pre-established criteria, for these cultures had their own aesthetic criteria for determining the beauty, quality, and causes of pleasure in art. This is precisely what the German sociologist, philosopher and political economist Max Weber articulated in a different context when he referred to the notion of “preferences” in his discussion of polytheism, which suggests that a culture’s options cannot all be captured by rational categories; rather they fall within what he calls “axiological” (meaning universal ethical and aesthetic) choices. This perhaps explains why Japanese culture chose the tea ceremony as its primary art form, whereas Arabic culture chose poetry. There are likewise other “preferences” in various cultures.
           When we consider the Arab-Islamic context for example, we find texts from the Umayyad and Abbasid periods in philosophy, literature, theology, and Sufism that provide a wide palette of criteria that distinguish between the imitators and the innovators; improvisation and recitation; music and “ecstatic utterance”; the geometric and the decorative; the one and the many; and similitude and dissimilitude.7 These are criteria that express the Arab/Islamic “production of decorum and beauty” as the Ikhwan al-Safa put it. Is calligraphy an art, and can it be naturally included in what we call the “fine arts” in the European experience?
           This question does not arise if we return to Arabic texts on calligraphy and realize what social and symbolic status it had acquired and the care and attention given to it. Numerous books and letters on the subject have been written by philosophers and poets alike, and the sumptuous collections of the Ottoman Sultans show it was held in high esteem. Calligraphy was not only employed in the art of the book – such as the Koran and its calligraphic expression – but also in the distinct scripts and signatures required by the ruling classes such as the Khat al-Mu’amarat style and the Ottoman Tughra, which was used by the sultans as their official seal. This is best expressed by the maxim, “Beautiful calligraphy gives truth more clarity”. This experience of calligraphy in Islam is only rivalled by similar developments in Buddhist cultures such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
           Art can be evaluated on its own internal compositional elements rather than some external criteria that inevitably elevate one tradition above another. For example, we can start with a purely formal approach valid for the study of Arabic calligraphy and European painting alike. In Arabic calligraphy, the line-cum-letter assumes a form or even a myriad of forms (with occasional geometric and vegetal motifs), so it has a formal structure; before the appearance of abstraction in Europe, a formal structure likewise underpinned the static landscape and dynamic human forms of figurative paintings.
           Reading artists’ books or their interpretation of calligraphy reveals that great effort was made to first define the “formal” property of the script, both in regards to the letters, letter by letter, and the corresponding pens, pen by pen. What is the relation between the shape of the alif in its upward rise above the line and the mim in its downward movement below the line? What are the similarities between the curves of the ba’ (b), the fa’ (f), and the qaf (q)? Some men of letters developed very refined distinctions. For example, in his Epistle on the Science of Writing, the tenth-century Shirazi essayist Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi specifies the measurements for configuring beautiful letters. He speaks of the “meanings of the lines”: “clearly delineating” all the letters; “whitening” the middle spaces in the ha’ (h), kha’ (k), and jim (j or g); “curving” the waw (w, u, aw), fa’ and qaf letters; “lightening” the faces of the ha’, ‘ayn (the ‘), and ghayn (gh or g); and clearly articulating the nun (n) and ya’ (y, i, ay). He writes that this “preserves their harmony and balance”, maintains the horizontality of the line, and prevents the letters from crowding each other.8 Al-Tawhidi is expounding measurements for creating a beautiful script in which attention and care must be given to the form of each and every letter. Even when he discusses the “meanings” of the script, he is specifically interested in the beauty of form. After all, he discusses categories of letters that share structural similarities. For example he advises the calligrapher to pay heed to the fact that the ha’, kha’, and jim have specific formal requirements given that they all fall within the middle of the word; likewise the calligrapher must give the waw, fa’ and qaf adequate circular forms. There are many more topics of interest in the various Arabic epistles on calligraphy found in classical sources.
           This profound interest in letters reached even loftier levels with philosophers and Sufis, who saw them not merely as structural forms but rather as existential structures that correspond to the structure of the cosmos. In their Epistles the Ikhwan al-Safa say that, “Irrespective of language, nation, medium or style of execution, the origin of all letters is the straight line, which is the diameter of the circle, and the curved line, which is the circumference of the circle”.9
           Therefore, one can speak of a diverse and rich tradition of books, experiences, reflections, and practices of calligraphy. They all start with the fact of writing but soon move to formal, intellectual, aesthetic, and religious issues. That is why a favourable treatment of calligraphy or figurative art is deceptive and has no sound basis. If the scholar is to produce something productive from a comparative study then he is better off comparing Arabic calligraphy with European music, as I have done elsewhere.10
           European music makes a distinction between the composer who writes the music (like Beethoven) and the performer who brings it to life (like Yo-Yo Ma). This is a valuable lesson for distinguishing between those who invent Arabic scripts (like the medieval scribes Ibn Muqla, Ibn al-Bawwab or Hamid al-Amidi) and those who execute it according to its rules with varying degrees of skill (the calligraphers). This is because calligraphy, like music, has two aspects: the rules that can be invented and the implementation of them.
           Calligraphy is clearly similar to music in this sense, therefore it is problematic if calligraphy and its rules are brought under the scrutiny of European painting and its rules. The rules required for the proper practice of calligraphy and for determining the excellence of one calligrapher over another are necessary, but are a hindrance if applied to painting or for determining the painter’s excellence.
           With painting the situation is different, for the aesthetic criteria used to determine an artist’s excellence are determined by the subject imposed on the artist. Leonardo da Vinci’s book, A Treatise on Painting, provides many examples of this, such as the drawing of a cloud, the edges of a curtain, and many other rich examples in what seems like a practical manual and diary of his experiments with subjects and techniques developed within Renaissance art.
           We may therefore say that Arabic calligraphy moved in the direction of developing rules of pure form dictated by the nature of Arabic script, whereas European figurative painting established rules of visual forms developed from the observation of human and natural forms.
           Therefore, comparing calligraphy to painting, as many Arab and Western scholars have done, has no sound basis if we keep in mind the unique experience and historical, social, and ideological commitments that accompanied the development of each of these arts. A similarity did arise, but it came much later, when European art became universal, from the Romantic period onwards, and began incorporating forms from other artistic traditions. Orientalist Art, with its interest in foreign natural landscapes and exotic human forms, is the most salient example. However, experimentation with pure form reached greater heights in the twentieth century at the hands of Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, and included experimentation with Arabic calligraphy and Asian styles.
           All of this requires that boundaries be drawn. We don’t often pay attention to boundaries, but they separate and unite simultaneously. A boundary is merely a line that demarcates without entirely separating. The clear boundary between text and image made sense in medieval times, when illiterate believers had their cathedral images and the cultured classes monopolized manuscripts, but the rise of the culture of the image (now a global phenomenon) and the growing literacy rates in Europe blurred the boundary between text and image.11 This requires yet another historical and artistic exploration of Mahdaoui’s experience.

 

In 1914 the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire demanded that fine artists consider him their equal when he declared, “And I too am a painter!”12 This is understandable when we see that his visual poems, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–16), conveyed meaning partly through the spatial arrangement of the verses. One can write a poem about murder in such a way that the verses are dispersed across the page in the shape of a gun.
           The French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé had pioneered this approach in 1897 in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard in which the typographic distribution of text on the page itself was the medium of expression. Such experiments began, therefore, with the poets themselves, who belonged to the Liberal Arts rather than the Fine Arts.
           During the same period in Italy, the Futurist “Words-in-Freedom” movement emerged. Its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti characterized its purpose in 1912: “After the birth of free poetry, finally there came the role of words in the realm of freedom”. The beginnings of this movement were not artistic though it used artistic means to achieve its goals. Its members were poets, first and foremost, but they set out nonetheless to create “poem-paintings”, to depart from the industrial era’s monotonous, uniform book production. The objective was a literary one: to create a singularly unique poem – a uniqueness only achievable through art – rather than a standard book.
           One critic cleverly pointed out that this style deconstructs the unity of the book in favour of the freedom of the page; the unity of the page in favour of the freedom of the verse; and the unity of the verse in favour of the freedom of the word. In pursuit of this goal, the poet experimented with the tools of art: colour and form. This is what Marinetti described when he said, “The alphabet has a special printed significance for each one of us and is a graphic expression of our nerves; it bears the trace of our hand muscles”.13
           In France, Italy, Belgium and other countries, this direction found many new and diverse expressions and possibilities, which created a special space for the blurred relations between calligraphy and painting. In these experiments poetry seeks to become like painting and painting seeks to become like poetry, testifying to a desire to eradicate the boundaries between modes of expression designated as separate and different according to Western classifications. It is not surprising, then, that the Belgian artist Henri Michaux explored Arabic and Asian calligraphy before experimenting with his own script. He visited Morocco in 1929, then China, India and Indonesia between 1930 and 1931 before venturing on his own calligraphic path in 1937.
           Tunisia also has a place in the early development of European abstraction; a fact often overlooked by art historians. What is worth exploring is why the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and his German student and girlfriend, the artist Gabriele Münter, and the German artist Paul Klee and his friend, the artist August Macke, came to Tunisia and toured its cities for inspiration. The trip had an obvious impact on their work, particularly the Arab script, which must have suggested abstract forms to them. This visit cannot be placed in the same category as previous Orientalist tours, many of which turned into mere curiosity and a fetish for everything foreign. What these artists painted does not fall under the category of Orientalism but rather another category altogether. The geographic proximity between Germany and Tunisia and the relative safety provided by the presence of the French may have encouraged these kinds of travels. As all accounts of their travelling, particularly those of Kandinsky, were lost, we may never be able to know the other motivations that lay behind such journeys.
           Between 1904 and 1908 Kandinsky (who had left Moscow for Munich in 1896 with Münter) embarked on a number of journeys through Italy, Tunisia, and France, before settling in Murnau in Upper Bavaria. After these artistic and touristic trips he began drawing two groups of works – Improvisations and Compositions, in both of which he pays special attention to the internal over the external world. Rather than paint familiar forms his brush invents new ones, which he discovers as they are being configured. The artist distances himself, then, from mimicking the external world and produces artworks that have legitimacy in their own internal structural relations.
           The birth of abstract art in the first decades of the twentieth century led to the most significant developments in Western art since the Renaissance. After perfecting the representation of livings things and objects, which the Renaissance painters aspired to master, artists now played with these realistic markings to the extent that they mutilated them, transformed them, and effaced them completely, as we find in Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism.
           With Paul Cézanne, the artist abandoned perspective, which had determined a fixed point of vision and distance from the canvas for the subject; instead he invited the subject to familiarize himself with the compositional form of the painting and to participate in its internal movement, thereby transforming the observer into an accomplice when, previously, he was a judge, even though he may have been a fair one. With Cézanne the artist felt the need to create a visual object that was independent and stood alone according to an inner necessity, as Kandinsky put it.14 Realism was no longer the goal, as it was for the Renaissance, nor a pretext, as it was just before abstract art. Rather the goal became a purely plastic one or, as Apollinaire once called it, a “pure painting”.15
           There are a number of paintings by Kandinsky from 1904 to 1910 that show this transformation. They are impressionist in that they record scenes from the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud or Murnau in Bavaria but reveal two co-existing and contradictory tendencies: the Kandinsky who is careful to register nature in oil as if it stood right in front of him, and the Kandinsky who is trying to capture the scene with utmost sensitivity and taste even at the expense of the natural appearance of things.

 

Kandinsky passed through Tunisia and admired the Arab-Islamic art in mosques, private homes, and illuminated books, particularly the diverse relations between line and line, curve and circle, and square and triangle in the forest of shapes characteristic of Arabic ornament. Kandinsky stopped over in Tunisia, unlike Eugène Delacroix, who stayed in Morocco. The two journeys were different: Delacroix was content to absorb the motifs of Moroccan art to embellish Western painting, whereas Kandinsky used the vocabulary of Arab-Islamic art to reconfigure it and move with it in an entirely new direction. Kandinsky left behind just a few paintings from his Tunisian sojourn, including Arabs I (Cemetery), Arab City and Arabs III (Eastern Suite). There is also a drawing made in Tunisia with the evident influence of Arabic calligraphy, now in Munich.16 Even his subsequent artworks were influenced by his experience in Tunis, as evidenced by the geometric forms that by now had come to characterize his painting.
          I am not giving this visit more attention than it deserves, rather I am merely shedding light on it and its possible or definite influence on his artistic vision, especially given that Kandinsky did not leave behind any texts that could explain his own artistic metamorphosis. The Tunisia visit was not arbitrary or merely touristic; rather, he meant to discover an “other”, and one of a religious nature at that.
          Kandinsky’s admirers, including Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque did something similar when they searched anthropology museums in Paris and elsewhere for foreign “signs”. What they discovered in museums, Kandinsky encountered on a daily basis during his Tunisian visit.
          He was the first “Oriental artist in the West”, as historians and art critics have referred to him. He is an Oriental artist, not an Orientalist like Eugène Delacroix and his followers. No other artist was given such a title, not even Henri Matisse, who visited Morocco several times, more than Kandinsky or Paul Klee, where he painted several now famous works. Matisse even made good use of Arab-Islamic ornament to minimalize the composition of his canvases, which I find in many of his paintings of dance, with their interplay between oil painting and ornament.
          Kandinsky executed one painting in Chinese ink that dates to 1938, which he called Arabesque, which describes its content. During his stay in Paris he made a large number of paintings in Chinese ink, based on the pure relation of lines. The evolution of Kandinsky’s work eventually led him to the discovery of the geometric and broken line.17
          Did Kandinsky advise Paul Klee and August Macke to visit Tunisia after they became good friends in 1911? We don’t know the answer to this question but what we do know is that Kandinsky and Klee were very close. A single wall separated the rooms they occupied in Munich! Klee describes his early relationship with Kandinsky in his diary: “Kandinsky was determined to gather artists into a special group. I came to feel a deep trust in him. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind”.18
          These two émigrés in Munich wrote the first letters of the book of abstraction. Their artistic sensibilities had, by then, set sail to a different wind altogether in search of different origins for art. Even after they had visited Tunisia, neither Kandinsky nor Klee had any real knowledge of Arab-Islamic art, as evidenced by their writings.
          However, it is in their art, not their writings, that we find these influences, which have organically merged into their art without them being aware of it. Isn’t this what Klee says when he writes in his Tunisian diary: “The echo of it resonates deeply within me and it shall persist even if I haven’t registered it immediately”.19 In Tunisia, Klee created remarkable, poetic, eloquent paintings and made one of the most beautiful statements about abstraction when he wrote in his diary, “Colour and I are one. I am a painter!”
          We can deduce from Klee’s writings that he did not have a sufficient understanding of Tunisian civilization, nor its various arts. It was merely Africa to him, at once mysterious and magical. After his first visit to Italy in 1902, he confessed that he had not come back with a classical taste but rather a desire to ignore Europe in order that he may become “almost primitive”. He was in search of new civilizations and fresh air to arrive at that primitive virginal state that can give birth to new possibilities. He did not have any clear ideas about Tunisia, its popular arts (such as carpet weaving and its colours, which inspired him), or Arab-Islamic architecture. Klee wanted to be himself and be ignorant; he was against the Western academy and its emulated methods and techniques. He wanted to be liberated from tradition, religion even, and be open and prepared to engage with and be influenced by artistic traces, signs and markings from non-Western civilizations. This is what the novelist and sociologist Jean Duvignaud said when he distinguished between Klee and Delacroix’s paths: “Klee does not subscribe to this hierarchical view of mankind. He does not search for a justification for his existence. He does not seek to take anything. He lets himself be taken. He is a gaze”.20
          Like Kandinsky, Klee discovered the line: the form of the alif and the ya’, the building blocks and the building itself. The Tunisian walking before the wall in one of Klee’s paintings is not a mass or body but a composition of lines that overlap, crisscross, and mesh with the lines of the wall. Does not Klee, here, speak of a relationship between the geometry of the city of Tunis and the geometry of the canvas itself?
          The influence of Klee’s Tunisian visit on his art did not fade but developed with potency and transparency over the passing years. What was so extraordinary about it was that Klee knew this would be inevitable at the very moment of his shock encounter. As he said in his diaries: “The true gain is deep within me but it is prepared to burst forth and manifest at any moment”.
          We can say about the “Arab influences” in his paintings that they left a deep impression that was both manifest and hidden, which made his works both similar and different from medieval Arab art. Klee did not have a conscious or scholarly knowledge of Arab-Islamic art but he had a feeling for it and interacted with it nonetheless; his gentle soul embraced it and a concordance developed. Regardless of the cultures they come from or the various styles they adopt, artists meet in the crucible of the soul. The Arab-Islamic artist may have penned this or that Koranic verse for religious purposes but he did, nonetheless, know the pulsation of beauty, as did Klee after him, when he balanced between the lines in search of their artistic relationship and doubtless experienced what Kandinsky did when he spoke of the “vibration of the line”.
          Does this mean that Arab-Islamic art led to the development of abstract art in the West? Absolutely not! Does this mean that Arab-Islamic art is abstraction itself? Absolutely not! Klee and Kandinsky were different despite deceptive similarities. They met, engaged, and stood counterpoised as equals. Is this not the essence of dialogue? Is this not the more beautiful encounter, especially when it is intuitive, and deeply felt, rather than driven by empty and hollow slogans?

 

What about the relationship between Arab artists and abstraction? Is there a natural and spontaneous relationship between them and calligraphy? Did they merely move from one medium (paper or manuscript) to another (the canvas and the etching)? This requires further study of the historical and aesthetic relationship between abstraction and the use of the Arabic letter in painting.
          In L’abstraction dans la peinture tunisienne,21 Ali Louati chooses precisely those works of Mahdaoui that do not connect with his Hurufiyya experiments and emphasizes that Mahdaoui began as an “abstract” artist. Then he compares the way in which Mahdaoui and the Tunisian artist Néjib Belkhodja use the line: Mahdaoui achieves with cursive calligraphy what Belkhodja does with rhythmic geometry. In addition, he defined calligraphy in the Arabic version of his book with specific and unique qualities not found in the original French text, in which he falls back on established and outmoded French narratives of Arabic calligraphy. This suggests a degree of confusion and fretfulness but also an overlap between Arabic calligraphy and European abstraction, a relationship of neighbourliness and distance.
          The issue takes yet another form when Louati considers the beginnings of an abstract school in Tunisia. He identifies the origins of this school, in the 1960s–70s, as an objection to academic restrictions, including the commitment to literary references, and an attempt to develop a pure visual art, which meant the independence of the artist in terms of his subjects and aesthetic criteria.
          Louati reveals one difficulty faced by the Tunisian school of abstract art, for its artists had to deal with more than one problem when they moved towards abstraction, because the art culture of Tunisia was heavily influenced by French art culture, even many decades after the French had left. Another factor that complicates the question is the acceptance of a different kind of abstraction, one inspired by the Arab-Islamic heritage, which even local artists and critics considered as belonging to the dustbins of history rather than to modern art.22
          The two artists in Louati’s study, Belkhodja and Mahdaoui, each exemplify this new move. Belkhodja dedicated himself to developing a form of abstraction derived from the geometric structure of the old city of Tunis, a structure that resembles the shape of letters (ashkal hurufiyya), specifically the Kufic style.23 Mahdaoui returned to the coastal town of La Marsa overlooking the bay of Tunis and to his own personal experience with “wavy colours”, elements that provided him with a measure of independence with regards to his aesthetic background.24 The sea was his point of departure, whereas Belkhodja’s was the Arab neighbourhood of Tunis (as opposed to the more recent European areas). In short, both of them departed from life itself, not from the academic models that were considered the standard in art. Looking at Mahdaoui’s work in the 1980s, we can observe a new interplay between the sea and the letter in the structure of his work, which prompted me to once write: “A wave of writing. Writing from a wave. A sea of ink. Ink from the sea … Nja Mahdaoui swims through the sea of language like a fish. A longstanding intimacy”.25 The Mauritian poet Édouard Maunick said something similar when he wrote, “We cannot write the sea nor spell fire”.26
          In his book Patrimoine culturel et création contemporaine en Afrique et dans le monde arabe, the Tunisian writer Mohamed Aziza attempted to make sense of Mahdaoui’s art but from a different angle, namely that of Hurufiyya. After studying Mahdaoui’s work he considered him to be among those artists who freely derive inspiration from the Arabic letter. The book divided the artists into three different groups: the first obey the Arabic letter without any change; the second are free in their appropriation of the Arabic letter; and the third approach the Arabic letter as any other plastic element for structuring the painting.27
          Mahdaoui and Belkhodja’s preoccupation with the local sign agrees with what Ahmed Cherkaoui began in Morocco when he turned to the Berber sign or what Mohammed Khadda and the Awsham group produced in Algeria. Therefore, what Mahdaoui did with the Arabic letter is part of a wider historical and artistic context. While Mahdaoui returned to the pen, leaving the brush and chisel behind, the Moroccan painter Farid Belkahia abandoned the use of oil on canvas in favour of other media (leather, bronze) and other artists abandoned artificial dyes in favour of natural and local colours (henna, saffron).
          Each in their own way, these artists preferred to critically re-appropriate the issue of the boundary in the single art form or that between arts of different cultures. This re-appropriation served the purpose of critiquing perspectives and judgments that, under the impact of the cultural hegemony of colonialism, had elevated some arts, devalued others, and, in some instances, severed relations between certain arts.
          This is what the French Islamic scholar Jacques Berque called “finding or restoring personal specificity” when discussing different poetic and plastic expressions in the Arab arts. “We might be very critical today in regards to the appearance of Western technology in Asian figurative art … let us set aside this weariness. Every culture seeks to restore its personal specificity in the midst of all this cultural interaction and in spite of these means”.28 This could take the form of symbolic or physical re-appropriation. After their independence from the colonial powers, many countries found it difficult to achieve this, but this is precisely what artists succeeded in doing or tried to do within the limits of their experiences.
          This is what Mahdaoui did after his early abstract period. Shortly after completing his purely academic art education, he immersed himself in calligraphy, a familiar world found in the mosque, the Koran, and on handcrafted objects. What made things easier for Mahdaoui and other similar artists is that the boundaries had already disappeared between script and form and between calligraphy and the image in Western and Asian art, both old and modern.29
          Mahdaoui’s immersion in Hurufiyya made him one of its pioneers and brought him together with the theorist of Hurufiyya, the late Iraqi artist Shaker Hassan Al Said, in an exhibition in Tunis. This led art critics to recognize an immediately identifiable Mahdaoui “signature”. He had carved himself a path that only became more defined with experience and brought him recognition among artists, not only in Arab countries but also abroad, as is evident by his numerous exhibitions and the presence of his work in many museums and art galleries around the world.
          Some scholars have criticized Hurufiyya art for its all too evident linguistic nature, but Mahdaoui distanced himself from this tendency from the very beginning. If others have found in some of the Hurufiyya experiments a loose appropriation of the logic of the letter and of painting, our artist, though at times bound to the script and the painting, departed from them. He forged a path based on a deep cultural and theoretical knowledge of the logic of both calligraphy and painting, creating spaces of encounter and dialogue through what the hand, connected to the eye, performs over the white canvas with no precedent to draw on, prompted only by its desire.

 

Aziza, Louati, and other Arab and foreign scholars – including myself30 – have tried to situate Mahdaoui in a specific group of Hurufiyya artists. However, they were unable to penetrate the heart of Mahdaoui’s diverse and rich artistic experiences. This is what I will try to explore with the following question: The traditional calligrapher’s point of departure is usually a sentence or text that he transforms according to a certain style, but is this what Mahdaoui is doing?
          The answer to this question does not require much knowledge of calligraphy or a special invitation from the artist to observe him at work; rather it is enough to take a quick look at one of his works to realize that it consists of a specific structure whose point of departure cannot be clearly discerned. Though the work springs from an unknown point of origin, it nonetheless coalesces into a clear, and often seemingly designed picture. There is no beginning or end to it, like the line in Arabic calligraphy in its horizontal swoop, vertical rise and fall, and twists and turns. It is also difficult to identify the “tip of the thread”, to borrow a common Arabic folk expression, because of the constant repetitive patterns. It becomes hard for us to follow the line: where it begins, where it breaks, where it turns upon itself, and where it ends.
          One focused look can capture the entire work; a characteristic also shared by classical painting with its vanishing point and focused visual field. This is what I have called “the eye’s moment”, which means that it is not the eye that initiates looking, as with reading a text, but rather the eye is gathered and concentrated as if it were receiving or encompassing one single thing occupying its gaze. In this case, the subject receives the artwork as a complete form rather than a continuous repetition of lines, breaks, colours, and signs. This is what happens with medieval calligraphy for it is perceived in the first instance as a single form and then it is read out as letters, words, and sentences.
          This is all the more true with Mahdaoui’s work because he provides a number of material and technical conditions that increase its formal quality. Unlike the medieval calligrapher, he does not take the letter, sentence, or book as his point of departure so that he may draw it again; rather he starts with a white space, which covers a large part of his work, and builds on it. He maintains the rhythm of the paper or manuscript as a structural basis for his work, preserves its white space, and derives his stylized letters from it, or with it. Unlike the medieval Arab calligrapher or the classical painter, Mahdaoui does not depart from a study of the letter in order to draw but draws so that he may study what he has drawn.
          As such, the movement of the line upon the white canvas becomes an act of drawing out what is latent within its hidden darkness; a visible manifestation of what is in-visible. This may lead some to give this experience a Sufi or mystical dimension, a manifesting of the invisible. This may be called writing the breath. The movement of the line is bound to the breathing of the artist and the movement of his hand, which holds the pen, oscillating between the impulse it carries in its “memory” and the impulse of what it can spontaneously create without prior experience or conception. The French author Jean-Yves Loude writes that “Nja Mahdaoui requires the breathing technique known to Sufi orders so that the beautiful execution of his work is not ruined by the slip of the pen. His method is to place before the eye the image of perfection”. Loude links this to a similar practice common among medieval Zen masters and Tibetan lamas.31
         If it is difficult for us to plunge into the depths of the artist’s movements – their origins and meanings; we can at least study the forms present in the works and pay close attention to their unique characteristics, which may reveal the artist’s desired effects. For when form is presented to the eye, it is not received in fragments but as a whole; however a process of deconstruction is required to study it carefully. What the eye sees is configured by specific material elements according to specific executions of shape and colour.
         We have already spoken about the fragments of Arabic letters that constitute the “matter” of the artwork. This matter is constituted either by fragments of Arabic scripts or by the movements of the artist’s hand with no external impulse whatsoever. This “matter” often moves in geometric spaces – such as squares, rectangles, and circles – traced out by the ruler or compass. There are, however, other “free” spaces that intentionally emerge above the surface of the material medium. Calling them “fragments” is relevant for the viewer, but not for the artist who executes them, for his movements are continuous and do not build up the work piece by piece.32
         This is what characterizes Mahdaoui’s work and what the observer immediately notices when he sees the elements of the artwork move in a space of their own; a space that structures the artwork and is specific to it, rendering it impossible to deconstruct or isolate any one of its elements.
         The work is a presence that radiates with a dynamism that spreads like a flame. One can say his hand has rhythm, like an expressive dance. While an expressive dancer would wear white clothes to contrast with their surroundings, the hand of the artist moves over a white canvas, leaving a black trail. The result of this encounter is the luminosity of black and our delighted eyes.
         The medieval Arabic thinker Abu Hayyan Al-Tawhidi spoke of the music of calligraphy, the way in which the movements of the letters assume various forms: fast, long, repetitive, overlapping, embellished or relaxed. These lead the eye to a state of ecstasy that is often associated with music. The repetition of musical sound (or its variations in a single Maqam, or moving from one Maqam to another) corresponds to similar harmonies found in other artistic forms. This is what Ibn Khaldun suggested when he discussed sight and sound together: “Agreeable sensations of vision and hearing are caused by harmonious arrangement in the forms and qualities of the things seen or heard. This impresses the soul as harmonious and is more agreeable to it”.33
         The harmony that one finds beautiful in musical tones is the same harmony found in visual forms for extending the voice obeys the same rules as extending the line. What is harmonious in geometry is likewise beautiful to gaze at: there is the pleasing curvature of the nun, the elegant posture of the alif, the beauty of the sin (s or sh) as it slides across the line at the end of a word, and the glorious manner in which the alif overlaps with an adjacent lam (l).
         Indeed, Arabic letters have certain “receptivities” based on their shape and arrangement: height, horizontal extension, angle of inclination, the thickness and thinness of the body of the letter, and whether the letters are connected or disconnected. This is what the medieval master calligrapher Ibn Muqla refers to when he discusses the five “appearances” of the line: vertical, horizontal, oblique (from upper left to lower right), inclined (lower left to upper right), and curved.34
         The image of the tree best captures the manner in which these “appearances” combine into shapely forms. This, perhaps, is what led some to suggest that scripts have a genealogical tree, an image that has given its name to several calligraphic styles: al-Muwarraq (foliated), al-Muzahhar (floriated), al-Rayhani (myrtle-like), and al-Nirjisi (daffodil-like), among others. These appearances emerge out of the nature of the letter itself and the manner in which the letters combine linguistically. However, they soon begin to blend together in new and different ways, propelled by the artist’s treatment and creativity. These treatments have values, as it is expressed in the plastic arts, such as similarity and difference; fitness and inversion; contraction and expansion; overlap and contrast; thickness and thinness; and coil and breakthrough. These can be seen in the similarities and differences between the ra’ (r) and waw; the qaf and sad (s); the ha’ and ’ayn; and many other possibilities between letters (or parts of letters), which the artist can preserve or modify, establishing a sense of familiarity or estrangement. One also notices the purely formal qualities of parts of the letters, such as the circular forms (ha’, ’ayn, fa’, qaf, etc.) and longitudinal forms (alif, mim, lam). This applies equally to the numerous possibilities of the dot: above, below, or in the middle of the letter, in addition to the two dots above some letters. These follow various rhythms of repetition and variety; consistency and bifurcation; reduction and intensification; and extension and elongation.

 

I have called my latest collection of poetry On the Tip of My Tongue (2013), which is preoccupied with similar concerns to Mahdaoui’s works, which we could even call On the Tip of My Pen, for Arabic and French (and English for that matter) combine, rather than separate, that which enunciates (lisan/la langue/the tongue) with that which is enunciated (lisan/la langue/the mother tongue). The title also suggests that the speaker may forget what he knows, knowing that he knows it, without being able to remember or enunciate it. This suggests that languages possess an “unconscious” that does not require psychoanalysis to reveal its existence. The poet forgets language when he calls upon it, for he does not remember it; rather it remembers him, for it is never absent. It is always there in the folds of his words, amplifying their expressive power beyond what he may have attempted.
         This is a valid description of Mahdaoui’s experience but with the important difference that the artist, unlike the speaker, does not stumble when initiating his work but rather begins with a series of preferential choices. Mahdaoui departs from the possibilities of Arabic script but excludes the styles and other criteria that characterized it historically. He begins the work without hesitation (unlike the speaker, who is often beset with hesitation and stutters). He begins with what is not available to Western figurative art or Arabic calligraphy and takes it in a new direction. However, what he initiates originates from the “tip of the pen” – from the necessities of the line itself – without his explicit knowledge or intention. We may thus speak of the line’s unconscious – it is the bearer of materialistic, artistic, and aesthetic demands that always accompany it.
         To continue the analogy between poetry and Mahdaoui’s painting, I would say (as in a previous poem of mine): “Words do not arrive, they just travel” and “Words do not convey definitions; rather they suggest possible meanings”. Mahdaoui’s pen inclines and twists, despite its occasional sharp vertical and geometric forms. It has a freedom, or rather the right to wander in the darkness of the white space, drawing out forms or configuring them. Though the artist is the master of his language, the blackness at the tip of the pen wanders according to its own desire. This is similar to the question that Japanese calligraphers give to their students to receive their diploma: “You have little time, your pen has a few last drops of ink, what will you draw?”
         Whether consciously or not, whether from memory or desire, the hand inclines, twists, collides, and turns upon itself like the movements of the soul. Echoing Mahdaoui’s own experience, Ali bin ’Ubayda says, “The pen is deaf but hears the silent supplication; it is mute but expresses the intended meaning”.35
         Though Mahdaoui may know his work’s own point of departure, he never knows its destination. Rather, he discovers it himself. Therefore, it can be said that he violates one of the principles of traditional Arabic calligraphy, for he moves away from the established styles, criteria, and rules of Arabic scripts. This is what the Lebanese writer Salah Stétié meant when he said that Mahdaoui’s art “writes dreams through us. Rather more accurately: It dreams us”.36
         The eye senses a familiarity and strangeness when encountering his work, especially those who do not know the shapes of Arabic calligraphy. The act of perception draws on the repertoire of familiar linguistic visual forms and scripts. What we have seen before informs what we see in the future, though only up to a certain point, after which it no longer counts. This is particularly true of Mahdaoui’s work, for the eye is not drawn by what is familiar to our visual repertoire but rather by what constitutes the work itself, with its unique structure and unique vision. Mahdaoui himself says, “If I leave behind the verb and the word, I try to make the evolution of the graphic form nobler”.37

 

Though we have already considered the origins of abstraction and its links with Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic calligraphy, it requires further investigation. We can sum it up in one question: Was there abstraction before Kandinsky?
         Art historians investigate Western abstract artists without ever defining abstraction itself. The scholar who searches for such definitions and studies the earliest experiments with abstraction discovers two tendencies: one is bound to the natural and human material world; the other is bound to planes, lines, colours or form. Indeed, abstract art consists of works that either reduce and minimalize the material world or create purely formal structures. This first type is related to representation, the second to something else entirely. In light of this, where do the various historical styles fall? There are, as it were, three known experiences: primitive art (cave paintings), Asian calligraphy (Japanese and Chinese), and Arabic calligraphy.
         In the caves of Graja in Spain, archaeologists found paintings from the Stone Age that resemble the animals and human figures painted by Spanish artists such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies. There are similar works from the Stone Age or Bronze Age elsewhere in Europe and Asia, which, though non-representational, we cannot call abstract. This is because we distinguish between the symbol and the abstract sign. The symbol points to abstraction only superficially, for it possesses an accepted and agreed-upon meaning and fixed form. The symbols from the cave paintings are similar to cuneiform letters or hieroglyphics in that they are lexical or have a pre-determined cipher. Abstraction is merely the point of arrival in these primitive paintings, not the point of departure.
         As such, hieroglyphic and cuneiform languages with clear decipherable meanings may be considered the earliest forms of abstraction known to mankind, but only in the negative sense (they do not mimic nature). Linguistic signs, on the other hand, do not give visual form to the objects they refer to but merely signify them through an arbitrary relation between the sign and its meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure alerted us not to confuse the symbol with the sign. For the symbol, the relation between the signifier and the signified is necessary. It is natural to refer to justice with the symbol of the scale (not the tank). On the other hand a linguistic community can agree not to give to the linguistic graphic sign for justice any relation to justice itself. It is important to point out that nothing in these paintings suggests that they were actually paintings. Comparing them with paintings might be a mistake. What early man left behind may have been a form of self-expression or, equally, information.
         We do not have this problem with Asian calligraphy, either in its early Chinese form or in its later Japanese expression. Instead we have an art that stands alone, an art that is characterized by refinement of the highest degree, practiced only by those few who have been able to master its techniques and methods. A comparison is therefore possible, but I will not venture a historical survey of Asian calligraphy. Rather I will restrict myself to exploring the artistic dimension of this art and its degree of abstraction.
         It is relatively easy to demonstrate the abstract character of Asian calligraphy, at least in the negative sense, due to the nature of the language itself. But what of the manner in which the language was executed?
         According to an ancient Chinese book, there are “seven secrets” to the art of calligraphy. The horizontal line Heng is like a long cloud that is suddenly cut off; the point Tien is like a rock falling off a ridge by the sea; Pie, which inclines from left to right is like the horn of a lobster; the vertical line Che refers to an ancient meadow in full bloom; the constricted circle Wan refers to the bow; and the inclined Na, which moves from right to left and from top to bottom resembles a wave; the seventh secret is Ti, which refers to a pine.
         These are indeed secrets but they refer us back to nature, which gave them their first form. We also notice this when we study the possible transformation of the letters, all 32 of them. They may take the form of a red bean, curled line, bird’s beak, tiger’s tooth, dew drop, bird’s wing, dragon’s tail, a pelican moving on the water, a joyful butterfly, a dragon curled upon itself, or a singing bug. The author of this book also warns the calligrapher to “Avoid the rat’s tail” and “the cow’s head”; to “be weary of the broken branch” and the “crane’s posture”.
         The Chinese calligrapher Wang Hi Tche (321–379) addresses his fellow calligraphers thus: “When you have finished writing a letter, you must assume the posture of a caterpillar eating a leaf, a baby frog swimming in water, a warrior holding his unsheathed sword, and the elegant stance of a young man”. A contemporary writer, Sowo Tsing, wrote that the letters Ts’aa must look like silver bows, the form of a frightened eagle, or birds preparing to fly with their wings half-folded.
         The French writer and scholar René Étiemble was not mistaken in his book, L’Écriture, when he wrote about the “confusion” that results on combining two arts, Asian calligraphy and European abstraction, for they are not similar.38 Étiemble was addressing Western artists who were using Asian calligraphy to renew Western abstraction. They were dazzled by the seemingly spontaneous movement that is found in the Asian scroll. The Belgian poet-painter Henri Michaux’s experience in this field is very suggestive: he did not know Chinese or Japanese, or the history of the language or its calligraphy for that matter, but realized that there is a necessary relationship between the product (the canvas) and the original script (the forms of the letters). There is a difference between the appearance of the Asian script to someone unfamiliar with it and its meaning to an Asian. For the foreigner, the canvas may seem like an amalgam of graphic abstractions, whereas in reality they are material transfigurations of letters. It is beside the point whether Henri Michaux was familiar with the principles of Asian calligraphy or not. Even if he had known it, he deliberately focused on the appearance or the “spontaneous” movement it could offer. Michaux was searching for what could liberate the artist, or rather what could liberate his hand from the censorship of consciousness so that he may spontaneously express himself. This is what he found in the Asian experience. He spared himself nothing, including drugs, to induce this invigorating psychological state. The Asian experience offered him a tool to accomplish this. What about the abstraction of Arabic calligraphy?
         The Ikhwan al-Safa say: “Know that many geometers and scientists think that the three dimensions of height, width, and depth have an intrinsic existence. They do not realize that this existence is within the soul itself, which is like matter in which their image is imprinted. The faculty of thinking has extracted it from feelings”.39 This is a useful quote, for it helps us to discover an aesthetics not based on the sensible image but rather on what has been presented to thought after it has been extracted from feelings (what springs forth from or dwells in the “soul”), possessing the power of thought or abstraction. This means abstracting an image, form, or shape from what is ephemeral and sensible. This kind of abstraction seems closer to European than Asian abstraction, which represents the natural world.
         The beauty of Arabic script is of the second type of abstraction discussed earlier, namely the purely formal. If we follow what has been written and said about Arabic calligraphy in traditional sources, we find evidence of its strong formal quality. Ibn Muqla made the alif the basis for all other letters, a point echoed by Ikhwan al-Safa when they discussed the vertical line or the alif. We also find this echoed by the medieval Persian mystic and poet Mansural-Hallaj when he wrote, “Knowledge of all things is in the Koran; the knowledge of the Koran is in the letters at the beginning of the chapters; the knowledge of these letters is in the lam-alif; the knowledge of lam-alif is in the alif; and the knowledge of the alif is in the dot”.40 We might find in these diverse quotes a foundation for religion, and for calligraphy too; one that is rooted in the formal quality of the alif (a line that begins as a dot). This implies that epistemology and religious beliefs are founded upon form. Form is at the heart of all art, regardless of culture, for it underpins the line, shape, painting, and image.
         This foundation seems self-evident, but it requires the artist to journey through labyrinths and perform his experiments in the forest of art. This is the path that he travelled, and the trail that he left behind.
         What remains is for us to explore the nature of the relationship between his work and historic and artistic time.

 

Arabic calligraphy served both religious and historical purposes, particularly those of courtly life and the Caliph’s need to project his high status. This is associated with the courtly belles-lettres tradition, particularly the art of writing and decorating them to make them more visually compelling. This focus on the visibility of script and courtly distinction naturally weakens the relationship between calligraphy and specific historical or cultural contexts. Not so with the art of painting (such as miniature painting) for it addresses a different kind of visibility: the visibility of specific faces, people, houses, and scenes from the souk – elements that are bound to specific cultural, historical, and architectural contexts. The paintings by the thirteenth-century Arab miniaturist Yahya al-Wasiti are the most salient example of this.41 Does Mahdaoui’s work follow in this vein, given that he moves away from representational painting?
         We need only consider a few of his pieces to see their relationship to history. His work participated in the creation of artistic and social time in many locations, including an airport pavilion in Saudi Arabia, the façade of a building in Tunis city, or the cover of poetry books in Arabic and French. What we notice is how many of these participations there are, which suggest that Mahdaoui aims to produce the “outside” world in conjunction with the “inside” of the artwork itself. Looking at his work, the viewer is not transported into an artist’s atelier, art gallery, or museum; rather the artist is transported through his works into the company of the viewer, where he walks, sits, and reads or takes part in whichever social situation he may find himself in. Mahdaoui cooperated with international organizations such as Amnesty International and, among other projects, took part in the production of Le Livre International de la Paix. A critical moment was when he inscribed a letter on a human body. It was a tense social, cultural, legal, and symbolic gesture given the nature of Arab-Islamic societies and their attitudes towards women, including their personal autonomy, where they are not considered able to take charge of themselves, in the words of the Koran, without a “guardian” to guarantee their existence and identity.
         This side relationship, as I have called it, defines a specific kind of partnership with the present, which is different from the second kind of relationship, “active in aesthetic time”. Earlier in the text we stopped at several points in the vast trajectory of Arab and European art to help us put Mahdaoui into context. If his earlier works engaged with abstraction, particularly pure colour, his subsequent move towards Hurufiyya was parallel to the development of non-formal abstraction and also echoed the developments in modern typography in Iran with Hossein Zenderoudi and the Saqqakhana School in particular.

         In his art, Mahdaoui avoids a relationship with history, in both its actual and social sense, in favour of an open-ended interpretation of history and aesthetics. This is evident in the manner in which he has pursued innovative art techniques and methods developed beyond the art gallery, salon, and museum. This has taken on various flexible forms: he has taken part in live performances and has illustrated books such as The Thousand and One Nights, the poetry of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Iraqi pioneer of modern verse, and other modern poets.
         The works created outside Mahdaoui’s atelier seem different from all the others, which are the result of his own efforts with the pen and white space. We must not forget the role played by the movements and inclinations of the pen itself, which reveal hidden emotional and expressive tendencies; tendencies that conceal a secret, that confound like a puzzle, that float like bubbles of joy, that persist like a mind-altering experience, whose fragrance unfolds like a Tunisian jasmine. This is because those works preoccupied with the abstract, the geometric, and the calligraphic are actually preoccupied with themselves, with writing over the white canvas, expressing the dialogue with themselves and others. This is what the hand, connected to the eye, is capable of, and more. Mahdaoui’s hand reaches out to express or invent forms, it breathes as it works and is saddened or gladdened as it writes. It is a “long hand” (as the hand of the thief is expressed in folk Arabic), for it reaches into the vast area that spreads out before the eye, the world of forms generated in the imagination, the distant past, or that intimate moment when the lips separate before a kiss.
         If calligraphy used to express words visually, Mahdaoui’s art expresses the deep promptings that emanate from the hand, as if they were an extension of the hand.
         Returning to the border as metaphor, what is an artist like Mahdaoui doing when he extends arteries of light between the arts, collapsing the boundaries between them, replacing them with friendship and, in the process, dazzling our eyes with the joy of the encounter? Perhaps the encounter between countries and cultures really emerges from the tip of a single pen, only to fill the cosmos with the love of this encounter?

 

---

1 Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, Horizons Maghrébins & Cahier d'Études Maghrébines (Toulouse & Cologne, 1998).

2 Interview with Barbara Arnhold in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, p. 132 : “Pour moi, le geste de prendre la lettre a été une décision de politique culturelle. Au départ, cela a été un choix”.

3 In his The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the need for ascribing “meaning” to art goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century.

4 Charbel Dagher, Al-Hurufiyya al-‘Arabiyya: Fann wa Hawiyya (Beirut: Charikat Al Matbou’at Lil Tawzi’ wal’ Nashr, 1990), p. 95.

5 See Tariq ‘Ubayd, “Al-Ab‘ad al-Ta­sh­kiliyya wa-l-Jamaliyya li-Surat al-Harf: Mushaf al Hadina Numuwdhajan”, in Al-Khat al-’Arabi bayna-l-‘Ibara al-Tashkiliyya wal-Manzumat al-Tawasiliyya, edited by Khalil Quway‘a (Tunis: Wizarat al-Thaqafa, Bayt al-Hikma, 2008), pp. 109–28.

6 Lecture given by Umberto Eco at the Library of Alexandria, 1 November 2003, translated into Arabic by Ali ‘Abdi-l-Amir Salih and published in Nazwa Quarterly Magazine, no. 74, Muscat, Oman, 2013, p. 286.

7 See Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 2.

8 Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, “On the Art of Writing”, in The Epistles of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, edited by Ibrahim al-Kilani (Damascus: Tlas Research and Publishing, 1985), pp. 239–68.

9 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, 4 volumes (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1957), vol. 1, p. 218.

10 Al-Hurufiyya 1990, pp. 116–17.

11 See Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

12 The book Et moi aussi je suis peintre by Guillaume Apollinaire would be published in 1914 but was abandoned at the outbreak of war. Only two proofs survived.

13 See Giovanni Lista, Le livre futuriste: de la libération du poème au poème tactile (Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1984).

14 Kandinsky defined “inner necessity” as a “mood” and a “vibration in the soul”. It is “inner” because it arises directly from the psyche or soul and it possesses a “necessity” because it is not a response to an incidental outside phenomenon (a landscape, a beautiful woman, etc.) but is a spontaneous, non-fortuitous and irresistible movement of the soul itself.

15 See Apollinaire’s essay, “On the Subject of Modern Painting” (originally published in Les Soirées de Paris, February 1912).

16 Skizzenbuch von der Tunisreise (1905), Arabic calligraphy, pencil on paper, 16.5 x 11 cm, p. 292. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

17 Homage to Wassily Kandinsky, edited by Gualtieri di San Lazzaro (New York: Leon Amiel, 1976).

18 The Diaries of Paul Klee (1898–1918), edited by Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

19 Ibid.

20 Jean Duvignaud, Klee en Tunisie (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1980), p. 27: “Klee échappe à cette perception hiérarchique des hommes. Il ne cherche pas à justifier sa présence. Il ne cherche pas à prendre quelque chose. Il vient de se laisser prendre. Il est un regard”.

21 Ali Louati, L’abstraction dans la peinture tunisienne (Tunis: Ministry of Culture, 1984).

22 Similarly, in the 1950s Japan witnessed a visual art movement called Bokusho in which leading calligraphers engaged in a dialogue between ink and the white void.

23 Another factor is that Paul Klee painted this before, when he sought to establish a formal similarity between the script and the shape of the old city of Tunis.

24 Mahdaoui’s paintings Concrétions are a rare example of works based on various colour waves without a single letter, which exemplifies this period described in Louati’s book.

25 Al-Hurufiyya 1991, p. 92.

26 Édouard J. Maunick and Ezzedine Madani, Nja Mahdaoui, Collection Peinture (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1983), p. 8: “On n’écrit pas la mer, on n’épèle pas le feu”.

27 Patrimoine culturel et création contemporaine en Afrique et dans le monde arabe, edited by Mohamed Aziza (Dakar and Abidjan: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1977), p. 83.

28 Jacques Berque, Languages arabes du present (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 229.

29 A comparison between the Arab and Japanese artists’ choices is useful, for some chose to side with Western schools of art while others sought to re-appropriate their traditional art forms with modern techniques.

30 In my book Al-Hurufiyya al-‘Arabiyya.

31 Jean-Yves Loude in Le Progrès, Lyon, 1986: “Il faut à Mahdaoui la respiration des pratiques mystiques soufi pour qu’aucune discordance ne trouble l’exécution de ces oeuvres qui fixent une vision de la perfection. Pour une méditation. Une contemplation. Mais si Mahdaoui s’abreuve aux sour­ces de sa propre culture, son geste rejoint la sérénité du scribe antique, de l’enlumineur, du maître Zen, du Lama tibétain”.

32 Mahdaoui often distinguishes between the letter and the sign, preferring the latter: “The sign offers a visual opportunity to form an ephemeral material graphic sign”. See Nja Mahdaoui, “Concept de la transformation de l’espace pictural”, lectured at the exhibition Écritures in Tunis, 1988 and at the Japan Foundation in Tokyo, 1995.

33 Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddima (Beirut: Dar Ihya‘ al-Turath al-‘Arabi, n. d.), p. 424.

34 Ibn Muqla, “Epistle on the Science of Penmanship”, in Naji Zayn al-Deen al-Musrif, Bada’i‘ al-Khat al-‘Arabi (Baghdad: Ministry of Information, 1972), pp. 457–59.

35 ‘Ali bin ‘Ubayda, Fi ‘Ilm al-Kitaba (Beirut, n. d.), p. 256.

36 Salah Stétié, "Nja l'inducteur" in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, p. 163: “L’écriture rêve de nous. Disons mieux: elle nous rêve”.

37 L’art du livre arabe: du manuscrit au livre d’artiste, edited by Marie-Gene­viève Guesdon and Annie Vernay-Nouri, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2001, p. 195: “En éloignant a priori le verbe, le mot, la parole, j’essaie de rendre plus noble encore le développement de la forme graphique”.

38 René Étiemble, L’Écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 128.

39 See note no. 9.

40 Naji Zayn al-Din al-Masrif, Bada’i al-khatt al’-Arabi (Beirut, 1981), pp. 470–71.

41 Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti’s most famous surviving works are his illustrations of the Maqamat (Assemblies) by the famous poet, al-Hariri.