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An Inventory of Shimmers

auspices of Mouna Atassi, a gallerist and wife of a deposed Syrian president. This commercial setting had much to gain from denouncing implicitly Ba`thist regime mythology through semipersonal, semipolitical marketready autobiography. But of greater concern, Lenssen sometimes reads retroactively from later sources as if they spoke to unchanging actors. At its most tenuous, Lenssen’s sublimation of her own critical voice produces some fanciful flights of ekphrasis and exegesis. For example, she interprets one highly typical 1960s composition by al-Moudarres: “By nesting the shapes of ‘children’ within one another to produce new imagery of codependent parents and offspring, he seemed to probe elements of threatening projection within the family” (178). While “codependent” could be read off the interlocked shapes, “projection” arises from Lenssen following patches of red across the canvas, from the “child” up to a “mother” holding a “rose” to a “father” expressing “shame.” This reading requires a chronological directionality to the eye’s movement while ignoring other red patches on the surface. It introduces “shame” (rather than, say, excitement) from a contemporary discourse on Italian art brut, as a response to guilt for fascism, which makes the work “al-Moudarres’s exploration of guilt” (178). Lenssen launches from this oil on canvas to the conclusion that, “accordingly, his wax drawings tend to give the impression of slowly manifesting tragedy, and they foreclose feelings of catharsis or victory.” Impression to whom? Again, a Deleuzian understanding of Bergsonian vitalism would argue such flights are not out of line, but should they not be marked as such? A felicitous and necessary contribution to studies of global modernism (among other issues), Beautiful Agitation painstakingly and passionately considers “how methods of painting might wield a globalizing force” (20). It exercises a nonrepresentational way of seeing the globalization that has long existed, thereby revealing facets of modern art often obscured when paintings or drawings move to metropolitan, institutionalized settings today. The book thereby exemplifies one answer to the timely question: “What do we do when faced with a refusal to speak? With objects that appear to be mute, or dislocated, or forgotten?” (212). Many other peoples have produced not just art but ideas and even ontologies whose surface similarity to familiar, Western ones has prevented their serious, critical consideration. As Lenssen summarizes her effort, she literally inverts the European template, “bringing material up to a surface of appearance (not down to a desecrated ground)” (212). Without detracting in any way from Lenssen’s own Sisyphean labor, we may still ask if with this book, have we missed an opportunity to jettison the structure altogether and explore how structures are formed? To build from different material without adhering to the canon? To question the formation of our minds through categories of canons and structures? In particular, her question of muteness reintroduces the question of linguistic strategies. Clearly, she has had to make decisions in balancing how much of Arabic to retain and how much to sacrifice in order to ease non-Arabic speaking readers into the fascinating material. When Lenssen started her research, she was one of few scholars who could read comfortably in languages across the colonial cleavage. Today, a rising generation greatly exceeds its predecessors’ capacities and interests. It is worth asking: what kind of art history does Lenssen imagine when she so rigorously Anglicizes and secularizes the material she shares? And what kind of people are to emerge from this art history?