Basim Magdy, an Egyptian artist, has created a wide variety of products in different domains ranging from painting to films to photography to cinema. Magdy was interested in wide variety of areas such as poetry and literature, as well as in photography and filmmaking. He liked playing with this idea of “absurdity” in his work.
Last spring, Magdy’s work was featured in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) exhibition, The Stars Were Aligned For A Century of New Beginnings.
Magdy’s work was chosen for the exhibition because of his ideas about the future that never happened!
“So I started by – I usually start by taking these structures or elements and they become the central element in the work on paper. And I start building around it to somehow create a different future that will never arrive.”
Among his works featured in the MCA was his short film called 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World.
These 13 Essential Rules are the following:
- Never assume or pretend to understand anything, we all know you don't, just like we don't
- Never try to change anything, you can't even change yourself.
- Never claim to like nature or defend the environment, you are an alien on this planet
- Never buy or exchange anything, with every purchase or exchange, you drown faster in absurdity whirlpools
- Never fall under the false spell of doing good with money.if money didn't exist in the first place, neither would the poor.
- Never let yourself fall asleep. You’ll dream
- Never try to make a point. No one will ever care.
- Never use logic. Abstract behavior is the way of this world.
- Never invent or produce anything. Others will use it and complicate things more.
- Never trust dogs or people. They both bite when angry.
- Never forget there are almost 7 billion other people here. You don't matter. Really, no one cares!
- Think of death and the dead everyday. Death will still take you by surprise but you’ll be more prepared than others.
Life's a tangled web of unexpected events. Never claim of believe that anything is certain.
REACTION TO THE PRODUCT:
According to the Manilow senior curator Omar Kholeif who interviewed Basim Magdy, the 13 Essential Rule elicits 2 types of reactions from people. People either think that this short film is tragic and dystopian or they think that it is hilarious, especially considering the faces painted on the flowers.
Magdy believes that the 13 Essential Rules explain his understanding of the world. He acknowledges that this list in the short film is “extremely harsh” however he claims that the faces of the flowers that he painted are in response to these harsh rules and are meant to be funny. He expected, or rather desired, these reactions from his audience.
“The reaction I get is like usually people find it humorous until the sixth rule, which says, "Never let yourself fall asleep. You'll dream." And then it kind of like starts getting heavy. But in the end, I think the best reaction to my work for me is people leave and are still thinking about it. And it just triggers a thinking or an emotional process.”
Magdy states that the 13 Essential Rules is the reason he gained interest in provoking an emotional response from his audience through this products.
PROCESS
“When I started drawing the faces on the petals of the tulips for 13 Essential Rules not knowing what I was doing, my daughter, my younger daughter, was a baby. And she was sitting next to me. And it was mainly like, “Look we can draw funny faces on the flower.’”
When Magdy first started working on The 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World he admits he had no idea what he was doing or what the end result would be. He just noticed various things around him and started making a list from it in order to understand this world he was living in. His method of making this list invokes the idea that Smith and Ward mentioned in their article Cognition and Creation of Ideas where the authors claim that noticing random details in the environment can aid the creative process.
Just as Frank Gehry playing with his grandmother and building blocks during his childhood sparked his interest in architecture, one of the reasons Magdy was inspired to be an artist was because his father was an artist and he grew up with art books as well as watching his father draw and paint. He is also motivated to produce art because he wanted to communicate his ideas to the world. Magdy admits how he enjoys accomplishing this communication using ‘absurdity.’
Magdy wanted all his ideas to connect, most of these ideas he had were ‘seemingly unrelated.’ However, he tried to connect them together. He mentions multiple times during his interview with Omar Kholeif about how he wants all the distinct themes to converge, this shows his ability to draw connections between things that are not closely related, or rather his ability to form remote association.
Magdy was aware that he was bad at writing poetry but he still did not give up, he kept writing and hoped that it would turn out poetic. He realized that he was enjoying this process and he kept doing it over and over again. Thus, this process became an essential part of this work. Here, we can draw another comparison between Basim Magdy and Frank Gehry. Gehry was told by his teacher at community college in his architecture class that this domain is not for him and he should get out of it. Nonetheless, he did not give up which resulted in him becoming a successful architect.
Just as Frank Gehry playing with his grandmother and building blocks during his childhood sparked his interest in architecture, one of the reasons Magdy was inspired to be an artist was because his father was an artist and he grew up with art books as well as watching his father draw and paint. He is also motivated to produce art because he wanted to communicate his ideas to the world. Magdy admits how he enjoys accomplishing this communication using ‘absurdity.’
Magdy wanted all his ideas to connect, most of these ideas he had were ‘seemingly unrelated.’ However, he tried to connect them together. He mentions multiple times during his interview with Omar Kholeif about how he wants all the distinct themes to converge, this shows his ability to draw connections between things that are not closely related, or rather his ability to form remote association.
Magdy was aware that he was bad at writing poetry but he still did not give up, he kept writing and hoped that it would turn out poetic. He realized that he was enjoying this process and he kept doing it over and over again. Thus, this process became an essential part of this work. Here, we can draw another comparison between Basim Magdy and Frank Gehry. Gehry was told by his teacher at community college in his architecture class that this domain is not for him and he should get out of it. Nonetheless, he did not give up which resulted in him becoming a successful architect.
“The titles somehow relate to that because what I do with my work is that sometimes I finish and I look at it and I try to detach myself from it completely. And I try to imagine seeing this somewhere and try to imagine another kind of unexpected way of looking at it or a different way of understanding that image.”
This process of looking at his work from a different perspective that helped him give titles to his work is similar to the process that Lehrer describes in his article Learning from Failure, where Lehrer mentions how looking at a problem from the outside helps the people solve the problem relatively faster.
“It's an evolving process.”
Magdy believes that his process of creating art is always evolving, similar to the Dogtown Z Boys movie we watched where the creative process was always evolving!
Magdy claimed that his work is simple and open, but also educational and slightly confusing. He leaves it ambiguous so that people can interpret it using their own context. He wants his work to be perceived as scientific fiction, or as political, or maybe even as humorous; but most importantly he wants his work to leave an impact on his audience, often by eliciting an emotional reaction.
SOURCES:
Really interesting creative to write about. It was interesting to read the 13 essential rules and realize that my reaction to the piece aligned with the groups mentioned in your blog.
ReplyDeleteReally great post! I enjoyed reading it very much, as well as learning about Basim Magdy as both a person as well as an artist. I liked how his creative process is labeled as that of an "evolving process". This essentially shows that Magdy recognizes that there is much more creative growth he is aspiring to reach, and this in itself is quite inspiring. Really cool individual, and really great work!
ReplyDeleteThe juxtaposition of the absurdist reality and the dystopian future some viewers identified with is particularly striking. Great creatives can often be seen as visionaries, but little of Magdy seems visionary in the traditional sense. Rather, his work seems rooted concretely, if absurdly, in the present.
ReplyDeleteThe organization of this post was really helpful in breaking down the subject material. I wasn't familiar with Basim Magdy's work, I'll have to check out some of his other creations in the future
ReplyDelete