04 April 2013
BEIRUT: Mazen Kerbaj is among a handful of artists from this country who have distinguished themselves in more than one form. Over the last 13 years, Kerbaj has established himself as an experimental musician, playing trumpet – solo and in a variety of ensembles – on the free improv scene.
He is also one of the founding members of Irtijal, Lebanon’s festival of experimental music, the 13th-edition of which opened Wednesday evening at Yukunkun.
For some years Kerbaj has also been a noted visual artist, having had his first solo exhibition in Lebanon in 2005, at the now-defunct EspaceSD. Since then there have been a panoply of solo and group shows – often showing in tandem with Laure Ghorayeb, his mother. Kerbaj’s second solo show in Beirut – an exhibition of ink-on-paper and acrylics entitled “NOW!” – is now up at Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
This is a notable achievement for an artist who has long shied from calling himself an artist at all.
“I always hated this word,” he says, “especially when I was younger. Today I would use the word ‘artist’ because I’m also a musician so I need an umbrella. But when I sign, I put ‘comic artist/musician’ or ‘trumpet-player’ sometimes, to be as neutral as possible.
“‘Artist’ is so abused. ‘This chef is an artist,’” Kerbaj smiles. “I’m a very retro guy and for me the word ‘art’ is almost sacred. I really believe in it and I hate how it’s used everywhere.
“‘Artist’ is worst. Just to come back to the contemporary art scene – because I love them and they love me – I learned recently that ‘illustrator’ is a pejorative word. So now I like to use this pejorative word. ‘I’m an illustrator.’”
The drawing came first.
By the time he was 5 years old, Kerbaj says, “I became very attracted to comic books. I understood, without reading, the links between each frame ... Since that time I said I wanted to be a comic artist.”
“People from Beirut,” the EspaceSD show, was unified by the preponderance of portraiture. The work in “NOW!” reflects some continuity, but some departures as well.
“Some boats appeared at this exhibition,” he laughs, “so it’s not any more about people only. Honestly I don’t know why. Maybe it’s an escape from the city and from the people. I’d say the unifying theme [in my work] is stories. There’s always a story.
“I never think of my works as a whole. I called this new exhibition “NOW!” because it’s a self-portrait of ‘now’ for me.
“I couldn’t write anything about the work, just this small text saying ‘This is what I’m doing now,’ ... It’s a tendency in art to write about your work, five pages of text for a work of 10x10 cm, explaining why you did it and so forth. I hate this. So I prefer to write a one-word speech balloon on the thing and make it clear.”
Music, Kerbaj says, came much later, being rooted in his long friendship with free improv guitarist and Irtijal co-founder Sharif Sehnaoui.
“We would go to Sharif’s place and stay ’til very late at night listening to music. We used to listen to rock. This too is an awful word, ‘rock,’” he laughs, “The old psychedelic rock, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Grateful Dead. Sweet Smoke.
“Then one summer Sharif came back from France saying, ‘Yeah, I’m listening to this guy John Coltrane.’ The first CD I stole – back then I didn’t have any money – was Coltrane. I was lucky ... I got ‘Ole,’ and there’s a track on it that completely blew my mind.
“Little by little Sharif was getting back to playing guitar. Then one day he told me, ‘I have a trumpet. Do you want it?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ I never thought about playing music. I thought I was too old to begin to learn. That’s how it started. I took some courses. I fought with the teachers about what is music and what is not.
“Little by little I discovered I’m a musician. It’s not a joke anymore.
“Today I can’t describe myself as more an illustrator or comic artist or a musician. I do both with equal passion.”
Kerbaj was perplexed to be giving concerts, and recognized as a performer, by 2000, while remaining virtually unknown as a visual artist, despite his 11 self-published books.
His visual art found its first international exposure because of ‘Kerblog,” where he published his visceral responses to the monthlong Israeli siege of 2006.
He remains extremely ambivalent about the attention the blog earned him.
“Because it was 2006, I hate the work I did back then ... mostly the drawing because the music hasn’t been published – except for this six-minute-long “Starry Night” [Kerbaj’s improv duet with the sound of an Israeli drone over Beirut].
“I feel we have to be exotic for the West. We have to talk about the war, like a guy from Rwanda has to talk about the massacres there ... I hate Lebanese who can speak of nothing but the war.
“For me it was, and still is, difficult to accept this – being the artist who drew the blood of the 2006 war and who resisted. No shit. I’m an anti-nationalist. If it was a civil war I would run away. But this war,” he laughs, “I refused to run away. It was too gross.”
One reason that Kerbaj appreciates performance is that it falls less easily into the trap of representation and identity politics.
With visual art, “you have the choice to be concrete or abstract. When you take something like ‘Starry Night,’ it becomes very concrete also. But usually I’m more free in music.
“I dream of being capable of drawing like I play music, to be as free as in music. Yet it’s impossible, [because] I’m so rational when I work. It’s frightening. Even when I do something totally distorted I reason out why I’m putting this eye here and this third eye there. In my drawing, everything has a reason. While in music, there is no reason for whatever I’m doing. I like these two extremes.”
Yet audiences insist on reading identity into the work of Lebanese performers, even free improv artists.
“People hear something else just because you come with these stickers on your head. I discovered that, yes, many of my sounds could be heard as helicopter sounds. I never said I wanted to make helicopter sounds until somebody said it. ‘F**k yeah. It is a helicopter sound.’” he laughs. “But there were no helicopters in the Lebanese war.
“When we arrive to play somewhere – you know, festivals of music from ‘the Orient’ or ‘the Arab world’ or ‘Lebanon’ – people want to feel with you. ‘Yeah,’ they say, ‘we felt the war. We felt what you lived.’ ‘No,’ I tell them, ‘No. You didn’t feel anything.’
“Improv is great because ... it has no roots. We know where it came from – free jazz and contemporary classical, etc – but, as a music, it’s so open, the fact of removing the idea of rhythm, melody and harmony. You can be a great jazz player, but you feel it’s something outside your culture ...
“You can really appropriate free improv. You can improvise with an Indonesian guy and an American guy and an Argentine guy and play music that makes sense – or not. But I’m not bringing quarter tones, and he’s not bringing Indonesian music.
“It goes back to the essence of music, which is sound. It goes back before the Greeks and the notes and the scales.
“Yet until today people can’t accept that sound is music. Music is such a violent art. With any other art, you have to go out of yourself to see it. But you are raped by music. You are penetrated by it.
“I think that’s why experimental music is less acceptable than experimental drawing. A century ago people would laugh at abstract painting. Today, even the most undereducated man on the street, you show him a work that’s just stains, he’ll say it’s a painting. He won’t argue with you.”
Irtijal 13 runs at various venues around town from 3-6 April. See www.irtijal.org. Mazen Kerbaj’s “NOW!” is up at Galerie Janine Rubeiz until April 6. See http://www.galeriejaninerubeiz.com.
Copyright The Daily Star 2013.
