Exhibition Poster of Farid Haddad’s exhibition at Contact Art Gallery 1972 (Farid Haddad archive)
Waddah Faris, Farid Haddad, 1973 © Waddah Faris
“What is this exhibition? It is not serious.” [1] With these words, a Lebanese art critic, Nazih Khater, expressed the confusion that many visitors felt during the opening of Farid Haddad’s exhibition “Hearts and Monuments” on March 7, 1972, at the newly founded Contact Art Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon. Reactions to the exhibition, and to the works he presented, created a controversy. While some art critics praised the experimental exhibition, others were confused by the sketchy nature of the signed pieces. In the exhibition’s booklet, Haddad revealed that he never thought of “finishing” a painting. For him, starting one was far more interesting.
These ambiguous works left the viewer with more questions than answers. At the same time, they also reflected the artist’s profound understanding of art and artistic creation as an endless process of exploration. Haddad confronted visitors to the show with ideas that required an effort to unpack. The multiple dimensions and possible meanings of the works required the patience to look beyond the visible. The exhibition was a challenge, but the city was ready for it.
Hamra Street in Beirut, early 1970s, photographed by Waddah Faris © Waddah Faris
Beirut the artistic center
Experimentation, openness, and fluidity characterized the atmosphere of Beirut during the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the city, and more specifically the thriving Ras Beirut area, had developed into the cultural and artistic center of the region. Writers, intellectuals, and artists from neighboring countries such as Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt were flocking there since the 1950s and actively contributing to its vibrant cultural life, thereby creating the cosmopolitanism that was crucial for Beirut’s development into what artist Kamal Boullata once described as the “metropolis of Arab modernity.” [2] It provided a space for artistic experimentation, intellectual debate, and political contestation. Coupled with a significant influx of foreign capital and a flourishing tourism sector catering mainly to a wealthy European and Arab clientele, this period has come to be known as the “Golden Sixties.”
Farid Haddad at the famous Caves du Roy nightclub in Beirut in 1972 with Lebanese artists Aref El Rayess and Amine El Bacha, photographed by Waddah Faris © Waddah Faris
Beirut was then burgeoning with numerous art galleries, cultural centers, and modern hotels, all of which organized art exhibitions featuring local, regional, and international artists. At that time, exhibiting in Beirut, especially in one of the city’s renowned art galleries, was an important step in the career of Lebanese and other Arab artists.
Ras Beirut was also home to the Fine Arts Department of the American University of Beirut, where Haddad completed his undergraduate degree in 1969 before attaining a masters degree from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. It was in this lively setting that the artist exhibited his 1972 work Untitled, featuring a heart and an arrow, as part of his exhibition “Hearts and Monuments.” This was one of the very first examples of conceptual art in Lebanon, providing a unique insight into the artist’s research process.
Farid Haddad, Untitled, 1972, gouache on paper, 62.5 x 45 cm © Farid Haddad
Hearts and Monuments
A red heart is placed in the middle of a blank white paper, and a black arrow points from the bottom of the page up toward it, establishing a relation between the two. The arrow is a symbol that carries narrative potential: its exaggerated length creates suspense and makes the heart even more important than if it were floating by itself. Both are drawn in gouache, with a single brushstroke, in a sketchy manner. There is nothing else on the surface, aside from the artist’s signature “Farid Haddad” and the year “1972” written in pencil at the bottom right. Since there is nothing else to see in the picture, pointing out the only visible pictorial element with an arrow, which cannot possibly be overlooked, creates a humorous moment.
The heart is a symbol for love, and the arrow could be read as belonging to Cupid, the god of love in classical mythology. An arrow through the heart symbolizes passionate and romantic love. By isolating these two pictorial elements, passion and love are dissociated from each other and turned into humor. Focusing on the idea rather than on the finished object, the painting resonates with the approaches of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s in the United States.
Farid Haddad, Monument, 1971, pencil (graphite) on paper, 65 x 50 cm © Farid Haddad
The exhibition also included a work entitled Monument, which shows a black rectangular shape hatched in graphite pencil. The rough square is placed in the center of the white surface with an arrow pointing from the bottom to the top, connecting the word “monument” to this shape. These elements are framed by rectangular lines to the left, right, and bottom of the page, encircling the paper, and enclosing the word “monument.” By adding the word “monument,” the artist designates the rectangular shape as such, thus conveying meaning which would have been obscured, or completely incomprehensible, otherwise. The fact that the drawing needs the help of semantics to gain meaning creates, again, a humorous moment where the artist demonstrates the representational limits of complex concepts such as a “monument.” Even the idea of what a monument looks like is subverted. Usually, a monument is a large three-dimensional work situated in an urban setting, carved in stone or cast in bronze, reminding us of someone or something, such as a famous person or a historical event. Here, it is simply a sketch depicting a very small rectangle surrounded by a lot of “empty” space.
Non-monumental monuments
The idea of a traditional “monument,” including its scale, or the amount of time it takes to conceive and execute it, is inverted in Monument. Haddad’s work asks: what is a monument? And his answer seems to be: it is simply a placeholder that refers to ideas and implications outside itself, just like the heart. Therefore, it could also be a collection of poems dedicated to someone or something, or, in this case, a series of hearts. The artist suggests that a monument does not necessarily have to be a three-dimensional physical object: it can simply be an idea.
The title of the exhibition “Hearts and Monuments” brings together two seemingly opposite ideas: the heart (which represents the organic, the vulnerable, the soft), and the monument (which represents the rigid, the monumental, and the inanimate). These associations are here amplified, but also reduced to pure form. The artist presents visual representations, but it is the responsibility of the viewer to determine the potential meanings of the work.
Different contexts, new meanings
In 1973, Waddah Faris, the organizer of Haddad’s exhibition and co-director of Contact Art Gallery, came up with a groundbreaking idea. A prolific graphic designer—in addition to being a photographer, artist, and gallerist—he replaced the advertisements in the catalogue of the XVIII Baalbek International Festival with works by contemporary Lebanese artists, creating a sort of exhibition within a publication. The festival committee welcomed this highly innovative approach as a means of spreading knowledge about art, as there was no proper documentation of art in Lebanon at the time.
From the XVIII Baalbek International Festival catalogue, 1973 (Farid Haddad archive)
Haddad’s painting Untitled was one of the works advertised in that catalogue. Placed in a completely different context, in a publication instead of a gallery, and as an illustration for the Lebanese Red Cross (Croix-Rouge Libanaise), the work suddenly generated new meanings. In addition to the visual correspondence of the colors red and black on white surface, it also resonated on a more metaphorical level: the juxtaposition of the red cross and the red heart alludes to the concepts of love and compassion, and ultimately the concept of (Christian) charity. Here, the cross became linked to the heart by the arrow, emphasizing and reinforcing their connectedness. Therefore, donating blood or money to the Red Cross, which is the ultimate purpose of this advertisement, is considered a humanitarian, loving act. At the same time, there is also the medical reference, in which the heart takes on an organic dimension, with red symbolizing the blood.
Yet another meaning emerges when considering the larger context. Farid Haddad’s work sheds light on a dynamic and exploratory artistic culture in a city on the brink of a devastating civil war (the artist left Lebanon in 1975 and has been living in the United States since). In retrospect, we can also recognize it to be of the utmost art historical importance: this is work that advanced the practice of art in a place where art was often expected to convey a conventional message or to seek its roots in one’s own cultural heritage. Haddad’s Untitled and Monument transcended local concerns, connecting Beirut with avant-garde global experiments.
