El Matam El Mish-Masry (The Non-Egyptian Restaurant)

Bruce W. Ferguson

There is a now renowned artwork by British artist Jeremy Deller based on a story in Neil Young’s first biography Shakey, in which his manager and he, when faced with a major decision would always ask themselves “What would Bob Dylan do?” Later when the manager, in due course manages Dylan, in a moment of indecision, Dylan asks him, “What would Neil Young do?” The oscillation of an imaginative incarnation from one artist to another makes sense. The idea that this question of mutual influence became a bold faced poster by Deller offered free in an art fair is smart and protean, but turns deliberately away from the art world to try to appropriate the broader world of pop music and its fans.

A more appropriate question that artists ask themselves all the time is “What would Marcel Duchamp do?” Or, “What would Joseph Beuys do?” Or, “what would the artist most important to me do?” These are more appropriate questions because art is actually not a part of the broader pop culture despite some seriously ludicrous attempts to make it seem so. It may be more likely that art and its world are part of “the promotional culture,” a term introduced by John Fekete, and confirmed again recently in its importance by no less than Noam Chomsky who showed statistics that “public relations” in all of its forms, including politics of course, represents about 17% of the American economy. But promotional culture refers to the way in which ideas and effects are sold and are not necessarily an index of a popular, imaginative, reception.

Asunción Molinos Gordo begins I think with something like the question of “social sculpture” and thus the Beuys question. If Beuys was nothing else (and he is many things to many people, both positive and negative), he was the most recent artist of iconic stature to not only believe that art is a process but also that it can embody both moral and aesthetic traits simultaneously and that it has a soft political agenda by nature of the possibility of changing consciousness. In short , art can also be educational, and his famous chalk on blackboard diagrams are the legendary objects of that reference to schoolrooms and discourse. And of course Beuys understood that the reflections of science produced a false understanding of nature; which is to say that science’s reductionist methodologies produced a belief in the control of nature that was misplaced and dangerous, of which he was highly critical.

In her recent work, Asunción Molinos Gordo has concentrated on agriculture, and thus food, as a significant and overlooked part of not just a postmodern economy but as a reflection of national “security”. Working in both Spain and Egypt, she has produced artworks that portray poignantly the question of support for an ecological and holistic understanding of economies to include and even emphasize indigenous foods. In other words, she is interested in the sustenance of both soils and peoples.

In most discourses, and in the academy and politics in general “security” has been narrowly reduced to weapons, arms control and military might. The paranoia and dread of national bodies are discussed in terms of weaponry and preparedness for war; narratives actually of “insecurity” and fear, posed in a kind of Orwellian way as their opposite.

Molinos instead offers the notion of security within the limits and strengths and skills of peoples who grow edible foods and provide security from scarcity, disease, poverty and filth. As nations embrace the move from formerly rich agricultural lands to urban centers to fulfill economist’s fantasies, Molinos instead offers instances and proof of resistances and new possibilities.

In El Matam El Mish-Masry (The Non- Egyptian Restaurant), she is opening a “restaurant” which, in effect, is a scanning machine, a kind of MRI of the agricultural body; a visualizing of the ingredients in the soil and the economy that lie in the territory beneath the cigarette butts and chewing gum and other debris of the informal housing settlements which make up so much of Cairo. And one mustn’t forget that her restaurant is NOT Egyptian as much as it is an interrogation of what is forgotten as well as found. Her methods have much to do with Egyptology however, being those methods and tools of archeology; excavation and conservation.

In 1996, The World Food Summit defined “food security” as “existing when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.” More than war, health problems are actually an increasing threat overlooked by national interests. Food Security involves sufficient quantities of food on a consistent basis, sufficient resources to obtain a nutritious diet, and adequate water and sanitation. Obviously, sustainability, whatever that means in each local condition, is paramount. But, Molinos Gordo, as she showed in her Untitled 3 (WAM) World Agricultural Museum in Cairo two years ago, is a believer and advocate that there is enough food in the world if distributed equitably and that future food needs can be met by thoughtful political will.

Her restaurant, ironic as it is, will begin with a global meal offering like those in international hotels in Cairo and move through the weeks to a more and more sophisticated, but labor intensive, investigation of the quotidian diets found in neighborhood economies to a kind of gastronomy produced by the archeological search of the neighborhood. The restaurant , as a reading and visualizing machine, will radiate out eventually to a rich past that has been scorched and parched beyond agricultural recognition. She will excavate the present for the past in order to produce a future. More than a metaphor, this daily discursivity could serve to produce recognition of the conditions of the economy of health and welfare of the audience to whom it is directed. Her question has become “What would anyone do?”

This text was published on the occasion of the exhibition Generaciones 2012 at La Casa Encendida in Madrid.