[Q&A] N
abil El Jaouhari is a graduate student at the University of Missour-Columbia. His work has been recognized at Pride Fest and other competitions. Leading a double life, El Jaouhari is an openly gay man in Columbia, Mo., and as a closeted homosexual around his family in Lebanon. When asked to do this interview about his artwork for [sh]out Magazine, the voice of LGBTQA on Mizzou’s campus, the artist was concerned whether our publication was far reaching enough to out him to his family in Lebanon. This necessity of leading a dual life and the struggles it has caused greatly influence Nabil’s artwork. By: Nichole Ballard
DUALALITY
[Q&A] Tell me a little bit about your background. Well, I’m Lebanese, and I come from a small village in the mountains close to the shore, about 20 minutes from the capital, Beruit. I’m the youngest of eight siblings. My dad is a furniture maker who owns a shop in the city—handmade furniture from bamboo and reeds. What else? I remember a bit of the civil war and the other wars that followed. What made you decide to become an artist and come to America? Well, I quit school for a while, and I didn’t graduate from high school. After a few years of being a waiter, I decided to go back to school. That was a technical school. There I studied material design, graduated and had my technical baccalaureate. Then I went to the bazaar, which is the fine arts copy of the French Academy of Art at the Lebanese University. It’s like a four-year program where you don’t have courses or semesters. It’s just a set scheduled program where you go to school for nine months a year for four years, and you study everything that’s related to art...It’s a really intense program. You study anatomy like a doctor, all of the muscles and all of the bones, so that you draw all of them and label all of them.
painting that I’m doing now. That is the work that I applied (to the Rollins Scholarship) with. These paintings, were they influenced by your identification with the LGBTQA community or the Columbia community? The whole work is about being closeted. The work started when I started feeling that my other body of work was becoming impersonal on a level. It is something important that the work would be personal, that you would remove it from you as far as possible so that you will be able to deal with it on a more of a conceptual and logical level and to try to understand it on a lot of different levels. So it’s not
I heard that you are a finalist for the art program scholarship. Tell me about it. Yes, I am a finalist in the Rollins scholarship. I’m really excited. My first year here, I had a very different body of work. Like I said earlier, I came from a very interdisciplinary study. When I came here, I was working on these tables where I was weaving this very innocent and very precious fabric…In my work, always, the process is very much a direct manifestation of the concept, and it’s still like that now. What are you working on now? My paintings. After a year of that work, I sort of dumped the whole thing and started this whole new body of work, the
What does your family think about your body of work now? Have they seen it? No one has visited me since I’ve moved here and they haven’t really seen my work. My work doesn’t really offer a sexual act. My work is sexual on a very subtle…like sexuality is almost injected into the work in subtle hints. It’s more seductive and sensual than sexual. You can look at my work and the dualities and the parallels and the hints
Sometimes I wish I did come out when I was younger. Like I said, the older you get the harder it becomes.
Then you came to Mizzou? Then I applied to the States, and Mizzou gave me a great offer to teach and not pay tuition. It was the best offer I got. Plus, after the period I was applying, I started getting closer to the people here through emails and through phone calls, and they were very welcoming. I was excited to study with Nathan Boyer, who is a Yale graduate. My chairman, who is Brad Grill, also graduated from New York. I’m happy I came here.
about you and what’s in your head, and you want to get the message through. At the same time, you have to sort of do it a smart way, and it’s not spoon feeding or dull or banal. It was a hard thing for me to explore.
only therapeutic, and it’s not only in your head, and maybe visually beautiful, but not really conveying anything. When did this begin to affect your work, before or after you came to Mizzou, or has it always been a part of your art? I’m sure, now that I look back on what I was doing in Lebanon, my final graduation project was actually extremely nostalgic. I was taking these Polaroids that my dad took, during the civil war, of my family that were just really [a] weird composition of things when I was really young. I was taking these and making them into paintings. So my work before was very nostalgic, and when I came here, I started wanting to deal with my homosexuality. Maybe try to bring it into my work. It was really tough. I think my struggle wasn’t with my actual work; it was with myself because I never ever lived somewhere where I’m out to everyone the whole time, and I don’t have to switch [between] being closeted and being out, which was the case in Lebanon. My friends at the university knew about me…back at home, I’m closeted and there are these people you have to meet throughout the day, where I have to maintain my other identity. Actually, it was here that I started wanting to talk about that. I realized it’s a very hard thing. It’s hard if you don’t want it to be only
that they put into my work...maybe they can definitely see concealment and dualities, but it’s not directly associated with homosexuality. Do you think it’s been therapeutic for you to create pieces that deal with this part of you? The LGBTQ Resource Center says in their training program that many students on our campus are dealing with this kind of “dual” life because they are not out at home but are able to be at the university. Do you have any advice for them on how to deal with it? It is therapeutic, and it almost trivializes the issue because my work sort of holds all of these suggestions about what is natural and unnatural. My advice would be that it feels like the older you get, the harder it is to come out. I feel like our valuations of relationships in the family go from issues of anger and understanding to becom[ing] more of cherished memories and moments and an appreciation of having a family in the first place. It’s sort of this idea of realizing your priority: is it losing a family because of coming out and “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” versus when you’re young and you have the ability to maybe come out. And it’s very different here than in Lebanon, even though [sic: Missouri is] conservative. But still there are a lot of people that come out in Lebanon. Sometimes I wish I did
come out when I was younger. Like I said, the older you get, the harder it becomes. Because of this value you place on your family as you age? Right, because you overcome a lot of issues with your family that are not related to homosexuality. They become the priority of this relationship, and you start understanding your parents more and their sacrifice. And you start understanding that even if it’s fake on a certain level, there is an importance in this relationship. I mean let’s be realistic here, who would really be there for you to lean on if it’s not your family, whether they fully understand who you are or not? Being closeted is hard and switching identities is hard. It almost leads to some sort of internal schizophrenia. I think only the person who is closeted can really understand what it is. Where do you think your artwork is heading? I think I’m still developing. What I’m actually doing is the idea of taking 16th and 17th Century flora paintings and taking late ‘60s and ‘70s British pop art and mashing them together. Because they both convey the artifice on a very different level. That’s what I’m interested in: conveying art as an illusion and giving hints of the artificiality of the work itself on a level that you start raising questions of what is real, what is unreal, what is natural, what is unnatural? It appears a lot that I have a canvas and I cut out the canvas to reveal the wood underneath it. The duality goes to another level where it’s not only duality on the formal level (painted/ unpainted, soft/hard, textured/flat), but also it becomes a duality on the conceptual level in that the act of removal becomes an act of revealing and vice-versa. Do you feel that LGBTQA issues are well represented in the art world? I’ll give you a simple example. My country went through a civil war and all the art that came out and all the movies were directly related to the civil war on a level that it was suffocating and boring and redundant and expected. I feel that the minute that this civil war becomes the margin and all the issues take place parallel to this civil war, knowing that this civil war is setting in the background, it’s not just taking over, conquering this issue, it becomes more interesting. It makes you look at life that could exist in parallel with issues that are as serious as the civil war. So related to the topic, but addressing other issues, but not isolating it. The more we isolate ourselves, the more we are being discriminated against and the more we look at ourselves...my work is
[Q&A] something I take from the fact that I’m gay, but I try not to be spoon-feeding and not be gay on a level that only a gay person can relate to the work. Do you think all artwork needs to be universal? Yes, it needs to be universal, and it needs to be seductive and attractive to every single person. And it needs to convey a message whether you’re gay straight or whatever else. This way of thinking about those issues on that level could make this representation of the gay community stronger. When you’re in somebody’s face about who you are all the time, it pushes them away. Do you have a favorite piece of work? I don’t have one favorite. I feel like as I explore the work, some of them convey certain messages that I was thinking about at the moment better than others. Or, others become a simpler read, a one-liner, which is something I don’t want in my work. Will you be entering Pridefest? I will be entering this year, again. What will you submit? Two pieces, possibly, the “Heritage” painting and definitely “Fig Wasp.” “Fig Wasp” is about reproduction, and the position of the figure is taken from the hangman, which is a tarot card [that] talks about being judged and being hung. Behind his back, he is holding on to this fig wasp. The fig wasp is the insect responsible for the fig tree to reproduce. The females lay their eggs in the nest inside the stem of the trees and the males will cut the pollen, which is inside the fruit, and the females will carry it to a faraway tree to breed. That’s how they pollinate the other trees. So two different types of reproduction occur in the same act? “Heritage”
Yes, but also by holding on to the wasp, he’s being asked to do something while being judged.
He’s holding on to this wasp, which represents reproduction. The upper background is the inside of the fruit and the lower background is the pollen. I think the painting is also very sensual because of the colors and the fruit. My last question will probably be the most difficult to answer. What is your favorite color? (Laughing) You’re right, that is a tough one... Wow...I think my favorite color would be not fit politely in its place. It would vibrate and have interesting conversations with its neighbor. Lately, in a weird way, I have been attracted to deep purple, even though I don’t really use it that often in my work. Maybe I’ll use it more often. Note: After the interview, El Jaouhari received the Rollins Scholarship from the University of Missouri. “Fig Wasp”