Ghassan Ghaib's cultural artworks violates our conventional epistemological expectations of reading the visual text in postmodern arts. He confirms the dislocation of the systemic fundamentals on which critics rely on. He also transforms the artist’s task from an individual practice into an epistemological act with a collective cultural passion in a way that carries him away from the individual self into a collective one with the aim of tackling the crisis of nature in parallel with the crises of man, as killing in both cases is the same. Thus, I am enthusiastically looking forward to replace the term ‘artist’ with a ‘producer of culture’ and ‘artwork’ with a ‘cultural product’ for many reasons. First, the artist has departed the dominant power of production; namely, all types of institutions, be it religious, ideological, and ruling which had their own representations from the time of classicism to the beginnings of modernism. Second, sticking to the stylistic system under the pretext of ‘art for art’ without paying attention to the social pressure has led to artists being isolated. Third, it is related to modernism that endeavored to upgrade the technical and individual aspects at the expense of the intellectual one. But Duchamp’s art has disrupted all the conventional modes of reading in contemporary art. So, in his cultural product, Ghassan Ghaib emerges with a global epistemological look fully informed of what is going on in the universe and with a broad sentence of a conceptual reasoning leading to awareness and not only the astonishment of seeing. Ghassan Ghayeb's texts fall into the ranks of intellectual rather than aesthetic or technical experiences. This in turn urges the critic, the specialist and the follower to probe into the secret of the hidden culture and the intended message that he wishes to convey to the public. Ghassan Ghaib’s artworks are not a veil (a curtain or a disguise). Rather, they are acts of indignation, disapproval and rejection of all forms of transgression.
Qais Issa
