Bekele Mekonnen The Breakthrough Years During the last fifteen years, we have witnessed several art trends and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to label an artist with one particular medium or style. The sculptor, the painter, the graphic artist or the photographer have all adapted untraditional mediums. For example, Bekele Mekonen has applied concrete or cement, a versatile medium, since his school years. However, he lately discovered that this traditional medium (used since the establishment of the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts) was not effective enough to quench his creative urge, nor effectively expose the anxiety in his mind. Bekele apprehended that in order to describe the inhuman grotesque time and to express the infinitely complex and depressing issues, his figures could not remain only informative and interesting. Unlike others who prefer stick to cement fondu and plaster cast or wood curving as a major sculpture medium, not only did he abandon cement and plaster as a medium, but also stopped producing naturalistic three-dimensional sculpting and figurative works altogether. Bekele, who studied and admired the older generation artists and noticed how their personal opinions were less regarded by the public, was obliged to face (with sober sense), his art and relations with the public. His predecessors, most affected by national sentiment, had a rose-tainted image of the society and the country. For him, storytelling offered no relief to the tormented souls of millions with a gruesome reality. In the 1990s, few years before he become the director of the Addis Ababa University School of Arts and Design, Bekele experimented with various materials, particularly wood and stone curving and latter direct welding of metals. Approximately a year later, assemblage of everyday objects and installation of rejected materials: plastic, wire, fiber, mild steel household items, bullet shells, matches and matchsticks, neon lights, syringes, office paraphernalia, and even foodstuff (such as egg and bread), which brought forth a new vision of sculpture in our visual culture, become his artistic medium. He assembles and installs these materials on wood, metal, or glass surfaces. He once stated, “I have to transform everything into art.” Although he understands the methodology of assemblage and installation processes, he applies these materials of cottage industry or salvaged discarded industrial products by cutting, binding, gluing, polishing, grafting and fastening them together, according to his own standards. The materials are cut, shaped and organized to fit within the composition in mind. Beyond and above their intended purpose as medium, the materials also acted as symbol of corruption, suffocation and subjugation of the society and its inability to escape from its own self-inflected shortcomings. He applied these materials in order to help him reflect and evoke the human drama of grief and indescribable misery. It is as if the horror and the devastating situations that are happening were beyond human dimension to be represented in traditional mediums and forms. The strong and brutal images of the metamorphosed materials act as unsettling images to traumatize and trouble the mind. As his technique becomes more complex and out of the ordinary, one sees his works only by association. In the final analyses, his sculptures are not meant to commemorate the nation, the people or history of the people; they are provided to expose the intense sorrow, feelings and concern of Bekele, as well as reflect his social and political statement. Regardless of the artistic medium applied by the artists, every work of important Ethiopian artists now represents a social and political issue. It is impossible for anyone to imagine that a work of art (of significance by an important artist) does not include the conundrum of our situation. This is not to say that the meanings attached to the imagery of a work of art are in any way fixed or limited. In fact, the public interprets images in numerous ways. However, any interpretation that does not encompass a contemporary issue is romantic and sentimental rather than ingenuous, unless the image is an illustration intended for propaganda purposes or for decoration. The extreme positivism, which has been expressed by the propaganda machine of the Derg in the 1980s, did not take effect in the mind of Bekele. Although he had established a style by that time, it changed and displayed witness within the climate. The remoteness of his works, from the patriotic and sentimental, must be seen as a negation to works done during the revolution. However, the end of the Derg regime and the coming of the Ethiopian People's Democratic Revolutionary Front (EPDRF) did not restore any faith in Bekele. He saw the never-ending human tragedy and continuation of suffering and degradation of Ethiopia’s people. His works are far from solely representing a formal play of materials--and he doesn’t disagree. He certainly will not receive an argument from anyone who is aware of the issues raised by the major contemporary Ethiopian artists. All his works make reference to national or international political and social issues. His work is magical and a spiritual force that depicts a contemporary enigma. Precisely like the most conscious and sensible musicians, poets, writers, comedians and human rights activists of the present-day Ethiopia, it is a statement by the sculptor. As seen in his recent works, his artistic language is murky, gruesome and stupefying. At first glance, one is either repulsed or attracted and capitulated by its aesthetic configuration and execution, rather than its moral, national or ethnic identity. The subject matter for his works is as much complicated as the execution of the work and materials used. Despite the fact that his work has the experimental spirit of Tadesse Gizaw, the force of Tadesse Mamecha, the detailed fascination of Bekele Abebe and the symbolism of Tadesse Belaynhe, it must be understood that his point of departure and objectives are different from his instructors. If the works of his predecessors impress us through their effort and persistence, Bekele’s new work (during the last five years), moves us through its conceptual intelligence and thought-provoking image of social content. The methodology in his work lies not in its aesthetic configuration, nor is it only in the creative force he feels deep within. Though highly formal, and concerned with a variety of shapes and forms, it is fundamentally an art of associations, emanating uniquely from highly complex social and political issues--an enigma and an atrocity that overpowered and subjugated the society. The tradition of human figure sculpture--and sculpture as a commemorating monument--is non existent in the annals of Ethiopian art. Sculpture in a public place, monuments in private arena or public building, is not practiced in the country’s’ long history. A public sculpture is almost nonexistent. Talented sculptures were either not provided the commission (or the chance) to create any type of challenging public sculptor. Few martyrs and heroes have their places in the cemeteries. The people, the millions of innocent victims, have no monument. Following the calamity and devastating famine and massacre of the innocents, not even one single community erected a monument for the victims. It is not an exaggeration to say that the new generation was in total amnesia concerning that dreadful period of the nation. The only type of sculptor we saw was the ready-made imported works that crowded the cemeteries of Addis Ababa. Unlike painting, the opportunities to exhibit sculpture are quite scarce. In these circumstances, not only the role of the sculptor (the artist trained as sculptor) has changed drastically, but the medium has also altered significantly. As sculpture was generally free play during the Atse Haile Selassie regime, it reverted to the “old” independence and freedom, but now with a more personal social context, applying a variety of mediums that produced repulsive and fearful images. Currently, the boundary between sculpture and other arts is fluid. On the another hand, as painting is still concerned with the identity question, as well as struggle with the pride and burden of the artistic tradition, sculpture remains free of these pressures. In a society devastated and broken down by anxiety, exploitation and suffering; in a society that is physically and spiritually tortured, abused and alienated, it is impossible to create a spiritually uplifting art. Bekele is a sculpto-poet of the unofficial Ethiopia, an activist poet in his sculpture, as he is an accomplish poet of sarcastic humor. His work is a statement regarding the gruesome reality of contemporary Ethiopia. If the ideological discourse of the Derg produced an aesthetic order of cement sculpture of artificially overblown figure, the EPDRF, with its excessive deluding narcissism and indifference, became a procreation system of an aesthetic order of gruesome, pathetic and depressingly strange image that lacks humanity. Bekele told Bryan Smith, Blade staff writer while a visiting international Artists at Bowling Green State University’s school of art in Ohio, that “Today, nothing is special about Africa except famine and war”. What we see in his intricately and candidly created works is today’s Africa, today’s Ethiopia. He did not look for any traditional, ethnic or historical paraphernalia to tell the truth about himself and his compatriots. The present-day, ghastly and distressful situation becomes inspirational subject matter for his creativity. He is clearly showing us, (or was he searching a panacea for), the contradiction between and the bizarre nature of contemporary existence. I see in Bekele’s work the scream, the uproar and discontent of the hungry, destitute, downtrodden, ill, helpless and abused people that he, and all of us, knew made ends meet in the streets of Addis and all around the nation. This kind of penetrating sardonic, ironic work of art, (which acts like a clairvoyant’s power penetrating into the future predicting the inevitable) would not have come from a trained hand and a plastic play alone, but from a matured, sensitive and conscious individual who receives the training and experience first hand from a life lived. (See Addis Tribune http://www.addistribune.com/Archives/2001/08/31-08-01/Bekele.htm Life and Art of Bekele). Bekele’s May 2002 exhibition at http://www.saci-florence.org/gallery/bekele.htm and May 2003 exhibition at the Bowling Green State University Bowen-Thompson Student Union Art Galleries in Ohio, despite the fact they were held a long distance from his native land, recalls and resonates the brutal truths, the subliminally monstrous. As one of his works, involving bullet shells and syringe (with its explicit and implicit role in killing and healing) best indicates, his works are riddled with the ironic, the parody, the inhumanity and the absurdity. The range and maturity of his work is also a significant achievement in sculpture and, perhaps, even painting since the days of Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian. The premises of his work have also, as did the work of Tadesse Gizaw, corroborated the philosophical relations between paintings and sculpture in 20th century Ethiopian Art. By: Esseye Medhin, December 23, 2003