Getahun’s Musical Arada Following in the footsteps of important and serious painters of contemporary Ethiopia, such as Mezgebu Tessema, who uses his realist painting and creates his own mode of symbolism to get his point across, Getahun Assefa, too, with a wider frame of reference, has exhibited a clever approach in contemporary Ethiopian art. After the pluralistic artistic movements and flux of the ’90s, by applying or appropriating an artistic language used by a specific artist of a specific time and place, Getahun remained consistent to a specific influence and inspiration. He became successful, and his work served as a distinct guidepost and inevitable inspiration for his students. Getahun graduated from the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts before he went to the former Soviet Union, where he obtained his MFA in 1996. By then, he had developed a highly recognizable style of painting and made this clear during the two-man show with his friend Kedir Keri at the Taitu International Art Center, Addis Ababa in 2001. In this exhibition Getahun showed a series of paintings titled Arada, all of which are posted on his web site. They all are inspired by the music, the women, and the history / yearning of the district of Arada. These works are like nothing anyone had done, neither in his generation nor in his instructors’ generation. Evidently, the present-day district is not the same as the Arada of the turn of the century; the current gruesome reality is totally different from the admired conservative and traditional old historic Arada. Nevertheless, as it has been inspirational for artists, authors, and musicians of the last century, it has become one of the fascinating and enchanting inspirational parts of Addis Ababa. The women of Arada and their music, which they often romantically and pleasingly represent, are favorite subjects. An attempt to analyze and associate Getahun’s musical Arada or, for that matter, works of any Ethiopian artist based exclusively on the artist’s personal experience, philosophy, or the internal necessity and the spiritual nature of the work, is almost always insufficient or incomplete. Typically, an important Ethiopian artist’s work lives on, and gets admired and treasured, not necessarily for the sake of the artist's personal deeply-felt experience, mystical experience, or internal reality, but for the collective feeling and experience it reflects. The public feels empathy with important works of art as a symbolic cultural form and achievement—responsive and sensitive for their spiritual, historical, social, and creative conditions. Also, traditionally, the public reaction to visual arts is different from that of entertainment or anything trivial that lacks critical consciousness. Incidentally, in the long history of civilization, no society ever classifies its visual arts collections as entertainment or artifact. Even if we feel that the public interest and reaction don’t matter; even if we try to enjoy the aesthetic without confusing it with other values; by far the objective, probably the best way, if not the easy and only way out, is to observe and analyze it in relation to the society’s collective experience, and where it is believed to have functioned culturally within the society. Because of its intent of creativity, even the most delusional of creative acts becomes a historical truth, a social and collective matrix. This, in turn, gives more importance and significance to the intuition and the artist’s connection to the society and the work’s place in the society's creative psyche. Otherwise, it will become meaningless, empty, boring, and end up being an artifact or, even worse, a temporary, ephemeral entertainment. As artistic and social commentaries, Getahun’s series of Arada paintings are not only attractive but also stupefying and perplexing. They offer an insight which assumes a spontaneous power of evoking and reflecting the artist's and society’s situation and experience. Unlike several others who studied like him in that part of the world, his work clearly reflects an interest of a specific important artist. He himself admitted that his work is “similar” to a nineteenth century Austrian painter of the Vienna Secession, the group’s first president, Gustav Klimt. Getahun’s thought-provoking Arada series of paintings are surely inspired by some formal approach of Klimt. However, the overall similarity of his work to Klimt’s stops with the decorative/ornamental background and the broken-stroke pattern, flattened often-horizontal or diagonal-spotted color. His philosophical bases and the urge for his artistic creation are totally different from that of Klimt. The basis for Klimt’s work, the psychological realism and the concept of la femme fatale, specifically that of the Western complex regarding modern painting and the physical and psychic anxiety, is visibly absent in Getahun’s work. Getahun gives his paintings the quality and the impact of the best of Ethiopian icons. They are composed and dignified, and are more like a work of art than a portrait of live individuals. They are, however, not the kind of art that comforts the thought and enlightens the soul that everything is going to be alright. They are contemplative, confronting, and questioning works at the same time. Getahun’s Arada, with carefully-painted fascinating dreamlike female floating images, depicts an intriguing and curious version of Arada. They are not joyous or cheerful, and maintain the same allure. They are frail, delicate, and are like a continuation of the concept of female beauty cherished by influential authors, musicians, and poets. Whether these women are imagined and painted, they seem to lack three-dimensionality and are far from tangible and concrete. There is an ambiguity and something quite disquieting in the character of these pale and monochromic indifferent female images. They are mortified prisoners in thought, and do not seem to reflect and expose the psychological passion of Getahun—the young man’s flare and drive for female body and beauty. Although the feminine components of the creative work are visible, the relationship between the portrayed women and the viewers, any indication of eye contact, is elusively avoided or is missing. In reality, they are only an artificial and artistic substitute for the horrible truth. Their sensual representation and the sensation they, and supposedly the music they play, clearly display to evoke the society’s misfortune and melancholy, are stuff the artist cannot suppress, conceal, or mystify. As art is becoming more and more a kind of status symbol, and mirror image of the mood of the society, these melancholic and disquieting women of Arada, as well as the music of Arada they are playing, reverberate and reflect the conscious and tragic image of the society. Getahun’s musical Arada reflects neither the past nor the present horror, or the disgraceful life and the truth about the women of Arada; neither does it echo the boisterous music of the present-day working class district of Arada. The women, and symbolically the music they are playing, are most definitely a distressing and melancholy tune. Hidden behind these tantalizing and woeful images is the reflection of the never-ending tension, and a desperate attempt of a section of the fashionable society of Addis Ababa to hang on to an irreparably destroyed time and place—long gone historic Arada. By: Esseye Medhin, December 31, 2004