The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

Death is not so curst as tyranny.

—Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Speculations on the human quest for freedom and the necessity of flinging open the floodgates of oppositional discourse have long been privileged themes in art and literature. Among Arab sculptors, no artist has taken up more seriously than Sami Mohammad the mission to perturb us with his reflections on these issues, and no artist has centered his aesthetics more resolutely on the task of thematizing them in order to unmask the dystopic conditions engendered by a floundering modernity.¹ The nature of the bleak reality that his visual art addresses is political and ethical; yet it underlies the linguistic as well. With a Bakhtinian spirit, Mohammad places the signs of his visual discourse in a historical and cultural context. He neither separates the social from the individual, nor the civic from the spiritual, nor yet language from speech

To interrogate, to chastise, and to allude to redemption, Mohammad, like some canonical figures of Western literature who have written politically motivated works, carries on a fervid dialogue with Greek mythology. In my view, during the years 1980 to 1990, which coincided with, among other climactic tragic events (the massacres at Halabja, the eight-year Iraq-Iran war), the consolidation of power of several authoritarian regimes, his dialogue seems to be concentrated around the figure of Prometheus.

The perspective of this study is biaxial: contextual and comparative. As a comparative study it postulates that aesthetically, Mohammad’s concept of art, like that of Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound and Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, is a dramatic envisioning of the nature of existence; that, like them, this vision is guided by a heightened political consciousness, the symbolic readings of the archetypal character of Prometheus, and an ethical ardor for humanistic values; that, like them, his visual art suggests that the sign of the buoyancy of culture (i.e., its positive attitude toward dissent and its passion for critical reflection) is the conviction that the underpinning logos should be freedom–and most specifically, free speech–a logos that is intrinsically and paradoxically antilogocentric. To establish this argument, my analysis explores the semiosis (i.e., the signification process in the broad, Peirceian sense) and literary acculturations of four of Mohammad’s major bronze figures in the round: Paralysis and Resistance (1980), The Challenge (1983), The Tied Man (1989), and The Earthquake (1990). The works were exhibited together during his 1994–1995 roaming solo exhibition and, therefore, can be approached as projecting a gestalt that regulates a coherent discourse. As a contextual study, this study maintains that the four figures are manifestations of a persistent political/axiological crisis in the Arab world and of an ardent search for an authentically liberating modern ethos. Moreover, and in terms of theme, the four sculptures are articulations of the dynamics and the problematics of self-fashioning in a world in conflict with political modernity.

No doubt, modernity is a capacious concept—John Rundell’s definition may best sum up its multifaceted nature. Modernity, he explains,

can be conceptualized as a process of societal and cultural differentiation and pluralization propelled by and revolving around a series of developmental logics or dynamics which may be located within each of the differentiating spheres. These developmental logics or dynamics include the general capitalization of social life; industrialization; the autonomization of art; and democratization or the debates and conflicts concerning the sovereignty of civil society and persons as autonomous beings.²

This last feature, democratization is, Rundell remarks, conducive to certain tensions, for “associated with the emergence of the public sphere, [it] interacts and clashes with the developmental logic of the state and its tendency to absorb society.”³ Given this conceptualization of modernity, it can be argued that Mohammad’s sculptures dramatize the subject’s desire to invest itself with agency because agency, among other positivities, makes the self coherent and knowable. At a basic level, this desire is intrinsically connected to the sanctification of the logocentricity of parole (i.e., the individual act of speech or utterance...