The Changing of Horses: Commitment, Realism, and the Uncanny in the Artwork of Aref El-Rayess

Abstract

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimāʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. Tabdīl Al-ʾAhsina (The Changing of Horses), a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution.

The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In this thesis, I show that The Changing of Horses is only legible as the crystal of its social totality—as the nexus of a constellation of art criticism, intellectual debates, dominant ideologies, available modes of representation, social classes, political struggles, and historical processes. By attempting to reconstruct a social art history of this artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around the work, I expose the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. I argue that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.