Lifestyle FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2017 For US composer, understanding Trump through optics o Mohammed Fairouz, a leading US composer whose work seeks the universal in the present day, policy experts have it Twrong when it comes to President Donald Trump. The artist, who has brought both poetry and politics alive through his music, finds it telling that Trump is so visibly enraged by Alec Baldwin, the actor who impersonates him on the comedy show Saturday Night Live. "I'm a composer; Alec is an actor. We know Donald Trump much better than the other side of me," said Fairouz, a frequent author of political essays. "The policy wonks don't really understand Donald Trump. People who come out of the entertainment industry do," Fairouz told AFP over an evening of contemplative conversation at his home studio in New York. With his background in reality television, Trump, to Fairouz, is "all about optics"-even when the new president takes actions A journalist watches a video by US artist Bill Viola during a press preview of the exhibition "Bill Viola’ Electronic Renaissance" that are highly controversial. "If it can be engineered so a woman on March 8, 2017 at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. — AFP photos who just got court protection for domestic abuse is then deport- ed, it looks awful-but he knows his base," Fairouz, who speaks with precision but passion, said of a recent case against an undocumented immigrant. Fairouz's latest work premieres this month at the Dutch National Contemporary master Viola Opera- "The New Prince," a futuristic reimagining of Machiavelli and his "end justifies the means" philosophy. The opera, with a libretto by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, casts a reborn Machiavelli in a world of contemporary figures including apostle of realpolitik embraces Renaissance roots Henry Kissinger. e calls it a homecoming. Bill Viola, the acclaimed con- down deep-you know, because my parents had gone." The Trump as opera? temporary artist, is back in Florence, the cradle of the first product of the new direction was "The Greeting", a work Asked if Trump could be the subject of a future opera, Fairouz HRenaissance masters who inspired some of his most inspired by the artist known as Pontormo's "Visitation," (1528- responded without hesitation: No. Opera is "a way to reach beyond famous works, powerful, immersive video installations dealing 29), which depicts the Virgin Mary greeting her pregnant the muddled present to touch things that are timeless and eternal, with the extremes of human emotion and experience. Four cousin Elizabeth. In Viola's video version, three women inter- and that is different from the ephemera of daily op-ed pieces and decades after he first worked in the Tuscan capital, the New act in a low-key but intense way in a super slow-motion breaking news," Fairouz said. "I think that Donald Trump lives in that Yorker regarded as one of the pioneers of video art has encounter based on the kind of chance street-corner meeting ephemera. When Donald Trump dies and is no longer able to gener- returned for a major exhibition that explores the links that had come to fascinate the artist. ate breaking news stories, his power fails." between his 20th-21st century output and paintings complet- Other highlights of the exhibition include the juxtaposition Fairouz sees as misplaced the depictions by some on the left who ed between 400 and 600 years earlier. of Florentine artist Paolo Uccello's fresco, "The Flood and see Trump as Hitler. Better comparisons, Fairouz said, may include "It has been really beautiful being in Florence again," Viola, Receding of the Waters" with Viola's 2002 video installation, more insular-minded masters of image such as Argentina's Eva 66, told AFP. "It has been completely emotional just to feel the "The Deluge (Going Forth by Day), and his "Man Searching for Peron and Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq. Yet Zia knew not to ruffle whole vibe of everything here. We have come back home and Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity," with Weimar the feathers of the powerful military and intelligence services from that is what it is all about." "Electronic Renaissance" opens to artist Lukas Cranach's "Adam, Eve", a 1528 work borrowed which he emerged, said Fairouz, whose upcoming projects include the public on Friday and runs through July 23, with the main from the Uffizi Gallery. Nearly all of the works on show, under- an opera on the lives and violent deaths of Pakistan's Bhuttos. collection housed at the Palazzo Strozzi and other works line the link between the religious themes that dominated "Zia was able to pull off a certain level of looking like a fool, cling- spread over a number of other museums and galleries Renaissance art with the spirituality that is ever present in ing onto power by being self-effacing-'I am your humble servant.' I throughout Tuscany. "Bill is one of the most important living Viola's meditations on birth, death and the cycle of life. don't think Trump can do that," Fairouz said. Fairouz saw the US national security establishment-"ossified and in many ways dysfunc- artists. He is one of the fathers of video art and this is the "I know Bill is a religious man but I could not say what his tional"-as a key factor in restraining Trump. biggest and most complete exhibition of his work ever done," religion is," says Galansino. "But yes, like the Renaissance said Strozzi director Arturo Galansino. "But it is so much more painters, his work is very spiritual. So in a way what we are prov- Symptom, not disease than that. For the first time, his installations have been put ing with this exhibition is how modern the past is." — AFP Fairouz, a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate together with the masterpieces that inspired them." Hillary Clinton, has stayed on the frontline. An Arab-American, Fairouz helped translate for travelers held up by Trump's initial ban Parents' death on entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries. He also The exhibition also includes photos and memorabilia from composed a song for a recent night of activist solidarity at Lincoln the two years Viola spent working as a video producer with an Center. Fairouz sees Trump, who enhanced his political career with avant garde art group in Florence in the mid-1970s. Although false claims that then-president Barack Obama was not born in the at the time he did not see the city's artistic treasures influenc- United States, as part of a deeper strain of anti-intellectualism on ing his own creative direction, Viola was struck as a young the US right.—AFP man by the presence of art in everyday life in Italy, and that influenced him long before the overt references to Renaissance art began to emerge in his output from the mid- nineties onwards. "As a boy from Queens in New York, growing up he had always seen art in a museum, not in the street, in a church etcetera," said Galansino. "Now he talks about the big fresco cycles in churches as art installations." Kira Perov, Viola's wife and career-long collaborator, jointly curated the exhibition. "Bill was really interested in what there was to see in Florence but he only consciously drew on it many years later," she said, describing how his change of direction was influenced by the death of his mother and father in the 1990s. "He came face to face with death, and also our two children were born. And it was then that the whole of emotional content, the humane- ness of Renaissance art hit him. "And it really hit him. He became very much influenced by the extreme emotions that were being experienced in these beautiful paintings... it was about grief, it was about loss and that very much shaped his work."

This file photo taken on January 23, 2015 shows composer A modern past Mohammed Fairouz speaking during an interview at a Viola himself says: "I just kinda felt it in my gut, outta here, US video artist Bill Viola speaks with journalists during a recording studio in New York. — AFP you know. That is where it came from for me, somewhere press preview of the exhibition.