ON THE WEBSITE for “Recognise,” a groundbreaking exhibition of art from and about the Middle East on view in London this past summer, its title is cast in the imperative: “Challenge your preconceptions. Unpick your presumptions. Dismantle your delusions. RECOGNISE!” If this was intended as a provocative entreaty to the art world, curator Predrag Pajdic succeeded in more nuanced ways in the exhibition itself, which presented conceptually challenging art by some forty artists, almost all Middle Eastern. For although increasing attention is paid to art from this region on the international level—with

“I’m a Real Photographer” trumpets the title of this first survey exhibition by Keith Arnatt. Presumably we are meant to see this as a proud assertion of identity by a man who started the ’60s as a painter and entered the next decade as one of Britain’s best-known Conceptual artists (participating in such shows as “Information” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and “The New Art” at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1972) yet in 1973 decided to bid farewell to all that. “Would you help me to become a photographer?” the already forty-three-year-old artist asked David Hurn, then a teaching

Twenty-one large paintings on newspaper, containing hundreds of small images, hung salon-style on the gallery’s thirty-foot back wall. Made over a one-year period and completely concealing the newsprint underneath, the paintings together looked like a vast storyboard or endless comic strip. Many of their small images contain figures in landscapes—sometimes seen from a great distance, sometimes from up close, as in a film by Antonioni, in which tiny unrecognizable figures seen from afar reappear in extreme close-up; the Greek-inspired structures, with their white surfaces and geometric colonnades,