Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses 9780755604432, 9781784530020

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Acknowledgments Initial plans for this book developed when I held a research associateship at Oxford University, sponsored by the Barakat Trust. During my associateship, I had the idea to organise a comprehensive event that could bring together the most current issues and discourses in contemporary art from the Middle East, and its position in relation to so-called contemporary global art discourses. While the conference that inspired parts of this book was very fruitful – as is the case for any similar event – it was limited to those who had participated in it. Thus, a book on the issues raised during the event needed to be written. The preparation of this volume was truly a result of teamwork, and I would therefore firstly like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the authors of each of the chapters. I would also like to thank the institutions and artists who have provided us with high-quality images for reproduction in the book. The entire project would have been impossible without the support and enthusiasm of Dr Hassan Hakimian, director of the London Middle East Institute, SOAS, to whom I am very grateful. I should like to thank all the members of the LMEI for their support and excellent professionalism – in particular, Louise Hosking, its executive officer, and also Valentina Zanardi and Vincenzo Paci. The project would likewise not have been feasible without the generous support of the sponsors – in particular the Baraket Trust, and its chairman of the time, Professor James Allan, who offered constant support and encouragement throughout the project; and of course the Goethe Institute, Iran Heritage Foundation, Caspian Arts Foundation, and Ibraaz. I am indebted to all of them for their support. Last but not least, I am very grateful for the excellent insights and suggestions provided by Charles Peyton, the copy-editor of this volume, and for the work of Arghavan Khosravi, the designer of the book. I should further like to thank Anna Coatman, the editor

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at I.B.Tauris, for her useful comments, and the publishers, for their keen interest in the project.

note 1

The conference, entitled ‘Regional vis-à-vis Global Discourses:

Contemporary Art from the Middle East’, was held on 5 and 6 July 2013 at the London Middle East Institute, SOAS, University of London.

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Notes on Contributors

James Allan has spent most of his working life at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, as curator of its Islamic collections, and later also as Keeper of Eastern Art. From 2006 until his retirement in 2013, he lectured in Islamic art in the Khalili Research Centre at Oxford University. Professor Allan has published numerous books and articles, particularly in the field of Islamic metalwork and ceramics. His latest book, The Art and Architecture of Twelver Shi’ism: Iraq, Iran and the Indian SubContinent, was published in 2012. Hamid Dabashi has had a long and distinguished academic career, since obtaining a dual PhD in the sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and he has taught and delivered lectures in many universities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Iran and the Arab World. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. Professor Dabashi has written numerous books on subjects ranging from Iranian studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing, The World is My Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader, co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, was published in 2010. Fereshteh Daftari obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1988. Her thesis, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky, was published in 1991. From 1988 to 2009, she worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, where she curated numerous exhibitions ix

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with international artists. In 2006 she curated Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. Revisiting art by Middle Eastern artists, in 2012 she curated an exhibition of performance art with Iranian artists in Paris, and in 2013 she guest curated Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists for MOA in Vancouver. She has also focused on modern Iranian art, having guest curated a 2002 exhibition for New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, which formed the basis for her essay ‘Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective’. Her second exhibition on this theme, Iran/ Modern, was held at the Asia Society in New York in 2013. Abbas Daneshvari is Professor of Art History and Acting Chair in the Department of Art at California State University, Los Angeles. His publications cover various aspects of Persian art. He is the author and editor of seven volumes on Iranian and Islamic art, as well as numerous articles on medieval Iranian, contemporary Iranian and European art. Professor Daneshvari is the editor-in-chief for Islamic art and architecture of Mazda Publishers, Inc., and editor of several collective publications. His latest book is Amazingly Original: Contemporary Iranian Art at a Crossroads (2014). Helia Darabi is an art critic, freelance curator, and lecturer on modern and contemporary art at the University of Art, Tehran. Since 1999 she has contributed to various publications focusing on contemporary art. She worked on the Encyclopedia of Art (as assistant to the author), was employed by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (as a researcher) and was an assistant editor of the contemporary art quarterly, Art Tomorrow. Her recent publications include ‘Found in Translation: The Productive Role of the Exile Experience on Contemporary Iranian Artists’, in Nukta Art (2010) and ‘Three Iranian Contemporary Artists’, in Art Press (2010). She is currently preparing a textbook for critical analysis as her doctoral thesis.

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Hamid Keshmirshekan is a research associate at LMEI, SOAS, University of London. He was the Barakat Trust Academic Fellow in the History of Art Department, Oxford University, and editorin-chief of the bilingual (English-Persian) quarterly, Art Tomorrow. From 2004 to 2012, he was Associate Fellow at the Khalili Research Centre, Oxford University. He received his PhD in history of art from SOAS, University of London, and was awarded post-doctoral fellowships by the Barakat Trust in 2004-05 and the British Academy, AHRC and ESRC in 2008 – both at Oxford University. His current research is on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art from the Islamic world, with a particular focus on recent developments in art practice and its relation to its context. He has organised several international conferences on aspects of modern and contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, and has contributed extensively to various publications. Some of his latest publications include Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (2013) and ‘Reclaiming Cultural Space: Artist’s Performativity versus State’s Expectations in Contemporary Iran’ (2013). Shaheen Merali is a curator and writer currently based in London. From 2003 to 2008, he was head of exhibitions, film and new media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by key publications, including The Black Atlantic, Dreams and Trauma: Moving Images and the Promised Lands and Re-Imagining Asia: One Thousand Years of Separation. In 2006 he was also co-curator of the sixth Gwangju Biennale, in Korea. Since leaving Germany, he has curated several exhibitions in India and Iran, and subsequently embarked upon a period of extensive research and consultation on the conservation and production of a major exhibition of the International Collection of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture ( January 2012). His recent exhibitions include Refractions: Moving Images on Palestine at the P21 Gallery, London, and When Violence becomes Decadent, at the ACC Galerie, Weimar, both of which took place in 2013. xi

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Venetia Porter is a curator responsible for the collection of Islamic art, in particular art of the Arab world and Turkey, as well as for developing the collection of the modern and contemporary art of the Middle East at the British Museum. She studied Arabic and Islamic art at Oxford University, and obtained her PhD on the medieval history and architecture of the Yemen from the University of Durham. She curated the exhibitions Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East in London (2006) and Dubai (2008), and Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (2012). Her recent publications include Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum (2011), and, as editor, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (2012) and The Art of Hajj (2012). A book based on the British Museum’s collection of Middle Eastern art is in preparation. Sarah Rogers is an independent scholar. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture in 2008, for a thesis on ‘Postwar Art and the Historical Roots of Beirut’s Cosmopolitanism’. Her writings on modern and contemporary art of the Arab world have been published by Parachute, Art Journal and Arab Studies Journal. She is a founding board member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA). She is currently editing a collection of essays on the Khalid Shoman private collection in Amman, Jordan. Irit Rogoff is a writer, curator and organiser working at the intersection between contemporary art, critical theory and emerging political manifestations. She is Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she heads the PhD programme in Curatorial/Knowledge, the MA programme in Global Arts, and the new Geo-Cultures Research Centre. Professor Rogoff has written extensively on geography, globalisation and contemporary participatory practices in the expanded field of art. A collection of recent essays, Unbounded – Limits’ Possibilities, was xii

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published in 2012 with e-flux/Sternberg, and her new book, Looking Away: Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities, was published in 2013. She lives and works in London. Hamid Severi studied the history of art at Santa Barbara University, and has taught theoretical courses on art at various universities and private institutions. He was deputy of education in the Faculty of Art and Architecture at Azad University in Tehran, and the head of the Research Centre of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. He has contributed articles to art journals such as the bilingual quarterly Art Tomorrow, has curated many photography and video art exhibitions, and has convened many conferences. He was chosen as the University of Ottawa’s Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2011, and is currently on the editorial boards of Art Tomorrow and Art and Media magazines. Nada Shabout is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Studies Institute at the University of North Texas. She is a former member of the board of governors of the Cultural Development Center of the Qatar Foundation, Consulting Director of the Research Center on Arab Modernity, and a long-term advisor at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, in Doha. She led Mathaf ’s curatorial team for its inaugural exhibition, Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, as well as curating one of the two accompanying opening exhibitions, Interventions: A Dialogue between the Modern and the Contemporary. Her teaching and writing interests are in the areas of Arab and Islamic visual culture, theory and history, imperialism, Orientalism and globalisation. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007), co-editor of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century (2009), and founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA). She has co-curated Modernism and Iraq at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (2009), and curated the travelling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art (2005-09). xiii

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List of Illustrations List of Figures Figure 1.1. Azadeh Akhlaghi, Aras River, Iran – Samad Behrangi/ 3 September 1968, 2012, digital print on photo paper, 110 × 174 cm, p29. Figure 3.1. Book cover: Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2007), p59. Figure 3.2. Book cover: Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi and Nada Shabout, eds, New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (London: TransGlobe, 2009), p59. Figure 3.3. Book cover: Saeb Eigner, Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran (Abingdon: Merrell, 2010), p59. Figure 3.4. Book cover: Lynn Gumpert‬ and Shiva Balaghi‬, eds, Picturing Iran‬: Art, Society and Revolution (I.B.Tauris, 2002), p63. Figure 4.1. Book cover: Alireza Sahafzadeh, Hunar-i huviyyat va siyasat-i baznimaei: mutali’ehii dar tarikh-i ijtimaei-i hunar-i amrika (The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation: A Study of the Social History of American Art) (Tehran: Bidgol, 2009), p77. Figure 4.2. Book cover: Tooka Maleki, Hunar-i nowgiray-i Iran (Iranian Modern Art) (Tehran: Nazar, 2011), p79. Figure 4.3. Book cover: Hamid Keshmirshekan, Amidst Shadow and Light: Contemporary Iranian Art and Artists (Hong Kong: Liaoning Creative Press), p81. Figure 7.1. Gohar Dashti, from the Me, She and the Others series, 2009, C Print, p112. Figure 7.2. Arman Stepanian, from the New Art series, 2008, C Print, 100 × 70 cm, p113. Figure 7.3. Parviz Tanavoli, Prophet, 1962, Bronze, 97 × 40 × 20 xiv

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cm, Coll. Walker Art Center Minneapolis, p115. Figure 7.4. Massoud Arabshahi, Untitled, 1964, oil on canvas, 110 × 70 cm, p115. Figure 7.5. Alireza Astaneh, from the Donald series, 2011, iron and industrial colour coated, 190 × 92 cm, p118. Figure 7.6. Amir Mobed, 50% Off, 2011, performance and installation at the Azad Gallery, p121. Figure 7.7a, and b. Neda Razavipour, Self-Service, 2009, interaction performance, p123. Figure 7.8. Barbad Golshiri, Qued, 2010, C Print on paper, 106.2 × 106.5 cm, 1/10, p123. Figure 7.9 a, and b. Barbad Golshiri, The Untitled Tomb1 & 2, 2012, iron, soot, 60.5 × 135 × 0.2 cm, Edition of 3 + 1 AP, p124. Figure 7.10a, and b. Barbad Golshiri, As Dad As Possible, As Dad As Beckett, 2000-2013, iron, ashes, 200.3 × 100.2 × 28.3 cm, p125. Figure 8.1. p137.

American University of Beirut, College Hall Gallery, 1971,

Figure 8.2. Ziad Abillama, beach installation, 1992, p145. Figure 8.3. Walid Sadek, Once I Dreamt I Was a Phoenix, 1997, p151. Figure 8.4. Walid Sadek, The Last Days of Summer, 1997, cassette cover, p151. Figure 9.1. Parastou Forouhar, Freitag (‘Friday’), 2003, 4, panels, digital print on canvas, edition of 5, each panel, 170 × 86 cm, p163. Figure 9.2. Parastou Forouhar, Blind Spot series, 2001, digital print on Alu Dibond, 65 × 45 cm, p164. Figure 9.3. Mandana Moghaddam, The Cube and the Red Ball, 2002, installation, p165. Figure 9.4. Mandana Moghaddam, interior of The Cube and the xv

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Red Ball, 2002, p166. Figure 9.5. Barbad Golshiri, Ghayr (‘the Other’), 2007, crude oil, saffron and semen, Azad Gallery, Tehran, p167. Figure 9.6. Babak Golkar, From Africa to Americas and Cubism, from the Return Project series, 2011, C Print, 92 × 66 cm, p168. Figure 9.7. Babak Golkar, From Africa to Americas and Cubism, from the Return Project series, 2011, detail of 10, wood sculpture, 17.6 × 11 × 6.6 cm, p169. Figure 9.8. Barbad Golshiri, Portrait of the Artist as a One-YearOld Child, 2005, photograph and digital retouch, 107 × 149 cm, p175. Figures 11.1 a, b and c. Hazem Harb, from the Beyond Memory Series, No. 1/3, 2012, p204-5. Figure 11.2. Rula Halawani, Negative Incursion, 2002, p208. Figures 11.3 a and b. 1997‐1999, p208.

Sadegh Tirafkan, from the Soldiers series,

Figure 11. 4 a and b. Sadegh Tirafkan, from the ‘Ashura Ritual Tehran Bazaar series, 1990, p210. Figure 11.5 a and b. Figure 11.6. 2011, p212.

Nicène Kossentini, Shakl, 2012, p212.

Nicène Kossentini, Khadija for the Boujmal series,

Figure 12.1. Queen Farah Diba and architect Kamran Diba in the main entrance hall, TMoCA, autumn 1975, p224. Figure 12.2. Main entrance hall, TMoCA, 1983 p228. Figure 12.3. Mohammad Reza Firouzeh, 1984, oil on canvas, printed on the leaflet of TMoCA’s activities in 1984 p229 Figure 12.4. p230.

Book fair held in the galleries of TMoCA, 1983

Figure 12.5. From left to right: President Mohammad Khatami, xvi

List of Illustrations

his bodyguard, Minister of Culture Attaollah Mohajerani, and the TMoCA director and head of the Institute for Plastic Arts, Alireza Sami Azar p235. Figures 12.6. a, b and c. Sadegh Safaei and Mehran Houshyar, The Road Is under Construction, (2002), live performance p237. List of Plates Plate 1. Book cover: Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Plate 2. Book cover: Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books, 2013). Plate 3. Azade Akhlaghi, Tehran-Mirzadeh Eshghi/3 July 1924, 2012, digital print on photo paper, 110 × 209 cm. Plate 4. Encyclonospace Iranica Exhibitions, curated by: Mohammad Salemy, 14 September-26 October 2013, Access Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. Plate 5. Newsha Tavakolian, Look, 2012, C Print. 105 × 140 cm. Plate 6. Katyoun Karami, Once Upon The Time, 2013, (first of four panels), digital print on plaster panel (moisture resistant KNAUF), ed. 5, 120 × 240 cm. Plate 7. Shapour Pooyan, Projectile 6, 2012, brass, iron, and steel, 200 × 90 × 90 cm. Plate 8. Amir Mobed, Fraud, 2013, performance at the Azad Gallery Tehran, courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Zarvan Rouhbakhshan. Plate 9. Mahmoud Bakhshi, Bahman’s Wall, 2011, Ropak Installation. Plate 10. Nazgol Ansarinia, from the Reflections Refractions series, 2012, newspaper collage.

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Plate 11. Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995, © Ziad Abillama. Plate 12. Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995. © Ziad Abillama. Plate 13. Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995, © Ziad Abillama. Plate 14. Mohammad Ghazali, Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest (Jay-i sar-i khouan), Abu Saeeid Abul-Khayr, 2009, edition of 7, 134 × 112 cm. Plate 15. Mohammad Ghazali, Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest ( Jay-e sar khouban), Reza Abbasi, 2009, edition of 7, 134 × 112 cm. Plate 16. Parastou Forouhar, Trauerfeier (‘Funeral Service’), 2003, office chairs and religious banners, installation at National Gallery Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Plate 17. Parastou Forouhar, Countdown, 2008, beanbags and religious banner, installation at the House of World Cultures, Berlin. Plate 18. Babak Golkar, The Ground for Standing and Understanding, 2012, Persian carpet, acrylic, wood and lacquer, 275 × 396 cm. Plate 19. Babak Golkar, Azadi Tower, from the Parergon series, 2011, acrylic, wood, and lacquer, 137 × 147.5 × 12.5 cm. Plate 20. Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Plate 21. Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Plate 22. Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Plate 23. Barbad Golshiri, L’Inconnu de la scène, 28 June 2012. Performance at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

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Plate 24. Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada. Plate 25. Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada. Plate 26. Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada. Plate 27. Mohammed Abla, In Conversation, 2011. Plate 28. Eman Mohammed, Untitled, 2009. Plate 29. Steve Sabella, Till the End Spirit of a Place, 2004. Plate 30. Nicene Kossentini, Ibn ‘Arabi, Al‐fana fi’l mushahada,2011, installation, wall mural, 9 mirrored panels, 450 × 360 cm. Plate 31. Boushra Almutawakel, Mother, Daughter, Doll, 2012. Plate 32. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, exterior view from the inner courtyard. Plate 33. View of exhibition Contemporary British Sculpture, 2003. Plate 34. View of first Fadjr Visual Arts Festival, 2008. Plate 35. A view of the Sug-nigareh (‘mourning-graphy’) exhibition, 2011.

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Introduction

I

n recent years, there has been a proliferation of exhibitions of contemporary art from the Middle East, both in the region and abroad. While it is possible to track the success of the art market and the rise of interest in art from this part of the world, the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding this phenomenon require closer analysis. It is generally agreed among scholars in the field that the discourses surrounding the production and reception of art from the Middle East need to be exposed and scrutinised. The domestic art boom spread before school curricula, museums, art critics or even scholars had begun to grapple with the relevant questions. However, there have been limited attempts to theorise unresolved questions about the definitions of such work, and the debate concerning the logic of the regional and local in contemporary global art discourses. All of the old questions regarding position and context – geographical, ideological and aesthetic – are being complicated. Since the uniformity of the global and the destruction of particularities threaten the exclusive diversity of cultural and artistic expression, should critical artistic practice underline and make visible the particular and represent this suppressed diversity? This book coincides with the recent flourishing of discussions and publications concerning contemporary Middle Eastern (or so-called Islamic) society and politics in Western academia. While attention has been paid to broader issues concerning the Middle East, the history and theory of the region’s contemporary art have not yet received the same level of analysis, despite the fact that over the past decade the global art community has turned its focus onto cultural activity across the region, and especially its varied social, economic and political experiences. Although there have been several gatherings and summits in Europe, North America – and even in the Middle East itself – on various aspects of art from the region, such as the state of the art market, of patronage, of museum strategies, and so on – there has been no comprehensive

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academic publication addressing the most recent cultural, intellectual and sociopolitical developments in contemporary art from the Middle East. As universities (departments of art history and cultural studies) and artistic institutions across Europe and North America are becoming increasingly interested and invested in the field, it seems timely to address these deficiencies. This book considers the present and future state of contemporary Middle Eastern art from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering global and regional viewpoints, and examining historical and cultural contexts. While avoiding homogenisation of the region’s cultural potentials, it tries to define the region commonly labelled the ‘Middle East’, as well as revealing the dilemmas with which artists, curators, authors and critics from within and beyond the region are confronted. A further objective of this book is to reflect on the methodological fundamentals of art history and cultural studies, and how they might be applied to the study of contemporary art from the Middle East. It also investigates how contemporary and so-called global theories of artistic practice affect the production and reception of art in the region. Reflecting on recent exhibitions and curatorial projects, it aims to address the question of what is liable to be lost in the process of transfer – for example, the contextual meaning of an artwork – and how this can be reclaimed. The book includes discussions on different facets of contemporary Middle Eastern art by a range of art theorists and professionals from around the world, as well as regional scholars and professionals. This volume consists of three sections. Section I, ‘KnowledgeProduction and Transfer’, explores the nature of ‘knowledge’ in culture and art, the main definitions and concepts involved, and their contextualisation in the Middle East. It explores the status of art criticism and art history produced within the region, and the ways in which they affect art production and artistic perspectives. It examines the literature on contemporary Middle Eastern art published outside the region; it deals with the problem of the dearth of theoretical constructs and the relative absence of academic discussion, which have left its art 2

Introduction

open to misinterpretation and simple conjecture. It addresses the current challenges in this field, and how are they being met. Questions explored include: What is the status of contemporary Middle Eastern art history? What is the timeframe for such a history? How closely should it be linked to contemporary art from the region, or to cultural and political history? How coordinated should it be with Western art history or aesthetic discourse? Is contemporary Middle Eastern art history a subfield of contemporary art history? Or are they comparable categories, with the presumption that the unnamed territory of ‘contemporary art history’ is Western-American? In Chapter 1, Hamid Dabashi discusses how the categories of regional and global discourse in our understanding of contemporary art already presuppose the unexamined categories of ‘local’ and ‘universal’. The claim to universality has been the privilege of art produced in Western Europe and North America, casting a shadow over the art produced in other regions. The author argues that – not only under the terms of ‘globalisation’, but even more as a result of the recent democratic uprisings in the Arab and Muslim world – the inherited colonial geography, with its tacit categories of ‘universal’ and ‘regional’, is now falling apart. He notes that, from curatorial practices to academic discourse, the constitution of contemporary art is either explicitly or implicitly enacted in – based on a delusion – the shadow of the West, subjecting the world beyond to the status of ‘the rest’. Dabashi also argues that terms such as ‘Middle East’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘modern’ art, and disciplinary formations such as departments of ‘art history’, are themselves the most basic traps posed in thinking about these forms of artistic expression. For the author, contemporary art in the areas colonially constituted as the ‘Middle East’ exists in the same way as any other region of the world – and yet, like any other art produced in Asia, Africa or Latin America, it is understood from Western European and North American perspectives. He believes that the theorisation of art from the Arab and Muslim world has finally passed the point at which it must be definitively liberated from a curatorial and art-historical frame of reference almost entirely predicated on the regions of the world in 3

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question that call themselves the West – based, arguably, on epistemic prejudices, and in which most exhibitions, and perforce conferences, are organised. Dabashi concludes that this issue is entirely epistemic, and not in the domain of identity politics: curators and theorists carrying an Arab or Muslim patronymic are not in any way exempt from extending the colonial imaginary of the ‘Middle East’ into the categorical and curatorial decisions they make about how to frame their next exhibition. His suggestion is to snatch away the works of art that testify to the world-historic changes from their systemic appropriation by outdated museums, recurring biennials, and passively or actively commodified curatorial practices. Works of art need to be seen as fragments, as ruins, and thus as allegories that implicate traumatic memories of the region. Irit Rogoff, in Chapter 2, concentrates on the problematics of the division between ‘regional’ and ‘global’. Rogoff argues that the problem at hand is one of differentiating between globalisation, which is founded on the idea of circulation, and regionality, which is founded on the idea of relationality. The author believes that, if seen within the overarching framework of globalisation, one needs to understand what kinds of circulation – internal and external – these forms of cultural production are undergoing. This generates an even bigger set of problems when one acknowledges the degree to which the art market is spearheading the onslaught of interest in the region and its cultural activities. Rogoff then introduces two terms that are useful in thinking through the political problems of the Middle East. One is the concept of ‘regional imaginaries’, and the other is that of ‘exhausted geographies’. She maintains that these terms provide the ‘oblique points of entry’ that refuse straightforward and seemingly normative designations such as nation, region, identity, discrete histories, contradictory belief systems, territorial conflicts, divergent civic imaginaries, differing experiences of colonialism, post-colonial liberation and national formation. Rogoff maintains that when artists move away from recent history or geography they are not romantically lost in the mists of time, nor are they didactically claiming that today’s problems are grounded in the deep structures inherited from ancient histories. They are, however, producing acts of dislocation – in her terms, they are 4

Introduction

‘exhausting’ the geography of modern nationalism, of endless conflict, of colonially established borders, divisions and identities. Rogoff continues by asking what the terms ‘global’ and ‘regional’ are that are positioned as binary opposites? She notes that when we juxtapose these two terms we acquiesce in the belief that they are two mutually opposing logics. We either ally ourselves with the global forces of ‘Empire’, or we investigate the conditions close to us as divorced from these – as unique and specific to a locale, as refusing any overarching homogenisation or subjugation. Rogoff believes that it is never that simple, and that the global is made up of numerous registers and textures of the local that weave around each other and defy any dominant logic. She conceives the concept of ‘exhausted geographies’ as one that is trying to work against the grain of both the boundaries of the possible and of location as the site of identity and knowledge. She therefore assumes that ‘exhaustion is in relation to political conflict, not a mode of opting out and withdrawing, but as one of recognising the limits of a logic that has dominated that conflict for most of its duration’. Chapter 3, by Nada Shabout, explores the theme of knowledgeproduction in the field of contemporary art from the Middle East. ‘Framing the Discipline of Contemporary Art of the Arab World through the Press’ begins by addressing the problem faced by all who teach twentieth- and twenty-first-century art from the region. She maintains that, aside from the problems of translation and publication, one can identify other reasons for the lack of resources – ranging from the history of Middle Eastern art’s ideological absence from the canon of Western art history to the lack of knowledge of the topic, and of trained historians specialising in it. Given the colonial history of most Middle Eastern countries, it is not surprising that they were essentially removed from history. This disavowal has led to the total marginalisation of modern art production outside the West, including the modern art of the Middle East. Unable to resolve its complication through the politics of identity, modern Arab art is fundamentally ignored and dismissed as being chiefly of propagandistic, and not aesthetic, interest. Shabout argues that politics forms a space of continuity between the modern and 5

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contemporary art of the Arab world, despite certain tensions between the two. While both modern and contemporary forms of visual production are engaged in the politics of their time, they vary in the relationship they each have with their respective states. Shabout continues by addressing the new wave of literature emerging on the art of the region, responding to the sudden proliferation of exhibitions in the West centred on themes and visual productions of the Middle East – particularly its contemporary productions. The global celebration of contemporary Middle Eastern art – exemplified in art fairs, auction house sales and exhibitions – has not been without its benefits to its art. She then analytically maps out the major publications on Middle Eastern art that have in effect constructed and defined the scholarship. In Chapter 4, Hamid Severi argues that, in attempting to understand the state of research and knowledge-production on contemporary art in Iran, it is necessary to keep several limitations in mind. Since the 1979 Revolution – and especially since 2009, the year of a controversial election – there has been a heightened pressure on intellectuals and the cultural elite to conform to the state ideology. Art and the humanities in general, as they exist in Iran, are considered Western-orientated, and thus politically and religiously suspicious. It is relevant to note that many of the translations occur in alternative spaces, and constitute an important source for artists’ and students’ understanding of contemporary art. According to Severi, the state institutions responsible for art education and exhibitions, as well as the various universities and museums, pay no attention to contemporary art – or, if they do, they approach the subject from an ideological perspective. After mapping the major art publications, he turns to address another area: knowledge produced by artists, curators, artistic researches, curatorial projects and virtual spaces – an expanded definition of knowledge-production that blurs the distinction between art practice and artistic research. Severi believes that, although the state’s official policy pursues the localisation and Islamisation of the humanities, and encourages indigenous knowledge and superficial post-colonial approaches, there are no significant scholarly works that observe these requirements. Although 6

Introduction

the knowledge-production being conducted in official spaces is scarce and conservative, it seems that, in spite of its many restrictions and shortcomings, it is proliferating in alternative spaces. Severi concludes that, despite the numerous sociopolitical and cultural restrictions, a younger generation of scholars, artists and curators is producing knowledge by writing books and articles, conducting artistic research, pursuing curatorial activities, publishing online magazines and websites, and producing documentary films. This new generation thereby keeps the disparate flames of knowledge burning. Shaheen Merali, in Chapter 5, asserts that the discussion of archives can be fruitfully pursued with this question in mind: What is the role of the archive in understanding and facilitating the visual arts in the region? He maintains that the term ‘spectre’ suggests something that appears and can easily be forgotten, or something that lingers while not necessarily always remaining visible. It is this notion of the spectre that would lead us to start thinking about the archive as a post-event – the return of the original in a different appearance. When he applies the notion of the spectre to the subject of the archive, he suggests two further readings. The first is that of a visible but disembodied entity allowing research to be comprehensive, and providing a final resting place for its many components. The second is of something that haunts or disturbs our mind, like a supernatural relationship to the past. Here, he suggests that tricks of the mind and of memory play a specific role in revisiting that which was once real but now remains with us only in an internalised sense, although somewhat intransigently. The archive, Merali maintains, has many possibilities and many points of entry; although imbued with a sense of objectivity, much of it remains principally in the subjective domain, and the element of selection must be reconciled with the researcher’s objectives. The Middle East is one that has gone through a great deal of traumatic change, leaving many to work within the voids that now remain the gatekeepers of the new repositories of often violated cultural history. Merali also notes that, in this profoundly haunted state, where so much of the past has been destroyed or remains not attended to, the innovative archives are spaces which themselves inspire fear, 7

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due to the adjustment of perspective that they mandate away from the traditional archive. In Chapter 6, James Allan notes that education is all too often seen as synonymous with knowledge, whereas the acquisition of knowledge is only a part of education. He points out the problems of volume, quantity and variety that exist even in the world of early Islamic art, and then compares them with those of contemporary art in Islamic societies. He observes that one can scarcely imagine the number of artists in the Islamic world, the variety of media through which they express themselves, representing as they do very different cultures within the world in which Islam is the dominant religion – and indeed the sheer number of artworks that each produces – to say nothing of the myriad of new art forms available. Allan believes that, in today’s world, we may encounter artists who are particularly articulate about the narrative or philosophy with which their artwork is engaged, and a whole host of critics whose views of that artwork may well be as diverse as their number. Given the volume and diversity of the material, the numerous contrasting perspectives it evokes, and the comparative understandings that might be required in order to reach a valid viewpoint, the question still remains: How are we to teach contemporary art from the Middle East? He answers this question to the effect that it is clearly impossible to study contemporary art history fully and completely, and that it should therefore never be the aim. Nevertheless, one should appreciate this fact, not in terms of knowledge distributed to or by the students, but for this subject’s great educational value, as it offered those students the opportunity to acquire the information they needed to think about the relevant problems, to evaluate the various ways forward, and to come to conclusions that would help them all make the most of their opportunities. Section II concentrates on ‘Artistic Production and Contemporary Global Discourses’, and examines contemporary practices in the region and their affinity with or divergence from contemporary global art theories and discourses. In Chapter 7, I examine the issue of belonging, which is related to localised historical and cultural landscapes and fuels a complex 8

Introduction

debate today in Iranian art, and perhaps that of the Middle East more generally. I argue that the lack of critical discourse regarding this issue has left individual artists to pursue their own solutions to the question, and to generate artistic strategies that are relevant to the demands of contemporaneity. I then examine the strategies pursued by artists in the Iranian context, and the wider politics of art practice relating to these fundamental yet unresolved questions. I examine this concern through the works of a number of artists (Amir Mobed, Neda Razavipour, Barbad Golshiri, Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar and Nazgol Ansarinia), situating them with reference to the concepts of identity, ethnicity and transnational contemporaneity. With reference to selected works, I also consider how artists enact a politics of resistance to explicit ethnocultural identity markers – that is, to essentialised cultural views that often reduce their works to geopolitical concepts. Using contemporary discourses on globalised art, their art practice aims to revisit a wellestablished debate within art-historical discourse: namely, whether art should have creative autonomy, or whether it is only ever determined by its context. I then argue that contemporary Iranian art, in the process of adaptation to and appropriation of the Euro-American artistic paradigms, has incorporated elements of so-called global contemporary art while seeking to create and reflect the phenomena of its own contemporaneity. In the second part of the chapter, through case studies of artists’ works, I show how artists act against the erasure of contextual frames, demonstrating an awareness of the fact that contemporary art is capable of transcending the politics of location. I then discuss the current dilemma of how contemporary Iranian artists have responded to Iran’s social and cultural complexities. Unsurprisingly, issues concerning the politics of identity have taken centre stage within this emerging context, and have thus shaped and influenced artistic practice. The central challenge is to construct an alternative set of expressive criteria, defined from within rather than from outside, while also gaining recognition from the art world as it presently exists. In Chapter 8, Sarah Rogers explores the history of art in Lebanon, and examines the incompleteness in that history which, in her view, was 9

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a result of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). The chapter attempts to define the missing historical space of art in Lebanon, and to identify a bridge between the prewar and postwar eras. The first section documents the fractured infrastructure of the visual arts throughout the civil war. The focus then shifts to two artists actively engaged in projects throughout the 1990s who sought to confront the legacies of the civil war: Walid Sadek and Ziad Abillama. A reading of their biographies together with their early work from this period suggests an orientation towards, not a vast rupture, but rather a historicised reconfiguration of art’s social role in the immediate postwar period. By examining the artistic trajectories of Sadek and Abillama, the author shows how art’s defined role has been determined in the wake of the civil war. A significant artistic partnership emerged from a project, the ‘beach installation’, on which Abillama and Sadek collaborated. After the installation’s opening, Abillama and Sadek held a series of formal and informal conversations that converged around the role of art in postwar Lebanon. Rogers notes that, in the aftermath of nearly two decades of violence, foreign curators lauded a set of critical practices (including those of Sadek and Abillama) that showcased the possibilities of an activist art. In the art world of the last decade – defined as it is by biennale culture and a deep investment in artistic practice as an intellectual, historical and activist engagement – the context of Beirut served as a fitting site for the possibility of a sociopolitical art. Rogers concludes that the radicality of the art produced by this first generation of postwar artists can only be understood by tracing a longer history of art in Lebanon than the one that emerges from the rubble left by the civil war. Chapter 9, by Abbas Daneshvari, opens with the Nietzschean concept of play or open-ended meditation which, he argues, is a central facet of contemporary Iranian art, and carries the work of artists beyond the horizon of art’s historical platitudes and conventions. Daneshvari maintains that this state in contemporary Iranian art is complex, labyrinthine,and often filled with allusions to multiple,conjoined concepts. Moreover, the new arts are conscious or subliminal reinterpretations and transformations of various ontological and philosophical perspectives in which deeper intellectual structures are hardly transparent. Daneshvari 10

Introduction

argues that, to embark on this path of extraordinary poetics, one needs to consider a surprising and unexpected feature of contemporary Iranian art – namely, deconstruction. Deconstructive features are often not consciously designed, but seem to arise from an intersubjective core. Daneshvari addresses the most salient feature of deconstruction in these works of artists – namely, reversal of the hierarchy; or more specifically, metaphysical-physical reversal. A reversal of the hierarchy undermines the notion of the mastery of one term over another, and thereby shows what the dominating argument is concealing in order to maintain its ascendant position. Reversal, by un-concealing what the privileged position has dissembled in order to guarantee its powerful status, undermines the logic of the privileged reading. Daneshvari believes that many examples of contemporary Iranian art constitute paths to undermining metaphysics and its frozen ideals. Like the Nietzschean concept of the affirmation of becoming, they are an acknowledgement of flux and of changing values – especially as disseminated in varying contexts and within the individual’s ontological praxis and represented in his/her practice. Daneshvari then applies these theoretical reflections to an interpretation of the works of a number of Iranian artists: Mohammad Ghazali, Parastou Forouhar, Mandana Moghaddam, Barbad Golshiri and Babak Golkar. He concludes that these artists have, as Derrida put it, whether consciously or unconsciously, expressed a desire ‘to dismantle [déconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work in [the text], not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way’. Section III, ‘Exposing Contemporary Art from the Middle East’, involves the issue of the ideological prisms through which Middle Eastern art is visualised. It examines art from the Middle East and its exposure in Euro-American and regional spaces, and the question of whether it is likely to build bridges or perpetuate stereotypes. In Chapter 10, Fereshteh Daftari considers notions of representation and reception, examining how context affects reading, and discussing whether such exhibitions are at all necessary or beneficial. She attempts to reformulate 11

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the issues, informed by her own personal perspective as a curator, in terms of the benefits and dilemmas of organising such exhibitions, including the gap between curatorial intention and critical reception. Daftari begins her chapter with an examination of the exhibition she curated with Middle Eastern artists, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking in 2006. Daftari elaborates on the theme chosen for this landmark exhibition – the first in 40 years devoted to non-Western artists – the central challenge being the use of the term ‘Islamic art’. Another issue that Daftari addresses is the large amount of Middle Eastern art that now exists in the commercial domain. She maintains that, although the market has done much to discover and feature artists, sales remain its central aim. Realising the need for non-profit enterprises to step in to present work that does not circulate in the commercial world, Daftari curated performances at the Iranian Arts Festival, held in 2012 at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. The performances were devised to challenge the notion of Iranian art as a commercial, decorative commodity, and as stereotypically ethnic. She continues by examining another major exhibition that she curated on art from the Middle East at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) in 2013 – Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists. In this exhibition, she was given an opportunity to rethink how to introduce ‘Middle Eastern’ artists to the Western public while realising that the term ‘Middle Eastern’ – like ‘Islamic’ – was itself clearly problematic. Daftari concludes that the benefit of such exhibitions goes beyond theoretical intentions, helping to restore the dignity of demonised peoples and heal their bruised egos. In Chapter 11, Venetia Porter, a museum curator having worked on contemporary art from the Middle East, by way of introduction, poses some salient questions: How could the subject matter of works of artists from the Middle East offer insight into the complex and increasingly harrowing politics of the countries that make up the region? How do the artists themselves react to being given this role? She goes on to discuss a different and yet related topic – namely, the relationship that some artists have with what could be termed ‘cultural tradition’, and how this is expressed in their works. She then focuses on examining works by Sadegh Tirafkan, Nicène Kossentini and Boushra Almutawakel. She shows how 12

Introduction

Tirafkan’s works reframe Shiite imagery, Kossentini pays homage to Ibn ‘Arabi and the Mu‘allaqat, and Almutawakel studies the issue of veil. Porter maintains that each of these artists is seriously engaged with and has deliberately chosen his or her theme from various aspects of history, tradition or literature. She argues that the works of these artists do not suggest an immediate engagement with contemporary political dilemmas, but, on the contrary, an extended commitment to their societies and the world that is creating them. For this reason their art is important for a deeper understanding of the desires that exist within Middle Eastern societies. In Chapter 12, Helia Darabi concentrates on the central role played by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) in the development and recognition of contemporary Iranian art. She shows the way in which the museum represented the cultural agenda of the Pahlavi monarchy, which was based on modernisation and Westernisation, while trying to reconstruct a spirit of national identity and pride. Darabi maintains that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution the significant function and influence of this museum has had little to do with the museum’s magnificent collection of Western modern art or its outstanding architecture. During its life, this place has played a variety of paradoxical and significant roles – including that of cultural façade and centre of official representation, making it in a sense the cultural arm of the state, and that of opposition platform for the artistic community. She shows that, rather than being a typical museum, TMoCA constitutes a paradigmatic example of a microcosm of a state’s cultural and artistic policies. The text attempts to analyse the extent of agreement between TMoCA’s activities and the changes in political circumstances and administrative cultural policies during five periods: formative years (1977–79); a period of pro-government or neutral exhibition (1980–90); the period, which saw its own curatorial revolution (1998–2005); and a period of ‘reversion and simulation’ (2005–13). Darabi traces the role of this uncontested artistic venue, which was destined to contribute to the development of official strategies of display, establishing the Islamic Republic’s cultural master-narratives and controlling myths, 13

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and heralding the concerns and imperatives of the governing ideology. The chapter concludes by maintaining that currently, when it seems that the utopian visions of the Islamic Revolution have themselves become the stuff of museum exhibits, the museum’s enchanting history, hidden treasures and fluid architecture continue to inspire a younger generation of artists and visitors. The discussions outlined in this introduction present some materials through which the constitution of contemporary art from the Middle East can be scrutinised and evaluated. Reading the texts collected in this volume should alert the reader to the ways in which our judgments about works of art are the outcome of complex historical and intellectual processes. The authors address those dimensions of the challenge posed by the new forms of intensified exchange between localities, nations and global discourses and their relation to contemporary cultural and artistic practices. Other relevant themes discussed include the significant place in contemporary artistic venues reserved for representations of what is commonly called ‘globalisation’ and its de-centring effects. These selected texts indicate some of the present direction of thought in this area, along with a sense of the development of these ideas during recent years and their likely elaboration in the near future. Hamid Keshmirshekan London, 2014

14

1 Trauma, Memory and History HAMID DABASHI

L

et us recall the conversation between a Japanese person and an Inquirer in Heidegger’s On the Way to Language, where Heidegger himself appears as the Inquirer and engages in a conversation with his Japanese interlocutor. The conversation begins with a recollection of Count Shuzo Kuki, who had studied with Heidegger. Count Kuki is now dead, and the Japanese interlocutor tells Heidegger how his Japanese student had devoted himself to reflection on what the Japanese call Iki. Heidegger says he recalls a conversation with Kuki about that word, but that he was not sure what it meant. The Japanese interlocutor then says that, once Count Kuki had come to Japan, he had tried ‘to consider the nature 17

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of Japanese art with the help of European aesthetics’. Heidegger is sceptical as to whether this is at all possible, while the Japanese interlocutor says, ‘Why not?’ – to which Heidegger responds: ‘The name aesthetics and what it names grows out of European thinking, out of philosophy. Consequently aesthetic considerations must remain alien to Eastasian thinking.’1

Philosophy Let me take that conversation now in a different direction, banking on that nearly impossible inhibition, and shift the question to the applicability of not just what Heidegger calls ‘aesthetic’ considerations that must remain alien to Eastasian thinking, and thus art. That moment of critical intimacy between Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor is infinitely superior to a moment a couple of hundred years earlier, which paved the way for it, when, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1734), Kant had no other words for Indian art except ‘grotesque’, and ‘grotesquery’.2 In a world of radical and transformative change, that condition that Heidegger calls ‘nearly impossible’ must be jettisoned in the direction of European ruptures, abandoning its delusional phases of metaphysical certainty about itself – ruptures spreading all over European history, all the way from Thrasymachus to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gramsci, Benjamin and Bakhtin, away from any systematic consideration of European thinking or aesthetics. But when that thinking and aesthetics have met their own moments of rupture and implosion – predicated upon its own traumas. On those momentous occasions of trauma, the metanarrative of Europe and European existence comes to share the traumas of the rest of the world – as Aimé Césaire, for example, argued in relation to the common thread shared by the European Holocaust and the structural violence of colonialism.3 18

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The categories of regional and global discourse in our understanding of contemporary art already beg the larger question that is embedded in the two opposite ends represented by these two designations – namely, local and universal. That universal has been the prerogative of art as produced in Western Europe and North America – and has cast a shadow upon the world they call ‘the Rest’. Not just under the condition we call globalisation, but more importantly because of the massive democratic uprisings we have witnessed, from the Arab and Muslim world into the heart of Europe, our inherited colonial geography, with its implicit categorisations ‘universal’ and ‘regional’, is now irrevocably dismantled. From curatorial practices to academic discourses, the constitution of contemporary art is either explicitly or implicitly performed under the shadow of the delusion that has violently termed itself the West and subjected the world to the status of the rest. Terms such as ‘Middle East’, ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ art, and disciplinary formations such as departments of ‘art history’ – the very tropes that are to guide our reading of this particular constellation of art – are themselves the most basic, the most flagrant traps posed in thinking about these forms of artistic expression. The very designation of this volume as including ‘the international body of art theorists and historians, together with regional scholars and professionals in the field’4 already exposes the problems we face. Who is an ‘international art theorist and historian’? And by what authority, and how, are we to distinguish them from ‘regional scholars and professionals?’ Contemporary art in the areas colonially constituted as the ‘Middle East’ is as old as in any other region of the world – and yet, like any other art produced in any other part of Asia, Africa or Latin America, it is seen in the shadow of the Western European and North American understanding, canonisation and theorisation of the self-same art. Chiefly responsible for this subjugation are the curatorial policies of art museums and biennials, which have to sell 19

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their ideas to directorial decisions that cannot imagine an African, Asian or Latin American to picture a vision of the world outside the purview of his or her own imagination – these arts can only be seen as flawed, distorted versions of their audacious Western originals: a little offbeat, no matter how excellent they may be. The theorisation of art from the Arab and Muslim world – in other words, from the West Asian and North African nations that have all been cast under the colonial shadow of the term ‘Middle East’ – has finally reached, passed, the point at which it must be once and for all liberated from a curatorial and art-historical frame of reference almost entirely predicated on North American and Western European epistemic prejudices that calls themselves ‘the West’, and in which most of these exhibitions, and perforce conferences, are organised. The central issue here is entirely epistemic, and not in the domain of identity politics. Curators and theorists carrying an Arab or Muslim patronymic are not in any way exempt from continuing the colonial imaginary of the ‘Middle East’ into the categorical and curatorial decisions they make about how to frame their next exhibition. The fabrication of liminal spaces is equally inadequate to place these arts in the no-man’s-land of cross-border identities, nor is the assumption of post-colonial nation-states any longer sufficient. Terms such as ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ are not sufficient either – not because ‘modernity’ in its colonial gestation has had no impact on the art of the world at large, but because the trauma of capitalist modernity, with all its calamities and efficacies, was far more global than merely European, and thus the Europeanisation of the project is precisely the axe we need to grind in the context of our contemporary history. There is also much housekeeping that needs to be done on the postcolonial side of the divide. By giving the primary agency to knowledgeproduction within the European project of Orientalism, and not to the mode and manner of discursive and aesthetic resistance to imperialism 20

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(Said); by questioning the ability of the subaltern even to speak in a European language of agency and subjection, let alone to sing and dance and paint and photograph (Spivak); by entrapping the fate of the post-colonial subject in the meagre domain of liminality (Bhabha) – what all these Europeanists have ultimately done is not to provincialise Europe, but in fact to re-capitalise Europe as the centre of universe. It is not accidental that, almost without exception, these post-colonial theorists are in fact housed in departments of English, and what they call ‘comparative literature’. Beginning with Orientalism, the shift to European and its manners of representation became the theoretical focus of an entire generation of scholarship – neither of these two areas, Europe or its representations, having anything to do with the world that these Europeans had sought to dominate, failing precisely because the range and reach of those representations were far too limited. All the while, the world was producing, speaking, singing, dancing, painting and photographing – but those mystified by the myth of the West could scarcely see, or even imagine, that world except through either European mimesis, or the critique of European mimesis. The task is no longer that of a critique of European representation, but that of achieving a critical grasp of the manner of non-Western subjection, agential historicity in worlding a map for the longest time covered and glossed over by the singularity of the Western world which, either through imperialism or its critique, continues to inscribe itself upon not just the older maps, but upon maps that have yet to surface. These works of art have been at the visual and aesthetic vanguard of an emerging world that cries for self-consciousness – and yet their curatorial relegation to the cul-de-sac of the horrid colonial legacy of the ‘Middle East’ continues to categorise them in the compromising context of a politics of location precisely at the sublime moments of their defiance; meanwhile a band of post-colonial theorists from Bengal keep regurgitating the post-colonial condition, and the 21

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impossibility of the subaltern speaking, and the liminality of their space – and thus, while they talk about provincialising Europe, they in fact re-capitalise it as the centre of the universe. Arguments attempting to provincialise Europe in fact continue to universalise it in critical terms, fetishising its particularity beyond history – as if there were something different about the European imperialism of today than the myriad imperial formations of the past twenty centuries. All empires have produced knowledge in a manner that has served their interests. The Abbasids did the same as did the Sassanids, the Romans, the Seljuqs, the Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals and the Ottomans. The radical presence and ahistorical disputation of literary critiques that theorise the condition of post-coloniality or their vantage point of the defeated position of the Mughal Empire bending backward to the might of British imperialism may partly explain this ahistorical privileging of European imperialism and its particular mode of knowledge-production. The critique of this particular empire and its mode of knowledge-production must be carried in comparative historical terms, so that Europe is neither demonised nor privileged, neither fetishised nor provincialised. The transversal intersections of the three leitmotifs of trauma, memory and history that I have suggested in my title I propose as a preliminary frame of reference for us to begin to think of alternative ways of curating and theorising the contemporaneity of the art that comes to us from the inside of those vanishing borders that can scarcely confine them to any national or regional identity.

Theory I began this reflection where Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor had left off about the impossibility of where Asia and Europe could possibly meet – aesthetically. Let me now pursue a different path that Walter Mignolo identified at the Sharjah Biennial 11 (SB11) just a couple of months ago, in an essay he published on 8 May 2013: 22

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In this fair-haired age of Biennials, Triennials and Quinquennials, there is an anxiety to be the ‘newest’ and a fear of being ‘behind’ on the latest artistic and aesthetic theories. It is refreshing and empowering to have a biennial exhibition like the Sharjah Biennial, which turns its back on the intellectual Euro-American fashions that have dominated, until recently, the ‘-ennial’ market place. Sharjah Biennial 11 drastically deviates [sic] our attention from this codification in such events and forces us to revise our assumptions about what art is, what ‘Biennials’ are, and what cultural cartographies we have been accustomed to until now. Sharjah Biennial 11 undeniably achieved what most events that mark a turning point generally accomplish – it announced the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us ‘an other’ conceptual and historical narrative. Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography opens up the silenced and marginalized creativity of the ‘Global South’ and ‘Global East’. What has been announced with Sharjah Biennial 11 is nothing less than the end of an illusion of the successful fiction of western modernity from the European Renaissance through the European Enlightenment right through to the end of the twentieth century.5 The key question, of course, is how to read what Mignolo rightly terms ‘the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us “an other” conceptual and historical narrative’. His reading of the Sharjah Biennial 11 is very encouraging: when the biennial as an institution moved from western Europe – where it originated – to the Middle East, the result was not an imitation nor was it indicative of a desire to have in the Middle East what Europe had. On the contrary, it was to appropriate the form of the biennial to 23

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do what it was not doing in Europe: open spaces for artists, memories, cultures, languages, sensing and knowledge to come together beyond Europe. I read Mignolo’s magnificent essay less as an account of what has happened than as a map of what is to come. For, as he knows very well, the shifting of the centre of globalised capital – from London or Paris or New York to Sharjah – does not mean the cultural or artistic accoutrements of power are going to change course immediately, without a necessary critical intervention of the sort that he in fact provides. On that particular path, where Mignolo’s assessment can begin to mean beyond any politics of location, the creative intersection where an artist attends to historical events and visually remembers them anew inevitably provokes the traumas that have constituted a collective subconscious. In the visual and performing arts from West Asia and North Africa, there are numerous occasions when artists attend to these traumatic moments in a manner that restores and excavates new meaning and significance in them. The affective history of these aesthetic experiences of national trauma works through the collective recollection of the uncanny – as read by authors from Nietzsche and Jentsch to Freud – when and where the familiar is made foreign by bringing it up close in a visual or performative encounter. These traumatic experiences in contemporary art have two complementary effects: they posit the traumatic art as ‘contemporary’, first, by way of a delayed remembrance and thereby historicising its own past, and second, by permanently investing the present with a past it can only forget at the cost of aborting its own agency. The now of this time is always already delayed, and the attachment to it of the term ‘contemporary’ is something memorial. To bring together all of the traumatic moments of contemporary history evidenced in the works of art they have produced, we must metaphorically extract them all from their museumising 24

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and curatorial trajectories, and begin to look at them anew as the fragments and allegories of something beyond their aggressive commodification in the contemporary art industry. Here Eisenstein and Benjamin come together to read the result as a filmic montage that brings out their untold truth by exposing their fragmented disposition and the categorical absence of their manufactured selfsufficiency. Here I have a far less sanguine reading of the biennials, art exhibitions, art galleries and national museum industries of the emerging nation-states, like Qatar or the UAE. The circularity of the globalised capital that might coagulate in New York one day and in Doha the next is not a reliable measure of where and how art needs to be unearthed and theorised. For me, the intersections of trauma, memory and history provide a far more necessary, reliable and enduring theoretical grid. My contention is that a renewed encounter with two seminal thinkers of the twentieth century is crucial for those of us in the twenty-first who believe in the aftermath of the Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring in the Arab world, the rise of the Eurozone crisis and of the Indignados in Europe, Occupy Wall Street in the US, and now the no-less-spectacular uprisings in Turkey and Brazil. With all their regional and global repercussions, we have entered a world-historic moment at which the exhaustion of post-colonial knowledge-production and political praxis has already necessitated the articulation of a post-metaphysical thinking in which we can incorporate the overshadowed theorists of the ephemeral, the fragments, the ruins, and thereby the allegorical and the carnivalesque. From Benjamin’s fragmented allegories to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, we have a spectrum of theoretical thinking that needs to be salvaged from the no-man’s-land between Europe and non-Europe, in order to overcome the binary and be more truthful to the emerging geographies of liberation that must be navigated around the world. Before you are sent off on a tangent, as some of my European philosopher friends are, wondering why, at this crucial moment of liberation from Eurocentricism, I opt for two European thinkers, 25

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let me remind you, if I need beyond the rhetorical register of the move, that, in the aftermath of the Eurocentric world, I, whose Oriental signs are categorically sous rature (under erasure), am no longer either frightened or friendly, neither beholden nor hostile, to thinkers whose mystified European signs I have lifted and pushed into the open. We are already far removed from such unnecessary anxieties. In a recent groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, my student Ajay Chaudhary has compared the work of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin, who he argues have dealt with similar and synergistic critiques of modernity through their respective engagements with religious ideas. What emerges in Chaudhary’s work is the proposition that these conversations, now mitigated through a third-party reading, challenge their civilisational divide by teasing out their almost identical use of ‘religion as critique’ in the early Frankfurt School authors and thinkers like Al-e Ahmad or Shariati. Chaudhary has in effect picked up, from where Terry Eagleton left off, the full recognition that Walter Benjamin … presses Marx’s dictum to a parodic extreme. His messianic reading of history forbids him any faith in secular redemption, dismantles all teleological hope, and in an astonishingly bold dialectical stroke locates the sign of salvation in the very unregeneracy of historical life, in its postlapsarian suffering and squalor. The more history presents itself as mortified and devalued, as in the sluggish, spiritually bankrupt world of German Trauerspiel, the more it becomes a negative index of some utterly inconceivable transcendence waiting patiently in the wings … Only the fragmentary work of art, that which refuses the lures of the aesthetic, of Schein and symbolic totality, can hope to figure forth truth and justice by remaining resolutely silent about them, foregrounding in their place the unredeemed torment of secular times.6 26

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This messianic reading of history has far-reaching implications for the task we face at the closing moments of our condition of post-coloniality – for, in Richard Wolin’s terms, in his reading of the intersections between experience and materialism and Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, The … more satisfactory approach to understanding history – and especially history under capitalism – as a dream is consistent with Benjamin’s new self-styled ‘Copernican turn’ in history writing, in which the traditional (read: German historicist) method of conceiving of history is reversed: the past is no longer valued for its own sake … But only insofar as it is relevant to the present … In this connection, two additional categories come to occupy pride of place: the categories of awakening and remembrance. The function of both is interrelated. For only insofar as the nature of history as a spell, a trance, a dream, is reflected upon and made conscious – the task of historical remembrance – can humanity hope to awaken therefrom.7 In a uniting of Bakhtin and Benjamin, an allegorical or carnivalesque reading of fragments and ruins reaches out for the truth of a centreless world to bring to the surface and reveal itself in the acts of remembering itself by way of imagining its future. In Benjamin’s conception of allegory, after all, the ephemeral restores the most trustworthy, where at the endgame of the post-colonial ruins we might begin to think of where and how our artwork may gel with our emerging world lines – now perhaps most clearly evident in how the two by-now-entirely-fictive nation-states of Iraq and Syria are dismantled to that level of despair that they can now begin to seek the necessary intuition of transcendence in Benjamin’s search for redemption right in the middle of their ruinous fragments. ˛ In my book on Shi ism as a religion of protest, I have extensively demonstrated how the partition between aesthetics and politics 27

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has occasioned this politics of despair. In the emerging organicity, that aesthetic will embrace the political to stage a renewed sense of intuition of transcendence beyond a politically degenerated Islamic juridical scholasticism. Beyond the parameters of the globalisation of neoliberal bourgeois morality, as people around the world are beginning to come to terms with the manner in which they must own, and own up to, their emerging world, fragments and ruins of bygone ages now assume renewed allegorical meaning. The aggressive and militant globalisation of bourgeois life-forms more than ever necessitates Benjamin’s search for meaning, not beyond, but through the ruins. That intuition of transcendence the work of art can generate and sustain not despite but through the ruins – as perhaps is clearest in Kamal Aljafari, Aydin Aghdashloo, Shirin Neshat’s alphabet that do not really mean anything, Mona Hatoum’s Suitcase, Emily Jacir’s Sexy Semites. Works of art precisely in their ruinous disposition before and after their museumisation in any museum of modern art are a contradiction in terms. Outside the galleries, outside the museums, and outside the biennials, where the artworks frame themselves to nullity and corporate commodification, these ruins are made accessible precisely as ruins, and precisely as fragments of the emerging allegories. The obscene corporatisation of the American art scene has now reached a point where even old-fashioned galleries are losing their grounds and momentum to online auctions, allowing art critics to write obituaries for the gallery scene – which had already deeply compromised the artist by catering to corporate tastes and power. As Jerry Saltz puts it in his ‘Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show’, now widely circulated among artists, the blood sport of taste is playing out in circles of hedge-fund billionaires and professional curators, many of whom claim to be anti-market. There used to be shared story lines of contemporary art: the way artists developed, exchanged ideas, caromed off each other’s 28

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Fig. 1.1

Azadeh Akhlaghi, Aras River, Iran – Samad Behrangi/ 3 September 1968, 2012, digital print on photo paper, 110 × 174 cm, courtesy of the artist.

work, engaged with their critics. Now no one knows the narrative; the thread has been lost. Shows go up but don’t seem to have consequences, other than sales or no sales. Nothing builds off much else. Art can’t get traction. A jadedness appears in people who aren’t jaded. Artists enjoying global-market success avoid showing in New York for fear any critical response will interfere with sales. (As if iffy international art stars could have their juggernauts stalled by a measly bad review or two. A critic can only dream.) Ask any artist: They’re all starting to wonder what’s going on … The auction houses are in on the new game as well. Christie’s, in partnership with a company called Y&S, now provides ‘a venue for emerging artists not yet represented by galleries’ and ‘creates a bridge between young artists and a young audience.’ Translation: ‘We’re cutting out dealers. Come on down. Make a killing.’ Thus, unrepresented artists go straight to auction. Work that is sold this way exists only in collector circles. No other artist gets to see it, engage with it, think 29

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about it. The public functions of the gallery space and its proprietors – curation, juxtaposition, ­development – are bypassed and eliminated.8 What I am suggesting here is not the shape of things to come, but the fate of the work of art as it is. All I am proposing, you might say, is the creation of something like a Pirate Bay for art historians, critics and theorists, to intercept the thing between that online auction house and that hedge-fund billionaire. Artwork as ruins, remnants, traces and intercepted allegories of the emerging world, pulling them out of museums and away from curatorial distortion, and doing precisely the opposite of what curators or auctioneers do with them – which is narrating them within palatable platitudes, systematically twisting the defiant disposition of works of art to make them palatable to banal and boring corporate sponsors. Is it something of a fateful fact that The Arcades Project is only a ‘torso’, as Richard Wolin puts it, so that the fragmentary disposition of the work also makes it allegorical of a time and place, and of a thinker on the run for his life only for him to take it himself. What can be the meaning of Benjamin’s search for a pre- or perhaps post-Kantian conception of history that overcomes Kantian methodological mechanisms, and if his subsequent quest for the Kabbalah – somewhere in between his ‘Theological-Political Fragments’ (1920) and his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940)? The distance between profane history and redemption must now be read against the background of the end of post-colonial history, upon whose allegorical ruins we must cultivate an intuition of transcendence – Benjamin’s ‘redemption’ – that spells out our ‘Copernican turn’. Visual, performative, poetic and literary arts produced in that prehistory of our emerging presence – their totality is now broken down into the ruins of our emerging allegories. I look at the expansive work of Ibrahim Mohammed El-Salahi, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Aydin Aghdashloo, Shahzia Sikander, Mona 30

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Hatum, Emily Jacir, Shirin Neshat, Ardeshir Mohassess, Nicky Nodjoumi, and scores of other artists I know and admire, and then I read through Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, featuring works at Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, in Doha. I look at the ruins of Youssef Kamal, or Ala Bashir, or I look at the meandering wonders of Charles Hossein Zendehroudi and Dia Azzawi, Rafik Lahham, or Shakir Hassan Al Said, and so on, and I wonder. What holds the world together, or else pulls it apart at the seams, is no longer any imperially manufactured axis of East– West (or South–North, for that matter). What holds the world together is what is threatening to tear it asunder – momentous traumas around the globe, from global labour migrations, rampant poverty, illegal immigration, refugee crises, environmental catastrophes, corporate greed, political corruption, the expansive reach of the surveillance state (as is now evident from Edward Snowden’s revelations), and militarised police brutality when people rise to make themselves heard. Under these circumstances, even nation-states can scarcely mean anything, let alone colonially manufactured geographies of imperial domination like the ‘Middle East’. It is only in lazy journalistic – and, less excusably, curatorial – practices that these terms seek to cater to corporate sponsors, the cultural anxieties of the newly minted nation-states, or the Ninja-turtle band of hedge-fund billionaires. Where is the public, and where is the public space, upon which any meaningful art can resonate with our contemporary realities? If not within false colonial geographies and the falsifying corporate framework, where and how can the sign of contemporary art make any sense? Let us now ask ourselves why it might be important to dwell on this moment of trauma when, through the operation of the Freudian uncanny, the artist remembers the past but in an uncanny way. And let us ask this question along the lines that Walter Benjamin had in mind in seeking to reconfigure the received conception of historical materialism – now read as fragments and remembrance. 31

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Benjamin detected something in the Arcades that would take a decade or two to come to Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (1957), Guy Debord in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967), and ultimately to Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Rancière – the fetishised transmutation of things into images, and thus of images into reality. From The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925) to The Arcades Project (1940), Benjamin was detecting and cataloguing the emerging constellation of where the fetishised commodification of life and history was taking us. In Terry Eagleton’s reading of Benjamin, Lukács opposes the artefact to the commodity; Benjamin, in another feat of dialectical impudence, conjures a revolutionary aesthetics from the commodity form itself. The blank, petrified objects of Trauerspiel have undergone a kind of leakage of meaning, an unhinging of signifier and signified, in a world which like that of commodity production knows only the empty, homogeneous time of eternal repetition. The features of this inert, atomized landscape then have to suffer a kind of secondary reification at the hands of the allegorical sign, itself a dead letter or piece of lifeless script. But once all intrinsic meaning has haemorrhaged from the object, in a collapse of the expressive totality which Lukács espouses, any phenomenon can come by the wily resourcefulness of the allegorist to signify absolutely anything else, in a kind of profane parody of the creative naming of God. Allegory thus mimes the levelling, equivalencing operations of the commodity but thereby releases a fresh polyvalence of meaning, as the allegorist grubs among the ruins of once integral meanings to permutate them in startling new ways. Once purged of all mystifying immanence, the allegorical referent can be redeemed into a multiplicity of uses, read against the grain and scandalously reinterpreted in the manner of Kabbalah.9 32

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This passage very much outlines the contours of where we are headed in reading the ruins of our post-colonial history, in making a new liberation geography, and in making the art that must keep it company. Praxis My proposal is that we must actively snatch away the works of art that testify to our world-historic changes from their systemic appropriation into outdated museums, cyclical biennials, and passively or actively commodified curatorial practices. Upon the very existence, logic and rhetoric of the globalised bourgeois public sphere, the work of art instantly degenerates into a fetishised commodity. Works of art need to be seen as fragments, as ruins, and thus as allegories – and this is precisely what Benjamin considered ‘the Copernican turn’ in reading and minding history,10 which, perforce, implicates their traumatic memories. That appropriation is the mark of a self-transcendence in which it no longer matters what our patronymic name is, or where we hang our hat and say no to power. This is the time of a complete collapse of absolute identities, and thereby of alterities. It is not accidental that it is only now, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the flimsy attempts of Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington to declare the ‘end of history’ or to fabricate new enemies for ‘the West’, in a presumed ‘clash of civilisations’, that Jean-Luc Nancy thinks of being in his Being Singular Plural (2000), where he addresses the question of how we can speak of a plurality, of a ‘we’, without making the ‘we’ a singular identity. Of course, there is no longer any being without ‘being-with’; there is no existence without co-existence. For there is no meaning if that meaning is not shared. Can our contemporary art be anywhere other than on the site and citation of the condition of globality? Is Al Jazeera de-Americanising globality? Or, as the distinguished Palestinian thinker Azmi Beshara 33

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put it glibly: Is Al Jazeera moving to America, or America to Al Jazeera? What are the structural links between Azadi, Tahrir, Taksim, Syntagma, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti, or the boulevards of Rio de Janeiro? Obama’s drones fly over Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen killing Muslims, just as the real terrorists dodge them and turn around to bomb the Boston Marathon or decapitate British soldiers in London. The state of exception is now the rule. Camp Zaatari in Jordan is where the Middle East has finally come to an end. Labour migration, the prospect of a darker Europe and a more coloured US, crafts the bizarre trio among Pamela Geller, Brigitte Bardot and Oriana Fallaci to oppose it precisely when the actual work of art produced in the Middle East – or in the rest of Asia, Africa, or Latin America – has already run away from its clichés. A new wave of theorists of the work of art requires a revolutionary confiscation of the work of art from its violently fetishised commodification into any and all forms of institutional framing – from museums and galleries to exhibitions, biennales, and so on. In the age of online auctions, this confiscation too takes place online – rendering the original entirely superfluous, leaving it to collect dust in private collections, graceless corporate headquarters, empty museum halls, and cyclical biennials. Let us remember Benjamin’s sparkling insight: ‘In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge [Erkenntnis] comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.’ We can do without that thunder. This revolutionary confiscation radically de-contextualises the commodified narratives of contemporary art, restoring to them their fragmented facts and ruinous disposition – so that they are the allegorical remnants of a past that need to be re-constellated (Benjamin’s term) on the fictive and fruitful borderlines of traumas, memories and history. What we lose from the aura of the work of art, we more than gain in liberating its memories and allowing it a far richer and more fulfilling life where it belongs – in the fragile but fertile memories of all our imperfect tenses.

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endnotes 1

See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper One, 1982), pp. 1-2.

2

Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 58.

3

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialism (Paris: Editions présence africaine, 1955).

4

This phrase is quoted from the introduction to the conference, ‘Regional visà-vis Global Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East’ (Ed.).

5

See Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Re:emerging, Decentring and Delinking: Shifting the Geographies of Sensing, Believing and Knowing’, Ibraaz, 8 May 2013, available at ibraaz.org (accessed on 19 June 2013). I am grateful to Professor Mignolo for kindly alerting me to this essay.

6

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 326.

7

Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 172.

8

Jerry Saltz, ‘Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show’, Vulture, 30 March 2013, available at vulture.com (accessed on 10 January 2014).

9 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 326-7. 10 Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 220.

35

2 Oblique Points of Entry IRIT ROGOFF

W

riting for a book dealing with Contemporary Art in the Middle East, one has by necessity to question not just the validity of its geographical assignment (the Middle of whose East?), but also of the discourses that frame it. The problem at hand is one of differentiating between the foregrounding of globalisation that is founded in a notion of circulation and on the other hand, the foregrounding of regionality that is founded in a notion of relationality. If what is at hand in the book, is an exercise in highlighting the artistic and institutional/cultural production of the broader region, then one has to find a relational language to characterise some underlying common ground in order to escape a 37

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form of particularism. If, however, it is seen within the overarching framework of globalisation, then we need to think of what kind of circulations, internal and external, these forms of cultural production are undergoing. This becomes an even bigger set of problems when we acknowledge the degree to which the art market, with its voracious appetites for both new products and new regions with emergent markets potentials, is actually spearheading the onslaught of interest in the Eastern Mediterranean region and its cultural activities. Given that the title of this book has set us the task of thinking about the relation between the global and the regional in relation to the so-called Middle East, I would like to introduce two terms that help me think through the problematics of this turbulent geography. One is the concept of ‘regional imaginaries’, and the other is that of ‘exhausted geographies’. These terms provide the ‘oblique points of entry’ of my title. These oblique points of entry are ones that refuse the straightforward ones – the simple and seemingly normative designations of nation, region, identity, including discrete histories, contradictory belief systems, military and territorial conflicts, divergent civic imaginaries, and differing experiences of colonialism – not to mention wildly divergent chronicles of post-colonial liberation and national formation. A refusal of these conventional designations requires that we come up with other categories – categories that cut across, recombine and invent shared locations and histories; categories that are not content with what we have, but pose the question: ‘What if ’? Just as Wael Shawky did when he posited much of the region as directly constituted by what the Crusaders did to the many Arab and other communities that populated the region, or as Kutlug Ataman did when he designated a Turkey that was not identified as Ottoman or Republican, but rather a recovery of the long-submerged footprint of ancient Mesopotamia. When these artists move away from recent history or recent geography, they are not romantically lost in the mists of time, producing a quasi-fictional history for a troubled present; nor are they didactically claiming that today’s problems are grounded in the deep structures inherited from 38

Oblique Points of Entry

ancient histories. They are, however, producing acts of dislocation – in my terms, they are ‘exhausting’ the geography of modern nationalism, of endless conflict, of colonially established borders and divisions and identities, of global alliances stemming from the Cold War, and of new multinational corporate trade routes, and introducing other, speculative possibilities of what we might align ourselves with, or imagine as having ghostly echoes of within ourselves. But, first, what are these terms ‘global’ and ‘regional’ that are here positioned as binary opposites? Is there a different understanding of them in the art world than there would be in discussions focusing on the circulation of goods, labour, capital, information, arms, and so on, while at the opposite end of the spectrum are the assumptions of a local, regional knowledge born of proximity and close attention to lived conditions on the ground? When we juxtapose these two terms, we support and partake in the belief that they entail two mutually opposing logics, and that we need to make choices between them. We either ally ourselves with the global forces of ‘Empire’, or we investigate the conditions close to us as divorced from these, as unique and specific to a locale, as refusing any kind of overarching homogenisation, or subjugation. But of course it is never that simple, and the global is made up of numerous registers and textures of the local that weave around each other, that scale up their international contacts in weird ways and defy a dominant logic. Recently, in discussing the last three years of dissent around the globe, including that of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, Saskia Sassen noted very astutely that it might not have been easily identifiable as driven by a common objective of overthrowing unconstitutional tyranny or refusing the dominant logic of capitalism, but rather that, for her, it was ‘the work of citizenship’. Instead of the usual banalities concerning the political effectiveness of Twitter, Facebook or mobile phone technologies in producing instant convergences and spontaneous insurrections, Sassen claims that they are united by a particular new form of ongoing labour – 39

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the necessary labour of citizenship. How interesting it is to think that the world is not being swept up by protest and resistance, but rather by an ongoing process in which the very notion of how to be a citizen is explored, expanded, voided and reinvented. This is the local and the global dancing with each other, weaving and ducking – not a set of individually given rights, but a stabilising form of work in facing the political precarity around us. Citizenship in the era of neoliberalism poses problems around the globe, while various local conditions elicit different forms and confrontations with it. But the problem is that the local, the regional, does not just furnish the global with various modes of inhabitation – it is also a series of explicit blockages and stoppages: our region is an endless war zone of international, supranational, and just plain national conflicts. The intra-national conflict of Israel-Palestine reflects an exhaustion of efforts to divide and contain that do not stand the test of daily life, and the endless carnage in Syria reflects an exhaustion of formally redundant Cold War superpower politics that are clinging to old spheres of power and influence around the globe. More recent phases of political efforts to dominate Iraq in its postwar chaos vie with the impact that these conflicts have in Kurdistan and the issue of refugees streaming in Lebanon and dislodging the balance of power there even further – and that is before we have begun to think about social tensions in Turkey or post liberation violence in Libya and of course the granddaddy of them all, four years of ongoing political upheavals in Egypt. In actual fact, there is not one country in the region that is currently exempt from the political, military and social turmoil that is marking the shift from post-colonial nationalism to self-constitution. And here is where my notion of ‘exhausted geographies’ comes in – in the need, in some way, to exhaust the belligerent geography of our region. The entire terrain of this conflict-riddled region is sustained by the internal and external tensions of unbreachable borders, politically driven restrictions, and the willingness to uphold 40

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divisions born of enmity. Added to these are the sepia-coloured traces of a series of alliances that can barely be understood within contemporary realities – Israel and the United States, Syria and Russia, half-forgotten echoes of the Non-Aligned Movement, of Pan-Arabism, of Jewish diaspora politics – old hurts, new offences that keep piling one on top of the other. If subjects are not liberated from boundaries by the universalist claims of globalisation, or cosmopolitanism, can these same boundaries somehow implode through subjects’ different inhabitation of them – i.e. not a resistance to boundaries, but a subjection of them to a different form of occupation, which in turn loosens their grip on our understanding of our positionality? I would like to focus on the uneasy life of boundaries as they fail to do what they have been set up to do: police the arbitrary structures of division and containment. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida in ‘The Eyes of the University’, ‘boundaries, whether narrow or expanded, do nothing more than set out the limits of the possible’. How then can we pursue an engaged discussion of place or location that is not held captive by the logics of division and containment – that does not, again and again, do the work of setting up conflict and reconciliation in terms of a binary pair of engaged protagonists? Even when these protagonists are entirely committed to transcending their conditions and location, they are still doing so from the opening position of being situated subjects. Perhaps one of the ways of doing so is through an understanding that geography is not a location but a situated knowledge – of who we are, where we are, what we know, who we learn from, what we encounter. The nature of our heritages and allegiances has always been linked to geography not as a set of locating vectors, but rather by way of yoking places to traditions and trajectories of knowledge. Each place ‘knows’ differently, and places are not to be related to one another in terms of dated and irrelevant notions of ‘knowledge from the centre’ versus ‘knowledge from the periphery’, then how might they produce circular movements of knowledge that defy geographical subjugation? 41

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The concept of ‘exhausted geographies’ is intended to work against the grain both of the boundaries of the possible, and of location as the site of identity and knowledge. And so I have been thinking of exhaustion, in relation to political conflict, not as a mode of opting out and withdrawing, but as a means of recognising the limits of a logic that has dominated that conflict for most of its duration. I suspect that this will take the form of an act of treason, in Deleuze’s sense of treachery – of a refusal to support and sustain that which demands it of you because it claims to support and sustain you. In the realm of living out long-term political conflict, treason and exhaustion are not unrelated to one another. Conflict requires energy, resources, enthusiasm or fatalistic resignation. It demands clear-cut positions which in turn demand to be defended at all costs. In situations of ongoing conflict, in those places and spaces in which it has been going on for what seems like an eternity, a certain moment of recognition invariably comes in which all of the efforts and sacrifices – the response to losses, injustices and oppressions that have been perpetuated and endured – suddenly seem to be propagating the very thing they supposedly exist to resolve. That is the instance of treason, the moment in which one refuses to read the scenario in the terms that it has set up for itself, and instead reveals it to be the mechanism of its own perpetuation. When one is deeply in the grip of a narrative, every detail of it assumes great meaning; but when its right to grip you is questioned, these twists and turns that have sutured us in as complicit participants are revealed to be preoccupied with little but their own legitimation. And so the minute internal differences of one minister saying one thing and the other saying the opposite; of successive prime ministers and presidents offering plans and road maps and revised borders; of political prisoners being released on the back of one political incentive, only to be re-imprisoned or assassinated as part of the next wave of retaliations, or shifts towards increasingly hardline tactics – all of these stage themselves as earth-shaking developments within the inner workings of a logic that is closed in 42

Oblique Points of Entry

on itself, as all such logics are. The exhausted geographies of which I speak are the material manifestations of what I am trying to describe: territorialities and territorial claims that cannot sustain themselves. In the course of inhabiting long-term and chronically unresolved political conflicts, such as the one that has been ongoing between Israel and Palestine for some 60 years, we come to moments of total exhaustion. This sense of exhaustion derives from spent energies, disappointed good intentions, numerous conflict-related deprivations on all sides, the utilisation of bankrupt models of political analysis, the inability to foresee a constructive future strategy, and numerous other dimensions of living out a long-term conflict. I am thinking of the time and energies expended in being critical, in resisting; of the construction of great projects of critical theory, and the deconstruction of the dominant ideology; of writing and teaching and protesting, and having angry arguments over family dinners; of saying, or thinking without saying, that I never again want to have to spend an evening with someone who does not share the belief that the occupation of Palestine is the degree-zero, the foundational cause, the absolute limit state, of everything that has gone so wrong in our Middle East. Among the friends who belong to the community of the critical, these moments of exhausted recognition can sometimes be seen as a turn to cynicism, an opting out – as a withdrawal or turning inwards; but that seems to me to be saying that there is no other way of living out political conflict but in energetic engagement with it on its own terms. At these moments of political exhaustion, we might actually exit a mode that seeks resolution of conflict and temporarily enter another, which is one of ‘inhabitation’. These ‘exhausted geographies’ are neither the maps nor the traces of territorial entities, but rather the ‘lines of flight’ that exit from such enterprises into an imaginative sphere that would produce a different set of relations between its components, prompting a move from binarism to dispersal. Thus an ‘exhausted geography’ is not a territorial entity, but rather a temporal 43

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one – a suspension of both the time and the terms framed by the state. It is, if you like, the move from the moment of treason – which holds the subject juridically to have transgressed structures and rules such as those of the army or other public institutions, or offended against ideological convictions underpinning political parties and social movements – to the moment of betrayal: an act that has as much to do with giving up something oneself as it does with dissatisfying the expectations of those around one; an act of self-excommunication. An ‘exhausted geography’, then, is not one that has collapsed, but one that is subjected to daily instances of non-support – it is not held or maintained; it does not ground our knowledge or delimit our sense of what can be inhabited. An ‘exhausted geography’ recalls Toni Morrison’s ‘floodings’ – a powerful wish to go back to some formless state of connectedness that does not adhere to the planners’ and architects’ vision of what is utilitarian or prudent or acceptable, but is instead grounded in forms of relatedness to what once was and what might once still be again. Within the realm of culture, we might be able to practise such ‘exhaustion’ routinely by relinquishing grounding principles and clear-cut identities. Considerable international attention was attracted several years ago by a film entitled Ajami (dir. Skandar Copti, 2008), which takes place in the largely Arab neighbourhood of the title, located in contemporary Jaffa. It is a skilful and powerful drama about the lives of Palestinian Arabs within contemporary Israel, exploring the financial hardships, tensions, displacements, invisibility, and marginalisation of this large and regionally deeply rooted group of people – and, in particular, the discrimination of the authorities against them. But, more than anything, it is an instance of ‘geographical exhaustion’. Within this film, we find a fractured condition in which the Israeli state, which is clearly the oppressor of this population, is at the same time largely irrelevant and unacknowledged within the complex structures of their daily lives. This does not come about as a result of direct resistance – it 44

Oblique Points of Entry

is not about political action, but about the dispersal of power structures at the heart of a situation in which the state is seemingly in total control, a dispersal that comes about through a shift in consciousness rather than in power relations. Within the film, power and authority are not in the hands of state agencies such as the army, police and judiciary – although they are present, and exert their considerable force, they remain simply a reactive force at the edge of the action. At the heart of the activity being described – a tortuous tale of gang warfare, drug dealing, interethnic relations between Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Jews, family pressures and generational gaps, gentrification and its ensuant displacement of the local population – the real, decisive power is in the hands of various unacknowledged authorities. These include the court of elders overseen by a Bedouin sheikh, and a middleman who brokers cash payments to cancel honour killings; meanwhile, a rash of retributive fires and murders and maimings substitute for any legislative framework. The state, in the form of the police and the army, as well as the all-dominant structure of the family, are always three steps behind all of this action, and are always blinded by their inability to recognise a parallel regime that operates informally but with a ferocious hold on a population for whom the state of Israel is not a source of identity, but an inconvenient and oppressive bureaucratic hindrance. The monolithic identity ( Jewish, Israeli, European) that seemingly characterises the state is thus unravelled not through opposition, but through dispersal. If it cannot sustain the totalisation it aims for in bringing this multiethnic space under the aegis of a single dominant identity, if all of its efforts to divide and contain and control produce nothing but lines of flight that are fuelled by the craving for drugs, by the sexual lure of the exotic, by simple curiosity, or by the economic dependence of the oppressed on their oppressors – if all of these are actually writing on the terrain of everyday life, then this is an instance of the enactment of ‘geographical exhaustion’ that I have tried to articulate: an unravelling of that which cannot contain because its logic cannot compel and its conviction cannot extort faith. 45

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‘Exhausted geographies’, then, are the sites of a multiple ‘swarming’ in which none of the liberal motions of tolerance, acceptance or mutual coexistence can survive, since they are the extension of a dominant ideology in the throes of recognising its own limits. Instead these exhaustions signify the suspension of that logic, and the unstable state of its borders. As part of the work on an exhibition entitled ‘De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman’,1 the artist Stephan Roemer and I spent a while in Istanbul researching and locating a visual essay in the city.2 As neither of us had much topographical knowledge of the city, we decided to ask friends and acquaintances to take us on daily walks to their favourite parts. Each day the narrative repeated itself in almost identical form – our different guides, all highly critical and theoretical colleagues, members in one capacity or another of the contemporary art world with no apparent nostalgia for bygone days in any way whatsoever, would point out various buildings and sites and say, ‘You see, there were the Armenians, the Jews, the Greeks, the Cherkessians, the Copts, the French, the Genovese’ – and so on – ‘and now they’re all gone and we are here alone’. Needless to say, these were events that had taken place long before any of these people’s births. For a teeming city of some 16 million inhabitants, with trade and migration flowing through it constantly, this was an odd sentiment indeed. To us visitors, it felt as fully and energetically inhabited as a city might be. These references to a larger past self, an extended body of people, a cosmopolitanism of multiple inhabitants, a set of links to other places and territories, resonated with me for some time, and the question presented itself: What kind of past formation, what kind of extended topography, was so imprinted in the minds of our guides that, looking around, they felt its lack so keenly that it somewhat overshadowed the city’s present energetic realities? Furthermore, the question arises of how this manifests itself within contemporary art and culture, not as backward-looking nostalgia, but rather as a daily practice of thinking oneself as 46

Oblique Points of Entry

differently located and differently linked to geographical and other formations. Our Istanbul guides seemed to me to be practising a form of ‘regional imagining’ – enacting a relation to place and space that projects upon it a series of possible expansions that are not perhaps materially available, but that have deep roots within what we perceive as the realm of the possible. It is a projection that has nothing to do with expansion, but rather with the effort to think oneself in another relation to the world. It therefore works against the strictures and limits of nationalism – of that which bounds us within a geographical terrain in the name of a shared identity, a shared topography, a shared history, and a set of claims to separatism and particularism. ‘Regional imaginings’, then, would seem to me to be an alternative, or parallel, non-identitarian practice. A practice that does not feel like an obligation to root oneself exclusively in either material histories or purely fantastical projections, but instead represents a means of piecing together a location from fragments of what was and of what might be. Simultaneously an attempt both to activate and to actualise notions of location away from being ‘located’ by an authority of knowledge or a political authority (being Turkish, being Middle Eastern, being of the Muslim world, for example) and towards a notion of ‘(self-)regioning’ – a notion I borrow from Heidegger (Gelassenheit), and which focuses not on trying to figure out what one’s identity might be as a given, but on trying to produce a set of relations in the world that might locate one.3 This discussion exists in the tension between the nation-state, aspirant communities and ‘Empire’. Each one of these emerges from a different set of desires. Nation-states emerge from the desire to find a collective identity in a narrative of nation as differentiated from other entities understood as nations, divided by borders and legitimated by mutually recognised authorities, be they historical, military or bureaucratic. ‘Aspirant communities’, on the contrary, are those who do not feel recognised – either externally defined or visible; they emerge from a fracturing of the older models of the nation-state, the geographically 47

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named region or the ethnic community, and they struggle both to define themselves and to gain recognition through an alternative set of criteria, defined from within rather than from without. As for ‘Empire’, Negri and Hardt use this designation to denote ‘the globalization of capitalist production and its world markets [and] the capitalist project to bring together economic power and political power’.4 A new set of relations, in other words, in which economies trump other types of connection and affiliation. But do all of these sufficiently explain the ‘affective’, emotional intensification of signs through which so many of these ‘regional imaginings’ operate? And so I came to the writing of this text with several questions – questions to do with this cultural, topographical layering of numerous coexisting narratives and timescales, and questions of how these operate in relation to a national, cultural identification. Other questions also present themselves about a new ‘becoming’: How do new regional formations come about? Do creative practices have a part in shaping them? Thus, for example, the contemporary art world in Turkey has set itself the task of becoming the hub of a Balkan – south-eastern European – Middle Eastern artistic sphere, as has been demonstrated in several of the recent Istanbul Biennials and in the work of arts organisations in the city such as Platform Garanti. There have been several excellent studies of the role of historical repression and the repression of memory within public and private culture in Turkey. But the questions I am trying to pose here are different – they have to do not with the active forgetting of uncomfortable or guilty histories, but with the ability to transcend restrictions by imagining oneself into a much larger world, in which patterns repeat and refer to one another, both historically and spatially. Such forms of ‘self-regioning’, stemming from geographical exhaustion, have become the hallmarks of some of the most exciting and innovative artistic practices to emerge from the region – those of Walid Raad, Wael Shawky, Akram Zattari,

48

Oblique Points of Entry

Kutlug Ataman, Skandar Copti and many others, whose close and destabilising gaze is enabling us to posit new and spatially complex sets of historical self-location.

endnotes 1

MuHka Antwerp 2006, Herziliya Museum of Contemporary Art 2008, Balhaus Naunyn + KunstRaum Bethanien, Berlin 2010.

2

De-Regulation.org (accessed on 23 June 2013).

3

Martin Heidegger, ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’, in Discourse on Thinking [Gelassenheit—1959], translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 63–4.

4

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 8–9.

49

3 Framing the Discipline of Contemporary Art of the Arab World through the Press NADA SHABOUT

I

magine someone attempting to teach the history of art (or even just art) of or from the Middle East at any university in the world in 1999. The Challenge

A consistent problem faced by all who teach twentieth and twenty-first century art of and from the region is the lack of trusted resources to use in classrooms. It is quite an arduous task to generate a syllabus of interest 51

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to students, or one that even remotely reflects the interests of the teacher, based on available publications. It is often the available publications that dictate the syllabus, not the other way around. Ironically, this problem exists in all languages. To date, the few relevant publications are mostly in English, which makes teaching these classes in the countries of the region or in non-English-speaking countries in general equally difficult. But the few primary sources available exist mostly in the country’s original language (Arabic, Persian, Turkish), with few in the colonial language of the respective occupier of that country, and remain beyond the reach of most scholars and academics. Researchers and graduate students alike contend with this issue, which necessarily limits the generation of further knowledge on the topic. Finding images of works by artists from the Middle East has been similarly problematic and challenging for both teachers and researchers. Work of early- and mid-twentieth-century artists from the region has not been professionally documented or archived. The few images that we have from exhibition catalogues are generally grainy, low-resolution black-and-white shots that may be cropped or out of focus, and often lack such basic information as date, title, dimensions and medium. Even the few museums that exist in some of the regional cities did not necessarily include images or complete data in their archives. But, aside of the problems of translation and publishing, one can identify other reasons for the lack of resources, ranging from the history of Middle Eastern art’s ideological absence from the canon of Western art history, to the lack of knowledge of the topic, and of trained historians specialising in it. Given the colonial history of the majority of Middle Eastern countries, it is not surprising that, as colonised regions, they were essentially removed from history and excluded from modernity and contemporaneity. This disavowal has been perpetuated by the consequences of a lack of careful investigation of the effects of colonisation and decolonisation on (Western) modern art, which has led to the total marginalisation of modern art production outside the West, including the modern 52

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art of the Middle East, and – of particular interest to me – modern Arab art. Unable to resolve its complication by the politics of identity, modern Arab art is fundamentally ignored and dismissed as being chiefly of propagandistic, not aesthetic, interest. Arab art of the twentieth century has been evaluated mostly as a tool for the search, creation and maintenance of national consciousness and identities, which effectively denies the history of the national project worldwide, including Europe. Such a notion is not without its implications for contemporary artistic production, given that politics has played a central role in defining and redefining form, and in informing meaning, in the visual languages of Arab artists throughout the last century and a half. In fact, it could be argued that politics forms a space of continuity between modern and contemporary art of the Arab world, despite certain tensions between the two. While both modern and contemporary visual productions are engaged in the politics of their time, they vary in the relationship that they each have with their respective states. Most Arab modernists, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, were active participants in their states’ national projects, perceiving hope for change and progress in the policies of the new national governments. That is not to overlook the few exceptions, like the Art and Liberty Group in Egypt – a chapter of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, and a socialist organisation that promoted freedom in art, was vehemently antifascist, and found itself very often in opposition with the government. But contemporary artists engage with the politics of the Middle East in a broader sense, deploying global concepts that generally produce critiques of their states, especially as many of them are exiled or carry dual nationalities – a course of action that was not a real option for the modernists at the time. In the last decade, however, a new wave of literature emerged, responding to the sudden proliferation of exhibitions in the West centred on themes and visual productions of the Middle East – particularly its contemporary productions. The political and economic 53

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state of the world are at least partly responsible for this recognition, while 9/11 signified a turning-point in the renewed interest in all things ‘Middle Eastern’. The ‘global’ celebration of contemporary Middle Eastern art, exemplified in art fairs, auction house sales and exhibitions, has not been without its benefits for the modern period of the Arab world and its art history. At worst, it has frustrated scholars of Arab art into intensifying their research for fear of historical distortion – in other words, the acceptance of the contemporary by the international art world as a detached and new phenomenon. At best, those writing about contemporary production have realised that, in order to sustain interest in that production – which had proved more than merely a transient moment engendered by historical circumstances of exile and diaspora, and by the sheer persistence of the artists themselves – they actually need to understand its history. New Directions At first, however, this new literature consisted of a plethora of mostly uncritical writings on contemporary art in the Middle East in general, including much on Arab art that only addressed certain themes and angles. This form of fast publication continues, contributing to a rapidly growing list of resources. But these resources do not cover the arts of the region equally. The recent exhibitions that this literature addresses seem always to focus on countries subject to political instability and war. The reasons for the choice of countries range from media obsession to lack of access.1 Although many exhibitions engage dynamic relationships between diaspora art and the homeland, in their packaging and dissemination they invoke an ethnographic representation of the arts of the ‘other’, particularly through their insistence on locking the aesthetics of production into current political rhetoric. Consequently, countries of the Middle East – or the Islamic world as it is sometimes uncritically referred to – are necessarily confined by the rhetoric of justification and explanation whereby they are forced to replicate Western-constructed terminologies as well as methodologies. In addition, the popular notion 54

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of ‘building bridges’ between cultures through beautiful artefacts, and the exhibitions that facilitate this process, necessarily and immediately embodies an apologetic aspect of the contemporary political condition of the objects’ home of origin, further removing them from the aesthetics of their making. Moreover, the notion of building bridges obscures the conflation of ‘Arab’, ‘Middle Eastern’ and ‘Islamic’, in its indiscriminate celebration of all three. In March 2006, the article ‘A Cultural Touchstone Connecting Europe and Islam’, in the New York Times, posed a question that is still continually invoked in media and press releases: ‘Can culture serve as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East?’ The article was written on the premise of a clash of civilisations, and pointed to the ‘rediscovery of Islamic art … now under way in the West, with new Islamic galleries in the works at the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and many other major museums’.2 This argument was also applied to contemporary production. This conflation, however, further denies specificities and nuances of the art produced, while positing its products themselves only as means of mediation rather than objects of aesthetic interest. On a different note, it is particularly interesting that the contemporary is celebrated enthusiastically in the spirit of globalisation, while modern Arab art is rejected for its national connections.The post-modern rhetoric of inclusivity notwithstanding, in these moments of token acceptance, contemporary Arab art is not accepted as equal by any measure. On the contrary, the doctrine of the post-modern celebration of difference and particularities has resulted only in a tolerant recognition of a further segregated ‘other,’ characterised by hyphenated identities, supposedly expressing mobility and transgression beyond borders. Yet the ‘otherness’ of artists originating from the Middle East is continuously emphasised as a point of identity. What is most intriguing here, however, is the contradiction of accepting contemporary Arab art because of its identity politics, while rejecting Arab modern art specifically because of its identity politics. Moreover, contemporary art 55

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of the Middle East seems to be required to display, explain and critique its politics, although mostly based on specific accepted criteria that miss the complications negotiated by the artists. Furthermore, technology (photography, video, installation, new media) is not highlighted as ‘Western’ and thus the work of Middle Eastern artists using this media is not dismissed as imitation. Painting, however, is still evaluated as ‘Western’ and thus rejected as replication. Most contemporary Arab artists, certainly the globally popular ones, are still trained in the West, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet they are accepted as ‘global’, transnational, ‘in-between’, ‘borderline’ artists and the ‘authenticity’ of their work is not challenged. Regardless of the possible political implications and interpretations, there is no doubt that the exhibitions and new text constitute a welcomed, albeit belated, acknowledgement. Initially most writing about contemporary art took the form of short and general text as introduction to exhibitions. With the understanding that exhibitions are never simply neutral, nor are they only about the objects they display any more than the objects are about themselves, the literature necessarily reflected the politics of the exhibition it accompanied. Further Challenges Moreover, one must consider that these exhibitions and the new literature have filled a vast vacuum,and are thus effectively constructing and defining both the field of study and the scholarship. Hence the urgent need to be critical in their evaluations. One hopes that the new literature will contribute to the construction of an academic field that will negotiate its unique discourse while simultaneously forming relationships with other art histories, particularly by way of methodological concerns. A number of important questions arise from this prospect: · How is knowledge about contemporary Middle Eastern art generated and constructed? 56

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· How does the focus on transnational histories and diasporic contributions, which seems to be at the core of writing the contemporary history, inform the discourse in the absence of conventional structures of art history? And how does it connect to the larger key issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the current context of an increasing interest in documentation and archives? · How can the shift from the national to the transnational be negotiated? · What sort of challenges is this literature raising in relation to colonialism, post-colonialism and neocolonialism? · How are the regional and local particularities and generalities addressed? · How does the literature produce knowledge that is relevant for contemporary exhibitions?3 Clearly, I cannot answer all, or even most, of these questions here, but I believe it is necessary that they be raised at the moment. I will try to tackle a couple of them, through a quick chronological review of a few key publications, and particularly of the language of their promotion. Vessels of Knowledge One of the first books published on the topic prior to the recent hype, which was the only available source for a while, was Wijdan Ali’s Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity.4 The book provided a brief survey of developments in each country, with data and artists’ biographies, as well as a few but high-quality images of the works. Although Ali was trained as an Islamic art historian, her involvement with modern art resulted in the establishment in 1980 of both the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Jordan and the Jordan 57

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National Gallery of Art – whose collections constituted the works included in Modern Islamic Art; and in 2008 she founded the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Jordan. Together with a few other essays published around that time, the book promoted a specific narrative that was then widely accepted as the official line on the development of modern art in the region, but was fiercely contested by the generations of scholars that followed. In 2006, Jessica Winegar authored a substantial discourse-based book that resulted from field research on contemporary visual production in Egypt: Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Plate 1).5 Although Winegar is a cultural anthropologist rather than an art historian, her sociocultural contextualisation and analysis, which focused more on the artists than on the art, contributed an important work to the field. Winegar’s book was essentially based on her PhD research and dissertation. The same was true of my 2007 book, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics6 (Fig. 3.1), in which I mapped out the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings that facilitated the transformation of aesthetics from one formed directly in relation to an Islamic religious ideal to one that responded to a secularised and Arab national ideal. I engaged with the issues of importance for the twentieth century and dedicated two chapters to the use of the Arabic letter, and its culmination in the vogue of Huroufiyah.7 These last two books were published in the United States through peer-reviewed university presses, which essentially meant that their production took a minimum of three years, and that they included a limited number of images, most of them in black and white. Their contents covered the period of what is now the historical modern, despite some connections to the contemporary post-modern. But they were followed by three expensive coffee-table-style books on contemporary art. All three appeared in the market within two years, and were published in Europe without any peer-review process: New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (2009) (Fig. 3.2); 58

Framing the Discipline of Contemporary Art of the Arab World

Fig. 3.1

Book cover: Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2007).

Fig. 3.2

Book cover: Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi and Nada Shabout, eds, New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (London: TransGlobe, 2009).

Fig. 3.3

Book cover: Saeb Eigner, Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran (Abingdon: Merrell, 2010).

59

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Contemporary Art in the Middle East (2009); and Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran (2010) (Fig. 3.3).8 The publisher of New Vision had previously published two other volumes on Iran and Turkey, as part of a series on the Middle East, followed by a book on patronage in the Middle East, as well as studies of contemporary art from Russia, Britain, Brazil, Korea and America.9 Similarly, the publisher of Contemporary Art in the Middle East produced the book as part of a series on global contemporary art that included volumes titled Contemporary Art in Latin America, Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, and Contemporary Art in North America. Prior to the appearance of these books, a three-volume work titled Arab Art Now had been published privately in 2007. While it never became available on the market, as the first publication of its kind, in many ways it did set the standard for the production format of large books incorporating high-resolution colour photographs of works of art. Moreover, the profiles of artists included in Arab Art Now introduced a standard that became compulsory in all the books that followed. The speed of publication of these big, glossy and highly polished books indicated the increasing market demand for any knowledge on the topic, as well as the publishers’ consequent recognition of a profitable opportunity. Equally, however, it sounded an alarm in relation to the research involved and the critical standards (or lack thereof ) of their contents. Moreover, given the deficiency of traditional research-based and peer-reviewed academic publications like the ones mentioned earlier, another important concern has developed in the field based on the use of this literature in academia as well, which in effect alters the construction and framing of the field of teaching and study. I should note here that I am not necessarily criticising the authors or editors of these books – after all, the list includes me and many of my colleagues! But I am pointing to the fact that none of us realistically had time to do much new or rigorous research beyond the knowledge we had accumulated in our previous work, in view of the short deadlines we were 60

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given, which allowed us to engage only in general reviews of a limited range of topics. The audacity of the request to write books of around 30,000 words on the arts of the whole of the Middle East was itself problematic, with its obvious implication of similarity across the region, and the potential effect of privileging some artists at the expense of others. These large, expensive books – beautifully bound, well designed and printed, and incorporating large, high-resolution colour images – are necessary in an otherwise dismal collection of badly printed books with poor-quality black-and-white images of the works. The latter were mostly official publications of the various countries in the region, which nevertheless remain rare and important primary documents today given the lack of alternative sources. At any rate, it seems that the demand for these big, glossy books has passed. What is curious and quite telling is the contrast between the blurbs devised to advertise the books and their actual contents. What all of the blurbs have in common is that each generally presents the book as the revolutionary new text on Middle Eastern art, the first of its kind, the most important contribution, and so on, while the text of the book, composed by scholars and historians, takes great pains to explain at length why it is not any of those things. In fact, what all of these books contain are introductory texts that explains what they are not, enumerating all of the pitfalls of the titles, approaches and other problematics, with additional essays that can address only a few artists and topics. Having myself been one of the authors and editors of these books, I am well aware of the conflicting feelings engendered by the process, and well understand the pressure induced by the publisher, whose aim is to sell a popular product. Scholars, on the other hand, are aware of the impossibility of the task, but equally are seduced by it – particularly by the possibility of the publication of high-quality images, which is very difficult to achieve for academic presses with restricted budgets. Moreover, they know well that if they do not agree to participate, someone else – possibly less knowledgeable – will do so; and thus they feel unable to escape responsibility for the result. 61

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Two country-specific studies should also be briefly mentioned here. One is Palestinian Art, by Ganit Ankori (2006).10 Ankori is an art historian at Brandeis University in the United States, who does not work exclusively on Arab or Palestinian art. The second, by the Palestinian artist and writer Kamal Boullata, is Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present (2009).11 Boullata has written extensively on Palestinian art in both Arabic and English. Both books focus on the formation of modern Palestinian art, and have generated much controversy. The latest two books of significance to join the list are Katarzyna Pieprzak, Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Post-colonial Morocco (2010),12 and Patrick Kane, The Politics of Art in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation-Building (2013).13 Pieprzak’s book is an examination of the cultural history of how modernity has been imagined and challenged in Morocco since 1912, through the role of the museum as a national monument to modernity, and its later configuration through exhibition policies and configurations. Kane’s cultural history investigates the evolution of art movements and aesthetics in Egypt from the 1920s to the 1960s, and their role in criticism and resistance to various notions, including the Nahda and later the nationalist agenda, within the context of political and social conflict and change. Clearly I have focused here chiefly on books on Arab art, and less on those dealing with that of the Middle East generally. Nevertheless, there is a similar story to tell about books on Iranian and Turkish art. In particular, I would like to note Wendy Shaw’s Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (2011).14 The book examines the formation of modern art in Turkey within the period of extreme transformation between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey in relation to nationhood, history and modern identity, and contextualises the country’s key art movements and artists. On Iran, similarly, for a while, only exhibition catalogues were available. An important example, edited by Lynn Gumpert‬and Shiva 62

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Balaghi‬, is Picturing Iran‬: Art, Society and Revolution (2002) (Fig. 3.4),15 which examined modernity in Iran by exploring the visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s. A recent publication by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (2013) (Plate 2),16 promises a more critical and thorough investigation of Iranian art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The exhibition Iran Modern opened recently at the Asia Society in New York City, accompanied by a catalogue of the same name.17‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Alternative Spaces As well as books, a few print magazines have been introduced to the field: Canvas, Bidoun, Contemporary Practices, and Art Tomorrow, to name few. Online magazines such as Ibraaz have also emerged.

Fig. 3.4

Book cover: Lynn Gumpert‬ and Shiva Balaghi‬, eds, Picturing Iran‬: Art, Society and Revolution (I.B.Tauris, 2002).

A number of art blogs have been started by interested individuals and gallerists in the field to disseminate information about the contemporary art of the region. While these venues provide good data and interesting text, they generally do not publish in-depth research on any of the topics they invoke. 63

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To date, however, there is no specialised, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to new research and scholarship on the topic. Publishing on modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art remains difficult. A few essays are occasionally accepted by peer-reviewed journals of Middle Eastern studies, and even fewer by art journals in the United States and Europe. There is definitely a need for all of the new publications, and one hopes for more discourse-based scholarly work for a healthier construction for the field of study. An important development in this direction is the flurry of documentation projects that has the potential to encourage research for such publications. I will not offer a review here, but an example I am familiar with is the Modern Art Iraq Archive, which focuses on twentieth-century art in Iraq.18 Despite the current popularity of archives – sometimes to the point of obsession – the documents have not yet generated more knowledge. Looking Forward What are we to understand from this short and general assessment of the state of publishing on the modern and contemporary art of the Middle East? An obvious conclusion is that the field is in definite need of more scholarship in order to construct a fully-fledged academic discipline. Moreover, there is less interest in research on Middle Eastern modern period, and much more in contemporary Middle Eastern art. In either case, it seems that research is mostly advanced within the parameters of cultural history rather than art history. Despite the usefulness and popularity of cultural history today – particularly as a new approach to studying artistic practices – the art of the Middle East seems to have missed out on the conventional construction of its art histories, including the close study of their objects. More important, however, is the pronounced tension between global and local approaches to history. On the one hand, if we are to believe what is argued by various scholars – that global history is made of intersections, adaptations and appropriations whose boundaries 64

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are continually shifting – are these publications, with their strongly geopolitical focus, not essentially enforcing segregation instead of encouraging connections? The Getty Foundation’s website, introducing the initiative of ‘Connecting Art Histories’ insists: The power and vitality of any scholarly discipline rests on its ability to forge connections – among people and ideas and across international boundaries. Connecting Art Histories aims to increase opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange across national and regional borders. It springs from the recognition that all forms of art historical study will be stronger when scholars from around the world inform each other’s ideas and methodologies.19 Nevertheless, the project so far remains limited, and does not include Arab or Middle Eastern art. One sees from the blurbs used to sell these books – and notwithstanding the self-congratulatory commercial aspect – that modernity is still understood today as a superior Western historical construct, which necessarily enforces a binary of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. It is true that there are increasing calls for its re-examination within the paradigms of imperialism and colonialism. But the alternative modernities offered by post-modernist apologetics do not suffice, but instead perpetuate a division between original and copy, and thus heighten exclusion and separation. On the other hand, if we were to begin today with an approach presupposing an ‘art of the contact zones’ – understanding culture as a series of encounters, as an entry into particularities, placing the transnational above the national – would we in effect be forsaking the national in favour of the neocolonial? Is there a risk of producing autoethnographic text (text that engages with and replicates colonial 65

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representations of the other) instead of allowing for self-representation? This is a particular danger for the many cultures whose nations are fighting their way out of the periphery to be acknowledged as equal, and find their place at the centre. I believe that there is much more value and potential for innovative scholarship in the peer-reviewed journal articles published by a number of the contributors to this volume. They not only present rigorous and precise new research and thought, but are also able to negotiate the national and transnational with a greater respect for nuance than is usually to be found. A good example is found in the four essays published in June 2013 in ‘Special Section: The Longevity of 1967 in Art and Its Histories’, in ARTMargins.20 In the end, it is as Radhakrishnan argues: ‘Unless and until other worlds are recognized not merely as other histories but as other knowledges that question the legitimacy of metropolitan theory, no substantive common ground can be coordinated between postmodernism and post-coloniality.’21

endnotes 1

It remains difficult to conduct research in various regions and cities of the Middle East. Thus even doctoral students’ focus seems to be limited to certain countries. For example, there seem to be a number of studies, both old and new, of modern art in Egypt, post-civil-war Lebanese art, and Iranian art, while there are hardly any on Syrian art.

2

Alan Riding, ‘A Cultural Touchstone Connecting Europe and Islam’, New York Times, 15 March 2006.

3

These questions formed the premise of a session organised by Salwa Mikdadi and me at the College Art Association annual conference in New York City, on 11 February 2011, titled, ‘Writing the Middle East’. See conference.collegeart.org/2011/documents/SessionsAtAGlance2011. pdf (accessed on 12 March 2013).

4

Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997).

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5

Jessica Winegar Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), as part of a series of Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures.

6

Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2007).

7

Huroufiyah, translated as ‘letterism,’ is a trend in modern Arab art that started late in the first half of the twentieth century as an experiment to ‘Arabise’ modern art. It secularised the Arabic language that had been revered as the language of the Qur’an but signified an Arab identity during the twentieth century as the language of political slogans. Unlike the tradition of Islamic calligraphy with its various standards and styles, Huroufiyah was free. It used the Arabic letter as a form of abstraction. Latter examples produced a commercial trend that used the Arabic letter as a simple identity marker and catered to a market that preferred abstraction.

8

Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi and Nada Shabout, eds, New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (London: TransGlobe, 2009); Nadine Monem, ed, Contemporary Art in the Middle East (London: Black Dog, 2009); Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran (Abingdon: Merrell, 2010).

9

See tgpublishingltd.com/artbooks.html (accessed 6 on February 2013).

10

Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art (London: Reaktion, 2006). For a review of the book, see Shabout ‘The Politics of Art History,’ a book review of Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art, in Arab Studies Quarterly 29: 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 57-61.

11

Kamal Boullata, Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present (London: Saqi Books, 2009).

12

Katarzyna Pieprzak, Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Post-colonial Morocco (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

13

Patrick Kane, The Politics of Art in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation-Building (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013).

14 Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). 15

Lynn Gumpert‬and Shiva Balaghi‬, eds, Picturing Iran‬: Art, Society and Revolution (I.B.Tauris, 2002).

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16 Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books, 2013). 17

Fereshteh Daftari and Layla S. Diba, eds, Iran Modern (New York: Asia Society, 2013). A forthcoming book by Talinn Grigor, Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (London: Reaktion: 2014) has been announced. Its blurb on amazon.com reads: ‘In the first comprehensive look at Iranian art and visual culture since the 1979 revolution, Talinn Grigor investigates the official art sponsored by the Islamic Republic, the culture of avant-garde art created in the studio and its display in galleries and museums, and the art of the Iranian diaspora within Western art scenes’ (amazon.com/Contemporary-Iranian-Art-TalinnGrigor/dp/1780232705/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384826 200&sr=1-3&keywords=Talinn+Grigor) (accessed on 8 February 2013).

18

See artiraq.org/maia: ‘The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) ... is a resource to trace, share, and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. Explore the works by artist, browse through related textual materials, or add your own images or stories to the archive.’

19

See getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/cah/index.html (accessed on 14 March 2013).

20 The papers by Anneka Lenssen, Clare Davies, Saleem al-Bahloly and Tammer el-Sheikh were first presented at the second annual conference of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, ‘The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories’ (mitpressjournals.org/toc/artm/2/2) (accessed on 22 March 2013). 21

68

R. Radhakrishnan, ‘Post-modernism and the Rest of the World’, in his Theory in an Uneven World (Chichester: John Wiley, 2008), p. 58.

4 Mapping Iranian Contemporary Art Publications and Knowledge-Production HAMID SEVERI

F

ormal academic knowledge of contemporary art in Iran is scarce, but if we accept an expanded definition of knowledgeproduction incorporating artistic research, curatorial

activities, online magazines and websites, and documentary film, we obtain different results.

It should be noted that there are many barriers to research and

knowledge-production in Iran. Among many studies in this area,

two are particularly relevant here. Focusing on the humanities, Hasan Tavanaee Fard’s 2009 essay, ‘Tahlili bar mavani’-i towlid-i danish dar howzeh ulum-i insani’ (‘An Analysis on Barriers to Knowledge-

Production in the Humanities’), groups the barriers to knowledge69

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production in the humanities into three categories: barriers inherent to the humanities, barriers within the realm of the humanities, and barriers from outside of the humanities.1 Clearly, some of these barriers may exist elsewhere in the world, but the presence of some of them – particularly the third category – is quite strong in Iran, where it can also be found operating in relation to arts research. Some of the specific barriers to which Tavanaee Fard pays attention include: ‘promotion of research without any educational parallel; weak scientific staff; a small research community in humanities; an inadequate methodology; a suffocation by methodology; trained incapacity; research hypocrisy; decorative research;… hostility towards the knowledge of foreigners; a belief that the country’s humanities knowledge is wholly useless; [or on the contrary] foreignism etc.’2 Another study relevant here was carried by Ali Tayefi. In his 2001 book Mavani’-i farhangi-i towsi’eh-i tahqiq dar Iran: muqaddemehei bar jame’eh-shinasi-i andisheh-varzi va andisheh-suzi dar Iran (Cultural Barriers to Research Development in Iran: An Introduction to the Sociology of Thinking and Thought-burning), Tayefi focuses on cultural factors, and pays attention to problems such as, among others: secrecy and a lack of information-sharing among researchers;3 the absence of straightforward language deriving from social, political and religious problems;4 the sanctification of some issues and inability to express doubt in relation to many other areas such as religious and political issues;5 an aversion to the material world.6 In attempting to understand the state of research and knowledgeproduction on contemporary art in Iran, it is necessary to keep these limitations in mind. Moreover, after the 1979 Revolution – and especially in 2009, the year of a controversial election, when there was heightened pressure on intellectuals, students and the cultural elites to conform to the state ideology – the government has been trying to Islamicise the humanities. For the past three years, 70 disciplines in the humanities have been reconsidered, and some, like arts management, have been 70

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removed from the roster of possible university majors. This policy has forced the institutions dealing with humanities and arts research to react by becoming more conservative, directing research topics towards uncontroversial areas and only allowing areas of enquiry that are politically and religiously safe. Art and humanities in general, as they exist in Iran, are considered Western-orientated, and thus politically and religiously suspicious. If established areas within the humanities with a longer history – such as sociology – face such formidable barriers, one can only imagine what the situation might be for arts research, given that theory, aesthetics, art criticism and art history do not have a strong tradition in the Iranian educational system, and especially that art history and art education do not yet exist as disciplines within Iranian universities, either public or private. Despite government scepticism towards these fields, the huge number of young art students and artists thirsty for knowledge, combined with a booming market in Iranian art abroad, the demand for publications on contemporary art is very high. The demand for published material in this area has resulted in a proliferation of booklets, brochures and exhibition catalogues (mostly including only one or two paragraphs of text), as well as some books on single artists. Since most of the large number of printed materials are neither academic nor scholarly, and thus are not a major source of knowledge-production, they are not considered in this essay. Likewise, there are a large number of translations that I will not consider here – not because translation is not knowledgeproduction, but because, owing to its important and complicated role in Iran, it needs to be studied separately. A large number of translated books and articles are published; but, in terms of their importance, it may suffice to quote Omid Mehregan’s remark on the philosopher and translator Morad Farhadpour: ‘I have seen repeatedly Morad Farhadpour’s thesis that “[t]ranslation in its widest sense is the only true mode of thinking for us” in the articles and notes of my generation, and this mode has still to continue.’7 But it 71

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is relevant to note that many of the translations occur in alternative spaces, and constitute an important source for artists’ and students’ understanding of contemporary art. Finally, it is important to pay attention to what Simon Sheikh calls the ‘commodification of knowledge in artistic research’. Sheikh writes of a linguistic turn, meaning that language and (inter)textuality have become increasingly privileged and important, in art practice, the staging of the discourses around art, the aestheticization of discourse, and the new knowledge-based industries such as marketing, PR and services. Similarly, and also simultaneously, as art has become dematerialized and expanded, labour itself has become dematerialized and expanded, we could say, and production shifted towards a cultural industry and the so-called knowledge economy.8 For better or worse, this does not yet apply very much to Iran – partly because those types of dematerialised artwork do not sell well in Iran, and partly because the proprieties of copyright are not observed in Iran. Knowledge, therefore, does not necessarily lead to economy. Institutions: In Charge, but Ignorant The state institutions responsible for art education and exhibitions (such as the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Howzeh hunari-i sazman-i tablighat-i islami (the Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation), the Iranian Academy of the Arts, as well as the various universities and museums pay no attention to contemporary art, or, if they do, they approach the subject from an ideological perspective. Since they consider modern and contemporary art to be oriented towards or influenced by the West, arts universities or departments in Iran consider the study of 72

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historical eras and the traditional arts safer, and pay no attention to contemporary art. Neither the University of Tehran Press nor the Tehran Art University Press, or indeed any other Iranian university, has published any books on contemporary art. Some institutions, such as Shahed University,9 even make it difficult for their students to undertake theses on contemporary art and related issues. The Iranian Academy of the Arts, which is affiliated to the presidency, was founded in 1999 in order to ‘preserve the national and Islamic cultural and artistic heritage, and also to propose policies and strategies, to achieve findings and innovations, and promote Islamic culture in order to face the threats of invading cultures’.10 The Academy has a publications arm called Mua’siseh-i ta’lif, tarjumeh va nashr-i ‘asar-i hunari (Institute of Production, Translation and Publication of Artistic Books), which has published more than 400 books and magazines since its foundation in 2004 – mostly translations or research on heritage, and on Islamic, and Eastern art. It has not, however, produced a single book on the contemporary art of Iran. The most active pro-government art institution is the Howzeh hunari, and its head is appointed directly by the Supreme Leader. The Howzeh hunari is active in music, cinema, literature and the visual arts. Its main emphasis is on the religious and revolutionary aspects of art. Among its many organisations and branches, the Islamic Art and Cultural Research Centre is responsible for theory and philosophy of religious art, Islamic art, committed art11 and aesthetics. Among the writers from within the Islamic and committed approach, Mohammad Madadpour was a student of Ahmad Fardid (1909–94), who, with his notion of ‘Occidentosis’, influenced Jalal Al-e Ahmad and many intellectuals. Fardid was fond of Heidegger, and taught the idea that the Islamic Republic was in keeping with Heidegger’s thought. In his Paradaym-hay-i zibaei-shinasi-i hunar-i mu’asir (Paradigms of Contemporary Aesthetics, 2005) and Haqiqat va hunar-i dini: nazari beh mabani-i nazari-i hunar, shi’r, adabiyat va hunar-hay-i tajassumi dini (Truth and Religious Art: A Look at 73

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the Theoretical Foundation of Religious Art, Poetry, Literature and Visual Art, 2008), Madadpour praises traditional and religious art. Without explanation, he makes the following sweeping statement: ‘The modern, post-modern and new art, as solely worshipping form, reaches in a maddening meaninglessness no further than instinct and the play of sentiment.’12 With such an attitude, it is not surprising that the Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation has not paid enough attention to contemporary Iranian art. One of the very few books focusing on this subject, particularly on painting, is by Morteza Goudarzi, who was the head of the Islamic Art and Cultural Research Centre (affiliated with the Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation) for several years. This book, entitled Justo-juy-i huviyyat dar naqqashi-i mu’asir-i Iran (Searching for Identity in Contemporary Iranian Painting, 2001), demonstrates that his notion of what counts as contemporary is broad, and includes the last 100 years of Iranian painting. From Kamal al-Mulk to the Saqqa-khaneh Movement and Qahveh-khaneh (Coffee-house), his main chapter is ‘Naqqashi-i inqilab-i islami va huviyyat-giraei-i dini va milli’ (‘Islamic Revolution Painting and Religious, National and Identitybased Tendencies’).13 Although, because of his ideological approach, he does not include many painters after the 1979 Revolution, his approach differs from the absolutist generalisations of Madadpour. Goudarzi deals with particular painters, and pays attention to their changing attitudes towards the social and religious contents of revolutionary art within the periods when they were active. His ignorance about many painters of the post-Revolution era, and his tendency towards historical inaccuracy, drew tremendous criticism from artists and critics. In general, he is not satisfied with the manifestation of identity in contemporary Iranian painting: ‘It seems that in terms of reaching an art with a national identity that would be able to flaunt itself on the world’s visual art scene, there is still a very long way to go for Iranian artists and painters.’14

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The Islamic Art and Cultural Research Centre has also published some books by writers who are not members of Howzeh hunari. Ali Asghar Gharehbaghi has translated several texts, as well as authoring books of his own, such as Tabar-shinasi-i pustmudirnism (‘The Genealogy of Post-Modernism’, 2001) and Hunar-i naqd-i hunari (‘The Art of Art Criticism’, 2011). Although his stance is not religious or pro-government, his contempt for post-modernism and feminism have aligned him with Howzeh hunari’s perspectives on these issues. Owing to its history and to its highly regarded collection, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, is the most important institution responsible for contemporary art in Iran. Mu’assiseh-i towsi’eh hunar-hy-i tajassumi (Institute for the Promotion of Contemporary Visual Arts) is in charge of the publications of the museum. It publishes only catalogues representing existing exhibitions, and includes only images accompanied by minimal text, but no critical commentary. TMoCA has published many catalogues for its exhibitions, and some monographs, but no critical surveys, or texts including thematic analyses of trends in contemporary Iranian art. It has not published a single book on contemporary art other than a small number of booklets and conference proceedings. Jahad-i danishgahi (the Academic Centre for Education, Culture and Research), which was established a few months after the Revolution, was founded by the High Council of the Cultural Revolution in order to fulfil its goals. Its major goals have been the reopening of the universities that were closed in the period following the Revolution (1980–83), the promotion of Islamic art and culture and its protection from Westernisation. Ignorance about contemporary art is evident in its Scientific Information Database,15 which boasts of being a comprehensive, up-to-date data bank. In this database, searching with the key words ‘contemporary art’ in English and ‘Hunar-i mu’asir’ in Persian produced only two articles from a total of 295,220 entries. 75

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Finally, the Sazman-i mutali’eh va tadvin-i kutub-i ulum-i insani-i danishgah-ha (Organization for Researching and Composing University Textbooks in the Humanities) is affiliated with the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. Since its establishment in 1985, with the aim of Islamising universities, it has compiled, translated and published more than 1,700 textbooks – some on traditional and historical art, but none on contemporary art.16 Individuals as the Main Producers of Knowledge Apart from these institutions, a few independent Iranian scholars write books or articles on contemporary art. There are not many theoreticians or philosophers working in Iran, and among those few an interest in visual arts is even less than in other fields of arts and humanities. There is thus little in the way of scholarly debate and discussion in this field and its various components. The former director of the TMoCA, Alireza Sami Azar, who, during the era of political reform between 1998 and 2005, initiated a new phase of the museum’s history, playing a major role in introducing contemporary art to a younger generation of Iranians, has written two books: Owj va uful-i mudirnism (The Rise and Decline of Modernism, 2009) and the Inqilab-i mafhumi (Conceptual Revolution, 2013). These consist mainly of compilations of other texts and ideas about Western art since the 1950s. No particular reading or interpretation of the subject is offered, nor is a coherent theory or personal approach evident. But the fact that someone who was an official of the Islamic Republic has written with a positive tone about Western art is itself a performative act worthy of recognition. Alireza Sahafzadeh’s book, Hunar-i huviyyat va siyasat-i baznimaei: mutali’ehei dar tarikh-i ijtimaei-i hunar-i amrika (The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation: A Study on the Social History of American Art, 2009) (Fig. 4.1), takes a further step. From 76

Mapping Iranian Contemporary Art Publications

Fig. 4.1

Book cover: Alireza Sahafzadeh, Hunar-i huviyyat va siyasat-i baznimaei: mutali’ehii dar tarikh-i ijtimaei-i hunar-i amrika (The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation: A Study on the Social History of American Art) (Tehran: Bidgol, 2009).

a younger generation than Sami Azar, Sahafzadeh wrote the book after years of research and with a tighter thematic focus. It is a social history of American art after the 1950s. Praising whatever is American, from Ronald Reagan to Andy Warhol, Sahafzadeh – like the American critic Michael Kimmelman – denies the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and America’s use of government organisations for the purpose of postwar political propaganda. Even though its focus is on the relationship between art and politics in America, it nonetheless offers Iranian readers possible points of comparison with their own circumstances. The author cleverly directs his readers to intuit his own view of the current situation of art in Iran, thereby elevating their expectations, while at the same time presenting his own opinions on the quarrel of Iranian intellectuals with America. But this tendency leads him to the point where he defends the Guggenheim’s censorship of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky project (1971), and calls Haacke’s strategy a terrorist act.17 Finally, as far as Persian books are concerned, Hunar-i nowgiray-i Iran (Iranian Modern Art, 2011), by Tooka Maleki (Fig. 4.2) is aimed at a young audience. As the author mentions in her introduction, 77

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‘To tell you the truth, up to now, almost no book has been written for adults about the history of Iranian modern art, only chapters or short articles in some books.’18 Although aimed at young people, the book pays careful attention to major themes, media, artists and institutions that had been overlooked in adult literature, and is no mere simplification of more specialised books. It is well researched and precise, and thus constitutes a great source of knowledge from which adults can benefit tremendously. Art Journals and Magazines The periodical literature follows the same pattern as most of the publications described above. The Iranian Academy of the Arts used to publish five journals: Khiyal (dealing with research on historical art); Gulistan-i Hunar (on traditional art); Pajuhishnameh (addressing different approaches to art criticism); Khiyal-i Sharghi (a general journal on visual arts that sometimes covered aspects of contemporary art); and Ayeneh-i Khyial (a newsletter covering events, though rarely encompassing contemporary art events). There was no journal dealing specifically with contemporary art, and since the controversial 2009 election and the dismissal of the founder and head of the Academy, Mir Hossein Mousavi, from his office, those mentioned above have all ceased publication. Howzeh hunari’s ideological preferences are evident in their magazine Hunar-hay-i tajassumi (‘Visual Arts’), which emphasises a religious and politically engaged approach. In recent years it has become more open to other issues, more picturesque in its layout, and more colourful in its images, and has introduced some contemporary international artists. The TMoCA does not publish any journals, and very few of the art journals published by universities deal with contemporary art issues. Aks-nameh, which is affiliated with the Cultural Research 78

Mapping Iranian Contemporary Art Publications

Fig. 4.2 Book cover: Tooka Maleki, Hunar-i nowgiray-i Iran (Iranian Modern Art) (Tehran: Nazar, 2011).

Bureau, has since 1998 published mostly translations, as well as articles about serious contemporary photography and related issues, but on an irregular basis. The crucial magazines for contemporary art are in fact not related to these institutions. The bi-weekly publication Tandis has been in existence since 2002, and is the most widely distributed visual arts magazine dealing with contemporary art. It includes news, exhibition reports and reviews, covering events in the form of short articles, as well as discussing Iranian modern and contemporary artists, and includes translations of short texts. It adopts a journalistic rather than an academic tone. The more serious magazine is the quarterly Herfeh hunarmand (‘Profession: Artist’), which since 2004 has offered its own divisions, with sections devoted specifically to painters,photographers,artists and authors. It consists mostly of translations of texts on modern and contemporary art issues and articles on established painters, photographers and other artists. Recently, however, the proportion of original material has been increased. It has published several interviews and articles that have mostly been critical of new trends – in particular, new media and conceptual art practices. The magazine has a broadly conservative approach, but lacks any clear critical stance or theoretical framework. 79

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The bilingual quarterly Art Tomorrow, which has been in existence since 2010 (though its ability to continue publication is uncertain), is the only bilingual (English–Persian) magazine that includes contributions on contemporary art issues from international scholars. It covers regional and international art discourses, as well as focusing on Iran and the Middle East. Each issue is dedicated to a specific contemporary discourse, with original contributions from international and Iranian scholars. With its heavily illustrated pages, it is a great source of knowledge on contemporary art issues both for Iranians and for an international audience. Books in English Some attention should also be paid to books written in English on Iranian contemporary art. Edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi, Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art (2009) was the first book that tried to offer a comprehensive portrait of contemporary Iranian art. The preface and the three articles by Iranian and international scholars and writers comprise less than one-sixth of the book, while the rest consists of short introductions to more than one hundred artists and curators, including some images of their artwork. With 303 fullcolour pages and 586 illustrations, this volume satisfies a thirst for knowledge of the subject in its lavishly produced pages. The same can be said about Iranian Photography Now (2008), edited by Rose Issa and with a short preface by Homi Bhabha. This publication introduces 36 photographers with brief passages of text, artists’ statements, biographies, and selections of their photographs. But the first academic book on contemporary Iranian art that includes a substantial number of articles is Amidst Shadow and Light: Contemporary Iranian Art and Artists (2011), edited by Hamid Keshmirshekan (Fig. 4.3). It comprises papers delivered at a 2005 conference at Oxford University on developments in and discourses on contemporary Iranian art, and offers coverage of various aspects of the subject from Iranian 80

Mapping Iranian Contemporary Art Publications

Fig. 4.3 Book cover: Hamid Keshmirshekan, Amidst Shadow and Light: Contemporary Iranian Art and Artists (Hong Kong: Liaoning Creative Press).

and international scholars. Another edited anthology – mostly, but not exclusively, on contemporary Iranian art – is Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013), edited by Staci Gem Scheiwiller. This is the first book focusing on a single significant aspect of contemporary Iranian art. Edited volumes are of course a valuable means of conveying various points of view, as well as being a great source of knowledge. But a book written by a single author after a long period of focused research will obviously offer much more detailed and comprehensive knowledge in the area it addresses. The first book of this kind, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (2013), is by Hamid Keshmirshekan (Plate 2). Offering up the results of 20 years of research, Keshmirshekan discusses Iranian contemporary art in the context of modernity, nationalism and globalisation. The author’s introduction reveals his central challenge: ‘The most pressing problem in the compilation of a well-balanced body of research on contemporary Iranian art is the scarcity of any precedent.’19 In many respects, he rightly considers his book to be venturing upon virgin territory, and he relies heavily on personal documentation, observation and participation.20 81

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The Other Side Having mapped the major art publications in a conventional system, I will now turn to address another area of knowledge produced by artists, curators, artistic researches, curatorial projects and virtual spaces. An expanded definition of knowledge-production would blur the distinction between art practice and artistic research, and between artists and theorists. This is more and more the situation internationally. Billy Ehn, in his article ‘Between Contemporary Art and Cultural Analysis: Alternative Methods for KnowledgeProduction’, comments: ‘Artistic research suggests alternative methods for producing various kinds of knowledge, whether within or without the confines of academe.’21 In the same vein, in ‘What is a Theorist?’ Irit Rogff writes: ‘The old boundaries between making and theorizing, historicizing and displaying, criticizing and affirming have long been eroded. Artistic practice is being acknowledged as the production of knowledge and theoretical and curatorial endeavors have taken on a far more experimental and inventive dimension, both existing in the realm of potentiality and possibility rather than of exclusively material production.’22 Seen in this way, artists such as Azadeh Akhlaghi (b. 1978), Barbad Golshiri (b. 1982), Homayoun Asgari Sirizi (b. 1981) and Bavand Behpour (b. 1980), or a curator like Mohammad Salemy, among others, are examples of figures who can be considered producers of knowledge. For her project By An Eye-Witness, Azadeh Akhlaghi spent three years researching the suspicious and tragic deaths of 19 well-known Iranian political figures, activists, artists and others, focusing on the fact that there is no visual evidence of the scenes of their deaths (Plate 3). She gathered archival documents, news pieces, witness accounts, interviews and memoirs, and painstakingly reconstructed the scenes for large-format staged photographs. Gathering detailed information and creating visual evidence for some of the most talked-about deaths of Iran’s last hundred years, the work provides historical, political and artistic knowledge to 82

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a new generation regarding events that had existed only in the clouded atmosphere of rumour. It also provides some basis for audiences to imagine other well-known deaths that, because of political restrictions, could not be shown by Akhlaghi, and perhaps to anticipate similar events in the future.23 The production of knowledge by curators is also crucial. Mohammad Salemy’s curatorial practice not only adds to existing knowledge, but also examines knowledge-production itself. His project Tahghigh24 (2013–14) is an extensive research initiative and curatorial endeavour that engages with diasporic Iranian knowledge-producers whose work involves a strong visual component or corresponds to contemporary global visual culture. Rather than a platform for showcasing ‘Iranian art,’ Tahghigh is an investigation into how the dominant ‘telecomputational’ paradigm – marked by the accelerating use of computers, networked technologies, software, big data, and digital visuality – has transformed the working practices of individual Iranian knowledge producers and the modes of research and selfrepresentation they employ.25 The project consists of an exhibition entitled ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA (appropriating its name from Encyclopedia Iranica) (Plate 4), a conference in 2014, two publications, and an artist’s residency. In the catalogue, Salemy begins his text, ‘Exit and Exile: Telecomputation and Emerging Art from the Iranian Diaspora’, as follows: A specter is haunting the space of knowledge – the specter of telecomputation. Unlike the modern age when scientific authority and the idea of objectivity were typically embodied in concrete objects like atlases, encyclopedias, books and 83

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photographs, the materiality and credibility of human knowledge in the contemporary moment is determined to a great extent by the gathering and sharing, as well as the algorithmic processing and visualization of digital data.26 Thus, regarding the possibility of knowledge-production, another area that technology opens up is to be found in online magazines, websites, blogs and social media. The challenges brought to old hierarchies of knowledge-production and research areas by these new opportunities have become a fascinating subject for many researchers of new media. In the context of Iran, Salemy rightly notes: ‘In the absence of national or international institutions whose mandate is to support contemporary Iranian art, the internet in and of itself has become an institutional space for facilitating contact and creating resources for Iranian artists regardless of their place of residence.’27 Unencumbered by the strictures of censorship, government authorisation, affiliation with conservative institutions, expense of paper and other production costs, online magazines and websites are a vital source of knowledge for many. Although usually short-lived, they are generally focused and up-to-date. Some of these magazines are to be found dealing with general art issues, such as Tavoos Online28 and the Tajrish Circle on Philosophy, Literature and Art.29 Some can be found based on particular media, such as Hastmag, dide.mag, and Akskhaneh,30 for photography. Some are issue-based, such as Bekran, Iranian Art Economy Online Magazine; and some are personal websites, such as those of Bavand Behpour.31 Another area that is gradually becoming a source of knowledge includes that of documentary films on visual art. Digital film production brought a tremendous change in this field. With limited budgets and often without approval or permission from the state, many documentary films have been produced on traditional and modern art, and some on contemporary art. One venue that gives exposure to this increasing level of production is Tehran’s Fadjr 84

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International Festival of Visual Arts. For the last two years, this festival has included in the national section a subsection called Documentary Film on Visual Arts. Although the festival has been boycotted by the most progressive and avant-garde artists since the controversial 2009 election, and although most of the films are not well researched, the increasing level of production by individuals and private institutions in this area was demonstrated by the 126 films in this section in 2012. Although the state’s official policy pursues the localisation and Islamisation of the humanities, and encourages indigenous knowledge and superficial post-colonial approaches, there are no significant scholarly works that observe these requirements. Nor are there voices similar to those of Brazilian post-colonial scholars Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira, whose books include Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge-Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis. Although the knowledge-production being conducted in official spaces is scarce and conservative, it seems that, in spite of its many restrictions and shortcomings, it is proliferating in alternative spaces. Still, the infrastructure required to enable major knowledgeproduction and sustain associated publications has changed little in either the state or private sectors. Although independent research outlets are the most progressive fields of knowledge-production, funding is always hard to secure. But without the formal establishment of disciplines like art history and art education, the building of archives of artworks and texts, images and films by the state, and the funding of research projects by philanthropists, the advancement of knowledge-production may not change dramatically. However, despite the sociopolitical and cultural restrictions and shortcomings outlined above, a younger generation of scholars, artists and curators is producing knowledge by writing books and articles, conducting artistic research, pursuing curatorial activities, publishing online magazines and websites, and producing documentary films. This new generation thereby keeps the disparate flames of knowledge burning. 85

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endnotes 1

Hasan Tavanaee Fard, ‘Tahlili bar mavani’-i towlid-i danish dar howzeh ulum-i insani’ (‘An Analysis of Barriers to Knowledge-Production in the Humanities’), Journal of Science and Technology Policy 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 4-5.

2

Ibid., pp. 4-16.

3

Ali Tayefi, Mavani’-i farhangi-i towsi’eh-i tahqiq dar Iran: muqaddemehei bar jame’eh-shinasi-i andisheh-varzi va andisheh-suzi dar Iran (Cultural Barriers to Research Development in Iran: An Introduction to the Sociology of Thinking and Thought-burning) (Tehran: Azad-Andishan, 2001), p. 225.

4

Ibid., p. 230.

5

Ibid., p. 244.

6

Ibid., p. 248.

7

Omid Mehregan, Ilahiyat-i tarjumeh: Walter Benjamin va risalat-i mutarjim (‘Theology of Translation: Walter Benjamin and the Responsibility of the Translator’) (Tehran: Farhang-i saba, 2008), p. 22.

8

Simon Sheikh, ‘Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research’, in Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2: 2 (Spring 2009), p. 2.

9

Shahed University was founded in 1990 to provide educational and cultural services to the children of martyrs, prisoners of war, missing soldiers, and veterans of war and the Revolution.

10

‘About us’ at the Academy of the Arts website, at en.honar.ac.ir/index. aspx?siteid=3&pageid=332 (accessed on 13 May 2013).

11

Hunar-i mutia’hhid, committed art, or revolutionary art – art having social and religious content based on official values and interests. For a discussion of this discourse, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books, 2013), pp. 181–200.

12

Mohammad Madadpour, Haqiqat va hunar-i dini: nazari beh mabani-i nazari-i hunar, shi’r, adabiyat va hunar-hay-i tajassumi dini (Truth and Religious Art: A Look at the Theoretical Foundation of Religious Art, Poetry, Literature and Visual Art) (Tehran: Art and Cultural Research Centre, 2008), p. 9.

13

Morteza Goudarzi, Just-o-juy-i huviyyat dar naqqashi-i mu’asir-i Iran (Searching for Identity in Contemporary Iranian Painting), second edn

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(Tehran: Intisharat-i ilmi va farhangi, 2001), pp. 185–229. 14

Ibid., p. 254.

15

Available at sid.ir.

16

The role of private art schools in teaching contemporary art, and in the dissemination of knowledge through conferences, is considered by many to be more productive than that of the universities. In terms of publishing, however, they are not very active, and are thus not covered here.

17

Alireza Sahafzadeh, Hunar-i huviyyat va siyasat-i baznimaei: mutali’ehii dar tarikh-i ijtimaei-i hunar-i amrika (The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation: A Study on the Social History of American Art) (Tehran: Bidgol, 2009), p. 165.

18

Tooka Maleki, Hunar-i nowgiray-i Iran (Iranian Modern Art) (Tehran: Nazar, 2011), pp. 5–6.

19 Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art, p. 9. 20 Ibid. 21 Billy Ehn, ‘Between Contemporary Art and Cultural Analysis: Alternative Methods for Knowledge-Production’, in Nordic Journal of Art and Research 1: 1 (2012), p. 4. 22

Irit Rogoff, ‘What is a Theorist?’ in Alphabet Primer 1 (Fall 2009), p. 6.

23

See Azadeh Akhlaghi, By An Eye-Witness (Tehran: Mohsen Gallery, 2013), with an introduction by Hamid Dabashi.

24

The Persian word for ‘research’.

25

Mohammad Salemy, ‘Tahghigh Project’, at tahghighproject.wordpress. com/2013/01/12/intro (accessed on 1 December 2013).

26 Mohammad Salemy, ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA (Vancouver: Vancouver Access Artist Run Centre, 2013), p. 11. 27

Ibid., p. 13.

28

At tavoosonline.com/main/indexfa.aspx (accessed on 2 December 2013).

29

At tajrishcircle.blogfa.com (accessed on 10 December 2013).

30

At akskhaneh.com (accessed on 2 December 2013).

31

At farsi.behpoor.com and behpoor.com (accessed on 12 December 2013).

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5 The Spectre (of Knowledge): Recording the vernacular SHAHEEN MERALI

T

he discussion of archives can be fruitfully pursued with this question in mind: What is the role of the archive in understanding and facilitating the visual arts in the region? In considering this, one word recurred: spectre. At first glance, the term ‘spectre’ suggests something that appears and can easily be forgotten or that lingers while not necessarily always remaining visible. It was this notion of the spectre that led me to start thinking about the archive as a post-event – the return of the original in a different guise and, in some cases, as a masquerade (a false show or pretence). When I started to apply the notion of the spectre to the subject of the archive, it also suggested two further readings. The first was that of a roaming spirit: a visible but disembodied entity – which is the state 89

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of the archives’ discourse – allowing research to be comprehensive, and providing a final resting place for its many components. The second, with its distinctively poetic connotations, is of something that haunts or disturbs our mind, like a ghost or a supernatural relationship to the past. Here, of course, I am suggesting how tricks of the mind and of memory play a specific role in revisiting that which was once real and which now remains with us only in an internalised sense, albeit somewhat intransigently. The archive, it seems, has many possibilities and many points of entry; although imbued with a sense of objectivity, much of it remains principally in the subjective domain and the element of selection must be reconciled with the researcher’s objectives. In Islam, the spectre is known as djinn (often translated in the West as ‘genie’) – a disembodied spirit or incorporeal supernatural being that can become visible (and/or audible) to human beings. It is mentioned in the Qur’an, and believed by some Muslims, that spectres inhabit the earth alongside the human race. Djinn, like ‘archive’, remains open to several interpretations, but it contains the core meaning of an ‘alternative’, invisible part of creation, – although in practice it revels in the hidden spheres of deserts and wastelands, remaining on the periphery of human activity, analogous to the filtering of knowledge by its gatekeepers. Similarly, the archive remains a dormant entity, limited in our daily experience. It is in the case of fear, doubt or the desire to incorporate a verisimilitude into our potential expressions or understanding that we place aside the knowledge that remains ‘othered’, rendered like an unused archive. Those issues which had remained untenable reveal themselves – or, we find a way back to them – when biased values and needs cannot help resolve present interpretations. To resolve unanswered questions, based on complex issues or circumstances that include mental uncertainty, insecurity and instability within the structures of our understanding, it is the unknown that we consult. 90

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Why do certain issues need to be reconsidered? We need to reexamine the subjective realm, to include knowledge from beyond the fixed patterns of society and to take into account alternative points of view and other values to arrive to a more or less intelligable place. A wide range of ideas has to be revisited in order to be able to reflect on the questions that continue to remain unanswered. A typical subjective recalibration must answer complex concepts in order to process information further or inform an argument that might not be otherwise easily solved. The archive does suggest a rescue from abandonment, and this resonates well with a literal interpretation of exorcism. Strangely, archives remain places that are haunted by material that resonates and vibrates with the past that they inhabited – for archives, like a good horror film, manage to make us feel disturbed and unsettled. The geographical region under discussion is one that has gone through a great deal of traumatic change, leaving many to work within the voids that now eerily remain the gatekeepers of the new repositories of often violated cultural history. In this profoundly haunted state, where so much of the past has been destroyed or remains non-negotiable – even absent – the innovative archives are spaces which themselves inspire fear, due to the adjustment of perspective that they mandate away from the traditional archive. Often, archives from within zones that have suffered traumatic shifts are reconstituted in digital format, in an attempt to observe, theorise and create access in a new way for a community of users who are geographically displaced. This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record. We are living with the consequences of two powerful, interrelated trends. The first is digital life. Your life today has a digital signature. Where you eat, shop and travel; whom you call, e-mail and text; every website, cafe and museum you visit even once is all stored in the 91

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great digital cloud. And you can’t delete anything, ever. The second trend is Big Data. Americans (and now the Europeans) were probably most shocked by the revelation that the US government is collecting massive quantities of their digital signatures – billions of phone calls and e-mails and Internet searches. The feds aren’t monitoring every last one. But they easily could, and this is the essence of the age of Big Data.1 The degree of energy devoted to collecting and digitally archiving data has beguiled the public, which finds itself embroiled in a quagmire of information. The war against terrorism has justified the collection of a significant amount of data. Likewise, the speed of collection and of storage has resulted in a rapid increase in data accumulation. In this age of Big Data, private moments enter the public sphere at an alarming rate and momentous events likewise enter private arenas. The gap between the public and the private is constantly eroded and the speed of contact between the two is constantly increased. Technology insures we are no longer alone and the sanctity of solitude has been violated and is now archived in a far distant part of the world. Of course, these technological innovations cannot be easily understood and accessibility by third parties has become an evergrowing problem. Any archive, especially those non-virtual ones that have to work within the constraints of a traditional building remains on a permanent quest for resources, and constitutes a very long-term and expensive undertaking. The initiation of a dialogue, promoting the formation of a new archive, which normally entails public access, has immense repercussions; major political ramifications surround its financial management and the arrangements that are necessary for its survival in perpetuity. But here we must be careful, because traditional archives were born out of the fame and fortune of illustrious individuals or families, who redeem the wider public by providing access to their life’s work. So, the traditional place of 92

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the archive remained within the institutional framework of study or research – which itself changed in the late twentieth century, so that those very notions have become much more diffuse and virtual. Even this model of accumulation is failing, as the actual memory of events cannot be easily located or recognised; an excess of data prevents focus, and we seem to be living in a world of versions. The unprecedented proliferation of technologies that capture and represent images has created ‘fake memories’,2 fake events and fake histories. In many ways the notion of the spectre suits the digital archive in these interesting times. One moment that has become distrusted, and often catches many of us out in the perpetual hashtag-uploading of information, has been the media coalescing around a golden hour. The golden hour is a matter-of-fact, instant archive, creating an instant karmic footprint for the audience. The golden hour is the hour that follows any act that is to be reported by a conglomerate of 24-hour news agencies, which results in a large volume of accumulated ‘facts’, and the hasty culmination of agreed positions on what has just happened that conspires to generate a newsworthy narrative. The golden hour is an instant combination of information and misinformation constituting a knowledge pool, often gathered using lens-based digital media. The information disseminated in this moment does not reflect any agreed perspective or adhere to traditional standards pertaining to the proper use of information or images. Here, key questions of knowledge – knowledge as a form and a structure to expropriate, and, more dangerously, types of knowledge that are often hastily constructed and unverifiable – undermine investigations based on ethical standards that emerged out of the development of inquiry-based journalism or investigative reporting. These instant technologies are indeed demanded by a sensate world. They are flourishing in an age that employs them in an immense break from the past – especially in the manner in which archives are employed as search-engines in the current profusion of social media ‘outlets’. Of course, key events in the region are often 93

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explored from a distance – geographical and cultural, as well as linguistic – and one can often discern this in reports on Gaza or on the spring and summer acts of revolution in the MENA region. If, once upon a time, the archive was a set of preserved and catalogued documents allowing a factual store of images, thoughts and life histories, and the management of records from a particular, partial perspective, it was nevertheless an organised genealogy – a record that could be used to create an interface between preserved information and the researchers’ subjectivity. What remains now for the archive is instant reportage rather than raw data – an instance in which the spectre travails in the unknown and unformed, among hundreds and thousands of other spectral ‘facts’. Many artists and writers seem to flourish by producing contemporary spectral works, employing the vocabulary of the instant archive, watching as the boundaries between reality and virtuality fade.3 The Fear of Dispersion Walter Benjamin’s key text, ‘The Collector’, furnishes an acute understanding of the role of the fear that motivates our contemporary realities. Benjamin’s key observations about the role of the collector can be applied to the archivist, and, furthermore, to the artist and the curator. The world flourishes – albeit unevenly – in an age of information, bridged by technologies and systems and served by professionals and unscrupulous corporations: Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found. It is the same spectacle that so preoccupied the men of the Baroque; in particular, the world image of the allegorist cannot be explained apart from 94

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the passionate, distraught concern with this spectacle. The allegorist is, as it were, the polar opposite of the collector. He has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects. Nevertheless – and this is more important than all the differences that may exist between them – in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector. As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist – for whom objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary, which will make known their meanings to the initiated – precisely the allegorist can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim to for each one of them.4 The archive reflects some of the combined concerns of the collector as the allegorist, effectively in pursuit of presenting the finite narrative of that which endorses their concerns, expressing the overarching desire to change from there on the signification of reference. One is still left to speculate on whether it grants access to a certain reality or invokes a sense of moral urgency to an awareness of one’s own time. In the spirit of Honoré Daumier’s now famous phrase, Il faut être de son temps (One must be of one’s own time), determining temporal reality and the significance of the fantastical, which has begun to 95

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temper our immense consumptive needs. The artists who do use the archive are absorbed in its properties and possibilities. If there is an archival turn, it is to be found in the unique way in which so many installations and moving-image works are produced as essays that spring from a demand to revisit the archive. In making their cases, the artists, as well as the curators of the contemporary, often rely on what has been accumulated, collected and made accessible. Archives often influence and change the perceptual and psychological way that reality and realism are portrayed or abstracted. Even though the idea of negotiating is often underplayed, as archives are somewhat like libraries and databases will remain in perpetuity, the rigid production of an abstraction of the reference and the haunted remains in itself preyed upon by inherent possibilities. The question asked by Armen Avanessian remains central: ‘If realism is the witness and mediator to the symptoms of a certain time period, what could be (or is) the realism of the 21st century, and how does it manifest in works of art?’5 Here we find another semiotic model whose credits and valorisation offer a comprehensive way of understanding why we have formed a special relationship to the fragments in an archive, making it a place of virtue rather than a destabilised, fleeting glance towards the intermingling of truth and untruths. The ghostly past is often herein regaled as an enchanted form of reality.

endnotes 1

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

2

See bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24286258 (accessed on 14 August 2013). Human memory constantly adapts and moulds itself to fit the world. This art project hopes to highlight just how fallible our

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recollections are. All of us generate false memories, and artist A. R. Hopwood has been ‘collecting’ them. 3

Claire Bishop’s short but precise proposed definition of art is as ‘a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world’. See blouinartinfo.com/news/story/923344/10-cutting-edge-curators-fromaround-the-world-part-1 (accessed on 21 August 2013).

4

Kevin McLaughlin and Philip Rosen, ‘The Collector’, in Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 211.

5

Armen Avanessian, press release, 9 October 2013, 6.30 pm, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Design Innovations Centre, 112 a. (Maironio str. 3, Vilnius). The lecture by Armen Avanessian, ‘On the Impossibilities of a Speculative Realist Aesthetics’, was the second event in the lecture series, ‘New Realism in Contemporary Art’, available at echogonewrong. com/events-in-lithuania/armen-avanessians-lecture-new-realism-incontemporary-art (accessed on 16 August 2013).

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6 Education and the Teaching of Contemporary Art from the Middle East JAMES ALLAN

A

lthough I am an art historian, and although my interests encompass contemporary art as well as the art of the past, I must say at the outset that I come from a very different academic background from that of most of the other contributors to this volume. My world is a world of the past, in which there are obvious limitations. For example, the quantity and range of material culture is limited, for it only exists in sale rooms, dealers’ shops, private collections and museums; archival material is also limited, and, alarmingly, is often in decline through the ravages of war, fire or insect infestation; hitherto unrecorded monuments are rarely found, and wars and fires lead also to declining numbers of standing, recorded buildings. One need think only of Iraq and Syria to realise the alarming speed and tragic breadth of this decline. Of course 99

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there is some growth: archaeology, or more localised excavations in museum basements, produce new finds, and the number of objects on the art market continues to grow through the worldwide looting of cultural heritage. But the loss of the Iraqi Ottoman archives and of the eleventh-century minaret of the Friday Mosque in Aleppo exemplify the way in which the field is so often a shrinking one. The debates of the scholar interested in this world may be with the written sources of the past (oral information is treated with extraordinary caution, despite the fact that most earlier historians relied on it for their information), or with other scholars of this or previous generations, but in both cases such debates utilise a finite, and very limited, amount of information. This is a safe world – a world of known boundaries. When I first became interested in Islamic art, as an undergraduate at Oxford University in the early 1960s, the only teaching available consisted of classes on Islamic ceramics held by Emy Wellesz, Sophie Walzer, or Géza Fehérvári, using objects recently donated to the Ashmolean Museum. Pottery pieces were discussed within their own world of style and basic technology, with little reference to the social or economic world of which they were a part, or the Arabic-, Persian- or Turkish-speaking cultures that produced them. Later, in the late 1970s, when working at the Ashmolean, I set up an MPhil in Islamic Art at Oxford, and here too the core teaching was based on media – architecture, ceramics, and metalwork and other minor arts – although we did try to broaden the students’ outlook by teaching and examining the history of a particular dynasty and its material culture, thus attempting to link art with the world from which it emerged. I also had the advantage of a museum post, as an assistant keeper in the Department of Eastern Art in the Ashmolean, with responsibility for the Islamic collections, and one of my duties was to provide regular Islamic exhibitions in the department’s small exhibition room in the museum. This offered not only the opportunity of displaying early and later Islamic objects from the department’s reserve collection, but also the chance to introduce 100

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students and the public to contemporary art from the Middle East through, for example, exhibitions of works of the Lebanese artists Michel Basbous and Jean Khalifé, before the Lebanese Civil War intervened, and, later, exhibitions of the works of the Libyan painter Ali Omar Ermes, the Palestinian Laila Shawa, and the Egyptian artist Ahmad Mustafa, as well as an exhibition of contemporary Arab prints from the collection of the Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi. Helen Molesworth’s comments on Harvard Art Museum reminded me somewhat of the Ashmolean Museum: The Harvard Art Museum is a more traditionally defined university art gallery, complete with a stored collection and an august history as a teaching museum. For most of the twentieth century, that teaching was based on connoisseurship, i.e., the close study of individual objects. However, as artists moved away from the production of highly crafted discrete objects, this historical mode of study did not adapt to new modes of production, leaving contemporary art largely to languish. It took until the late date of 1997 for a department of Modern and Contemporary Art to be established.1 In Oxford new changes were brought in during the 1980s, and the Islamic art course then adopted a historical framework, using three periods of Islamic history: roughly 650–950, 950–1250 and 1250–1700. This left the art of the last three centuries untouched. Recently the system has changed again, with greater focus on great monuments per se, which by itself gives clearer access to the world they represent. My colleagues and I have spent many hours over the years trying to devise better courses on Islamic art, but, try as we might, we find that no course is ideal. The time spent by graduates learning about Islamic art and architecture is too short, and to fit a full spectrum of objects into three 101

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eight-week terms is like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot – particularly when there is a language qualification needed too. At Oxford we insist on a qualification in either Arabic, Persian or Turkish. The problem of quantity and variety is thus one that, in our relatively safe world of early Islamic art, we have had to face. How much more the teacher and student of contemporary Middle Eastern art: one can only imagine the number of artists in today’s world, the variety of media through which they can express themselves, representing as they do very different cultures within the world in which Islam is the dominant religion – and indeed the sheer number of artworks that each produces – to say nothing of the myriad of new art forms available. How does a student then make valid comparisons between them? And how can one teach a student to compare effectively a video clip, an installation, or a photograph whose contents have been subject to electronic manipulation, with a full-length film – leaving aside traditional forms of artwork: painting, sculpture, ceramics and so on? Quantity also poses problems for our discussions of the merits of the works of art we want to study, for the views of fellow art historians are not the only ones to be considered. In today’s world we may encounter artists who are particularly articulate about the narrative or philosophy with which their artwork is engaged, and a whole host of critics whose views of that artwork may well be as diverse as their number – or even more so, if some of them cannot decide what opinion they really hold! More than that, we may have large numbers of articulate members of the public who like to tweet or use blogs to express their views of what they have seen, and why a particular work of art is, or is not, to their taste. We are thus faced with an extraordinary volume of information and views about works of art, as well as the number of artworks themselves. And our students need somehow to access all of this information and assess it. 102

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Hence, as Grant Kester points out, ‘contemporary art history poses something of a threat to traditional art historical discourse: the threat of unregulated and multiple claims of interpretive authority. Moreover, both of these factors tend to undermine the perception that the discipline of art history is defined by a capacity for critical detachment or a more objective, less interested, relationship to its object of study.’2 Adopting a different perspective, Miwon Kwon notes that, from a structural point of view, contemporary art history does not fit with most university art history departments: Contemporary art history sits at a crossroads in the uneven organization of the subfields that comprise the discipline of art history. Within most university arthistory departments, one group of subfields covering Western developments is organized chronologically, as periods (i.e., from Ancient to Modern, with Medieval and Renaissance in between). Another group of subfields that covers non-Western developments is identified geographically, as culturally discrete units even if they encompass an entire continent (i.e., African, Chinese, Latin American, etc.). The category of contemporary art history, while institutionally situated as coming after the Modern … is also the space in which the contemporaneity of histories from around the world must be confronted simultaneously as a disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon, integral to the understanding of the present … Contemporary art history, in other words, marks a temporal bracketing and a spatial encompassing, a site of a deep tension between very different formations of knowledge and traditions … thus a challenging pressure point for the field of art history in general.

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The author then uses the example of contemporary Chinese art history to highlight the difficulties.3 Chika Okeke-Agulu offers one solution – that of comparative art history: What is to be done? The place to begin is to dispense with the hope of finding singular models or the wish for the return of rehabilitated grand narratives that can possibly make sense of global contemporary art. Rather, the task facing contemporary art scholarship must be the development of a comparative art history, and the place to begin is to recognize the discrepant practices, histories, ideas, and geographies of contemporary art. Despite the criticisms that have been leveled against comparative literature, its recognition of multiple literatures and literary traditions that can be studied comparatively, provides a model for art history, criticism, and theory. The advantage of the comparative mode is that it demands the acquisition of critical tools and languages relevant to more than one discursive field – which means that rather than observe other fields from one position, the scholar acquires the ability to view multiple sites from cross positions and with differently fashioned binoculars, the use of which she must master as well.4 If we view contemporary art in this light, then contemporary art from the Middle East fits very comfortably within such a framework. For it already has within it specific linguistic, and hence calligraphic traditions, as well as varied religious and cultural histories, all of which need to be accommodated and appreciated. But, given the volume and diversity of the material, the numerous contrasting perspectives it evokes, and the comparative understandings that might be required in order to reach a valid 104

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viewpoint, the question still remains: How are we to teach contemporary art from the Middle East? Or is this all perhaps a red herring? Is our fear of failure in fact due to our having the wrong aim? All too often, education is seen as synonymous with knowledge. But the acquisition of knowledge is only a part of education. For education is about training a student’s mind: it is the opportunity a student has to examine and assess a particular body of information, and then draw from it valid and worthwhile conclusions. It is clearly impossible to study contemporary art history fully and completely, and that should never be our aim. Those who devise courses in contemporary Middle Eastern art must be selective. And the staff available at any one institution will inevitably impose their own selectivity, so that their own interests and enthusiasms can flourish to their own benefit and that of their students. This is surely both possible and appropriate, for we can still use that limited body of material to train students to assess evidence, to make judgements, to come to conclusions. That is education, and that is after all precisely what we do in this volume on contemporary art from the Middle East. A book of this kind cannot be all-inclusive: it is limited by its contributors, and their subjects. Nevertheless, we should be encouraged by it, and appreciate it, for it offers the readers the opportunity to acquire the information they need to think about the problems, to assess the different ways forward, and to come to conclusions that will help them all make the most of their opportunities. Let us not be daunted by the problems. Let us be selective. Let us develop a comparative art history. Let us enjoy working among today’s artists, their critics and their public. Above all, let us use the opportunity to train the minds of those we teach.

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endnotes 1

‘Questionnaire on “The Contemporary”’, October Magazine 130 (Fall 2009), p. 112.

2

Ibid., p. 8.

3

Ibid., p. 13.

4

Ibid., p. 45.

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7 The Crisis of Belonging: On the Politics of Art Practice in Contemporary Iran HAMID KESHMIRSHEKAN

T

he issue of ‘belonging’, which is related to localised historical and cultural landscapes, fuels a complex debate in Iranian art today, and perhaps more generally in the

Middle East. I will argue here that the lack of critical discourse regarding this issue has left individual artists to pursue their own

solutions to the question and to generate artistic strategies that are

relevant to the demands of contemporaneity – a concept that itself

remains undertheorised. I will then explore the strategies pursued by

artists in the Iranian context, and the wider politics of art practice relating to these fundamental yet unresolved questions.

Rather than offering a broad summary, I will examine this

concern through the works of a number of artists, situating

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them with reference to the concepts of identity, ethnicity and transnational contemporaneity. With reference to selected works, I will also consider how artists enact a politics of resistance to explicit ethno-cultural identity markers – that is, to essentialised cultural views that often reduce their works to geopolitical concepts. Using contemporary discourses on globalised art, their art practice aims to revisit a well-established debate within art-historical discourse: namely, whether art should have creative autonomy, or whether it is only ever determined by its context. As will become clear, for some artists, artistic practice is an intellectual and activist project that serves as a fitting site for the possibility of a responsible and sociopolitical art.1 In the second part, through five case studies of artists’ works, I will examine how artists act against the erasure of contextual frames, demonstrating an awareness of the fact that contemporary art is capable of transcending the politics of location. I will discuss the current dilemma of how contemporary Iranian artists have responded to Iran’s social and cultural complexities. Contemporary Iranian art, in the process of adaptation to and appropriation of the Euro-American artistic paradigms, has incorporated elements of so-called global contemporary art while seeking to create and reflect the phenomena of its own contemporaneity.2 This alternative context of contemporaneity is obviously a response to canonical discourses, and ideally aims, in turn, to inscribe new discursive formations in the contemporary era. Unsurprisingly, issues concerning the politics of identity have taken centre stage within this emerging context, and have thus shaped and influenced artistic practice. A familiar debate within this arena concerns whether it is possible to articulate specific cultural issues (usually denoted by the cultural past) while addressing contemporaneous issues related to the wider and broader global field. This reveals deep-rooted anxieties that relate to the issue of cultural belonging and identity, and their possible affinity with international concerns, and poses the important 110

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question: Is it possible to open up an art practice and discourse that are contemporary and global, while also being indigenous and specific? It might first be useful to consider the origin of some of these practices that have sought to engage with the global arena. As I have argued elsewhere, by the end of the 1990s a number of young artists, in rather a short time, increasingly began to make use of new and unprecedented means of media. At the same time, artworks appeared that were in line with contemporary art processes incorporating new viewpoints that reflected existing circumstances in Iran. As with contemporaneity, the impetus for this came partly from the international arena and partly from domestic conditions, where the need to record reality in a transitional era in all its shifting forms had become more urgent. The emergence of newer media and various contemporary approaches arguably enabled a more sustained critical and direct social address than was possible with earlier forms of Iranian modernism.3 This new trend was established first in the early 2000s, when it found support in official institutions – in particular the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA).4 A common thread uniting these artists was a yearning to be in the here-and-now: to incorporate into the experiences of globalised internationalism in a simultaneous and concrete practice. The postscript for the contemporary artist was now defined by their need to be in the ‘contemporary’, rather than to produce a belated or anachronistic response to the everyday. Inevitably, then, this drive to comply with global value systems would entail an understanding of global discourses on art. There seemed to be an insatiable demand to reveal what might be defined as ethno-cultural identity markers, often encapsulated by specific, essentialised symbols: subjects such as cultural heritage, tradition, and gendered experience, which would also comply with typical definitions of cultural authenticity.5 This insatiable demand would in return affect choices of subject matter and imagery. This often leads to the prohibition of cultural aspirations or forms of address when artwork is exhibited. The impulse to suppress 111

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Fig. 7.1

Gohar Dashti, from the Me, She and the Others series, 2009, C Print, courtesy of the artist.

cultural statements or gestures within the exhibiting establishment is a response to the presumed demands of the cosmopolitan art world, rather than to domestic sensibilities. References have been made in Iranian art to the issues from traditional imaginary and cultural frameworks to vivid political and controversial subjects6 (Fig. 7.1). Exploring these themes in art would be a strategy whose parameters are at least clear to win recognition internationally, although not necessarily locally. Thus, this strategy often goes unchallenged by practising artists who wish to be part of this international system. Examples of a nostalgic aesthetic approach towards local and national imaginaries are not hard to find (Fig. 7.2). Here one should beware of the issue of the essentially dissimilar reception and reading of these artistic strategies which aim to reconcile cultural specificities with international demands at home to the international scene. Artworks that are praised by the world exhibition centres as strongly representative of the cultural mood of the country are fiercely criticised at home, as it is said that they aim only to win the approval of ‘the Other’. Despite the fact that these artists are more widely represented in the current surge of interest in contemporary Iranian art – and are indeed associated with such trend-setting schemes – there is open criticism of this situation at home, where it is argued that their position is based on ‘stereotyping’ of these trends.7 112

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The tensions between the two opposing movements – representing the claims of cultural homogenisation on one hand, and of cultural heterogenisation on the other – are clearly reflected in the products developed by artists: global forms, aesthetics, functions and concepts versus local values and desires. But art cannot be seen simply as a linear story in which a local art is introduced onto a global platform. The questions that result from this are: How do local languages adopt to a globalised art discourse? How does hegemonic language of art discourse affect an artist for whom it is not his or her mother tongue?8 Intellectual and artistic strategies are central to the challenge of dealing with this hegemonic structure. The issue of cultural otherness has also been framed by the Iranian state, although making use of different ideological resources from what the international almost unanimous value systems would propose. The question of a return to a glorified past and political stance against modernity, which gathered momentum in the 1979 Revolution, is still strongly present in the cultural policy of the state. The use of various materials and themes from native sources to

Fig. 7.2

Arman Stepanian, from the New Art series, 2008, C Print, 100 × 70 cm, courtesy of the artist..

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construct ‘independent’ or ‘authentic’ works, supporting the idea of cultural specificity and indigenous expression in artwork, has been partly the result of this formulation.9 The materialisation of this idea can be seen in the works of artists who are still influenced by such debates as that concerning the creation of a unique artistic identity within the cultural domain of the country, aired in particular during the 1960s. This decade had already seen the influential role played on the art scene by the so-called neo-traditionalist Saqqa-khaneh movement.10 The artists affiliated with this movement attempted to reconcile the cultural heritage of the past with the language of modern art (Figs 7.3 and 7.4). The use of ancient, traditional or national materials in order for their work to be identified specifically as ‘Iranian’ was partly the result of nativist and nationalist beliefs that had been variously presented throughout the recent history of Iranian art. The artists appropriated Western canon and discourses, but looked for inspiration in native popular culture. The result was a new form of art inspired by contemporary trends in the West while at the same time questioning Eurocentric hegemony, as well as incorporating elements from local cultures in order to promote more polycentric and alternative aesthetics. These artisits sought to situate their practice in the broader intellectual context of their era, and devoted considerable effort to building new institutional frameworks of exhibition, patronage and reception for modern art. Interestingly, in addition to the wide domestic realisation that they received, their works were also successful in gaining international recognition at the time, as it was taken to constitute the perfect way of representing Iranian, or more broadly Middle Eastern, art. The cultural administrative bodies of the Islamic Republic have attempted to formulate a definition of an ‘authentic’ identity based on an essential idea to present itself as a homogeneous entity. This over-centralised, anticompetitive and ideological idea suggests that this identity is an integral component of Iranian cultural essence and materiality. However, as the philosopher and social scientist Ramin Jahanbegloo maintains, the very notion of ‘ideology’ has 114

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Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Parviz Tanavoli, Prophet, 1962, Bronze, 97 × 40 × 20 cm, Coll. Walker Art Center Minneapolis, courtesy of the artist.

Massoud Arabshahi, Untitled, 1964, oil on canvas, 110 × 70 cm, courtesy of the artist.

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gradually lost much of its coherence in recent years among the new generation of Iranian intellectuals and art activists, and this situation has accompanied the crisis of political legitimacy in Iran.11 Thus, for the majority of the artists of the new generation, the governmentapproved formulation of culture no longer seems plausible. This has led to an artistic and intellectual reaction against stereotypical ways of thinking that impose a monolithic formula. According to Jahanbegloo, ‘today, a democratic notion of identity, emphasizing the formation of a pluralistic civil society in Iran, is more welcomed among the new generation of Iranian elites than romantic or traditionalist notions of Iranian identity.’12 In many instances, however, the absence of a sustained tradition of art criticism has also meant that artists have had to establish their visual strategies without an appropriate ground, such as strong local discourses on art. During recent years the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has set up regular formal art events, including national biennials (not perhaps held very regularly) and the annual Janshnvareh-i biynulmilali-i hunrhay-i tajassumi-i fajr (‘The Fadjr International Festival of Visual Arts’),13 as well as art expos all from within the state’s rarefied ideological ghetto and politics of culture.14 Currently the administration’s ideological view of culture obviously frowns on any kind of critical or ‘cutting edge’ art practices.15 Various restrictions are also applied to some kinds of work – photography in particular – that are seen as misleading cultural products acting against national religious values or the political system, according to the defined formula of cultural and ideological essentialism. An equivalent approach is adopted in relation to all cultural products, including art publications operated under the heading of ‘regulation’. Any message critical of the state’s ideological system would not be allowed, and would be condemned by the system, which essentially believes in directing and guiding the national culture towards the ‘right manner’ (the main connotation of the word ‘Guidance’ in the very name of the ministry). There has been practically no effort to promote Iranian art internationally through the public sector in 116

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recent years.16 At best, these events must limit themselves to a small portion of the cultural potential of the country. This excessive lack of inclusivity has turned against the cultural norms of the status quo and has created powerful commercial or alternative sectors. By the late 2000s the art scene in Iran was growing as a result of private funding bodies. In addition to the state-run events, there are various private art competitions and prizes17 that have attracted a greater number of emerging artists who will not accept restrictions. There are a few websites and art centres18 that aim to build platforms for young artists and facilitate the introduction of contemporary Iranian art onto the international art scene, and hold occasional exhibitions of foreign artists in Iran that promise an alternative to institutional norms. The past decade has also seen a surge of regional and international interest in the Iranian art market, and as a result a rise in domestic interest. Geopolitics and the state of the economy have been at least partly responsible for this. The recent development of the art market in the Middle East (chiefly in the Persian Gulf countries), in particular Christie’s biennial auctions in Dubai, has also been expressed in art fairs, auction-house sales and exhibitions, all of which has not been without benefits for modern and contemporary Iranian art.19 Here the issue of stereotyping makes itself felt, which is not very different from the perspectives of the world exhibition system or the state’s clichéd definition of authenticity. This might represent a threat for the position of a large group of practising artists, including in particular younger and emerging artists, who are not willing to comply with the market system. In addition, this system would generate stereotypical ways of thinking among arbiters of taste and value by imposing its own standards. This might result, in turn, in an unhealthy homogenisation according to the familiar, clichéd criteria. Many artists have set aside the issues of the pricing of their work, focusing instead on making it with uncompromising rigour. Nevertheless, many, unconsciously or consciously, make work 117

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for the market. Various kinds of calligraphic trends, explicit social representations are the most fashionable examples among other market-oriented genres (Fig. 7.5). In order to achieve some degree of originality, artists are usually expected to represent their given identities as safe havens in their

Fig. 7.5

Alireza Astaneh, from the Donald series, 2011, iron and industrial colour coated, 190 × 92 cm, courtesy of the artist.

art. This has now developed into a discourse. This dilemma is a major challenge relating not only to the politics of identity, but also to the politics of visuality, which focuses on the way that certain identities become visible. But there is some resistance and dissatisfaction which is often voiced in opposition to ethno-religious categorisation. As the art historian Sussan Babaie argues, ‘the point is to not be label the artist by an ethnic or religious marker but to apply critical tools of art history to locate the work within the intersections of international contemporary art and historical art from the artist’s 118

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country or region of origin’.20 Accordingly, the resistance on the part of artists is to taking part in such a process – and, in particular, to being categorised according to primary, all-encompassing terms such as ‘Islamic’ and ‘Middle Eastern’. According to the cultural aesthetician Khaled Ramadan, The strategy of ‘cultural difference’ corresponds almost literally to the problem of the ‘representational’ role of non-Western artists. As for the dominant discourse, it is so obsessed with cultural difference and identity [that] it too is suffering from an intellectual blockage. In addition, the obsession with cultural difference is now being institutionally legitimized through the construction of the ‘post-colonial other’ that is allowed to express itself only as long as it speaks of its own Otherness.21 To avoid any straightforward interpretation or clichéd reading of the work of art by the mentioned stereotyped frame of the world exhibition, the art market and the ideological frameworks of officials domestically, Iranian artists are asked by domestic critics to avoid complying with these expectations. They are encouraged to be more complex in approaching their art, try not to be trapped by those conditioned systems of reading by those readers. There has thus been an attempt to re-orientate this discourse – a drive to change the terms of the debate and a resistance to ‘categorisation’, rejection of the notion of an art industry itself, and of ideological formulations around their work. The major issue for many artists is that they have never considered what is ‘Islamic’, or even in particular ‘Iranian’, in their artwork – in the sense that these terms function as labels or stereotypes – even though these artists might deal with those issues in their work as a response to their ‘immediate context’. The disapproval of the cliché-ridden idea arises 119

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mainly when the immediate aim of the artist is to comply with the formulated demands rather than tracing the lived experience and self-expression in any way possible, whether or not those features are indicated. This disapproving idea has been reflected in the works of artists working with the various media now accessible to them. Here it can be seen that the maintenance of the cultural ideals presented in the works of those previous generations has now become challenging, perhaps because these cultural standards and their presentation hold little influence over those who do not identify with them. Works that best reflect this challenge are those being made in the here and now: the contemporary. Such works consider the most pressing personal, social, cultural and political issues of the time, recognising the need to communicate clearly, with an eye to the complexities of contemporary culture (Plates 5 and 6). In these cases, this perspective enables them to resist the temptation of revisiting exotic imagery.22 Their works reflect contradictions and demonstrate critical ideas through autobiographical exposition and elements of everyday life. This criticism goes even further when addressing collective memories, deconstructing tradition, belonging and identity. This persistent concern with challenging norms is sometimes epitomised by humorous commentary on those ideals instead of their commemoration, as was offered by artists of earlier generations (Plate 7). Accordingly, although themes such as tradition, gender and dislocation may appear in the works of contemporary artists, these are embedded within larger concerns about culture and society. These works in effect could recreate the semiotics of the society. Although a large number of artists reject any reference to anything collective, their work adheres to an ironic, and at times humorous, approach to the evident desires of the past. Making use of culturally sacred or symbolic objects, the artists struggle to redefine them through critical discourses. Another familiar strategy is to address the limitations of normative paradigms concerned with social status. 120

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Having considered some of the more theoretical questions and issues relating to the situation of contemporary Iranian art, I shall now consider some of the artists’ works. The body as a site of intellectual, physical and psychological expression is a consistent aspect of the work of Amir Mobed (b. 1974). His work incorporates the use of subversion as an artistic strategy – a strategy that can be performed through the body. The artist pursues his objective of challenging norms through the use of various unconventional materials, but in particular in his controversial performance projects. Using his own body, the artist puts himself in the position of a victim of torture; the audience either play an active role in his torture or remain indifferent observers. His shocking performances question social and political violence, both domestic and institutional, as well as human pain, suffering and totalitarianism. His 2011 work, 50% Off, challenged both the artist himself and the audience, as well as the art market. In

Fig. 7.6

Amir Mobed, 50% Off, 2011, performance and installation at the Azad Gallery, courtesy of the artist.

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this performance he tied himself to a column to test his powers of endurance, and at the same time had his body parts (moulded and gilded) hung on the walls and auctioned (Fig. 7.6). His performance, Fraud, at the Azad Art Gallery in 2013, revolved around similar issues (Plate 8). Once again, he pushed his body to its physical limits with giving his blood, using it to make a statement about the tensions, pressures, and hypocrisy in culture and politics. Through this ‘re-enactment’ of the hospital scene in a gallery space, and by sprinkling his own blood on a canvas where the already hidden words ‘It Is A Good Price’ (referring to a term in the art market) are revealed, the artist lays bare the level of violence and fraud that have been taken for granted in their normative occurrence. In a similar vein, Neda Razavipour’s interactive installation, SelfService (2009),23 actualises violence by signifying the ways in which chaotic violence permeates the whole of society (Fig. 7.7a and b). It also involves the audience in an ethical dilemma: one can contribute to the success of an interactive art installation, but in the process also destroy one’s cultural legacy and heritage. This project returns to a central question identified in this paper – that of the artist’s cultural belonging – and to questions surrounding identity. It is in this light that we can read the subtlety and layered complexity of this artwork, in particular given its siting of social reality in the Iranian context. The work of Barbad Golshiri (b. 1982) represents a paradoxical circumstance: the simultaneity of symbolic local meanings with metaphors that resonate internationally. His art is critically responsive to Iran’s contemporary political culture, and questions its formal ideological grounds. The use of English is typical in Golshiri’s works. He says that he uses Persian script only when he wants it to be readable – only when he wants his writings to represent both a language and a pictorial signifier. That is why Quod (Fig. 7.8), for example, is only for Persian-speaking audiences. Since reading Quod (slang for ‘prison’) stimulates nausea, this feeling is deeply rooted in the unique experience of reading it, and hence ‘only available 122

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Fig. 7.7 a, & b

Fig. 7.8

Neda Razavipour, Self-Service, 2009, interaction performance, courtesy of the artist.

Barbad Golshiri, Qued, 2010, C Print on paper, 106.2 × 106.5 cm, 1/10, courtesy of the artist.

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Barbad Golshiri, The Untitled Tomb 1 & 2, 2012, iron, soot, 60.5 × 135 × 0.2 cm, Edition of 3 + 1 AP, courtesy of the artist. The stenciled text narrates the labyrinthine death of a man who for political reasons could never have a tombstone on his grave. His family commissioned the artist and he made an ephemeral tombstone for him. Each time the family visits the cemetery, they bring along the stenciled tombstone with them, place it on the grave and stealthily pour soot powder on it. The text is thus imprinted and depending on the wind strength vanishes in a few hours or a few days. The act is repeated as a ritual.

Fig. 7.9 a, & b

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Barbad Golshiri, As Dad As Possible, As Dad As Beckett, 2000 – 2013, iron, ashes, 200.3 × 100.2 × 28.3 cm, courtesy of the artist. The iron tombstone is a replica of Beckett’s tomb in dimensions. Inside the artist has burnt hundreds of works he has produced during the past 13 years: his writings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, prints, sketches and so forth. Fig. 7.10 a, & b

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to those who read Persian’.24 Golshiri’s work, when criticising Iranian calligraphic abstract works (very popular commercially), concerns itself with this approach with the use of his visual strategy. While emphasising the availability of the work ‘only to those who read Persian’, he criticises the ambiguity of written materials and contemporary calligraphic works, and suggests that for non-Persian readers these works are purely decorative pieces. Golshir’s most recent series of tombstones, Curriculum Mortis (2013), explores the issue of death, what has been an essential concern throughout his work (Figs. 7.9a and b, and 7.10a and b). Now it is the main theme of his art ‘through which all other aspects are filtered, as physical bodies are replaced with tombstones, turning the gallery into a graveyard’.25 In this sculptural installation, each work has its own title, and the artist addresses each death individually, ‘creating grave markers so closely attuned as to become physical manifestations of the people they commemorate’.26 The artist’s personal history is as deeply intertwined in this work as are the histories of the dead. The graves include those of Samuel Beckett – ‘a stone with the inscription “[There is] no God”; a Tombstone of Jan van Eyck; and finally Golshiri’s own tombstone. Walking through this makeshift graveyard, we are moving through a mindscape of the artist; each grave presents a portal into worlds beyond the present one, where transformation is possible and all can – finally – be different.’27 The simplicity and minimal aesthetics of these works challenge traditional appearances of tombstones that celebrate death and martyrdom, ‘befit[ting] his larger gesture [of outdoing and questioning] authority without making a frontal attack on it’.28 The works of Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar (b. 1977) convey an ambiguous presence, hovering between the notion of faith and devotion, on one hand, and official propaganda on the other. Bakhshi has integrated everyday objects from his country into his work – objects that have acquired a political character beyond their banal everyday use. The installation Bahman’s Wall (2011) is made up of the Bahman cigarette, a low-quality post-revolutionary brand 126

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alluding to the month of Bahman, when the Revolution took place (Plate 9). As in previous works, Bakhshi uses the formal character of traditional Islamic art to signify contemporary issues in Iran in an ironic way. The wall consists of geometric Islamic motifs executed by the use of numerous cigarettes. The cigarettes and the repetitive presence of the motifs signify a hopeless act that a prisoner might obsessively carry out just to kill time – just like the act of smoking a cigarette.29 This complex work also gently comments on political injustice and its relation to everyday life in contemporary Iran. The projects of Nazgol Ansarinia (b. 1979) raise similar questions by examining the systems and networks that reinforce her daily life, such as routines, events and experiences, and the relationship they form to a larger social context. Ansarinia’s various projects feature sensuous ornamental images from traditional sources, such as carpets, architecture and old manuscripts. Their inherent contradictions deepen as images of contemporary society are concealed in their traditional shapes. They suggest possibilities for recreating alternative identities out of a rich layering of available pasts. In a moment, this contradiction can fracture and subdivide, in turn, under our gaze. In her Reflections Refractions series, she uses geometric forms that refer to traditional sources as a formal and conceptual device (Plate 10). The works aim to negotiate the questions of representation, imperfection and the poor dissemination of information. For her, representation is understood as a depiction of a scene or an object, a description of an event, the writing of history, or the rendering of a memory. The encountered image and its constituent elements are themselves at odds with their message – the image devours and ejects the message simultaneously. Each of the artists I have discussed here, who are mostly from the new generation and who have acquired the status of avant-garde practitioners, are wary of the of issues such as ‘Iranian-ness’ and of labels such as ‘Perso-Islamic’ – in particular, of how such issues or labels might invoke stereotypes about Iranian cultural production 127

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and art, and of the underlying politics of representation (familiar in the debate over Orientalism). In their various ways, they seek to tackle the questions of belonging and identity, and of how to reconcile these issues within the wider context of contemporary international art. They attempt, as the art theorist Irit Rogoff puts it, to avoid naming their identities through their ‘belonging’ to a particular nation or ethnic group, trying instead to find other, more ephemeral and immaterial levels in their heritage which will allow them – and us as viewers – to inhabit a much larger terrain.30 This indeed resonates with the idea of contemporaneity and its aim as a phenomenon that can erase the boundaries of location. This idea is the basis of an understanding that ‘belonging’ is by necessity a performative stance that has to be rehearsed daily. The central challenge is to define an alternative set of criteria, defined from within rather than from outside,31 to express themselves, while also gaining recognition from the art world as it presently exists. Thus, in the perception of these artists, their central concern is not the marketability or exotic quality of their works, but rather their own effort to depict reality and lived experience. This intellectual strategy renders the contemporary landscape of artistic production an important space for the negotiation of cultural, political and social ‘renewal’. It has created a new trend that questions the sociopolitical and cultural forces driving their society. This is what is often termed ‘contemporary’ artistic and cultural practice. ‘Contemporary’, in this usage, takes on a very specific meaning, relating not to a work’s own aesthetic qualities, but connoting certain politically subversive qualities. Visual art practice in Iran became compelling, relevant, critical and political – though, significantly, not ideologically political – in the post-Revolutionary era, upon the death of ‘institutional ideology’ as it were. These artists thus refuse a paradigm that solely associates a vernacular language with identity. But it is important to note that I am not merely disputing the opposition between the central and the marginal – some artists’ works have in fact made a good case for 128

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the deficiency of this binary. These artists are already aware of the traps of authenticity that endorse the globalised art world. As these artists produce and circulate work within local infrastructures, they also negotiate global concepts in a context where local values retain significant power – mainly by appropriating them both.

endnotes 1

This attitude is basically the result of the belief that art must have an intellectual function and should contribute towards representing society, if not serving it. It is a confirmation of Hal Foster’s statement in his essay, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, when he discusses the paradigm in advanced art on the Left. He maintains that ‘there is the assumption that the site of artistic transformation is the site of political transformation, and, more, that this site is always located elsewhere, in the field of the other: in the productivist model, with the social other, the exploited proletariat; in the quasi-anthropological model, with the cultural other, the oppressed post-colonial, subaltern, or subcultural’. Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ in his The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 302.

2

We can agree with the definition of the art historian and critic Terry Smith, which says that ‘contemporaneity is basically a concept that captures the frictions of the present while corroborating the inevitability of currently competing universalisms, new ways of conceiving the present’. Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry 32: 4 (Summer 2006), p. 703. Yet it should also be said that the art growing out of the complexities of contemporaneity does not offer easy explanations. An art truly intertwined with contemporaneity ‘is shaped from its deepest impulses; its surfaces are marked by the interplay of such aspects, from the most fashionable and forward-looking to the most paradoxical, from the most trenchant dichotomies to random particularities’. See Terry Smith, ‘What is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to Come’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 71: 1–2, p. 11.

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3

For further discussion of post-Revolutionary modernism, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Discourses on Postrevolutionary Iranian Art: Neotraditionalism during the 1990s’, Muqarnas 23 (2006), pp. 131–57.

4

For details and the role of the museum on the Iranian art scene of this period, see Helia Darabi’s essay in this volume.

5

For discussion of the viability of the relationship between contemporary art and the artistic traditions of Islam, see Sussan Babaie, ‘Voices of Authority: Locating the “Modern” in “Islamic” Arts’, Getty Research Journal 3 (2011), pp. 133–49.

6

An example is the political trauma in the country – in particular the controversial post-2009 election and the associated Green Movement, which attracted intense world attention to Iranian politics and society, and accordingly to its art. This period saw the exceeding emergence of contemporary Iranian art in world exhibitions, galleries and the market itself. Unprecedented attention was also paid to political issues by curators, serving the heightened demand from an international audience for documentary material from within Iran.

7

For a comprehensive account of this theme, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art’, Iranian Studies 43: 4 (September 2010), pp. 489–512.

8

In Foucault’s view, knowledge (which could include art theory and discourse) is inextricably connected to power. Drawn from Foucault’s idea of power and discourse, as defined by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, knowledge refers to a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. 185. Foucault’s focus is upon the question of how some discourses have shaped and created systems of meaning that have gained the status and currency of ‘truth’, and dominate how one defines and organises both oneself and one’s social world, while alternative discourses are marginalised and subjugated, yet potentially offer sites where hegemonic practices can be contested, challenged and resisted.

9

See Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Reclaiming Cultural Space: The Artist’s Performativity versus the State’s Expectations in Contemporary Iran’, in Staci Gem Scheiwiller, ed., Performing the Iranian State: Cultural Representations of Identity and Nation (London, New York: Anthem Press, 2013), pp. 145–55.

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10 For further study of the movement and associated socio-cultural developments in Iran, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Neo-traditionalism and Modern Iranian Painting: The Saqqa-khaneh School in the 1960s’, Iranian Studies 38: IV (December 2005), pp. 607–30. 11

Ramin Jahanbegloo, ‘Introduction’, in Ramin Jahanbegloo, ed., Iran Between Tradition and Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), p. xx.

12

Ibid., p. xxii.

13

Inaugurated in 2008, it is held on the annual celebration of the Islamic Revolution. The festival is divided into two sections, national and international, and categorised according to the media used – the standard, official means of categorisation of the visual arts in Iran. The national section consists of media including painting, sculpture, calligraphy, pottery and ceramics, Persian painting, and the international section includes poster design, photography, cartoons and documentary film.

14

These exhibitions are conventionally held in public art centres and museums under the control of the ministry or the Iranian Academy of the Arts – in particular the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Niavaran Cultural Centre and the Saba Cultural and Artistic Centre. For further details, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books Books, 2013), pp. 235, 236.

15 Here, ‘cutting-edge’ refers to new media, site-specific works, or performances located in private spaces or distributed through the artists’ own networks. 16

It is worth mentioning here that it was only for a short period in the postRevolutionary period that the TMoCA, as well as the Centre of Plastic Arts of Iran (Markaz-i hunar-hay-i tajassumi-i kishvar), played a key role in promoting various forms of contemporary Iranian art. The latter, which came under the control of the Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for Artistic Affairs, had been established in 1983, and was directed by the head of the TMoCA. Both the museum and centre have also supported visual arts through the establishment of organised programmes, including giving their biennials more comprehensive aims (and also involving the newly established artists’ societies directly) and holding thematic exhibitions both of contemporary Iranian art and of contemporary European and American art (for example, on twentiethcentury British sculpture in 2004 and contemporary Japanese art in 2005). National and international gatherings and academic discussions

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on different aspects of contemporary art and culture were also organised. The museum also increased its international activities by establishing links with other international art institutions and museums, and by lending works from its own collection of Western works (many of which had been unseen for years), as well as through a number of exhibitions of Iranian artists in Europe, America and Asia. For further details on developments in this period, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Contemporary Iranian Art: the Emergence of New Artistic Discourses’, Iranian Studies 40: 3 (2007), pp. 335–66. 17

One could name the London-based Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize (MOPCAP), which was established in 2006 (magicofpersia.com) and the online contemporary art competition Persbook, inaugurated in 2010 (persbookart.com).

18

See, for example, sazmanab.org (accessed on 5 January 2014).

19

In line with this development, the local market has also been powerfully affected, with the creation of private galleries and large art centres. The Tehran annual auction, which follows the schedule of international auctions but on a national scale, and saw its third round in June 2014, is a recent private development in this field. This market particularly favours certain modern Iranian masters, mainly those who were at their height in the 1960s and 1970s, and more marketable media such as painting and sculpture, and on a much smaller scale photography. This interest has also dominated the interest of many commercial galleries. The number of newcomers is increasing, and several young collectors are likewise joining the club. Given the current economic instability of the country and the high degree of liquidity in the hands of a small cluster of rich people, art represents a less risky commodity investment for those who can afford it than many other options. There are other reasons for the growing interest in collecting contemporary (although here rather modern) art locally, mainly on the part of a new generation of rich buyers. One is to gain prestige – as for the rich elsewhere. But this has created problems resulting from the increasingly rarefied and exclusive character of the market.

20

Babaie, ‘Voices of Authority’, p. 139.

21

Khaled D. Ramadan, ‘The Edge of The WC’, in Khaled D. Ramadan, ed., Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007), p. 27.

22

See Keshmirshekan, ‘Question of Identity’.

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23

This interactive installation was performed once again at the Paris exhibition Iranian Art Now, curated by Fereshteh Daftari in 2012.

24

Golshiri’s statement, in Barbad Golshiri, And I Regurgitate And I Gulp It Down (exhibition catalogue), (Tehran: Aaran Gallery, 2011), p. 13.

25 WSI Administration, ‘Barbad Golshiri. Curriculum Mortis’, Wall Street International, 23 September 2013, available at wsimagazine. com/uk/diaries/agenda/arti/barbad-golshiri-curriculummortis_20130923120516.html (accessed on 23 January 2014). 26 Ibid. 27

Ibid.

28

Bansie Vasvani, ‘Barbad Golshiri: Curriculum Mortis at Thomas Erben Gallery’, Daily Serving, at dailyserving.com/2013/10/barbad-golshiricurriculum-mortis-at-thomas-erben-gallery (accessed on 23 January 2013).

29

The artist’s unpublished statement, given to the author.

30 Irit Rogoff, ‘Regional Imagining’, in Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Eisler, eds, Unleashed: Contemporary Art from Turkey (London: TransGlobe, 2010), p. 52. 31 Ibid.

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8 A Short History of Postwar Art in Lebanon through the Early Work of Walid Sadek and Ziad Abillama SARAH ROGERS

I

f ever there was an unfinished story, the history of art in Lebanon is one.’1 With these dramatic words, art historian John Carswell concluded his 1989 overview of Lebanese painting. For Carswell, writing in the catalogue for a London exhibition, this incompleteness was the result of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990).2 His own text reflects this assumed genealogical break: art history commences with the presence of the Crusades in Mount Lebanon and concludes at the commencement of civil strife. Scholarship on Lebanese art repeats this historical eclipse,

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concerning itself with the period prior to the civil war (concluding in 1975) or the postwar period (beginning in the late Nineties). In the first case, historians and critics lament the civil war as a devastating interruption to the thriving artistic world of the previous decades.3 From a second perspective, other critics and curators concentrate solely on postwar artists. This discourse, as I have argued elsewhere, frames the aftermath of the civil war as a tabula rasa for the visual arts, thereby neglecting an intriguingly complicated history.4 This essay attempts to define the missing historical space of art in Lebanon, and to identify a bridge between the prewar and postwar eras. The first section documents a fractured infrastructure for the visual arts throughout the civil war. Next, the focus shifts to two artists actively engaged in projects throughout the Nineties that sought to confront the legacies of the civil war: Walid Sadek (b. 1966) and Ziad Abillama (b.1969). A reading of their biographies together with their early work from this period suggests an orientation towards not a vast rupture, but rather a historicised reconfiguration of art’s social role in the immediate postwar period. Art’s Tumultuous History Throughout 1973 and 1974, student rioters ransacked the campus of the American University of Beirut. Symptomatic of the social and economic turmoil infecting the entire country, the attacks were instigated by various student political organisations. In one particularly volatile event, these embryonic militias stormed College Hall, the repository of the university’s new contemporary art collection, and defaced a number of the works (Fig. 8.1).5 A year later, a memo from the board of trustees approving a combined School of Art and Architecture failed to reach the university’s development office. The designated recipient had been killed crossing one of the checkpoints that now divided the city into militia-controlled territories.6 By autumn 1976, the majority of the fine arts department’s foreign faculty had fled Lebanon, leading 136

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American University of Beirut, College Hall Gallery, 1971. Works by (from left to right), David Egee, Stélio Scamanga, Jean Khalifeh, and Farid Haddad. (Photograph credit: Photo Sayak, Beirut, Lebanon). Photograph provided by Farid Haddad Fig. 8.1

to the dissolution of the department. Numerous failed ceasefires eventually resulted in the permanent emigration of nearly half the population of Lebanon.7 In Beirut, the civil war brutally segmented the city as a complicated set of conflicts were fought along sectarian, political and proxy lines. The image of the city was transformed from one of cosmopolitanism to one of uncontrollable instability, creating a breeding ground for snipers, kidnappings, suicide bombers, and a general, unbridled chaos. Images of this destruction would later infiltrate postwar art criticism, equating the status of art with that of the nation. A 2005 article, ‘After the Blast: Rebirth of a Nation’, in the London-based journal Modern Painters began as follows: Once known as ‘the Paris of the Orient,’ today Beirut generally conjures more violent associations. But the snipers are no longer perched atop the city’s buildings, and the wreckage

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of gunned-down airplanes is a distant memory. And while Lebanon, which borders Syria, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea, is still at the centre of a region that is undergoing great upheaval and transformation, Beirut is returning to its former role as a melting pot for Middle Eastern, European, and North African cultures and as a unique pivot between the past, present, and future of the Arab region. The author then proceeds to detail the intense activities of postwar institutions in the immediate aftermath of the war, before reaching a hopeful conclusion: The realities and memories of the war and occupation have understandably shaped the ways Lebanon has been defined both internally and externally for many generations. Today artists, architects, writers, and curators are addressing these realities through an exploration of the history, social politics and urban development of the country as well as within the larger Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions. Tension and tentativeness have been matched, and in many circles replaced, by optimism as Lebanon is poised for cultural rebirth in the early twentieth-first century.8 Such accounts highlight the intense creative efforts characterising postwar Beirut despite its turbulent history. In doing so, however, they fabricate an historical and artistic rupture. Art operates through a logic that configures violence as a disruption of an historical flow that is assumed to be natural; the irony is that the aftermath is rich in artistic production. A cursory review of the print media offers clues to a somewhat different reality for art during the civil war. The Francophone newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour lists three openings during the first week 138

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of August 1980 – five years after the civil war had begun. Shows later that month were held at the Goethe Institute, the John F. Kennedy American Center, the French and Spanish Cultural Centers, the American University of Beirut’s Jafet Library, and several commercial galleries. That same August, 100 Years of Plastic Arts in Lebanon, 1880– 1980, at Galerie Chahine, accompanied the publication of owner Richard Chahine’s two-volume book of the same title on Lebanese art history.9 Throughout the Eighties, the Nicolas Sursock Museum continued to sponsor its annual salon d’automne of contemporary art, offering exhibitions in 1982, 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1989, and suggesting a continuity of artistic production. Moreover, in certain instances, the violence proved oddly navigable for some of Lebanon’s artists and intellectuals. For Janine Rubeiz, founder and director of Dar el-Fan, art was a medium through which to overcome the violent potential of sectarian difference. For the first five months after the start of the war, Rubeiz believed that the fighting would cease and maintained the activities at Dar el-Fan even amid the encroaching sound of gunfire.10 Yet, on 12 September 1975, Dar elFan was finally forced to close its doors officially. According to Rubeiz, ‘It was necessary to give into the facts.’11 By April of the next year, Dar el-Fan’s building had been burned and pillaged into what Rubeiz described as ‘modern ruins’.12 Members of the association persisted in their work, and continued to meet at Rubeiz’s home. In 1977, Dar el-Fan – hoping once again that a ceasefire would hold – organised an exhibition of paintings. Liban ’78 included the work of 105 artists, in addition to a letter signed by the participants and addressed to President Elias Sarkis (1976–82). Entitled ‘Towards a Political Culture in Lebanon’, the letter was printed in French and Arabic newspapers, and demanded the formation of a Ministry of Culture independent of other government bureaucracies. The ministry’s mission would be to combat racism and communicate the valuable cultural contributions of the Arab world to the West. Sadly, Rubeiz’s memoirs of Dar el-Fan end with her discussion 139

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of Liban ’78 and a note regarding the continuing violence: ‘Nothing remained of this country except our determination and our hope.’13 For Rubeiz, art is neither a casualty of the civil war nor a reflection of the nation. By calling for an independent ministry of culture, Dar el-Fan defines art as a forum in which political culture can operate without reinstating the sectarian divisions institutionalised in Lebanon’s confessional system of government. Art’s social role is for the present. As Rubeiz lamented the civil war’s destruction of all but society’s ‘hope and determination’, others, such as Ramzi Saidi, industriously began collecting art in order to preserve Lebanese heritage for the future. Saidi had returned to Lebanon in 1979 after working in Zambia for a number of years. Although he had begun his collection during the civil war, the hostilities did initiate Saidi’s interest in art; he had already decorated his dormitory room at Broummana High School, outside Beirut, with reproductions of European Impressionist works. The violence did, however, incite his dedication to Lebanese art in particular. Saidi recalls his motivation in a 2005 interview: There was a feeling of cultural loss, memory loss, and heritage loss that the war was creating. This is what made the interest to collect and preserve art from Lebanon even more urgent. There was something one wanted to hold on to or protect because you were afraid that this heritage may not survive.14 Although the civil war simultaneously triggered and naturalised Saidi’s collecting impulse, his words convey both the anxiety of an impending loss and the elusive question of precisely what it was that required protecting. The materiality of the art object transformed the nebulous nature of that ‘something’, the idea of ‘this heritage’, into a tangible artefact. Without a museum for modern and contemporary 140

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art, Lebanon’s national collection is dependent upon individual benefactors.15 In an article appropriately titled ‘Collecting Art for a Wider Audience’, Saidi himself acknowledges that his personal holdings of over 600 works actually belong to the public.16 The civil war had materialised Saidi’s view of the relationship between art and nationhood – expressed as heritage. His comments reveal a conceptual dependence upon objects and what they are made to represent: national heritage, culture and memory. From another perspective, Rubeiz and the members of Dar el-Fan situated their work in response to the failures of the nation-state. Each story represents an instance in which art’s social role is configured differently. For Rubeiz, the role of art assumed an immediacy in the context of the civil war and its sectarian violence. Saidi, on the other hand, awards art the future-directed function of sustaining Lebanon’s cultural legacies. In order to consider art’s defined role in the wake of the civil war, the following section follows the artistic trajectories of artists Walid Sadek and Ziad Abillama. ‘I was born during the Gulf War’ Autobiographical and fictional accounts of the Lebanese Civil War relate a particular tension in the experience as both surreal and normal. A primary reason for this strain is the duration of the violence. The 1989 declaration of the Taif accords introduced a period of relative stability to a generation of Lebanese who had known only war. Secondly, the first several years of hostilities were localised in various sections of Beirut, before subsequently engaging other areas of the country. This resulted in a dislocating experience of the war for certain individuals, who were able to avoid the violence by either moving to another part of the country or emigrating. In the 2002 documentary Voices Off, artist and critic Walid Sadek confesses that his experience of the civil war was in fact pleasant. When the first 18 months of fighting were contained in downtown Beirut, Sadek relocated to his family’s summer chalet in the North. Learning to 141

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swim and play tennis, Sadek experienced a change to his lifestyle consisting of ‘the dubious effect of not carrying the war’.17 For both Sadek and Abillama, it was paradoxically during time spent in the US that each was confronted with the politics of the civil war. Abillama fled Lebanon in 1982 for the quaint comforts of the Massachusetts boarding school Cushing Academy. Lebanon remained mired in violence at the time of Abillama’s graduation, persuading him to enrol at Amherst College. He had exhibited a childhood predilection for drawing and decided, with his parents’ encouragement, that ‘art [should] remain a hobby’, and registered with a major in physics.18 Unwilling to abandon his creative interests completely, Abillama supplemented his core subjects with courses in drawing, printmaking, acting, art history and museum connoisseurship. By the autumn of his second year, Abillama had come to the conclusion that art offered ‘a more immediate way of dealing with life, a way to shuffle reality or the dominant way of organising life’. He enrolled for a trial semester at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), incurring the risk of being financially abandoned by his parents. He returned to Amherst that spring with a successful transcript from RISD substantiating his dedication to the arts, and thereby securing his parents’ approval of the direction he had taken. Until the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, Abillama’s Lebanese identity had failed to arouse any feeling of foreignness in his New England setting. Immersed in a liberal, collegiate community, the young student embraced the critical approach to history espoused in the departments of women’s studies and AfricanAmerican studies. A course catalogue highlighted by Abillama reveals an interest in courses on gender studies, the representation of the ghetto in American literature, the history of the Vietnam War, the history of Israel, and on democracy, culture, and the mass media. In addition to his scholarly studies, Abillama recalls an international group of friends responsible for introducing him to the work of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Edward 142

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Said. But Abillama’s critical sensibilities were shaken when the First Gulf War thrust the Arab world to the forefront of the American media, and he was confronted with either apathy or hatred towards Arabs. He was shocked, first, by the racism that inhabited his liberal college community and, second, that this discrimination was directed towards him – he had not considered himself an Arab, but rather of Phoenician descent.19 Abillama’s experience of the First Gulf War while attending Amherst College forced a critical selfawareness of one’s identity as defined by the discourse of others – leading Abillama to claim repeatedly that he had been ‘born during the Gulf War’.20 The anchoring of one’s identity to a moment of political awakening also characterised Sadek’s experience. In describing himself as ‘going to Lebanon rather than returning home’, he implies a recasting of his birthplace after having studied in California for nearly ten years.21 After failing the French-based baccalauréat, Sadek was dispatched by his parents to California to complete his schooling. Planning to study illustration, Sadek enrolled at Long Beach California Community College, changing his major to painting after two years. At the time of his graduation, the Lebanese Civil War prevented his return. He worked illegally in construction for two years, before registering for a Masters in fine arts at California’s Claremont College, where he ‘devoured theory’ and eventually stopped painting.22 The US was to Sadek a place where he could reinvent himself without the reminder of previous failures in Lebanon. It is also where he traces his political awareness. Raised in a Catholic household, Sadek assumed that ‘we’ were not Arabs. At a dinner party in California, a Palestinian immigrant challenged Sadek’s selfprofessed Phoenician identity within the context of the Lebanese Civil War. Reflection on this unexpected confrontation led Sadek to declare to his parents his desire to defect from the Catholic Church during his next visit home. In an amusing tale, Sadek recounts that 143

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his mother’s response was to drag him to the local church, where the priest warned him of the suicidal implications of his decision and Sadek confidently answered that this was exactly the point. In some respects, these biographical sketches represent little more than tales of rebellious young men in pursuit of independence. Abillama risked parental disapproval to pursue his childhood aspirations, and Sadek returned to Lebanon as both an artist and an ex-Catholic. But my interest in these recollections is the manner in which their narrative structures convey a political awakening, and how such experiences would guide the future projects of Abillama and Sadek: an interrogation of the legacy of a purported Lebanese cosmopolitanism and its historical sources within Christian nationalist circles. Postwar Beginnings On the evening of 20 August 1992, Abillama presented his first art installation upon his return to Beirut in 1991, after completing his Bachelor’s degree in fine art (Fig. 8.2). With the help of some 20 individuals, Abillama removed piles of garbage from a small patch of land in north Antelias, a working-class beach area adjacent to one of Beirut’s central highways. Enclosing the space with a barbed-wire fence, he blasted it with light powered by a portable generator, and placed several objects inside. Some were military debris (scrap metal, bullets and discarded military equipment), and, more interestingly, some pieces were constructed by the artist during apprenticeships in the city’s metal shops. The installation’s abrasive aesthetic was reinforced by the surrounding landscape: the garbage waiting outside the threatening fence, the overpowering hum of a generator, and the large fluorescent lights. Both visually and aurally, the installation prompted a visceral experience for its local audience, and recontextualised these artefacts of war through their presence in an artwork: tools of destruction 144

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Fig. 8.2

Ziad Abillama, beach installation, 1992, © Ziad Abillama, photograph provided by the artist.

transformed by creative production. The violent potential of these objects, now spent, alluded to another conversion: the experience of violence metamorphosed into an object of historical analysis and aesthetic contemplation. In a poster Abillama designed to accompany the installation, the artist collaged a selection of textual and visual quotations that underscored the twentieth century’s embrace of technology and war as regenerators of culture. Sadek has dated the ‘re-start’ of postwar artistic activity to Abillama’s beach installation, due to its ‘sufficient condensation of ideas and methodological hybridization’.23 His choice of the word ‘re-start’ certainly proposes an artistic beginning. Accordingly, Abillama’s formal language signalled its novelty, in Lebanon and this originality translated linguistically. Writing in the Arabic newspaper an-Nahar, one critic labelled the beach installation as ‘the first of its kind in Lebanon’. He defined it through ‘the Western label’ of ‘conceptual art’ (written in French) because it contained ‘an installation’ (written in English) in which the viewer was confronted by an environment where the artist worked in situ.24 Artistically, 145

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Abillama depended upon a Western language that is mirrored linguistically by the critic writing in an-Nahar. But, as Sadek insists, the beach installation’s importance was in its introduction of a localised practice and contextualised aesthetic meaning. In his 2002 essay, ‘From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon’, Sadek outlines three characteristics defining installation art in Beirut: non-infatuation (or critical consciousness), excavation, and transience.25 In his judgment, the beach installation was the first project to exhibit all three. Abillama’s decision to address the subject of the civil war represents a strategy of historical excavation. The overpowering hum of the generator, however, prevented visitors from becoming absorbed by the ‘alluring siren’ of art.26 Third, Abillama abandoned the installation after the opening, leaving the Lebanese Army, who patrolled the area, to enjoy what soldiers called the work’s ‘military authority’, before they eventually disposed of it.27 The significance of the beach installation was in its signalling of the emergence in Lebanon of an art practice that critically engages the circumstances of production. Remarkably, Sadek resists claims to authenticity even as he traces a genealogy of Lebanese installation art. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1995, he and Abillama had issued a collaborative artistic manifesto, in French and English, calling for a local art. The full text of the manifesto reads: Territorializing our work: making it relevant to our lives ‘here,’ has been a growing concern of ours in the past three years. Such a work is not produced by sovereign, constituted, positive selves; it is rather imbricated in a relentless genealogy of ourselves: a derailment of our occidental/ Christian destination that inscribes us in a larger project of deconstruction or (post)structural analysis. It will appear that ‘territorializing’ our work is a resistive 146

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gesture which does not aim at producing ‘Lebanese’ or ‘authentic’ Art. It is rather a serious (yet playful) critical engagement with the political and philosophical situation of ‘authenticity’ i.e. : with what passes as proper, familiar, inherent to and owned by the Self (be it a Subject, a Nation, or a Community).28 In its reliance on inclusive pronouns and emphasis on a locally relevant art, the manifesto evokes Dar el-Fan’s 1978 letter ‘Towards a Political Culture in Lebanon’. Both the manifesto and the letter identify a contextual immediacy for art that aspires not so much to escape the sectarian politics of nationalism as to provide a space for their interrogation. The critical difference between the two agendas is that Abillama and Sadek do not assume that the categories of art and community are predetermined; they refuse a paradigm that equates a vernacular formal language with national identity. The manifesto insists on distinguishing between an art produced for and engaged with the immediate local context and one that claims authenticity in the process. This crucial differentiation underscores the intimate relationship between genealogy and authenticity, which are the grounds of recognition for both art history and the art market. It matters little that Abillama and Sadek penned their manifesto in French and English rather than Arabic. For these two artists, the ideology of the subject, nation or community requires consistent ‘derailment’. Abillama and Sadek’s 1995 manifesto was presented as part of Abillama’s project Systême Full Fill (SFF), from the same year. In the form of a colourful brochure, SFF advertised a new commodity for postwar Lebanon: a small, shiny, multipurpose missile (Plate 11) that recalls the imagery of the beach installation. Through a series of photographs, the viewer learns that this shiny gold-andsilver missile serves a range of functions, from that of small-scale modernist sculpture for the home to that of toy playfully tossed in 147

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the air (Plate 12). Most important for postwar Lebanon was SFF’s ability to serve as a substitute for the absent father figure within the family unit. In a struggling economy in which males were forced to emigrate for employment, SFF kept their wives company in bed. The humorous nature of the brochure does not outweigh the critique that underlies it, but is in fact its strategy. A series of photographs testify to the relief, confidence and happiness of the father upon his discovery of this postwar commodity. Posing as the father, Sadek cuddles a small baby, stands proudly with his family (including two male heirs), and kisses his peacefully sleeping wife. In turn, this familial rebirth unfolds into a national one, ‘after a night particularly sober and difficult’.29 Yoking the persuasive language of advertising to an aggressive nationalist discourse, SFF promises a new aesthetic: the ‘order and simplicity’ achieved through ‘the systematic elimination of parasites and enemies of the state’. The violence of the rhetoric on the last page of the brochure is matched by its image: a red bull’s-eye imprinted on a black-and-white photograph of an East Asian domestic worker holding a neatly pressed skirt (Plate 13). Yet the combination of text and image uncovers the empty promises of postwar Lebanon, and the dangerous ambiguity beneath this vague nationalist rhetoric. The bull’s-eye draws our attention to the phallic substitution of SFF for the absentee male figure. But this image, unlike the previous photographs in the brochure, visualises a penetrating violence, reinforced by the text. Together, text and image reveal the false promises of the languages of both advertising and nationalist rhetoric in postwar Lebanon. The ‘elimination of parasites and enemies of the state’ alludes to the often-heard conviction that the civil war was actually a proxy war fought on Lebanese soil between Syria, the US and Israel. The phrase also refers to a commonly held conviction that the presence of the Palestinian refugee community endeavoured to establish a Palestinian state within Lebanon, leading to the tensions of the civil war.30 SFF promises a postwar rebirth – even after the failures of the civil war – through the tightening of national boundaries and the purification of the state. Yet the image 148

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documents the actual postwar absentees – the mother and father figures – represented by the mirages of the commodity and false promises of violent purification. In SFF, Abillama implicates art in a dual task, making it serve both as a tool of social critique and as a commodity. To this end, he employs the format of the advertisement brochure and replaces the traditional artist’s statement with ‘a word from our sponsor’. Addressed to ‘Lebanese friends, European friends, and Arab brothers’, the text – printed in Arabic, French, and English – concludes with an assurance of inclusiveness: ‘I am not only the director of this society, but I am also a member and a client.’ The figure of Lebanon’s migrant labour force personifies the invisibility of human labour in the commodity that stands at the intersection of gender, race and class.31 This strategic appropriation of the language of marketing imposed on sepia photographs immediately conjures up the work of American artist Barbara Kruger from the 1980s, as does Abillama’s choice of format. Kruger, who had been trained as a graphic designer and was employed by Vogue in New York City in the 1970s, mobilises the language and visual format of advertising. Through her use of shifting pronouns, Kruger implicates the viewer’s complicity in consumerist ideology and forces the viewer to choose a subject position: ‘we’ or ‘you’. Abillama’s choice of addressees – Lebanese friends, European friends, Arab brothers – forces the same categorical choices upon his audience. His strategic use of shifting pronouns within his multilingual texts forces an uncompromising choice on his viewers that is immediately implicated in the politics of postwar Lebanon.32 Sadek’s works from the 1990s exemplify parallel tactics to those in SFF. In 1995, Sadek entered his first Beirut-based art work, Once I Dreamt I Was a Phoenix, into a design exhibition (Fig. 8.3). The project asked viewers to sit at a mechanically rotating table while looking through a magnifying glass at a series of photographs. Taken from a book on violence, the photographs document a male 149

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figure falling from a building. At the table’s centre, Sadek placed a sculpture of a phoenix – the mythological bird employed as the symbol of the Phalange, a right-wing Christian political party. The magnifying glass’s inflexible focus prevented the viewer from seeing the figure of the phoenix, whose presence continuously circles above the photographs of an individual falling to his death. Sadek’s choice of title, and his use of the first person pronoun, suggests his own complicity with the mythology of the Phalange party. The title’s inclusion of the words ‘once I dreamt’ recalls his separation from the Catholic Church and its attending ideologies after his earlier experiences in the US. Certainly the verb ‘to dream’ indicates a change in consciousness. This individual history was grounded within the shifting landscape of a postwar exhibition held in the heart of downtown Beirut. During the opening, then Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri – the Sunni Muslim in charge of the privatisation of the reconstruction of downtown Beirut – brushed past Once I Dreamt I was a Phoenix. According to Sadek, ‘it was a brilliant moment in which the dominant ideology of the past met up with the dominant ideology of the present – a spontaneous performance of sorts.’33 Sadek continued to unearth his historical involvement with Lebanese right-wing Christian ideology with his 1997 submission for the Ayloul Festival.34 In The Last Days of Summer, the artist collected traditional songs that had been popularly rewritten during the civil war with derogatory sectarian lyrics (Fig. 8.4). The title was taken from the work of the famous Lebanese singer Fairuz, whose songs grieve for her war-torn country. Sadek provided visitors with the reworked lyrics and a recorded cassette of the reworked songs. In this way, the experience of the war, simultaneously lamented in Fairuz’s songs and used to justify the degrading lyrics, implicated everyone.35 Sadek also included himself in his critique of Lebanese society: the cover of the cassette was a childhood photograph of Sadek and his brother dressed in military clothes. In his discussion 150

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Fig. 8.3

Fig. 8.4

Walid Sadek, Once I Dreamt I Was a Phoenix, 1997, © Walid Sadek, photograph provided by the artist.

Walid Sadek, The Last Days of Summer, 1997, cassette cover, © Walid Sadek, photograph provided by the artist.

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of The Last Days of Summer, journalist and critic Bilal Khbeiz explains that Sadek’s choice of cover insists on ‘a sign of belonging to the conditions of living and the coincidence of birth’.36 If the civil war dispersed Beirut artists across the globe, then the promises of the Taif accords returned a new generation to the city. A significant artistic partnership emerging from the beach installation coupled Abillama and Sadek. The latter had returned to Beirut from California on the opening night of the beach installation and met Abillama there.37 If this historical coincidence is accurate, what Sadek terms his ‘going to’ Lebanon represents the birth of both a national and an artistic consciousness. After the installation’s opening, Abillama and Sadek held a series of formal and informal conversations that converged around the role of art in postwar Lebanon. In beginning a historical discussion of postwar art through an allusion to the beach installation, I do not intend to establish it as an authoritative work. Following Sadek, I mean to suggest that the project serves as a historical signpost for postwar artistic practices in Lebanon. In his choice of media, Abillama sets the stage for a departure from the conventional media of painting and sculpture dominating the local art market. Moreover, the early projects of both Abillama and Sadek suggested an interest in both the particular history of the civil war and the issues of representation more generally. The emergence of this dual practice in these projects from the early nineties defines a critical shift in the history of art in Lebanon. For curators and critics outside Lebanon, Beirut entered the contemporary art world around 2002, when the city began to experience a series of international projects invested in an art scene that purportedly operated in a liminal zone – the product of a war-torn history that nonetheless promised an alternative to institutional norms. In the aftermath of nearly two decades of violence, foreign curators lauded a set of critical practices (including those of Sadek and Abillama) that showcased the possibilities of an activist art operating in what has been characterised as a 152

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postwar tabula rasa in terms of its audience, institutional support and art history. In the art world of the last decade – defined as it is by biennale culture and a deep investment in artistic practice as an intellectual, historical and activist engagement – the context of Beirut served as a fitting site for the possibility of a sociopolitical art. What I have sought to argue here is that the radicality of the art produced by this first generation of postwar artists can only be understood by tracing a longer history of art in Lebanon than the one that appears in the rubble left by the civil war.

endnotes 1

John Carswell, ‘The Lebanese Vision: A History of Painting,’ Lebanon: The Artist’s View (London: British Lebanese Association, 1989), p. 19.

2

Sponsored by the British Lebanese Association, Lebanon: The Artist’s View was held at the Concourse Gallery at the Barbican Centre in London from 18 April to 2 June 1989.

3

See Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Frieda Howling, Art in Lebanon, 1930–1975: The Development of Contemporary Art in Lebanon (Beirut: Lebanese American University, 2005); Helen Khal, The Woman Artist in Lebanon (Beirut: Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, 1987); Silvia Naef, A la recherche d’une modernité arabe: l’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996).

4

Sarah Rogers, ‘Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut’, Art Journal 66, 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 9–20.

5

Farid Haddad, who had returned to Beirut for a seven-week visit in summer 1980, recalls his painting in the collection being defaced with black ink. Author email correspondence with Haddad, June 2007.

6

Memo from John Carswell to the American University of Beirut, October

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2003, John Carswell Papers, file AA/6, Library and Special Collections, the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, n.p. 7

According to Boutros Labaki, 990,000 individuals – 40 per cent of the total population – left the country between the years 1975 and 1989. See his ‘Lebanese Emigration during the War (1975-1989)’, in Albert Hourani and Nadim Sheehadi, eds, The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies/I.B.Tauris, 1992), p. 609.

8

Rochelle Steiner, ‘After the Blast: Rebirth of a Nation’, Modern Painters (September 2005), pp. 49-50.

9

Richard Chahine, One Hundred Years of Plastic Arts in Lebanon, 18801980, vols I and II (Beirut: Chahine Gallery, 1980).

10 Janine Rubeiz, ‘Fondatrice de Dar el-Fan, 1967-1975,’ unpublished memoirs, private papers of Janine Rubeiz, Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon, n.p. 11

Janine Rubeiz, ‘Mais il a fallu se rendre à l’évidence’, in ibid.

12

‘Des ruins modernes’, in ibid.

13

‘Il ne reste plus rien de ce pays sauf notre détermination et notre espoir’, in ibid.

14

Quoted in Nada al-Awar, ‘Collecting Art for a Wider Audience’, Canvas: Art and Culture from the Middle East and Arab World ( July-August 2005), p. 42.

15

Saidi’s story is not an exception. Saleh Barakat, owner of Agial Gallery (est. 1990), purchased the nucleus of his private collection directly from Waddah Faris of Contact Art Gallery, as well as from individual artists and their families. Painter Farid Haddad recalls a number of individuals, including Barakat, visiting his family’s home to purchase works throughout the 1980s. Saleh Barakat and Farid Haddad, author interview, December 2006. Both Barakat and critic Cesar Nammour dedicated themselves to learning the history of Lebanese art during the civil war. Cesar Nammour, author interview, June 2005; Saleh Barakat, author interview, July 2007.

16

al-Awar, ‘Collecting Art’, pp. 37-45.

17

Quoted in Voices Off, dir. Marko Doringer, 2002.

18

The biographical information in this section is compiled from a series of extensive interviews conducted with Abillama during autumn 2005 and

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spring 2006 in Beirut, Lebanon. 19

On the history of Phoenicia in relation to the formation of a particular Maronite Christian Lebanese nationalism, see Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia: In Search of Identity in Lebanon (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004).

20

Ziad Abillama in conversation with Jayce Salloum and Walid Sadek, September 1992, videotape, private archives of Walid Sadek, Beirut, Lebanon; Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, ‘Abillama Returns with Sculptures that Act’, Daily Star, Lebanon, 9 November 2004, p. 7; Abillama, author interview, May 2006.

21

Quoted in Doringer, Voices Off.

22

The biographical information in this section was compiled through a series of interviews with Sadek throughout autumn 2005 and spring 2006 in Beirut, Lebanon.

23 Walid Sadek, ‘From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon’, Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon 1, p.68. 24

Fadi Abu Khalil, ‘Emir Ziad Abillama’, an-Nahar, 5 September 1992, p. 19.

25

Sadek, ‘From Excavation to Dispersion’, p. 75.

26

Sadek, ‘From Excavation to Dispersion’, p. 74. One of the few critics writing about the beach installation to have experienced it in situ, Sadek fears that his writings have unwittingly contributed to a mythology of the work. Author interview, May 2006.

27

Abillama, author interview, June 2006.

28

The unpublished manifesto was provided to me by Abillama.

29

This is a reference to the nondescript colloquialism for the civil war, alhadath, or ‘the events’.

30

Abillama interrogates the foreign conspiracy theory of the civil war in his short videos of 2005, La Nature et la Drogue (‘Nature and Drugs’) and Pour finir avec la sagesse populaire! (‘Let Us Finish with Popular Wisdom!’).

31

An estimated 10,000 males and females from Africa and East and South East Asia arrive annually in Lebanon. Handing over their passports upon arrival, these individuals relinquish their political rights and legal protection. An estimated 20 per cent of the 80,000 females suffer from some form of maltreatment at the hands of their employers. See Carol

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Mansour’s documentary Maid in Lebanon (2005) and Monica Smith, ‘Model Employees: Sri Lankan Domestics in Lebanon’, Middle East Report 238 (Spring 2006), available at mafhoum.com/press9/272S21.htm (accessed on 5 November 2013). 32

Similarly, the language of his 1992 poster wherearethearabs depicts a title printed in French, English and Arabic, with the Arabic translation marked by a shift to the pronoun: ‘Where are we?’

33

Sadek, author interview, November 2005.

34

Sadek also examined the construction of origin myths through the written word when he wrote a piece responding to Hareth Boustany’s essay, ‘The Main Stages of the History of Beirut’, previously published in the magazine Rotary Loubnan. Sadek’s essay, ‘Greater Loubnan’, examines Boustany’s language as promoting the ‘Foundationalist Fable’ that reductively roots Beirut in Ancient Phoenicia. For instance, Sadek notes that Boustany’s use of the inclusive pronoun ‘our’ in describing Beirut is matched by his description of the Arab ‘conquest’ as a ‘brutal rape’, indicating a particular perspective that is disguised as historically objective. Sadek’s choice of title further draws attention to the historical construction of modern Lebanon as a French-governed mandate. See Walid Sadek, ‘Greater Loubnan’, Rotary Loubnan, 1990s, private papers of Walid Sadek, Beirut, Lebanon, pp. 4–5.

35

During his research for the project, Sadek found a recording of people at a dinner party singing the reworked, sectarian lyrics. He decided against including it because he did not want to ‘overstep his boundaries’. Author interview, June 2006.

36

Bilal Khbeiz, ‘Beirut’s Costly Modernity’, in Beirut: It’s Not Easy to Define Home, a special edition (108) of Parachute (2002), p. 118.

37

Sadek, author interview, June 2006.

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9 Deconstruction and the Contemporary Arts of Iran: Reversal of the Hierarchy1 ABBAS DANESHVARI

I do not know of any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness this is an essential presupposition.

Friedrich Nietzsche2

I

cannot think of a more exciting moment in the arts of twentiethcentury Iran than today. The Nietzschean concept of play3 or open-ended meditation is a central facet of contemporary

Iranian art and carries these works beyond the horizon of art’s

historical platitudes and conventions. This state in contemporary 157

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Iranian art is surprisingly complex, labyrinthine, and often filled with allusion to multiple conjoined concepts. Moreover, the new arts – even when related to other styles, whether Iranian or foreign – are not, as in the mid twentieth century, desiring aesthetic acculturation or affirming national identity.4 In contrast, they are thoughtful or subliminal reinterpretations and transformations of various ontological and philosophical perspectives in which deeper intellectual structures are hardly transparent. Indeed, upon scrutiny, they are often seen to reach beyond what is politically and socially associated with contemporary Iran. To embark on this path of extraordinary poetics, one needs to consider a surprising and unexpected feature of contemporary Iranian art – namely, deconstruction.5 Deconstructive features are often not consciously designed and seem to arise from an intersubjective core. Let me start with the most salient feature of deconstruction in these works – namely, reversal of the hierarchy, or more specifically, metaphysical – physical reversal. What is reversal of hierarchy, and what does it aim to achieve? It is one tactic or strategy, among the many others, within the philosophical strategies of deconstruction. Given that, within any philosophical opposition (for example, man/woman, man/ animal, art/junk, original/derivative, creator/created), one term dominates the other and is thus assigned a higher value. A reversal of the hierarchy undermines the notion of the mastery of one term over another and thereby shows what the dominating argument is concealing in order to maintain its ascendant position.6 The reversal shows that within the very folds of any truth-statement lies the key to its collapse. Perhaps in more traditional wording, as William Ray put it, the reversal of hierarchy is a paradox in which the received opinion supports its own antithesis.7 Reversal, by unconcealing what the privileged position has dissembled in order to assume its powerful status, undermines the logic of the privileged reading. Although reversing the hierarchy often readily shows that 158

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one’s truth is no more than a perspective or a bias, the reversal also makes for play that widens the field of vision, understanding, and interpretation. Above all, it allows the reader to leave the narrow procrustean bed of conventional interpretation and view various previously not considered options. Reversal of hierarchy as a play to disrupt and deconstruct metaphysics In short, metaphysics is that reflection upon the world that leads to absolute truth and knowledge. The claim of absolute knowledge leads to the claim of ever-present, originary, pure and genuine concepts. Derrida in Limited Inc describes it fittingly for our present task: [Metaphysics is] the enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ideally, to an origin or to a ‘priority’ held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.8 For example, the belief that the pure, the positive, and the essential precede the impure and the negative led to the Socratic requirement that arriving at absolute knowledge requires one to clear the mind of knowing anything at all, from which would then spring forth true knowledge. Plato believed that access to the first principle would lead to truth.9 In fact, one identifying sign of metaphysics is that 159

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it fails to relate knowledge of the world to the knower, and views knowledge as pure reflection of the world itself. This concept of a pure, essential, permanent, ever-present and immutable truth led Nietzsche to view metaphysics as mummification and stagnation and, above all, as the rejection of flux in time and space. Nietzsche, though often called the last metaphysician,10 in such works as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, The Twilight of Idols and Ecce Homo, among others,11 continually undermined metaphysics. One succinct phrase of his, ‘Only ideas won by walking have any value’,12 acknowledges the physical earth as the source of great thoughts, and devalues ideas that arise from abstractions rather than experience in the world of flux and change.13 For Derrida, all metaphysics is the ‘metaphysics of presence’, and in fact, as William Ray pointed out, ‘His goal is nothing less than to deconstruct the entire tradition of western metaphysics…’14 It is fascinating that so much of contemporary Iranian art constitutes a path to undermining metaphysics and its frozen ideals. More often than not, the arts represent a force disrupting the notion of the stability of signs. And, like the Nietzschean concept of the affirmation of becoming,15 they are an acknowledgement of flux and of the sign’s metamorphosis and changing values – especially as disseminated in varying contexts and within the individual’s ontological praxis and applications. Let me begin to set the stage for this discussion with the works of Mohammad Ghazali (b. 1980). His photographs of ‘Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest’ (Plates 14–15) reverse the hierarchy of the viewer and the viewed, the sentient and nonsentient. Now those who look at civic monuments and idolise them are themselves viewed by the civic monuments.16 It is, first and foremost, imperative to note that, were it not for the title, these works would have remained quotidian views of Iranian urban spaces. The fact that language is the key to the reading of these images privileges hearing over seeing. This fact alone sets up the metaphysical condition par excellence in 160

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these works, for as Emmanuel Levinas has put it, ‘the movement of metaphysics is … the transcendence of hearing in relation to seeing’.17 The heads of the renowned, the nonsentient sculptures, are codes or signs through which the notion of a culture’s desired essence and its doxa are communicated. As we look up at them, we are clearly to be moved and elevated by the Apollonian and ideal structures of the presented signs. Clearly, our views of the civic monuments represent our majestic and heroic imagination, the enchanted landscape of a higher plateau of life and being. Their poetry, though ambiguous, is of dreams that are often codified in epic narratives. And yet, as Ghazali illustrates, the view from the heads of the renowned is the most prosaic and quotidian of perspectives possible. The heads of the renowned offer from their high perch of idealism a view of mundane daily life. They offer from their metaphysical-heroic, cultural and mythic visions the banality of real life. The way in which we see Abu Sa‘id Abul Khayr, Sheikh Farid ad-din ‘Attar, and Sa‘adi is radically different from how they see us. The contrast from the perspective of metaphysics is pitifully mundane, even hopeless. Ghazali has shown how we, through these ideals, have so brutally placed ourselves outside the real. These works also reveal that the real unrelentingly persists behind the masks of our dreams. But there is another element, one of profound significance in these works – namely, that our view of the heads of the renowned, our metaphysical perspectives, our notions of the so-called ever-present Truth (the metaphysics of presence), are always regressive, and are dredged up from the memory of a culture and opportunistically reconfigured by cultural and political forces. But the view from the cold and objective angle of the nonsentient monuments is of the contemporaneous life. While the metaphysical visions remain static and immutable, physical reality is in a state of flux and change. Clearly, as Nietzsche asserted, the constancy of metaphysics is made possible by means of the mummification of ideas, or as a reification of ideas in the nonsentient state – in fact, here as sculptural form. The physical world and its ever-changing face make the metaphysical 161

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appear as a deluding narrative construct – and yet, we must admit, an indispensable one. Now, we who have created the nonsentient idols to rise above ourselves are forced through this reversal of hierarchy to recognise the limits of our world as defined only by the physical. Ghazali’s works have shown that within the very folds of the ideal lies the key to its subversion and theoretical collapse. The view from the heads of the renowned undermines the surface logic of the ideal symbol for the sake of the mundane sign, the metaphor of truth for the sake of the shifting metonym. Here, the distance between the ideal and real, the origin and derivative, the past and present, the truth and flux is reduced to such a degree that the first term in the binary – namely, the primary condition – is, through praxis, reinscribed as nonessential, or functions as pure decoration. Parastou Forouhar (b. 1962) lays bare in Trauerfeier (‘Funeral Service’, Plate 16)’18 the structure and the mechanics of metaphysical claims and operations – in this case religious truth and the so-called promise of the afterlife. In this work, as in many others, she tears at the serene and often beatified cultural veils instituted by Iran’s religious hierarchy, and reveals the physical reality of blood and gore that is (and has been) concealed beneath the mask of metaphysical truth.19 The Trauerfeier and Countdown (Plate 17) exhibit covered office chairs and bean bags wrapped with funerary Shiite religious banners used in the Shiite rite of ‘Ashura, in commemoration of the death of Hossein ibn Ali in 680.20 The effect of these works is dialectical,21 and reveals the inherent contradictions of any religion’s claims to transcendence and higher truths. Trauerfeier shows that the power of any religion is exercised from office chairs, rather than in a holy, heavenly, transcendental vision. She brings home the fact that the seat of otherworldliness resides in the earthly and physical, and is governed by the self-fulfilling human interests carried out by bureaucrats on modern office chairs and bean bags. The heavenly does not extend beyond the chairs used in their offices as seats of 162

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authority; the godly does not extend beyond offices whence are issued orders to manipulate, exploit, and even murder. Religions are no more than their quotidian banners and settings.22 And their language of otherworldliness, on banners or anything else, is no more than a language game. The physical–manipulative nature of this so-called transcendental power becomes clear when we realise that, according to Forouhar, the Trauerfeier refers to the 22nd day of the month of Bahman (the date of the Iranian Revolution) and to 22 November 1998 (the date of the assassination of her parents by the Islamic government of Iran).23 So, on another level the works point an accusatory finger at religious narratives that ‘make crooked all that is straight and make turn whatever stands’.24 Forouhar’s Freitag (Fig. 9.1) is another powerful example of how metaphysical principles collapse under the very force of the physical. The chador is a metaphysical example par excellence of transcendental truth by certain believers. It represents, as does Freitag, a religious decree, a religious realisation, a godly prescription that carries within its borders implicit and explicit proscriptions. What is at stake is the

Fig. 9.1

Parastou Forouhar, Freitag (‘Friday’), 2003, 4 panels, digital print on canvas, edition of 5, each panel, 170 × 86 cm, courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 9.2

Parastou Forouhar, Blind Spot series, 2001, digital print on Alu Dibond, 65 × 45 cm, courtesy of the artist.

female’s sexuality, which must remain hidden and even, according to these transcendental truths, become seemingly erased. Yet, in Forouhar’s work, the sexuality of the female seeps through, as both a sign and a symbol. It is a poignant reminder of the powers of the physical that the hand that tightly holds the fabric of this religious decree, the hand that firmly grasps this protective casing of the female’s body, the hand that is to conceal the physical, is the very instrument of its revelation and manifestation. Freitag, or Friday, the holy day of the week in the Muslim calendar, is as much a metaphysical sign as is the chador or the religious decrees aimed at concealing earthly powers and physical presences. Now, the hand that holds together the folds of the metaphysical is also – because of its resemblance to the female’s sexual sign – the hand that deconstructs the metaphysical and privileges the physical. In other words, the paradox of this piece is that the metaphysical thesis has held within its embrace the seeds of its ‘reinscription’, or the theological philosophy that had so laboured to undermine the physical and the real is itself overwhelmed by the physical. In one sense, Forouhar’s Freitag and Trauerfeier, as well as her Blind Spot (Fig. 9.2), accomplish what Derrida believes to be essential to any deconstructive operation – namely, ‘to dismantle the metaphysical 164

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Fig. 9.3

Mandana Moghaddam, The Cube and the Red Ball, 2002, installation, courtesy of the artist.

and the rhetorical structures which are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way’.25 Reversal of the hierarchy aims to deconstruct by exposing the inherent contradictions within any truth-centred claim. As Derrida notes in Positions, it is essential that we seek out, within any philosophical belief and by careful examination of its concepts, those ‘structures of concealment’ that have been imposed from the outside to allow for that philosophy or truth-statement to stand.26 This is clearly the case in Forouhar’s Blind Spot. The seemingly superficial structure is the female’s weakness, but the reversal of hierarchy has brought out the concealed structure, which affirms the male’s weakness, insecurity, fear of wilful women, and terror of male competition. The metaphysics of the female as weak and in need of male protection is easily deconstructed. In Blind Spot, the privileged term is revealed for its inadequacies, and a new concept has emerged.27 Emotionally and intellectually, Forouhar’s Freitag, Trauerfeier, and Blind Spot accomplish what Karl Reinhardt, in his 165

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Fig. 9.4

Mandana Moghaddam, interior of The Cube and the Red Ball, 2002, courtesy of the artist.

interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, calls the unconcealment of the world of seeming (the world as we construct in order to avoid the real).28 Forouhar hammers away at every metaphysical construct that has justified enslavement and abuse. She has shown, as Heidegger put it, that the path between glory and tragedy is the struggle between seeming (concealment) and Being (unconcealment).29 Mandana Moghaddam (b. 1962) unveils, in The Cube and Red Ball (Figs 9.3 and 9.4) the ingenuity of metaphysical control and the preciosity of its distortions. The concept of a cube as the navel of the earth, as the site of God’s throne and the place from which all order emanates, is studied. Jerusalem and the Ka‘ba are two such examples.30 The cubes are symbols of order and control of the primeval chaos by God. The cube of the Ka‘ba and the cube of Jerusalem are also the sites of the creation of Adam, and is the metaphysical symbol par excellence. Yet Moghaddam shows not just the interior but the innards of this metaphysical structure. It is all made of the most mundane of human narratives, of daily reports of ordinary lives unfolding in ordinary ways. It is an amazing reference to metaphysics as a game of concealment of daily physics, and the red ball is most likely a sign of this game. Or perhaps the red ball is a 166

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Fig. 9.5

Barbad Golshiri, Ghayr (‘the Other’), 2007, crude oil, saffron and semen, Azad Gallery, Tehran, courtesy of the artist.

pitiful simulation of the mother of all metaphysical concepts, the sun. After all, metaphysics is physics simulating itself as transcendental. It is all language and language games and, indeed, as prosaic as newspaper reports. The desire for the metaphysical – the other of our world – is subtly and poetically played out by Barbad Golshiri (b. 1982), who communicates in Ghayr (‘The Other’, Fig. 9.5) a reversal of the hierarchy of the word’s order as it appears as its own mirror-image. This apparently formalistic gambit is a twofold play, encompassing both meaning and the other of form. In both instances there is a reversal. The form’s is obvious, but the reversal of the meaning is a shift from the physical to the absolute, or the metaphysical. For Ghayr in reverse exists only in the imagination, and is a desire for a non-existent entity. To put it differently, Ghayr in reverse is the kind of other that is experienced by distortion, and this makes it metaphysical, absolute, and unavailable. The Ghayr in reverse has no home in our physical world, neither in the dictionary of words nor in signified content. And this Ghayr, this distortion, will find meaning when reified or returned back to its physical role. In Golshiri, as Levinas puts it, ‘The metaphysical desire tends toward something 167

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Fig. 9.6

Babak Golkar, From Africa to Americas and Cubism, from the Return Project series, 2011, C- Print, 92 × 66 cm, courtesy of the artist.

else entirely, toward the absolutely other.’31 However, Golshiri reinscribes this absolute other, and undermines it by landing it in the bed of physics: of saffron, oil and semen. Let us now consider a series of works by Babak Golkar (b. 1977): the Return Project (Figs. 9.6 and 9.7), The Ground for Standing and Understanding (Plate 18), and Parergon (Plate 19). The Return Project is the quintessence of deconstruction, fully engaging many of the deconstructive tactics – not only the reversal of hierarchy that we have briefly addressed, but also dissemination, parergon, grafting, the death of the author, and, above all, the marginalisation of signified content. Other artists, such as Barbad Golshiri and Neda Razavipour (b. 1969), also express the marginalisation of the signified content. I shall briefly refer to them here, but they are discussed more fully elsewhere.32 Golkar’s The Ground for Standing and Understanding is a bold reversal of interior vs exterior, of decorative vs fundamental. A carpet – a purely decorative item that is placed inside on the floor of a building, and that plays a marginal and supplemental role within the structure – is now the ground for the building itself. If the building is a symbol of man’s intellectual and epistemic constructs (for example, of rising above nature, building culture 168

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Fig. 9.7

Babak Golkar, From Africa to Americas and Cubism, from the Return Project series, 2011, detail of 10, wood sculpture, 17.6 × 11 × 6.6 cm, courtesy of the artist.

and civilisation), then the carpet – a purely decorative and nonessential product – has now become the very ground of man’s highest achievements. What is revealed by this reversal between inside and outside, and between decorative and fundamental? Does it not say, at least in one regard, that all of man’s achievements rest upon and have risen from sheer decoration? In other words, is our ground not a frivolous mask, a decorative narrative hiding the real ground? What is this ground after all? The ground we stand on is what sustains us, directs us, and produces meaning in our lives.33 It is what Husserl viewed as the essence from which emanates all values, truths, and Truth, and it is the place where the ‘means for the solutions must be contained’.34 The ground is the metaphysical principle par excellence, and the umbrella beneath which all things stand. And yet, here we have a carpet, a man-made object inscribed and adorned with man’s concepts of harmony and order. This carpet, this physical, decorative item, conceals the real ground. It covers the ground that we truly stand upon – the ground that we are terrified to admit as our essence because its flux and chaos and unpredictability assert the absence of meaning and purpose in Being. As John Caputo points out in a beautifully written 169

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article on ‘Ground of the Soul’ (which includes a succinct discussion of Eckhart, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida’s views of the ground for knowing and acting), there is beneath the ‘thin membranes of the structures which we stretch across the flux’ our fear of the nothingness of it all.35 We are reminded of Nietzsche’s comment (made by the hermit) regarding each layer of production (writing, making, speaking): Does not one write books precisely to conceal what one harbors? Indeed [the hermit] will doubt whether a philosopher could possibly have ‘ultimate and real’ opinions, whether behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper cave – a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, under every attempt to furnish ‘grounds’ … Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word a mask.36 Now the physical carpet is both the essence and also a mask of the essence. It is a sign of man’s denial of the reality of Being and a sign of man’s need to escape that reality. The physical and the metaphysical are eventually one. The human stories and constructs stretched across the face of the mystery are both the shelter and the prison of man. The fact that, in the last analysis, the metaphysical can be expressed only as the physical is also evident in Golkar’s series Negotiating Space, in which man’s constructs, be they the structures or the ground, are reflections of one another. Golkar, in his Return Project, purchases ordinary decorative and utilitarian objects (African masks, toy planes, candles) from local stores and transforms them by always cutting away one or more pieces of the object, from which he fashions a sculpture. The

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remainder of the object is sometimes also decorated and redesigned, as the African mask exemplifies (Fig. 9.6). A photograph of the original, along with the transformed object, and the sculpture is taken before he repacks the transformed item and returns it to the store. The unsuspecting clerk, unaware of the changes made, reshelves the object and subsequently sells it to another buyer. Most importantly, I should address the concept of the reversal of the hierarchy and its subsequent implications. Here, a commonly sold, quotidian item (a marginal presence) is transformed into art (a privileged presence as Golkar’s art), and is disseminated masked as a quotidian object (sold without the buyer’s awareness of its being made by an artist). Transforming junk into art is not new, but releasing it back into the junk category is quite a significant act, because the reversal of junk into art and art into junk undermines, within any binary structure, any certain knowledge of the value of the privileged or the marginal. We have here not just the paradox of the entrenched, privileged concepts, but also that of their diametrically opposed states. Art is art and also junk, and, likewise, junk is junk and also art. Golkar shows that the value of the work is now primarily a matter of parergon or its framing.37 The same object is art when presented in the frame of art and junk when defined by the frame of junk. Thus, the manifest argument of art as unique, original and creative is undermined by the very presence of the concept of parergon, which privileges or marginalises the values of objects by its various acts of framing. Parergon puts into play a reversal of hierarchies that shift back and forth between the privileged and the marginal, depending on the conditions that produce value more from the outside than the inside. For example, if art is junk and junk is art, then the hierarchical opposition between junk and art is produced by preferences that have structured a certain political, social and personal outlook. Clearly, the general rule has been, and continues to be, to grant art a sovereign value. Golkar38 and Golshiri39 draw attention to

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how the sovereign and enshrined definitions of art are arbitrary and rhetorical strategies. The definition of something as art is a rhetorical gambit of language. The privileged and marginal positions are nothing but a play of metaphors shaped by biases, as is the word ‘truth’. Now, of course, the photograph, the record made by Golkar, will be treated as art only because it is within the artistic frame or the parergon of the art’s institutional parameters, which will persist despite deconstruction or any reversal of hierarchical play. Let us also keep in mind that, through this reversal, the view of art – always defined as absolutely pure, original, spontaneous and subliminal – is also undermined. For, if junk precedes art or supersedes it, then art has plenty of ancestors whose origins, as this work by Golkar illustrates, are impossible to access. Likewise, it has plenty of progeny that are inaccessible, and remain so. Here, as Spivak points out in her introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, ‘the work is open at both ends’40 and thus lacks a stable identity, stable origin, and stable meaning.41 ‘Dissemination’, Caputo wrote, ‘shows in concreto the drift, the slippage, the instability in the chain of signifiers … releasing it into its free play.’42 The words of Derrida resonate throughout Golkar’s dissemination ‘as the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad’.43 Thus, the absence of a known end-point (telos) of the art and its quantum-like dissemination, as Derrida has pointed out, make for infinite possibilities and ‘the free play of imagination’.44 To put it differently, within this play is the disruption of parergon and the dissemination of information beyond mimetic control.45 This is so because junk, which precedes art, serves as a preface to art; and art, which precedes junk, is a preface to the next stage as well. Or, rather, every stage is a metaphor and a simulacrum of the previous stage, and thus, the question of identity and meaning is not repeatable. As Derrida puts it, it is shifting and unreliable.46 For Golkar and Golshiri, this absence of certitude represents freedom from rationality and entry into the world of play – a magical world open to infinite possibilities. The concept of play is further enhanced because the 172

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final product is no longer owned and framed by institutions; thus, the work will not be defined by the metaphysics of art terms, literature, and subsequent theoretical suggestions that will mummify it. The work is now beyond control, and is therefore full of possibilities. It has a magical presence, as it is released from the procrustean bed of theoretical propositions. No wonder that Golkar sees these works as alchemy. In fact, Golkar’s Return Project reminds me of the magical performances of Joseph Beuys as a shaman, in which neither the healer nor the healed are aware of their powers. Freedom, with all of its pitfalls, is magical; to see the world without the dictates of metaphysical narratives is magical. Golkar’s objects, now floating in unknown and inaccessible locations, are disseminated only to be metamorphosed by various hands and minds and places. It is a Kafkaesque path of radical transformation – a Kafkaesque place of flux and unpredictable change. On another level this dissemination, this release of objects by Golkar into the winds of time and shifting spaces of human unfolding – into the unravelling of undetermined forces, into the infinite manifestations of human will manipulating the mythic plays, and into the mysterious flux of Being – reminds us of Meister Eckhart, Heidegger and Derrida’s notions of Glassenheit.47 For Heidegger, just as for Angelus Silesius,48 the world is without why and authenticity of being is ‘openness to mystery’. The magic of being is to see causation and effect as one. Here we have a serene system of making art, of recording it and releasing it without any labels into the world; we have the kind of flux and anti-metaphysical stance that Caputo described as the trembling of Kierkegaard and the Husserlian realisation of annihilation and deconstruction of the world, and of Derrida’s ébranler.49 In his essay ‘The Ends of Man’, Derrida wrote, ‘because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “Style”; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural’.50 Of course, what Nietzsche and Derrida meant by plurality was not variety, but a style that

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carried its opposite, and offered a resolution of these opposites through what Derrida called différance (both difference and deferment).51 For example, in the hierarchical play of the opposites of nature/culture, sensible/intelligible, man/beast, and art/junk, one term is the differing and the deferred of the other.52 Intelligible is the differing and the deferred of sensible; man is the differing and the deferred of what he has named the beast; culture is the differing and the deferred of nature. This point is present in many contemporary Iranian artworks. Ghazali’s real is the differing and the deferred of the ideal (metaphysical); Forouhar’s religion is the differing and the deferred of greed; and Golkar’s art is the differing and the deferred of junk. At this juncture it is important to discuss a work by Barbad Golshiri, The Portrait of the Artist as a One-Year-Old (Fig. 9.8). The portrait is a synchronic image shown diachronically – the figure of childhood embodied by age. The opposites of youth and old age, the binary contradistinctions of synchrony and diachrony, are resolved in terms that undermine the very notion of presence, ideal, and pure understanding. Golshiri’s work underlines the fact that no moment, no concept and no understanding, regardless of how minuscule, is present without difference and deferral. One facet of the binary moves towards the other, and thereby undermines its own integrity of presence, and also that which it will be in another moment and context. On another level, the fact that Golkar and Golshiri are not concerned with the end product or the signified content places the emphasis, first, on dissemination and, second, on how the possibilities of production and the artist’s choices are governed by the institutional and structuring principles of a time (such as modes of trade, concepts of art and junk). Here, in a manner that is reminiscent of Christo’s art, Golkar and Derrida’s discussion in ‘The Conflict of Faculties’ merge to show how the processes and the possibilities in institutional structures make for certain teleological conclusions:

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Fig. 9.8

Barbad Golshiri, Portrait of the Artist as a One-Year-Old Child, 2005, photograph and digital retouch, 107 × 149 cm, courtesy of the artist.

What is somewhat hastily called deconstruction is … a way of taking a position, in its work of analysis, concerning the political and institutional structures that make possible and govern our practices, our competencies, our performances. Precisely because it is never concerned with signified content deconstruction should never be separable from this politico-institutional problematic and should seek a new investigation of responsibility, an investigation which questions the codes inherited from ethics and politics.53 Derrida’s point regarding the questioning of the codes inherited and the institutional structures that ‘govern our practices’ is fully at play in the Return Project, for Golkar shows that the idea of parole is possible only within its langue.54 That is, he shows that the structure of institutions (the commercial grammar, or langue) in a certain time and place makes possible certain aesthetic expressions (paroles). Golkar’s selection of common, mass-produced objects and the transformation of these objects 175

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into art is not new. Duchamp’s work is one well-known example. What is new and quite fitting in deconstruction is the dissemination of the art objects back into the commercial stream as quotidian items, with only a trace of the process recorded as a photograph and a sculpture. Once returned and resold, they are bought as non-art; the buyer is wholly unaware of the mediating powers of the artist, and of the object’s transformation. Not only does the buyer not view the item as art or know the artist, but the buyer does not see him- or herself as a collector. Here, Golkar has released the work from the narrowly defined procrustean bed of what makes art. He has released it from its intellectual, economic and elitist parergon. It is a truism that art is not art unless it is institutionalised by the artist and society. Above all, the dissemination of art into public hands without the abracadabra of parergon erases its artistic privilege and yet allows for objects either to remain quotidian or to have an aesthetic presence, depending on either the venue of their dispersal or the subjective ontological bent of the buyer’s grace. Many ideas follow from this seemingly simple transaction: first, that the Kantian idea of absolute aesthetic value is a myth; and second, that the value of art is not based upon an indubitable foundation but is a function of its parergon as a work of art. In fact, the proof that parergon determines value may well be established by reminding oneself that a genuine work of art, when judged a fake, loses its value and even its aesthetic appeal. Third, if the frame for the work of art is a local dispenser of quotidian items, and if the declaration of the artist is not known, then the frame of utility will be its destiny, and art may become an irrelevant issue. Conclusion In the work of Ghazali, Foruhar and Golkar, the entrenched, privileged concepts become paradoxical, standing for their own opposites: art for junk and junk for art; Le Courbusier for Saddam, beauty for brutality, and value for parergon; God for man and man for God. By reversing the hierarchy, the metaphysical concepts of 176

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art, junk, speech, writing and love, for example, become unreliable; yet, despite this unreliability, we must maintain these concepts. This is also a point Derrida made when interviewed by Julia Kristeva regarding the dismantling of metaphysics.55 In all of these works one sees the shifting value of signs, the metaphysical integrity of the sign is being undermined. Their art rejects the transcendental pretension of understanding the world, because all concepts and values are determined in context. These artists show repeatedly that the same sign, the same metonym, carries various conflicting and contradictory assignations. One may see that signs radically undermine mimesis and give way to diegesis, which takes place through the differential play of a sign with the infinite intents of its readers in various contexts. In all of these works, we have seen what Derrida is interested to unveil – the force that will dismantle the hopeful, selfish, metaphysical position. As a result, new concepts will irrupt into from the old.56 For Forouhar, Moghaddam and Golkar, Ghazali’s approach is phenomenological – a radically objective approach. Their works help crumble the rigid and mummified structures of metaphysics.57 A number of points need to be made here. First, almost all metaphysical expressions are palimpsests – they are documents written over what had to be concealed. For Golkar, the carpet is a palimpsest written over a nature that frightens us; for Forouhar, the weak female is written over the naturally frightened male; and for Golshiri, art is a palimpsest written over junk. What these artists have done is quite similar to the way in which Derrida described his method (to Jean Louis Houdebine): reversal and displacement.58 The choices of these artists include those moments that ‘genuinely threaten to collapse that system’. They have, as Derrida put it, whether consciously or unconsciously, expressed a desire ‘to dismantle [déconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work in [the text], not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way’.59 Yet, most of all – as we look at the works of Ghazali, Forouhar and Golkar – we are reminded 177

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of Emmanuel Levinas’s remark in Totality and Infinity that ‘the movement of metaphysics is the transcendence of hearing in relation to seeing’.60

endnotes 1

Reversal of the hierarchy is one strategy, among a few others – for example, dissemination, grafting, mimetic perversion, parergon – that allows for a critical and yet unconventional reading of a text.

2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, transl.

and ed. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 714.

3

Derrida also believed in play. For example, he wrote that ‘the conceptual determination of the end, limits the free play of imagination’. See Jacques

Derrida, The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 104. 4

Though the claim has been made that contemporary Iranian art owes a great deal to Saqqa-khaneh, the fact is that this style remained within a procrustean

bed of either ancient Iranian or Shiite religious signs concomitant with a European vocabulary of colour and abstraction. For a discussion of

these points and numerous references, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Neo-

Traditionalism and Modern Iranian Painting: The Saqqa-khaneh School

in the 1960s’, Iranian Studies 36: 4 (2005), pp. 607-30. See also Abbas Daneshvari, ‘Seismic Shifts Across Political Zones in Contemporary Iranian Art’, in Staci Gem Scheiwiller, ed., Performing the State: Visual Culture and

Representations of Iranian Identity (New York/London: Anthem, 2013), pp. 101-20. Keshmirshekan’s work offers a full list of references. 5

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Deconstruction is a philosophical strategy and a kind of scrupulous reading that subverts the seemingly apparent message of any text and

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communicates the impossibility of a centred and systematic reading, and

thus of knowledge altogether. The strategies of deconstruction are varied, but in simple terms involve reversal of the hierarchy of any philosophical

opposition, such as grafting, dissemination, and so on. For some excellent readings of deconstruction, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory

and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 3rd edn (New York/London: Routledge, 2003); Rudolph Gasché, ‘Deconstruction as

Criticism’, Glyph 6 (1979), pp. 177-216; J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 6

On this point, Derrida wrote: ‘In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with a peaceful vis-à-vis (coexistence of facing terms) but

rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other

(axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn (reverse) the hierarchy at a given

moment. To overlook this phase of overturning (reversal) is to forget the

conflictual and subordinating structure of the opposition.’ Jacques Derrida,

Positions, transl. and annotated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 41. See also Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 85; or,

‘An opposition of metaphysical concepts (e.g., speech/writing, presence/ absence, etc.) is never the confrontation of two terms, but a hierarchy and

an order of subordination. Deconstruction … must [take place] through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing – [must] put into

practice a reversal of classical opposition and a general displacement of the system.’ See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of

Philosophy, transl. with additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 329. 7

William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction

8

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 173. Press, 1993), p. 93.

9 Plato, The Republic. See his discussion of ‘dialectic’ in any edition.

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10

Heidegger calls Nietzsche the last metaphysician because of Nietzsche’s

theory of the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same: ‘The whole of Western thinking from the Greeks through Nietzsche

is metaphysical thinking. Each age of Western history is grounded in its respective metaphysics. Nietzsche anticipates the consummation of metaphysics … Nietzsche, the thinker of the will to power, is the last

metaphysician of the West.’ Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to

Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, vol. 3 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 7-8. 11

Nietzsche, criticising philosophy and its metaphysical search for truth,

compared philosophers to dwellers on the rigid ice dreaming of the high

plateaus of truth: ‘Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains’. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 674. 12

Nietzsche’s comment comes when rejecting an aphorism by Gustave Flaubert, who had stated, ‘On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis’ (‘One can

think and write only when sitting down’). Nietzsche replied, ‘Now I have you, nihilist! Assiduity [das Sitzfleisch] is the sin against the Holy Spirit.

Only ideas won by walking have any value.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Maxims

and Arrows’, no. 34, The Twilight of Idols, in The Twilight of Idols and the Anti-Christ, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction by Michael Tanner (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 36. 13

And yet, from the view of physics, this flux, as Heidegger defines the Nietzschean concept of change, ‘cannot simply mean waste confusion, but the secrecy of the unsubdued domain of becoming’. See Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xxxiv. 14

Ray, Literary Meaning, p. 144. For a wonderful study of metaphysics,

see Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, a new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000).

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15 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, pp. 64-67. 16

In an interview, Ghazali mentions that the project was a by-product of his idealisation of these figures. See vimeo.com/24270944 (accessed on 25 November 2013).

17

The quote is from Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, transl. with an

introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 100. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and

Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007), pp. 33ff. 18

See Daneshvari, ‘Parastou Forouhar’, in Amazingly Original: Contemporary

19

In an interview for Deutsche Bank Magazine, commenting on her 2002 show,

Iranian Art at a Crossroads (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2014).

‘Shule Auszeichen’ (‘Take Off Your Shoes’), she said: ‘At the present moment I am more involved with politics than with art.’ Russel Harris, ‘A Cultural Predicament’, in Issa, Parastou Forouhar (London: Saqi Books, 2010), p. 13.

20

See also Britta Schmitz, ‘Tausendundeine Macht’, in Tausend und ein Tag,

21

I am using the term in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung or abstract-

(Berlin: Reiter Druck, 2003), pp. 17ff.

negative-concrete, wherein the inherent flaws of any abstract idea lead to its dismantling and the formation of new ideas.

22

The idea of covering structures with religious banners is, of course,

a throw-back to the covering of so-called holy structures with kiswas

(textiles bearing religious signs) to ascertain the presence of the divine principle. The covering aims to hide and mystify a physical construct

whose pretensions to the unseen and the invisible would, without the

rituals of concealment, be easily revealed as mundane. Though the covers need covers too, however, the first stage of mystification, the first wrapping, entraps the believer and silences doubts. 23

Rose Issa, ‘Foreword’, in Parastou Forouhar, p. 6. Her father Dariush

Forouhar was minister of labour in Bazargan’s government, and advocated the separation of Church and State.

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24

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, transl. Walter Kaufmann

25

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. lxxv.

26

‘To deconstruct philosophy would be to think, in the most faithful interior way, about the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine, from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy, what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhat motivated repression.’ Derrida, Positions, p. 6.

27

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. lxxvii.

28

Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, transl. H. Harvey and D. Harvey (Oxford:

29

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 82.

30

Abbas Daneshvari, Of Serpents and Dragons in Islamic Art: An Iconographical

(New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 86.

Blackwell, 1979), Chapter 4.

Study (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2011), pp. 107-26; A. J. Wensinck, ‘The Ideas of Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth’, in Studies of A. J. Wensinck (New York: Arno Press), pp. 1-65.

31 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 33. 32

Daneshvari, Amazingly Original.

33

John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the

34

J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction, p. 18.

Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 268-78.

35 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 269. 36

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings, p. 419.

37

Parergon is an issue of profound significance in the works of Golkar, to which I have referred elsewhere. See ‘Babak Golkar’, in Daneshvari, Amazingly Original.

38 Ibid.

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39

See ‘Barbad Golshiri’, in Daneshvari, Amazingly Original.

40

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. xii.

41 Ibid. 42 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 148. 43

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. xi; see also note. 8.

44

Ibid., see note 3.

45

As for the photograph taken by Golkar, whose ancestral origin is readily

known as Derrida’s concept of différance once again deprives the work

of the notion of purity and of the metaphysic of presence. This is so because the meaning of the art is suspended between differences with other entities and temporal deferral, which causes it to shift. As a result,

meaning is never stable, and it lies across an unmapped topography. For a succinct introduction to Derrida’s différance, see Norris, Deconstruction, pp. 24-31. 46

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. lxxvii.

47

For the ethics of Glassenheit, see Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, pp. 264–78.

48

Ibid., pp. 268–78.

49 Ibid. 50 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 135. 51

On Derrida’s difference and différance see ibid., pp. 1–28. For full references

52

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. xxix. See also Derrida, Margins of

and a succinct discussion, see Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 89ff. Philosophy, pp. 3–27.

53 Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 156. 54

See Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1973), pp. 45ff, wherein utterances (paroles) are made possible by the system of langue (the structure or grammar of language).

55 Derrida, Positions, pp. 17, 18-19.

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56

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. lxxvii.

57

K. Malcolm Richards, Derrida Reframed (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), p. 32.

58

Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, pp. lxxv and lxxvi.

59

Ibid., p. lxxv.

60 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 100; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Chapters 1–3.

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10 Introducing Art from the Middle East and Its Diaspora into Western Institutions: Benefits and Dilemmas FERESHTEH DAFTARI

H

amid Keshmirshekan’s question – whether ‘exhibitions of “Middle Eastern” art build bridges or perpetuate stereotypes’– leads me to consider notions of representation and reception, to examine how context affects reading, and, finally, to assess whether such exhibitions are at all necessary or beneficial. These are issues that, informed by my own personal curatorial perspective, I will reformulate in terms of the benefits and dilemmas of organising such exhibitions, including the gap between curatorial intention and critical reception.

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Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking Among the various exhibitions I have curated with Middle Eastern artists, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking is the one exhibition I will discuss at greater length because, thanks to its mainstream exposure at the Museum of Modern Art, it instigated a great deal of discussion, raising questions that have remained unanswered to this day.1 Held in 2006, it was the first exhibition initiated by the Department of Painting and Sculpture in 40 years to be devoted to non-Western artists, and the first one to feature artists mostly from the Middle East.2 This fact in itself, I would argue, represented a benefit to the institution, in that it brought to light issues not generally associated with MoMA, thereby expanding its discursive space and conferring a truly international status upon a museum sometimes criticised for its Euro-American centrism. This exhibition of work by artists from an ‘unorthodox’ origin, a complex and vast area known as the ‘Islamic world’ – which encompasses cultural spaces beyond the geography of a museum best known for its superb collection and exhibitions of Western art – was allowed to take off only because of the support I received from the director, Glenn Lowry, whose own background is in ‘Islamic art’ (I will keep this phrase when referring to traditional art). Yet Lowry and I did not share the same views. His angle at the beginning of the project was ‘Islam and modernity’, and mine was questioning the very phrase ‘Islamic art’ when applied to the contemporary production of a heterogeneous group of artists living in diaspora. The curatorial agenda was not always apparent to critics, who confused the intentions stated in the exhibition catalogue by the curator with the director’s personal assessments published outside the framework of the exhibition, in Art News.3 Some critics, including one of the participating artists, paid attention to the director’s words while disregarding the actual curatorial parameters. In addition, given the religious sensitivities that were pervasive at that time (the

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opening of the exhibition coincided with the controversy around the Danish cartoons), and the tacit policy of public institutions to favour neutrality, taking an unequivocally militant stance against the phrase Islamic art was not an option, lest it result in unintended consequences and false interpretations, such as an opposition to Islam as a religion. Religion was not my target; Orientalist visions were. In not reverting to neutrality, while making an effort to resist Orientalist assumptions and being cautious not to offend people of faith, I laid out a treacherous path for myself to follow. Genesis of the Exhibition The ever-increasing flow of artists from various parts of the Islamic world to study, and then mostly to settle and work, in the West was a contemporary phenomenon worth highlighting. In addition, widespread use of the phrase Islamic art, applied mostly to traditional art but also being extended to contemporary art, needed further scrutiny. Since its use was being pursued with renewed vigour both in academia and museums, it was necessary then, as now, to dwell on it. Contesting the Phrase ‘Islamic Art’ The artists selected for the exhibition, now acknowledged as the most outstanding of their generation, had very little in common, I argued. They did not share the same nationality, ethnicity, aesthetics, culture, history, or political concerns – or even a common preoccupation with politics. In several cases they did not share Islam as a religion. How could they share an Islamic denomination? The phrase ‘Islamic art’, a European invention, is enmeshed in a colonial history that homogenised the artistic production of an area stretching from Indonesia to Morocco, from the seventh century to modern times. Yet, as recently as 2010, an exhibition held in Munich exemplified the persistence of this mentality.4 While celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the famous 1910 Masterpieces of Muhammedan 189

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Art exhibition, viewed and praised by artists such as Matisse and Kandinsky,5 it included a substantial section on contemporary art, which was presented as contemporary Islamic art. Its organisers, claiming a progressive agenda, wrote: ‘This notion of setting equal time to these works of art is a corrective act that rescues Islamic art from the past in which it was typically situated and gives it a space in the modern and contemporary domains.’6 Does anyone protest that Christian art has not been rescued from the past and applied to discussions of Picasso and Cindy Sherman? An artist such as Barnett Newman, of Jewish faith, would never be labelled Christian by Western curators and professors of art history, but the organisers of the Munich exhibition did not hesitate to include Shohreh Feyzjou (a Jewish Iranian), as well as Emily Jacir, Walid Raad and Mona Hatoum (all three Christians), under the umbrella of contemporary Islamic art.7 Thus, by means of academically imposed constructs – this time with a politically correct agenda – we are again witnessing the perpetuation of the myth of a collective Islamic identity. In confirmation of my position, the critic Souren Melikian has noted, ‘The very concept of Islamic art is alien to the cultures that adhered to Islam, but that has never troubled the scholars who hold forth on the subject in their books as in their university lectures. This phrase was never used in Islamic lands until cultural institutions in Middle East started copying the West.’8 Today, it seems, the vacuum in the new, emerging fields of modern and contemporary art of the various Middle Eastern countries is often filled by specialists either from disciplines that do not involve any knowledge of art or from the discipline of historic Islamic art. But attention needs to be paid to the voice of prominent Islamic art specialists such as Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, who maintain that ‘there is no reason why anyone trained to study the Islamic art of eighth-century Syria … should be more interested or able to expound on the art of contemporary Kuwaiti women’.9 Consider the reverse situation: asking the opinion of specialists in modern and contemporary art on, for instance, Fatimid mosques or Safavid textiles. The absurdity 190

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of the expectation is self-evident. Indiscriminately clinging to the term Islamic for all contemporary art is what I would consider a ‘friendlier version of Orientalism’ – and is not, as one critic claimed, what I tried to do in Without Boundary. 10 It appears to me, however, that the strongest objection against the application of the term Islamic for contemporary art comes from Iranians. Viscerally connected to a national identity in formation centuries before the arrival of Islam and the Arab conquest, Iranians resent their historical position as what today would be termed ‘subaltern’. Opposition to the term Islamic finds further justification when you consider the contemporary political conditions in Iran – very different from, say, Egypt before the Arab Spring, where opposition to repression came from religious and not secular quarters. In Iran, to name an Iranian artist Islamic is to identify him or her as being in alliance with state ideology. The possibility that such an implication might be made erroneously is one more argument against a broad application of the term. Holding views that differ from mine, Jessica Winegar,an anthropologist who worked in Egypt before the Arab Spring, and Barry Flood, a professor of Islamic art at New York University, feel uncomfortable about what the latter calls ‘the emphasis on Islamic art as a predominantly “secular” art’.11 Somewhat in agreement with them, Salah Hassan, writing in the publication released for the hundredth anniversary of Muhammedan Art in Munich, laments museums and curators who ‘rush to show “good” Muslims or the positive aspects of “moderate” Islam’.12 By implication, Without Boundary is found guilty of representing ‘good Muslims’ as opposed to ‘bad Muslims’ – the latter denoting militant voices opposing US interventionist policies. Applying a political model – expounded by Mahmoud Hamdani in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2005) – to contemporary artists is highly problematic not only because the reference to religion Islamicises all artists, but also because it accuses secular voices of complicity with American foreign policy. This Manichaean position not only fails to

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acknowledge that one might be secular and still against interventionist American policies, but also creates a stereotype that all artists from the region are political activists. While denying the choice of being apolitical, it homogenises practices attached to a variety of cultural or national allegiances, promiscuous aesthetic affiliations, and subversive positions. Ultimately, it also hampers the basic right to keep one’s faith or lack of it private. In short, my argument is that the term Islamic can no longer be divorced from religion and politics, and therefore cannot be applied to all indiscriminately without potentially imposing irrelevant readings. Islamic art, a phrase of convenience, has become increasingly inconvenient. It is instructive to consider the dilemma of naming an exhibition that aims to dismantle the application of an Orientalist-derived denomination for a post-Orientalist art. At MoMA, my first thoughts were in the direction of ‘Art after Orientalism’. Other titles followed, including ‘Islamic or Not’, which I retained as the title of my own essay. The administration decided on Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. This title suited my purpose because the boundary I was contesting was the dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The artists and I were all outside this binary opposition. The explanation about the exhibition title may serve as a cautionary note to those who are not familiar with the internal mechanisms of institutions: they need to bear in mind that the ultimate package they get does not necessarily reflect the unedited voice of the curator; nor can it be considered a pure manifestation of an institution’s DNA. How Was the Argument Implemented in Without Boundary ? To begin with, I brought together a number of disparate works, a selection that in itself would repudiate homogeneity. I asked, What does the hedonist painting of the Muslim/Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw have to do with the anti-Orientalist vision of the half-Iraqi, half-Irish artist Jananne Al-Ani, whose religion I do not even know? Even when dealing with two artists from the same country – in 192

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this case, Iran – such as the New York–based Y. Z. Kami, whose work is deeply entrenched in a universal kind of spirituality, and the humorous comic strips of the Paris-based Marjane Satrapi, who satirises the ramifications of a mandated Islamic identity, the question of whether there was any common ground remained. Certainly, neither would be considered Islamic inside their native country. Kami’s thinking has greater affinities with the American artist Bill Viola, one of whose videos was included in the show, than with Satrapi’s. Why frame such a disparate group of artists as practitioners of Islamic art? Every single piece in the show problematised this vision. My strategy in one section of the exhibition was to employ aesthetic categories intimately linked to traditional Islamic art, which I was going to dismantle – categories such as miniature painting, carpets and calligraphy. It would have made no sense for me to select works without any reference to the past vocabulary of Islamic art, or any relevance to certain regional issues, and conclude they were not examples of Islamic art (Plates 20–22). For instance, I could not have selected works such as the cribs or the magnified kitchen utensils that abound in Mona Hatoum’s body of work, because they remained outside the discourse I had decided to engage with. Instead I picked her Prayer Mat. I needed to maintain the link in order to measure the distance. Let us consider two examples. Shahzia Sikander’s Perilous Order13 provides a perfect entry into the conceptual framework of the exhibition. Even though this miniature painting masquerades as a Mogul portrait, it consists of so many layers (Hindu, Western traits derived from Minimalism, and personal iconography) that the end result is such a hybrid that it defies the reductive designation Islamic. The artists in this show not only aimed to revise and subvert traditions of Islamic art, but also operated against Western stereotypical perceptions and aesthetic traditions. Ghada Amer’s Definition of Love According to Le Petit Robert14 is a case in point. 193

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While defying her French teacher, who expected her to produce manicured calligraphy in Arabic script, she turned to a dishevelledlooking Roman script and, furthermore, subverted the macho culture associated with Abstract Expressionism and drip-painting, creating a feminist statement by using a needle and thread – tools traditionally associated with women’s labour. Overcoming Ghettoisation Without Boundary also addressed the danger of ghettoizing the art. My solution was to open up the space by including a couple of works by Western artists – not to legitimise the rest, as was narrowly understood by some critics, but rather to further my argument against the notion of Islamic art. Bringing together the work of Shirazeh Houshiary, Bill Viola and Y. Z. Kami created a spiritual space beyond the boundary of any specifically defined religion (Plates 20–21). Another cluster included Shirana Shahbazi, Mike Kelley and Mona Hatoum, who were not producing examples of Islamic art but making conceptual interventions into the trope of Oriental carpets (Plate 22). Ironically, the carpet by the American artist, Mike Kelley, was the most traditionally Islamic-looking object in the entire show – Islamic because it was based directly on a seventeenth-century Turkish carpet in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kelley’s cross-pollination of traditional motifs with hex signs of the Pennsylvania Dutch people, for instance, is close in spirit to Shahbazi’s introduction of Western iconographic categories (portrait, landscape and still life) into the medium of carpets woven in Iran. Prayer Mat,15 by the Christian artist Mona Hatoum, has greater affinities with conceptual art than with Islamic carpets. Hatoum appropriates the idea of a prayer mat not to continue the tradition but to reinvent it, and perhaps to subvert it. The brass pins dotting the field of the floor piece create a repellent site, not a welcoming prayer mat. If the intention were to be subversive, that would be a major reason not to label it Islamic on 194

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religious grounds. But the Islamic-or-not argument constrains the fundamental message of the piece, which is in line with the rest of Hatoum’s body of work. The repellent quality of this floor piece and the compass embedded within it speak of Hatoum’s pervasive anxiety over location – or, better yet, dislocation – in relation to exile and disorientation. Equally, the sculpture is about formal issues alien to Islamic art. Hatoum reconciles Western aesthetics considered to be polar opposites: minimalism and the Duchampian readymade (the pins and compass). The formal result is as hybrid as Mike Kelley’s, but with references beyond the deceptively Islamic appearance of the sign and the title. Disentangling the work from the false identity of ‘Islamic art’ allows the release of the various concepts, strategies and meanings. The inclusion of the two American artists served to break down the ‘Islamic’/ ‘not Islamic’ opposition, and create a more fluid space where parallel strategies could be observed beyond the divisive politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Without Boundary and Politics: the Dilemma of Context I would like to address the question of politics in relation to this show, as the subject was much written about. Tyler Green, for instance, titled his review ‘MoMA Keeps the Walls Clean; Islamic Show Sans Politics’.16 He was wrong on both counts: his rubric Islamic and his assertion that the show was devoid of politics. Shahzia Sikander’s Web, in which fighter planes are caught in the spider’s web of some oil-rigged corner of the world – which is nothing if not a condemnation of US intervention in the Middle East – was one instance of political art.17 Blindness to it points to another dilemma: that of subtlety. When those who are not trained to read visual texts become the arbiters of taste, their preference is often for overt slogans rather than a quiet, poetic, nuanced, anti-war editorial such as Sikander’s. Mona Hatoum’s Keffieh – one of the 195

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most politically charged objects she has ever created, and one that she describes as ‘a potent symbol of Arab resistance’, a statement quoted in my text – was another example.18 I could also point to Emily Jacir’s subtle antidote to the Western media’s demonisation of Palestinians in Ramallah/New York, her double-screen video – one channel shot in Ramallah, the other in New York – which leaves any viewer puzzled as to which scene is located in which city.19 Jananne al-Ani and Walid Raad scrutinised and dismantled Orientalist constructs: Al-Ani deconstructed the Orientalist gaze pervading the way in which exotic identities are performed in photo studios; Raad reversed the mission civilisatrice agenda by having his fictional Lebanese historian inspect European capitals.20 Raad’s images were created after 9/11 but, as I noted in my text, they allude to a period before 9/11 ‘when an Arab could innocently pose against the landmarks of colonial powers’.21 Marjane Satrapi and Shirin Neshat treated political issues related to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Neshat – the very artist who was interviewed by Tyler Green, and who objected to the lack of political content in the show – was represented by some of her most political imagery, right next to that of Hatoum, Raad and Jacir.22 In addition, as was recognised by some, the very existence of this show – mounted in New York City, within the stronghold of Western art – was itself a political gesture. Having said this, the expectation of political content from Middle Eastern artists is in itself a dogmatic stereotype that was questioned in the exhibition. I did so by featuring works by Shirazeh Houshiary and Y. Z. Kami, who do not operate within a political register. The issues and themes tackled by the artists in this show covered a wide territory. They ranged from formal and aesthetic issues to philosophical themes, such as the flux between presence and absence, all the way to political themes (gender issues, colonialism, Orientalism, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Palestinian issue, US intervention in the Middle East, and 9/11). If the show did not include works about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was because, to my knowledge, the represented artists – the strongest 196

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of their generation – had simply not produced any. Capitalising on the stereotypical view of MoMA as a formalist institution, the critic found corroboration in Neshat’s negative attitude, evoked by other authors who regrettably failed to contextualize her critical impulse within personal motives and agendas. The ‘Question of Bridge-Building’ In my view, artists do not set out to build bridges. Some operate beyond the polarities implied by the very notion of a ‘bridge’. Kami, for instance, maintains that ‘art has no country’.23 Others dwell on the notion of difference; for instance, the fictions that Neshat weaves in diaspora are perceived – not in Iran but over here – as reliable information from a local informant, as a bridge to the other side. Without Boundary contextualised her viewpoint as one among many. All voices need to be heard. Any exhibition that stresses complexity acts as an antidote to the toxic and simplistic images presented by the Western media, and consequently erodes barriers of misunderstanding. Dismantling Stereotypes, or Creating Them? Within the modest space afforded by the exhibition, I attempted to dismantle the perception that artists from a certain region of the world are tethered to their place of origin and belong to a single community – that they live in a cultural quarantine; that they are engaged in perpetuating traditional modes of expression along expected lines; that all have Islam and politics on their minds; that they come from monolithic societies without any dissenting or self-critical resources; and that all share the same political concerns and outlook on identity, spirituality and aesthetics. If, as some believe, the exhibition did not resolve the issue of Islamic art that it set out to resolve, that is precisely because of the strategy I chose. This is a common dilemma of any form of art or discourse that employs the language of what it is denouncing. 197

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Iranian Arts Now: Performance Art Seven years after Without Boundary, a great deal of Middle Eastern art now exists in the commercial domain. The market, it must be acknowledged, has done much to discover and feature artists, but sales remain its central goal. Realising the need for non-profit enterprises to step in to present work that does not circulate in the commercial world, I agreed to take part in the Iranian Arts Festival, held in 2012 at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where I featured performance art. The performances were devised to challenge the notion of Iranian art as a commercial, decorative commodity, and as stereotypically ethnic. Four artists participated: Barbad Golshiri (Plate 23), Amir Mobed, and Neda Razavipour, all residents of Tehran, and Amir Baradaran, from New York.

Safar/Voyage : Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists Around 2010, I was asked by the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to create an exhibition that would provide an introduction to contemporary Middle Eastern art, preferably with calligraphy. I presented to them a different concept: the idea of placing the artists within the universal theme of the voyage.24 My initial concerns, based on my own outdated notions of anthropology, were soon dispelled, as I learned how MOA was itself engaged in deconstructing obsolete definitions, and in their pioneering programmes were exhibiting art from various world regions. I found it very interesting that, within the context of this specific museum, in order to reach the two exhibition galleries allotted to Safar/Voyage, visitors had to cross the Great Hall, passing through a forest of majestic nineteenth-century totem poles. Such a trajectory instantly de-exoticised the encounter with the first work in the exhibition, by Raafat Ishak – a sequence of panels presented as a march of nations, each one represented by its national flag and its bureaucratic response (or absence of response) 198

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to a request for immigration (Plate 24) – and squarely placed it in the contemporary world. I constructed an odyssey, beginning with our shared world represented by a map by Farhad Moshiri, a globe by Mona Hatoum (Plates 25–26), and a panoramic view of humanity seen from above by Ali Banisadr. The trajectory then descended into cities, following distinct narratives woven around themes such as war, revolution, pilgrimage, and a politically invested archaeological site. The encounters brought viewers to places such as Baghdad (Adel Abidin), Tehran (Nazgol Ansarinia and Mitra Tabrizian), Cairo (Susan Hefuna), Konya (Y. Z. Kami) and Persepolis (Parviz Tanavoli). Kutlug Ataman revised the notion of Mesopotamia, and Tarek AlGhoussein’s featureless settings provided a stage for the performance of identity. A number of metaphoric works revealing various facets of the idea of the voyage supplemented the show. Among them were Taysir Batniji’s longing to return home, Ayman Baalbaki’s pressing urge to escape from it, and Raafat Ishak’s desire for immigration. Life itself, conceived as a voyage or as abruptly terminated introduced further subjects, tackled by Youssef Nabil and Hamed Sahihi. Relayed through an imaginary itinerary, some of the burning issues of the region and of our time, as well as the existential concerns of individual artists became vividly apparent. This voyage could be continued with many other artists from all the corners of the globe. With this exhibition (which could not have been organised around the time of Without Boundary because, with a few exceptions, the art was created in 2006 and later), I was given an opportunity to rethink how to introduce ‘Middle Eastern’ artists to the Western public while making sure that the term ‘Middle East’ itself (like Islamic) was clearly problematised in the accompanying publication.25 I look back with gratitude at working with an institution that respected my views and never attempted to clip my wings. As far as I am aware, the only point of contention among critics was a desire to see more Canadian artists included. Despite this critique, the exhibition’s very positive reception

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confirmed to me the joy of certain communities at being referred to in creative works rather than negative portrayals in the news media. The benefit of such exhibitions goes beyond theoretical intentions. As I have witnessed several times, these shows help to restore the dignity of demonised peoples and heal their bruised egos. Personally, the enthusiastic response I received from the general public of different nationalities has been my greatest reward. In 2006 my motive was to bring visibility to artists who had been traditionally excluded from the canon, and to recalibrate perceptions about the art they produced. In 2012, the performance art shown in Paris flowed in a counter-current to the kind of art promoted for its speculative value. Finally, in 2013, when Safar/Voyage was inaugurated, I worked with a concept that allowed for culturally specific and personal visions to exist within a universal spectrum. When an artistic field is new, and familiarity with it is limited, an introductory phase, as represented by the exhibitions described above – despite its pitfalls – may be necessary. This ‘Middle East 101’ phase is perhaps over by now, at least in North America. Today, we may perhaps stage thematic exhibitions including artists from all parts of the globe, as well as focusing increasingly on individual achievements – an indulgence reserved until now for European and American artists.

endnotes 1

See Fereshteh Daftari, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, with

an essay by Homi Bhabha and prose by Orhan Pamuk (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006).

2

200

I must qualify this statement by pointing out that, in 1964, an exhibition

of 26 Israeli painters and sculptors had been organised at MoMA.

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I am also excluding the film department, which has always been quite international. The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, an exhibition

organised by Dorothy C. Miller and William S. Lieberman in 1966, was the last exhibition of non-Western art held at MoMA. 3

Glenn D. Lowry, ‘Gained in Translation’, Art News, March 2006, pp.

4

See Chris Dercon, León Krempel and Avinoam Shalem, eds, The Future

121-5.

of Tradition – The Tradition of Future: 100 Years after the Exhibition

‘Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art’ in Munich. (Munich: Haus der Kunst/ Prestel Verlag, 2010). 5

See Fereshteh Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse and

6

Avinoam Shalem and Eva-Maria Troelenber, ‘Changing Views: The 1910

Kandinsky (New York/London: Garland, 1991).

Exhibition as a Pictorial Turn’, in Dercon et al., The Future of Tradition –

The Tradition of Future (Munich: Haus der Kunst/Prestel Verlag, 2010), p. 15 7

As reported in ‘Islamic or Not’, my text for the catalogue of Without Boundary, I asked Oleg Grabar, the eminent scholar of Islamic art, to provide a definition of Islamic art, to which he replied that it was ‘art

made in and/or for areas and times dominated by Muslim rulers and

populations’. Grabar clearly stated to me that he did not consider the works in the exhibition to be Islamic art. 8

Souren Melikian, ‘When Cultural Identity Is Denied’, New York Times, 9

9

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field’, Art Bulletin 85: 1 (March 2003), p. 175.

10

To avoid confrontation with many colleagues whose work I often respect,

March 2012.

I will refrain from footnoting those statements I have interpreted as being malicious, self-aggrandising or thoughtless.

11

Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Post-modernism? New

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World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’, in Elizabeth C. Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions (New

York/London: Routledge, 2007), p. 44. See also Jessica Winegar, ‘The

Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror’, Anthropological Quarterly 8: 3 (2008), pp. 651-81. 12

Salah M. Hassan, ‘Contemporary “Islamic” Art: Western Curatorial Politics of Representation in Post 9/11’, in Dercon et al., The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future, p. 35.

13

See Daftari, Without Boundary, Plate 9.

14

See ibid., Plate 7.

15

See ibid., Plate 18.

16

Tyler Green, ‘MoMA Keeps the Walls Clean; Islamic Show Sans

17

See Daftari, Without Boundary, Plate 11.

18

See ibid., Plate 25, and p. 22 for the quote.

19

For a selection of images, see ibid., Plates 36 and 37.

20

For images of Al-Ani’s Untitled I–II, see ibid., Plates 23 and 24; and for

Politics’, New York Observer, 3 April 2006.

Walid Raad’s Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves, see Plates 39-42.

21 Daftari, Without Boundary, p. 22. 22

For Neshat’s Untitled and Speechless, see ibid., Plates 2 and 3; for her Last

Word, see Plate 38. For images of Marjane Satrapi’s Kim Wilde chapter, see Plates 27-35.

23

Ibid., p. 99.

24

See Fereshteh Daftari and Jill Baird, eds, Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists (Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley: Douglas & McIntyre, 2013).

25

202

See Derek Gregory, Middle of What? East of Where? in ibid., pp. 39–51.

11 Histories of the Present: The Changing Worlds of Middle Eastern Artists VENETIA PORTER

A

t the press conference to launch Shubbak, the Festival of Arab Culture, in the summer of 2013,1 the respected Financial Times journalist Peter Aspden placed the events that would be happening around London at that time squarely within the framework of the contemporary politics of the Middle East. This was a theme that had begun to interest him upon seeing the work of Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla at the London gallery Art Space the preceding year (Plate 27).2 For him and others – indeed, including museum curators such as myself – a powerful draw of the work currently being produced by artists from or of the Middle East is that in its subject matter it appears to offer some insight into the 203

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Fig. 11.1a

Hazem Harb, from the Beyond Memory Series, No. 1/3, 2012, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

Fig. 11.1b

Hazem Harb, from the Beyond Memory Series, No. 1/3, 2012, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

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Fig. 11.1C

Hazem Harb, from the Beyond Memory Series, No. 1/3, 2012, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

complex and increasingly harrowing politics of the many countries that make up the region we call the Middle East. Aspden wrote: ‘Art in these regions is both a clarion call and a signifier.’3 He contrasted this with the work of Western artists, saying that ‘nothing dulls the creative spirit more than centuries of civil liberties’. The question that immediately arises out of this is: How do the artists themselves react to being given this role? This essay explores this question by way of introduction, and then goes on to discuss a different and yet related topic – namely, the relationship that some artists have with what we can broadly term ‘cultural tradition’, and how this is expressed in what they do. In relation to Aspden’s ‘clarion call’, we need to examine what the potential dangers are in what is in effect the search for an understanding of the contemporary world through an analysis of the art. This issue has been most succinctly framed by Tunisian artist Nadia Kaabi Linke, who is most troubled by this notion.4 ‘Correct me if I’m wrong’, she writes,

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but I think the last thing the world needs is a bunch of artists who have become activists or visionaries ‘on demand’. Artists cannot do the job of journalists, political experts or scientists. We just need time to understand the realities we are confronted with, more time than the news media and fashion-driven markets can grant us. But artists need this time to discover and experiment [with] new ways to reflect and understand the unexpected of the unexpected. Yes, I think the demands of a globalised media economy have influenced the artistic practice in the MENA region. However, let’s be optimistic about contemporary and aesthetic powers in the region and act on the assumption that they will be able to shape demands of media and markets in the future.5 Kaabi Linke is rightly questioning the tacit motivations of those interested in works by Middle Eastern artists and who are looking at it other than just as art. But is there another danger – that artists as a result feel a need to make art that caters to this hunger on the part of Western curators, journalists and cultural commentators? This is probably a matter that can only be judged in years to come, following a comprehensive analysis of the subject matter covered by artists of the Middle East during the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. But the other question is whether art that may reflect on a particular political situation can really have the power to change perceptions. For example, when one considers the work of a number of Palestinian artists, viewers looking at the work of Eman Mohammed, for example (Plate 28) – whatever their political affiliations – must undoubtedly be moved by the personal story of Khidr and his daughters; or, equally, when they consider the lyrical photomontages of Hazem Harb (Figs. 11.1a, b and c), the stark Negative Incursion of Rula Halawani (Fig. 11.2), or the paintings on Jerusalem stones by Steve Sabella (Plate 29). While

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such works are not likely in themselves to change the policy on the illegal settlements on Palestinian land or the ‘separation wall’, they, among many others, will stand in the future as body of work contributing to the recording of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While these works may not individually constitute a ‘clarion call’, taken together, they provide a persistent and steady message with a slow burn effect. Artists and ‘Cultural Tradition’ The relationship that some artists have to what might loosely be termed cultural tradition, or heritage, is illuminated by the work of three artists whose work I will briefly discuss: Sadegh Tirafkan, whose self-declared ‘Iranian-ness’ conditions his work connected to Shiite tradition; the Tunisian artist, Nicène Kossentini, who uses texts by the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabi, as well as pre-Islamic poetry; and the Yemeni artist, Boushra Almutawakel, who has explored issues around the veil in her Mother Daughter Doll series. Sadegh Tirafkan (1965-2013), in a 2008 interview, having spent time in New York where he met a number of conceptual artists, described how he was inspired by these artists ‘on a technical level’ rather than by the content of their work ‘By this’, he said, ‘I mean I was not influenced by the subject matter that western artists were tackling at that time. In fact the experience made me believe even more in myself and my “Iranian-ness”.’6 One of the obituaries after his death in 2013 spoke of how he ‘remained an Iranian in his heart, deeply proud of his culture’.7 There are a number of series in the body of work that Tirafkan left behind that demonstrate what the essential dilemma was for him, and for many others: how to negotiate cultural tradition within the contemporary world. We can see this in particular in Loss of Our Identity, and in his other series Persepolis. Each of these reflects his growing interest in Iranian history, including its art and its

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Fig. 11.2

Rula Halawani, Negative Incursion, 2002, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

Figures 11.3a & b Sadegh Tirafkan, from the Soldiers series, 1997‐1999, courtesy of the Sadegh Tirafkan Foundation.

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monuments. But it is his ‘Ashura series that goes directly to the heart of who he was. There are three reasons why this theme was to become so dominant in his work: he was born in Karbala in 1965; his father was an active Shiite; and he was a basiji – a member of the youth militia many of whose members famously fought and died in the Iran-Iraq war. His family had been in Iraq for a long time, as part of large community of Iranian Shiites who were brutally expelled by Saddam Hussein in 1971. But it seems that Tirafkan’s father was a clever businessman, and astutely sold his business in Iraq, enabling him to set up in Iran, where he settled in Ahwaz. He was a bazari, from the wealthy class of merchants. Sadegh was six at this time, and a connection with the ˛ rituals of Shi ism had been instilled in him early on. His father led the Muharram processions, and was a well-known performer, leader and participant in the ceremonies. Tirafkan was 11 in 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war broke out. When he was 15, he volunteered as a basiji, and remained in the militia for three years. It is important to realise that he was a volunteer: the basij was separate from the official army, and many of his contemporaries did not in fact enlist in it. This became a complex issue for many Iranians, and it is clear that some guilt was attached to those who did not join the basij. At this point, being a basiji was highly charged; it has been said that Ayatollah Khomeini deliberately encouraged the link between Shiite martyrdom and jihad against Iraq, in order to send young men out to war. Many would carry photographs of the Supreme Leader in their pockets. During those three years, Tirafkan and other young militiamen lived side by side in a mosque, where all the boys carried out collective rituals in honour of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Tirafkan’s experiences of the war were later re-created in a series in which he used staged photographs to evoke the memory of the experience, and of the friends he had lost (Figs. 11.3a and b).

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Fig. 11.4a

Sadegh Tirafkan, from the ‘Ashura Ritual Tehran Bazaar series, 1990, courtesy of the Sadegh Tirafkan Foundation.

Fig. 11.4b

Sadegh Tirafkan, from the ‘Ashura Ritual Tehran Bazaar series, 1990, courtesy of the Sadegh Tirafkan Foundation.

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But these photographs were not his initial ventures as an artist. After returning from the war, he began his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tehran University, where he studied between 1984 and 1990. He specialised in photography, and his earliest works – which he later entitled Initial Steps, and which he documented in a monograph published in 2013 – showcase a series of university projects from 1985 to 1990.8 We can observe an early preoccupation with Shiite ritual in the ‘Ashura series of 1990 (Figs. 11.4a and b). But he did not like the genre that he was studying with the direction of his course at the Faculty. It was designed to provide training in photojournalism, in which what was most important, photographically, was to ‘capture the moment’. Tirafkan quickly realised it was not for him – because he was ‘not much of a social person and [didn’t] like being in crowds, [he] was not willing to treat photography in this way’.9 It was at this point that he began to experiment with staged photography. This came about entirely because Tirafkan came across a magazine of photography in which he encountered the works of American artist Cindy Sherman, which led him to change his approach to photography entirely. An early experiment with his new thinking can be seen in the ‘Ashura series, where he began to combine ‘real’ photographs with staged ones – often inserting himself into the picture, as he would often do later in his career. There are strong evocations here of the fervour and intensity of religious ritual, in relation to which Tirafkan can be seen as a bystander, an observer, or perhaps even a reluctant participant. This preoccupation with overtly Shiite themes – the focus on ‘Ashura; the associated subject matter of Zurkhanah, with its overt references to Imam ‘Ali;10 the installation, Hejleh, that he created at the Los Angeles County Museum in 2011 as part of the Gifts of the Sultans11 exhibition – can be seen as part of a single preoccupation that he was continuing to develop. This inevitably recalls Saqqakhaneh – works produced by a number of Iranian artists during the 1960s and 1970s, which were united by their varied evocations of Iranian historical tradition.12 Tirafkan, along with Khosrow 211

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Fig. 11.5a and b

Fig. 11.6

212

Nicène Kossentini, Shakl, 2012, courtesy of the artist.

Nicène Kossentini, Khadija for the Boujmal series, 2011, courtesy of the artist.

The Changing Worlds of Middle Eastern Artists

Hassanzadeh and other contemporary Iranian artists,13 can in a sense thus be considered inheritors of that tradition. But Tirafkan introduced other elements – those of homo-eroticism and violence – which made frequent appearances in his work. It is clear that he was developing a singular vocabulary and that, taken as a whole, his body of work emphasises a view that he would articulate in conversation: that it is important to understand Iran’s cultural and religious traditions not only for their place in history and art history, but also for geopolitical reasons. It should be recalled that the period when he was making these works – from the late 1990s until 2013 – was one of extreme antagonism between Iran and the West.14 Nicène Kossentini’s preoccupations are entirely different. Her inspiration derives from Arabic philosophy and pre-Islamic poetry; but, like Tirafkan, she weaves the past in with the present, producing multifaceted works with clear messages. Born in 1976, Kossentini studied in the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis, at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She is currently Assistant Professor of experimental cinema at the University of Tunis. Particularly striking in the present context is Shakl (Figs. 11.5a and b). This remarkable series consists of panels of what appear to be mere dots and dashes, but are in fact tashkil, or vocalisation,15 written in black ink on sheets of perspex that form the lid of a box. The Arabic text itself, which we do not see, is ‘Ibn ‘Arabi’s Kitab al-Jalal wa al-Jamal (‘On Majesty and Beauty’). We are left with an allusion to it that is just as mystical, in its way, as the original text itself. Upon meeting and discussing this work with the artist,16 I learned what had led her to create these compositions. She had started to read the works of Arab philosophers and mystics upon her return to Tunis, after many years of study in France. In quick succession, she read The Incoherence of the Philosophers by al-Ghazali (1056– 1111), The Incoherence of the Incoherence by Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’, 1126–98), and the Rasa’il (‘Letters’) of Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240).17

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She described how, when reading this material, she began to feel that a huge distance separated her from these writings. The distance was not, she said, linguistic – as she knows Arabic extremely well – but, rather, was a result of the separation between the thoughts and subject matter of what is a whole world conjured by these writers of the medieval period and those of the period inhabited by the artist. Frustrated by this, she began by reading these texts in French, and then began again on the Arabic. The most powerful of these texts for her was Ibn ‘Arabi’s Kitab al-Jalal wa al-Jamal, and re-creating it using tashkil was her extraordinary homage to it. If we examine two other works – Mirrors and Boujmal – we can see how they also seem effortlessly to blur the boundary between past and present. In Mirrors (Plate 30), Kossentini created an installation based on the Great Mosque of Kairouan, built in the late seventh century by the great general ‘Uqba ibn Nafi, the founder of the city, in which she integrated another text by Ibn ‘Arabi, Kitab alFana fi al-Mushahada (‘Extinction within Contemplation’). Boujmal (Fig. 11.6) was a series in which she used family photographs, superimposed onto a lake called Boujmal in central Tunisia, near her home city of Sfax, which had dried up and represented a cause of ecological concern. She then added lines of script from the opening verses of three famous poems of the pre-Islamic era by Imru’l Qais, Labid ibn Rabiya and al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, known as the Mu‘allaqat – the ‘hanging poems’ – said to have been suspended on the walls of the Ka‘ba, in Mecca.18 The text – in a style characteristically Maghribi Kufic19 – marks the line between land and horizon. It was motivated, she explained, partly by the run-up to the 2011 Revolution in Tunis. Before the revolution, her feelings had been of helplessness – of a sense of drowning: ‘The repression around me was so hard and wild, yet I wasn’t able to protest in a loud voice … When we can no longer speak, it is like drowning and choking … When I discovered the extent of the dry pond Boujmal, I immediately felt that I had found the desert of the Arab poets.’20 She describes how, while she was making this series of photographs, 214

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she was also translating the Mu‘allaqat from Arabic into French. By inserting them into the photographs, she was trying to express ‘the break between an imaginary past that I want to try and capture or recapture. I think that all my artistic work rests ultimately here, to catch a lost past and to re-invent it.’21 Boushra Almutawakel’s series of nine photographs, Mother Daughter Doll, explores the subject of the veil (Plate 31).22 Each photograph shows the three figures in progressive stages of covering up, eventually wearing the full traditional Yemeni sharshaf, and going dark – even the doll. Although she recognised that this was a highly stereotyped subject, it was a lecture she heard by the veteran feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi at the University of Cairo that inspired her to create a work that encapsulated the contradictions and complexities of the issue. In an email exchange with this author, she responded to the question, ‘When you made the Mother Daughter Doll, who did you make it for?’, in the following way: When I made the series, I was in a workshop, and used the workshop to get my sketch of the series into reality. I think I made it first and foremost for a Yemeni audience. I was asking my society many things, like: To what extent will we cover our women. What is enough? The covering is about the literal covering, but also about so much more that is symptomatic of the state and status of women in our culture. My worry initially was that it would reinforce Western views and stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims, and in particular Yemeni culture. When I start worrying about how my work would be interpreted, I think of a quote a teacher of mine used to tell me: ‘You can’t be the artist and critic at the same time.’ It is me addressing my culture in Yemen, and the region as a whole. I think at one point I was addressing the West, but I was very careful for example to create the work so that it can be seen in Yemen, and without 215

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it being too offensive. For example, I did not start the series with us say wearing bathing suits. I am not trying to attack the hijab or even the niqab, because the first image shows me wearing the hijab. Reaction to the showing of this work at the National Museum in San‘a in 2012 was mixed: ‘It was mostly positive. Some people told me it is a true reflection of what is going on, while others criticised me, asking why I was attacking the hijab when Allah made it a duty for every woman. Who did I think I was?’ Following its acquisition by the British Museum, it went on display and elicited a number of comments from the public.23 There was debate about whether it should be ‘read’ from left to right (light into dark) or right to left (dark into light); there was anger among some women who did not wear hijab, who complained that the West was always fixating on this issue. On the question of the direction of the work, Almutawakel’s response was that she had ‘had the intention of light to dark. However, I have seen different interpretations of it in social media, where they have it the other way round, which I didn’t really think about, but I also like, so I would like to leave it to the viewer.’ On the matter of the wearing of the hijab itself, she noted: Yes, my fear was of this criticism, which I truly understand, because, like you said I don’t want to feed into the stereotypical views of the west about the Arab Islamic world. I think most Arab women agree with the premise of the work, but it makes us vulnerable somehow. We can talk about these things but only amongst ourselves; it is like airing one’s dirty laundry … it is as if you would expect such work to come from a Westerner; but sometimes, based on the comments I have heard, it is as if I had betrayed my people, my culture, religion. They assume I have somehow aligned myself with the West. Although it is one work, it does not 216

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show my other views on other things, including on the West (the double standards, hypocrisy, self-righteousness). So only the West is allowed to comment on our religion, culture, traditions? As an artist, I am learning it is my job to tell the truth as I see it, come what may. And I have been very happily surprised about all of the debate, which makes me happier than being right or wrong in terms of my views. Tirafkan’s powerful reframing of Shiite imagery; Kossentini’s homage to Ibn ‘Arabi and the Mu‘allaqat; Almutawakel’s study on the veil – each of these works is the result of serious engagement with various aspects of history, social tradition, or literature. The works themselves are striking in their execution and choice of themes, which are deliberate and considered. For Kossentini, the aim was ‘to catch a lost past and to re-invent it’; for Tirafkan, it was to express his ‘Iranian-ness’. Of the three, it is perhaps Almutawakel who is the most overt in expressing the notion that it is her ‘job to tell the truth’. Theirs is not a two-dimensional and immediate engagement with contemporary political predicaments, but, the contrary, a measured and extended engagement with their societies and the world that is creating them. It is for this reason that what they have to say is important for a deeper understanding of the passions and hopes alive today within Middle Eastern societies.

endnotes 1

Shubbak is a festival of Arab culture that was held in London in 2011 and 2013 (shubbak.co.uk).

2

Mohamed Abla: My Family, My People, Art Space Gallery, 9 May – 9 June 2012. A booklet accompanying the exhibition was published by the gallery.

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3

Peter Aspden ‘The Power of Painting’, Financial Times, 12 May 2012. This was also referred to in Venetia Porter, ‘Behind the Image’, in Marta Weiss, ed., Light from the Middle East (London: Steidl, 2012), p. 135.

4

See nadiakaabilinke.com (accessed on 13 June 2013).

5

These are the opening lines of the article, ‘How Has a Globalised Cultural Economy Affected the Production of Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East?’ available at ibraaz.org (accessed on 7 May 2013).

6

Sadeq Tirafkan, ‘In Search of National Masculine Identity’, n.d., at tavoosonline.com (accessed on 10 May 2013). See also The Identity of Tradition: The Works of Sadegh Tirafkan, at contemporarypractices.net (accessed on 12 May 2013).

7

John Seed,‘In Memoriam: Sadegh Tirafkan (1965-2013)’, at huffingtonpost. com (accessed on 26 May 2013).

8

Sadegh Tirafkan, Initial Steps 1984-1990, (Tehran 2013).

9

Ibid.

10

L. Ridgeon, ‘The Zūrkhāna Between Tradition and Change’, Iran 45

(2007); V. Porter, ‘Shi‘ism and Contemporary Iranian Art’, in Fahmida Suleman, ed., People of the Prophet’s House: Artistic and Ritual Expressions of Shi’i Islam (London: Institute of Ismaili Studies and Azimuth Editions, 2014).

11

Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts, 5 June

2011–5 September 2011 – shown again, in 2012, at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. See ‘Artist Interpretations in Gifts of the Sultan: Q&A with Sadegh Tirafkan, at lacma.wordpress.com (accessed on 27 May 2013).

12

Hamid Keshmishekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives

13

Mirjam Shatanawi, ed., Tehran Studio Works (London: Saqi Books, 2007).

14

There are other important series: Persian Painting, Portraits on Script,

(London: Saqi Books, 2013), pp. 94ff.

or the Human Tapestry series, which was intended to draw attention to youth unemployment.

15

218

Arabic letters of similar shapes are distinguished by the use of dots above

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or below the letters. Vowel sounds are expressed with a series of symbols placed on the letters which aid pronunciation. All of these symbols make up the tashkil. 16

In May 2013 I met the artist in Tunis, and we subsequently corresponded

17

Ibid.

18

Robert Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert (London: Penguin, 1999),

19

A style of script developed in Spain and North Africa in the ninth and

about her work by email.

pp. 6ff.

tenth centuries. Shiela Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 392ff.

20

Anna Wallace-Thompson, ‘What Lies Beneath: The Changing Face of

Water in the Works of Nicene Kossentini’, n.d., at canvasguide.net/en/ articles/what-lies-beneath.html (accessed on 28 May 2013).  Water plays an important part in her work and in this interview with Anna Wallace-

Thompson she is also referring to another series called What the Water

Gave Me. 21

Based on email correspondence in French, translated by the author.

22

Acquired by the British Museum in 2012 (2012, 6041.1-9). See

23

From Boushra Almutawakel to Michael Rakowitz, on display in Gallery 34,

britishmuseum.org (accessed on 28 May 2013). British Museum, 2013.

219

12 Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a Microcosm of The State’s Cultural Agenda HELIA DARABI

I

naugurated in 1977 and located in the heart of the capital, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) has played a central role in the development, orientation and recognition of Iranian contemporary art (Plate 32). Launched with the full support of the former queen, it once represented the cultural agenda of the Pahlavi monarchy, which was based on modernisation and Westernisation, while trying to reconstruct a spirit of national identity and pride. Its exceptional, comprehensive collection of modern art, encompassing the broad episodes of the Western avant-garde, from Impressionism to early conceptual art, has often been the focus of media attention.1 It is still considered the most inclusive collection of Western art outside the Western world. 221

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Ironically, however, the significant function and influence of this museum, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has little to do with the museum’s magnificent collection or its outstanding architecture. During its life, this place has played a variety of paradoxical and significant roles, including that of cultural façade and centre of official representation, making it in a sense the cultural arm of the state; that of mere exhibition space; and that of opposition platform for the artistic community. Rather than being a typical museum, TMoCA therefore offers a case study as a microcosm of a state’s cultural and artistic policies. This essay is an attempt to analyse the extent of agreement between TMoCA’s activities and the changes in political circumstances and administrative cultural policies during five periods between 1977 and 2013. The analysis takes into account variations in the museum’s activities – including exhibiting strategies, international relations, curatorial approaches, space and interior organisation – and their interaction with the Iranian artistic community. Formative Years (1977–1979) In the short period of its inception and formative years before the Islamic Revolution, TMoCA announced its mission and priorities, and though these were soon curtailed, displayed the most accordance between its function and structure. The Act of Iran’s Cultural Policy, drawn up by the Secretariat of the High Council of Culture and Art in 1968 and enacted by Mohammad Reza Shah in 1969, partially illustrates the Pahlavis’ notion of cultural development: ‘In the light of the White Revolution,2 the overthrow of Feudalism, the emancipation of women and the circulation of social justice, education and hygiene, the nation experiences a transition from economic and material needs to spiritual and cultural demands.’3 Museums, as ‘cultural centres and strongholds’, are mentioned in the fifth chapter of the act. 222

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The idea of TMoCA was conceived by Queen Farah Pahlavi,4 a graduate of architecture at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris in 1957, who married the Shah in 1959, and in her 20-year tenure as Empress of Iran was patron to 12 artistic institutions and presided over 26 educational, health, sports and cultural organisations,5 as well as a number of non-governmental entities.6 In a 2012 interview, she recalled: ‘A number of private galleries were open at the time and the ministry of culture had a biennial of art and I was always involved in the inaugurations and the ceremonies.’7 In another recent interview, she commented on the rationale for the establishment of the TMoCA: Eventually, we decided to establish a museum of Western art for our people to see contemporary developments outside of Iran. After all, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibits Near Eastern art. We envisioned the museum as a lively centre, a place where people would attend lectures, hear music and see films. The museum’s placement in a park in Tehran helped to encourage visitors who happened to be walking nearby.8 The museum was named and programmed by Kamran Diba – artist, architect and city planner. Its outstanding architecture, combining Iranian traditional elements of architecture with a modern minimalist approach, is considered one of the best architectural achievements of the last 50 years in Iran:9 ‘At the time of its conception in 1970 it had less than ten counterparts; and at the time of its inauguration in 1977, it was the only meeting place for the display of modern art in a major part of the world including Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.’10 Both Iranian and foreign works were bought under the supervision of the Queen’s Office11 (Fig. 12.1). The budget was provided by the National Iranian Oil Company and the Budget Planning Office. Diba, a cousin to the queen, had direct and informal access to her, and did not have to deal with her secretariat 223

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Fig. 12.1

Queen Farah Pahlavi and architect Kamran Diba in the main entrance hall, TMoCA, autumn 1975.

or office.12 After four years of intensive work, TMoCA was opened in 1977 in the presence of the royal family, international luminaries, and the Iranian artistic community.13 Through the short period of 13 months of public operation, nine spectacular exhibitions were hosted, including both Iranian and international work. One of the most significant of these was the Saqqakhaneh School Revisited exhibition (1977), which reviewed and established this movement in the history of Iranian modern art. The Saqqa-khaneh Movement might be considered the first successful Iranian artistic endeavour to combine Iranian traditional and popular iconography with modernistic approaches in painting and sculpture.14 Some of the major exhibitions in this period included: Creative Photography: An Historical Survey (1977); Sharp Realistic Vision: The Hyperrealist Movement (1977); Graphic Arts (1977); The Ludwig Collection (1977); David Hockney: Voyages through Pen, Pencil and Ink (1977); Iranian Poster Art (1977); An Experience of Neighborhood: Tehran/Brooklyn (1977); British Posters 1890–1976 (1978); Patterns of Persia: Roloff Beny Photographs 1973–1978 (1978); and Pop Art (1978). In its first three months, the museum was visited by 46,000 people, with a daily average of 567 people. 224

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The inclusive modernisation programme launched by the Pahlavis during the 1960s and 1970s brought vast economic, social and cultural consequences.15 The Islamic Revolution of 1979, which closed this culturally progressive chapter in Iran’s history, also put an end to TMoCA’s glory days. Kamran Diba, the director and chief curator, resigned and left the country during the early stages of the Revolution,16 during the prime-ministerial rule of Mehdi Bazargan (February–November 1979), and Mehdi Kowssar, the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Tehran, assumed the directorship. It was Kowssar who kept the collection intact during the ensuring riots and periods of lawlessness. He made a list of all the museum’s works, and ensured their protection in the basement.17 Many of the queen’s cultural projects remained unfinished,18 while a new chapter was opened in TMoCA’s life – her favourite museum Pro-Government or Neutral Agent (1980–1990) After the Revolution, TMoCA, as the only major exhibition venue located in a strategic spot in the middle of Tehran – and close to the University of Tehran and the most culturally active part of the city – immediately became an ideological pawn. This major artistic venue was destined to contribute to the development of official strategies of display, establishing the Islamic Republic’s cultural master-narratives and controlling myths, and heralding the concerns and imperatives of the governing ideology. Exhibitions during the first two years after the Revolution included Activist Painters (1979 and 1980), Revolutionary Graffiti (1979), The Palestinian Resistance Movement (1979), Drawings by University Students in Tehran (1979), Mexican Revolutionary Murals (1980), and a number of photography exhibitions. Likewise, during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, modern and elitist art was not valued. The economic crisis, the closure of borders, and governmental rule over artistic activities restricted art production 225

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and exhibition to a local, administrative level, placing it under close control. No analysis of the local artistic scene could ever come from the outside world, while the access of artists to the global art scene was also extremely limited. This situation solidified TMoCA’s potential as a platform for ideological propaganda. Both the administrative activities and the exhibition space of the museum were dedicated to revolutionary agendas, while politically neutral traditional arts such as miniature painting and handicrafts were also encouraged. The promotion of Shiite tradition, and the indictment of both modernisation and Westernisation, went hand in hand with advocacy on behalf of the poor and marginalised – namely ‘the oppressed’. Ali Mirsepassi notes how the state-sponsored modernisation programme of the Pahlavis had led to a social polarisation of urban life: ‘This fostered a hostile attitude among the urban poor and other urban social groups toward modernisation, and engendered their negative reaction to the imposition of Western-oriented culture which they correspondingly viewed as the root cause of their predicament.’19 In TMoCA’s agenda, this was translated into a series of exhibitions by various marginalised groups, including art from various towns and cities across Iran, as well as artworks by the handicapped, the addicted and even children. Just as the royal palaces and residences were captured and opened to the public, the prestigious halls of TMoCA were dedicated to humble works by anonymous people. A return to native culture among some Iranian intellectuals, prompted by alienation caused by Pahlavi’s modernisation programme, was rooted in the work of influential intellectual figures like Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, who turned their attention to Islamic traditions. A writer and social critic, Al-e Ahmad articulated a powerful critique of the hegemonic power of the West during the 1940s to 1960s, centred on the concept of ‘Occidentosis’ (Gharb-zadigi). This critique attacked Iranian secular intellectuals as complicit in Western power, and incapable of effectively constructing a genuinely Iranian modernity. In furious words, Al-e 226

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a Microcosm

Ahmad called for a ‘return’ to an ‘authentic’ Islamic culture to avoid the homogenising and alienating forces of socio-technological modernisation:20 I speak of ‘Occidentosis’ [Gharb-zadigi] as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From inside. The membrane remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it.21 During the 1960s and 1970s Ali Shariati extended Al-e Ahmad’s critique of the secular political culture of the time for ignoring the Islamic culture of Iran, making every attempt to offer a positivist theory of Islamic creed, and to construct and popularise a modern Shiite ideology. The work of these figures provided the theoretical framework for the anti-Westernisation and Iranian-Islamic romanticism which dominated the cultural discourse after the Revolution. Its influence still prevails in the endless rhetoric of ‘the enemy’ among all the hardline sectors of the Islamic Republic (Fig. 12.2). These ideas greatly affected the role and decisions of cultural officials, whether they were merely seeking the approval of their higher authorities or truly persuaded by the anti-Western discourse articulated by the intellectuals mentioned above.22 In a leaflet about TMoCA’s mission, published in 1982, President Seyyed Ali Khamenei, currently the Supreme Leader, shows a somewhat Platonic approach to the arts, as they might be acceptable if pressed into service on behalf of the good of society, and as a means of mobilising people: No school of thought may be recorded in the history, nor will it infiltrate through the depths of society, unless it is 227

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Fig. 12.2

Main entrance hall, TMoCA, 1983. On the placard is a quote from Seyyed Ali Khamenei: ‘May the people’s cry of “God is Great” find resonance in the works of the artists’.

combined with art. If a school of thought cannot absorb the art-seeking spirit present in all human beings in various forms, it will not be able to penetrate society and the people. Among the many and various devices for conveying thoughts, art is the best and the most effective.23 The few brochures published during the first two years after the Revolution also reveal the affiliation of the museum, first to the Foundation of Art and Culture, and later, from 1982, to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. In this period, even part of the museum space was dedicated to the Bureau of Preservation of the Relics of the Imposed War.24 The exhibitions in this period fell into three categories: 1. Ideological and propagandistic: Photography of War, 228

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a Microcosm

Fig. 12.3

Mohammad Reza Firouzeh, 1984, oil on canvas, printed on the leaflet of TMoCA’s activities in 1984. Advocacy on behalf of the poor and marginalised – namely ‘the oppressed’ was a main attitude in the cultural agenda of the first years of the Islamic Republic.

The Graphic Arts of Revolution, Political Cartoons, Art by Martyrs, The Revolutionary Guard Painters, The Artists of Howzeh hunari (the Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation), The History of Shiite Movements in the Past 100 Years (1980), and various political cartoon exhibitions. 2. Exhibitions supporting marginalised groups: exhibitions of works by ethnic and religious minorities, art from various towns and cities across Iran (Fig. 12.3), the work of women artists, and of the disabled, drug addicts, students and children. Major book exhibitions held in the museum space might also be grouped in this category (Fig. 12.4). 3. Neutral art: realistic representation of landscapes and local subjects, Paintings by the Pupils of Kamal al-Mulk (1981),25 landscape photography, calligraphy and illumination. 229

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Fig. 12.4

Book fair held in the galleries of TMoCA, 1983. René Magritte’s sculpture La Thérapeute (1967) can be seen in the centre of the photograph, apparently used as a decoration of a booth.

Casual selections from the museum collection might be added to this category, including: Memorial to Marc Chagall (1985), Impressionism (1985) and Expressionism (1992). The first category effectively contributed to defining and establishing the overall notion of post-Revolutionary art, mainly maintained as the discourse of the muta’ahhid artist (‘committed’, i.e. devoted to addressing Islamic and revolutionary values).26 Along with an ideological wave in poster art, graphic design, cartoons and photography, the emergence and establishment of the ‘Painters of the Islamic Revolution’ was largely indebted to such formal exhibitions, among other factors. This group of revolutionary, left-wing and religious artists, with radical ideals and aspirations, gradually developed an established genre and became assimilated into the system. But this genre failed to gain popularity, save for its few followers who have benefited from a privileged status to the present day. Morteza Goudarzi (Dibaj), painter and theorist of postRevolutionary art, says in an interview about the Revolutionary art’s agenda, ideals and consequences: 230

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a Microcosm

This happened in a totally unpredicted situation. Nobody knew that the Revolution will be victorious … After the victory of the Revolution, many fields – like art and culture – were neglected, and there was no evaluation of the social needs in these fields. We hadn’t invested in any field other than political fight, partisanship and sometimes armed struggle; and actually, maybe such investment was not possible anyway. He continues by identifying this as ‘a most drastic negligence after the Revolution’, stating that art after the Revolution ‘did not have any sort of organisation, and unlike the political forces, which formed a solid organisation, there was no such thing in the cultural, artistic field’.72 By the end of the 1980s, Iranian society had embarked upon reconstruction in various fields. The population increased steeply, and many young people gravitated towards practising and observing the arts. Private galleries that had previously been inactive or closed were revived – and many new ones were opened – showing independent art. Nevertheless, the constant presence of government in the directing of art in modern Iran should not be ignored.28 General Support and Advancement (1990–1998) The end of the war opened a chapter of political ‘reconstruction’ (Sazandigi). TMoCA, under the Institute for the Development of the Plastic Arts, a subdivision in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, began to recognise various branches in visual arts, provide logistical support for artists, and resume biennial exhibitions of visual arts. During this reconstruction phase, the museum’s association with the concept of ‘plastic arts’ was gradually strengthened. Various genres were therefore identified within the practice of the plastic arts, including painting, miniature painting, calligraphy, ceramics, 231

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photography, graphic arts, children’s book illustration, cartoon and later sculpture. Regular annual or biennial exhibitions began to develop in these categories, and the museum gradually shifted from being merely a large exhibition venue and propaganda centre towards becoming a main hub for the plastic arts in general. General governmental support for arts in this period of reconstruction ranged from the distribution of high-quality painting materials to the artists and art students at a subsidised price, to supporting the inauguration of ‘Artists’ Associations’,29 which later played a significant role in consolidation and autonomy of the artistic community. The Institute for the Development of the Plastic Arts resumed the art biennials in the museum space.30 An independent organisation was developed to facilitate autonomous, artist-governed biennials. The recommencement of the biennials effectively influenced the artistic activity in the capital. A crudely ideological administrative approach gradually gave way to a general ambiance of artistic ferment. As Hamid Keshmirshekan notes, ‘Following several years of haphazard activity, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art began organizing regular biennials and triennials, among which the painting biennials were the largest and seemingly the most controversial … The catalogue of the First Iranian Painting Biennial31 announced a clear and very ambitious goal: the exhibition, organised by the Artistic Deputy of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, was intended to ‘improve the art of painting in both quantity and quality, establish a true atmosphere of competition among artists, and explore and support young talent’.32 It was in this period that the museum started to function as an active and popular core in Iranian contemporary art. Another significant event – the first and only one of its kind – took place in September 1991. The first major international festival of Iranian art and culture since the Islamic Revolution was inaugurated in the German city of Düsseldorf, with opening speeches from the Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammad Khatami, and the German Minister of Education.

232

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This was the largest festival of Iranian art and culture ever held outside the country, either before or after the Revolution up to that time. For an entire month, the principal art galleries of Düsseldorf were devoted to this major endeavour: one mounted an exhibition of Iranian paintings while another displayed fine Persian carpets … Meanwhile, concerts of Iranian music, in Persian, Kurdish, and Baluchi styles, were held in Düsseldorf ’s auditoria.33 The Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance paid the expenses incurred by the festival, while the hard currency expenses, which amounted to about DM 3 million, were met by the German Thyssen company.34 During the festival, Mohammad Khatami met German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who proposed the expansion of cultural relations between Iran and Germany. Like any other artistic event, the Institute for the Development of the Plastic Arts was in charge of policy-making, TMoCA being the centre of all arrangements. Along with the specialisation of the museum and its focus on a variety of genres within the visual arts, a degree of classification and categorisation of artists solidified, and official definitions of art-making came to be theorised and formulated; a community – of people and of values – was thus developing. The genre of Revolutionary Painting inaugurated by Howzeh hunari was now becoming a definite category that demanded and determined particular modes of representation. It was now privileged to be hung on the walls of the best rooms of the museum. As Irit Rogoff puts it, ‘The museum, as a complex amalgam of ideological intentions operating through strategies of pleasure and gratification, is equally the site of the production of cultural identities. Through numerous and varied practices, cultural exclusions are reproduced and cultural “otherness” is constituted.’35 In this way – along with propagandistic murals, TV shows and interviews, and various books and catalogues from these artists published by Howzeh hunari, TMoCA grew into a platform and exhibition venue. Making a habitus, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, the title ‘engaged artist’ defined criteria

233

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which functioned in favour of both inclusion and exclusion. Such a classification excluded a major part of the artistic community from the official definition of the artistic practice. The group of the Painters of the Islamic Revolution thus frequently exhibited in a prestigious museum with spectacular architecture, in which their paintings nevertheless acquired the status of transcendent, high art, taking the place of the museum’s internationally reclaimed works. In a note in 1994, Abolghassem Khoshroo, the Cultural Deputy in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, wrote in response to a criticism of the sloganising character of the paintings by the Painters of the Islamic Revolution: ‘... But who might chant slogans better that an artist? Chanting slogans is what the artist does. Someone who avoids this is “wise”, but the artist, like a child, says his word in the most direct way.’36 In the light of such unqualified support, a sort of ideological aristocracy was growing on the museum’s walls once designed to show the greatest international masterpieces, taking advantage of the significance and ‘aura’ which the museum had retained even when purged of its prestigious collection. A Curatorial Revolution (1998–2005) Along with the phase of political ‘reform’ – known as the Islahat period – TMoCA adopted a daring approach to exhibiting and curatorship. It introduced new artistic media, involved a young, critical generation of artists, and encouraged sociopolitical themes. This period was important in attracting a far wider range of practising artists, as well as a large public; and in establishing new definitions of artistic practice and the consolidation of an artistic community. The new wave of reform initiated by the reformist victory in the presidential elections of 1997 promised a more open social and cultural atmosphere. The new reformist Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, an ally of President Khatami, Ataollah Mohajerani, who was later forced to resign, appointed progressive

234

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Fig. 12.5

From left to right: President Mohammad Khatami, his bodyguard, Minister of Culture Attaollah Mohajerani, and the TMoCA director and head of the Institute for Plastic Arts, Alireza Sami Azar, in a presidential visit to the museum in 1999.

directors who continued to push back against government control of artistic production and exhibition (Fig. 12.5). Alireza Sami Azar, the educated director of TMoCA under the reformist government, effectively substantiated Khatami’s thesis of a ‘Dialogue of the Civilizations’. A new regard to the global art scene was therefore shaped by hope and optimism. In Sami Azar’s words: If I had written my memoirs in TMoCA, it would have made a best-seller, as it was a mirror of overall course of events in Iran. The artists experienced an open atmosphere and came to the fore. Relations with the West were restructured, and the West was no longer an enemy; it was a friend who welcomed the new circumstances, and did not intend to plunder us in the way that had long been suggested.37 Joan Miró (2000), Gerhard Richter (2004), Arman (2003) and Heinz Mack (2004) were among many international artists expansively 235

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exhibited in this period at TMoCA, while the 20th-Century British Sculpture exhibition (2003), (Plate 33) when artists Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon, among other artistic and cultural figures, were invited to be present in the show, was considered the most significant artistic project up to that time between Iran and Britain. With mutual trust partially restored between artists and government institutions, including the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, TMoCA began to organise a series of retrospective exhibitions for Iranian modern artists. Artists such as Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1936) and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (b. 1937) returned to Iran and exhibited extensively in the museum.38 Sami Azar also encouraged the formation of artists’ groups to facilitate their presence on the international art scene.39 The first Iranian representatives were sent to the Venice Biennale since the Revolution.  The three annual exhibitions of New Media Art (2001, 2002 and 2004), together with other thematic multimedia exhibitions launched in TMoCA – among them The Spiritual Vision (2003) and The Persian Garden: Ancient Wisdom, New Visions (2004) – heralded an extensive approach to new artistic media, such as installations, video art and live performances. These events, though highly spontaneous and experimental, played a significant role in opening the doors of the museum to a wider range of the artists, drawing a large public, and establishing more flexible definitions of artistic practice. The alternative artists, however, welcomed the open-call opportunities to create occasional satirical, politically engaged or anti-institutional art, with the state’s financial support, using the strategies of allegory and metaphor. This approach led to some significant works. Shahriar Ahmadi’s Cobweb (2001) was a huge, realistic spider’s web hanging in the middle of the museum’s main hall. The Road Is Under Construction (2002) was a live performance directed by Sadegh Safaei, in which a dozen young men and women, with covered faces, first blocked the entrance of the museum using barbed wire, then forced the audience to pass through moving frames

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to enter the museum, and finally marched within the museum halls in military-style overalls with paper batons (Figs. 12.6a, b and c). Both works were presented in the New Media Art exhibitions. In 2003, Amir Mobed installed a hundred headless, rusted Angels (2002) in the museum garden, responding to the open call for an exhibition titled The Spiritual Vision (2003). When it comes to the museum’s permanent collection, it must be noted that it had been partially brought to display throughout all the previous periods. But Sami Azar, making use of the connoisseurship of prominent art historian Ruyin Pakbaz, held carefully curated, thematic exhibitions drawn from the collection, including Expression/Abstraction (1999), Pop Art (2000), Cubism to Minimalism (2001), Impressionism/ Post-Impressionism (2002) and Abstract Expressionism (2003). In his last show, The Modern Art Movement (2005), Sami Azar brought almost the entire painting collection to the walls of museum for the first time

Fig. 12.6 A, B & C Sadegh Safaei and Mehran Houshyar, The Road Is Under Construction, (2002), live performance. A dozen young men and women with covered faces first blocked the entrance of the museum by barbed wire. They then forced the audience to pass through moving frames to enter the museum. Finally they marched within the museum halls in militarystyle overalls with paper batons.

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since the Islamic Revolution. This was TMoCA’s most significant event since the Revolution, and Sami Azar later noted in an interview that, among all of the innovative events he launched in TMoCA during his management, this most normal act for a museum director – displaying the museum’s collection – was commonly distinguished as his most daring and controversial act.40 This exhibition recorded over 2,000 visitors each day. The emergence of various art magazines helped to publicise TMoCA’s new activities.41 By the end of this period, the curators and the museum staff were much more highly trained and experienced – qualities transferred to the period that followed.42 The reformist period ended in 2005 when a new, conservative faction came to power, inaugurating a new cultural agenda that involved sweeping changes of personnel in the key administrative posts. Reversion and Simulation (2005–2013) The general policy of TMoCA in this period has swung between retrogression to highly ideological post-Revolutionary cultural policies and a simulation of the schemes of the two previous periods. Anti-Western rhetoric was immediately revived by the new directors. In a Guardian interview, Habibollah Sadeghi – director of the museum from 2006 to 2008, and one of the Painters of the Islamic Revolution – commented: ‘We are opposed to an aggressive, dominant culture.Westerners, especially Americans, think they are the rulers of the whole world and that other people are their servants. Perhaps they see themselves as the heads of the military camps in Rome and we are the gladiators.’43 Mahmoud Shaloui, the director who survived longer than anyone else in the post, serving from 2008 to 2012, immediately embarked on a tightening of administrative control over artistic production and exhibition, which included placing an obligation on art galleries to send photographs from planned exhibitions to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for authorisation. He also set about decentralising art, promoting it in cities other than Tehran. Coming from a clerical background, he based his strategy on seeking the advice of specialists; but, to the disappointment 238

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of the artistic community, the list of experts he published was confined to of the Painters of the Islamic Revolution and calligraphers. On the other hand, the popularity of the new artistic media was not neglected by the government. The process of appropriating the New Art movement had begun soon after its recognition. Spiritual, traditional and religious themes had been encouraged even during the reformist period, but they now became the dominant approach, and even the exhibition titles became openly ideological. Consequently, in this period in TMoCA, the genre of Revolutionary Painting was shown extensively alongside installations and video pieces with religious or ideological subject-matter (Plate 34).These were largely created by a new generation of artists who probably lacked the inner beliefs and ideals of the Painters of the Islamic Revolution, but they nevertheless greeted the opportunity to produce and exhibit with the support of the museum. With the gradual development and consolidation of an artistic community, political developments in this period critically affected TMoCA’s activities. During the 2009 presidential campaign a great number of artists and university professors supported the moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi in a variety of manifestos, while, in an unprecedented move, Saffar Harandi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Minister of Culture, prohibited the artists in a TV interview from supporting ‘a certain candidate’.44 Following the diputed presidential election in 2009 – leading to the second round of Ahmadinejad’s presidency – and the resulting brutal suppression of the Green Movement, a majority of the artistic community, including all the artists’ associations, issued manifestos and signed declarations advocating a boycott of collaboration with government institutions, and declaring the new government illegitimate.45 This time, the artists willfully chose to exclude themselves. TMoCA continued nevertheless with various exhibitions and programmes, principally the annual Fadjr Visual Art Festival (Plate 35). In the absence of professional artists, a number of the Painters of the Islamic Revolution,46 a new generation of artists, and a number 239

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of politically neutral artists constituted the participants in the Fadjr Festival. In this way, the festival came to take the form of a massive populist event held in various venues in Tehran and other cities. The winners were occasionally sent to the Venice Biennale. Among the major exhibitions held in TMoCA in this period was the well-received Painters of Dreams: A Review of Masterpieces of Coffee-House Painting and Painting on Glass (2010), which, through the welcoming of collectors, was one of the foremost cultural events of the period. At an international level, two major exhibitions were organised in TMoCA by the cultural attaché of the German embassy in Iran. Käthe Kollwitz & Ernst Barlach (2008) showcased 60 drawings by Käthe Kollwitz and 120 drawings, sculptures and prints by Ernst Barlach. All curatorial decisions, including installation, texts and labelling, were made by the German partner. Similarly, Gunther Uecker: Injuries and Connections (2012) displayed prints, paintings and large installations by the German contemporary artist. Again, the curatorial work was carried out by a team assigned by the German embassy in Tehran. Even such well-compiled exhibitions could not restore the active and popular days of the museum, and the number of visitors substantially declined.47 Today, when it seems that the utopian visions and ideals of the Islamic Revolution have themselves become the stuff of museum exhibits, TMoCA, the sole home of the visual arts in Tehran – reminiscent of a vanished era, with its enormous charm and allure, continues to attract people, like a huge magnet, and its enchanting history, hidden treasure, and flowing architecture which once encouraged the opening of a new chapter in Iranian contemporary art, still inspires a younger generation of artists and visitors.

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endnotes 1

Given the importance of its collection, little scholarly work has been

done on TMoCA’s collection. There is no substantial guide or text on the collection to the date.

2

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi launched the so-called White Revolution, a sweeping series of reforms in pursuit of a non-violent regeneration of Iranian society, in 1963. These included but were not limited to land

reform programmes and the abolition of feudalism, the privatisation of

government-owned enterprises, profit-sharing, extension of the franchise to women, the formation of the Literacy, Health and Development Corps (subdivisions of the military service), and free and compulsory education. 3

Siyasat-i farhangi-i Iran (Act of Iran’s Cultural Policy), codified by the Secretariat of the High Council of Culture and Art, (dabir-khaneh-i showray-i ali farhang va hunar), in 1968.

4

The queen was often involved in the inauguration of various cultural

and artistic programmes, such as the art biennial held by the Ministry of Culture. In these situations artists might have approached her with an idea for a museum, a cultural centre or gathering place, or a home for

the plastic arts. For example, she remembers the painter Iran Darroudi’s expressed desire for the establishment of a place for the permanent display of Iranian modern art. Saeed Kamali Dehghan, ‘Former Queen of Iran on Assembling Tehran’s Art Collection’, Guardian, 1 August 2012. 5

Among other museums she initiated were the Carpet Museum, the Abguineh

Museum of pre- and post-Islamic glassware and ceramics, the Reza Abbasi

Museum of pre- and post-Islamic pieces, and the Niavaran Cultural Centre. 6

See Myrna Ayad, ‘The Queen of Culture’, Canvas Magazine, 6: 1

7

Kamali Dehghan, ‘Former Queen of Iran’.

8

Donna Stein, ‘For the Love of her People: An Interview with Farah Diba

( January/February2010),pp.37-49.

about the Pahlavi Programs for the Arts in Iran’, in Staci Gem Scheiwiller, Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian

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Identity (New York: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 80. 9

Ali-Reza Sami-Azar, ‘Le Musée d’art contemporain de Teheran’, Art Press 2, 17 (2010), artpress.com/article/10/05/2010/alireza-samiazar--lemusee-dart-contemporain-de-teheran/23568 (accessed on 4 November 2013).

10 Ibid. 11

For a more detailed account of the acquisition of artworks, see Tara Kaboli, ‘Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’, ADC Journal 0 ( June 2013) (digital format).

12

Correspondence with Kamran Diba, 28 June 2013.

13

The museum’s advisory board included curator Donna Stein, Professor of

American Literature David Galloway, artist Parviz Tanavoli, gallery director

Tony Shafrazi, and Kamran Diba. Karimpasha Bahadori was the chief of staff. 14 The Saqqa-khaneh Movement had been recognised and coined by the critic Karim Emami about 15 years before, but the inclusive exhibition

of its representatives in TMoCA had a major role in its establishment.

For an inclusive record of the Saqqa-khaneh School, please see Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Neo-Traditionalism and Modern Iranian Painting: The

Saqqa-khaneh School in the 1960s’, Iranian Studies 38: 4 (December 2005), pp. 607–30. 15

For an analysis of the socio-economic changes during the 1960s and 1970s, see Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (London: Penguin,1979).

16

Diba later described the TMoCA days alongside some of his other

architectural projects in Baqi mian-e do Khiaban (‘A Garden between Two Streets’), co-authored with Reza Daneshvar (Paris: Alborz Press, 2010).

17

Correspondence with Kamran Diba, 28 June 2013.

18

Among them renovation plans for Isfahan’s bazaars, the restoration of ancient monuments and the documentation of Iran’s tile and brickwork heritage, for which she had commissioned the historian Yahya Zoka. Also

included was a plan for a Museum of Western and Iranian Contemporary

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Art in Shiraz, with Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) considered as the architect. 19

Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization:

Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 73.

20

For a detailed description of the thoughts of Al-e Ahmad and Shariati,

21

Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague From the West, transl. R. Campbell

22

As a concept, Gharb-zadigi (Occidentosis) met with massive success. It

see ibid., pp. 96–128.

(Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), p. 27.

became the most popular concept that the oppositional intellectuals and

critical public used to show their resentment of the Pahlavi society in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. 23

Brochure of TMoCA mission and objectives (in Persian), 1982, TMoCA

24

The Bureau for Preservation of the Relics of the Imposed War was

archive.

established to gather, organise and preserve the geographical data of the

eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. This bureau, headed by Seyyed Gholamreza Eslami, was based in the administrative halls of the TMoCA building. Eslami also briefly held the directorship of the museum in

1990. Gholameza Islamai, ‘Tavajjuh beh towsi’eh-i kiyfi’, Guft-u-gu ba Gholamreza Islami (‘Considering Qualitative Development’, Interview with Gholamreza Islami), Tandis 124, (May 2008), p. 13. 25

As Keshmirshekan notes, ‘[W]orks such as those of Kamal al-Mulk

(1847/8–1940) and his school, which had almost disappeared from the contemporary Iranian art scene after the ascendance of modernist

art in the 1940s and 1950s, were again included in official exhibitions and promoted, mainly because of their naturalism. Consequently,

Kamal al-Mulk’s works were published and a surprising revolutionary and anti-monarchical ethos even ascribed to his art and character’. Hamid Keshmirshekan, ‘Discourses on Postrevolutionary Iranian Art: Neotraditionalism during the 1990s’, Muqarnas XXIII (2006), p. 155.

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26

For a more inclusive account of post-Revolutionary painting in Iran,

27

Morteza Goudarzi (Dibaj), ‘Hashiyeh muhim-tar az matn’, dar Guft-u-

please see ibid., pp. 131–57.

gu ba Fatemeh Shirazi’ (‘Margins More Important than the Text, in an interview with Fatemeh Shirazi’), Sureh 40 (December 2008), p. 19.

28

See Keshmirshekan, ‘Discourses on Postrevolutionary Iranian Art’, p. 136.

29

The Association of Iranian Graphic Artists was established in 1997, the

Association of Iranian Painters in 1998, and the Association of Iranian Sculptors in 1998.

30

The first biennial held after the Revolution took place in autumn 1991,

showcasing 500 paintings. The first Photography Biennial was in 1994, and the first Sculpture Biennial (initially defined as triennial) in 1995.

31

The 1991 Painting Biennial was in fact the sixth, since there had been five

32

Keshmirshekan, ‘Discourses on Postrevolutionary Iranian Art’, p. 137.

33

Among the artists participating in this event were Mohammad Ehsai

others held in Tehran before the Revolution.

(calligrapher and painter), Mohammad Tahir Imami (woodcarver or

munabbat-kar), Mehdi Ghan Beigi (ceramicist), Majid Mehregan (miniature painter), Assadollah Kiani (painter), Nasrollah Afjei (calligrapher), Seyyed Abdolmajid Sharif Zadeh (ceramicist), Hamid

Reza Azadeh Far (musician), Majid Kiani Bina (musician), Abdollah Sorur Ahmadi (musician), Jalal Zolfonoon (musician), Changiz Mehdi Pour (musician) and Haj Ghorban Soleimani (musician).

34 Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran–Europe Relations: Challenges and Opportunities (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 43, 44.

35

Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds, Museum Culture, Histories,

36

Abolghassem Khoshroo, ‘Payam-i muhandis Abolghassem Khoshroo,

Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 232.

mu’avin-i umur-i hunari-i vazir-i farhang va irshad-i islami’ (‘ A Note by

Abolghassem Khoshroo, the Cultural Deputy in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’), Faslnameh-i Hunar 26 (Fall 1994), p. 371.

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Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a Microcosm

37

Alireza Sami Azar, in a 2007 interview with the author.

38

Parviz Tanavoli (2003) Behjat Sadr (2004), Mansoureh Hosseini (2004), Massud Arabshahi (2004) and Mohsen Vaziri Moghddam (2004) were among the Iranian modern artists for whom retrospectives were held in TMoCA in this period.

39

Among the groups founded in this period were Group 30+ and the Dena Group of women painters. The formation of these groups was mostly based on their logistic needs such as exhibition planning and fundraising rather than intellectual harmony or stylistic affinity.

40

Bahman Kiarostami, La Cave au Trésor (2009), short film.

41

Some of the art journals that emerged in this period include Aksnameh (1998), Tavoos (1999), Golestaneh (1999), Dourbin Akkasi (2002), Tandis

(2002), Herfe-Hunarmand (2002) and Akkasi Khallagh (2004). 42

On aspects of this period, see Alisa Eimen, ‘Shaping and Portraying Identity at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (1977–2005)’, in Scheiwiller, Performing the Iranian State, pp. 83–100.

43

Robert Tait, ‘The Art No One Sees: A Basement that Symbolises Cultural

44

Tandis Art Biweekly 147 (May 2009), p. 27.

45

A manifesto signed by 287 members of visual art community was published in

Isolation’, Guardian, 29 October 2007.

summer 2009 in mass-circulation newspapers and on websites, to declare their withdrawal from all artistic and cultural activities tied to the government. In

September 2009 a list of artists banned from appearing on radio and television channels was published by the government.Some of the Revolutionary Painters,

including Habibollah Sadeghi and Hossein Khosrowjerdi, were among them. 46

Their leading figures, such as Hossein Khosrowjerdi and Nasser Palangi,

47

Unfortunately, the new director of the museum, Ehsan Aghaei, refused to

had already left Iran, or had considerably changed their attitude.

grant me a meeting, and the staff in the research department did not have

any information regarding the activities of the museum. The last part of this chapter is therefore based largely on personal observation.

245

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251

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Studies/I.B.Tauris, 1992). Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, transl. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007). Lowry, Glenn D., ‘Gained in Translation’, Art News, March 2006, pp. 121–5. Madadpour, Mohammad, Haqiqat va hunar-i dini: nazari beh mabani-i nazari-i hunar, shi’r, adabiyat va hunar-hay-i tajassumi dini (Truth and Religious Art: A Look at the Theoretical Foundation of Religious Art, Poetry, Literature and Visual Art) (Tehran: Art and Cultural Research Centre, 2008). Maleki, Tooka, Hunar-i nowgiray-i Iran (‘Iranian Modern Art’) (Tehran: Nazar, 2011). McLaughlin, Kevin, and Philip Rosen, ‘The Collector’, in their Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Mehregan, Omid, Ilahiyat-i tarjumeh: Walter Benjamin va risalat-i mutarjim (‘Theology of Translation: Walter Benjamin and the Responsibility of the Translator’) (Tehran: Farhang-i saba, 2008). Melikian, Souren, ‘When Cultural Identity Is Denied’, New York Times, 9 March 2012. Mignolo, Walter D., ‘Re:emerging, Decentring and Delinking: Shifting the Geographies of Sensing, Believing and Knowing’, Ibraaz, 8 May 2013, available at ibraaz.org (accessed on 19 June 2013). Mirsepassi, Ali, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Monem, Nadine, ed, Contemporary Art in the Middle East (London: Black Dog, 2009). Mousavian, Seyyed Hossein, Iran–Europe Relations: Challenges

252

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and Opportunities (London: Routledge, 2008). Naef, Silvia, A la recherche d’une modernité arabe: l’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, transl. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1966). ———Ecce Homo, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, transl. and ed. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992). ———‘Maxims and Arrows’, in The Twilight of Idols and the AntiChrist, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction by Michael Tanner (New York: Penguin, 2003). Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 3rd edn (New York/London: Routledge, 2003). Pieprzak, Katarzyna, Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Post-colonial Morocco (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Porter, Venetia, ‘Behind the Image’, in Marta Weiss, ed., Light from the Middle East (London: Steidl, 2012), p. 135. ———‘Shi‘ism and Contemporary Iranian Art’, in Fahmida Suleman, ed., People of the Prophet’s House: Artistic and Ritual Expressions of Shi‘i Islam (London: Institute of Ismaili Studies and Azimuth Editions, 2014). Radhakrishnan, R., ‘Post-modernism and the Rest of the World’, in his Theory in an Uneven World (Chichester: John Wiley, 2008). Ramadan, Khaled D., ‘The Edge of the WC’, in Khaled D. Ramadan, ed., Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007). Ray, William, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

253

Contemporary Art from the Middle East

Reinhardt, Karl, Sophocles, transl. H. Harvey and D. Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). Richards, K. Malcolm, Derrida Reframed (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008). Ridgeon, L., ‘The Zūrkhāna Between Tradition and Change’, Iran 45 (2007). Riding, Alan, ‘A Cultural Touchstone Connecting Europe and Islam’, New York Times, 15 March 2006. Rogers, Sarah, ‘Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut’, Art Journal 66: 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 9–20. Rogoff, Irit, ‘What is a Theorist?’, Alphabet Primer 1 (Fall 2009). ———‘Regional Imagining’, in Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Eisler, eds, Unleashed: Contemporary Art from Turkey (London: TransGlobe, 2010). Rubeiz, Janine, ‘Fondatrice de Dar el-Fan, 1967–1975’, unpublished memoirs, private papers of Janine Rubeiz, Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon, n.p. ———‘Mais il a fallu se rendre à l’évidence’, in ibid. Sadek, Walid, ‘Greater Loubnan’, Rotary Loubnan, 1990s, private papers of Walid Sadek, Beirut, Lebanon, pp. 4–5. ———‘From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon’, Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon 1, 2002. Sahafzadeh, Alireza, Hunar-i huviyyat va siyasat-i baznimaei: mutali’ehii dar tarikh-i ijtimaei-i hunar-i amrika (The Art of Identity and the Politics of Representation: A Study of the Social History of American Art) (Tehran: Bidgol, 2009). Salemy, Mohammad, ‘Tahghigh Project’, at tahghighproject. wordpress.com (accessed on 12 March 2013). Salemy, Mohammad, ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA (Vancouver: Vancouver Access Artist Run Centre, 2013). 254

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Saltz, Jerry, ‘Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show’, Vulture, 30 March 2013, available at vulture.com (accessed on 10 January 2014). Sami-Azar, Ali-Reza, ‘Le Musée d’art contemporain de Teheran’, Art Press 2 17 (2010), available at artpress.com (accessed on 4 November 2013). Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1973). Schmidt, Eric, and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York: Knopf, 2013). Schmitz, Britta, ‘Tausendundeine Macht’, in her Tausend und ein Tag (Berlin: Reiter Druck, 2003). Seed, John, ‘In Memoriam: Sadegh Tirafkan (1965–2013)’, 26 May 2013, at huffingtonpost.com (accessed on 26 May 2013). Shabout, Nada, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2007). ———‘The Politics of Art History’, a book review of Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art, in Arab Studies Quarterly 29: 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 57–61. Shalem, Avinoam, and Eva-Maria Troelenber, ‘Changing Views: The 1910 Exhibition as a Pictorial Turn’, in Dercon et al., Future of Tradition. Shatanawi, Mirjam, ed., Tehran Studio Works (London: Saqi Books, 2007). Shaw, Wendy, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). Sheikh, Simon, ‘Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research’, in Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2: 2 (Spring 2009). Sherman, Daniel J., and Irit Rogoff, eds, Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994). 255

Contemporary Art from the Middle East

Smith, Monica, ‘Model Employees: Sri Lankan Domestics in Lebanon’, Middle East Report 238 (Spring 2006), available at mafhoum.com/press9/272S21.htm (accessed on 5 November 2013). Smith, Terry, ‘What is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to Come’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 71: 1–2, (November 2002), pp. 3–15. ———‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry 32: 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 681–707. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Stein, Donna, ‘For the Love of Her People: An Interview with Farah Diba about the Pahlavi Programs for the Arts in Iran’, in Scheiwiller, Performing the Iranian State. Steiner, Rochelle, ‘After the Blast: Rebirth of a Nation’, Modern Painters (September 2005), pp. 49–50. Tait, Robert, ‘The Art No One Sees: A Basement that Symbolises Cultural Isolation’, Guardian, (29 October 2007). Tavanaee Fard, Hasan, ‘Tahlili bar mavani’-i towlid-i danish dar howzeh ulum-i insani’ (‘An Analysis of Barriers to KnowledgeProduction in the Humanities’), Journal of Science and Technology Policy 1 (Spring 2009). Tayefi, Ali, Mavani’-i farhangi-i towsi’eh-i tahqiq dar Iran: muqaddemehei bar jame’eh-shinasi-i andisheh-varzi va andishehsuzi dar Iran (Cultural Barriers to Research Development in Iran: An Introduction to the Sociology of Thinking and Thought-Burning) (Tehran: Azad-Andishan, 2001). Tirafkan, Sadeq, ‘In Search of National Masculine Identity’, n.d., at tavoosonline.com (accessed on 10 May 2013). Vasvani, Bansie, ‘Barbad Golshiri: Curriculum Mortis at Thomas Erben Gallery’, Daily Serving, at dailyserving.com (accessed on 23 January 2013). 256

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Wallace-Thompson, Anna, ‘What Lies Beneath: The Changing Face of Water in the Works of Nicene Kossentini’, n.d., at canvasguide.net (accessed on 28 May 2013). Wensinck, A. J., ‘The Ideas of Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth’, in Studies of A. J. Wensinck (New York: Arno Press, 1978). Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, ‘Abillama Returns with Sculptures that Act’, Daily Star (Lebanon), 9 November 2004, p. 7. Winegar, Jessica, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). ———‘The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror’, Anthropological Quarterly 8: 3 (2008). Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). WSI Administration, ‘Barbad Golshiri. Curriculum Mortis’, Wall Street International, 23 September 2013, available at wsimagazine.com (accessed on 23 January 2014).

257

Index Abidin, Adel 199 Abillama, Ziad 10, 135, 136, 141 147, 149, 152 Plates 11-13 Abla, Mohamed 203 Plate 27 Abu Sa‘id Abul Khayr 161 Academic Centre for Education, Culture and Research 75 Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis 213 Afghanistan 34, 196 Aghdashloo, Aydin 28, 30 Ahmadi, Shahriar 236 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud President 239 Ajami, film 44 Akhlaghi, Azadeh, 82-83, 87, 29 Plate 3 Akskhaneh 84 Aks-nameh 78 Al-Ani, Jananne 192, 196 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal 26, 73, 226, 227 Al-Ghoussein, Tarek 30, 199 Ali, Wijdan 57 Aljafari, Kamal 28 Al Jazeera 33, 34 Allan, James 8, 99 Almutawakel, Boushra 12, 13, 207, 215-217 Plate 31 al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani 214 Al Said, Shakir Hassan 31 Amer, Ghada 193 American University of Beirut 136, 139, 137 Ankori, Ganit 62 Ansarinia, Nazgol 9, 127, 199 Plate 10 Arab Museum of Modern Art 31 Arabshahi, Massoud 115 Arab Spring 25, 39, 191 archive 7, 8, 52, 57, 64-5, 85, 89-96, 100 Art and Liberty Group 53

258

Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation 72, 74, 229 Artistic Deputy of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance 232 ARTMargins 66 art market 1, 4, 38, 100, 117, 119, 121-122, 147, 152 Art Tomorrow 63, 80 Asgari Sirizi, Homayoun 82 ‘Ashura 162, 209-211 aspirant communities 47 Astaneh, Alireza 118 Ataman, Kutlug 38, 46, 49, 199 Ayeneh-i Khyial 78 Ayloul Festival 150 Azad Art Gallery 122 Azzawi, Dia 31, 101 Baalbaki, Ayman 199 Babaie, Sussan 118 Bakhshi Moakhar, Mahmoud 9, 126-127 Plate 9 Balaghi, Shiva 63, 63 Banisadr, Ali 199 Baradaran, Amir 198 Basbous, Michel 101 Bashir, Ala 31 Batniji, Taysir 199 Bazargan, Mehdi, Prime Minister 225 Behpour, Bavand 82, 84 belonging 8, 109, 110, 120, 122, 128, 152 Beshara, Azmi 33 Bhabha, Homi 21, 80 Blair, Sheila 190 Bloom, Jonathan 190 Boujmal 214 Boullata, Kamal 62 Canvas 122

Index

Centre of Plastic Arts of Iran (Markaz-i hunar-hay-i tajassumi-i kishvar) 131 Chaudhary, Ajay 26 Christie’s 29, 117 College Hall 136 colonialism 4, 18, 38, 57, 65, 196 contemporaneity 9, 22, 52, 103, 109, 110, 111, 128, 129 contemporary Arab art 55, 56 contemporary Iranian art 10-11, 13, 74-75, 80-81, 84, 110, 112, 117, 121, 157-158, 160, 174 Contemporary Practices 63 controversial election, 2009 6, 70 Copti, Skandar 44, 49 cosmopolitanism 41, 46, 137, 144 cultural agenda 13, 221, 238 cultural authenticity 111 cultural master-narratives 13, 225 cultural policy 113, 222 Cultural Research Bureau 78 cultural specificity 114 cultural tradition 12, 205, 207 curatorial approaches 222 curatorial parameters 188 curatorial perspective 187 Dabashi, Hamid 3, 4, 17 Daftari, Fereshteh 11, 12, 187 Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists 12, 198, 200 Plates 24-26 Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking 12, 188, 191-192, 194-195, 197-199 Plates 20-22 Daneshvari, Abbas 10, 11, 157 Darabi, Helia 13, 221 Dar el-Fan 139-141, 147 Dashti, Gohar 112 Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for Artistic Affairs 131 Dialogue of the Civilizations 235 Diba, Kamran 223, 225, 224

Diba, Layla S. (3) n 17 68 Dubai 117 educational system 71 Egypt 40, 53, 58, 62, 191 Eigner, Saeb 59 El Saadawi, Nawal 215 El-Salahi, Ibrahim Mohammed 30 Empire 5, 39, 47-48 Ermes, Ali Omar 101 ethno-cultural identity 9, 110-111 Euro-American artistic paradigms 9, 110 European imperialism 22 exhausted geographies 4-5, 38, 40, 42-43 Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Jordan 58 Fadjr International Festival of Visual Arts 84, 116, 239-240 Fardid, Ahmad 73 Farhadpour, Morad 71 Feyzjou, Shohreh 190 First Gulf War 142-143 Flood, Barry 191 Forouhar, Parastou 11, 162-166, 174, 177, 163, 164 Plates 16-17 Gharehbaghi, Ali Asghar 75 Ghazali, Mohammad 11, 160-162, 174, 176-177 Plates 14-15 global art discourses 1 globalisation 3-4, 14, 19, 28, 37-38, 41, 55, 81 Golkar, Babak 11, 168, 170-177, 168, 169 Plates 18-19 Golshiri, Barbad 9, 11, 82, 122, 126, 167-168, 171-172, 174, 177, 198, 123-125, 167 Plate 23 Goudarzi, Morteza (Dibaj) 74, 230 Green Movement 25, 239

259

Contemporary Art from the Middle East

Grigor, Talinn 68 (3) n 17 Gulistan-i Hunar 78 Gumpert, Lynn 62 Haddad, Farid 153 (8) n 5 Halawani, Rula 206 Harb, Hazem 206 Hariri, Rafiq, Prime Minister 150 Hassan, Salah 191 Hassanzadeh, Khosrow 211, 213 Hatoum, Mona 28, 190, 193-196, 199 Hefuna, Susan 199 hegemonic language 113 Herfeh hunarmand 79 High Council of the Cultural Revolution 75 hijab 216 homogenisation 2, 5, 39, 113, 117 Houshyar, Mehran 237 Howzeh hunari-i sazman-i tablighat-i islami (Artistic Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation) 72-73, 75, 78, 229, 223 Hunar-hay-i tajassumi 78 Huroufiyah 58 hybridization 145 Ibn ‘Arabi 13, 207, 213-214, 217 Ibraaz 63 ideological essentialism 116 Imru’l Qais 214 indigenous expression 114 Indonesia 189 Institute for the Development of the Plastic Arts 232 internationalism 111 Iran 60, 63, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77, 80, 117, 127-128, 157, 191, 193, 197, 213, 223, 225, 229, 231, 233, 236 Iranian Academy of the Arts 72-73, 78 Iranian Diaspora 83

260

Iran-Iraq war 209 Iraq 27, 40, 64, 99, 196, 209, 225 Ishak, Raafat 198-199 Islamic art 8, 12, 55, 57, 73-75, 100 102, 127, 188-195, 197 Islamic Art and Cultural Research Centre 73-75 Islamisation 6, 85 Israel 40-41, 43-44, 138, 142, 148 Issa, Rose 80 Istanbul Biennial 48 Jacir, Emily 28, 31, 190, 196 Jahad-i danishgahi (Academic Centre for Education, Culture and Research) 75 Jahanbegloo, Ramin 114 Jordan 34, 57-58 Kaabi Linke, Nadia 205 Kabbalah 30, 32 Kamal al-Mulk 74 Kamal, Youssef 31 Kami, Y. Z. 193-194, 196, 199 Kane, Patrick 62 Karami, Katyoun Plate 6 Karbala 209 Keshmirshekan, Hamid 14, 63, 80, 81, 109, 187, 232, 81 Plate 2 Khalife, Jean 137 Khamenei, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali 227, 228 Khatami, Seyyed Mohammad President 234-235, 235 Minister of Culture 232-233 Khbeiz, Bilal 150 Khiyal 78 Khiyal-i Sharghi 78 Khomeini, Ayatollah Seyyed Rouhollah 209 Khoshroo, Abolghassem 234 knowledge-production 2, 5-7, 20, 22, 25, 69-71, 82-85 Kossentini, Nicene 12, 207 Plate 30

Index

Kowssar, Mehdi 225 Kurdistan 40 Labid ibn Rabiya 214 Lahham, Rafik 31 Lebanese Civil War 10, 101, 135, 141, 143 Lebanon 9-10, 40, 135-149, 152-153 Libya 40 liminality 21-22 localisation 6, 85 L’Orient-Le Jour 138 Madadpour, Mohammad 73 Maghribi Kufic 214 Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize (MOPCAP) 132 (7) n 17 Maleki, Tooka 77 Mehregan, Omid 71 Melikian, Souren 190 memory 7, 17, 22, 25, 48, 90, 93, 127, 137, 140-141, 161, 209 MENA region 94, 206 Merali, Shaheen 7, 89 Mikdadi, Salwa 66 Ministry of Culture 139 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance 72, 75, 116, 231-234, 236, 238 Ministry of Islamic Guidance 228 Mirsepassi, Ali 226 Mobed, Amir 9, 198, 237, 121 Plate 8 modern Arab art 5, 53, 55 modern art in Turkey 62 Modern Art Iraq Archive 64 modernisation 13, 221, 225-227 modernity 20, 23, 26, 52, 62-63, 65, 81, 113, 188, 226 Moghaddam, Mandana 11, 166 Mohajerani, Ataollah 234 Mohammed, Eman 206 Plate 28 Mohassess, Ardeshir 31 Morocco 62, 189 Moshiri, Farhad 199

Mousavi, Mir Hossein 78 Mu‘allaqat 13, 214 Mua’siseh-i ta’lif, tarjumeh va nashr-i ‘asar-i hunari 73 Mu’assiseh-i towsi’eh hunar-hy-i tajassumi 75 Muharram 209 Mustafa, Ahmad 101 muta’ahhid artist 230 Nabil, Youssef 199 National Gallery of Art 58 national identity 13, 74, 147, 158, 191, 221 National Iranian Oil Company 223 National Museum in San‘a 216 nationalism 5, 39-40, 47, 81, 147, 155 neocolonialism 57 Neshat, Shirin 28, 31, 196-197 new art 8, 10, 74, 102, 158, 239 Niavaran Cultural Centre 131 Nicolas Sursock Museum 139 Nodjoumi, Nicky 31 Occidentosis 73, 226-227 Orientalism 20-21, 128, 191-192, 196 Orientalist visions 189 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah 222 Pahlavi, Queen Farah 223 Pahlavi monarchy 13, 221 Pajuhish-nameh 78 Pakbaz, Ruyin 237 Palestine 40, 43 Palestinian art 62 Pan-Arabism 41 particularism 38, 47 Perso-Islamic 127 Pieprzak, Katarzyna 62 Platform Garanti 48 Pooyan, Shapour Plate 7 Porter, Venetia 12-13, 203 post-colonial history 30, 33 post-colonial subject 21 post-colonialism 57

261

Contemporary Art from the Middle East

post-coloniality 66 post-modern rhetoric 55 post-Revolution era 74 postwar artists 10, 136, 153 postwar Lebanon 10, 147-149, 152 postwar period 10, 136 Preservation of the Relics of the Imposed War 228 Qahveh-khaneh (Coffee-house) 74 Queen’s Office 223 Raad, Walid 48, 190, 196 Ramadan, Khaled 253 Razavipour, Neda 9, 122, 168, 198, 123 regional identity 22 regional imaginaries 4, 38 regional imaginings 47-48 Revolution, 1979 6, 13, 70, 74, 113, 222, 225 Revolution in Tunis, 2011 214 revolutionary art 53, 74, 230 Revolutionary Painting 233, 239 Rogers, Sarah 9-10, 135 Rogoff, Irit 4-5, 37, 128, 233 Royal Society of Fine Arts 57 Rubeiz, Janine 139-141 Sa‘adi 161 Saba Cultural and Artistic Centre 131 Sabella, Steve 206 Sadeghi, Habibollah 238 Sadek, Walid 10, 135-136, 141-150, 152, 151 Safaei, Sadegh 236 Sahafzadeh, Alireza 76, 77, 77 Sahihi, Hamed 199 Said, Edward 21, 142 Saidi, Ramzi 140-141 Salemy, Mohammad 82 ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA Plate 4 salon d’automne of contemporary art 139 Sami Azar, Alireza 76-77, 235, 236 238, 235

262

Saqqa-khaneh movement 74, 114, 211, 224 Sarkis, Elias President (1976–82) 139 Satrapi, Marjane 193, 196 Sazman-i mutali’eh va tadvin-i kutub-i ulum-i insani-i danishgah-ha 76 Scheiwiller, Staci Gem 81 School of Art and Architecture 136 Severi, Hamid 6-7, 69 SFF 147-149 Shabout, Nada 5-6, 51 Shahbazi, Shirana 194 Shaloui, Mahmoud 238 Shariati, Ali 26, 226-227 Sharjah Biennial 22-23 Shaw, Raqib 192 Shaw, Wendy 62 Shawa, Laila 101 Shawky, Wael 38, 48 Sheikh Farid ad-din ‘Attar 161 Sheikh, Simon 72 ˛ Shi ism 27, 209 Shiite imagery 13, 217 Shubbak the Festival of Arab Culture 203 Sikander, Shahzia 30, 193, 195 sociopolitical art 10, 110, 153 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 180 Stepanian, Arman 113 stereotypes 11, 119, 127, 187, 197, 215 Syria 27, 40-41, 99, 138, 148, 190 Tabrizian, Mitra 199 Taif accords 141 Tajrish Circle on Philosophy, Literature and Art 84 Tanavoli, Parviz 199, 236, 115 Tandis 79 Tavakolian, Newsha Plate 5 Tavanaee Fard, Hasan 69 Tavoos Online 84 Tayefi, Ali 70 Tehran annual auction 132 (7) n 19 Tehran Museum of Contemporary

Index

Art (TMoCA) 13, 75-76, 78, 111, 131, 221-227, 231-236, 238-240, 224, 228-230, 235, 236 Plate 32 Tirafkan, Sadegh 12-13, 207, 209, 211, 213, 217, 208, 210 transnational contemporaneity 110 trauma 17-18, 20, 22, 24-25, 31, 34 Turkey 25, 38, 40, 48, 60, 62 University of Cairo 215 ‘Uqba ibn Nafi 214 Westernisation 13, 75, 221, 226-227 White Revolution 222 Winegar, Jessica 58, 191 Plate 1 Zattari, Akram 48 Zendehroudi, Charles Hossein 31

263

Plate 1

Book cover: Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

Plate 2

Book cover: Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books, 2013).

Plate 3

Azade Akhlaghi, Tehran-Mirzadeh Eshghi/3 July 1924, 2012, digital print on photo paper, 110 × 209 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 4

Encyclonospace Iranica Exhibitions, curated by: Mohammad Salemy, 14 September– 26 October, 2013, Access Gallery, Vancouver, Canada, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 5

Newsha Tavakolian, Look, 2012, C Print.105 × 140 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 6

Katyoun Karami, Once Upon The Time, 2013, (first of four panels), digital print on plaster panel (moisture resistant KNAUF), ed. 5, 120 × 240 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 7

Shapour Pooyan, Projectile 6, 2012, brass, iron, and steel, 200 × 90 × 90 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 8

Amir Mobed, Fraud, 2013, performance at the Azad Gallery Tehran, courtesy of the artist. Photographer Zarvan Rouhbakhshan.

Plate 9

Mahmoud Bakhshi, Bahman’s Wall, 2011, Ropak Installation, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 10

Nazgol Ansarinia, from the Reflections Refractions series, 2012, newspaper collage, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 11

Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995, © Ziad Abillama, Brochure provided by artist.

Plate 12

Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995. © Ziad Abillama, Brochure provided by the artist.

Plate 13

Ziad Abillama, Systême Full Fill, 1995, © Ziad Abillama, Brochure provided by the artist.

Plate 14

Mohammad Ghazali, Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest (Jay-i sar-i khouan), Abu Saeeid AbulKhayr, 2009, edition of 7, 134 × 112 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 15

Mohammad Ghazali, Where the Heads of the Renowned Rest ( Jay-e sar khouban), Reza Abbasi, 2009, edition of 7, 134 × 112 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 16

Plate 17

Parastou Forouhar, Trauerfeier (‘Funeral Service’), 2003, office chairs and religious banners, installation at National Gallery Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, courtesy of the artist.

Parastou Forouhar, Countdown, 2008, beanbags and religious banner, installation at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 18

Babak Golkar, The Ground for Standing and Understanding, 2012, Persian carpet, acrylic, wood and lacquer, 275 × 396 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 19

Babak Golkar, Azadi Tower, from the Parergon series, 2011, acrylic sheet, wood, and lacquer, 137 × 147.5 × 12.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.

(Plates 20-26: The collections are listed as they were at the time of the exhibition.)

Plate 20

Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel.

Left to right: Shirazeh Houshiary, Fine Frenzy, 2004, black and white Aquacryl, white pencil and ink on canvas, 190 × 190 cm, private collection; Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne, White Shadow, 2005, anodized aluminium, 398.8 × 170.2 cm, courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York; Bill Viola, Surrender, 2001, colour video diptych on two plasma displays mounted vertically on wall, overall 204.2 × 61 × 8.9 cm, private collection, New York.

Plate 21

Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel

Left to right: two works by Y.Z. Kami, Untitled, 2004-5, oil on linen, 325.1 × 233.7 cm. Collection Alberto and Katharin Spallanzani, Paris; Untitled, 2004-5, oil on linen, 340.4 × 198.1 cm, courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery; Ghada Amer, The Definition of Love according to Le Petit Robert, 1993, embroidery and gel on canvas, 100 × 100 cm, collection FRAC Auvergne, France.

Plate 22

Installation view of the exhibition, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. 26 February - 22 May 2006. MOMA; New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel.

Left to right: floor sculpture by Mona Hatoum, Prayer Mat, 1995, brass pins, brass compass, canvas, and glue, 15 × 67 × 112 cm, British Council, London; Mike Kelley, Untitled, 1996-97, hand-woven silk (made in Ghom, Iran), 101.6 × 152.4 cm, courtesy Brian Butler, Los Angeles; two carpets by Shirana Shahbazi: [Farsh-08-2004], 2004, hand-knotted wool and silk carpet, 70 × 50 cm, courtesy Gallery Bob van Orsouw, Zurich; [Farsch-01-2004], 2004, hand-knotted wool and silk carpet, 70 × 50 cm, courtesy Gallery Bob van Orsouw.

Plate 23

Barbad Golshiri, L’Inconnu de la scène, June 28, 2012. Performance at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, photographer: Maryam Ashrafi.

Plate 24

Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April - 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada.

Raafat Ishak, Responses to an Immigration Request from One Hundred and Ninety-Four Governments, 2007-9, oil and gesso on medium density fibreboard panels: 30 × 21 cm each (overall 194 cm), collection Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Plate 25

Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April - 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada.

Left to right: Nazgol Ansarinia, Rhyme and Reason, 2009, carpet: hand-woven wool, silk, and cotton, 360 × 252 cm, collection Abraaj Capital Art Prize Dubai; Parviz Tanavoli, Oh Persepolis II, 1975-2008, bronze, 186 × 128 × 25 cm, courtesy of the artist; Y.Z. Kami, Konya, 2007, iris-printed photographs with oil painting on paper, 221 × 408 cm, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery; Susan Hefuna, Woman Cairo 2011, 2011, wood and ink, 200 × 200 cm, courtesy of the artist; Mitra Tabrizian, Tehran 2006, 2006, C-type light jet print, 101 × 302 cm, courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 26

Installation view of the exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. 20 April - 15 September 2013. MOA; Vancouver, Canada.

Left to right: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, stainless steel and neon tube, diameter: 217 cm, Rennie collection, Vancouver; Ayman Baalbaki, Destination X, 2010 (recreated for MOA 2013), mixed media installation; Farhad Moshiri, Yek Donya (One World), 2007, Swarovski crystals on canvas on board, 138 × 223 cm, collection Gold Tulip Art Foundation, Zurich.

Plate 27

Mohammed Abla, In Conversation, 2011, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Gift of Artspace and Mohamed Abla.

Plate 28

Eman Mohammed, Untitled, 2009, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

Plate 29

Steve Sabella, Till the End Spirit of a Place, 2004, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Funded by CaMMEA.

Plate 30

Nicene Kossentini, Ibn ‘Arabi, Al‐fana fi’l mushahada, 2011, installation, wall mural, 9 mirrored panels, 450 × 360 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 31

Boushra Almutawakel, Mother, Daughter, Doll, 2012, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Gift of Midge and Simon Palley.

Plate 32

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, exterior view from the inner courtyard, designed by Kamran Diba (completed 1976). The outstanding architecture of TMoCA, combining Iranian traditional elements of architecture with a modern minimalist approach, is considered one of the best architectural achievements of the last 50 years in Iran.

Plate 33

View of exhibition Contemporary British Sculpture, 2003, TMoCA. Works by Richard Deacon (foreground), and Tony Cragg (background).

Plate 34

View of first Fadjr Visual Arts Festival, 2008, TMoCA. The organisers of the Festival intended to promote politically neutral and medium-specific art.

Plate 35

A view of the Sug-nigareh (‘mourning-graphy’) exhibition, 2011, TMoCA. The popularity of the new artistic media was nonetheless well observed by the new conservative government. In a process of appropriating the New Art movement, traditional and religious themes were encouraged in new media works including installations and video works.