M41 The New Vision Group

Towards a New Vision (1969)

In the late 1960s a vibrant art scene emerged in Iraq. The socialist Ba’ath party, which had assumed power after a revolution in 1968, soon established a lively, well-supported cultural system, creating museums, art festivals and touring exhibitions in order to promote the ideology of Pan-Arabism – a predominantly secular, transnational, political and cultural movement devoted to the unification and modernization of the Arabic-speaking world.

This flourishing gave rise to several artist associations, one of the most influential being the New Vision Group (Al-Ru’yya al-Jadidah). Founded in 1969 by the artist Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939), who co-wrote the manifesto with Rafa al-Nasiri, Muhammad Mahr al-Din, Ismail Fattah, Hashem Samarji and Saleh al-Jumaie. The group espoused ideas of Pan-Arab unity and called for a new Arabic modernism, one that connected artists ideologically and culturally rather than stylistically. As the second generation of pioneer modern artists – the first being those associated with the Baghdad Modern Art Group (M12) – they recognized the importance of taking an active role in building a new society; yet, having lived through a period of extreme political turmoil, they were cautious of the new regime, advocating an artistic vision that served humane ends. Their apprehensions turned out to be well founded. The brief blossoming of the arts in Iraq soon wilted as the Ba’athist regime evolved into a dictatorship. The group disbanded after their last exhibition, in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972, and Dia al-Azzawi moved to London in 1976.

The New Vision Group’s Arabic manifesto argues that the artist must live in a state of constant sacrifice and they refer to the seventh-century Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj, who most famously said ‘I am the truth’, and exhorted his followers to find God within their souls. The manifesto was first published in a Baghdad newspaper at some point in 1969, and then collected in Al-Bayanat al-Fanniyya fi al-Iraq (Art Manifestos in Iraq) by the artist and writer Shakir Hassan al-Said (M12, M52) in 1973.

* * *

There is an internal unity to the world that places the human within a non-visible position towards it. There is no doubt that contemporary consciousness is nothing other than a process of discovering the essential identity of the human on the one hand, and of civilization on the other.

If our current stage of civilization is the inevitable outcome of humankind’s previous discoveries and surpassing of his external world, then actual existence will only be realized through a living movement that rejects any ultimate purpose for existence. The presence of an object lies in its continuing evolution and constant change. Since the continuity of exploration has become an intrinsic characteristic of the conscious man, the contemporary artist has refrained from presenting the world as something stagnant and incapable of change. As such, its mystery drove him to take interest in discovering the true essence of things, and he has placed himself in confrontation with the great challenges of the external world, demonstrating his capacity to transgress the limits of appearances that nature and social relations force upon him in the domain of experience.

If the primitive peoples endowed art with magic, and the Greeks ascribed to it the study of beauty, and the medieval era expected art to reinforce the realm of faith, our civilization makes of it a human practice undertaken by one who lives in constant contact with the world, using it to present a human existence laid bare before the truth, and thus bringing about a different form of relationship between the contemporary human and the world.

Art is the practice of taking a position towards the world, a continual practice of transgressing and discovering human interiority from within change. It is a mental rejection of all that is wrong in the structure of society, and thus becomes a practice of constant creation, by which it offers to human existence its own independent world, composed of line, colour and mass. In this way, rejection and resistance – not in their absolute form – become two indispensable presences for the continuous practice of innovation.

The artist is a fighter who refuses to put his weapon down as he speaks in the name of the world, and in the name of the human. He lives in a state of constant sacrifice towards his world, expressing a burning desire to denounce the masks of falsity, and so he always owns what he wishes to say. The unity of artistic production throughout history places the artist at the centre of the world and at the focal point of the revolution. Change and transgression are two faces of a conscious challenge to all the regressive social and intellectual values that surround his world. A true artist is one who affirms his refusal to fall captive to a mummified body of worn-out social values. Instead, he must rise against the world so that he finds himself on the opposite side, from where he is able to judge it. At the centre of the revolution, he rises above any ready-made givens, transforming himself into another Hallaj, standing against injustice and intellectual servitude. The artist is a critic and revolutionary, negating the world around him.

The presence of the revolution confronts him with the spirituality of self-annihilation and sacrifice as he explodes the fallacies of the past and present, and seeks to restructure the world within a new artistic vision. The closure of the self, and the commodification of art, is the result of a superficial view of the world. The rejection thereof will not be realized except by continuous change so that man is rescued from the crushing effect to which his material and social relations subject him. As such the artist’s task is to place these relations in human terms, so that they develop and grow with new discoveries and successive modulation; his task is to bring a lasting end to previous forms of thought and relation, so he may grow anew. For the new always has its own vision, and its own voice. Unity with the new will not be achieved except by engaging it in terms of that vision and voice.

An artist grounds his justifications for human existence in nature. Alongside the historical dimension of existence, he grants it a human one, such that, by the legitimacy of his existence, he acquires the possibility of creating history or inventing it once again. For when he brings, on a one-dimensional surface, his own unique world into existence, he is presenting to the world a truth which, at first, appears not to exist. Through his creative capabilities he gives that truth a presence in the world of light so that it may help us uncover some of the hidden aspects of our lived experience – those that cannot otherwise be revealed in mental perceptions.

Artistic vision is only one of the images we use for our internal and external world, but an artist draws on that vision in order to secure the foundation of that world, which he wishes to build anew. Thus, the artwork is a manifestation of the emergence of the artist’s world into public existence. A good artist is one who realizes the greatness of uniting with others through his artistic production. For an artist who relates to art as production only, and who produces work as a commodity, cannot be a historical witness to the human capacity to create. He cannot become an authentic artist so long as he is a Trojan horse carrying inside him the body of a dead society.

The artist lives the unity of all periods of history, even while he lives in his time, and as a part of his own society. As much as he feels that he must change the past through contemporary vision, he also feels that the past orientates the present, that between the past and the present there is unity and coexistence. For if artistic vision is presence realized in the painting, and this presence is a self that is anxious to search for a civilizational identity, then legend and historical sensibility are the means by which the artist will arrive at his new world. It is a return to the singular self, in which he may either live or die. For we die in the unity of our human and civilizational selves, and it is through the unity of that self that we begin the journey of change and creation. We find no artistic generation among the generations of our nation that lived its whole life demanding this, as we now do. No generation was as immersed in the spirit of homeland and humanity, with such urgency, as ours is. We are continually called to challenge and confront all the threats to the homeland. We live in the midst of a vortex of the military advances of a new Nazism. Our existence is always under threat. We work for the sake of clarity and the call for an avant-garde art that integrates its humanist goals with a new artistic vision. And we shall continue to be a generation which brings its spirit to these challenges with urgency, making art not a means of seclusion in individual existence or immersion in one’s private world, but rather a vision directed to the world by a tacit language articulated by the artist in his own way. This rejects any mechanical understanding of art and its role in society that limits the artist to what is readily available within the restrictions of existing relations. The processes of obliteration that social relations have enacted upon the artist, and which at times made him a bearer of masks of fakeness and subservience, and at other times a victim, cannot retain their legitimacy, nor prevent us from extending our perceptions beyond things.

Let us be the vanguard of the challenge. We want to be nothing but the artists who carry the spirit of homeland and humanity. Be with us so that we unite the new vision of the world. Grant it the aggressiveness and rebellion of youth, transforming academic halls into strongholds of change, so that we may have an independent painting of transgression – the painting which shakes our depths, tears through falseness, opens the river of life in our society.

There shall be no presence of such painting nor building of a new vision, except by a plunge, by a work of creation, by a civilizational, humanist, creative self – the repository of human creation.

Let us remember our art in the lands of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Nile, and let us reject the world of rigidity and imitation. Let us construct a permanent and honest relationship with our generation.

We must tear apart heritage so that we recreate it.

We must challenge it in order to surpass it.

We must recognize it, within the confines of its museum existence, and recognize the aggressiveness and fierceness of the encounter. Let us unite in our souls a desire to surpass. We will not be ripped from our roots, but rather extend them deep into the land – a depth of reach, of honesty, filled with vivid life. So long as we hold a free stance towards it, heritage is not dictatorial art that drags us in and locks us inside of itself. It is that malleable dough worked by the hands of the creating artist. We will not traverse our heritage with fear of slavery; rather we shall place it on our foreheads so that we may wade through the world, speaking in the new language of life, using its symbols, its new humanity. We carry the spirit of incursion, a spirit of rebellion that tears all ossified things apart, so that we may return from our journey bearing a new vision.

We are the generation that demands change, transgression and innovation. We reject the embalmed past.

We reject the artist of divisions and boundaries. We advance. We fall. But we will not retreat. We present to the world our new vision: