Man beh Mehmani-ye
Donya raftam
[I went to the festive gathering
Of the world.]
—Sohrab Sepehri
In a recent interview in anticipation of the premiere of her third feature film at Cannes Film Festival, “Five o’clock in the Afternoon” (2003), Samira Makhmalbaf—the youngest Iranian filmmaker with a spectacular record in world cinema—was asked why she had opted to shoot her most recent film in Afghanistan. “There are physicians without border,” she responded, “why not artists without border?”
Meanwhile, on February 16, 2005, BBC News (World Edition) had a rather strange news to report:
Mother auctions ad space on bump: The adverts have a limited shelf life—A mother-to-be from New Zealand has run an online auction selling advertising space on her pregnant tummy. Julz Thomson, whose baby is due in March, made NZ$255 (£96) when she put her bulge up for auction on the Internet last week … Ms Thomson has agreed to wear a T-shirt with the advert every day until her baby is born next month. “It’s a bargain for daily advertising until the middle of March,” said businessman Lawrence Raukete.1
Somewhere between the idea of artists without borders, the practice of the multinational corporate sponsorship of art exhibitions and film festivals, and the vanishing space of a pregnant belly as the waxing and waning site of an advertising exhibition, the fate of contemporary art and its national domains needs to be radically reconsidered. Vanishing sites, porous borders, imperially redrawn maps, and an active re-imaging of colonially constituted boundaries and frontiers seem to be the emerging parameters of the new world—and the art that seeks to (but does not) represent it. On this map, whence and where the location of a national art—Iran or any other cat sitting on the map?
One: Berlin
Introducing an exhibition on contemporary Iranian art at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, “Neue Positionen iranishscher Künstler/Contemporary Positions of Iranian artists” (2004) in Berlin, the director of the House, Hans-Georg Knopp, began by admitting that the world he still insisted on calling “the Middle East,” and as characterized by what he believed to be “Islam,” is “both exotic and fascinating, [and] yet at the same time dangerous.”2
Exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous: How could the director of any museum of modern art or biennale resist Iran as a subject matter?
Hans-Georg Knopp proceeded to propose that we need to have a “differentiated view” of the region, views that in his estimation replace those that come to us from the mass media. The necessity of this imperative, Hans-Georg Knopp insisted, has to do with the fact that these countries are much closer to the site of this exhibition in Berlin than its audience may have assumed: “This differentiated view is also essential,” he pointed out, “because many people from these countries are living here [here meaning in Germany and by extension in Europe], primarily as political migrants. Although the Middle East may be spatially distant, in a global-virtual world it is very near.”3
“The Middle East,” wherever that is, is not “spatially distant.” It is where it is—or perhaps where it should be. Iran is not any more “spatially distant” than Germany. Or is it?
Whether as justification to a board of trustees, explanation to bureaucrats in superior positions of authority, or as curatorial policy, the proposal that: they may appear to be there, but they are in fact here too, and they are exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous, very much (over) determines the nature and disposition of what is to be shown, exhibited, framed, formed, catalogued. This is to give a whole new meaning to what Bertolt Brecht meant by “alienation effect” (or a-effect). This is to use the distancing effect, the Verfremdungseffekt (or V-effekt) to distance the audience from any emotive involvement in the spectacle through narrative reminders of the alien and foreign disposition of the exhibition. In this case, “der Welt” in “der Kulturen der Welt” is not really the world, it is the foreign, the strange, the distant—or as the director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hans-Georg Knopp, puts it, the exotic, the fascinating, and (above all) the dangerous.
The first essay of any such catalogue, where the person who has raised the fund to pay for the party is given the prerogative of a stately entry, exposes more than the inside contributors may wish to have revealed. There is an exhibitionism to exhibition catalogues that is always more revealing than the actual show. For in the space of the enduring exhibition that is evident in an exhibition catalogue, the Guttenbergian logic of print (putting up a valiant, graceful, and perhaps even futile resistance) defies the makeshift logic of the exhibition hall and the playful rhetoric of the cyberspace alike and reveals more than it conceals. (I have no way of knowing what will come before or after this very essay I am writing for an exhibition catalogue. It remains to be, as it were, seen. All I can do is to plant and tuck away this parenthesis.) The language of a museum or biennale director is the unwitting (and thus accurate) barometer of the spirit of ecumenicalism that goes into the exhibiting of a “world” (no less) culture.
What, in this case, the catalogue of “Neue Positionen iranishscher Künstler/Contemporary Positions of Iranian artists” reveals is the spatial politics of curating, the distancing stratagems un/consciously evident in placing a work of art from a place like Iran in its right place. But where exactly is the right place for a work of art, thus designed and described, from a place like Iran. It is obviously (obviously?) a work of art from there, that has been brought and exhibited here.
The spatial politics of curating, already evident in the very title of the exhibition, “Far Near Distance,” is predicated on an aging (by now quite funereal) trope: they are there, while we are here; they are exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous, while we are all the opposites of the exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous. To make the matter more dangerous, we have them among us (them sleeper cells) as “political migrants,” while our media fails to have us understand them (them inscrutable Orientals) properly. We need to do something about that irresponsible act of the media to show and tell who exactly these people are, so we have their artists come over here and tell us in their own language what in the world is the matter with them. In addition, Hans-Georg Knopp notes, we have some of them already here, so we need to include them too (them sleeper cells), for they have learned some of our ways, so they might act as an intermediary in telling us what their brethrens and sisters are up to, say, do, paint, perform—by way of telling us how come they are so dangerous, blowing things up, buildings and airplanes, innocent passengers and guilty assailants altogether.
Mohammad Atta was the last curator—the curator who ended curating. His exhibition, a bloody spectacle, with no catalogue to his name except ashes, no Haus der Kulturen der Welt would care to call anything but terrorism.
Art exhibitions of things Arab, Iranian, or Islamic are acts of neurotic exorcism, of collective therapy, of cathartic release of fear and anxiety: “Look, they are not so bad. They are human too. They paint and perform, sing and dance. They even know how to take pictures. So there is nothing to be afraid of.” Art exhibitions of things Oriental are to re/assure the Occidental. In New York we say Woody Allen wanted to deduct the fee that he paid his therapist as medical expense. The tax collector said no that’s entertainment. Between “medical expenses” and “entertainment,” we say, Woody Allen and his tax collector settled for “religious contribution.” The budget allocated for art exhibitions in Europe is for psychotherapeutic expenditure, entertainment, and religious contribution—all, as in New York, at the same time.
The fear factor posits the logic of Verfremdung. The spatial politics of distancing, exoticizing, and thus facilitating the employment of a native informer (aka curator), evident in Hans-Georg Knopp’s entry, is equally present in the piece that Shaheen Merali, the project director, wrote, “Tehrancentric & Iraninity,” for the volume. “I have had the pleasure of visiting Iran on two occasions,” Merali reports, “both times through the generous invitation of the Fadjr International Film festival.”4 Merali writes for the elucidation of what he terms “the Occidental imagination,” having visited the Orient twice in a row, taking advantage of his conversations with his Iranian interlocutors inside Iran, reflecting their rather critical perspective toward what Merali calls “occidental film festivals.” “Occidental film festivals,” as a category, is predicated on “Oriental films,” and that binary supposition, ipso facto, casts a thick layer of categorical acclivity (a slanted slope) upon the location of a culture it may or may not wish to entertain.
Visiting Tehran twice and writing in Berlin for this catalogue, Merali reports of the philosophical disposition of Tehrani cab drivers and assesses the site of their vehicle as the space of social interaction in gridlock traffics. This Tehrani space, Merali contrasts with a cab driver in Berlin in which the German counterparts “no longer want to talk as they listen to their radios for the next job.” Conclusion? “It is sad that the intimate space of their (German cab drivers’) cab appears to reflect the bankruptcy of the city finances.” A rather old and cliché trope—that the Orientals are better off in their human contacts than the Occidentals and their rationalized relations and specified spaces—the binary that Merali proposes is of course very much limited to only one sort of (orange) cabs in Tehran and radio-dispatched cabs in Berlin. Site unseen, I am pretty sure there are (Turkish, Iranian, Moroccan) cab drivers in Berlin who would be happy to indulge a tourist’s curiosity, as I know of radio-dispatched taxis in Tehran who would not exchange a word with their passengers (except for common curtsies) by virtue of company regulations. The logic of capital cannot and will not be compromised—and there is no center and thus there is no periphery to that logic. The spatial trope, of the difference between a Tehrani cab and a cab in Berlin, marks the distance and posits the space between the location of an exhibition (in Berlin) and the habitat of the artists (Tehran) it will now re/present.
The notion of “Iraninity” (grammatically awkward in English but perhaps less so in its German rendition as Iranität) that Merali proposes in reading the condition of the Iranian exiles (by way of reading their artistic productions) traps and incarcerates the fluidity of the immigrant culture in prison-cells of their endemic presentiments. Merali is quite perceptive in his reading of these exilic communities—marginal, meandering, futile, bitter, resentful, at home in neither of their two received and rejected cultures. But what precisely is their impact in producing and reading works of art? The over-fetishized and under-determined condition of “exile” is left entirely unexamined in such sort of positing of an expatriate community that in its transitory disposition is entirely tangential in the fate of art in its emerging sites—cast and curated in a world no longer respectful of inherited boundaries, outdated ideologies, outmaneuvered politics. “Exile” no longer means anything—for the politics of persecution is no longer contingent on any territorial claim on any “home.” Both Knopp and Merali have an over-politicized notion of what they term “political migrants.” The overwhelming majority of immigrants to North America and Western Europe are not “political migrants.” They are labor immigrants. They are not escaping anything except poverty. They are not running away from political persecution. They are just looking for a decent job—Turks in Germany, Moroccans in Spain, Algerian in France, South Asians in England, all of them and more in the United States. The overzealous Mojahedin and other Iranian leftist émigré in Europe have skewed the reading of the immigrant population at large. Three million Iranian high school graduates participated in the national university entrance examination in 1997. Only 240,000 of them (less than 10%) were accepted into any college (the entire capacity of Iranian university system). More than 90% of high school graduates (and in any number of other years) poured into a jobless economy, more than 85% of which is oil-based. That is the condition and cause of labor immigration from Iran into the rest of the world—and not political persecution, which is brutal and barbaric as it only affects fragmented portions of the Iranian bourgeoisie. Terming the Iranian expatriates in Germany or elsewhere “political migrants” gives, moreover, a humanitarian disposition to their host countries that their actual status as abused immigrant laborers, subject to systematic racial profiling and labor discrimination by state and federal authorities and the corporations they represent in Germany and much of the rest of Europe, does not. There is thus a collusion of interest between liberal European sentiments and middle-class morality of countries like Iran that systematically advocates the cause of human rights, women’s rights, or religious and political minority rights, which is legitimate and noble as they are, they also manage to camouflage a more horrid fact of abused labor migration that has no liberal marker to register its barometers.
The notions of “political migrants” and of the “exilic community” thus corroborate the geopolitics of distancing—the small fraction of an alien people on the European continent serves to separate and distance the people they are framed to represent (and they do not). The political distancing of the national designation is commensurate with the aesthetic alienation of the art they produce.
An identical politics of spatial alienation is also evident, though with a confident air of cool metrosexual despondency, in Tirdad Zolghadr’s “Framing Iran: A Coffee-Table Genealogy” in the same volume. Here, we first encounter Zolghadr fully functioning like a native informer for Christian Kracht, a Swiss author with some literary interest in contemporary Iran. The employment thus conversely qualifies him as a connoisseur of the contemporary Iranian art and artistic scene—where he would take foreign visitors to have “raisin vodka,” as he puts it, “with international film-makers, smoke water pipes with conceptual artists, and … buttered rice and chicken kebab with critical intellectuals. They bickered about the heat, talked politics, … and complained about Shirin Neshat.”5 Shirin Neshat? Over buttered rice and chicken kebab?
Zolghadr is disarmingly self-referential—his time is “also a time when scores of Iranians who had grown up outside, like myself, started showing up at Mehrabad airport, committed outsiders with slushy accents and good intentions.”6 His undoing, which he does himself so well, is that he thinks he is an “outsider” in Iran, chicken kebab, raisin vodka, water pipe, and complaining about Shirin Neshat notwithstanding, fancying himself an “insider” where exactly—perhaps on a squash court, the game he plays so well: “Against the Wall,” right? “Gegen die Wand” (2004), as Fatih Akin, a fellow émigré, would say. There are no sides anymore, in or out—here is where we all stand and cannot (just like that first Lutheran himself) do otherwise, or go anywhere else—for else (both somewhere and something) has long since disappeared.
But the aesthetics of positing the somewhere else persists, for European art exhibitions of non-Occidental art (as Merali would thus say and designate) appropriates to alienate, incorporates to dismiss, familiarizes to exoticize, owns to disown—a manner of curating akin to curing an illness, as in inoculating against a disease, a vaccination, which perforce must inject a little of the same poison that must both kill and cure the disease. Zolghadr is critically (charmingly even) self-conscious of his own role in all this and banks on theorizing it—rather well. “With a … booming demand for transcultural consumption,” he notes, “the kulturindustrie has become dependent on a small handful (sic) of interregional exerts, translocal informants with a foothold in the Western world.”7 He then rightly (and quite insightfully) points to framing works of art as the primary function of curatorial politics to fabricate a projected aesthetics, made out of nowhere, for their bemused audiences. As a “translocal informant,” as he typologizes himself in fact, Zolghadr believes that the deluge of what here in New York we would call infomercial gathering around “the postmodern severing of signs from referent has dispelled hope of representation.” He then rightly adds: “As just about any issue, from Khayyam to Khamenei, to digital video is subject to dozens of articles, critical essays, online publications…” there is simply no time to figure out and decode, read, and register any work of art. Here is where the curatorial class of translocal informants and their manner and modes of framing always already reads a wok of art by having it selected and suggested in an exhibition. Zolghadr’s self-conscious sardonics—well-equipped with a proper dose of Dipesh Chakrabarty and of course Homi Bhabha seasoning his Said’s—does well in making him quite transparent, but no less implicated in a kulturindustrie that has long since exhausted its aesthetic categories. Baudrillard remains adamant (but he is late) that commercialization of the work of art amounts to “the aestheticization of the whole world.”8 The terms of such aestheticization, however, are not coterminous with what Baudrillard insists in calling a “transaesthetics of indifference.” Works of art can defy the Tower of (aesthetic) Babel and make a difference. But in what terms and to what end? So far as the strategies and stratagems of distancing, a kind of curatorial Verfremdung, persist to ascribe an alien registration card to works of art it deigns to curate, so will the attribution of the exotic, the fascinating, and (above all) the dangerous. Today, one of the greatest con artists (dead or) alive, Osama bin Laden, has fully recognized the power of curatorial Verfremdung and thus opted for video installations of the first kind—broadcast on Aljazeera, censored on CNN—rather than the old-fashioned pamphleteering of yore.
The weakest link (entirely unnecessary and quite dispensable without the slightest damage to the veracity of the argument) in Edward Said’s magisterial achievement Orientalism is when he brings Aeschylus’ Persian into his frame of references in order to work through the earliest literary evidence of European Orientalism.9 The Greek Orientalism evident in Aeschylus’ Persian was an Orientalism of fear, as the Orientalism of Mozart in his “Abduction from Seraglio” was an Orientalism of rivalry, and both categorically different from the Orientalism of domination that Said best documented in the European age of colonialism. “Europe,” as a colonially manufactured idea, did not even exist at the time when Aeschylus wrote his Persian. It is this distant memory of Orientalism, however, that Zolghadr resuscitates and then links to that of Zoroaster to generate a genealogy of European interest in Iran, thus effectively cross-essentializing both, while appearing to dismantle them. From Aeschylus and Zoroaster, Zolghadr moves to the Enlightenment and the dawn of such classical Orientalists as Sir William Jones’ interest in medieval Persian poets. Edward Fitzgerald makes a showing in the narrative, before the late Shah and her queen pick up the narrative, facilitate the creation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, and that brings the story all the way to the threshold of the Islamic Revolution.
As all acts of transhistorical generalizations, this narrative of how Iranians have been loved and feared in Europe flies in the face of historical vicissitude, thematic variations, selective memory, narrative appropriation, and discursive colonialism. What Goethe did with Hafez in his West-Ostlicher Diwan (1819) was vastly different from what Edward Fitzgerald did with Khayyam in his Rubaiyat (1859), or Mozart had done with Zoroaster in his Magic Flute (1791), or Friedrich Nietzsche with his Zoroaster in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), or James Morrier did in his Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824). Europe, as a categorical imperative of an overarching colonial imagination, is of a very recent vintage, as is Iran, the Middle East, or Islam for that matter. This is not to say that such strategic essentialisms, as Gayatri Spivak calls them,10 are historically irrelevant, or politically moot. This is just to say that systematically succumbing to and corroborating such essentialisms, rather than strategically using them or categorically historicizing them, are two vastly different things. The net result of positing them against each other—Europe has thought this, that or the other thing about Iran—is bound to substantiate and corroborate that politics of distancing in which an aesthetics (and/or dramaturgical) Verfremdung is specified, articulated, and put to immediate psychopathological ab/uses.
Zolghadr is exquisitely self-narrative, placing and positing his own generation of Iranians (born and) bred outside Iran as the cultural intermediaries of the two sites they now un/comfortably occupy—between Iran and what they still like to call “the West”: the travelers in between, the comprador (no pun intended here) curators (sometimes I think antique dealers are the best curators, curating private vanities at the public cost of our collective memories of things lost and found their expensive ways into private collections). Yuppie, young, jetsetter, jugglers of colorful mothballs of memory, curious, curators, critical, poco/pomo raiders of the lost ark full of curiosities: this generation of exceedingly (precociously even) smart people is outsmarting itself, the light-and-shadow give and take of the art dealers of yore, chroniclers of our historical disappearance, smuggling their accented Persian and slanted English under the disguise of their Persian demeanor one way, and the metrosexual inauthenticity of the culture they can no longer claim the other. They do not buy and sell antiques. They just trade in signs, manufacturing consent, negotiating identities—building nations for rich Arab Shaykhs in the Gulf (Persian or Arabic, they can pick for you), or else lending a hand in making people look stranger than they really are. Children of the post-Islamic-Revolution, speaking a few languages, with an endearing accent to their hesitant Persian tucked away under their tongue, this generation is at home nowhere—they are the simulacrum of their own undoing, the sweet smell of transitory success.
Zolghadr is quite perceptive in articulating the dilemmas of his generation—that if they go for histories and geographies of art they are told they are essentializing and if they go for the work of art itself they are told that they are aestheticizing, fetishizing, objectifying. They do not know quite what they are doing, though they usually can fake it quite well. The virtue of Zolghadr is that he is critically sure of his uncertainties—casting a sardonic and sour look at the whole spectacle, theorizing his autobiography of a national art going under. His sardonics un/done, he cannot but remain a stranger, estranged from the work of art he cannot (but) represent. Distancing, Verfremdung, is the principal task of comprador curators—their trading trademark. They do not bring nations and their art together. They in fact alienate them ever more distant from each other, casting them in a permanent corner of strangeness: Ever more exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous.
The dangerous is ethnic—and the charge fills the galleries that exoticize exactly at the moment that they are seeking to humanize. The question of ethnicity in a radically ethnographic universe is almost inevitable. The question is if one can bank on one’s ethnic credentials to discredit them, a kind of intentional overdraft where and when one knows one does not have sufficient fund. The bounced check is the evidence of not only an ethnic bankruptcy (that the ethnos has already mutated into the ethos) but also of a homeless mind—and that in the dead of winter and in glorious summer alike, thriving in the open air of no walls, under the protection of no roofs, no boundaries and no borders, no geography, no custom officers, and (yes) above all no history. In the absence of ethnic bankruptcy, all art becomes ethnographic—ever more exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous. Haus der Kulturen der Welt is predicated on a notion of “the world,” which is not multiple, but essential, and as such it is always already somewhere else. That essentialized world, I believe, is at the root of Baudrillard’s despair, when he believes that in our time art has become Byzantine, iconic, and thus entirely anthropological: “Perhaps we ought to consider art solely from an anthropological standpoint, without reference to any aesthetic judgment whatsoever.”11
If one were to hope that the poco/pomo, as we call it here in New York, had put an end to the culturalist reading of art one would be wrong. Zolghadr’s consistently sardonic tone and postmodern posturing become decidedly positivist when he opts for “Cultural Paradox” as the “dominant trope” of his time. He thus finds a natural alley in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s terms of endearment for the hybrid and the multiple personality. Zolghadr rightly seeks to dismantle any credibility given to the illusory notion of “resistance” in works of art, and instead opts for and puts his money on the equally dubious narratives of exile, which he finds formally and aesthetically more compelling than acts of political testimony. He is, Zolghadr, quite playful in his subversive dismantling of just about anything that might mean anything to just about anybody—and quite cleverly so. But his decidedly culturalist critic turns on itself and becomes a critique of the polluted reason—the reason that is neither pre-modern private nor post-Kantian public, neither here nor there, but everywhere and thus nowhere.
This nowhere, which is quite evident (though in an uncanny way) in Zolghadr’s take on staging (or what he appropriately calls “framing” with multiple intentions) of the contemporary art becomes the transparent apparition of a virtual space where Baudrillard’s fear of an aesthetics of indifference can be alleviated. A good place to start is this mutation of Neshat from an artist to an issue of critical conversation over buttered rice and chicken kebab. Whence the animus toward Neshat? Other than being successful, I think, the major reason why Neshat has become an issue is that she is artistically from nowhere—and as such she cannot be represented, for she has suspended all acts and claims of representation. In his essay in this catalogue, Zolghadr reserves his severest criticism for Neshat. Here, he drops all his postmodern histrionics and becomes positively livid—calling Neshat such names as “protagonist and grande dame of the euro-oriental art exchange.” The texture of the animus is quite curious, sipping through a critic of the European reception of Neshat’s work to her work itself, and even quite ad hominem. The problem might indeed in part at least rest in the word “exile” that both Zolghadr and Neshat (unadvisedly) find operative and relevant—and yet Zolghadr objects to Neshat’s use of the term as an excuse to keep her apartment in New York for fear of compromising her art in Tehran. Zolghadr rightly observes, and quite poignantly, that this mere suggestion casts all those artists who have opted (or have no choice but) staying in Iran as compromised artists—which is certainly not the case. But the evident fact is that neither those who live and work in Iran are compromised, nor Neshat is disingenuous in her work—and yet both she and Zolghadr put misplaced concreteness on the notion of exile. They are not in exile. I met one of them for the first time in New York in Walter Reade theater during a New York film festival and the other at the lobby of a hotel in Sharjah. We spoke in Persian in both cases. None of us were in exile. Nobody is. For exile predicates a home, and there is no longer any home left for anyone. Home is where you hang your hat, frame your picture, and brew your (Oriental) tea. In my experience, only Tehrani intellectuals are very particular about “Iran” and homeland and exile. Home-wise, we provincial people, coming from the peripheries of the Iranian capital (in my case from southern climes of the country), have always had to fend for ourselves. I feel far less alienated here in New York than I did in Tehran—and both Tehran and New York are emotively equidistant for me from Ahwaz, where I can no longer call home.
Zolghadr remains consistently bold, armed with his deconstructive charm, in naming names: “If ‘globalization’ is what you now call imperialism, if you don’t want to lose your Ford Foundation grant,” he says poignantly before self-mockingly asking, “what’s wrong with calling something a coffee-table catalogue, a bestiarium, terrarium, ethnic marketing, or unchecked xenophobia.” Toward the end of his essay, the trans-migrant curator, incurable, drops his gauntlets at the door of his hotel room, where the museum or the next biennale has always already picked up the tab:
At the end of the day, all that’s necessary to ensure the credibility and coherence of an exhibition, to enucleate the fantasy of a testimony to cultural realities, are the catalogue commentators, the author-curators, the artist-ethnographers, the translocal speakers themselves. It is to us and to our moral standards, quasi-allegorical hypothesis, ethnic credentials, murky ideological affiliations and glossy catalogues that one turns to for meaning ad cultured entertainment. After “representation” comes representation, after “Iran” comes Iran, after the catalogue the catalogue and so forth.12
This is what Gayatri Spivak would call “strategic essentialism,” though with a price tag on it. The task of keeping the Orient at an arm’s length, by making their foreignness familiar and their familiarity foreign, has already framed the Oriental art (even if you sugar coat the deal and call it “Kulturen der Welt”) in the convenient act of Verfremdung.
With Zolghadr as the critical (creative, sharp-shooting, dashingly polyglot and bicoastal) intermediary, the move of the catalogue is outward and inward, from outside (Knopp who has presumably never been to Iran), to Merali (who has been to Tehran only two times), to Zolghadr (who frequents Tehran regularly), and then to Mahsa Shekarloo and Amin Farzanfar (who live in Tehran), down to Mir-Ahmad Mir-Ehsan (b. 1954) and Daryush Shayegan (1935–2018) who are iconic insiders, archetypal in their representations, members of the older generation of intellectuals, summoned here to reflect on the status of Iranian artistic creativity. The distance, between Berlin and Tehran, or between Knopp and Shayegan (frequented by Zolghadr), is the space where the geopolitics of Verfremdung takes place.
Once inside, the vision of Iranian intellectuals from within their midst and gathered here as testimony on the way Iranians produce their art is as old and as cliché-ridden as a worn-out suitcase that still miraculously smells of mothballs—all its openings and closings notwithstanding. As evidenced by two of its prominent intellectuals, commissioned here to reflect on the status of artistic creation in their homeland, Iran continues to be seen as the place where the binary opposition presumed between the oldest clichés in the bag—“Tradition and Modernity”—is still operative, and yet now encouraged to be overcome—an encouragement that in effect, and not so paradoxically, ends up corroborating and ossifying them even more than before. Mir-Ahmad Mir-Ehsan announces that “in Iran the challenge of uniting intellect and intuition, west and east, past and future has reached epic proportions.”13 The hyperbole, evidently, reflects more than a quarter of a century living in the throes of an Islamic Republic running wild after the goose chase of cultural authenticity, coming soon after a Pahlavi monarchy seeking to turn Iran into “Japan of the Middle East.” The prophecy of uniting intellect and intuition—quite intuitively (as it were) attributing the intellect to “the West” and intuition to “the East”—is predicated on one of the oldest and most tired Orientalist tropes, now thoroughly internalized by the natives. Our Oriental past, Iranian intellectuals seem to be saying from the inside, is identified with tradition and intuition, our Occidental future, they suggest, need not be a blind acceptance of modernity and intellect coming from the land of Oz. We can combine them and come up with a third way. The third way, as it were, is trapped between the two it seeks to navigate and ends up corroborating them far beyond the fact of their outmoded validity around the world—of which fact, the representative intellectuals summoned here to testify in Berlin remain blissfully oblivious.
Judging by these reflections from inside (a location already dubious of that designation), the long since outdated cliché of tradition versus modernity still holds tyrannical and exclusive sway in Iran. One intellectual thinks that the problem with Iranians is that they have neither totally abandoned their Tradition (Sunnat) nor fully embraced modernity (modernité), while another believes this to be a good thing and it can actually teach the world one thing or another by way of rescuing it from its larger predicaments. But in opposing each other, and even in opposing absolutist binaries, they too seem to be categorically trapped in the pigmented binary invented by Enlightenment modernity. The result is an epistemic paralysis, an obsessive compulsive disorder, spasmodically oscillating between the two polar opposites of Tradition and Modernity, or at best a third path that seeks to escape the polarities and ends up corroborating them even more solidly, trapping itself even more thoroughly between their tyrannical mandates. Not the fabricated categories of Tradition and Modernity, but that we have to choose one of them is what is challenged. They believe that the two ought to be freely adopted and adapted. But that these two categorical imperatives are epistemically given is never theoretically challenged or analytically superseded. They have inherited a division of their moral universe between two camps, Tradition and Modernity, and are blind to the point of this categorical invention in the course of colonial modernity, far beyond their narrative control or normative imagining.
As a descriptive category, Tradition was the greatest invention of Modernity, its ulterior motive, made to authenticate its own otherwise recent vintage, its categorical rootedness in the European Enlightenment. European Orientalists went around the world inventing “traditions” for colonized nations (Islamic, Chinese, Indian, African, etc.), by way of corroborating a notion of “modernity” that was constitutional to the colonial project. To Iranian intellectuals seemingly trapped in a box with no access to this point of origin, “to combine traditional Iranian epistemology with the most positive aspects of freedom, democracy, modern rationalism, science and technology under an ethical rubric”14 is the thing to do. Not a moment of pause is evident in questioning the point of origin, the specific historical circumstances when these categorical imperatives were coined and made current. Tradition and Modernity: These are the sole and solitary set, the Ying and Yang, of intellectual debates among contemporary Iranians—the origins of which in the most recent history of Iran go back to Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–1969) highly influential essay, “Westoxication” (1962),15 in which he had categorically posited “the West” as the moral and normative opposite of a nativist notion of authenticity that was later instrumental in the making of the Islamic revolution of 1979.16
Daryush Shayegan’s take on this binary is even of an older vintage—not just between Tradition and Modernity, but in fact between their more archaic archetypes, the East and the West. Shayegan believes, along with generations of other cartographers around the flattened globe, that Iran is smack in the middle of the universe, between its East and its West: “Deep down,” Shayegan believes, “Iran remains a world at the crossroads of two great continents of thought: on one hand it looks obliquely towards the East, its language and immemorial myths associate it with India and the Indo-European world and, on the other hand, its position of bordering upon the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and its conflicting relationships with ancient Greece render it incontestably a neighbor of the West … The fact remains that Iran is still, in every sense, a country which is both mediator and median.”17 So did believe imaginative and sacred geographers of every clime, East and West of Shayegan’s cartographic imagination. Jerusalem has been offered as the center of universe as has Constantinople, Rome, Cairo, and of course not to forget the good old New York—where we (along with Frank Sinatra) sing “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” We have a joke in Persian: Someone asked Mulla Nasr al-Din (our proverbial idiot savant) where is the center of the earth. He pointed to the nail on the ground holding the rope that held his mule in place and said there that it is the center of the universe. How do you know, the man asked him with incredulity written all over his face. You don’t believe me, said Mulla, go and measure the distance to its East and West. From the spot where Mulla’s mule pondered the nature of the universe to Kalamazoo and Timbuktu, and from there to its sunrise to its sunset, Iran or any other figment of navigational imagination is the center of nothing, the middle of nowhere, the median of no other godforsaken place than the captured imagination of its own design and designation. Fetishizing the shape of a colonially manufactured map and speculating on its presumed centrality on a repeatedly redrawn atlas of a bewildered earth are the least consequences of successive generations of inorganic intellectuals.
On the surface and deep in the bosom of such geographical imaginings, presumably informing artistic creation in Iran, are dangerous delusions. Racial profiling bordering on racism abounds in Shayegan’s thinking, “If, in Arabic countries,” he believes, “religion is often confounded with ethnic identity, it is not at all the same in the non-Arabic cultural zone where the language and the literature delve into a more ancient collective memory.”18 Predicated on this racial and racist ignorance of the history of any number of nations and cultures around the Mediterranean Sea, simply lumped together and dismissed as “Arabic countries,” Shayegan’s conception of Iranians is not any more complementary. By virtue of their multiple identities—from ancient to modern—Iranians, in Shayegan’s estimation, are “schizophrenic.”19 Ethnic, religious and modern, or Iranian, Islamic, and Western: These are the three sides of the cervical vertebrae, sites of sonorous contentions, on a lost soul, that hold Iranians, according to Shayegan, together and yet pull them apart:
Faced with the unidimensional man of modern times, the amphibious situation that these three tiers can procure is a; for it works as well in the horizontal dimension of history as in the vertical sense of higher orders. People who belong to the extra-occidental cultural area are trapped in a fault-line of worlds which repel and reform each other. If assumed with lucidity and without resentment, this ambivalence can enrich them, extending the registers of knowledge and enlarging the range of feelings. But, driven back from the critical field of knowledge, these three layers provoke blockages and disfigure, as in a shattered mirror, the reality of the world and its mental images. This unifying art of remodeling heterogeneous spaces is, to my mind, the third way, which escapes at the same time from monolithic visions of ideologies as from the illusions of unrealizable utopias. It is perhaps the way of tamed schizophrenia.20
The Iranian art exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, “Neue Positionen iranishscher Künstler/Contemporary Positions of Iranian artists” (2004), in Berlin best exemplifies the elementary problem we face today in observing the artistic output of a nation like Iran—thus designated and dismissed at one and the same time. The most significant aspect of this problem is in its geopolitics of distancing, the paradox of its Verfremdung, in order to make sense of something making it nonsensical—catapulted beyond the pale of the Same and cast into the realm of the Other. The best of intentions, the famous road to hell, is paved via a path that cannot but alienate and make strange—thus to authenticate the authenticity of the subject who cares to look (out of fear, fascination, or fright) and the simultaneous idiosyncrasy of the object thus observed. The camera is located in Berlin and the traveling shot begins to move and to zoom in, from a location that it now becomes the center toward a point that now becomes the periphery—thus located and dislocated, casting its works of art in an oblique dimension always already slanted. The result is that the objects, ipso facto, appear as disfigured and disembodied—not just divorced from the dreams and the nightmares of a people that begat them, but in fact procreating them out of the wedlock of their history, irrelevant at home, useless abroad, mere signs without any significance, mechanical instruments of symbolic nation-building, as if for illiterate and unlettered people in outlandish places ranging from Berlin to Sharjah.
The systematic Verfremdung of the gaze from outside, casting “Iran” into a corner that cannot be but exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous, is matched and mixed with the schizophrenic perception of the interior where people like Mir-Ehsan and Shayegan tell the world that Iranians are fundamentally fragmented people, culturally caught in a mutilated perception of themselves, and as such psychically diseased, inflicted with an historical malignancy fraught with a fragmented sense of themselves, as if projected onto a broken mirror in which they cannot see straight.
Between an exotic and dangerous view from the outside and a schizophrenic view from the inside, Zolghadr’s sardonically self-conscious language, the best and most insightful in the catalogue, is the epitome of what Baudrillard called a “transaesthetics of indifference,” now going sour and feigning satirical—with frivolity thinly camouflaging its angst. But here is where the translocal confuses the site and takes the postmodern frivolity of the worst kind for the material forces of history: Having vacated the nation-state of its political parameters it now solicits the aesthetics of its own emerging terms, at once of its own entrapments in a world of its own making, and yet the future terms of its own emancipatory illusions.
To see the terms of those emerging illusions, we might look beyond Berlin and beyond Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and see what Iranian artists are up to in other parts of Europe. Since the Islamic revolution in Iran, Europe has been a significant site of Iranian artists trespassing their national boundaries in search of a new and more global stage for their art. Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi was born in Iran in 1937 and in 1961 he moved to Paris—where he has been exceptionally prolific as an artist with a wide range of global exposures. Zenderoudi’s work began with a creative adaptation of Islamic visual, performative, and pious leitmotifs and then extended into abstract paintings of luminous virtuosity. The most recent Iranian artist who has moved to Europe is Sussan Taslimi (born in 1946), once an actress of exceptional performing talents in Iranian theater and cinema and now a promising director living in Sweden. After the Islamic revolution, Taslimi left Iran, moved to Sweden, learned Swedish well enough to act in theatrical productions and finally made her directorial debut in “All Hell Let Loose” (2002). Vahed Khakdan (born in 1950) is another accomplished painter who has lived and made an illustrious artistic career in Germany. Esmail Khoi, perhaps the most prominent living Iranian poet, continues to write the most potent political poetry of his career—but has remained exclusively limited to his Iranian readers. Ebrahim Golestan in London and Shahrokh Meskoob (1924–2005) in Paris are the best examples of towering literary figures that dwindled into anonymity in their adopted lands. Goli Taraghi and Mahshid Amirshahi in Paris are two other eminent novelists continuing to produce great works of fiction to an exceedingly limited readership. Gholamhossein Sa’edi (1936–1985) also died in Paris, far below the level of his dignity and the literary masterpieces that he created over three fruitful and active decades in his homeland.
What Iranians lost in Paris with Sa’edi’s death they in part reproduced in a gifted artist called Marjane Satrapi (born in Rasht in 1969). Her Persepolis (2003),21 originally published in French and subsequently translated into English, has been justifiably compared to Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1991). Satrapi’s wise and witty memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution is an exceptional work of satirical insight, accompanied by a subdued and incisive visual illustration. Wise, witty, joyous, defiant, creative, courageous, and caring, “Persepolis” is written from a position of abundant love for one’s own people—without being negligent of their failures. Its contagious joy crosses boundaries and generations. Its visual wit and humorous undertone are the harbingers of a whole new generation of hope—with a different, far more liberating, learning, and a deeply cultivated and patient poise sustaining its enduring intelligence.
The work of gifted writers and artists like Satrapi and Taslimi flies in the face of the systematic act of estrangement and Verfremdung that exhibitions such as “Neue Positionen iranishscher Künstler” (2004) in Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin inadvertently posit and pose, as they also dismantle the blasé and outdated binary of Tradition versus Modernity or the West versus the East that continues to be thematically corroborated inside Iran. As the assumption of the exotic, the fascinating and (above all) the dangerous on part of the directors of museums and biennales continues to frame and deform works of art of diverse disposition and demeanor, the function of the comprador curators as native informers is to act as the conduit of a prolonged and long since discredited act of representation. As a result, what is ticketed as an encounter is in fact, and quite paradoxically, an act of estrangement, a bizarre example of fetishization, where the former colonial and the current imperial imaginary does not (want to) recognize its own handiwork.
Two: Tehran
The view of the creative consciousness of Iranians from the inside is not that different and quite complementary—for the inside is already out, for in and out of any side have categorically collapsed. If the view from the outside is one of estrangement and Verfremdung, the one from the inside is the selfsame schizophrenia that Mir-Ehsan and Shayegan best represent—a self-fulfilling prophecy, a culture seemingly condemned to weave the ropes of its own entanglements.
To the degree that Iranian artists imagine themselves inside their country, the assumption of their schizophrenia—broken into Iran, Islam, and that dreaded category “the West”—corroborates the systematic act of estrangement targeted toward them from the outside, and the two complementary acts require a regimented logic of representation.
The predominant spirit of contemporary art in Iran proper is overwhelmingly determined by the traumatic events of the Islamic revolution of 1977–1979 and the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–1988. A massive social revolution and a corresponding loss of life in the course of a prolonged and brutal war have left their enduring marks on contemporary Iranian art. In the course of the Islamic revolution of 1977–1979, revolutionary posters, defiant murals, and colorful banners began to mobilize Iranians in their millions against the monarchy. Soon the grassroots, multifaceted, and multi-ideological effervescence of this revolutionary art gave rise to the official organs of the Islamic Republic propaganda machinery that systematically repressed the secular leftist artists and instead massively promoted artists in ideological conformity with the flailing revolution. The gradual mutation of revolutionary art between 1977 and 1979 into the official art of the Islamic Republic soon after the institutional Islamization of the revolution led to the period of the Iran–Iraq war and the emergence of an art at once pious and committed to defending the country and the nation, and yet systematically Islamicizing its aesthetic vocabulary.
Represented by the extraordinary work of painters like Aydin Aghdashloo, Hossein Khosrojerdi, Kazem Chalipa, and Parvaneh Etemadi (and many others), works of art produced as eyewitness to the Islamic revolution and under the bombs of Saddam Hussein chronicle the visual memory of a traumatized nation at war, having mobilized its most cherished memories to sustain itself and survive. What has been termed “the Islamic” art of this period has a distinctly paradoxical characteristic—at once pious, heroic, and noble in its mobilization of sentiments to defend a nation, and yet exceedingly iconic in its ideological corroboration of the Islamic Republic.22 This art can neither be completely rejected for its propagandistic disposition, nor indeed can it be categorically celebrated despite some of its most exquisite accomplishments. The notion that those Iranian artists who opted to stay in Iran, or had no choice but to stay, or indeed came to fruition in the Islamic Republic, in any shape or form compromised their artistic integrity is of course as ludicrous and untenable as the assumption that those who left Iran produced a more progressive or emancipatory art—either in their politics or in their aesthetics, in their thematics or in their forms. Aydin Aghdashloo and Hossein Khosrojerdi inside Iran have been far more progressive and liberating in their art than Mahmoud Farshchian or scores of other highly talented but exceedingly limited Iranian artists living abroad. In defense of the art of this period as produced inside Iran, Khosrojerdi, one of its most prominent practitioners once said: “Although the perspective of artists during the war was not critical, this was no indication that they were official and made-to-order.”23
Is it just a matter of architectural restoration, or is there something more to the extraordinary work of Iranian architects attending to the old and dilapidated buildings that mark the passage of history on the traumatized physiognomy of a nation? The death and destruction concomitant with the revolution and the war has been concomitant with innumerable restoration projects attending to the masterpieces of Iranian architecture—particularly those buildings associated in their enduring memory with the cause of democracy and rule of law in Iran. Mohammad Reza Haeri is one of the most active Iranian architects devoted to the cause of saving and restoring the dilapidated sites of some of the most precious remnants of Iranian architecture. Perhaps the most telling example of his involvement with restoration of an important building is evident in his report of how the historic site of Iranian parliament in Baharestan Square, hit by a missile in 1988 and yet again severely damaged by a fire in 1994, was successfully restored.24 A restorative attention to the site of the Iranian parliament from a previous revolution, historically identified with the dreams and aspiration of Iranians for democracy in their homeland, could not have been without its symbolic reference to the absence of democracy at the time of this restoration.
Chiefly characterized by an historical trauma of enduring significance, the potential emancipation of contemporary Iranian art from its territorial boundaries within an Islamic republic means nothing for about sixty five million Iranians who are trapped in their own country in the brutal throes of a medieval theocracy and its corrupt clerical beneficiaries—whose most spectacular public performances for their nation is the gruesome public hanging of common criminals (covering up the mass execution of secular leftist revolutionaries for decades), stoning to death of women suspected of adultery and judged on the edicts of a medieval jurisprudence, kangaroo court trials of civil right activists, and other similar ignominies—all predicated on an exclusive command and an ideologically saturated control over the mass media—identical in their driven commission to manufacture consent with the CNN, the Fox News, and shelves-full of colorful tabloids (bought and paid for by millionaire militants determined to silence voices of reasoned dissent) in the United States. The Iranian airwaves, meanwhile, is equally littered by an avalanche of garbage coming their way from a major expatriate community in Los Angeles, encouraging them to rise up and revolt against the Islamic Republic, while those who call for such revolts are themselves tucked away safely in a long row of Chellow Kebab restaurants in Westwood, California, in between their ardent calls for the US army to invade and liberate their homeland (one Abu Ghraib torture chamber and another Falluja massacre at a time). Attending to these expatriate pathologies is now a whole industry of career opportunist memoirists, weaving truth and falsehood together to portray an image of a backward and retarded culture and thus to encourage the United States to invade Iran and make the region safer for democracy, as it were, for Halliburton, and for reading “Lolita” in imported bathtubs.
Perhaps the most publicly evident aspect of contemporary art in Iran is the monumental murals painted all around the capital and other major cities commemorating the martyrs of the revolution and the war that followed it. These murals have become integral to the propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic, using and abusing the memory of martyred heroes who died defending a nascent revolution and after that their homeland in a nasty war with Iraq—and thus sustaining the traumatic moments of the revolution and the war for posterity. More than a quarter of a century into the success of radically Islamicizing the Iranian revolution of 1979, at the expense of eliminating all its ideological and political rivals, the organs of the Islamic Republic use art, massive murals in major cities and provincial capitals in particular, to sustain a memory of the revolutionary zeal most conducive to their waning legitimacy.25
The annual commemoration of the revolution in February 1979 has become an occasion for enormous rallies with revolutionary slogans, borrowing from the annual Moharram processions (in memory of the Third Shi’i Imam, Hussein ibn Ali, and his sacrifices in the year 60 AH/680 AD), and meant to mobilize the religious sentiments of the nation to sustain the flailing legitimacy of the state. On these annual occasions, new murals are commissioned of the fallen heroes of the revolution and the war, canvassing in bright and bold colors in the main thoroughfares of cities. Successive generations of Iranians, with the passage of time, and from all walks of life, have lost faith and hope in this revolution, and this propaganda art is meant to sustain their allegiances to an otherwise delegitimate state. The traumatized nation and the delegitimized state cross-reference and check each other out.
That the state apparatus of the Islamic Republic abuses these murals for its propaganda purposes does not mean that the piety and devotion with which their artists attend to their work is to be ignored. Evident in these murals is a profound act of faith, a pictorial homily and heartfelt homage to fallen friends and comrades. There are reports that young soldiers on their way to the front gave their pictures to these mural artists knowing that they will not come back. Many of the painters are in fact war veterans themselves. The art that they produce defies the logic of art galleries, biennials, or museums. It goes straight to public spaces where it announces (and imposes) itself—very much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in the Central Park, New York (2005), which itself is reminiscent of the Israeli apartheid wall built around Palestinians (and of course around themselves, for every wall, inevitably, has two sides). Using the specific site of where they used to live, the murals of these martyrs are usually cast in pious and devotional dispositions, reminiscent of their earthly virtues, premonitory of their heavenly abode.
What balances these artworks is the actual site of a massive cemetery in a suburb of Tehran called Behesht-e Zahra, where countless graves of young victims of a betrayed revolution, a wasteful war, and a traumatized nation are decorated by their mournful parents, widowed spouses, and orphaned children. A photograph of the fallen soldier, barely showing the signs of a grownup adult, decorated with flowers, poems, Qur’anic verses, and loving odes by their survivors in each and every case is a mournful installation in and of itself. Behesht-e Zahra is the first “gallery” that one must visit in Iran, a monumental homage to dreams betrayed, hopes cut brutally short, youth wasted—dead bodies resurrected in bold and unforgiving signs of futile heroisms, fragile hopes, misbegotten ideals, heavenly illusions, persistent miseries. At a remote corner of Behesht-e Zahra is a section called La’nat-abad (“The Cursed Land”). Here is where the victims of mass execution of leftist revolutionaries—secular or Islamist—opposed to the Islamic Republic are laid to rest. No monument to their name, no memorial testimony to their aspirations, the flat demarcation of their loss reflects and echoes the more ornamental part of the same cemetery where their brothers and sisters are buried under a more glorious testimonial to their sacrifices. The invisible monument imagined in the mind and sculpted in the soul of the survivors of those leftist revolutionaries is the pictorial memory of an art that was long in design and cut brutally short in execution.
Between huge murals decorating the walls of the high-rises with the portraits of dead soldiers and the bodies of those soldiers buried under over-decorated graves navigates two opposing claims on the creative consciousness of Iranians—one trying to justify a theocracy, the other evading it.
As in all other anxiogeneric moments of its modern history, Iranian public figures and establishment intellectuals are concerned with re-asserting the Iranian collective claim to nationhood, cultural identity, and even civilizational (aka imperial) uniqueness. If in medieval history, commissioning the writing of a new (preferably illustrated) manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (composed circa 1000) was the rite of passage and ritual of self-legitimacy for a new Persian dynasty, in modern times the writing of a monumental tome of Iranian history in arts and letters seems to perform a similar function. By far the most expensive and ambitious scholarly project addressing the question of Iranian art in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic revolution in Iran was a massive three-volume tome, The Splendour of Iran (2001), initiated and sponsored by a British publisher, Edward Booth-Clibborn, and executed by an array of prominent Iranian scholars.26 Though not officially sponsored or endorsed by the organs of the Islamic Republic, these three volumes represent the collective scholarly sentiments of an impressive list of distinguished Iranian scholars on the subject of Iranian art in general. This scholarly community, by and large concerned with ancient and medieval art, does not know quite what to do with the issue of contemporary Iranian art, in or out of the country. In The Splendour of Iran, written and published entirely and exclusively in English, the subject of contemporary Iranian art is categorically ignored—while the wide spectrum of Iranian ancient and medieval art is thoroughly covered and systematically nationalized (even imperialized) into a sustained and uninterrupted narrative.
In its symbolic celebration of Iranian arts very much on the model of an earlier monarchist blueprint—Roloff Beny’s Persia: Bridge of Turquoise (1975)27—this Islamist mutation of physically heavy, exceedingly expensive, and entirely impossible to pick up and read books was entrusted to a prominent Iranian scholar, Nasrollah Pourjavady. I say impossible to read for the sheer size of these sorts of books makes it abundantly clear that the extraordinary scholarship invested in them notwithstanding they are all monuments of nation-building at particular moments of their historical anxiety, than works of arduous scholarship meant to elucidate and clarify one thing or another.
Paramount in the production of this book, insisted by its British originator and corroborated by its chief editor, was the quintessential fetishization of “Iran itself,” and “Iranian themselves.” “The publisher’s idea from the very beginning,” reports Pourjavady, “was that this book should be produced in Iran, and that it should present what is preserved today in Iran itself. He also wanted primarily Iranian scholars to speak about their past and present, and Iranian photographers to photograph the sights, monuments and museum holdings in Iran. No one I talked to could disagree with this idea; in fact from everyone I received only approval and encouragement.”28
But why—one may wonder? The insistence is rather bizarre and open to all sorts of mis/readings. Is this a gesture to compensate for a long history of British (European) Orientalism—non-Iranians writing on Iran and about themselves? If so, this is an entirely fallacious reading of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism. As a mode of knowledge production, Orientalism was instrumental in the European colonial project not because Orientalists were (necessarily) evil people, but because the epistemic assumptions and thus the mode of scholarly operation contingent on them, and above all the sensus communis29 in which they manufactured knowledge, were all geared toward a particular political purpose. The British publisher’s insistence that only Iranians, and Iranians inside Iran for that matter, write this book is a supreme (and rather embarrassing) example of categorically fetishizing Iran and essentializing Iranians, whose scholarship can indeed be as much Orientalist as anyone from Germany, France, England or Holland. There is nothing in the blood of any Iranian scholar that prevents him/her from partaking in the Orientalists mode and manner of knowledge production. In fact the overwhelming majority of the most prominent Iranian scholars today (as always) are entirely innocent of the most debilitating epistemic challenges to positivist (Orientalist) modes of knowledge production, and if one were just to lift their names from their essays and books and place a European Orientalist’s name instead they are entirely passable as works of classical Orientalism. What Edward Said challenged was the epistemic premises, political purposes, and sensus communis of Orientalism as a mode of knowledge production, not anything biologically deficient about the Orientalist themselves—or the most ludicrous of all conclusions that “the Orientals” (qua “Orientals”) had to write their own histories. Scarcely can a methodological supposition be more instrumental to corroborating the debilitating problem of representation than fetishizing Iran and Iranians in terms domestic and indigenous to an art-historical self-narration.
The result of the British publisher’s insistence and the Iranian editor’s celebratory acceptance that only Iranians write about Iran (and only Iranians living inside Iran, for that matter) is that an entire school of prominent Iranian scholars are cast into the role of native informers telling their British publisher and his friends and families what are the masterpieces of Iranian art. Edward Booth-Clibborn’s personal introduction to these volumes speaks of how initially his friends and family were skeptical of his intention to travel to the Islamic Republic in mid-1990s, and how once he went there he found Iranians quite cultured and civilized people—so much so that in his future trips he took his friends and family along with him. He saw so many fantastic things, he says, in Iran and its past that he wanted Iranian scholars to tell the rest of the world what a great culture and civilization they have. That is the framework within which these three volume are produced, promoting Pourjavady to begin his introduction by saying that Iran is one of the six (no more) other world civilizations—“the other five being the Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and modern Western Civilization.”30 Who said so, by whose counting, and by what authority? Arabs, Jews, Africans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, Japanese, Russians, and a whole slew of other peoples and nations did not have a civilization? What sort of jingoistic nonsense is this? Not an iota of critical thinking about the very contemporary rise of civilizational thinking, and its recent imperial upsurge in the United States after Samuel Huntington’s essay on “Clash of Civilizations” (1993),31 and then the oldest and most tired clichés are used to claim a civilizational standing for Iran from the entirely tenuous position of a complex-ridden anxiety of authenticity, authority, and above all a pitiful imperial self-imagining.
If Hans-Georg Knopp of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin exoticizes and antagonizes the Iranian artistic context, Edward Booth- Clibborn fetishizes and essentializes it—in both cases deterritorializing the presence of artistic production from its material and effective histories.
Needless to say, the three-volume tome benefits from extraordinary scholarship of an array of distinguished scholars—ranging from pre-Islamic to the end of the Qajar period—with a single photograph from Shirin Neshat’s “Rapture” (1999) as the sole and solitary reference to anything in the twentieth-century Iranian art worth noting. The volume, decidedly dedicated to Iranian art, and consciously following on the footsteps of Arthur Pope’s equally monumental A Survey of Persian Art (1939), is thus far more an excavation of the dead, past, and presumed glories than with the living present and its tenuous anxieties of creation—with the chief editor of the tome saying outright that there is “a marked difference between writing on the art and culture of contemporary Iran and that of the past”32—and thus leaving the whole world of contemporary art untouched, with the exception of that blown-up picture of Neshat’s “Rapture” and a short caption noting that Iranian cinema has recently been globally recognized.
From this categorical fetishization of Iran and voluminous disregarding of contemporary Iranian art, in a volume conceived outside Iran and delivered entirely in English for the benefit of the outside world, we move to the government of the Islamic Republic itself, where not a single Rial is spent on anything except with immediate propaganda benefits to a delegitimized state apparatus. The Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance routinely organizes major art exhibitions, targeting specific sectors of the population, such as a major exhibition devoted to women painters in 1994. Tajalli-e Ehsas (“Manifestation of Emotion) was one such exhibition that also resulted in a three-volume catalogue.33 Very much on the model of Hans-Georg Knopp in Germany and Edward Booth-Clibborn in England, Seyyed Mustafa Mir Salim, the Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, writes an Introduction to these three volumes, extolling the virtues of the Islamic Republic for having enabled “the Muslim and Iranian woman” to express her artistic capabilities.” In addition to Seyyed Mustafa Mir Salim, other officials, such as Abolqasem Khoshru, Deputy Minister in charge of art, and Seyyed Mohammad Sohofi, the Head of Plastic Arts of the same ministry polished their Persian prose in praise of the Islamic revolution and the noble and chaste Muslim Iranian women and their art. The exhibition on which this catalogue is based was opened in Azar 1373/October 1994 to coincide with the birthday of Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter. Abstract, still life, landscape, miniature, portraits, as well geometric designs are present in abundance in these three volumes.
While Hans-Georg Knopp in Berlin exoticizes the Iranian artistic context, Edward Booth-Clibborn fetishizes it, Mir Salim and his colleagues in the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance equally essentialize Iranian visual arts for an exclusively “Islamic” genealogy—in all these cases deterritorializing the presence of artistic production from its material and effective histories.
By far the most ambitious project to reflect on Iranian contemporary art was launched in Fall 1999, with the publication of Tavoos, a comprehensive forum for recording the achievements of Iranian artists in and out of their homeland. The most immediate feature of this journal, other than the exquisite quality of its visual reproductions, is the fact that it is bilingual, each article written first in Persian and then immediately translated into English and paginated from the opposite side. The result might be slightly disorienting at first—but far more significant is a comparison of the Persian and English prose of the journal. While the Persian prose is confident, elegant, commanding, and narratively self-assured, the English prose (quite to the contrary) is shy, shaky, at times even clumsy and awkward. Capably edited by Ali Dehbashi, one of the most distinguished Iranian literary editors, Tavoos lacks any singular ideological agenda and seeks to promulgate a widespread, generous, and embracing vision of Iranian contemporary art in all its manifestations.
In addition to a singular ideological streak, Tavoos equally lacked a vision of where Iranian art is, was, or is headed—whence its genealogical disposition, and what its salient features are. In many respects, issue after expensive issue of this journal is similar to the extraordinary photography of Maryam Zandi, by far the most gifted Iranian portraiture photographer. Zandi has a penchant for photographing the face and physiognomy of prominent Iranian artists and literati.34 When one looks at these photographs, one sees the traces of history carved on the bones, flesh, nook, and crannies of these faces. Zandi has elevated the art of portraiture to a photographic adventure, in which she has tried to capture the soul of her subject’s work in their paved and pondered physiognomy. She radically dramatizes these faces—the crème de la crème of Iranian artists and literati—tracing, as if, a whole intellectual history of a nation as navigated on the topography of these faces of these faces. These faces seem wise but agitated with futile reasons, aging but malcontent, the excavated site of an archeology of just one second gone ancient.
Traumatized, anxiogeneric, fetishized, essentialized, and unable to write and record its memory, the view of Iranian art from within (within?) remains expectant, wanting, wishful—with its vision of itself blindfolded, blighted.
Three: New York
New York is the capital of nowhere and the center of everything. There is a shapeless urbanity to New York, a cosmopolitanism with no name, that allows its persistently immigrant disposition to improvise on its emerging shape, bypass its commanding logic, acclimate to its expectant temperament. When you live in New York, you feel like you live nowhere—and yet everything seems to happen here. New York defies representation—for it is an aftertaste.
The most spectacular case of an Iranian artist leaving his homeland for a second round of struggle to make it in an entirely foreign context is that of Amir Naderi—perhaps the principal force that brought Iranian cinema to world attention almost a decade before Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf became household names in art-house cinema. A pioneering figure in the rise of Iranian cinema to global significance, Naderi left his homeland in the early 1980s and began a second artistic career in New York, where he has succeeded in making four brilliant films about his adopted city: “Manhattan by Numbers” (1993), “ABC … Manhattan” (1997), “Marathon” (2002), and “Sound Barrier” (2005) are integral to a vision in which Naderi has captured the heart and soul of New York—an artistic achievement that after 9/11 has assumed added significance. The challenge that Amir Naderi’s cinema poses is whether he is an Iranian or an American filmmaker—this challenge is at the heart of the critical crisis of representation that categorically questions the issue of “national art” in the age of globalization.
There is a migratory soul searching through Naderi’s depiction of New York—from his very first to his most recent film. “Manhattan by Numbers” is almost entirely shot in exterior takes, showing an unemployed journalist, George Murphy (John Wojda), navigating the streets of Manhattan, from its Northern tip in Washington Heights to its Southern climes in the Financial District, in search of money to pay his back rent, only to give Naderi an occasion to have his camera wrestle with the sculpted bull aggressively announcing the spirit of American capitalism. If “Manhattan by Numbers” maps out the exterior of the Cosmopolis, at once brutal and beautiful, “ABC … Manhattan” turns Naderi’s camera toward the reflection of that architecture in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, three young women in particular—Colleen (Lucy Knight), who is a single mother struggling to make ends meet as a photographer and who finally loses her daughter to her former husband; Kacey (Erin Norris), who has already lost her girlfriend, boyfriend and her dog; and finally Kate (Sara Paul), who in her solitary musician soul has for long kept a deeply troubling secret. Shot mostly in interiors takes, medium and close-up shots, “ABC … Manhattan” gives Naderi’s camera an occasion to become psychoanalytical in its probing of the reflection of the architectonic exterior of New York in the hidden soul of its inhabitants. In “Marathon,” Naderi opts to move underground, literally, and take a long and lasting look at the subterranean soul of the city, the labyrinth of its subway system, and the sinuous spirits that move the body of a people. Shot almost entirely in the New York subway system, with the exception of its final sequence that carries the noisy soul of that subway into the interior of an apartment, “Marathon” is the story of Gretchen (Sara Paul) obsessively determined to break her own record of solving seventy two crossword puzzles in a 24-hour round, while addicted to the sound of noise, most evident when echoed in the serpentine sinuses of the underground world. Solitary obsession, dogged singularity, and the physical embodiment of a phantasmagoric machinery that is New York, Gretchen is how Naderi sees his adopted city: introverted, self-absorbed, indifferent to the fate of the universe it projects. Finally, “Sound Barrier” moves Naderi’s camera into a navigation between two singular sets—the interior of a storage room in Queens and the exterior of a bridge traffic to navigate the soul of a deaf and mute 11-year-old boy, Jesse (Charlie Wilson), in search of the suspected secret and possible cure of his ailment. By now, Naderi has mapped out the exterior of the Cosmopolis he now calls home, searched through its traces inside the soul of its inhabitants, plunged deep into the subterranean spirits that sustain its exterior awe, and narrowed in on a solitary soul, deaf and mute in the language of its inhabitants, and yet observant of its ways in manners unheard of and unseen before. These four films are the autobiography of a city, as seen and heard by one of its millions of immigrant souls—in this case an Iranian expatriate, no longer completely Iranian, no longer really an expatriate, more at home here in New York than he ever was in Tehran: And thus making it impossible to trap him inside any renegade identity that chases after him from one city (Abadan) to another (Tehran, New York), from one country (Iran) to another (France, United States).
Immediately related to the case of Naderi is the work of another extraordinary Iranian artist, Neshat, who too has opted to live in New York, now the principal site of her celebrated artistic career. Born and raised in Iran, educated in the United States, Neshat’s daring photography and imaginative video installations have captured the attention of the world over the last two decades. Her recent works—such as “The Last Word” (2003) and “Mahdokht” (2004)—marks the transition of Neshat’s oeuvre toward a more ambitiously cinematic direction. Integral to the visual aspect of Neshat’s work has been the vocal and compositional gift of Sussan Deyhim. Over the last two decades, Neshat and Sussan Deyhim have worked together to craft a thriving creative career. A vocalist with an astonishing range and depth to her voice, a brilliant composer, and a performer and actress with a versatile screen and stage presence, Deyhim’s most spectacular achievement was in her leading role as Hoopoe in Neshat’s adaptation of the medieval Persian poetic masterpiece, “(Conference) Logic of the Birds” (2001). Independent of Neshat, Deyhim has had her own independent career as a vocalist, attracting the attention of the legendary Bill Laswell who reproduced Deyhim’s “Madman of God” (2002)—along the same lines that he did the works of Miles Davis, Bob Marley, and Carlos Santana. In one of Neshat’s most recent video work, “Tooba” (2002), she collaborated with one of the most celebrated cinematographers of our time, Darius Khondji. After having worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Lars von Trier, Roman Polanski, Alan Parker, and David Fincher (among many others), Darius Khondji lent her perceptive camera to Neshat’s vision. The particular constellation of this company points to a republic of vision entirely outside the geopolitics of power, the axis of East versus West, the binary of Tradition and Modernity, the toy store of fetishes and totems.
Central to Neshat’s work is her consistent attempts at visualizing the bodily disposition of veiled women in a highly stylized, deeply devotional, and quintessentially bifurcated (at once sacred and sensual) manner of representation. Perhaps the singular achievement of Neshat—through a succession of globally celebrated pictures, video installations, and soon her first feature film—is having restored a pride of place to a feminine face, figure, and physiognomy, visibly drawn from an Islamic text in an ostensibly Islamophobic context. A cautious restoration of dignity to the veiled body, embracing it on its face value and sans judgment, and then taking it to the borderlines of its hidden anxieties and evasive erotics, has remained central to Neshat’s aesthetic preoccupation with the Muslim feminine figures. Visualizing an ostensibly Islamic constellation of metaphors on such a massively global space that destabilizes the otherwise ossified boundaries of the private and the public domains, Neshat has succeeded in crafting a virtual mannerism elemental in its force and expansive in its imagination. She has succeeded in her art against two diametrically opposed modes of reception: a globalized celebration that looks at her work through a politics of representation, and a nativist reaction that either resents or challenges that representation. She, as a result, has the great mis/fortune of being far worse praised by her admirers than best blamed by her detractors—her admirers praise her with all the wrong terms; while her detractors blame her with all the outdated categories. While she is billed as an Iranian or a Muslim artist globally, locally she is criticized for catering to “the Western conception of Muslim women.” The problem with all such praises and blames is that they still operate on an outdated binary opposition presumed valid and operative between an imaginative East, fabricated by European Orientalists in order to authenticate the imperial manufacturing of “the Western Civilization,” and its corresponding West as the site of that civilization. By virtue of the radically globalized capital, we are now at the dawn of a whole new planetary re-imaging of our creative and critical universe that has in advance anticipated its own artists—artists who bewildered curators, latter-day Orientalists (now aided and abetted by a platoon of comprador intellectuals), medieval theocracies, and postmodern Empires notwithstanding still show and share their premonition of our whereabouts in the world to come. Here, on this emerging plane, there is no room for “an aesthetics of indifference.” The challenge that Neshat’s work puts forward, in her anticipation of worlds to come, is how to prevent her to be assimilated backward into a global fad by European and American art curators on one side and an ethnic art syndrome by the expatriate bourgeoisie on the other. Her work is one of the most successful attempts by an Iranian artist taking full advantage of new cross-national spaces to redefine the aesthetic terms of a more global emancipation in form—and the freedom that is contingent on it. What is paramount in Neshat’s art is that it disallows the quick manufacturing of yet another metaphysics of authenticity, and as such it defies the politics of representation as it does the mandate of an aesthetic of indifference.
New York was also the scene of another great Iranian artist—Reza Abdoh (1963–1995), who before his premature and tragic death from AIDS, revolutionized the experimental and site-specific theater in such works as “Tight Right White” (1994). In 1992, Abdoh also made a film via a suggestion of Sadeq Hedayat’s literary masterpiece—to this day the crowning achievement of modern Persian fiction—“The Blind Owl” (1951). As an Iranian homosexual who came to erotic awakening and artistic effervescence soon after an Islamic revolution (1977–1979) in his homeland, Abdoh had a thunderbolt of a creative career, leaving a permanent mark on world theatrical scene. Coming to both erotic and artistic effervescence in New York, the twilight zone of the forbidden and the impossible, Abdoh is in fact the farthest removed from being called “an Iranian artists” by virtue of anything except his parental culture—and yet the intensity of his erotic rebellion, his attention to the most subversive literary masterpiece in modern Persian fiction, and ultimately the dramaturgical disposition of his situational drama combine to implicate the culture which he sought to evade and thus paradoxically managed to implicate. The twilight zone of his theatrical impossibilities is the set of the hidden and denied domains of all hitherto authenticated metaphysics of recalcitrant cultures.
Beginning to receive the recognition that he richly deserves, Nikzad Nodjoumi has for over three decades worked hard in crafting a sustained artistic career in New York. Born and raised in Iran and moved to New York after the success of the Islamic revolution, Nikzad Nodjoumi’s painting mixes a sharp political satire with an increasingly horrid awareness of his émigré environment—both of which have started fading in and out of each other. Over the last three decades, Nodjoumi has exhibited his work extensively and art critics in the United States and in Europe have started taking note of his significance. In a succession of highly stylized, satirical, and blatantly political large canvases, Nodjoumi has mapped out a panorama of phantasmagoric universe uniquely his own. That universe is liminal in its definitive disposition, mapped out somewhere between Iran (where Nodjoumi began his career as a revolutionary graphic artist in 1960s and 1970s) and the United States (where he has lived for over three decades). The emotive threshold definitive to Nodjoumi’s work is constitutional to a mode of creative disposition that no longer recognizes one or another territoriality as the site of its aesthetic or politics. Mullahs on these canvases are as sinister and ludicrous as American businessmen and politicians are duplicitous and vile.35 The thematic liminality of Nodjoumi’s paintings has once and for all dismantled the politics of location, sociologies of cultures, aesthetics of cultural authenticities. On the liminal borderland of what used to be called the East and the West, Nodjoumi has detected and detailed an absurdist universe, a furious frivolity, at once satirical and yet exceedingly bitter.
Equally important in his achievements in New York is the bitingly satirical work of Ardeshir Mohassess, by far the most celebrated cartoonist of his generation whose work evolved into a bitter and piercing indictment of political power in a more universal scale soon after he escaped the repressive measures of the Islamic Republic and moved to New York, where his work gradually evolved into a far more universal, far more biting in its planetary depiction of militarism, brutality, and an almost atemporal awareness of a metaphysics of violence definitive to human history.36 In Iran, his military brutes usually assumed an ahistorical Qajar disposition, while in New York they have become an oversized and caricatured combination of German and American generals. Trampled under the boots of these generals is a representative regimen of ordinary people—peasantry when Mohassess was in Iran, disfigured marionettes when he moved to New York. In Mohassess’s work, as a result, we see a successful sublation of a critic of violence on the colonial edges of modernity projected into the center of its imperial postmodernity.
Perhaps the model of all these Iranian artists finding a room and thriving in different terms in New York is Manoucher Yektai (b. 1922), a painter-poet who has lived and worked in New York for over half a century. Yektai came to New York in 1945 and studied under the legendary Amédée J. Ozenfant (1886–1966), who between 1939 and 1955 taught at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York. From 1949, Yektai began exhibiting his work in New York, Chicago, Paris, London, Cannes, and other places. Yektai is also a gifted and voluminously published Persian poet—and perhaps his Persian poetry has managed entirely to exorcise his political engagements with Iran, allowing for a cleaner canvas on which his paintings navigates the abstract domains of an entirely different disposition.37
The story of Iranian artists living and working in the United States is not all of rosy promises and singing nightingale. Sohrab Shahid Sales (1944–1998), a pioneering figure in Iranian cinema whose two masterpieces—“A Simple Incident” (1973), and “Still Life” (1974)—have had enduring impact on the rest of Iranian films, emigrated to the United States soon after the Islamic revolution (and a sojourn in Europe) where he lived in dire circumstances and died in Chicago unceremoniously and in solitude. The case of Shahid Sales notwithstanding, altogether visual and performing artists have had a much better chance of working in their new environment than those whose literary and poetic output, and beyond that the universe of their creative imagination, has remained linguistically limited to their expatriate Iranian audience. Nader Naderpour (1929–2000), one of the most celebrated poets of his time, died in Los Angeles without anyone other than Iranian émigré community noticing his work or significance. Sadeq Chubak (1916–1998), one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation, died in exile in California barely noticed by anyone except the expatriate Iranian community. One of the most gifted Iranian novelists, Shahrnoush Parsipour, lives between Los Angeles and New York, barely known outside the small group of Iranian literati following her spectacular literary career. Meanwhile, Parviz Sayyad, another prominent Iranian filmmaker, playwright, satirist, and theater director, did not manage to sublate his creative disposition beyond the limited Iranian expatriate community. The phenomenal character of Samad that he created in Iran (an idiot-savant of extraordinary wit and wisdom) ultimately withered away prematurely and long before Sayyad could uplift him into a wider domain of significance.38
Failures and successes put together, the presence of Iranian artists in New York, and by extension in the United States, amounts to an experience of luminous liminality, resistance to representation, defiance of fetishization, navigating the hinterland of the culturally forbidden, and above all a categorical rejection of any metaphysics of authenticity. Iranian artists in New York have joined myriads of others to think and create in the twilight zone of history, where no one belongs to anything but the suspended geniality of his or her creative ego. These artists have defied representation, resisted the systematic fetishization of themselves, their nationality, and their art, and above all rejected the politics of their presumed identity. No metaphysics of authenticity, no politics of representation, nor indeed any aesthetics of indifference has attended upon their work. Farthest removed from such attributes are Naderi and Yektai; closest to the danger zone are Neshat and Nodjoumi. Between the two Neshat is closest to the danger zone of being consistently misread, and perhaps that is both the reason for her extraordinary (and richly deserved) success and for the animus she generates among her detractors. Neshat plays with fire—and she plays well—she makes the familiar look foreign, by way of making foreign look familiar. She excavates the erotics from the pious, weds the pious to the political, and thus she makes a visual spectacle of unsurpassed power and potency. She is the dream/nightmare of her once commanding culture going for an interpretation beyond the logistics of lexicons and well into a world market of sentiments and ideas well beyond words, yet to be scripted. Meanwhile Naderi and Yektai have moved far into the domain of the safer zone of the unknown, of the unfamiliar, of the uncharted—the harbingers of visions yet to be seen.
Four: Artists without Border
Over the last quarter of a century, Iranian art has become increasingly de-territorialized. This is neither good, nor bad—this has been inevitable. The rapid spiral of the globalized capital has amounted to a planetary pattern to artistic creativity. But this de-territorialization has also been commensurate with an aesthetic disembodiment—a vacating of the work of art of its actual, factual, and virtual significance—and above all with the material dismemberment of its production, exhibition, and reception. That disembodiment of the work of art (of the endemic collapse of its inherent semiotics of communal significance) is the paramount, and most paralyzing, context of artistic production today—prompting Baudrillard to pronounce his fear of an aesthetics of indifference. The specific case of Iranian artists—exoticized abroad, traumatized at home, the binary between their home and exile permanently collapsed, and budding possibilities of an emerging impetus to their artistic disposition already pointing to an art beyond the banality of bourgeois expats and their contingent question of representation—may be exemplary of a larger reality.
While the expatriate poets and novelists have remained in the deep background of the contemporary global attention paid to Iranian artists, the wings of Iranian visual and performing arts open ever more widely around the globe. It is of course important to keep in mind that the roots of these arts remain lost in its own immediate soil—in prose and poetry, visual and performing arts, sacred and secular traditions. But the visual and performing arts have assumed a reality almost sui generis. What we see and note outside Iran is of course only half of the story. Despite the fact that a considerable number of Iranian artists have left their homeland physically or by their global reputation, still the overwhelming majority of them remains inside their country and barely noted outside. Major novelists like Mahmoud Dolatabadi and until his recent death Houshang Golshiri (1938–2000) and prominent filmmakers such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Ebrahim Hatami-Kia are not as well-known outside Iran as their work so richly deserves, nor are artists such as Parviz Kalantari, Farshid Mesghali, Farah Ossouli, and Hossein Khosrojerdi, or sculptors and painters like Maryam Salour and Jazeh Tabataba’i, or photographers like Bizhan Bani-Ahmad.
Needless to say, no complete picture of Iranian art is possible without a simultaneous attention to the massive work produced inside the Iranian borders for a specifically Iranian audience. But this knowledge will have to be produced in a language and through a set of critical lenses that do not anthropologize Iranian art for a presumed foreign—that horrid abstraction colonially code-named “the West” in particular—audience. The emerging global exposition of Iranian art is an exceptionally important development that has a catalytic effect on the texture and disposition of artistic creativity. People of all cultural temperaments and aesthetic dispositions today converse with Iranian art in terms domestic to their aesthetic sensibilities, and irrespective of the larger context of its cultural origin and historical progeny. Embedded in every aspect of Iranian art—poetic, visual, or performative—is a worldly conversation with the best of the rest world. Iranian artists who have exited their national boundaries in language or in location—in spirit or in site—have in effect facilitated a new register in that worldly conversation. Living inside or outside Iran is no longer the measure of this creative engagement. There are artists like Abbas Kiarostami who have been born and bred entirely within the current borders of Iran and yet their art has crossed cultural boundaries East and West of their homeland—and then there are filmmakers like Parviz Sayyad or painters like Mahmoud Farshchian who have physically moved outside Iran and yet their art caters almost exclusively to a hermetically sealed exilic community—with almost no organic connection to the material evidence of their physical environment. The antidote to that sickly isolationism is the rich and robust cinema of Naderi, the flirtatious poignancy of Neshat’s photography and video installations—and with them the rising salutation of Iranian cinema welcoming the world to its embrace.
If we were categorically to abandon the outdated binary of home/exile (no longer valid, legitimate, or even operative), we will see the emerging atlas of a different domain, de-territorialized from any specific coordinates on the world map, and yet fully embodied and inhabited by artists working in or out of their cartographic presumptions. Iranian artists are now conversing with the world with their own Persian accent. Artists around the world in turn are now picking up their accent and producing their respective art with a Persian intonation: One can today arguably speak of an Iranian cinema at large—where Kiarostamiesque realism has become a universal staple of world cinema. “Iranian cinema is now produced from all over the globe,” Naderi once told me after serving as a juror in an international film festival. Iranian cinema no longer belongs to Iranians alone—its thematic and aesthetic outlines are now freely quoted, creatively adapted, and fruitfully assimilated into other cinematic traditions: precisely in the same way that Iranian cinema itself borrowed freely, unequivocally, and with ingenious results from other cinematic traditions. People are now paying homage to Iranian cinema by imitating it—sometimes better, sometimes worse than the originals—precisely the same way the Persian carpet designs are produced much less expensively in Pakistan! The result is an artistic tradition in which is expressed the colorful hopes of a world now in dire despair.
The virtual space forming beyond the deforming (and jaundiced) impact of such binaries as home/exile, East/West, Tradition/Modernity is not just of artistic but also of political consequences. After the events of 9/11 in New York and Washington DC, the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq signal the commencement of a new imperial design for the world at large. As the world is dangerously moving toward a mono-polar Empire, with the United States aggressively pursuing an adventurous imperialism, the Iranian art projects an exemplary case for a polyfocal vision of our planet. The catastrophic looting of the world cultural heritage in Iraq, and before that in Afghanistan, is a clear indication that this predatory empire has no claim to any cultural hegemony and sees the world as the topographical site of natural resources and globalized market. Places like Iran and the entirety of the region it represents mean nothing to the ideologues of this Empire except a constellation of oil reserves. Often ruled and represented by alternatively corrupt potentates or medieval tyrants, these countries have no recourse to self-representations except through their globally celebrated artists who have defied their colonially construed borders and crafted a vision beyond our current despair and toward the more hopeful horizons of our future.
Paramount at this particular time in Iranian artistic history is to allow its individual and collective works of art to emancipate themselves from inherited and manufactured categories that have for long distorted their thematic dispositions. The global celebration of Iranian cinema over the last quarter-of-a-century has marked a critical passage in the Iranian cultural history. More than anything else, this passage marks a critical juncture in the most enduring problem of Iranian art: Its categorical trauma. Throughout its modern history, contemporary Iranian artistic expressions have had a problem of categorization: Where and within what larger frame of references should “Iranian art” be located? In this respect, the problem of categorization of Iranian art reflects the larger issue of Iranian cultural and political history—namely the conflicting claims on its geographical imagination.
Placing Iranian art in the larger context of “Islamic Art” has always been problematic. The category “Islamic Art” was an Orientalist creation to expand upon a prior category “Arabic Art,” in order to accommodate a larger frame of reference—ranging from Southern Asia, Central Asia, Iran, the Ottoman territories, then all the way West to North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, down to Malaysia and Indonesia, and then of course China. The category “Islamic Art” was also to pay homage to specifically “Islamic” leitmotifs and aesthetic tropes in this constellation of artistic creations. Placing Iranian art in the larger context of “Islamic Art” has both pre-Islamic complications as well as problems pertaining to the artistic expressions in post-colonial modernity, where one cannot place the cinema of Kiarostami, the poetry of Ahmad Shamlu, the drama of Gholamhossein Sa’edi, the paintings of Iran Darroudi, or the photography of Zandi in the category of “Islamic Art”—the ideological insistence of an “Islamic Republic” notwithstanding. The presence of certain Islamic motifs in the photography and video installations of Neshat, the paintings of Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, the sculptures of Parviz Tanavoli, the calligraphy of Israfil Shirchi, or certain aspects of post-Islamic revolution cinema may indeed warrant such a category, but that would create additional problems of an ideological nature, as to how to reconcile between distinctly different emotive universes that inform and animate these varied artistic modes. Nationalist scholars like Jalal Matini and activist artists like Parviz Sayyad have vociferously opposed the inclusion of Iranian art in the category of “Islamic art” in sometimes cogent and at other times belligerent (but always persuasive) terms.
Equally problematic for Iranian art would be to place it in the category of “Arab Art,” which even when applied to Arab countries has its own categorical problems. For a whole set of rather complicated linguistic, jingoistic, and perhaps even artistic reasons, Iranian artistic expressions are not integral to their Arab neighbors. Colonial divides, aggravating already racialized categories, thicker and wider and longer than the Great Wall of China separates contemporary Iranians and Arabs, disallowing even a modicum of cultural communication in their normative, aesthetic, and thematic concerns. Though a younger generation of artists in both Iran and the Arab world, perhaps best represented by a new journal called Bidoun: Art and Culture from the Middle East, is beginning to make holes through the Great Wall of China. But the appellation “the Middle East” in the title of Bidoun is already trapped in another (more insidious) deforming category.
Perhaps the nastiest of all such categories is this ghastly colonial invention called “the Middle East” that alas even people from the region continue to use without the slightest hesitation. Not just the Iranian art, but the art of all the other nations colonially divided (in order to rule them better) and then summoned to submission under the category of “the Middle East” (that would be the middle of a distance to the East of some colonial officer sitting in London or Paris—or right now on a corridor between Princeton, NJ and Washington, DC) defies the colonial logic and escapes the rhetorical trap of this category.
If Iranian art is not to be located in an Islamic, Arabic, or Middle Eastern category, then where can it be placed to give it a wider thematic disposition for a more universal theoretical currency? One may posit the possibility of looking in a North and North-Eastern direction and propose the notion of “Iranian Art” in an all-embracing way of a different sort that includes Central Asian elements, all the way from the Caucuses to Afghanistan. A common linguistic, literary, and in part even cultural common denominator recommends this category as perfectly plausible. The problem with it, however, is that since the early nineteenth century and the political incorporation of central Asia first into the Russian Empire and subsequently into the Soviet Union, there has scarce been a sustained communication between Iranian art proper and Central Asian Artists. The result is that Central Asian art is in fact far more communicative and conversant with Russian, Soviet, and Eastern European art of the last century than with Iranian art. An additional problem is of course the imperial imaginary behind the notion of “the Greater Iran,” or the “Iranian plateau” that in the heyday of Iranian jingoism of the Pahlavi period had created both racial and racist proclivities of its own—some of which has in fact survived well into even an Islamic Republic! So not much is gained by placing Iranian art in the larger context of the Persian-Speaking “Iranian Plateau” while much is lost and/or compromised in the substance of the progressive and emancipatory content of the Iranian art of the last two hundred years.
What about “Western art?” Can Iran be considered in the frame of that context? The suggestion is quite curious on the surface. But it is not that outlandish either. Yes, indeed Iran is geographically located far from the Western European and North American provenance of any artistic creation, and as such it does not qualify to be considered as “Western.” But Israel and South Africa are systematically included in such a “Western” context, while they are not geographically any closer to the domain of “the West.” One may argue that as colonial settlements, Israel and (until very recently) South Africa partake in the Judeo-Christian tradition that seems to inform the notion of “the West.” But “the West” is meant to be a pronouncedly secular idea, and not reducible to its Christian, or even the more recent (and theologically deeply flawed) proposition of a Judeo-Christian, denominator. That proposition creates additional problems—such as the avowedly Jewish disposition of the state of Israel, which puts it on the same level as an Islamic Republic, or Christian Empire, or even the idea of a Hindu fundamentalist (on the BJP model) state in India, and thus not exactly on the model of a secular blueprint proposed by Enlightenment (capitalist) modernity, which would also, until very recently disqualify the apartheid South Africa from inclusion in “the West.” So the geographical distance of Iran from Western Europe and North America cannot be an issue, nor indeed the Islamic disposition of its state. If the problem of its un-democratic disposition were to be raised, perhaps millions of non-White South Africans until very recently, or millions of Palestinians trapped in their own homeland until this very day have something to say about the matter too.
So there does not seem to be any problem for Iran to be embraced under the grander canopy of “the West,” except it just looks, sounds, seems, and is exceedingly odd, if not altogether ridiculous. That sentiment is not entirely false not because one can offer any legitimate and rational reason why Iran (or Afghanistan, or Tajikistan, for that matter) should not be included in “the Western art,” except that the very fabricated category “the West” is itself deeply flawed, a recent colonial coinage, and by now a completely outdated category—except in the tormented mind of grand ideologues like Bernard Lewis.39 As a category, “the West” was invented to supersede “Christendom” in the course of capitalist modernity and as an umbrella oratory covering first the Western European and then Northern American national polities.40 Other, retarded, versions of the selfsame civilizational category—the Islamic, the Indian, the Chinese, the African, etc.—were co-invented to corroborate “the West” as a legitimate conception: Systematically positing it on a self-raising/other lowering axis. “The West” thus served for over two centuries as a colonial divide, separating the presumed centers of the operation of capital from its colonial peripheries. With the rapid collapse of any notion of a center, and thus a contingent periphery, to the operation of the globalized capital so has collapsed the categorical assumption of this thing called “the West.”
Perhaps one explanation for the insufficiency of all such distorting categories is precisely the fact that territorial designations are no longer valid and that only temporal descriptions are applicable. “Contemporary Art,” as an organizing category, seems most neutral and most effective in surpassing all these categorical entrapments and move beyond their outdated loyalties and forward toward a far more embracing and emancipatory vision of artistic creation. Recognizing such fundamentally flawed and/or outdated categories as Islamic, Arab, Iranian, Middle Eastern, or Western art, and then altogether abandoning territorial, religious, racialized, colonial, imperial, and civilizational designations, and instead opting for the leveled field of a temporal designation such as “Contemporary Art” has a number of significant consequences worth noting:
First and foremost that art has no history, that all art, and at all times, is contemporary art, for art always reinvents its own history in order to discard it.41 The contemporary Iranian art is as much conversant with its own historical antecedents as it is with its immediate and distant geographical vicinity. Naderi’s cinema is far influenced by John Ford and Akira Kurosawa than it is by Persian miniature painting. Kiarostami’s photography is as much influenced by Sohrab Sepehri’s paintings as it is by Japanese Haiku poetry. Neshat’s video installations are as much conversant with Stan Brakhage as they are influenced by Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry. The geographical serendipity of art overrides its historical rootedness. The New York based-Iranian artist Nodjoumi’s paintings respond to Iranian politics as much as they do to his American milieu. The Tehran-based photographer Zandi has crafted an art of portraiture in terms almost entirely domestic to her own visual sensibilities, with effectively no evident root in anything particularly Persian or Iranian, modern or medieval.
All territorial claims to artistic production, exhibition, and reception categorically outdated and descriptively inadequate, works of art are now produced and received in a far more spontaneous modus operandi. Works of art, as a result have become amnesiac, generating and discarding their own memories at one and the same time. Local histories of a work of art have become globally irrelevant, while their global reception is in terms entirely alien to their local in/significance. As such, works of art seem to be in need of an entirely new, perhaps emerging, lexicon of aesthetic theorization. The end of art history is not the end of emerging memories for works and sites of creative emancipation. The paramount task is the situational citation of such sites, were works of art are ipso facto (irrespective of their distant memories) dis/mantled.
The conversant nature of art has always been paramount in its aesthetic disposition, and now it has become even more evident. Not influence but conversation is the manner of artistic creation, with the Mediterranean Sea and its navigational routes and trading ports perhaps the most significant site of artistic conversation in world history. Within that and all other similar contexts, artists are not as much influenced by each other as they are conversant with each other—across their presumed cultural divides, beyond their enduring societal prejudices, and through their constructed political divisions. The conversational embeddedness of works of art in their global geo-aesthetics makes the Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu, for example, as much a significant figure in the rise of contemporary Iranian cinema as anything domestic to its immediate cultural vicinity.
The collapse of territorial claims on artistic creation, and the radical contemporaneity of its production and reception have given a critical significance to the makeshift location in which a work of art is exhibited (the decline of permanent museums in significance and the rise of periodic biennales)—with the contingent fact that the dismantling of a work of art from one location and re-assembling it in another will have a categorical significance in its aesthetic experience. Perhaps the most significant recent example of this latter point are Mohammad Ghaffari and Abbas Kiarostami’s respective staging of the Persian Passion Play, “Ta’ziyeh,” in New York in 2003 and Avignon, in 2004, respectively—both plucking a deeply entrenched theatrical experience from its communal context and trying to plug it into an entirely different, indifferent, and in fact even hostile (in New York) context, with radically divergent experiences.
The end of territorial claims on art disallows the artistic productions in one communal context to be narratively, thematically, and aesthetically subsumed under any grand narrative beyond its immediate and spontaneous production and reception. Consider for example the two historical antecedents to the current rise of an aspect of Iranian art to global attention: One, when Goethe (1749–1832) published his Westöstliche Divan in 1819 on the basis of his readings and impressions of the Persian poet Hafez (1319–1389), and second, when Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883) published his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859, based on similar impressions from another Persian poet. Goethe and Fitzgerald heralded a global celebration of Persian poetry that until the rise of Iranian cinema to a similar attention during the last two decades of the twentieth century no other Persian art had enjoyed. The difference, however, between Goethe and Fitzgerald’s renditions of Hafez and Omar Khayyam into German and English and the current global celebration of Iranian cinema is of course the difference between the means of communication in the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Today, the celebration of Iranian cinema at Cannes Film Festival—among a myriad of other festivals in four corners of the world—means the commencement of its global dissemination around the planet. At this stage, and considering the categorical collapse of any territorial grand narrative to claim and contain these artistic expressions, we have entered a mode of hermeneutics that needs radically to reconsider the terms of its aesthetic engagements. At the time of Goethe and later Fitzgerald, Hafez and Omar Khayyam were immediately subsumed under the generic rubric of European Romanticism (and later of American Transcendentalism). But today, no such generic category can claim Iranian cinema, except for a categorical “neo-realism” which by now has effectively lost all its historical meanings.
The systematic de-territorialization of all artistic expressions, combined with the dispersion of expatriate bourgeois communities around the world, come together to produce an enduring politics of identity through which the white-identified expatriate bourgeoisie seeks to solicit and cash in a modicum of cultural authenticity for itself by way of appropriating and claiming the de-territorialized art. Celebration of Abbas Kiarostami in London (April–June 2005)—“Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist”—sponsored by the London-based Iran Heritage Foundation is a perfect case in point. Another example from New York is the annual fund-raising banquets sponsored by the Iran Center of Columbia University, where Encyclopedia Iranica is edited and published. In this case too, such Iranian artists as Neshat, Hollywood actresses like Shohreh Aghdashloo, and neocon debutantes like Azar Nafisi are ethnically claimed and celebrated by way of catering to the vacuous identity crisis of the expatriate bourgeoisie. The function of these expatriate bourgeois communities is in fact in perpetuating outdated territorial claims on works of art. Financially successful and yet culturally dispossessed, these communities seek to assimilate the achievements of artists like Neshat and Kiarostami backward into their outdated nostalgia for a past that never was, in preparation for a future that is not the subject matter of these artists. Prior to the global celebration of artists like Kiarostami or Neshat, these bourgeois banalities have no way of knowing what is evident or paramount in the world of art. Their expatriate ethnic claims on these artists are at great cost to their artistic integrity, entirely irrelevant to what is enduring in their work, and yet conducive to securing a modicum of presumed bourgeois respectability in their host countries.
Equally noteworthy in this respect are the critical services that the expatriate comprador intellectuals like Azar Nafisi provide to the ideological foregrounding of the US Empire by way of casting Iran as a constitutionally backward and fundamentally flawed culture, in dire need of being emancipated by an imperial intervention in its affairs, on the same model that English literature has purportedly performed in rescuing the soul of that nation from the evil of its own culture. 42
If the systematic de-territorialization of artistic production has resulted in what Jean Baudrillard has called “an aesthetics of indifference,” then the challenge of contemporary Iranian art, as indeed the challenge of any other de-territorialized art, is how to avoid the various identitarian traps planted on its way by a rootless bourgeoisie and their attendant career opportunist expatriate intellectuals, take advantage of new global opportunities to redefine the aesthetic terms of a more planetary emancipation in form and freedom alike, and ultimately avoid the danger of manufacturing yet another metaphysics of authenticity and its contingent aesthetic of indifference.
The signs of that emancipated aesthetics of a de-territorialized art are today evident all over the best and most celebrated aspect of Iranian art—namely Iranian cinema (embracing, as it does, all other aspects of contemporary Iranian art, from painting and graphic design to calligraphy, photography, music, dance, sculpture, sound design, etc.) Today Iranian artists are no longer limited to the inherited borders drawn for them and their neighbors by their own corrupt and incompetent leaders and by colonial powers that have come their way—the Russians and the British in particular—in the heydays of nineteenth-century colonial nationalism. The younger generation of Iranian filmmakers in particular has trespassed these borders and engaged a larger territorial claim for their art. Before shooting “Five o’clock in the Afternoon” in Afghanistan, Samira Makhmalbaf had made her second feature film “Blackboard” (2001) in the Kurdish mountains between Iran and Iraq—thus making one of the few films extant at the time about a state-less nation, which by virtue of its historical predicament makes a mockery of the entire project of colonial nationalism. Samira Makhmalbaf’s father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the leading post-revolutionary Iranian filmmakers, had already transgressed the national boundaries of his cinema by making a film in Turkey (“A Time for Love,” 1990), one in Tajikistan (“Silence,” 1998), and another two (“Kandahar,” 2001; “Afghan Alphabet,” 2002) set in Afghanistan. His “Cyclist” (1987) was already about the fate of Afghan refugees in Iran—thus ipso facto turning his camera away from a national and toward an intra-national direction. Having finally rescued himself from a fanatical devotion to a bankrupt revolution, Mohsen Makhmalbaf turned his cinema into the site-specific citation of an emancipatory art in Afghanistan—for him at the time the blueprint of a larger symbolic significance. Hasan Yektapanah’s “Jom’eh” (2001) also attended to the fate of Afghan refugees in Iran, as did Majid Majidi’s “Baran” (2002). In an almost total absence of any film production in Afghanistan, and before Sadiq Barmak’s “Osama” (2002) broke that spell in Cannes, Iran became the site of an Afghani surrogate cinema.
With the appearance of Bahman Qobadi, the Iranian cinema witnessed its first globally recognized Kurdish filmmaker. Qobadi’s “A Time for Drunken Horses” (2001), “Marooned in Iraq” (2003), and “Turtles can Fly” (2004) gave the Iranian Kurds their own voice and vision—and with these three films at the forefront of world attention the plight of ten million Kurds in Iran, five million in Iraq, another million in Syria, and more than ten more millions in Turkey assumed the semblance of its global significance. Before Qobadi, another great Kurdish filmmaker, Yilmaz Güney in his “Yol” (1983) had already brought a global attention to the predicaments of his nation. There is a couple of other Iranian Kurdish filmmakers who are as active as Qobadi—if not as internationally noted. Most recently, the selection of the Paris-based Kurdish filmmaker Hiner Saleem’s “Kilometer Zero” (2005) in the official selection of Cannes Film Festival added further momentum to the creation of a national cinema by a stateless people. All of these filmmakers put together, from within and without the Iranian cinema has now emerged a Kurdish cinema that at one and the same time confirms and negates the colonial boundaries artificially drawn between nations and their collective sentiments.
Consider the fact that there is a nation-state (colonially manufactured early in the nineteenth century by the British as a bumper zone between Russia and their Jewel in the Crown) called Afghanistan, but it lacks a national cinema, while a surrogate national cinema is being made for it in Iran—by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Samira Makhmalbaf, Marziyeh Meshkini, Majid Majidi, Hasan Yektapanah, Nelofer Pazira, and Sadiq Barmak. Meanwhile as a stateless nation, the Kurds (caught between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) have pieced together a national cinema for themselves. The logic of national cinema, predicated on national traumas, defies the absence of a nation-state and in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and above all in Palestine, and successfully generates and sustains a robust cinema. The Afghans have a state despite the multiplicity of their ethnicities challenging their claim to nationhood; Kurds lack a state despite their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural claim to nationhood: One willed while the other withered by the whims of colonialism.
The simultaneous attention of Iranian filmmakers to both the Afghan and the Kurdish predicaments, now extended into Iraq by a younger generation of Iranian filmmakers, began to corrode into the fabric of the nation-state as the natural boundary of artistic creativity—particularly when its most celebrated achievement, Abbas Kiarostami, made a film about AIDS in Africa: “ABC Africa” (2001); while another accomplished Iranian filmmaker, Ebrahim Hatami-Kia made a film about the civil war in former Yugoslavia, “Green Ashes” (1993), and other filmmakers have made feature films on Palestine. In this trans-regional reach of their artistic creativity, Iranian artists had an historical antecedent in the literary and poetic disposition of Persian language that has never been confined to the current borders of their homeland. From the Ottoman Empire (1300–1918) in the eastern Mediterranean to the Mughal Empire (1526–1857) in the Indian subcontinent, both embracing the Safavids (1502–1737) in their middle, Persian language—poetry and prose, creative and critical, social and scientific—was the lingua franca of poets and prose stylists across borders and all along the centuries—long before colonial borders and manufactured boundaries separated their creative output. The forced nationalization of Persian literary history began only in the late nineteenth century as a major component of colonial nationalism. What today is happening in Iranian cinema is creatively recapping the trans-regional texture and disposition of its artistic primogeniture.
The transnational proclivity of Iranian cinema is metaphorically best represented in a series of short films that were directed by some prominent filmmakers in the Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. Films such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s “Baran and the Native” (1999), Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “Door” (1999), Daryush Mehrju’i’s “The Cousin is Lost” (2000), or Marziyeh Meshkini’s “The Day I became a Woman” (2000) are all set in this non-descriptive island which can be anywhere but nowhere in particular and thus the somewhere of a cinematic invention. One of the most successful films made in Kish is Babak Payami’s “Secret Ballot” (2001), based on Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s script, which has the transgressive visions endemic to a nameless land and yet none of the habitual anthropological gaze of Tehran-based artists looking down at provincial sites. While Payami achieves that perceptive vision without collapsing into anthropological gaze via a judicious use of his camera, Bahman Qobadi achieves the same insight in his “A Time for Drunken Horses” (2000) by virtue of his vision being native to his Kurdish homeland.
But that “homeland,” as all others, is now evident only in absentia. The evidence of that absentia and the terms of its emancipation are already evident. Tirdad Zolghadr’s “Tropical Modernism” (2004) is an exquisite exercise in eliminating the role of the videographer—the absented filmmaker—by giving the digital video to the subject himself, in this case a former leftist activist, a certain Dr. Rahati, now in his middle ages and living a moderately comfortable life, yet having surrounded himself with the paraphernalia of his leftist memories, Carlos “the Jackal,” perhaps the most iconic member of the Baader Meinhof Gang, Salvador Allende (1908–1973), the deposed Chilean Marxist, and such. What is extraordinary in this video is Zolghadr’s playful iconography of the Iranian left by way of juxtaposing a historical narrative of the movement as given by a participant observer against the backdrop of an eerily solitary life, ascetic shots of vacated frames, and the impromptu awkwardness of a man shooting himself (double-entendre of course), while (seemingly) eliminating the role of the videographer—particularly at the moment when Dr. Rahati bring Zolghadr into a frame and asks him what does he intend to achieve in (not) making this video, to which question Zolghadr remains disarmingly silent. The result is a mute (but not moot) act of semiotic smuggling of signs out of the territory (homeland, Islamic Republic, country, nation, history) for some posterity to read and unlearn the world.
A semiotic smuggling of unsuspecting signs—contemporary Iranian art is the site and citation of a nation of emancipatory sentiments no longer exclusive to any particular people, and yet particular to the predicaments of a planet we all cannot but call home.
*First published in Octavio Zaya (Ed.), Contemporary Iranian Artists: Since the Revolution (San Sebastian, Spain: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005) (in English, Spanish, and Catalan).
1From BBC News (World Edition), Wednesday, February 16, 2005.
2Shaheen Merali and Martin Hager (Eds.), Entfernte Nähe/Far Near Distance (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004): 6–7.
3See ibid. Emphasis added.
4Ibid., 20.
5Merali and Hager (Eds.), Entfernte NäNewhe/Far Near Distance: 40.
6Ibid., 44.
7Ibid., 41.
8Jean Baudrillard, “Transaesthetics,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (New York and London: Verso, 1990): 16.
9See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978): 56–57.
10See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader. Edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York and London: Routledge, 1996): 214.
11Baudrillard, “Transaesthetics”: 17.
12Ibid., 49.
13See Mir-Ahmad Mir-Ehsan, “This and the Other,” in Shaheen Merali and Martin Hager (Eds.), Entfernte Nähe/Far Near Distance (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004): 111.
14Ibid., 113.
15For an English translation, see Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi: Weststruckness (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1982).
16For the details of Al-e Ahmad’s ideas and their influence on the Islamic revolution of 1979, see my Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
17Daryush Shayegan, in Shaheen Merali and Martin Hager (Eds.), Entfernte Nähe/Far Near Distance (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004): 119.
18Ibid., 120.
19Ibid.
20For a swift dismissal of Shayegan’s thesis (that we are in fact mentally diseased and that is the source of our historical malady), predicated on a more elaborate argument, see Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994): 119. The suggestion that Arabs, Muslims and Orientals in general suffer from delusions and maladies is of course not limited to Shayegan. Fatimah Mernissi, Fouad Ajami, Bassam Tibbi, and most recently Azar Nafisi have also contributed to this idea—all predicated on the legendary work of their doyen, Bernard Lewis, most recently articulated in his What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003).
21See “Récit de l’Exil Occidental” in this volume.
22For a comprehensive study of the art of the revolutionary period and the art of the Iran–Iraq war period, see Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
23See “The Impact of War on Contemporary Art,” an interview with three contemporary Iranian artists, Tavoos: Iranian Art Quarterly, 2, Winter 2000: 7.
24For a report of this restoration see Mohammad Reza Haeri, “Iranian Architecture and the Architecture of the Iranian Mind,” Tavoos: Iranian Art Quarterly, 1, Autumn 1999: 38–59.
25Frances Harrison of BBC News (World Edition) wrote a fine report, “Reviving Iran’s revolutionaries,” on a number of these mural artists from Tehran on Friday, February 11, 2005.
26See Nasrollah Pourjavady (Ed.), The Splendour of Iran. Three Volumes (London: Booth-Clibbourn Editions, 2001).
27See Roloff Beny, Persia: Bridge of Turquoise (New York: McClelland and Stewart, 1975).
28Pourjavady, The Splendour of Iran: 9.
29For an historical assessment of sensus communis as the framework of knowledge production and the hermeneutics that is contingent on it see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989): 19–30.
30Ibid., 9.
31See Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs: Summer 1993, Volume 72, Number 3: 22–28. Samuel Huntington later expanded this essay into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
32Pourjavady, The Splendour of Iran: 11.
33See Anonymous (Ed.), Tajalli-e Ehsas: Montakhabi az Athar-e Naqqashi-ye Zanan (Manifestations of Emotion: A Selection of Paintings by Women). Three Volumes (Tehran: Farhang-Sara-ye Niavaran, 1373/1994). Other examples of such exhibitions and publications include a collection of photographs called A Collection of Photographs of the Second Sureh National Exhibition of Photography of Children and Young Adults, published by Sazeman-e Tablighat-e Islami, Howzeh-ye Honari (The Art Department of the Organization of Islamic Propaganda) in 1371/1992. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is equally active in publication. For example, in their Pioneers of Iranian Modern Art series they have recently (2001) published a monograph on the prominent Iranian artist, considered the founder of what is called the Saqqa-khaneh style of painting—Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi (b. 1937).
34See Maryam Zandi, Portraits. Three Volumes. With Introductions by Abbas Kiarostami and Karim Emami (Tehran: Mahnaz Publishers, 1376).
35For an insightful essay on the works of Nicky Nodjoumi see Octavio Zaya, “Elective Affinities,” in Nicky Nodjoumi (New York: Mike Weis Edition, 2004): 1–2.
36For critical reflections on the early work of Ardeshir Mohassess see Ardeshir Mohassess,: The Library of Congress Drawings (Washington, DC: Mage Publications, 1993); and Ardeshir Mohassess, Closed Circuit History (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1989). Equally significant is the extraordinary work of Bizhan Asadipour. See his Khat Negari: Bizhan Asadipour (Upper Montclair, NJ: Rowzan, 1989).
37Manoucher Yektai’s most famous collection of poetry is Falgoosh (Upper Montclair, NJ: Rowzan, 1991). For a short biography and a selection of his paintings see his Paintings: 1951–1997 (Upper Montclair, NJ: Rowzan, 1998). An equally successful Iranian artist, though opting to dwell in Canada, is Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937), one of the most celebrated contemporary sculptors who revolutionized the modern Iranian art, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada, where he continues to break new grounds in his work.
38Years ago I edited and (along with M. R. Ghanoonparvar) translated a couple of his plays. See Hamid Dabashi (Ed.), Parviz Sayyad’s Theater of Diaspora: Two Plays: The Ass and the Rex Cinema Trial (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1993).
39More than any other Orientalist (turned imperial ideologue) alive, Bernard Lewis has been instrumental in the systematic demonization of Islam, as a categorical imperative, vis-à-vis what he continues to call “the West.” See for example his Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
40For a detailed argument in this respect see my essay, “For the Last Time: Civilizations,” International Sociology. September 2001. Volume 16 (3): 361–368.
41For an art history take on Louis Althusser’s assertion that “ideology has no history,” see John Roberts (Ed.), Art Has No History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art (London and New York: Verso): 194.
42Sentences have been deleted from the text as the similar passage has already been appeared in “Récit De L’exlil Occidental” in this volume.