—Sohrab Sepehri
Bordercrossings
The kind of visual art that Shirin Neshat has now brought to perfection receives much of its energy from that ambiguous borderline where veiling and revealing converse. The equivocality of that borderline is where body flirtatiously rubs itself against its commanding culture. When we look at that borderline the way Neshat pictures it, we realize that it is always through the violent terror of naming that cultures regulate their mandates. Naming (of bodily organs, birth certificates, and all in between) is the most immediate form of veiling whereby a culture controls the effervescent defiance of the body. Neshat has trained her camera with such precision of insight that the negotiated and settled differences between the overriding culture and the submissive body are once again agitated and brought back to the negotiating table. To be able to do that, an artist needs a judicious presence in a transgressive space. Creatively to dwell in that space and yet use it with impeccable control is what distinguishes a great artist from a mere globetrotting dilettante. To what Neshat owes the spectacular control of her vision is impossible fully to articulate. What is immediately evident, however, is the visual evidence of her successfully tapping into the volcanic junctures of her fragmented cultures, the normative crossings of good and evil, beautiful and repellent, feminine and masculine, controlling and releasing, seduction and solemnity, thus taking us all back to the festive occasion of in/articulate presence in the pre-moment of our historical agency.
Neshat has persistently dwelled on that borderline and thus infiltrated the modified museum spaces of a global bewilderment in order to de-museumize her received, now retrieved, culture: the result is the sublation of one critical cultural moment into the neighborhood of a global aesthetics. Neshat is an aesthetic tactician of uncommon precision, brevity the soul of her visual wit, bordercrossing her tenuous, attenuated, trademark.
By far the most powerful set of binary oppositions now visually collapsing in Neshat’s work is sanctity and sensuality. The lifted hand that points to the lips at once allows for the fingers to silence the lips while letting the lips kiss the fingers. The ascetics of silence and the erotics of kissing are here the subtextual prelude of a hand that pictures two iconographic opposites of sanctity of the supreme Shi’i invocation “Ya Qamar-e Bani Hashem” and sensuality of one of the most famous poems of Forough Farrokhzad. Masculine Shi’ism as ascetic inhibition and feminine poetics as sensual emancipation here embrace each other in the back of a single hand. In this single move, Neshat embraces the im/possibilities of two iconographic inhibitions. Through their matrix of inhibitions, cultures make it impossible for the juridically mandated pieties to border with the suppressed and denied sensuality. An ascetics of denial is at the roots of the jurisprudence of piety operative in Neshat’s paternal culture. In the same culture, however, the subversive theo-eroticism of Persian Sufism has always experimented with the im/possibilities of that border. While in the realm of the literary from Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi’s mystical poetics in the thirteenth century to Sohrab Sepehri’s ascetic realism in the twentieth we have witnessed destabilizing encounters of the sensual with the sacred, in visual terms we have never seen what it means to have the two universes collide. It is through her extraordinarily perceptive grasp of the nature of feminine piety in an Iranian/Islamic universe that Neshat can detect and convey the seductive energy of the clasp when the sacred and the sensual meet. The palpable love and affection with which Neshat embraces such evident opposites is one crucial source of the precision of her visual bordercrossings. The prophetic and the poetic, the sacred and the sensual, and ultimately home and exile collapse into an overwhelming embrace summoned by Neshat’s loving hands, seen and shot through her sensual gaze.
Equally evident in this measured awareness of the colliding energies of her inherited culture is Neshat’s pictorial oscillation between controlling the visual while releasing of the sensual. This precision of balance can visually transform the clasping of two maternal hands into an embracing vaginal hold of two infantile hands in the simulation of a fetus formation. This is the mother-and-child: in the making. In another move with similar features, she can aesthetically transform the dismissive clasp of the vaginal formation in the moment of pregnancy into the inviting openness of a womb. The aesthetic control of the visual unleashes here an energy of unsurpassed power, beyond any cultural control. Here, and through Neshat’s camera, body is teaching itself how to mock the inhibited, deride the forbidden, simulate the truth. By teaching its organs how to mock, Neshat invests the body with artful counter-intelligence. Through its mocking organs, the body is now storing itself with ironic memories, restoring itself to its defiant disposition, teaching itself how to remember things forbidden, play with fire, dare its own forgotten elements. Neshat chronicles the forgotten memories of the body, retrieves them from the suppressed reservoir of her culture, waging them against their own god-terms, freeing the body from the prison-house of its accumulated, ossified, rectitude.
In the feminine body in particular, Neshat has much more enduring memories to invest. The kind of bordercrossings evident in her photographic faces begins to inject seduction into sadness, violence into serenity. How could a sad face be sensual, how could serenity harbor violence? Beyond a furious revolution in 1979 and a catastrophic war between 1980 and 1988, the two most violent memories that animate Neshat’s photography, she reaches for the innermost assumptions that divide and conquer the anxieties of revolt and the dreams of emancipation. The instant that her camera forgets how to look for the erotics of irony in a face that emancipatory possibility is in danger. The glory of Neshat’s photography is in her uncanny ability to turn violence into an energetic serenity, sadness into sensuality. The result is an unsettling revelation about the seductive force of violence. In this respect, she is the visual conscience and photographic memory of an entire generation of hopes turned into fears, laughters turned into tears, joyous ephemerality of the body turned into the dead certainties of a culture. By picturing our present predicament with a loving gaze, Neshat has a claim on being the photographer of our past indiscretions, future emancipation. She pictures things that have already happened but unregistered, things that are yet to happen but unforeseen: She is a visionary of the im/possible.
It is to articulate the terms of that future emancipation that Neshat’s turn to the male body ought to be read. Her male bodies are the projected sites of a decidedly feminine gaze. From the secure vaginal embrace of an infantile boy to the distant figure of a full-bodied man, the masculinity of a body remains always contingent on the femininity of the gaze cast on it. Without that feminine gaze, without Neshat’s seductive camera, man is but a name with no claim to any body. Thus her entire camera-work is the corrective lens of a culture of masculinity that has formed the male body in the absence of the publicity of a feminine gaze. Neshat’s camera publicizes the private look of a feminine denial into the pronounced gaze of its positive affirmation. She is looking at the masculine body with the intensity of all the denied feminine gazes that her culture has harbored. The result is not a mere publicity of the feminine gaze. The result is destabilizing the fake confidence of the masculine body, formed and infused in the absence of a confident feminine gaze.
Neshat’s body of photographic evidence thus registers the sustained record of successful bordercrossings. As she challenges the received repressions of all our metaphysics of denials, she invests in us all the emancipatory memories of a bodily resurrection. The strategic modulations of bordercrossings, definitive to her entire oeuvre, function like a visual ploy to intimate the possibilities of a bodily resurrection. Bodily resurrection, as a metaphysical im/possibility, has a long and revered history in her received (Islamic) culture. But what she does with that im/possibility is precisely where her art has a fateful rendezvous with the global implications of her metaphysical culture.
The Global Gaze
Today the possibilities of that bodily resurrection are taking place in full public view and on the site of two crisscrossing passages: bodies taking their cultures to task, cultures taking their nations to the globe. The global view though confuses the two, taking one for the other, ignoring the organic root of the two in each other. In his review of the Sante Fe biennial, Ralph Rugoff opted to showcase Neshat’s video installation “Rapture” as an example of what he termed “migratory artists” crowding “circus-like surveys … [of] an internationalist ethic.”1 As Rugoff noted, “the international biennial has taken centre stage as the dominant exhibition format for presenting new works,” and even more important, showcasing “an internationalist ethic” has become “in itself a prerequisite for creating a truly contemporary art show.”2 That may indeed be the case, but to what end? Rosa Martinez, the Spanish curator of Site Sante Fe, calls the Exhibition in her New Mexico space “Looking for a Place,” out of her conviction that “the most innovative art seeks to break of institutionalized spaces.”3 If European museums at the turn of the last fin de siècle in the nineteenth century were the substitute pantheons of high European bourgeoisie, replacing the palaces they had vacated of power and churches they had declared dead, these international biennials at the turn of this fin de siècle in the twentieth century are now rightly the sites of immigrant artists no longer at home where they were born but seeking to turn the lemon of migratory labor into the lemonade of creative art.
Rugoff credits Neshat with having “developed a hybrid vernacular capable of simultaneously addressing her different audiences”4 and points out that many of her colleagues at the Sante Fe have failed to do so. The question, though, remains what precisely is this “hybrid vernacular” which is capable of addressing multiple audiences? Does Neshat indeed manage to speak to more than one audience? And who might these audiences exactly be? Iranians? Migratory communities? Globalizing capital and labor, of the sort that Financial Times chronicles? Neshat’s audience(s) cannot of course be considered her compatriot Iranians inside their country because, as Rugoff rightly notes, she “cannot be shown in her native country (Iran).” As for the “globality” of Neshat’s art, the term conceals much more than it reveals. What it reveals, though, is quite crucial. The globality of the predicament that embraces and informs Neshat’s art supersedes such binary opposition as East–West (or Islam and the West) of terms that have for long distorted the circularity of capital and its culture. The globality of our predicament, which is nothing new, though recently aggravated, cannot any longer be collapsed into convenient but misleading categories. To be contemporary is to be global, but global in terms constitutional to the circularity of capital (and labor) migration and the culture it equally forces to be migratory. The global also means the immediate suspension of all the aggressive categories that have so far forced the world into artificial encampments independent of the circular logic of capital and its commanding culture.
As Rugoff notes of the Chinese artist Lai Guo-Qiang’s installation of a 20-foot-high lighthouse built from timber and detritus atop Site Sante Fe’s building, it collapses into a “repackaging their aesthetically modest work as grandiose metaphor” and as such having a claim over nothing more than “its inane pretension.” This is an example of remaining within the confinements of a domesticity that fails to transcend beyond itself and reach for a “hybrid vernacular” that locates the Chinese in the globality of its post-Tiananmen Square predicament. But the example also points to entrapment in the existing paradigmatics of identitarian ethics and politics, of which not just Lai Guo-Qiang but Rugoff himself remains accused. The inter-national reception of an art generated within the global circularity of capital and culture cannot but continue the old, outdated, binary assumptions of East-and-West, of nations and national cultures, in conversation or clash with each other. If there is to be a “hybrid vernacular,” it can neither be “hybrid” nor assumed “vernacular.” The “hybridity” assumes an originary authenticity that no longer is, as the “vernacular” predicates a sacramental Latin we can no longer revere.
Rosa Martinez, the curator of Sante Fe 1999, is credited for having recently announced that “cultures must reinvent a new ethic of existence.”5 Whether or not such lofty credits, self-assigned by curators, is in or out of place, presumably what Martinez has in mind is for art to catch up with the migratory force of capital and labor. Neither Martinez though nor any one of the artists she has exhibited can “invent” anything unless the outcome corresponds to a yet to be named, pictured, or narrated reality. The reality which Neshat pictures and of which her audiences are yet to be informed are always-already bordercrossing realities. These bordercrossings are locally subvertive precisely because they are globally transgressive. They liberate domestically precisely because they subvert globally. In the process, they manage to do what Rosa Martinez demands them to do and “invent” an ethic of globality that at the same time liberates them locally. But they do so not because they are sitting on an Olympian mountain of aesthetic aloofness. They do so because they are responding in earnest to a cultural globality that is barely catching up with the capital that has occasioned it.
Ralph Rugoff’s principal objection to Rosa Martinez is that the majority of the art she has exhibited “seem far more concerned with declaring what their work is about, rather than showing us how they get there.” The problem with such a blunt declaration, Rugoff declares, is that “exhibitions like this can do little more than celebrate internationalism for its own sake—a worthy political goal, perhaps, but utterly bankrupt as an aesthetic proposition.” This damning declaration points precisely to the tension between the emerging globality of an art that still rightly lacks a definition and an internationalist’s expectation of a definitive aesthetics that charts and locates that definition. The result of this tension is precisely the condemnatory language of the art critic who thus declares that what we see in Sante Fe “is a latter-day Tower of Babel where the possibility of dialogue between cultures is reduced to a polyglot din. If contemporary art is truly becoming a global language, exhibitions such as this one will need to find new formats, and perhaps new ambitions, in order to do it justice.” This of course is as charitable and sympathetic as an art critic for Financial Times can get in attending such Towers of Babel. But precisely the site of Financial Times is where the underlining globalization of capital and its culture is best readable and thus its attention to the art that this globalization generates noteworthy. It is precisely against that reading of the “internationalism for its own sake” that Rugoff’s attraction to Neshat’s work, entirely despite himself, informs the “new ethics” that Martinez expects, equally despite herself. The problem is in the configuration of the emerging cultural globality being read from an angle entirely alien to the aesthetic locality that has occasioned them, right before that locality itself is superseded by the globality it informs. The circularity of the argument simply mirrors the circularity of labor and capital that has occasioned it, making an “international” perspective no longer viable, as it makes a “dialogue among cultures” entirely moot. Neither national nor cultural units of analysis can any longer hold any water against the broken dam of postnational globalization. The kind of categorical bordercrossing that Neshat’s art simulates is one particularly poignant strategy of bodily resurrection against the tyranny of cultures and the prison house of their national identity, a cultural revolt against national cultures that actively partakes in cultural globalization. By positing an aesthetics of alterity, by placing the body against its tyrannical culture, and ultimately by staging a bodily resurrection, Neshat’s work collapses her local culture into the parameters of a globality that now has to account for its own terms of terror and intimidation, depravation and poverty, tyranny and injustice. Her work, the best that this transitional bordercrossing between the local and the global can afford is a guerrilla-tactic, where the local escapes into the global, the global into the local, crisscrossing and transgressing one trap into the other, all the while keeping a defiant resurrection of the body in her camera’s mind.
By now an “international aesthetics,” what Rugoff seems to demand is a contradiction in terms. But the problem is not with the false expectation of a singular “aesthetics” that can be read and visualized across the presumption of hermetically sealed cultures. The problem is rather with the falsifying assumption of inter-nationalism and dialogue between cultures. What Rugoff intuitively notes in his reading of Neshat but theoretically fails to articulate about Sante Fe in general is that we can no longer enter such exhibitions with the assumption that there are nations and cultures categorically distinct from each other and yet in aesthetic need of communicating with each other. The internal and spiraling logic of the incessantly globalizing capital and its culture has necessitated a mode of reading that can no longer be predicated on such assumptions of constitutionally different cultures and successfully policed borders. Neshat’s “native homeland,” which now boasts of living under an “Islamic” Republic, can hardly conceal the categorical location of that Republic from its nascent ideological formation to its institutions of legitimate authority in the colonial bosom of the project of Modernity. The entire artifact of the “Islamic Ideology” is a product of active response to the colonially mitigated project of Modernity and as such a mere mirror image of it, albeit made of the distant memories of an ancient culture. The art that the globalizing capital and its culture engender categorically defies any distinct moral or political, social or cultural, boundary. This art represents, instead, the transfiguring nature of both the material basis and the aesthetic parameters of that emerging world that the inner logic of capital can hardly conceal or legitimately deny.
Less than twenty years ago it was impossible to imagine a Shirin Neshat. Today it is impossible to imagine her out of the visual repertoire of our world.
The Local Look
It is not just the global gaze that under-theorizes itself. The local look is equally bewildered. The criticism leveled against Neshat by some Iranians, Muslims, or in general by those who advocate the cause of the “Third World” is that she takes advantage of and thus reinforces the existing stereotypes of Muslim women and as a result perpetuates that image. She is accused of aestheticizing and thus celebrating what she ought to be criticizing and subverting. She is said to have catered to the tantalizing whims of her “Western Audience” by giving them the over-Orientalized version of what they have already imagined. Women in veils: How more can one self-Orientalize?
All these accusations are fallacious and predicated on an outdated identitarian politics, continuing to paint a static world to the East and a creative world to the West of Neshat’s logistics. The dichotomy is false and the Iranian cinema of Neshat’s lifetime is the evidence. Central to Neshat’s photographic imagination is the performative disposition of veiling. She de-mystifies the act of veiling via an orchestration of the face, simultaneous with choreography of the body. She over-stages veiling by placing it as a pronounced social practice, the claim of the culture on the moving body. The performative presence of Neshat’s work cannot be bracketed and then accused of self-Orientalization. It is constitutional to the very act of bordercrossing she performs that she must take the culturally private to the globally public. We need a whole new conception of cultural mobilization here. With East–West dichotomy melting away under the gaze of the globalizing capital no longer an Orient exists to be Orientalized. Neshat’s bordercrossings is a dialectics of defiance, a bodily resurrection against fabricated cultures and the prison-house of their national identity, with the nation-state as the custodian of the power that reaps the benefit.
Performing the veil, as Neshat does, stages the culturally constituted body in an overwhelmingly exaggerated way, the only way that the body can be shown in its cultural contortion. The implications of that exaggerated, performative, staging of the concealed body commence with the physical evidence of the body but extend all the way to the underlying metaphysics that animates the cultural constitution of the body. Prior to its aestheticization, the veil cannot conceal its own history that it was there to accompany the body, there as the canvas of the metaphysics that demands it. There is a progression in the practice of veiling from the politics of power to the metaphysics of signification. There is a choreography to the social practice of veiling that embraces the body in the politics of its control, and the metaphysics of its submission. With the veil the hands are made inoperative, the speech impossible, the face covered, the body denied. The body—carrying the face, the hands, and the voice-moves and the veil—legislates on behalf of the metaphysical culture that authorizes it. The face that the veil covers can no longer reveal itself as a sign that signates and thus threatens all the controlling signifiers that ipso facto implicate a Transcendental Signified. The body that the veil denies is prohibited to substitute the soul that animates that metaphysics. The speech that the veil inhibits is mutated to authenticate the masculinity of the Divine Voice at the root of that metaphysics. The hands that the veil ties are rendered inoperative so that the act of productivity is incubated and its fruits denied.
The veiled body, as we can now see it through Neshat’s revealing camera, is the walking denial of the culture, the supreme summation of its repressed denials, the negative aesthetics of its inhibitions, the shadow of its light. On the premise of the veiled body, the social practice of veiling mutates the politics of power into the metaphysics of its inevitability immutable, absolutist, permanent. The practice is close-circuit, circuitous, self-authenticating: From the politics of its practice to the metaphysics of its certainty. Neshat visually interjects into that social practice, strategically disrupts that metaphysics. This she does in two simultaneously disruptive, mutually corroborative moves: In the privacy of her Iranian aesthetics and in the publicity of her global audience. The term glocal is nowhere more applicable and apt than here. Her global audience miss out on the locality of her references (ritual veiling, calligraphic poetry, Persian music, Qur’anic recitation, folkloric references), while her nativist audience equally fails to reconfigure its binary suppositions between Islam (or the East) and the West, or Tradition and Modernity. The result is that her global audience celebrates her for the wrong reasons, while her nativist critics condemn her with a bad politics. Bringing her local aesthetics and her global audience together, and bypassing her international admirers and nativist critics, we can see Neshat at the forefront of an aesthetic imagination that is behind the globalizing logic of the capital but ahead of its trailing culture. Bordercrossing left and right, Neshat stages a bodily resurrection in which the face is allowed to signate beyond the control of any Transcendental Signified, the body to substitute the soul, the speech demasculated, the hands productive in the field of the otherwise.
Bodily Resurrection
Shirin Neshat is the artist of the space in-between, of suggestions and suppositions, of a whole new cosmogony of vestiges and mementos. She gives an entirely new meaning to the idea and practice of flirting. She flirts. She flirts with danger with flare. The verbal abuse, the knee-jerk reaction would be to go for the kill with the visual. But not Neshat. She goes for the visual with the haunting instinct and patient precision of a lioness. She waits patiently, calculates with the precision of a Swiss-watch: Where to sit, when to move, what to show, why to retreat, and when to go for the jugular. Neshat is the artist of the un/seen, of the not/shown, of the strongly suggested, of “who?-Me?-I-never-said-that!” She is the artist of light and shadow, the marker of the twilight location where all the suggested signs remain signaling, but never significant enough to register a sentence, suggest a phrase, issue a statement. Never a statement: Always only a hint. Neshat’s is an aesthetics of im/permanence, of in/articulation.
With that arsenal of suggestive mobilization at her disposal, Neshat has singularly targeted the body as the site of her contestation. From her earliest photographic work to her latest video installations, and before and after anything else, Neshat is a visual theorist of the body. Her bodies are the sites of critical contestations with the cultures that create, seal, and sign them. Bodies are the signed and sealed signatures of a culture. In and of themselves bodies are already inscribed, constituted, defined, veiled beyond recognition. Veils are just the slightly more exaggerated veneers of the cultured bodies. Topless bikinis, even skinny-dipping in nude colonies, are as much markers of cultural constitutions of the body as a fully veiled figure. Clothing of any kind, from a turban to a tie, is the cultural closure of the body, a claim on its location, demanding it to behave, exacting a tax on its rectitude. Clothing though pales in comparison with how bodies in and of their nude selves are culturally constituted. Bodies are the mobile repositories of the culture they, literally, embody. From the moment of their birth, before the moment of their birth, to the moment of their death, beyond the moment of their death, bodies are the sites of cultural contestations. Cultures demand and exact obedience from their bodies, before conception, beyond grave. A Muslim is a Muslim before her conception, before his parents are married, before her grandparents are born, before his entire ancestry took their first breath. A Muslim is a Muslim beyond her grave, into the afterlife, long, very long, after he is dead and gone, into the Day of Resurrection, she is still a Muslim, a believer of one sort or another.
Neshat is born and bred into the Iranian version of the Islamic culture. Her art is decidedly rooted in her ancestral culture, in the manner and matter of her parental faith. It is almost impossible to read and write Neshat without noticing her incessantly quoting her culture. As a visual theorist of the body, she resurrects her bodies against the culture that has historically claimed them in order to deny them. The control of the culture over body is beyond measure, pre-dating any time, anticipating any space. In the Islamic culture, bodies are mandated and controlled before their ritual birth, beyond their ritual burial. Muslims believe that beyond their ritual birth into their faith they will die in their physical bodies and then they will be bodily resurrected in the Day of Judgement to be rewarded in Paradise for their good deeds or else punished in Hell for their evil acts. God is the “Owner of the Day of Judgement” (The Qur’an, I: 3), “… the day when every soul will find itself confronted with all that it hath done of good and all that it hath done of evil …” (III: 30), “… the day when (some) faces will be whitened and (some) faces will be blackened; and as for those whose faces have been blackened, it will be said unto them: Disbelieved ye after your (profession of) belief? Then taste the punishment for that ye disbelieved. As for those whose faces have been whitened, lo! In the mercy of Allah they dwell forever” (III: 106–107). It is not just the soul and the face of the created being that are resurrected on the Day of Judgement. They will resurrect in their entire body, from their bone, through their flesh, to their skin: “Lo! Those who disbelieve Our revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment. Lo! Allah is ever Mighty, Wise” (IV: 56).
From this Qur’anic beginning, the question of the corporeality of the body and the im/possibility of its bodily resurrection became a matter of grave theological debate among Muslims. The theological debate, however, is a subterfuge for something far more worldly and tangible, and that is the enduring claim of a commanding culture on the corporeal reality of the defiant body. What Neshat is doing today in the light-and-shadow reconfiguration of the human body is visually theorizing the caro corporalis where her ancestors failed to sublate it verbally into caro spiritualis. This is a battle of wits that has raged throughout the Iranian history and Islamic culture, from the dawn of Islam some fourteen hundred years ago down to the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. Today, at the writing of this essay, the most critical public debate in Iran is the question of public flogging and execution, with the Islamic judiciary strongly insisting that it will continue such practices irrespective of the objection of President Khatami’s government and the international outrage. The body of the Muslim subject of an Islamic Republic is the most immediate, most visible, most politically significant, site of the cultural claim on it.
There is a history though between the commencements of the Qur’anic constitution of the human body as the punitive site of the faith and its combative predicament in an Islamic Republic. The rise of philosophical rationalism in medieval Islamic intellectual history resulted in the denial of the possibility of bodily resurrection. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) denounced the philosophers for their belief in the eternity of the world, their denial of God’s knowledge of the particulars, and of bodily resurrection on the Judgement Day. Throughout the Islamic history, theological and philosophical debates about bodily resurrection were in effect battles over the metaphysical mutation of the caro corporalis into caro spiritualis. The battle came to a culmination in the sixteenth century in the figure of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1641) and the establishment of the School of Isfahan. Mulla Sadra Shirazi’s ambition was to bring together the best and most enduring philosophical speculations in Islamic intellectual history and wed them with the Islamic metaphysical doctrines. His efforts were so monumental and enduring that to this day the practice of Islamic philosophy has not freed itself of his influence. By the nineteenth century, one of his astute philosophical followers, Shyakh Ahmad Ahsa’i (d. 1826), brought his philosophical speculations on body to an unprecedented edge and founded the Shaykhi School of philosophy, named after him, which in turn resulted in by far the most revolutionary social uprising of the nineteenth-century Iran, the Babi movement.
Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i faced the same problem that generations of Muslim philosophers had faced. What was he to do with the physical body? It had all the signs of generation and corruption. It had come about and it dies away and yet the Qur’an had said that these very bodies will be resurrected, brought back to life on the Day of Judgement and then praised in Paradise or punished in Hell for what the selfsame bodies had done on earth. Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i came up with an elaborate theory of body to rescue it from corruption, save it for paradisiacal praise or infernal fire, and thus metaphysically prolong its endurance into a post-eternity that embraced its earthly existence. To do that end, Ahsa’i categorically divided the body into four stages of its corporeal existence. Two were related to the term jasad, which literally means corpus, and two with the term jism, which literally means body. There are, Ahsaíi surmised in his theory of the body, two stages to jasad and two to the jism.
Jasad A is our corporeal body, the body we touch and feel. This body, according to Ahsa’i, is like a garment that a man puts on and later casts off again. This body in and of itself has neither enjoyment nor suffering. It is subject neither to fidelity nor to rebellion. This fleshly Jasad A can diminish or increase, a person may get sick and lose weight or else eat too much and get fat, but his essential quality, servile or rebellious, Ahsa’i insists, will remain the same. This body “is homologous to the opacity that exists in silica and potash.”6 This visibly opaque body is our caro corporalis.
Jasad B is our quintessential body, the body that survives, according to Ahsa’i, the decomposition of our Jasad A into its constituent elements, when upon death its fire goes to Fire, air to Air, water to Water, and earth to Earth. This Jasad B is “the reality of the human being,” Ahsa’i insists, because when Jasad A, our caro corporalis, is decomposed and destroyed, “there is finally nothing of it to be found, so that some people affirm that the human being is annihilated. Not at all! Not so!” But if we say that there is a body that survives in the tomb, “that body is nonetheless invisible to earthly beings to the people of this world, on account of the opacity that darkens their fleshly eyes and prevents them from seeing what is not of the same kind as themselves.” When it is finally time for the soul to return to a bodily formation to be brought back to face the consequences of its actions, God causes a rain to fall from an ocean under His throne, a rain “colder than snow,” which in turn causes “a universal refining process,” at which point, “the members of the spiritual body (Jasad B) of each individual join together to form an organism in perfect shape,”7 that is to say conforming to the structure the body had in this world; the elements of the neck are welded to “the elements of the head, then to those of the bust and so forth … This spiritual body coming back to life is the body which belongs to the earth, Hurqalaya. This is the body in which humans are resurrected, and with which they enter into paradise or into Hell.”8 Ahsa’i responds to the objection that his view is too philosophically anti-Islamic by asserting that what will resurrect is in fact the caro corporalis but that it has been purified from its opacity and density, while sustaining its identity and ipseity. This invisibly luminous body is our caro spiritualis.
What happens though to the soul when it departs the caro corporalis and before it enters the caro spiritualis? Here is where Jism A, our astral body, becomes handy, because this is the body in which the soul departs from our corporeal body. The astral body accompanies the soul to the Earthly Paradise if it is a believing soul, or else to the Terrestrial Hell, if it is an unbelieving soul. The Earthly Paradise, where the believing soul and its astral body dwell, is located in the West of Ahsa’i’s geographical imagination. The spirit of the infidel, meanwhile, accompanies its astral soul at the sunrise, and at the sunset it takes refuge in Barahut and wanders with it during the night in the valley of sulfur in a geographically unspecified location. This is how the spirit persists until the First Blast of the Trumpet of Resurrection, at which point all the spirits are annihilated between the First and the Second Blast of the Trumpet. This cosmic pause lasts for 400 years, and then the spirits are resuscitated into their second Jism, Jism B, or our terrestrial body. This is made possible because Jism B (our terrestrial body) is just Jism A (our astral body), now purified of its opacity and density. The soul now resides in this terrestrial body in the purgatory until such time that the Second Trumpet of Archangel Seraphiel summons all souls to Divine justice, at which time they all enter their designated Jasad B, caro spiritualis, and attend to the Day of Judgement, burned in Hell or rewarded in Paradise.
Ahsa’i’s theory of the body, articulated in support and anticipation of bodily resurrection, can be summarized as follows:
We are born into the world in our:
Jasad A (Caro Corporalis)
Upon our death, our soul departs from our Caro Corporalis and enters our:
Jism A (Terrestrial Body)
After a cosmic pause and at the wake of the Day of Judgement our soul moves from our Terrestrial Body and enters our:
Jism B (Astral Body)
And finally on the actual Day of Judgement we are bodily resurrected out of our Astral Body and into our:
Jasad B (Caro Spiritualis)
Ahsa’i’s elaborate theory of the body thus divides it into a caro corporalis and a caro spiritualis, with the astral body and the terrestrial body acting as the intermediary vehicles of sustaining the soul in a state of limbo when it has exited one and not yet entered the other, until such time that it is ready to meet its creator and reap the reward or suffer the consequences of its worldly deeds.
Shirin Neshat’s art is nothing if not restoring the caro spiritualis visually where her theological ancestry failed verbally to sublate the caro corporalis. Partaking in an entire history of theological debates confronting the onslaught of philosophical rationalism, Ahsa’i struggled valiantly to demonstrate that caro spiritualis (the spiritual body that the soul ultimately occupies after leaving its primary abode, the caro corporalis, and as it attends the Divine justice on the Day of Judgement) is invisible to humans because of the “opacity that darkens their fleshly eyes.” The kind of photographic memory that Neshat has now brought to perfection is precisely teasing an in/sight out of the opacity of our fleshly eyes, making them see the otherwise invisible configuration of the caro spiritualis which this time around is not a negation or sublation but in the very material texture of our caro corporalis. As Forough Farrokhzad was the poetic voice, Neshat is the lyrical vision of a living aesthetics of the matter superseding the deadly metaphysics of the soul.
Neshat is doing nothing if not making visible the invisible body, the body that the Shi’i saints and the Muslim scholars have compared to “the gold dust in the goldsmith’s crucible. This, likewise, the eyes do not see. But the goldsmith, having washed it with water and purified it of the earth with which it was mixed, causes it to become visible.”9 Neshat’s art is an alchemy of revelation, making the invisible visible, the hidden manifest, the potential possible, teasing the caro spiritualis out of the caro corporalis, soul out of the body, soul of the body, soul no longer having any claim on authenticity other than in and of the body.
In Neshat’s ancestral culture, the physical body, caro corporalis, is metaphorically identified as an item of clothing that one wears. In Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i’s words, “indeed, in regard to the human being, [the corporeal body] is, as it were, a garment thrown over him.”10 This is the “carnal coating,” as Ahsa’i calls the human body, that in effect makes it visible. As soon as that carnal coating is taken off, the quintessence of the human body, its caro spiritualis, becomes “imperceptible to the sight of ordinary humans.” Neshat is the visual theorist of that imperceptibility, making it, in effect, perceptible, but not by verbally sublating the caro corporalis to the imperceptible supposition of a caro spiritualis, instead by visually positing that spiritual body in and out of the physical body itself, teasing it out of its opacity and ipseity, its being physically there, in-the-world.
The result is that Neshat visually succeeds where Muslim theologians have philosophically failed. They have had to theorize the body in the absence of the evidence and by repressing our defiant caro corporalis. She, on the contrary, visualizes in the very body of our evidence. Their theoretical failure has historically translated into a triumphant metaphysics of violence against the body. Her visual triumph has now succeeded to liberate the body from the prison house of its presumed soul. Their Platonic philosophizing pretends that the soul is incarcerated in the body in order to incarcerate the body in an entire cultural supposition of “The Soul.” Her vision retrieves a transparent luminosity out of the physical body, and thus liberates the body from the supposition of its holding a soul hostage. Body does not hold any soul. The supposition of a soul holds the body. An entire culture of terror has visited upon the Muslim body by Muslim theologians just because they could not Qur’anically account for bodily resurrection after death. Neshat’s still and moving pictures are the manifesto of the liberation of the body from the prison house of its presumed soul, sighting, as she does, the sensual evidence of the body. Muslim theologians have terrorized an entire culture of fear and intimidation by theorizing a caro spiritualis out of the evidence of our caro corporalis, presuming an astral side to the terrestrial evidence of our body. Neshat de-terrorizes us out of that culture by de-theorizing us out of the prison house of the soul, teasing out visually the caro spiritualis that is evident (as she evidences it) in our very caro corporalis. Muslim theologians have begun with caro corporalis in order to suppress, deny, and denounce it on their way to the presumed destination of a caro spiritualis. Neshat begins and ends, dwells in and celebrates, with and in the body of our evidence, our caro corporalis. Muslim theologians promised and warned of a bodily resurrection they could never prove. Neshat delivers a bodily resurrection, which is always already there.
Two Trilogies and a Soliloquy
A visual theorist of the body, Neshat has over the last decade quietly corroded into the patriarchally patented theory of the corpus, liberating it from the prison house supposition of its soul, celebrating a caro spiritualis evident in the every body of our caro corporalis, thus once and for all collapsing the binary opposition into each other: the body as the evidence of its own radiant luminosity, the evidence of its own significance.
In two successive trilogies, shot between 1998 and 2001, Neshat narrates two complementary moves launched from the privacy of a performance toward the publicity of a communal recognition, before erupting in the apocalyptic landscape of a resurrection and renewal. The first trilogy consists of Bi-Qarar (“Turbulent,” 1998, 9:47 m.), Owj (“Rapture,” 1999, 12:25 m.), and Eltehab (“Fervor,” 2000, 10:12 m.). The second trilogy consists of Nabz (“Pulse,” 2001, 9:26 m.), Fetneh (“Possessed,” 2001, 13 m.), and Safar (“Passage,” 2001, 13:16 m.). These two trilogies are punctuated by a soliloquy, Zemzemeh (“Soliloquy,” 1999, 17:30 m).
In the first trilogy, Neshat begins (“Turbulent”) with the male articulation of a poetic presence set up against the feminine in/articulation of a lyrical luring of reason from the logos, both performed in the enclosed atmospheric control of a stage. She then moves (“Rapture”) to the citadel site of a civilitas and concludes (“Fervor”) with the apocalyptic terror of a resurrection.
As in most other titles of her work, the English “Turbulent” does not quite catch the Persian “Bi-Qarar,” nor Persian the English, though Neshat insists in giving them both at once, a kind of “Dialogue of Civilization” of a contorted kind, a bilingualism that belies the two opposing cultures at one and the same time. Restless, or restive, is a much better translation for “Bi-Qarar” than “Turbulent,” and if the reference is to the woman character, then she is far better described as restless than turbulent. Bi-Qarar has a sense of erratic and anxiogenic restlessness, an impossibility to sit or stand still, perturbed by some emotion or incident. Turbulent describes the state, Bi-Qarar hints at the im/possibility of resting a case. Turbulent has forgotten all the memory of its pre-turbulent state. Bi-Qarar has all the physical evidence of its stability right in front of it, in Qarar, which means to have peace and stability. Bi negates Qarar without erasing its compelling memory, just puts it under erasure, writing and crossing it at the same time. And that memorial trace is critical in the reading of the piece, though now we call it: “Turbulent.”
The entire piece operates on comparison and contrast of light and shadow, male and female, white and black, a successive binary tête-à-tête of oppositions. The male figure sings with eloquence and conviction, the female with inarticulate passion. He dresses in white and faces a crowded hall, she in black sings to an empty auditorium. He is in full public view, she in the complete privacy of her solitude, feigning publicity. He faces the camera, she hides from the camera, and the camera has to circumambulate around her to find and face her. He is evident. She is hidden. His presence is frontal and vertical, hers concealed and circular.
But before this binary opposition can flatly collapse into a passive resignation to the masculinity of a culture and the peripheral femininity of it, something quite surreptitious begins to happen. The look of bewilderment on the male singer announces an almost inconspicuous articulation emerging from the female voice. Suddenly we realize that the space of the masculine is entirely occupied, actual, fulfilled, while that of the feminine is suggestively inviting, potential, promising. The masculine voice and vision are named and identified, while that of the female merely noticed and palpably syncopated. The male space is entirely delivered, while that of the feminine is simply promised. The male space is lightly occupied, the feminine space is darkly inviting. Now if we look closer at the masculine face of confusion, suddenly the feminine circulation of a vertiginous look begins to ooze an in/escapable in/articulation. The slash in/between, (/), emerges as the suggestive symbol of this entire visual articulation of the feminine circular up against the frontal matter-of-factness of the masculine vertical. It is not just that the male is so utterly named and the female so suggestively noticed. No: there is something far more important here. The masculine is the flat phallic of a mirror reflection, the feminine a specular depth of vaginal pace. The light clothing of the masculine phallic is evident, worn out, while the dark cover of the feminine cave is pregnant, promising.
We have the same problem of discrepancy between the Persian Owj and the English Rapture. Owj is more soaring, rising, or ascension than “rapture,” unless we take this as in elation, exaltation, exultation, or even euphoria. But still the dominant mood in Owj is going high, as in the rising of a wave, or the soaring of an eagle, a deliberate verticality strongly implicated in the term. This is suggested both in the masculine climbing of ladders in and over the fortress and the rising ululation of women in the desert. “Rapture” thus picks up in the open landscape where “Turbulent” left off on the enclosed stage. The a-positioning here is between the masculine verticality of the citadel and the feminine flatness of the desert men occupying a fortress, women emerging from a forsaken land. Men in “Rapture” are erectly occupied, women flatly inviting. The masculine fortress rises out of the feminine flatness of the desert. Men in white occupy and pro/claim the civilitas while women announce the deserted im/possibilities of their origin: In the castle much cry, in the desert much whisper. Men are ordered and determined, women chaotic and pregnant with yet to be articulated in/ordinates. Men are in the full light of their recognition, women in the dark concealment of their promises. Men are ceremoniously quarrelsome, women are chaotically observant. The camera looks up to the men and down on women. Men are in rank and file of determined destinations, women defy the logic of any ordering. Throughout “Rapture,” men are on the move and at the end come to a vertically idle standstill, women are stationary until the very end when they move to the determined horizontally of their sailing into the sea. There is a rhythm to the masculine figures on the move, and yet barely a pulse is audible about the feminine figures in the scene. The men’s naked whiteness has nowhere to go, the women’s covered blackness everywhere to choose. Men are actors, women the audience. Men are agents, women subjects. Men are fighting, women are watching.
There is a sudden rupture in “Rapture.” Almost halfway through the event, there is an abrupt rising of feminine ululation that interrupts and stops the masculine busy-ness. Men are cast into long shots and women are brought into a close-up. Males are interrupted, females are interrupting. In this second, interrupting phase, men are sitting in a circular long shot of inarticulate aggregation, while women march in a columnar intrusion. The visual event is verbally marked by a majestic Qur’anic recitation Chapter LXXXI, verses 1–9:
THE OVERTHROWING
Revealed at Mecca
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
For what sin she was slain …
The atmosphere of this early Meccan chapter is entirely apocalyptic, the content of it the famous Qur’anic condemnation of an ancient tribal practice of female infanticide. But why Qur’anic recitation, and why these particular verses? The most immediate presence of the recitation is evident in the beauty and elegance of its melodic incantation. Except for very few in Neshat’s audience, no one understands what the melodious recitation actually says. It is an operatic aria of some unfamiliar origin. That it has an almost physical effect on the inner ear and the hidden heart of a Muslim, driving him to tears, invoking her most sacrosanct pieties, is entirely lost to the regular crowd that attend a video installation in a gallery. But the voice is audible, commanding absolute and total attention. More than and before anything else, the Qur’anic recitation is eloquent beyond mere words, musical to the tonality of its every reverberation. There is a sudden and sacred silence about Neshat’s vision just before the Qur’anic recitation begins: Every atom of her visual vigilance in deferential attendance for the announcement, as if this were the very first verses that were ever revealed by Archangel Gabriel to Prophet Muhammad, on Mount Hira, near Mecca, in about 610 CE.
The eloquence of this Qur’anic recitation in “Rapture” is reminiscent of the poetic beauty of the masculine love song in “Turbulent,” that in Persian, this in Arabic, that from the poetic pantheon of Neshat’s language and culture, this from the pious memory of her faith and religion. That from the poetic interior of Rumi, this from the revelatory rhythm of the Qur’anic landscape. But both masculine in their eloquence, placed and positioned against the feminine in/articulation of poetry and piety.
Beyond the eloquent announcement of the Qur’anic recitation, the apocalyptic atmosphere of the verses warn of the Day of Resurrection. Bodily resurrection is here not just anticipated. It is enacted. The Day of Judgement is at hand. Equally pronounced in the verses is the Qur’anic condemnation of the ancient practice of female infanticide. Here, Sussan Deyhim’s selection of the melodious Qur’anic recitation uses the sacred text of Muslims itself against its own clerical abuses. “And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked/For what sin she was slain”11 refers to the practice of female infanticide. But that factual condemnation and Qur’anic quotation are fused and mutated into a compelling visuality that takes full advantage of their melodic resonance without allowing what they mean to modify or compromise what they resonate. Neshat uses sounds, vocal or instrumental—for their reverberating effects, as they echo back and forth between the fact of their audibility and the fantasy of their undulation. The result is that the body of evidence we see exudes the terms of its own signation beyond or before any domain of signification. The body resonates not from the depth of its presumed soul but from the surface of its evident signation.
“Fervor,” the third installment of this trilogy, equally operates on the borderline light and shadow of a would-be love affair. Neshat draws the two (male and female) figures from the shadowy configuration of their walking their way toward a religious gathering. Here, Shirin Neshat is at her visual best in gathering together the emotional energy of the ceremony, her camera in effect mimicking the ritual disposition of the event. In the central figure of the Naqqal (the storyteller at the borderline center of the male/female gathering), Neshat portrays the third articulation of masculine eloquence. His masculine eloquence reflects the Qur’anic recitation in “Rapture” and the Persian singer in “Turbulent.” His eloquence, though, is frightful and terrorizing. There is thus in effect a progression of masculine eloquence, from poetic love (in “Turbulent”), to sacred awe (in “Rapture”), to apocalyptic terror (in “Fervor”).
This succession of the sacred and profane emotions places this trilogy on an extraordinarily critical plane against the very composition of the culture. Anything from a beautiful love song to an awe-inspiring Qur’anic recitation, to a frightful account of the Day of Judgement is here brought together under one verbal canopy of terror and intimidation, stifling, in effect, any possibility of breathing. In that suffocating moment, Neshat achieves one crucial moment of affinity between overwhelming sensuality and the mysterious energy of piety. What exactly is the texture of piety that is so oozing with sensuality? In the figure of the woman protagonist, reminiscent of many of Neshat’s earliest photographs, she capture the quintessence of pious sensuality, the sensuality which is in piety, the piety in sensuality. No one before Neshat has dared in her received culture to get close to and visually trespass this dangerous territory where the erotic and the sacred embrace. “Fervor” is by far her most successful articulation of that embrace, where the carnal and the sacral collapse to reveal the quintessentially sensual disposition of the sacred. Through Neshat’s camera for the first time we see the body resurrecting and revolting against the tyrannizing terror of an entire history, and a whole culture, of fear and intimidation by revealing its own inherent, innermost, piety, by revealing the erotic energy that the sacred has commandeered and hijacked for its own exclusive benefit. Retrieve that erotic energy from the sacred, that carnal from the sacral, and there remains nothing of substance to it. This bodily resurrection against the commanding cultures that claim and control it is Neshat’s most daring bordercrossing, from the parking lot of the permitted into the open space of the forbidden.
Neshat’s second trilogy “Pulse,” “Possessed,” “Passage” follows a similar trajectory as the first one: From the privacy of a solitary reflection, to the publicity of an urban defiance, and ultimately to the apocalyptic conclusion of a death and resurrection.
Nabz (“Pulse”) is the temptation of a solitary woman (Shohreh Aghdashlu) in the privacy of a room lip-singing with the publicity of a male/female duet on radio. The most pronounced force in “Pulse” is the pulsating rhythm of the event narrowing in on the solitary interior. The parabolic move of the camera around the room, rotating one complete round from long shot to close up back to long shot, secures the event in one swooping summation. The male/female voice over coming from the radio (Reza Derakhshani and Sussan Deyhim) sings a famous ghazal of Jalal al-Din Rumi. The poem rests on the critical assertion that all humanity is trapped in bodily limitations and material boundary. The poetic pronouncement that “Shoma hamcho asirid” (“You are all like slaves”) anticipates the announcement that “Cho zendan beshekastid/Hameh shah o amirid” (“When you break loose of the jail of your bodies)/You are all kings and princes.” The radio is the symbolic link between the privacy of the mournful solitude and the publicity of a poetic promise.
In Fetneh (“Possessed”), the solitude of that poetic moment expands and moves out into the publicity of a feminine madness in full view. The woman as the personification of madness expostulates hysteria on a blatantly public plane. The feminine figure of madness enters and disturbs the public peace as the repressed catalyst of anarchy. Once initiated by the repressed feminine madness, the fury continues even after she has left the scene. The public is in danger of disintegration once her lunacy transgresses the privacy of her bewilderment and enters the publicity of her denial. The danger though, the danger: is being woman, mad, and in public, and thus the visual suspense of initially nobody noticing her as she enters the public. The suspense of these few minutes of being in public incognito underscores the public presence of the feminine absence. The private is now gone public and the privacy of in/sanity is staged in the publicity of the in/sanity, and thus in/sanity is demarcated. Here we have entered the publicity of an urbanity, after having just moved out of the privacy of a solitude. The move anticipates “Passage” into the apocalyptic desert (Sahra-ye Mahshar), so that we can move through this trilogy from sitting in whispering solitude, going out into the in/sanity of the public, and from there into the apocalyptic desert.
The woman in madness facing the dead-end of a thick wall, with nowhere to go, intimates the prophetic figure of defiance, a messianic visionary collapsing the borderline between reason and revelation. Both the prophetic and the messianic suggestions again anticipate “Passage” as apocalyptic and resurrectionary. We have the privacy of a room anticipating the publicity of a city, and leading into an apocalyptic landscape, a private contemplation whispering a public declaration and pregnant with an apocalyptic death and resurrection. The movement is equally tantamount to a universalization of the thematic core of the subject. The setting is the town of Essaoira in Morocco, but through the visionary sublation of Neshat, aided impeccably by Deyhim’s haunting music (a stunning harmony of her voice with Kamancheh and Cello), the implication becomes global.
In Safar (“Passage”), brought home by Philip Glass’ music, the trilogy comes to a closure. We have now moved from the private whispering of “Pulse” into the public in/sanity of “Temptation,” and entered the apocalyptic murmur of “Passage.” Philip Glass’ haunting music announcing the forbidding event, Neshat’s camera begins to play with the long shot dead assertion of a phallic column approaching the temptation, palpitation, of the vaginal grave, while a little girl is making a stone house for herself. The columnar masculinity is carrying a dead body, dead phallic in the midst of the living and mobile, toward a circular femininity of a grave being ardently dug by a group of women. But we scarcely know or even see that. Neshat’s camera (Qasem Ebrahimian at his absolute best) teases and flirts, suggests and hesitates, promises and barely delivers, apparition into spectral apparitions. This is ritual preparation for a dead, deadening, intercourse, of a dead phallic body into a vaginal grave, the moment of birth collapsing on the moment of death, the love-making of a life-making made into a death-making, beginning to end. In this light–dark palpitation of the im/possible, the ceremonial preparation for love(death)-making, the little girl, Neshat incarnate, sits as the virginal dream of a house/hole.
The “Passage” is visually mesmerized. The sky, sea, sand embrace of a masculine crowd delivers the mourning ceremony of carrying the white shroud of a dead body, men in black, the dead body in white. The camera then cuts and curiously approaches the sky, sand silent embrace of the feminine digging of a grave. The columnar intrusion of the masculine dead phallic into the feminine digging begins to visualize the dead, deadening copulation, a necromantic occultation of the living soul, a transgressive copulation of dead bodies. From the vicinity of its periphery a little girl, a child, is already born out of that dead wedlock. Dead-men walking, and dead-women digging their grave. The little girl re-enacts the digging of the grave with dead stones for the digging women and a whole in-between for the grave into which she places a piece of deadwood.
The moment of the apocalypse is now upon us. This is the Day of Judgement. Lo and Behold! Ecce Homo! From under the feet of the little girl sitting, now rising, emerges the Fire of Hell. Engulfing the desert in the rising flames of an apocalyptic conflagration, the fire is about to consume the columnar masculinity and the vaginal grave, gently sparing the child-girl, resurrected from the dead certainties of a culture that once buried her alive (“Rapture”). This is a nightmare of a dream, Neshat awakening and concluding with her camera imperceptibly lifting the little girl’s perspective, ever so gently, just high enough for her to see the whole desert: desolate, destitute, in fire, with the dead certainties of a dated, an outdated, world now fully under her gaze: Bodily resurrection from an immaculate conception.
A visual theorist of the body, Neshat has teased out of the classically constituted conception of the corpus the terms of its own luminosity, without subjecting it to the realm of the spirits. In no other work is this extraction of the constitutional incandescence of the body more evident than in her Zemzemeh (“Soliloquy”). Two identical women (Neshat herself) enter a simultaneous act of remembering/reflecting, a creative anamnesis, an absolutely stunning inversion of time and narrative that collapses the telos of any cultural teleology into one genealogical plateau of presence. But yet again, soliloquy is not exactly what Zemzemeh means. These repeated discrepancies between the English and the Persian create a suggestive crevice in Neshat’s works that tilts the visual narrative off, just a bit. Zemzemeh means “to whisper” or “to murmur.” Soliloquy, as interior monologue, has quite a distance from Zemzemeh. Zemzemeh is audible but inarticulate. Soliloquy is inaudible but articulate. They are almost exactly the opposite of each other. The burden of semantic proof, however, is on Zemzemeh, which has to be pulled quite a distance, stop being audible and start being articulate before it can meet soliloquy. Soliloquy too will have to be mutated quite seriously no longer articulate but perfectly audible before it can metamorphose into Zemzemeh. In effect, Neshat pulls and pushes the verbal boundaries of cultures almost in the same way that in “Zemzemeh/ Soliloquy” she contracts and expands the visual boundaries of anamnesis. The two identical women are placed at two opposite temporal poles, one at the extremity of the past and the other at the extremity of the present (to call this “tradition and modernity” is ludicrous and will rub the narrative of its far more serious twist).
Celebrating a caro spiritualis evident in the very body of our caro corporalis, thus once and for all collapsing the binary opposition into each other, requires a mode of visual narrative that categorically defies the telos in the metaphysical teleology of every culture. Neshat achieves that in “Zemzemeh/ Soliloquy” via an ingenious act of anamnesis. The woman at the extremity of the present remembers an entire history of feminine de-subjection, simultaneously as her identical counterpart remembers the same in her future. In that bizarre act of anamnesis, Neshat makes it possible for the woman at the extremity of the past to remember her future, precisely at the same time that her selfsame counterpart remembers the same in her past. The events are simultaneous, and simultaneously targeted against each other. The past remembers the future and the future remembers the past. The result is an act of simultaneous anamnesis that categorically contracts the critical element of time in the narrative constitution of truth. That visually achieved, the metaphysical constitution of the culture, incubated in the temporal implications of its narrative, collapses onto itself and the inhibitive repressions of the culture are flattened and mapped out for one critical encounter, flat on the surface of the present, the contemporaneity of our being-toward-now. No history, no time, no past, no present, no memory, no forgetfulness. Here we are in the full presence of the present, culture at its most immediate, irreducible, flattened out matter of factness. No mother and no father, no king and no cleric, has any claim on this presently articulated slicing out of the culture. On the flat and evened-out surface of that plane, Neshat subjects the de-subjected, and as she gives agency to the feminine, the masculine is re/articulated, there and then to de-gender an entire repressive operation of the culture, giving birth to an Adam and Eve who are no longer the gender-ed articulation of power, who are the harbinger of a whole new culture of emancipation and freedom: The body resurrected as the evidence of its own radiant luminosity, the evidence of its own significance, historical agency creatively restored out of a critical resubjection of the colonial subject.
*First published in Catalogue of Castello di Rivoli Retrospective on Shirin Neshat, Turin, Italy. January 2002.
1Ralph Rugoff, Financial Times, Weekend, July 31/August 1, 1999.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6English translation of Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i, Kitab Sharh al-Ziyarah in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977): 180–221.
7Ibid., 183.
8Ibid., 184.
9Ibid., 185.
10This is an abbreviated version of a more elaborate account of Ahsa’i’s theory of the body. See Ahsa’i, Kitab Sharh al-Ziyarah in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: 176–189 for the fuller account.
11Qur’an (81:8–9).