Azari is the artist of the danger zone, of the realm of the forbidden, where the homely becomes unhomely, the familiar foreign, the comforting uncanny, the sacred sacrilegious. He is the artist of the borderline, where you cannot tell if he is going or he is coming, in or out, to or from, the habitat of our humanity, site of our solace. Azari plays with fire. He is the artist of our liminality, of the twilight zone of our certitude and doubt. In Persian, we call that moment of the dawn when light is about to overcome darkness Gorg-o-Mish/Wolf-and-Sheep, for one (the shepherd) cannot tell one from the other. He could be, like that Aesop fable, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or else a sheep in wolf’s. His art thrives on the uncertainty of that border.
In his most recent work, Azari goes back to two venerable artistic traditions in Iran and in Shi’ism in order to test the waters and experiment with the formal and temporal borderlines of the sacerdotal and the societal, the poetic of vision and the politics of pain and suffering, where his people, the people he has to call his, have to negotiate the distance between their highest hopes and their deepest fears. His most recent work are by far his most socially committed, politically potent, and above all formally jolting works of art, destined to be most disconcerting, pulsating with a verve and energy that conspire to catapult him into the forefront of where we stand today, at the crossroad of a history that demands and exacts from the work of art, and from the artist, to come out and speak in a language that is the testimonial of our worldly whereabouts. Azari gives this moment his all—and his all will shake and shatter, dismantle and disconcert, deform and disturb. He means business—and his business is deadly serious.
The Pain of the Presence
We are all (along with the artist) standing on the edge of the precipice—and this is the point of no return. This, to be sure, was not by choice—this was (perhaps) by historical inevitability. In a key moment during the social uprising in the aftermath of the post-June 2009 presidential election in Iran, young men and women were pictured praying in public (in streets adjacent to Tehran University Campus, which the ruling clergy has now occupied for Friday Prayer ceremonies and sermons) standing shoulder to shoulder with each other, some of them wearing shoes (sneakers to be exact). The public anathema angered the custodians of the Islamic Republic, denouncing the young praying crowd as blasphemous, not even knowing the proper etiquettes of praying (which requires that men and women pray separately and with their shoes taken off). Within minutes after this official rebuke was leveled against the young men and women joining in prayers, the Internet was abuzz with commentaries and pictures of soldiers during the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) praying with their shoes on and standing in their trenches—arguing that they too (the young antigovernment demonstrators) were in a battlefield, that they too were in a state of war fearing for their lives from attack by the Basijis, the militarized security apparatus of the Islamic Republic. These are all innocent and even subtle niceties compared to when Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn, the iconoclastic nineteenth-century revolutionary woman, unveiled herself in public in 1844 and who so shocked the people in the audience with her outrageous act that one of them instantly slit his own throat upon seeing the site of a veil-less woman. Forms have always been invitation to assault—and art is nothing if not an assault on the form in the formal destruction of the impossible. From the streets of Tehran to Manhattan galleries, the artist and the citizen are breaking the unwritten rules. They have had it up to here—where form implodes under the weight of a logic that once authorized it.
By far the most provocative aspect of Shoja Azari’s two most recent works—”The Day of Resurrection” (2010) and “The Iconic Series” (2010)—is precisely their formal ambitions to re/think and re/form the locus classicus of Shi’ism in visual modernity. From the iconoclastic and provocative “The Iconic Series” to transformative and frightful “The Day of Resurrection,” we are in the presence of the familiar made foreign by the formal destabilization of the sacred. To be sure, the Shi’i iconography in and of itself is transgressive, a visual and performative aberration launched against doctrinal inhibitions of Islam, whose absolute monotheism is an anathema to any mode of visual representation. Sunni Muslims have always been suspicious of Shi’i Muslims’ love and adulation for their Imams and consider them blasphemous. The Wahabi orthodoxy in particular is categorical in its denunciation of Shi’ism precisely because of such proclivities. But Iranians, and by extension Shi’is, have always found ways to navigate their visual and performative urges past such doctrinal inhibitions and sectarian rivalries. The Shi’i iconography is a deeply rooted and widely variegated art form in both visual and performative registers. What Shoja Azari is now doing with the legacy of that visual transgression made into an act of piety is an aberration upon aberration. He is outgaming the game. The last person who did this, and did it so effectively in narrative details, went into hiding for his life and gave the world “the Salman Rushdie Affair.” Heresy is the fuel of Orthodoxy—has always been: from the Spanish Inquisition to Salem Witch Trials to Kangaroo Courts in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In his homage to Coffee-house Painting, Azari invites you to look at a classical canvas, in this case “The Day of Resurrection” by Mohammad Modabber (died 1346/1967), one of the masters of the genre. Coffee-house Painting is a unique Iranian genre that developed late in the Qajar and early in the Pahlavi period, with such masters as Hossein Qollar Aqasi and Mohammad Modabber as its prominent representatives. The genre assumes its name from tea and coffee-houses scattered from major urban areas to small villages in which these canvases were unfurled and stories of ancient Persian kings and heroes and the travails of Shi’i Imams and saints were narrated upon them by a traveling troubadour, a Naqqal/Narrator. One might in fact consider this genre as a precursor of cinema in Iran, in which you have a narrative picture, a narrator, and an audience all participating in a performative experience. Azari’s invitation is initially innocuous, familiar, and homely. Then things begin to happen. Pictures begin to move, images start morphing and altering into and out of each other. Wars and mayhems begin to change time, space, history, sides. We are on a move—toward the unfamiliar that is (alas) only too familiar, unhomely that is homely. Familiar news headlines begin to appear on foreign frontiers of visual registers. Did we just hear someone come alive and speak American English on Mohammad Modabber’s canvas?
Azari’s “The Day of Resurrection” takes full advantage of the larger framing of Shi’is Passion Play (Ta’ziyeh) in which the tradition of Coffee-house Painting might in fact be located. He becomes the Naqqal, and he has a story to tell. The distinct aspect of Azari’s work is its contemporary relevance, in which scenes from the most recent carnage in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan are cinematically interjected into and onto the canvas. Mohammad Ghaffari, the prominent Iranian theater director, did a similar take on Ta’ziyeh in his staging of “Moses and Wandering Dervish” at Trinity College in 1988. What Azari is now doing with his deadly serious and yet ponderously playful manipulation of the sacred certitude of those metaphors is to lend them renewed power and legitimacy by asking them to speak to terrorizing realities beyond their historical (and perhaps even formal) reach. The pain of presence, where headlines become bone-deep, resonates on Azari’s canvas, trespassing on Mohammad Modabber’s.
The Formal Destruction of the Sacred
Equally compelling is what Azari does with the Shi’i tradition of iconography in his “Iconic Series.” This will be by far his most disconcerting work that will jar, shock, awe, drop jaws, and may in fact prove most unsettling to his audience. What we are witnessing here is a straightforward iconoclastic gesture, the disconcerting replacement of the face of ordinary women (the artist’s own female friends) for the image of extraordinary saints in Shi’i iconography, while keeping the entire topography of its visual registers—including its masculinist demeanors—intact. The initial shock of looking at these pictures—female faces occupying masculinist gestures in familiar Shi’i iconography—will only expand and exacerbate the more you dwell on them. Add to that initial and expanding shock the fact that the gentle video installation projected onto the icons makes these faces actually come alive and make subtle motions, and even at one point cry, with tears welling up in her eyes. Here we are witnessing multiple acts of transgression: the icon has become worldly, its theomorphic force anthropomorphized (like the famous “Ognissanti Madonna” of Giotto, circa 1314–1327); the icon has come alive; and the icon is cross-gendered—and yet in a unique and unprecedented gesture, the icon has been, ever so imperceptivity, re-signified. We stand in front of the transfigured icon, and if we can overcome the uncanny moment (and there is the rub), we are in the presence of a renewed spirituality. The sacred is cracked open and the icon has been brought back to life and released upon the world. The moment is revelatory, frightful, uncanny.
Re-Imagining the Sacred
In order to dwell on that uncanny moment, when Azari makes the familiar foreign, we need first to come to terms with the formal destruction of the received dramaturgy that he has ventured to upstage. What in effect we are witnessing in Azari’s work on Shi’i and Iranian iconographic, performing, and visual arts is a very powerful participation in a more widespread national resurrection of premodern Persian traditions, in which Iranian artists, in both visual and performing arts, have turned to these premodern genres in order to push them forward in meeting the challenges of a more urgent reality. In both visual and performing arts, throughout the twentieth century, and well into the first decade of the twenty-first, Iranian artists (from painters to filmmakers) have turned to such traditions as Manaqeb Khani (reciting in epic poetry the valiant acts of Shi’i Imams), Hamleh Khani (doing the same about heroic battles of the Prophet and Shi’i Imams), Rozeh Khani (reciting the suffering of the third Shi’i Imam, Hossein ibn Ali, and his family and companions in the Battle of Karbala in 61/680), Pardeh Khani, Surat Khani, Shamayel-gardani (doing the same from a canvas), Ma’rekeh-giri, Kheymeh Shab Bazi (performative variations on similar themes), as well as the art of Saqqa-khaneh (sanctified and ornamental water stations). These premodern performing traditions have offered contemporary artists ample opportunity to address far more urgent and immediate issues and concerns than those of the bygone years and events that may or may not register with the younger generation of sensibilities. The preeminent Iranian dramatist and filmmaker Bahram Beizai, in his Namayesh dar Iran/Theater in Iran (Tehran: Roshangaran Publishers, 2000), has extensively studied these theatrical forms, as he has also been instrumental in extending them into cinematic and performative adaptations.
The key question of course is if these mundane manipulations of the sacred icons of a people do them harm, rob them of their allegorical magnitude, sacred certitude, or else deplete them of their enduring sanctity—or, alternatively, re-signify them for a renewed generation of sensibilities. Salman Rushdie’s venture into the life of the Prophet of Islam in his Satanic Verses (1988) has now become proverbial for the limits of such playful fireworks. People may mix your metaphors, as you mess with theirs. Here we need to make a clear distinction between what Salman Rushdie was doing in Satanic Verses and what Theo van Gogh and Hirsi Ali did when they deliberately launched a rather crude assault on Muslims’ sanctities in their “Submission” (2004), or the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons did in their depiction of the Prophet in compromising gestures (2005). All these varied forms of turning on the sacred have now been mixed. The murder of Theo van Gogh is the prime example of how such abuses of a people’s sanctities come with at times very heavy prices, and an artist ventures into this dangerous zones at his/her own risk. Such ventures, however, assume entirely different disposition when Muslim (nominal or practicing) intellectuals and artists venture to this forbidden zone knowingly. Leading Muslim intellectuals like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Akbar Ganji are now all on the record for having questioned the most sacrosanct principles of their own faith—including the revelatory nature of the Qur’an, the nature and function of Prophet’s mission, and even the viability of the twelfth Shi’i Imam’s “occultation.” These Muslim preoccupations with the nature and disposition of their collective faith ought to be categorically differentiated from the abusive speculations of comedians like Christopher Hitchens or Bill Maher who “go after Religion” with a vengeance and seem to be entirely oblivious to the politics of their atheism.
In his “Iconic Series,” Azari has trespassed into the danger zone, where his particular take on the sacred needs to be saved from being assimilated backward or forward into a globalized domain beyond his control. On that domain, to which Azari is subject and not an agent, Islam and Muslims are sitting ducks, and this is an open season on them. It is not just the late Theo van Gogh or the Danish cartoonists who take liberties at their own perilous risk. The Prophet of Islam has been a consistent subject of Christian insult long before Dante’s Inferno Canto 28, and it is only when Pope Benedict XVI decides to quote these passages that they assume far more urgent contemporary power. When in his lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany in September 2006 (Glaube, Vernunft und Universität: Erinnerungen und Reflexionen/Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections), Pope Benedict XVI quoted a derisive remark about Islam, originally made in the fourteenth century by the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, the full force of Dante’s Canto 28 in Inferno assumes far more contemporary Islamophobic significance. Azari, as a man, a person, a Muslim (by communal identity if not by practice), and artist is subject to that domain, as he, paradoxically, intends to be an agent in his own community of sacred sensitivities. Will he ever succeed (will he ever be allowed) to evade that subjection and become the agent of his own art? Time will tell.
In the larger global context of Islamophobia (Muslims as terrorists, Arabs as homicidal, Shi’is as suicidal, etc.), artists who like Azari have a communal connection to Islam face a double-bind, which makes their own creative conversation with their ancestral faith a double-edged sword. The global spectacle is now inseparable from any given communal conversation, and the introduction of a radical contemporaneity can both dismantle and reaffirm their faith—if in nothing else then at least in their own art. To be sure, the artist is not the person who made the first move on the sanctity of the icon—the tyrants and the world conquerors did. From the Islamic revolution of 1977–1979 to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 those sanctities, the certitude of the metaphors that have held a people together, have been at the receiving end of militant assault. The intrusion of an instrumental, historically anchored, reason into the realm of the revelatory was in full operation when the Islamic revolution began to claim the entirety of a massive social uprising all to itself and spend everything Islam and its revelatory language had to possess, own, and tyranize it. The de-iconification of these icons has happened long before Azari reached out to claim them for a renewed signification, make them once again meaningful to a renewed set of communal and global sensibilities. These icons were effectively used and abused first during the Iranian revolution of 1977–1979 and then during the eight brutal years of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Today (massively contested) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the entire Islamic Republic apparatus along with him, continues to use and abuse people’s faith for their own, immediate, political purposes. These sacred icons have been equally instrumentalized by militant Shi’is in Lebanon and Iraq. So if anyone were to be shocked by the “abuse” of these icons they are a bit late. Karbala was violated, long before Azari began artistically to rethink it as a metaphor, when the US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld unleashed his military campaign of “shock and awe,” as he called it, on Iraq and Iraqis, Karbala and its sanctity. The raped, burned, and murdered body of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, the 14-year-old Iraqi who was gang-raped on March 12, 2006 by US soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was the site of a violation infinitely more sacred than a picture of a saint or an Imam. What is happening to these icons in Azari’s work is in fact entirely in the opposite direction—a cry of defiance, the iconography of a revolt against the obscenity of violence done in the name of or against those who hold these pictures sacred. He does not so much de-iconicize them, as he in fact re-signifies them for a new generation of aesthetic, emotive, and political registers.
The Verfremdungseffekt Effect of the Uncanny
Clearing the air from the global context of the work of art and naming the site of the far more deadly violations before the artist has turned to the icon refocuses the attention on the work of art itself and its, above all, formal daring of the elements. Azari’s work does have that distancing effect (the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt), that shocking perhaps, certainly perplexing, effect that forces the audience away from a comfortable and complicitous location, passively partaking in the dramaturgical event that these pictures signify, and as such positions the audience in a distance that inaugurates the radical shock of the pictures the artist has placed in front of his and her eyes. One looks at these pictures and they are at one and the same time both warmly familiar and yet eerily strange—so that the Freudian sense of the uncanny sets in and reminds you of something that you may have never actually seen before, or wanted to but never actually seen before, or else saw and readily repressed before, or else perhaps saw and in fear of what it meant you instantly camouflaged before.
The Unheimlich/Uncanny is unsettling, for through it these pictures become familiar yet strange, and thus the sense of strangeness and discomfort they generate and sustain unsettles their audience, disturbs their metaphors, dislodges their allegories, and thus dismantles the scaffolding that has held their mind and soul together. The cognitive dissonance that this sense of the uncanny, this transgendering of masculinist icons, generates dwells on the moment when they become (one and the same time) both attractive and repulsive. The cognitive dissonance is conducive to outright anger, frustration, and of course rejection, even violent rejection, for in the Heimlich/Homely one is seeing something Unheimlich/Unhomely, in the familiar something strange, in the sacred something sacrilegious, subversive, disconcerting. The foreignness of the transgendering suddenly makes the familiar masculine icons equally foreign—was there something always feminine about these familiarly masculine pictures we had failed to notice? Perhaps—and that perhaps becomes disconcerting/reassuring at one and the same time, which is exactly what both the Heimlich and the Unheimlich do. These icons used to be the topography of a reassuring haven by the force of their own repression, and now, that repression returned, they have become the signposts of a danger zone, or the artist has forced them to expose their hidden paradox—and thus they attract and repulse, reassure and frighten, at one and the same time.
At issue here is not any scarcity of women saints in Islam or in Shi’ism. In Shi’ism the figures of Fatemeh, the Prophet’s daughter and Ali’s wife, and Zeynab, sister to Imam Hossein, project particularly powerful presence in Muslim history, doctrine, and particularly in the communal rituals of Shi’ism. Even in Shi’i iconography and Ta’ziyeh performances these and similar feminine appear regularly, but of course completely veiled, their faces invisible, as in fact should be—doctrinally—the faces of all other saints and Imams, and Prophet Muhammad (as you notice in the late Moustapha Akkad’s famous film “Message” [1976]). The paradoxical (and entirely controversial) Shi’i proclivity pictorially to imagine the picture, and to picture the face, of Prophet Muhammad or Shi’i Imams is an act of popular piety that has always troubled the doctors of law (the custodians of the sacred) of both Shi’i and Sunni schools. Shi’i popular piety has defied its own doctors of law and pictured those faces and staged their redemptive suffering in Ta’ziyeh performances as if authorized (commanded even) by their own pious fantasies and imagination. So the uncanny disposition of Azari’s replacing feminine faces for where masculine faces used to occupy is a twist on a twist, a transgression upon a transgression, a transgendering and cross-dressing that simply pushes and twists a popular art form only one—and there is the rub—notch.
In his essay “Unheimlich/The Uncanny” (1919), Freud discovers that what is Unheimlich is the reversal of the Heimlich, and Heimlich is not just homely but also secret and thus covered, concealed, camouflaged, denied. So in the uncanny we become warily familiar with something we had better stayed unfamiliar with and distanced from. In the uncanny, we are in the presence of what Philip Rieff (in his extension of Freudian theory) called a “transgression,” for in that transgressive mode we are revealing to ourselves that which we had wisely thought well concealed. The result is anger at self-indulgence, in self-revelation. So the Heimlich is always already Unheimlich, the comforting discomforting, the trust built on a betrayal, truth on a lie, and the act of estrangement reveals that debilitating secret. Heimlich is both homely and frightful; Unheimlich grabs hold of one of these two twins and thus exposes the other, and thereby the binary collapses and our having deceptively concealed our own anxiety is exposed—we catch ourselves red-handed, with our own hand in the cookie jar of our own sacred order. The fear of watching for Freud was the fear of castration (and thus the blinded Oedipus), which here in the case of visual art that Azari has placed in front of our eyes simply means the loss of any potent control over metaphoric meaning, allegorical legacy, and above all a sense of sanity and solace.
Azari’s incorporation of video images from Iraq, where Karbala is located, and where the US-led invasion and occupation has caused such unfathomable pain and suffering, is by far the most potent force in re-metaphorizing a medieval allegory for modern effect. His images of the mayhem in Iraq and Lebanon, where Shi’ism is having a renewed rendezvous with its militant history, is equally empowering for his work. These transhistorical migrations sustain the formal force of the image, while making them speak to contemporary calamities. To the degree that he is anthropomorphizing the sacred icon of Karbala, he is also theomorphizing those very people’s pain and suffering, bringing them to attention of the transcendence that has to be a witness and even made accountable.
This transhistoricity of images and the interplay between anthropomorphizing iconic representations and simultaneously theomorphizing factual realities brings us back to the manner of Shi’i dramaturgical mimesis, which is quintessentially different though on the surface identical with the Verfremdungseffekt. The emotional distance that Brecht thought necessary in order to break the identification process is predicated on the Aristotelian mimesis of a one-to-one correspondence between reality and representation, which is absolute, total, and final, whereas Ta’ziyeh mimesis is always already incomplete and transitory, and thus a Verfremdungseffekt (long before Brecht theorized it) is always already built into the mimetic act, for it is never complete, total, or final. We go to see a play where Lord Olivier will do his damndest to convince everyone he is Hamlet. No Ta’ziyeh actor or audience will ever take that particular Hossein Aqa they know from their neighborhood as a greengrocer or teacher or barber to be Imam Hossein. The audience is always aware of the theatricality of the event, while fully partaking in its drama. In his version of Ta’ziyeh, as previously in his “Taste of Cherry” (1997), Abbas Kiarostami sought to recognize and come to terms with this particular dramaturgy by way of visually transporting an Iranian (Shi’i) audience, taking a video of them and projecting it on a screen along with the Ta’ziyeh they were watching, for a non-Iranian (non-Shi’i) audience now to behold in France or England. Kiarostami’s act inevitably has an anthropological gaze built into it, where art becomes (perhaps despite itself) a medium of turning a people into the ethnographic curiosities of another. Incorporation of modern sites of mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine into the allegorical sites of other atrocities now codified in bygone years works in Azari’s case far more effectively, for in effect he is telling an American audience what they have done in Iraq, so the American audience is far more directly implicated in the drama, and Ta’ziyeh is effectively brought home to them.
Renewed Pacts of Piety
To surmise the sense of the transcendence is and remains first and foremost worldly, communal, material to the best that is hoped in the sacred un/certainties of a people, the hope (and the fear of losing it) that keep its artists awake at night. “Now faith,” if the cross-referential wisdom of Hebrews 11:1 were to be taken beyond its Biblical borders, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—as “believing in the Unseen” (The Qur’an II:3) is the defining moment of faith in the Qur’anic revelation. Our artists habitually see things we wished we did but we cannot. They are far more invested in that vision than their audience will ever be. Why would an artist like Azari go to the danger zone (Unheimlich) of the sacrosanct, to the abode of the transcendence, where our sacred sanctities dwell—if he were not morally invested in that realm? The question has baffled everyone at least since Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) who too had the same proclivity—dwelling too much on the moments of his doubts and disbelief to be believable as a non-believer. Omar Khayyam too made of his disbelief an act of piety. He, like Azari, spoke too much of his doubts and impieties. They both protest too much.
In Rumi’s (1207–1273) Mathnavi, there is a story about a shepherd whom Moses once run into while the shepherd was singing his heart out to God Almighty with love and affection. Oh my beloved God, the shepherd was singing, where are you so I can comb your hair, kiss your hand, massage your feet, mend your close, and look after your comfort? Moses gets very angry at hearing such blasphemies, the attribution of human organs and attributes to God Almighty, and severely admonishes the shepherd for not known the proper etiquette of praising Almighty God without anthropomorphizing His Absolutist and Abstract Majesty. He has no hand for you to kiss, Moses wags his finger at the poor shepherd, no feet for you to massage, no hair for you to comb, no clothes for you to mend. Stop your blasphemous nonsense! The shepherd is properly reprimanded, swallows his pride in his love for God, apologizes, and goes away. What follows is one of the most magnificent segments of the entire Mathnavi, when Rumi brings God’s voice down to speak to Moses and reminds him who is who and what is what. God now turns around and unleashes His anger against Moses and severely admonishes him. Why did you turn my obedient servant away from me, God ask Moses. It’s none of your business how he expresses his love for me. I have sent you to bring them closer to me, not to make them more distant. You never mind how they talk to me, God says to Moses. For each one of my created beings I have given them one particular language for them to talk to me. The Indians praise me in their language, Arabs in theirs, Persians in there, so do Chinese, the Africans, everyone, everything. You don’t tell people who are drunk with my love how to walk properly, you don’t tell people who have torn their shirt with joy in my love to run along and mend their clothes! God then sends Moses to run along and find the shepherd and apologize to him. Artists are just like that shepherd. We should never find fault with the language—visual or verbal, emotive or affective—with which they address the sacred certitude we thought we had but evidently still lack. Instead, we need to be patient and learn the language in which they bring the transcendence down to grace our being and talk to us mortals. They know what they are doing. We don’t.
*First appeared in Shoja Azari’s Exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery (2010).