The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability is the past to be held fast … For it is an irretrievable picture of the past which threatens to disappear with every present which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)
How do artists from what Europeans have called “the Orient” create in a space that is not theirs by birth and upbringing? Suppose you are an Iranian, Arab, Indian, or Turkish artist living in New York, Paris, or London, your name is Nikzad, Nahid, Shirin or Amir or Ayman. Suppose you speak your English, French, or German with what they call an “accent” (not hearing their own accent). Suppose you were born and raised there and came to artistic fruition and maturity here. What then? What do you do, what do you paint, and how are you seen, watched, understood, interpreted? To what anthropological grid or Oriental fantasy you are crucified before you even put brush to canvas—and how can you run away from your dogged stereotypes?
Cut loose from his or her collective memory, an émigré artist can fall between two demanding locations, belonging neither here nor there, spinning on the self-absorbent amnesia of an ahistorical dislocation. The immigrant condition is as much a space of liberating emancipation where the impossibilities of the home culture can be critically reconsidered as a quagmire of infectious maladies of turning into utter irrelevance where the palpable hopes of the homeland give in to parameters of a careerism that caters to the most malignant manifestations of neo-Orientalism, this time with the active complacency of the “native-informers.” Self-exoticization becomes the trademark of this predicament. Orientalizing, exoticizing, spiritualizing, and categorically casting into a nebulous haze of jaundiced uniformity is the most palpable symptoms of this malady. The native informer tells his and her employer what he wants to hear not what he needs to know.1 The fate of the postnational artist, however, is more complicated—where do you draw a line between dismantling the regime of power at home without underlining the one in which you live “in exile” if you are Orientalized, exoticized, and your art turned into anthropological object of curiosity, how can a postnational artist dodge these bullets and create beyond the reach of the provincial critic?
Dislocated Brushes
Immigrant artists, organically dissolved from the invigorating predicament of their homeland, are let loose into the No-man’s-land of a yawning culture of consumption that has no space or time for the Other, now intimated in the proximity of the immigrant culture and the complacency of the native informer, except to drop it into the food processor of one form of “Spiritualty,” Neo-Orientalism or another. The disease is doubly infectious, symptomatic of more malignant conditions. On the home-front, it brings out a pathological pacifism that seeks solace from the splitting headache of an age spinning faster than itself in any innocent or complacent space it can Orientalize, Spiritualize, make look odd to add to the oddity of being bored in body and tired in mind. On the immigrant front, the émigré artist is made morally muted, politically paralyzed, and aesthetically meandered into the passive fertility of any nonsensical hallucination, totally on automatic piloting, dumb and deaf to the maternal culture, mute and mollifying to the one abroad. Thus “the Orient” becomes “the land of Spirituality,” while “the West” thrives as the abode of Reason. Reason has run amok, and the Spiritual East is coming, once again, to the rescue. An army of boredom on the march discovers Rumi, mystical unions ensue in spiritual orgies, entrepreneurial charlatans see the translucent greenback in the mystical mirror of the dollar bill and a whole culture of catastrophe is let loose into the market. And the market is the final, ferocious, arbiter of the maddening game. Lost is the equally maddening logic that pushes the most brilliant critical consciousness of a generation like Ardeshir Mohassess2 (1938–2008) to the edges of insanity.
The fate of the postnational artist is intertwined with the subversive texts of yore we may have all but forgotten how to read. To retrieve such readings brings us closer to inoculating the artist against self-exoticization. Today we have all but lost the shattering effect of a text like Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr (“Conference of the Birds”) in which the poet posited the verbality of Truth Absolute as the visuality of a communal self-reflection of particular agencies. From Attar to Rumi, a handful of rebellious poets against the tyrannical terror of the juridical posited and placed a splitting cleavage in the despotic game of legalized signification. Between the autocratic claims of the Signifier, having successfully suppressed the Sign, and the equally presumptuous Signified, implicating the Omniscient power of a Transcendental Signified, the joyous gesticulations of Sufism planted an explosive device that shattered and exposed the fabricated power of the verbal as legal. Through the Karamat literature, the very organic tyranny of the prose, the grammatology of our legalized verbal culture (the Shari’ah) was destabilized. The poor émigré artist is in no position to fall into this trap.
The homeless artist is at home in these itinerant texts. Through the creative confusion of an urbane guerrilla tactic of doubting the organicity of the link between the word and the worded, the world and the worlded, the verb and the verbalized, the revelatory and the legalized, the gnostic turn in Islamic intellectual history categorically weakened the syntactical hook on which hanged the balance of an incurably logocentric theocracy. By weakening the link between the whole regime of theocratic signification, the mundane Signifies and the Transcendental dignified, by prosaic performances, by performing the text instead of pretending to tell the Truth, the Sufis signaled the signifying regime back to its healthy visual designation. Words relented their pompous ceremony of the meaningful and became what they are, healthy Signs signifying nothing but the visuality of their performance, the vocality of their poeticity.3 If rescued from the damned domain of Orientalism and New Age mysticism, the Karamat literature—where saints fly, sinners save, and the sacred sacrileges—is the glorious evidence of a culture defying itself, cornering a niche from which its most tyrannical forces of terror are overthrown, de-structured, eased into a creative coup against words and their tyranny.
A history of visuality and its revolutionary implications is yet to be written about the colonial encounter of the postnational artist with European modernity. The migration from the verbal realm of our ancestral obedience to the visual domain of our revolt is the moral projection of a discovery, a re-inventing of our agential presence in our own history, our subject re-configured. The visual domain has constituted a critical location on which we have engaged in a combative conversation with forces inimical to our historical reconstitution as a people. Between the two constitutional claims on our identity raising their opposing banners around Tradition and Modernity (aka “Islam and the West”), we have re-imagined ourselves in the poetic shattering of our tyrannical Words and the visual reclaiming of our Signs. The transmigration from the terror of the verbal to the expanse of the visual is one singular achievement of our uprising against colonially mitigated Modernity and the Traditions it had to invent in order to believe in itself. Before we even saw our first piece of visual art, we were poetically prepared to look for it.
In the works of two contemporary artists, Nicky Nodjoumi (born 1942) and Nahid Haghighat (born 1943), I wish to see how the dismantling of the verbal into the visual has turned the relics of all previous and existing empires into allegories of revolt. Their art, as I will argue, is respectively fragmentary, thriving on relics and debris, and in my prose, as I get close to their canvas, I too will have to follow the allegorical mimicry of their art. In this mimicry I am far less interested in the genealogies of their respective arts than in the archeology of their postnational revolt against the aesthetic provincialism of their spectators.
Homo Satiricus
There is a laughing man staring at us from behind Nicky Nodjoumi’s canvasses. The homo satiricus of Nicky Nodjoumi’s invention is the sojourner of some nightmarish satire. His politics of despair, his categorical proclamation that, “There it is. Nothing can be done about it,” outlines a psycho-semiotics of defeat all too familiar. His visual anti-manifesto of resignation and mockery leads to a claustrophobic of despair—and yet.
Nodjoumi is a contemporary of Ardeshir Mohassess, a common vision in two sights. Nodjoumi though has moved from there, but into a nightmare, a nightmarish realism embraces the politics of his despair. Nodjoumi’s is a landscape of despair, a frightful escape into the extremity of no-where, where things become the dreadful remembrance of themselves. Solitary figures, forgotten planets, desperate nights, frightful stars bulging out of the thick darkness of a nomadic darkness: These are the insignia of Nodjoumi’s remembrance of things on their surface, above their skin. But how and why?
Nodjoumi, born in Kermanshah in 1942, is the subject of revolt. Foreign occupation, tyrannical rules, super-powers, pathetic patriarchs, weak outside, monstrous inside, a nation at risk. Nodjoumi’s is the nostalgic heartache of remembering a defeat, the possibility of a victory, political to the marrow of his defiant brush. By 1968, when he left Iran to come to the United States to have a dangerous open-heart surgery performed on him in Texas, he had already established himself, one among a handful of other critically creative artists: Ardeshir Mohassess, Farshid Mesqali, Kambiz Derambakhsh. They were in the midst of a figural revolt. They taught us how to see: politically.
The figural revolt was against the letter of the law, the written fate, the constitutional scripture of our having been born Iranian. There was and is a mockery about this figural revolt, a poking fun, a bitter laughter, a dark humor that knows better, but knows beyond words. Beyond words they had detected a moment of pause, an occasion to launch their revolt and in that revolt, we were with them and they with us. Official censorship of the Pahlavi period was a key catalytic factor in the emergence of this figural revolt. Words were easy to detect, locate, and cut. But the figural revolt had a wider margin of tolerance, speculation, mis/understandings. The figural revolt transcended that necessity and gradually located a stand that discovered the terra incognito of the visual, where the verbal could be accosted. When we look at Nodjoumi today, decades after the crescendo of revolutionary momentum coming to an Islamic conclusion, the visual prowess of his pen has become far more confident, though nightmarish. Today Nodjoumi is lost and found in the multidimensional vertebrae of his, and our, memories, remembering, re-membering them anew, as he must, as if by a brutal edict, things in their lost proportions, in their insomniac unawareness of not quite being there. A free fall, a self-protective hand raised against the face, a tree growing out of nowhere, and to nowhere a horse drawn. All and everywhere against a landscape of desperation, colors vaguely remembering themselves. What were they supposed to color, mean, signify, matter?
Today they are back, Nodjoumi’s figures, shaken down, to their mere matter-of-factness, mere signs still palpably political, yet a desolate isolation about them. Nodjoumi today is a landscape artist of our frantic gloom, having all but forgotten ourselves, our hopes, aspirations. Fear rampant. His vision is nightmarish: His reminding us, remembering himself, revising his and our grotesqueries—a retrospective of our hopes in the wind. “O yes. I do remember that hope.”
Nightmarish frames, framing a room, full of walls of disturbing reminiscences. Nodjoumi remembers. The robed man-of-God holding a pre-eternal spear, threatening while at a moment of divine serenity. Facing the man-of-God are the men of power, in full business-as-politics attire, earthly this time, holding a more medieval (a sword) arm that kills even in the modernity of their regalia. Facing on the opposite wall, facing the wall that would be our own faces as we look, are no regalia, no suits, no robes, no concealing of the vital signs of sex and aggression.
We look and we see: Two beasts at each other, for the kill, a naked woman de-flowered with a gun, and the flower … a decoration upon the wall. Nodjoumi’s is the politics of fear, the insomniac apparitions of all robes and veils and concealments collapsed. The falling of the curtain. The Revelation of the Concealed. The anti-hermeneutics of “here it is, let me show it to you.” All the guards down, all the masks lifted, a bal-masqé of naked fears. All coming true. All being true. Here I draw. I cannot draw otherwise. My thesis on the wall. Nailed down to the door of my closing the gate to all returns.
This is bitter self-remembrance, a forgetting of things, and yet a deliberate dreaming of them for the visual posterity. Nodjoumi the Public Record Officer. The painter, graphic artist, collective memory of things better forgotten, and yet better remembered. When did I have, as in eat, that dream? Was I wet or vigilant? A naked woman raising or dropping her veil in the dream, who is this? … a Militant Man-of-God. O thou the Militant Man-of-God! Wet or vigilant? And yes the monstrous apparition of a man turning away, toward no-where, the landscape of despair, his, ours, to claim. A nightmare come true, an exilic anger turned loose against home, but abandoned in desperation, in futility. The naked woman again. Nodjoumi exposed. The prose must mimic to remember what it has seen.
We in our dreams, wet or vigilant, look again. The naked woman of Nodjoumi’s dreams exposing the man in full business-as-politics attire, entrapped, as in a cargo, carried, like a shipment, though from nowhere to nowhere, but as if from somewhere to somewhere. A dream of nakedness: Wet or vigilant? Men-of-God, Men-of-politics-as-business-as-usual. Militant Mullahs. Military attachés in the complete immunity of their diplomatic attire: Remembered. Who are these men in full business-as-politics attire? Who are they? Why does Nodjoumi remember them so well, so fully? “Remember me: I am thy father’s spirit/Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night/And for the day confined to fast in fires/Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purged away.”
In the complete business-as-politics attire? Businessmen, politicians, professors are all in a pact. Diplomatic pacts, military attachés, oil company executives. “Eye-Ran is an ancient land. We love Persian carpets, cats, and caviar.” All in alphabetical order. Ready for encyclopedic entry in Encyclopedia Iranica, Encyclopedia Islamica, or Britannica, or Americana. “Persian carpets we have seen at the Metropolitan.” Persian cats with Zsa Zsa Gábor. Persian caviar at the Persepolis. “This distinguished gentleman is a Professor of Iranian Studies. He is an expert in Persian Visual Art. He has written numerous articles for Encyclopedia Americana, Britannica, Islamica, Iranica.” Before you know it, Nodjoumi’s characters start writing your prose, drawing you into his pictures.
Entrapment, oscillation from and to nowhere, in full business-as-politics attire. Suspension from no-where, entrapment in an enclosure of transparency that reveals everything but marks nothing. The figural banality of despair. In full business-as-politics attire, minds meet, alliances made, and flashes of insight soar into a rainbow of coalition. A pact, no handshake, just the bodily embracing of two complementary gestures. You hold your heart in your own hand, the red of its oddity bursting with blood against the gray of your business-as-politics attire. This is Nodjoumi’s heart, the organ that brought him to the land of the brave, the business-land, the Disney-land. Now mended or marred, by-passed beyond despair. There is a patronage to this art of the man in full business-as-politics attire holding the picture for the artist to draw, paint, post, and pester. There is a business-as-politics behind every exhibition, every artist, every innocence of: “Here I paint. And I cannot do otherwise.” Here is Nodjoumi the freelance artist, textile designer, working for a living. When did I read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” last? The balancing act of the business-as-politics raises the gray dagger of threat against the gory red of the heart. Whose heart? His. The tie. Everything is in the tie. Civility knotted against itself. Killing with a tie. With politics-as-business attire goes a visiting of the site, though nothing in the sight. Primordial spears raised to balance the ties, chasing, all in the gaze, after the spectacle of a tie-less man upon a bike, giving ride to a crow holding three balloons on high. Progress. Going somewhere. Nowhere. A landscape of despair, desolation, destitute. Men in full business-as-politics regalia. Dressed to kill. Nicky Nodjoumi’s paintings are postcolonial theory in visual orgy.
Cars exploding, fire-bombs blasting, politicians running for life, bestiality running amok. A baboon riding a hare, oversized by and for labor: And all cast against a landscape of a nightmarish memory, remembering nothing, nowhere. Nihilism rampant. A culture dismissing its own character. An artist making faces at the world, at us, at his audiences, at his art critics. We are in Nodjoumi’s dreams, remembering his homeland, now the global village of an ancestry that is now, here, and for good—no good. A rain of rocks upon two unsuspecting businessmen-as-politicians. The politics of their business as the business of their politic. Nodjoumi’s homo politicos, reigning supreme, under a rain of rock, the world, in Armageddon, coming to an end and yet no one to mind. This is the visual revolt, the mutiny of the masked, revealing the hidden darkness of a betrayal that marks every corner of our history as … Iranians. On that visual site, Nodjoumi has posted a sign that remembers with brutal, self-inflicted, accuracy. The silent soaring of a visual record that testifies. Nodjoumi’s visual testimony begins at home but has now assumed the universality of a nightmare that marks no cultural identity.
The biting cut of Nodjoumi’s pen now targets the very institutions of power that mark the very legitimacy of the visual possible. Consider the spectacular spectacle of a shoe, encased, subject of the gaze. But who is to look, and what is I to look at? Who looks at what, or what looks at what? What does it mean to look, to antiquate, curate, museumize, dishonor with a place to stand and be looked at? The politics of museumization. A place in the cultural memory of the Other. “The Islamic Art” section, the mezzanine of our ordering of the Other, antiquating the Other, ordering, Orienting. “Here you stand. You are Iranian, Islamic, Oriental. You stand still. You are a spectacle. Don’t move!” Making a spectacle of the spectator, the shoe is a plot, a stratagem, to make the spectators look so that Nodjoumi can capture them, dressed and naked, at the moment of looking, so that we can detect them off-guard, poised, naked, looking. But then as we look, who is looking at us? Here, right now, in this very gallery? Are these mirrors or pictures? And where is the hidden camera, and where is Nodjoumi himself? Is he watching, drawing, taking mental notes, and when would we come back to haunt him in his nightmares, and he in ours? The shoe still in bound and in balance, the spectacle of a vision, but no visitors in sight. No visitor but those who are now walking, now sitting, now looking, in the gallery. Baffled, confused, askance. “What does he mean? What could he mean?” He means nothing. He means “Sensation.” The Saatchi Collection. Bullshit on the wall—literally. The Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts—indeed. “Let’s get out,” Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, the towering Iranian artist told me when he saw the sliced horses, “I need to safeguard my humanity for my books.” We left.
Nodjoumi’s is the landscape of desolation, man in full business-as-politics regalia collapsed, the balloon of an empty mirage promising: Nothing. The pre-historic spanking of the mother naked and child-dog coming out of the womb, the fruit of some forgotten, forlorn, foreclosed penetration, now bursting back to birth. Playing strings that tie the hand in the moment of the act. The play-turned-to-hand-cuff. Play’s the thing. The play-thing though turning around. Tying the hand in a gesture of the game. The game turning against itself. The game of anger. Anger at large, aggression naked, the sign of a dog, in the quiet dignity of a threat. Naked aggression. Fascism in the face. Anger for no reason. Aggression incarnate. Hands too: instruments of control, curtailing the loose independence of a thread into the closing eye of a needle, the overpowering, dominant, prominent hands and the submissive thread, the receptive needle. Babies too. Infants in full size hanged from the suspension of two lips. Nodjoumi remembering a birth, against the landscape of a nowhere. Nodjoumi is the history of art on steroid.
What is it about the naked body in Nodjoumi’s nightmarish remembering of them, placing the paramount, leading a parade of businessmen-as-politicians to nowhere, with the mocking look of a raised mask chasing the whole parade from the back? Exposure of the hidden. The suits that lie, the naked bodies that expose, and the raised masks that mock. That is the sunny face of truth that shines and balances the exposition of the naked body, announcing “ROUND # 3” of a game no one knows or cares to know. Businessmen-as-politicians conferring upon the desolate land of a godforsaken memory, and that in the presence of the outlandish apparition of a child flying pigeons to grace a graceless land. Where are we? Upon what constellation of banality, remembering what minuscule innocence fading in the presence of Capital-as-Power, Power-as-Capital, the capital power, and the power of capital. Where are we? What innocence, what face, have we lost? The man in business-as-politics suit in control of a giant, defiant, disproportionate heart. Heart bounds—heat beats. Tied upon a road from and to nowhere. The heart wants to stop. The man in politics-as-business urges to move and beat. No bleeding-heart liberals need to apply here.
In Nodjoumi the politics of the visible is canvassed to cover a culture of revolt over which he has impeccable control. The mutation of the verbal into the visual is done here with such commanding control that nothing escapes Nodjoumi’s critical care. He is anchored, his vision critical to the very point of break, and yet it never succumbs to apathy—or sympathy. And that, for someone who has seen so much, and so persistently, is quite a feat.
We must enter and exit Nodjoumi’s canvas because staying there will make you reasonably mad, as looking away will make you insanely reasonable.
Comrades in Brush
Nahid Haghighat is a book-breaker, a painter of the past in present. She sees what she reads. She is a woman of all pages. A painter of pages past, pasted upon a present—always imperfect. The landscape of her memory is always mutilated, though shapely, shaping, elegant, appeasing, and yet a violence of unimaginable proportion lurking behind the scene. She is in full control. An active remembrance of things past, promising nothing to come, pondering on the moment now, and the battle of pages that demand obedience, define cultures, wage wars, put living bodies against the execution squad. Born and raised in Iran of the Pahlavi might, she came to New York, the land of visions and voices beyond and against her dreams, in 1968, a painter and a world apart from a land of lost hopes. An education in art, a profession in the business side of the game, but ultimately the conviction in the visceral clarity of her vision. She abandons all, homeland, classroom, business-as-usual, and succumbs to a surrender to the vision that refuses to let go of her.
She begins by separating the pages from the books they make and looking at them for the treachery of their apparent innocence. Pages, carriers of a culture, the makers of a history, the paginating power of narration. She begins by separating the pages and looking at them, the innocent sites of memory claiming a history, fear feigning a faith, love demanding a record, a culture curiously self-conscious. She begins by looking at pages, tearing them off from the sites of their significance, books of their location, libraries of their power. Hers is an urban guerrilla tactic of dividing the enemy into its single most defeat-able piece: pages of its treacherous memory, records of its history. She begins to look at the pages and the pages are pacified under her critical care, her brutally precise vision, her subversively elegant composition. How can you destroy and the destruction be so beautiful?
She begins by looking at the page and then it begins to happen: collapsing of words and visions, texts and textures, images surreptitiously sneaking on words, disrupting their textual claims to autonomy, authenticity, integrity. Words become shapes, shapes making faces at the words. Are these pages of a book, or signs simulating signification, reminding signifiers they are nothing but signs having been obediently chained to the calligraphic land of meaning. The words here are forced to remember that they, in and of themselves, left to their own devices, mean nothing. Significate nothing. Signs, mere signs, having been, at one inaugural moment of a culture of submission, mutated into signifiers. Here though, on Haghighat’s pages, they are reminded of their shapely shapes, formal forms, meaningless magnificence.
Haghighat graduated with a bachelor degree in visual arts from Tehran University in 1967. By 1968 she was in New York. She is a creature of the Sixties twice over. Once on a semi-colonial postcolonial site. Twice on the site of the anti-War New York. The proposal for her doctoral dissertation at New York University failed to convince the professoriate that revolution and visuality had something to share. She abandoned the idea, some two-hundred pages into writing her thesis, and then she turned the page, going for the kill: Visuality and revolution. Here they are. Hers is a generation of page-painters. For years she made a living by illustrating children’s books. She is a page-painter, residing in the authoritative demands of a page. But teasing her way out of that tyranny. Making the page ashamed of itself, of its history, historicity, histrionics, theatrical mannerisms, his story never hers. She dodged the site, from the streets of Tehran to the pavements of our paternal, patronizing, pages. She has been wreaking havoc on these pages for more than thirty years. Now that is a tireless revolutionary. Thirty years. From a monarchy to a theocracy. From an imperial kingdom to an imperialist whereabouts. Thirty years. Sit down woman. It’s time to rest. No time to rest.
No time to rest: A microcosmic projection of a shape, you may call it a horse, but nothing but a shape exits the textual authority of the page and parades to its own haphazard destiny. No destiny though. Haghighat takes to task the very logic of the page, its tyrannical rule, its location of the culture, its bookbinding, binding, claims on the accidentality of having been uttered, voiced, conceived, imagined. Pages dissolve, books unbound, words de-signify, and instead a whole shapely apparition of the mere sign reigns supreme. No power in sight, no authority for the page. Books unbound. A feminine mocking of the masculine power of the book. Welcome to this “spread,” Sofreh in Persian. A white or colorful spread, spread like a sheet on the ground. On it food and decorations, hopes and fears. For everyone to sit, eat, chat, live. This is the culture of eating on the ground. No table or chairs in sight, gathering around Sofreh. Sofreh is a Spread, the opened page in a day of life. Spreading out in full view. Whatever there is to eat, to show, to share. To show and share food and fantasy, on the face of a page. The edibles and the show-ables are spread in full view, in perfect harmony, symmetry, food as part of the arrangements, the arrangement of all almost edibles. Harmony with no order.
We eat more with our eyes than with our mouth. We begin by eating with our eyes. Mouth the biological necessity. The accident. Welcome to this Spread, Haghighat’s Sofreh! An opened page of a life. The expression in Persian is: Sofreh- ye Del, the Spread of the Heart. On it what you want to spread, show, exhibit. “She spread open her heart,” we say. Welcome to this Spread. What do you see? Not the edibles. But the watch-ables. A Vase. Full of flowers. Spread open upon … a page, incorporating, compromising, the page. The page compromised, the site of a literal culture, literary to the core of its imagination, worded into the world. Worlded in words. Haghighat goes for the juggernaut, the page of the culture, the site of its authority. “It is written,” the everlasting biblical command. “But I show unto thee,” the objection.
“I love miniature. I hate miniature,” Haghighat once told me. “I kept tearing it apart into pieces and re-assembling it.” Why would someone want to do that? “Let’s cut the ceiling of the universe open,” Hafez, code name for our collective memory at its best, thought once in a poem, “and draw a new design.” Where is the Centerpiece? The Center cannot hold. The Center rotates. The center is off tangent. Here is my family photo on the corner. Mother and father. Sister and brother. I remember them well. The photographic memory, intruding, interrupting, the regal authority of the “Persian Miniature.” What scary propositions, suppositions? The so-called “Houghton” Shahnameh. Cut into pieces, pieces sold for an arm and a leg. Private Collections. Rich merchants. Expatriate antique dealers. Merchants of memory. Dead aristocrats. Dynastic relics. Monarchy, monarchists, museum curators. Orientalists poring over the “Persian Art.” Here we Orientalize. We cannot do otherwise. We did not know Mr. Houghton was planning to cut the book into pieces. He promised us the whole book. De Kooning returned. Pages of the “Houghton” Shahnameh returned—homebound, homeland. De Kooning recovered. Here we exchange, and here we sell. Here we profit, and here is an essay for the Journal of American Oriental Society. “I love miniature. I hate miniature,” Haghighat once told me. “I always liked to tear it into pieces and re-assemble it.” Miniature. Shahnameh miniature. Shahnameh. The Book of Kings reaped into pieces. Children of a revolution playing with the ancestral relics of a culture, dead serious in its certainties. Ex-Maoists writing essays for the glossy catalogues of the dead certainties of born-again aristocrats, Prince Ehtejab donating family bones to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Feces. So full of thesis. Let’s have a conference on Salman Rushdi. The Moor’s Last Sigh.
Texts dreaming. In Haghighat’s pages texts are dreaming. Their dreams coming true. Words dreaming of visions. Their visions coming true. I had a dream of two horses embracing, kissing. I had a dream of sketches of horses running. I had a dream, the page professes, of heroes on their horses hunting. I had a dream that there was a lonely tulip. I had a dream. Texts dreaming. Words remembering signs they forget. Freedom of face, the face of a page, that means nothing. Retrieving the signs of the real, meaning nothing. Retrieving the sign, the question mark, in the full absence of any question. The sign marking its own question. Haghighat’s is a vision of remembrance of things forgotten, signs lost to their ordinary absence of the depth, all on the sur-Face. Haghighat remains and reminds on the sur-Face. In the absence of the Face. No Infinity. No Invisible. All is visible. Mis-trusting the Hidden, the Deep. The depth is corrupt. The depth is hidden. The depth is the implication of the veil. Haghighat unveils. Her sisters veiled. She unveils in bits and pieces, memorabilia of a culture tortured, a history destroyed, a facial fact fantasized, sublimated, repressed. Bring out the veils. Haghighat unveils. Look at her pictures: The crocked timber of life, de-narrated back to the magnificence of its signs signaling supreme, signs symbolizing nothing, signs robust in their resistance to a whole culture of hermeneutic conspiracies.
An invasion of butterflies, flower pieces flying, the territorial integrity of the page violated. This is an exegesis in practice. A bringing into the text not intentions but signs. Signs of no significance. Pretending to make no sense. Making no sense. Signs supreme. Visual elocution of a counter-culture claiming and reclaiming the culture. “I have always loved and hated miniature at the same time,” she said once to me. “I have always wanted to tear them into pieces and re-assemble them.” You want to claim it but claim it differently. The invasion of the body-snatchers. Snatching the page, re-claiming the culture. A hermeneutics of signs reminding signifiers of their bondage, treacherous betrayal of their birth-rights, as signs, signifying nothing. Just there.
You want a center. Here is a center. Made of peripheries. Approximating the center. Narrowing in on the presence of the absence, reminding, remembering, the center. Made of pages, upon pages, covering pages, revealing pages, all nothing—but pages. Pages of history, evidence of memories, lost, gained, arranged, choreographed, stacked upon a constellation of re-membering a culture, from afar. From the distance of the sign remembering what is significant. From the distance of the feminine look remembering the brutality of the masculine sight. Remembering by dismembering. Dismembering the Book, letting it loose, upon the canvas, where the book must succumb, in a revolution, to the look. But look closer. Not just signs—horses and heroes, polo game and polo. No. Not just the sneaking face and the loose turban. Not just the seal or the signal. Also the words, the calligraphic re-constellation of signs remembering signs reminding signs. Words that mean nothing, but fake meaning a thing or another. Pages remembering. Pages dismembered. Pages remembering actions. Tired of promises they make but cannot keep.
And now the final look: In her later work now, Haghighat is pausing, pondering, concentrating. A moment of pause, concentration, reflection, letting go of memories. Memories delegated to the long shot of a distant past. Present is just one object, magnified, close-up. Shut in full visceral view. Just one flower. Long, demanding, the erect stem, the full presence of the present. The past faded. Distant words, faded scenes, memories relenting. And the present, the long, overwhelming physicality of the present, casting a lengthy, lasting, shadow over a life remembered, dismembered, and cast aside. The aging look. Not nostalgic. Better forgotten than forlorn. Nahid Haghighat: The cantankerous book-breaker, mocking the words, severing the sentences, teasing the phrases, taunting the verses, turning the pages, breaking the book: the literal tyranny of a culture.
In a poem called “Another Season,” Ahmad Shamlou begins with one of the most memorable invocations of poetic visuality—anticipating in his words, the broken images of Nicky Nodjoumi a and Nahid Haghighat. It is in poetic preparedness of this sort, the visceral anticipations of the visual, that we have as much learnt to show as taught to see.
*The earliest draft of this essay was written in the late 1990s on the occasion of a collective exhibition of a number of Iranian artists at La Maison Française at Columbia University. The exhibition was curated by Maria “Chus” Martinez and included the works of Nicky Nodjoumi, Nahid Haghighat, Ardeshir Mohassess, Amir Naderi, and a few other artists. This essay concentrates only on the works of Nodjoumi and Haghighat. This revised version of the essay has not been published before.
1I have examined this matter in detail in my Brown Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2011).
2See “Ardeshir Mohassess, Etcetera” in this volume.
3I have dealt with this process of de-signification in detail in my essay, “In the Absence of the Face,” in my Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (New York: Palgrave, 2012): 47–83.
4See Ahmad Shamlou, Shekoftan dar Meh/Blossoming in Fog (Tehran: Ketab-e Zaman, 1349/1970): 25.