Too Much Pollution to Demonstrate

 New York, Apexart

February 9, 2005

Abbas Milani

 

I must begin with a word of thanks, and a small disclosure. I am grateful to Ms Merriam Horri for the invitation, and I salute the memory of Amiel Grunberg, for whom this exhibit was clearly a labor of love. By way of disclosure, I must say that I am going to talk about two artists, one in this exhibit, and the other not present here. Ala Ebtekar has been my student at Stanford, where he is finishing a MFA; Barbard Golshiri is the son of my dear departed friend, Houshang Golshiri. It is truly an indescribable experience to be talking about his work, as my last memory of him was as a child.

            Iran has long been a country of many dualities: from the Manichean rift between the world of light and darkness, good and evil, to the architectural and linguistic chasm between zaher ba baten, the public and the private. In Iran what you see is rarely what you get. There is always, to use Eliot’s poem, "a word within the word," a layer beneath the surface.

            In the west, or recent years, this dualism has found another manifestation and appears in the form of the great gap between the formulaic image of the country as a black hole of fanaticism and the reality of a vibrant, often defiant, usually creative, subaltern culture, what they here call "soft guerrillas" in an atmosphere too polluted for demonstration, that is struggling to keep alive, and break out of the straitjacket forced on it by a strident Procrustean regime.

In the exhibit this dualism is cleverly captured. As we enter, we must step over a whole field of papers-and thus perceptions-of Iran. In Islamic architecture, they say, the entry to the mosque invariably entails walking through a long dark corridor. To enter the sanctuary of the divine, you must free yourself of all worldly attachments. Here too, to enter the sacred realm of art, to get a true glimpse of the soft guerrillas at work, we must step over all we have read, and seen, all the headlines, and stereotypes. Cleansed of our preconceptions, we can then begin to appreciate the uncanny brilliance of these young artists. They literally as well as figuratively give of themselves to create, to survive "a few centimeters above sea level" and all they expect in return is our receptive vision, unclouded by the shibboleths of the day.

For at least a century now, Iranian artists have been faced with the great dilemma that has shaped Iranian culture and politics, namely the question of modernity, and modernism, of identity and hybridity. They are faced with the same question posed by Montesquieu some three centuries ago: How can you be a Persian in modern times. For a whole generation of Iranians, the answer was simple: it amounted to self-mutilation and sheer emulation; you have to become, one advocate of modernity suggested," in your blood and bone" Western. Iranian tradition, they claimed, offers nothing but an abyss of despotism and dogmatism. Kamal-al Mulk, the master painter of early twentieth century came to a Europe whose representational tradition was being challenged with impressionism and expressionism, and all he brought back with him was the idea that great painters try to "represent" reality as "it is." Implicit in his message and method was that Iran's own representational  tradition-from calligraphy to tiles, from miniatures to wall paintings-has little to offer an Iranian aesthetic modernity. The ultimate success for the artist was thus her or his ability to find an audience in the west. Like characters in Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Iranians had internalized the values of the west as both supreme and sublime and unless they received the approval of the "Sahib", their work was of little worth, even to themselves. Painters, whether of the "progressive" group, like Pezeshknia, or of a vast variety of modernist groups had little that was Iranian about their work. Some have even argued that the greatest literary masterpiece of this period, Sadeq Hedayat's Blind Owl was more than anything else a Western novel.

            It took a good seventy years before this tradition was challenged. Beginning with the work of what is known as Saggakhaneh, Iranian artists began to challenge the notion that Iranian modernity goes through Western tradition. There is, they argued, much that is useful in Iran's past and a genuine modernity must go through the Iranian tradition, and from it seek what it needs and deems successful. This trend was not limited to painting; in architecture, the works of Moghtader and others began to go back to elements of traditional Iranian architecture. In fiction, Golshiri was amongst the few advocates of the idea that Iranian fiction can learn much from Iran's cultural legacy. The poetry of Nezami, and the history of Beyhagi,, he argued, and even the hadiths of Shiism, can be a mine of literary tropes. A new identity was being forged. Iranian artists were beginning to realize that to be modem, they needed to be at once local and global; in tune with all that was happening in the world, but at the same time uniquely Iranian. Barbad Golshiri, and Ala Ebtekar are the epitomes of this new generation.

In mid-eighties, Houshang Golshiri wrote a short story of stunning power. It has much in common with his later masterpiece, King of the Benighted-a book I translated into English. In What Has Befallen Us, Barbad?, the narrator, a woman, talks of her son, named Barbad; a child who has seen the inferno of an Islamic Republic prison and the experience has rendered him mute. He only observes, and paints; the "horror, horror" of what he has seen can not be rendered in words. Only images can help assuage his anger and pain.

Not long after his father's death, his son, the Barbad of the story, and the eternal Barbad of Iranian history, has given us another rendition of his sad tale. Barbad is the troubled muse of Iranian music; he is our tormented Dionysus; he was a master of mirth and melancholy; to Khosrow-Parviz, the ultimate king of Pre-Islamic Iran, he sang of sorrows and victories; when the king's favorite horse, Shabdiz, died, no one dared tell him of his loss. He had threatened to kill any bearer of such message. Barbad cleverly conveyed the bad news through a masterful composition, and when the king was imprisoned by his son--'incidentally a rarity in Iranian history where it is always the fathers that kill their sons-the grieved Barbad burned his musical instruments, and cut off his own playing fingers lest he be tempted to make music again.Our Barbad takes a different path. He surely gives of himself, but not to kill his art, but to create it. This time, it is the patriarchs who are killing their children and imprisoning their souls, and the sons, defiant and self-assured, angry but not despondent, ask again, What Has Befallen us, Barbad?

The video begins with an empty white space, a tabula rasa, a canvas. Defiantly, and briskly, a head of hair, as much of Bob Marley as of Barbad, as likely of a woman as a man, appears. There is no face, but only the menace of a scissor, and a pair of hands, clad in white. Hair, we know, is a much contested part of human anatomy in Islamic societies. In man, and even more so in woman, it is a potential tool of the devil. In woman, the first now eminently liberal President of the Islamic Republic told us, it is charged with erotic electricity. It can ensnare the hapless men around it. In man, too, it can be a sign of frivolity. Morality police roam the cities searching for men with long hairs, and for women with any evident hair. And Barbad, reversing the Samson myth, where hair was a sign and guarantor of his power,  has turned the hair into the ultimate metaphor for all that has happened to art and humanity in Iran. But this is no mere lament against oppression. It is also a call to action; an act of creation. Not just of his soul, but even of his body the androgynous figure of these powerful images is willing to give. There is in the gestures of the hand and the head, defiance, anger, and sacrifice. In Kubrick's memorable beginning of Full Metal Jacket, young marines are being shorn of their hair, and of their identity, so that the foul-mouthed sergeant can make of them a killing machine. Here however, the sheering is voluntary, and from it comes the redemption of art. The scissor at times comes close to cutting not just the hair, but the hand--making art in Iran can be a dangerous proposition. Guerrillas, even if soft, are the enemies of state. There is also moments of apparent resignation, where the head seems to want to escape the ordeal, but a force, mysterious but powerful, keeps it in its place.

And by the end of the process, as the hand at times angrily, other times with decided deliberation, throws away the hair, the once empty canvas has become an eerily and powerfully resonant image, full of characters--there stands a hint of a cloud, and here the apparition of Simorgh, the wise bird of Iranian mythology. It is painting by "hair-drip," it is, to borrow Nietzsche's words, creating art by blood. Read in the context of Iran, it is a cry against oppression, censorship and brutality; read in a global semiotics, it is a defiant manifesto for the necessity of creating art, of communicating with the world at any price. Barbad is at once Persian and global.