Communications, in the sense of human interactions, imparts open and hidden aspects of exerting force and control instead of balance, supervision instead of interaction, and misunderstanding instead of understanding. The message is conveyed from the sender to the receiver but meaning is never transmitted. Even in the “most immediate” forms of communication, the signified concept is always deferred, delayed, put off to interpretation. Therefore, in all interactions, the ground will be open for the formation of various interpretations on a linguistic sign, thus understanding the relationship between language and meaning, as a direct and one-to-one relationship, becomes highly challenging.
Sara Abri, in her various art collections and creations, has worked on various aspects of the factors that depict communications from simple transmission of a “message” between the “sender” and “receiver” to the most complicated conceptual grounds. Such grounds as linguistic structures made of letters, voices and pictures were presented in her previous conceptualist installation art and voice collections – such as “Rough Sounds” – and telephone set, as one of the basic symbols of this communication, has been meaningfully used in the majority of her art collections. It is an element adapted from the world around and personalized in the artwork to have a critical approach to and review of the real relationships via artistic expressions.
The expanded dimensions of objects in Abri’s works remind us of the gigantic icons of popular culture in “public art” creations by the pop art artists in urban spaces. In these works, an ordinary object is blown up and exaggerated to the point of defamiliarization from the routine form in a bid to specifically bring to light the forgotten functions and aspects of the object. In this collection, the object of telephone set, as one of the symbolic symbols of communication in modern-day world, is magnified in size to find a symbolic and conceptual function and to impose its presence on the viewer. In an interactive situation a dialog takes place between the viewers and via this object, someone speaks and another one hears, and the status of sender and receiver changes in intervals. In this situation the message is conveyed in its formal aspect without any additions or deletions, and apparently it is sent “exactly as it is”, while as far as meaning is concerned we face multi-layers and “chain of floating signifiers” instead of the signified. It means the exactness of what we hear and what has been told happens in an ocean of floating signifiers despite plurality in meanings and disambiguation. The words are transmitted but the signified meaning is never conveyed.
In continuation of the aforesaid concern on uncertainty of meaning, other collections of works, consider relations in sexualized structures. Pluralistic factors organize the significations of these relationships, but in societies like Iranian society sexual implications and sexuality – womanish sexuality in particular – are effectively taken as main factors in interpretation of the message of the sender. Six works in this collection depict busts in which reproduction organs have been transformed to communication tools – telephone set. These works do not represent an immaculate, neutral and direct situation in formation and conveyance of meaning either. Sexual identity – as a sign of female body on which patriarchic society and culture imprint their whims and wishes – has a more pluralistic and non-signified context than the dominant notion that sees a direct relationship between women’s biology and their identity. In the structure of patriarchic societies, however, gender becomes a key factor in formation of conceptual referrals and significations in communications. When a woman is one party of a dialog, specially with a man as the other party, she is evaluated according to a gender approach and her communicative signs are interpreted according to certain mode. In this collection, this reductive approach leads to down reduction and transformation of the identity of the individual in relation with her sexual identity. Sexual organs are the only organs that speak because they have been transformed into telephone parts. These works, therefore, address the sexualized structure of social relations in a double-sided symbolic way, and at the same time, find a way toward emancipation. The collection has provided tools in a self-sufficient way for communication with oneself. All required tools for a telephone dialog have been placed inside the body organs – resembling a woman. The receiver, sender, speaker and hearer, all and all are placed inside the structure and active and efficient communication is made possible, not through interaction with the world, but through internal dialog of woman with her diversified aspects and self-assertiveness. Each one of these works portrays an aspect of social roles of “women” as beloved, wife, mother, etc. The roles, in the meantime, are defined in connection to her relationship with the males and at the same time, in an autonomous way each work completes its internal relation with its role. Therefore, commemorating women’s autarky of internal and psychological life takes place in six complementary frames.
The uncertainty along with plurality and referral in concepts, either in the realm of general communication between the speaker and listener or in critical approach to the certain role of sexual clichés in reception and interpretation, have been presented in Abri’s works within a greater generality, i.e. a frame, in which the works have been formed. And that frame is nothing other than the artist’s selected style who, putting behind painting, has found cubism and installation art an appropriate media for expression.
The last but not the least point is related to the style of the work and a critical approach to the style. Generally speaking, the conceptual works are kept strong in view of idealistic aspect, and intentionally rigid and rational in terms of senses and sentiments. Therefore, looking at these works has to be different from looking at the non-conceptual works. The hidden ideas in these works are important to some extent, since according to minimalist tradition, artists delegate part of the construction to the others in order to produce an artwork beyond handiwork. The ordinary aesthetics does not constitute the existential necessity of these works and the ultimate goal behind their production is not visual and sensual pleasure. These works are made with more or less conscious content and idea. As objects of thought, they are to make the viewer think about the concepts and subjects around him. The ultimate form comes out of these ideas. The conceptualist work of art tries to instigate the thoughts by setting forth challenges between the familiar existing concepts. This is to help the artwork play a role in the real world, to use and own its elements, to review the power relations and to determine new intellectual frameworks.
Category: Press Release
The Meeting Point of Identities
Drama, theater and any other type of performance give man a chance to live in “another” form: face masks are worn, dresses are put on the bodies, and makeups are worn to display actors as young or old, wicked and virtuous. The meeting point is where dresses are put off and makeups are washed away. This fluidity of identity is in many cases associated with gender identity in dramatic arts representing itself in wearing dresses and playing the role of the opposite sex. The tradition has always been in practice in traditional Japanese plays (Kabuki). In early years after the appearance of this genre, women used to play for both men and women. The role-playing was vested on the young boys later and then since 1629 men appear in male and female roles. Also in ancient Greece, men used to play the roles of women. Even in some dramas and operas at the age of Renaissance, playing opposite sex’s role was something ordinary.
In her recent series, Shirin Fathi has alluded to various historical and geographical periods to record her dramatic performance as different personalities: from Onnagata – male actors who impersonate women in Japanese kabuki theatre – to the Qajar princes’ painting personalities and the contemporary European works of art. The artists in this collection highlight some historical periods of art in which gender identity – in view of dressing and makeup – have appeared as phenomena not that much assigned. For instance, the portrait paintings belonging to the Qajar period are good examples of vanishing boundaries between male and female gender identities. The faces are extremely similar in the majority of the works: the traditional model of “Maahroo” or round face with continuous and dark eyebrows and red lips like rosebuds. Only the beard and men wearing boots make the distinction between male and female, otherwise the dresses are long with sumptuous adornment. The famous portrait of Fat’halishah by Mehr Ali the painter is a good example.
Talking about these works and to understand them better, it is necessary to point to one of the most important contemporary theories on gender identity. It is for over two decades that Gender Queer Theory – a meeting point between gender studies and post-structuralism – has turned into the dominant theory in gender studies. No distinction between gender identity, i.e. features, manifestations and behaviors we attribute to male and female sexes and their social construction were concepts paid attention in the second wave of feminism. However, in Gender Queer Theory this concept has been expanded to finally a broad meaning that Judith Butler, one of the most influential theoreticians of Gender Queer Theory refers to as “performative nature of gender identity” in her book “The Gender Trouble”. According to her “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender. Identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results.” Butler in her famous sentence refers to a sort of identity that is not expression or manifestation of an innate quality, but it is itself the whole story. Therefore, gender identity is not something fixed or assigned, nor a source of act to lead to various behaviors and activities. It is the sort of identity that is made infirmly in the course of time. It is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” In this sense, body gestures, movements, dresses and various styles create a sort of hallucinatory identity, while there is no pre-destined identity and whatever exists in terms of identity is the actions, behaviors, and appearances. For butler, gender identity is like a dress we select and put on from among various other dresses available at the cupboard. This means, gender identity is something “optional” and transient, just like a dress. This is the same concept employed a few decades ago in the works of such artists as Cindy Sherman through undertaking various roles, or in the works of Yasumasa Morimura, the Japanese appropriation artist, who represented female role-playing in the history of art very well: man as a creature whose right to have a stable position is nothing but a myth. The pluralistic social roles and their cross-meeting with gender, racial, tribal, etc. identities do not happen at a fixed point named “self”, rather it turns into other “self” each time according to the properties of these points. The body has never been the aboding place of something assigned, rather it is a place for the coming and going of these identities. This is something Butler refers to as transient subject. Lack of this fixed and strong position is realizable in the works of art, specially through the medium of photography. Photography is a time-bound medium that provides the chance for recording pluralistic and possible types in a short time, the “self” that is constantly changing into “other” in a bid to symbolically reconstruct and record various available aspects and potentials in “self”, as a multi-layered being. Our contemporary art, though, is still at the beginning of the path to create a complicated world of the same level with this theme, the sort of the world that needs something beyond the represented subject to be visually able to create diversified and intertwined layers.
Artificial History!
“History Found” is the title of the fourth episode of the collection “Revealing Realities” by Mehdi Moghim-Nejad which was exhibited in February 2012 at Mohsen Gallery. The Revealing Realities collection was the result of efforts by the artist in photomontage transformation technique and pictures created in the framework of images which do not easily reveal that they are artificial at first glance. In “History Found”, like the first, second, and third episodes, the artist has adopted a psychological approach towards the issues of common national and historical identity of human beings. If in the first episode of this collection, namely “The Scattered Dream of a Long Day,” the artist depicts a day hidden in his individual subconscious through travels and trips in the nature as a communal location, in the second episode, namely “Within the Oriental Winds” he crystallizes the fearful and scary aspects and nightmares of the atmospheres related to the Iranian history. In “History Found” history and the remaining parts of it, namely the parts which are constituents of the national identity and collective subconscious, appear as a form of a person’s dream, the only difference is that the artist in this collection is again more distant from the reality and approaches with a take beyond reality.
In this episode, in continuation of the previous episodes we are faced with a victory over the foggy and dreamlike atmosphere and photography in natural scenes, just like the dream of a person who dreams somewhere which belongs to an unspecified time and resembles a place he has already seen but is not any of those places. If we consider that the collective subconscious contains the legacy of history and its implications and the related meanings, the artist forms this dark and hidden side with a subjective and personal look and also by extracting parts from the heart of history. The gray images from an arid land and an unfertile desert in a foggy and abandoned condition while the recycled parts are generally ruined and destroyed from the historical-artistic works are the only pivotal subjects of the frame: From the statues dating back to the pre-Islam era in Iran to the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, the broken urn and the potteries from Neishabour, the mythological paintings of Shahnameh at the 4th Century AH, the miniatures related to the post-Islam era and the Qajar prince. The atmosphere created in this collection is highly apocalyptical, as if the world has come to the end and we are witnessing the last remains of it. We might only hear the distant howling of the wind within the absolute silence of the atmosphere. Despite the diversity in the historical elements of this collection, we should not forget that these elements do not introduce the particular names or different historical periods of art, as it is known, but the presence of national identity elements are symbolized as a whole in the realm of the collective conscious. These images, which are sometimes registered as photomontage on slates and desert land and sometimes stand as a minaret or part of an old monument or a statue, are considered the only colorful elements among the dominant gray atmosphere of these works. Although, in this collection the artist takes advantage of the photos he has taken on his trips to different corners of Iran in many years, the desert is intentionally de-identified by the dominance of the fog, as well as the black and white color, so attentions would be drawn to the tiling, designs and statues. It seems as if these symbols related to the national identity are the only bright points of the historical oblivion of a mind which are never thoroughly buried; these are the common past we drag everywhere with us, although in our subconscious memories.
Even thought, Moghim-Nejad’s perception in this collection is still tied to the history, “History Found” more than anything else raises a serious obsession about the medium of photography spontaneously and puts forth its ratio with reality. When faced with this collection, prior to any efforts to read the symbols this question occurs to us: “Is the picture before me a real one?” And when we realize that the answer is negative, the technique by which the photographer achieves such realism becomes thought-provoking. Therefore, meaning implications in the hierarchical system is subdued to the second degree of importance and the artist passes through the conduit of paradox in the process of getting to the meaning: He creates concepts through a modern involvement with the medium and technique along the conduit of “art for art.” He also does another seemingly paradoxical action and encodes the work of art ambivalently and in a two-fold way: It means he tries to accurately and “realistically” construct the destruction and ruins. He assembles the destruction, constructs it and injects it to the core of the picture in order to create his own concepts. The result is pictures which are formally possible and are in accordance with the logic of realism, but in fact they are real only in the realm of the artificial pictorial logic of the artist.
In his writings, Baudrillard says: “On the spot the virtual action takes place, it overcomes reality and then without any changes turns into its alternative.”
A similar process goes on in this collection; the elements assembled on the background of the picture enter the image’s framework from the outside boundaries of that photo, therefore, taking the picture’s “reality” into consideration, the alien elements are “virtual” and are created by construction. However, after they enter the picture and, of course, after placement with an accurate and powerful technique, they become part of the work as if they have been there for centuries and are considered an inseparable reality of the picture. Hence, the logic of picture with its specific “reality”, namely a dream-like reality, finally makes us convinced and the work in its development process transforms from “objectivity” to “subjectivity”: these pictures are considered opposing sides.
Photomontage, as a synthesizing technique, has resulted in a sort of irony, and equivocalness in the climax of its function in the works of Berlin Dadaists and Surrealism artists and has made radial criticism in the works of artists such as Hannah Hoch. It seems this technique forms at a time when the existing “reality” seems insufficient and the artist seeks to artificially construct a reality beyond the existing reality. Man Ray has said: “I paint something that I cannot take a photo of.” Photomontage is, in fact, an inter-disciplinary technique which pushes construction and painting composition into the world of photography and changes the reflection rules of photography without straightforwardly denying the specific aesthetics of this field. However, contrary to the common trend of photomontage in conveying the message, implications and other concepts of the type, Moghim-Nejad still leaves the audience with freedom to find the direction of meaning in a suspenseful manner. He never aims at over-symbolism or over-verbalization and although his involvement with the medium marks a modernist aspect, his works – contrary to many contemporary works – potentially yield to numerous interpretations. He sets off with his personal experience of photography during his trips around the country and his passion for that, and gets to creating concepts and at the end leaves photographic paintings for us. In spite of the fact his collection takes up photography with a historical-psychological approach, it is still more of photography than anything else.
Mahsa Farhadi-Kia
February 2012
From Myth to Satire
“Therefore I ordered them to extract the cuspid of the crickets so I extracted confessions out of them that how many times they had licked the nation’s luminaries? My hands do not reach my feet unless I feel I’m a tomato and in the living room, I gave words to Zahhak that I would become a vegetarian. And I signed a peace treaty with the 16 grasshoppers that had attacked the farms in the south so they would all move along the economic development plan, right in the direction of the oil pipelines.” Mostafa Choub-Tarash
The above excerpt is the title of the recent exhibition by Mostafa Choub-Tarash. The artworks were exhibited in February 2012 at the E’temad Gallery. The title of the exhibition shows this collection is different: By placing one of his short stories instead of the title of his work, the artist has taken a satirical look at the story of Zahhak as a mythological icon. His approach towards history and mythology in the realm of writing and visual art is a practical example of “New Historicism” approach towards history and literature: reading history, art and literature not based on the social context of the time the work was created, but according to the necessities of the readers’ and critics’ time.
In this collection, Choub-Tarash goes through history anew. Reviewing familiar narratives and allegories which are registered on the collective mind of a nation and playfully adopting an ambivalent approach towards icons and historical myths, put the post-modern artist at the position of a theoretician who deconstructs myths and renders a different, and most-of-the-time ambivalent and satirical reading of the past works by tampering with their aura of “originality.” This sometimes appears through the childish action of drawing mustache on the portrait of Mona Lisa – as a symbol of the golden age in the history of art and intellectualism – and sometimes in the form of copying the originality of a famous work and deconstructing the work of art.
Deconstruction in this collection takes place by applying minor changes to the pictures from the history of art. Pictures which contain events that form the collective unconscious of people and form their wide system of values, and beliefs. In here, the familiar pictures of books on the history of art or lithographic images with gray acrylic and the usual inexperienced style of the artist are drawn on the canvass, and the artist tries to unify the whole work as a historical myth not by emphasizing on the narrative or a certain character but by implementing only one color. Hence, the variety of the images should not act as an obstacle to reading the entire collection.
There are images of King Shapur the First’s victory over the Roman Empire, the romantic narrative of Homay and Homayoun, Rostam’s battle with the Akvan Demon and the King Sultan Hossein Safavi and the Zahhak monarchy. However, the post-modern take on the work of art with the present and past is by no means straightforward and rule-governed as it is expected, but history turns into a basis to reveal internal conflicts and ironies and incorporates with the present time to form an ironic situation. In this collection satire and destruction appear as colorful designs which are sprayed or painted onto the work like a graffiti in a destructive, speedy and childish way. The past and future meet each other in an ironic fashion, Zahhak goes vegetarian and Rostam has a bouquet of flower in his hand instead of dagger and the ceremony of Awarding Divine Splendor turns into drawing pistols on each other. Therefore, the artist makes a two- or multi-fold encoding of all the works: paintings as a sublime art and the artist’s hand-drawn paintings on the piece of art as an ornament.
Reviewing and changing the stories and historical myths from Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood to Hamlet and toppling the hero to an anti-hero and vice versa, is the process of tampering with narratives which are deeply rooted in the realm of history, history of art and folkloric stories and allegories and their implications and results are well-seated in the collective beliefs and have turned into a part of culture and value system of people. The playfulness and destruction is in fact part of revealing relativity and conflict at the core of accepted certainties. A process which introduces post-modern art as a representative of “doxa” art and counter-nature-oriented, in a way presenting one of the numerous macro-narratives of an event instead of only a micro-narrative is acceptable. Rostam is an example of chivalry and athletics and has turned into a modern Don Juan and attacks the Akvan Demon – who has now transformed into a ridiculous beauty – with a bouquet of flower instead of his dagger. King Soleiman is hanged in the festival of musicians and the fable of Homay and Homayoun changes into a flashy modern view of flying hearts. Therefore the borders defined between concepts such as being honorable and ridiculous, divinity and sublimity and anger, platonic love and backstreet songs shatters under the pretext of tampering with icons of history of art. The plural and conflicting situation, which formed the basis for position of human beings in the post-modern and contemporary era, is clearly evident in these works. A position in which the narratives of “true”, “real” and “original” are nothing but imagination and illusion. A situation which is well-defined in the following quotation by Baudrillard:
“Belief in truth… is the weak point of perception and common sense… really no one believes in reality… our belief in reality and its proof is shameful. Truth is something to be sneered at. There may be some people who dream of a culture in which they laughs upon hearing “this is true, this is real”… pretentions have turned into realities! … Now, the act of pretending puts a lid not on the reality but the point that there is nothing, or in other words, on the continuation of absurdity.”
Mahsa Farhadi-Kia
February 2012