Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi

By Anthem Press

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089215

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Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture

Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture

Essays by Hamid Dabashi

Edited with an Introduction by Hamid Keshmirshekan

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2019 Hamid Keshmirshekan Introduction, editorial matter and selection; © 2019 Hamid Dabashi Individual Chapters

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-919-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-919-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Hamid Keshmirshekan

General Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1Sharjah Art Museum, photo Lucy Rees

1.2Azadeh Akhlaghi, Aras River, Iran – Samad Behrangi/ 3 September 1968, 2012, digital print on photo paper, 110 × 174 cm, courtesy of the artist

2.1Marjane Satrapi, a page from Persepolis 1, 2002

3.1Shirin Neshat, Speechless, 1996, RC print and ink, 118.7 × 86 cm. Copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

4.1Farhad Moshiri, Self-portrait, 2004, courtesy the artist and The Third Line

5.1Shirin Neshat, Untitled, 1996, RC print & ink (photo taken by Larry Barns), 121.6 × 84.5 cm. Copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

6.1Shirin Neshat, Rapture series, 1999, Gelatin silver print, 111.7 × 173.35 cm. Copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

7.1Shirin Neshat, Soliloquy series, 2000, Cibachrome print, 121.9 × 152.4 cm. Copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

7.2Shirin Neshat, The Last Word, 2003, still from the video

8.1Bahman Jalali, Image of Imagination series, 2008, digital print on paper, size varied, private collection, Tehran, courtesy of Rana Javadi

8.2Bahman Jalali, Days of Blood, Days of Fire series, 1979, analogue photo, size varied, artist’s collection, Tehran, courtesy of Rana Javadi

9.1Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Untitled, 9 d series, 2005–6, digital print, 55 × 75 cm, courtesy of artist

9.2Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Untitled, 10 b series, 2005–6, digital print, 55 × 75 cm, courtesy of artist

10.1Ardeshir Mohassess, The king is always above the people, Life in Iran series, 1978, ink on paper, 46 × 60 cm

11.1Shoja Azari, Icon #5, 2010, still from video, video portrait, courtesy of artist

12.1Nicky Nodjoumi, Inspector Scrutiny, 2012, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist and Taymour Grahne

12.2Nahid Haghighat, Shabrang, 1998, mixed media on canvas, 28 × 22 cm, courtesy of the artist

13.1Still from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant), 2002, httpsprojectedperspectives.files.wordpress.com201801mahmutwave_hires

14.1Still from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, 2005, https://3brothersfilm.com/blog/2012/02/medieval-as-modern-the-historical-accuracy-of-kingdom-of-heaven

15.1Still from Zack Snyder’s 300, 2007, http://www.cais-soas.com/ CAIS/Iran/300_movie_seperating_fact_from_fiction.htm

16.1Still from Amir Naderi’s ABC Manhattan, 1997

16.2Still from Amir Naderi’s Sound Barrier, 2005

17.1Poster of Yossef (Joseph) Cedar’s Beaufort, 2007, https://www.fruugo.lu/beaufort-movie-poster-11-x-17/p-9002061-19367234

17.2Still from Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, 2008, https://editorial .rottentomatoes.comgallery28-best-and-worst-r-rated-animated- moviesbashir

17.3Still from Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, 2009, http://dennisamith.com/ wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lebanon-2009-Samuel-Maoz

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank Professor Hamid Dabashi for offering me this opportunity to edit this volume based on his outstanding writings on contemporary art, world cinema, and visual culture. He was also so generous with his time and constant help with providing immediate answers for my questions on the textual materials, and approaching artists for high-quality images of their works to be included in this book.

I am equally grateful to all of the eminent artists whose works I have had the privilege of using in this book. In particular I wish to thank Shirin Neshat, Nicky Nodjoumi, Amir Naderi, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Shoja Azari, Nahid Haghighat, Azadeh Akhlaghi, Farhad Moshiri, the late Bahman Jalali and the late Ardeshir Mohassess for their permission for reproduction of their works, and their respective galleries and estates for their very kind help in obtaining those pictures.

I would like to acknowledge the SOAS, University of London library for providing the online and other resources which were greatly useful in shaping this project.

I should further thank my daughter, Pegah, for providing the format for the cover design of this volume with high competency.

Last but not least I would like to thank Anthem editorial and production team, in particular Tej P. S. Sood, Publisher and Managing Director, for his attention and support, Nisha Vetrivel, the project manager in the Production Department, for her courtesy and consideration and also Abi Pandey in the Editorial Department of Anthem Press.

INTRODUCTION

Hamid Keshmirshekan

I was thrilled when Hamid Dabashi, the cultural critic and scholar of comparative literature, suggested to me if I would be willing to edit a collection of essays on visual, literary and performing arts that he had written over the last quarter of a century and adapt them in a volume. I thought it would certainly be an inspiring experience, and it was indeed in practice. For me it was also an exploratory journey, a process of entering new territorial domains with a wide range of materials and methodological approaches and interdisciplinary strategies. As an art historian whose main preoccupation has been art and material culture of modern and contemporary Iran and the Arab world, it was a process of diving into a new territory of knowledge. I realized how Dabashi’s vast knowledge in historical and contemporary intellectual and artistic practices, Iranian Islamic philosophy, Persian literature, poetry, Arab and Muslim cultural representations, as well as contemporary theories, philosophy, social and political ideologies and public affairs has enabled him to portray an unprecedented critical perspective on artistic practices and their contextual implications.

Dabashi’s pioneering scholarly writings on the subjects of cultural and intellectual history and postcolonial studies through criticism of Orientalism and imperialism are integrated assets in his writings on interpretation of artistic and cinematic materials. This book is in fact based on works of a cultural theorist who extrapolates more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. The main objective of this volume is to open up the horizons of critical thinking about these arts in a manner that we do not have any available source except by leading European or American critics. By putting these scattered materials together in this anthology, an attempt has been made to underline their theoretical and critical logic—something quite unique and effectively nonexistent in the field. Given also the recent move within the global art history—the ongoing debates on the Western-centric art histories and criticism, the struggle for an alternative art historical/critical approach within the transcultural contexts and flows, and the search for new methodological and theoretical practices—this book is indeed a response to this demand. It critically discusses and brings up these issues and concerns with reference to the arts of the Muslim world and beyond.

Dabashi’s everlasting involvement with postcolonial thoughts has allowed him to construct an extraordinary body of theoretical texts that will provide quite a novel angle for art criticism, literary and world cinema studies. The manner in which they inform a particularly critical angle is identified by a system of interpretation based on the legitimate questions about the self-determining subject who is nevertheless politically influential where postcolonial agency plays a central role. Furthermore, as a public intellectual, his writings clearly epitomize his political and social involvement in reference to the recent events and public affairs. This often means that there is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgently global issues of the day.¹

What coheres the chapters of this book together is in fact their reflection of Dabashi’s views on the question of authority, the existing unbalanced and hierarchical subject positions, and their indisputable consequential influence on controlling and determining knowledge and epistemology. He describes how methods and paradigms that were previously thought to be certain and unfailing could now be subject to a radical rethinking and revision. He moreover redefines important issues such as local vis-à-vis international, center vis-à-vis periphery, traditional vis-à-vis contemporary, past vis-à-vis present, classical vis-à-vis modern, north vis-à-vis south, east vis-à-vis west, and how artists, performers, writers, and other cultural agents react in response to these concepts.

One of the core arguments in this volume is directly linked to the point that Dabashi raises in his seminal essay: Can non-Europeans think? What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical ‘pedigree?’ In that essay Dabashi points out that:

The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (deep and far, that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives.²

The central argument embracing the principal theme of the essay, prevalent in this volume too, is how thinkers and artists outside the realm of European (and American) domain could contribute to this world and how they are designated and honored in the age of globalised media.³ He questions why if Mozart sneezes it is named music but at the same time the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of ‘ethnomusicology’⁴ (the same way that African philosophy is named ethnophilosophy)? He continues by saying that

The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America—counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself the West but happily no more.⁵

He maintains that in this globalized world, the Arab and Muslim world in particular is experiencing historic changes resulting in the formation of thinkers, poets and artists whose political imagination and thoughts are at the same time domestic to their immediate geography and yet global in its consequences.⁶

One of the other critical points shining in this volume is Dabashi’s position versus Who Watches the Watchers?, an expression usually used in the domain of political institutions safeguarding the abuse of power.⁷ He raises this important question in ration to the exhibitions affiliated to the theme of Islamic art representing the Muslim and/or Arab identity even though the artists are expected to break away from the tradition of Islamic art. Dabashi argues against the idea of the category of contemporary Islamic Art. He rightly maintains that this is an Orientalist creation to expand upon a former category—Arabic Art—with the intention of accommodating a larger frame of reference. He suggests that such curatorial decisions along with exhibited items reveal anxieties integral to European and American metropolis. The identifiable themes of these exhibitions surround the issues of conflicting identity—national, regional, civilizational and in particular distinguishing presumption between who governs the autonomous subject position as spectator and what the subservient spectacle is.⁸

This anthology is based on my selection from essays that Dabashi has written on the subject of contemporary art, world cinema, and visual culture many of them have already appeared in different venues. However, they have been adapted in this book consistent with their thematic connection and their contents. The main criterion of this selection is based on their theoretical integration with the subjects of contemporary art criticism and world cinema. Some of the online materials, typically shorter than the essays that have encompassed in this book, although addressing crucial issues, have not been used here mainly because of their availability and on occasions their different format from the academic structural preference of this volume. The organization of this book is based on three main sections, each comprising chapters with associated themes or media, mainly visual arts and cinema.

The first section, Theorizing the Frame, starts with a chapter that addresses the representation of trauma, memory and history in contemporary art of the Muslim world. Dabashi argues that on certain historic junctures of traumas, the metanarrative of Europe and European existence comes to share the traumas of the rest of the world, such as the violence resulting from colonialism. He further proposes that any categorical definition such as regional or global discourses (which are supposed to affect art practices) is already embedded in the other two opposing designation of local versus universal. It would at the same time connote the first as the subaltern, the rest, and under the shadow of the second that is progressive and global, here referring to the art productions in Western Europe and North America. Dabashi suggests that this inherited colonial geography and categorization should now be pulled apart, not just because of what is called the globalization process, but what is being experienced—socially and politically—during recent times in the colonially constituted the Middle East and Muslim world and its reflection in the rest of the world. He maintains that one should avoid seeing contemporary art of this region—like all the other artistic productions in Asia, Africa or Latin America—in the shadow of Western European or North American canonization of identical art. He believes the curatorial policies applied in the exhibitions, museums and biennales in Europe and America have played key roles in stereotyping and defining the binary in accord with organizational preference, one that can only conceive artists from outside the canon portraying these framed imaginations. Dabashi rightly continues by saying that this is an epistemic issue and not related to the identity politics. Those curators and theorists continue portraying the colonial imaginary of the Middle East in the definite frames of references in the exhibitions. The connection of three strands of trauma, memory and history that he suggests in this chapter is proposed as a frame of referential contents to think of alternative approach for curatorial and theoretical strategies when framing the contemporaneity of the art from those disappearing borders that can rarely be affiliated to a regional identity. He maintains that artwork should be seen as ruins, fragments, traces and captured allegories of the emerging world. This work of art that testifies to the contemporary world and historic changes should be taken away from their systemic appropriation into outdated museums, cyclical biennales, and passively or actively commodified curatorial practices. Works of art must be realized as fragments, as ruins and consequently as allegories, which inevitably involve in their traumatic memories, he suggests.

The second chapter, Récit de l’Exil Occidental, deals with artistic and literary productions—both historical and contemporary—on the subject of autobiography; Iranian women’s autobiographical narratives in the United States and Europe, in particular the post-9/11 aftermaths, and provides comparison accounts of various artistic and literary genres. It examines autobiographical literature written in English by young Iranian women living in the United States or Europe. Dabashi argues that the theme of representation has become a problematic subject in the narrative and pictorial accounts of Iranian women. He raises the question of who is representing whom and draws our attention to the inevitable range of social and economic forces that have separated the representation from the representing. He examines Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah series where Neshat pictures herself as the subject and, although some of the photographs have been inspired by journalistic images, her work is seen as skillfully independent stylized depictions. Therefore, although they are autobiographical, they are exceedingly formalized and aesthetically sublated visual vocabulary. These works are both autobiographical and they are not. Dabashi argues that these photographs effectively took the autobiographical images of a nation at large and heavily stylized, edited, and choreographed them, sublated them into the creative elements of a highly aestheticized visual lyricism.⁹ Finally, he concludes that Neshat presents nothing and portrays no particular person, but applies visual vocabulary of a cultural environment as representative of her artistic preoccupation.

Providing a full historical account of a number of literary and intellectual figures in Islamic Iranian history, in this chapter Dabashi argues that two consistent circumstances gave rise to the importance of visual and narrative representation of Iranian women in the United States: first the exceeding number of middle-class Iranian emigrants who left Iran after the Islamic revolution and second the global reflection of these depictions in English published in the United States.

In the second part of this chapter, Dabashi examines Marjan Satrapi’s Persepolis and how she approaches the language and classifies concepts such as traditionalist and Western women. He maintains that in Satrapi’s books the dialectic between local stories that she narrates and the global audience to whom she addresses is simulated by the dialectic between her shared verbal and visual language. Her verbal language is fluent and vernacular to the English speaking audience, but her pictures preserve much less idiomatic.

In the next chapter, Women without Headaches, Dabashi looks into Neshat’s work and its highly responded place in the Euro-American art scene. He criticizes the overpoliticized reception of Neshat’s art and views it through merely the politics of her aesthetics. He argues that in the globalized world where the aesthetic parameters of art are evolving criteria, the continuous psycho-semiotics of the outdated and fixed divisions between Islam and the West or The East and the West cause more complication. Dabashi furthers this argument through the examples of international art exhibitions and in particular the ephemerality of contemporary art biennales. He maintains that these events are indicative of the changing shape of a homeless aesthetics that does not belong to any particular world. It should instead be imaginatively settled. The author also criticizes the exhibitions in the United States based on a troubled imagination of the post-9/11 syndrome where the labels such as Arab or Muslim artists are used. He suggests that contemporary art should be read through bifocal lenses, meaning local and global, native and universal, emotional and memorial layers should be seen together. Contemporaneity unfolds its meaning only when this reading of art is established.

Section 2 examines the aforementioned themes by a set of case studies in Visual Arts and Material Culture. In Artists without Borders: On Contemporary Iranian Art, Dabashi provides a critical account of the exhibition on contemporary Iranian art at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, entitled Contemporary Positions of Iranian artists (2004) in Berlin. He theorizes the subject of ethnic-oriented perspectives. He argues that Haus der Kulturen der Welt is based on the concept of the world, which is essential, not multiple, and it is intrinsically always already somewhere else. The catalogue of the exhibition reveals the spatial politics of curating, the distancing stratagems un/consciously evident in placing a work of art from a place like Iran in its right place. Dabashi raises the questions of where exactly the right place is for a work of art originating from a place like Iran. Dabashi further continues by arguing that the spatial politics of curating manifested in the exhibition’s title (Far Near Distance) is based on an old metaphor: "they are there, while we are here; they are exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous, while we are all the opposites of the exotic, fascinating, and (above all) dangerous."¹⁰ Dabashi points out that the exhibition demonstrates the fundamental problem one would face in perceiving the artistic production of a country like Iran: at the same time designated and dismissed. The main issue for criticism is in its geopolitics of distancing, the paradox of its alienation (Verfremdung) with the aim of making sense of something by making it senseless—catapulted beyond the pale of the Same and cast into the realm of the Other.¹¹ Dabashi warns us about the danger of ethnicization and exoticization of culture at the very moment when the Euro-American museums and galleries are in quest for humanization of art. He argues that the main task of the comprador curators as native informers is to act as the channel of a lengthy act of representation, because the assumption of the exotic, the attractive and in particular the dangerous on part of the directors of museums and biennales remains to frame and deform works of art with diverse characters. Accordingly, what is labeled encounter is in effect, even if paradoxically, an act of estrangement, a weird illustration of fetishization, where the earlier colonial and the existing imperial fantasy does not identify its own deed. He concludes this chapter by arguing that

The collapse of territorial claims on artistic creation, and the radical contemporaneity of its production and reception have given a critical significance to the makeshift location in which a work of art is exhibited—with the contingent fact that the dismantling of a work of art from one location and re-assembling it in another will have a categorical significance in its aesthetic experience.¹²

The Gun and the Gaze: Shirin Neshat’s Photography examines Neshat’s photography through a postcolonial lens and explores it in relation to the Iranian society. Dabashi in this chapter maintains that Neshat’s art captures both the tragic and the comedy of a body influenced by the logic of a transition from the premodern to the postmodern, the colonial to postcolonial, all through the captivated power of a gun and gaze, violence and sensuality. He believes that a central theme in Neshat’s photography is providing a transitional site where patriarchy and coloniality are reconstructions that work against each other. Her returning gaze mesmerizes the patriarchal and the colonial by setting them in opposition. Dabashi also argues that Neshat’s photography acts as the iconic index of modernity when one’s body is denied her but at the same time is used and abused to mark the metaphysical claims of tradition vs. modernity.

Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence looks at her art in relation to feminine gaze and body and argues that her work is glocal. In this chapter Dabashi examines the critiques raised about her art, by both global audience and local critics, arguing that her global audience fails to understand the locality of her references represented in elements such as ritual veiling, calligraphic poetry and Persian music. Neshat is criticized by the local critics as aestheticizing and celebrating of what she is supposed to be condemning and undermining. By providing her Western Audience with the over-Orientalized version of their imagined truth, she is also accused of supplying the provocative supplies for them. However, Dabashi argues that these kinds of criticisms are misleading and are based on an invalid identitarian politics that tries to portray a static world to the East and a creative world to the West of Neshat’s logistics. He points out that her local audience fails to reconfigure the binary ideas between tradition and modernity or Islam and the West.

Dabashi further examines the concept of body and its relation to the historical Islamic Iranian sources and Islamic philosophy, and their association with Neshat’s videos and the concept of dialogue of civilizations. He maintains that Neshat’s art stimulates the definite bordercrossing that represent a moving strategy of bodily resurrection in contrast to the tyranny of cultures and the limitation of their national identity. This feature signifies an active provocation of cultural globalization. Dabashi concludes that the performative presence of Neshat’s work should not be linked to self-Orientalization, but this feature is constitutional to the actual act of bordercrossing that she must take the culturally private to the globally public.

In continuation of the above chapter, in the next chapter, Shirin Neshat: Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography, Dabashi analyzes Neshat’s body of work through her biographical account. He maintains that after Neshat became more established in New York and more known internationally as an artist, her native country, Iran, and its political concerns were not her direct question any longer. The dominant themes and aesthetical concerns changed to more universal themes. Her art is now integrated to a manner of transaesthetics, associating with a globalized susceptibility to describe the beautiful and the sublime. Dabashi believes that the most particular feature of Neshat’s work is that it is at the same time diagnostic and therapeutic. It is diagnostic because it demonstrates symptoms of the dread of threatening Islam and is therapeutic since her work offers a reading that would relieve the anxiety of the world she is referring to. Another specific feature of her art is offering a successful synthesis of piety and eroticism. This subversive association is articulated in the poetic character inspired by her Iranian heritage, particularly in Persian poetry, what Dabashi calls its strong theo-erotic disposition. Therefore, the main challenge posed by Neshat’s body of work is indeed situated in the juncture where the historical world meets its aestheticized version.

In the next chapter, Dabashi examines the Iranian photographer, Bahman Jalali’s life and work and the parallels in literary modernity in Iran. The author maintains that during more than three decades Jalali’s prolific artistic output together with his constant attempt as a curator, historian and collector have been indeed an inspirational source to the new generations. His pioneering photographic projects visually represent his nation’s encounter with colonial modernity. His photographic projects from revolutionary days, reminiscent of Iranian people’s suppressed wishes, to the Iran–Iraq bloody war’s scenes capture the illusions and visions that mark the possible and credible reality of humanity. Dabashi concludes that Jalali’s art at the same time depicts a complicated vision of Iranian experience with colonial modernity and represents a variety of visual regimes that have constituted the Iranian modernity. What are marked obvious throughout his photographic memory are the vigorous records of a visual modernity coeval with a national narrative rooted from Iranian collective consciousness.

In the subsequent chapter Dabashi analyzes Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s artworks with their contextualization in association with his Palestinian background. He theorizes his photography within the framework of Roland Barthes’s theory of Studium and Punctum. Borrowing the two conflating semiotic turfs of studium signifying the cultural constituent of the photograph (from linguistic to political) and punctum marking the personal (from memorial to emotional) from Barthes in the making of a photographic message, Dabashi argues that in Al-Ghoussein’s photography both of these mechanisms collapse into each other. In this process, the personal changes into public, and the individually commemorative becomes collectively memorial. The author believes that this is a common destiny for art affiliated to Palestinian. He further maintains that there is a sense of public mourning about Al-Ghoussein’s photography of a wall-enclosed, caged-in Palestine that he cannot (but) claim and call home—a premonitory set of images in which he at once announces the photographic memory of his homeland (making it possible for the whole world to see) and mourns the fact that he can no longer see it.¹³ Dabashi concludes the chapter by saying that Al-Ghoussein’s art unifies art and politics, home and natural surroundings, private imagination and civic images. It merges formal aesthetics with the political while barring the usual political in order to overcome the individuality of his art.

The chapter Ardeshir Mohassess, Etcetera consists of biographical account with an emphasis on the political setting during Mohassess’s life. Dabashi examines the Iranian poet Esmail Kho’i’s writing and conversation with Mohassess: typifying the verbal versus the visual. He states that morality and aesthetic modernity are key features of Mohassess’s visual vocabulary. His critical awareness is represented by a democratic vision that is inclusive of all different beliefs. The artist’s visual vocabulary is profoundly implanted in the syntax and morphology of visual modernity without which his art cannot be read appropriately. Dabashi maintains that Mohassess’s work created during his stay in the United States should be placed along with his earlier work criticizing the tyranny during the Qajar, Pahlavi and postrevolutionary periods. His condemning pictures against US imperialism are in fact the logical conclusion of his earlier work criticizing totalitarianisms in his native country.

In Shoja Azari: Making the Homely Unhomely Dabashi explores two series of the artist’s work in 2010: The Day of Resurrection and The Iconic, and their interpretation in both religious and secular contexts. He provides a psychological reading of the works with application of Freudian and Brecht theoretical accounts. Dabashi explains how Azari in these two series refers both formally and thematically to two grand artistic traditions in Iran and Shi’ism, namely coffee-house painting and Ta’ziye, in order to address the political pain and tyranny, hope and fears that his homeland has to experience in recent history. These images are the most socially committed and politically involved works by the artist designed to be disturbing and at the same time lively and full of vitality, all representing his personal position today. Dabashi argues that The Day of Resurrection and The Iconic series formally depict rethinking and reforming the "locus classicus of Shi’ism in visual modernity. In these works Azari does not transform or change the iconic characteristics of those old sources, but rather re-signifies" them in order to portray new emotional and more importantly political histories.

Nicky Nodjoumi, Nahid Haghighat: Liberating Fragments against Totalizing Myths deals with the works of the two contemporary artists. Dabashi’s main aim is to show how these artists visually turn the ruins of old and contemporary empires into allegories of rebellion. He argues that their art is fragmentary, flourishing from ruins and debris and is therefore allegorical. What is more important in this allegorical mimicry is the archeology of their postnational revolt against the aesthetic provincialism of their spectators rather than the genealogy of their individual art. Dabashi further maintains that Nodjoumi’s visual demonstration assumes the universality of a nightmare without marking any cultural identity. Haghighat’s work, however, reveals memories of a destroyed history, a tortured and repressed culture.

Section 3: World Cinema and Performing Art starts with a chapter entitled The Sublime and the Beautiful in the Time of Terror. It looks into Turkey’s desire to be a part of the European Union and examines its paradoxes through postcolonial critique of the situation. It deals with Kant’s definition of the Orientals and its representation by the world cinema. It also examines European/Western philosophers’ thoughts toward the connotation of West and Orient in art and cinema. Dabashi questions those philosophical frameworks in regard to aesthetic definition and the need to resist against them. He further examines the film Uzak (Distant) by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and shows how the film questions the reductive notions of East or West and their geographical imaginary. He argues that the discussion about accommodating Turkey in the EU is the indicative mark of the end of the West and the beginning of intercontinental changes in the moral imaginary of the planet at large. Dabashi argues that Ceylan’s cinema directs our attention to a new perception about what is sublime and beautiful, enabling and emancipatory by placing an ordinary character in an ordinary cosmopolis. He concludes that for the emergence of a materialistic notion of the sublime and the beautiful, one needs to start with cosmopolitan axis of current materialistic locations such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Mumbai, Tokyo, Beijing—where there are a lot about the sense of beautiful and the site of the sublime to demonstrate to the world—and only then move to Paris, London, Berlin and Rome via the subaltern tensions of their marginalized communities.

In Warriors of Faith Dabashi presents his personal experience with Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, a film based on the events of the late 12th century, during the years between the Second and Third Crusades. He examines the two contradictory articles by European historians about the film, both criticizing the film before it was even produced. The main point common in both articles is the criticism that the film supplies Islamic fundamentalism and promotes a particular account of history that only dictators and terrorists such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would approve. Dabashi, however, believes that Kingdom of Heaven does not overlook the fears of history and is persistent in uncovering betrayal and avarice from all sides. Borrowing Derridean term, he maintains that the film pursues to withdraw the pharmakon of healing from the poison of history where the actual cruelties occur. Scott’s film, Dabashi elucidates, does not provoke ferocity or violence, but reconceives the Crusades through illuminating shared characteristics of humankind.

In the following chapter, The ‘300’ Stroke, Dabashi examines Zack Snyder’s film 300 (2007). Through a postcolonial reading of the film, he argues that it visualizes the myth of the West as the Christian God’s gift to humanity. He maintains that ‘300’ is just a bodybuilders’ wet-dream version of a foundational myth, of how ‘the West’ began. He further elaborates on this idea in more detail about the film and its formal and conceptual features. Analyzing the central concept that the film is trying to visualize, Dabashi explains how the ever more ahistorical implication of the clashes between the Ancient Greeks and the Achaemenid Empire parallels directly with the development of European colonialism and its attendant self-conception of the West as the broad heading under which Europeans launched their global conquest. He further explains how 300 is contributing in the depiction of the juvenile criminality of the US Empire and American imperialism. By presenting a comic-book-like image of the war and violence, the film portrays an illusionary empire and fantasy of a deadly real world, avoiding any indication about ideological or political principle that has made these violent acts of killing innocent people around the world justifiable.

Amir Naderi’s New York is about Naderi and the narrative of his character and life in New York, Manhattan. It examines some of his films and how Naderi and New York are affiliated to each other. Dabashi interestingly traces the astonishing relation of Naderi’s physical presence in New York to the visual characteristics of his art. He argues that physicality, visuality and aesthetics are the main features in Naderi’s films and photography. For Naderi to make these features work, he has increasingly avoided any political reaction to his location. Although he lives in New York and is eventually involved in such political interference as immigration, exile or colonialism, he has deliberately detached himself from them. Instead his attachment to the city is physically resonated in postindustrial machinery, buildings and streets. Dabashi further points out that this abstract visualization of the world through defamiliarizing the familiar and depicting its internal anguish is deliberate and decisive. This quality makes Naderi’s cinema visually complex and thoughtfully poetic.

The last chapter of this book, A Deadly Cinematic Subconscious, examines Israeli war films and how the concept of war has been depicted through three case studies: Yossef (Joseph) Cedar’s Beaufort (2007), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009). Dabashi shows how the narratives and images in these films depict the visual records and cinematic subconscious of the state of Israel. For example, the main characters of these films carry a surrounded soul detained inside an imprisoned body rushed forever into the center of a killing machine, beyond human reach. He maintains that Israeli films like Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon could be remarkably optimistic marks that expose and warn the fragile humanity behind the killing machine to the world, including Israel. They portray the positive signs of a society when it ultimately came to realize not what it has been doing to others but what it has done to itself.

On the whole, the overarching theme that holds the texts together in this book is how contemporary arts could posit in the wider scope of culture and political power relations. The texts allow us to understand the consolidation of hegemonic colonial discourses and how they continue to influence our vision today. The chapters represent a set of intellectual contributions to presenting a radical examination of art and material culture. This collection of writings is categorically a significant and transformative addition to both postcolonial studies and art criticism, and their methodological foundations and approaches.

¹ http://hamiddabashi.com/the-world-is-my-home-a-hamid-dabashi-reader/ . Accessed August 2018.

² Hamid Dabashi, Can non-Europeans think? What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical ‘pedigree’? https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html/ . Accessed August 2018.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ See Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes: Who Watches the Watchers?, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication , 1 (1): 24–29.

⁸ Ibid., 25.

⁹ See Récit de l’Exil Occidental in this volume.

¹⁰ See Artists without Borders: On Contemporary Iranian Art in this volume.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ See Tarek Al-Ghoussein Does Not Exist in this volume.

Section 1

THEORIZING THE FRAME

Chapter One

TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND HISTORY*

Let us recall the conversation between a Japanese person and an Inquirer in Heidegger’s On the Way to Language where Heidegger himself appears as the Inquirer and engages in a conversation with his Japanese interlocutor. The conversation begins with a recollection of Count Shuzo Kuki who had studied with Heidegger. Count Kuki is now dead and the Japanese interlocutor tells Heidegger how his Japanese student had devoted himself to reflection on what Japanese call Iki. Heidegger says he recalls conversation with Kuki about that word but he was not sure what it meant. The Japanese interlocutor then says that once Count Kuki had come to Japan he had tried to consider the nature of Japanese art with the help of European aesthetics. Heidegger is skeptical if this is at all possible, while the Japanese interlocutor says why not, to which Heidegger responds: the name aesthetics and what it names grows out of European thinking, out of philosophy. Consequently aesthetic considerations must remain alien to Eastasian thinking.¹

Philosophy

Let me take that conversation now into a different direction, banking on that nearly impossible inhibition, and shift the question to the applicability of not just what Heidegger calls aesthetic consideration that must remain alien to Eastasian thinking and thus art. That moment of critical intimacy between Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor is infinitely superior and path breaking to a moment a couple of hundred years earlier when in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763) Kant had no other word for Indian art except grotesque and grotesquery.²

In a world of radical and transformative change, that condition that Heidegger calls nearly impossible must be jettisoned in the directions of European ruptures, abandoning its delusional phases of metaphysical certainties about itself—ruptures spreading all over the European history, all the way from Thrasymachus to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gramsci, Benjamin and Bakhtin. Away from any systematic consideration of European thinking or aesthetics, but when that thinking and aesthetic has met its own moments of rupture and implosion—predicated upon its own traumas.

On those momentous occasions of traumas, the metanarrative of Europe and European existence comes to share the traumas of the rest of the world—as Aimé Césaire, for example, argued how the European Holocaust and the structural violence of colonialism share a common thread. The categories of regional and global discourses in our understanding of contemporary art already beg the larger question that is embedded in the two opposite end of these two designation—namely local and universal. That universal has been the prerogative of art as produced in Western Europe and North America—and their extended shadow upon the world they call the Rest. Not just under the condition we call globalization but more importantly because of the massive democratic uprisings we witness from the area and Muslim world into the heart of Europe, our inherited colonial geography and its implicit categorization of universal and regional is now irrevocably dismantled. From curatorial practices to academic discourses the constitution of the contemporary art is either explicitly or implicitly performed under the shadow of the delusion that has violently termed itself the West and subjected the world to the status of the rest.

Terms such as Middle East, contemporary or modern art or disciplinary formations such as departments of art history, namely the very tropes that are to guide our reading of this particular constellation of art, are themselves the most basic, the most flagrant, traps that thinking about these artistic expressions pose. The very designation of this conference³ that is to include the international body of art theorists and historians, together with regional scholars and professionals in the field, already exposes the problems we face. Who is an international art theorist and historian, and by what authority, and how are we to distinguish them from regional scholars and professionals?

Contemporary art in the areas colonially constituted as the Middle East are as old as any another region of the world—and yet like any other art produced in any other parts of Asia, Africa, or Latin America it is seen in the shadow of Western European and North American understanding, canonization, and theorization of the selfsame art. Chiefly responsible for this subjugation are the curatorial policies of art museums and biennales who have to sell their ideas to directorial decisions that cannot imagine an African, an Asian, or a Latin American to picture vision of the world outside the purview of his or her own imagination—these arts can only be seen as the flawed, distorted, no matter how excellent still a bit offbeat version of the audacity of the Western original.

Theorization of the art from the Arab and Muslim world, from the West Asian and North African nations that have all been cast under the colonial shadow of the term Middle East has finally reached or perhaps even crossed the line when it must be once and for all liberated from a curatorial and art historical frame of reference almost entirely framed in North American and Western European epistemic prejudices that calls itself the West and in which most of these exhibitions and perforce conferences are organized.

The issue for us is entirely epistemic and not in the domain of identity politics. Curators and theorists carrying an Arab or Muslim patronymic are not in any way shape or form exempt from continuing the colonial imaginary of the Middle East into the categorical and curatorial decisions they make in how to frame their next exhibition. The fabrication of liminal spaces is not equally inadequate to place these arts in the no-man’s-land of cross border identities, nor is the assumption of postcolonial nation-states any longer sufficient.

Terms such as modern or modernity are not sufficient either—not because modernity in its colonial gestation has had no impact on the art of the world at large, but because the trauma of capitalist modernity with all its calamities and efficacies was far more global than merely European, and thus the Europeanization of the project is precisely the axe we need to grind in the context of our contemporary history.

There is also much housekeeping that needs to be done on the postcolonial side of the divide. By giving the primacy agency to knowledge production of the European project of orientalism and not to the mode and manners of discursive and aesthetic resistance to imperialism (Said), by questioning the ability of the subaltern even to speak in a European language of agency and subjection let alone to sing and dance and paint and photograph (Spivak), by entrapping the fate of the postcolonial subject to the meager domain of liminality (Bhabha), what all these Europeanists have ultimately done is not to provincialize Europe but in fact to recapitalize and recenter Europe as the center of universe. It is not accidental that almost without any exception most of these postcolonial theorists are in fact housed in the department of English and what they call comparative literature.

Beginning with Orientalism, the shift to the European site and its manners of representation became the theoretical foci of an entire generation of scholarship—neither of these two thrust—Europe or its representations—having anything to do with the world that these Europeans had sought to dominate but failed precisely because the range and reach of those representations were far too limited. All the while, the world was producing, speaking, singing, dancing, painting, and photographing—but both the myth of the West and those mystified by it could scarcely see or hear or even imagine that world except through either European mimesis or the critic of the European mimesis.

The task is no longer a critique of European representation, but a critical grasp of the manner of non-Western subjection, agential historicity in worlding a map for the longest time covered and glossed over by the singularity of the Western world that either by imperialism or by the critique of that imperialism keeps inscribing itself upon not just the older maps but the ones waiting to surface.

These works of art have been the visual and aesthetic vanguards of the emerging world that cry for self-consciousness, and yet their curatorial condemnation into the cul-de-sac of the horrid colonial legacy of the Middle East keeps categorizing them in the compromising context of a politics of location precisely at the sublime moments of their defiance—and then a band of postcolonial theorists from Bengal keep regurgitating the postcolonial condition, and the impossibility of the subaltern speaking, and the liminality of their space and thus while they talk about provincializing Europe they in fact recapitalize it as the center of universe. Argument to provincialize Europe in fact continues to universalize Europe in critical terms, fetishize its particularity beyond history, as if there is anything different about European imperialism of today than myriad of other imperial formation one to twenty centuries earlier. All empires produced knowledge in a manner that serves their interests. Abbasids did the same as did the Sassanids or the Romans, or the Seljuqs, the Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals, the Ottomans. The radically present and ahistorical disputation of literary critiques who theorize the condition of postcoloniality or their vantage point from the defeated position of the Mughal Empire and the might of British imperialism may in part explain this ahistorical privileging of European imperialism and its particular mode of knowledge production. The critic of this particular empire and its mood of knowledge production must be done in comparative historical terms so that Europe is neither demonized nor beholden, neither fetishized nor sought to be provincialized.

The transversal intersections of the three leitmotifs of trauma, memory, and history that I have suggested in my title I propose as a preliminary frame of reference for us to begin to think of alternative manners of curating and theorizing the contemporaneity of the art that comes to us from the inside of those vanishing borders that can scarcely hold them to any national or regional identity.

Theory

I began this reflection where Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor had left off about the impossibility of where Asia and Europe could possible meet—aesthetically. Let me now continue with a different path that Walter Mignolo saw opening at the Sharjah Biennial 11 (SB11) in an essay he published on May 8, 2013:

In this fair-haired age of Biennials, Triennials and Quinquennials, there is an anxiety to be the newest and a fear of being behind on the latest artistic and aesthetic theories. It is refreshing and empowering to have a biennial exhibition like the Sharjah Biennial, which turns its back on the intellectual Euro-American fashions that have dominated, until recently, the -ennial market place. Sharjah Biennial 11 drastically deviates our attention from this codification in such events and forces us to revise our assumptions about what art is, what Biennials are, and what cultural cartographies we have been accustomed to until now. Sharjah Biennial 11 undeniably achieved what most events that mark a turning point generally accomplish—it announced the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us an other conceptual and historical narrative. Re: emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography opens up the silenced and marginalized creativity of the Global South and Global East. What has been announced with Sharjah Biennial 11 is nothing less than the end of an illusion of the successful fiction of western modernity from the European Renaissance through to the European Enlightenment right through to the end of the twentieth century.⁴

Figure 1.1 Sharjah Art Museum, photo Lucy Rees.

The key question, of course, is how to read what Mignolo rightly terms: the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us ‘an other’ conceptual and historical narrative. His very encouraging reading of the Sharjah Biennial 11 is: when the biennial as an institution moved from western Europe—where it originated—to the Middle East, the result was not an imitation nor was it indicative of a desire to have in the Middle East what Europe had. On the contrary, it was to appropriate the form of the biennial to do what it was not doing in Europe: open spaces for artists, memories, cultures, languages, sensing and knowledge to come together beyond Europe. I read Mignolo’s magnificent essay less as what has actually happened and more as a map of what is to come. For as he knows very well, the changing center of the globalized capital from London or Paris or New York to Sharjah does not mean the cultural or artistic accouterment of power is going immediately to change course, without a necessary critical intervention of the sort for which he in fact is a perfect example.

On that particular path, where Mignolo’s assessment can begin to mean beyond any politics of location, the creative intersection where an artist attends to historical events and visually remembers them anew inevitably provokes the traumas that have constituted a collective subconscious. In visual and performing arts from West Asia and North Africa there are numerous occasions when the artists attend to these traumatic moments in a manner that restores and digs out new meaning and significance to them. The affective history of these aesthetic experiences of national traumas works through the collective recollections of the uncanny—as read from Nietzsche and Jentsch to Freud—when and where the familiar is made foreign by bringing it up close for a visual or performative encounter. These traumatic experiences in contemporary art have two complementary effects: first they posit the traumatic art as contemporary by way of a delayed remembrance and thereby historicizing its own past, and second by permanently investing the present with a past it can only forget at the cost of aborting its own agency. The now of this time is always already delayed and the appellation of contemporary to it something memorial.

To bring all the traumatic moments of contemporary history evidenced in the works of art they have produced together, we need (first and foremost) metaphorically to take them all out of their museumizing and curatorial trajectories and begin to look at them anew as the fragments and allegories of something beyond their aggressive commodification in the contemporary art industry. Here Eisenstein and Benjamin come