Archive for category: Visual Arts

Aleš Erjavec

Source: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/

Abstract
The author discusses “artification” and attempts to ascertain whether some common features can be found between artification and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics, especially his notion of the “aesthetic regime of art.” The author argues that Rancière’s project of “art become life” can be employed as a common denominator of both theoretical frameworks, that of artification and that of the aesthetic regime of art. Nonetheless, the art to which Rancière’s notion primarily applies is different from art in the traditional sense, which seems to form the empirical basis of the notion of artification.

Key Words

aesthetic regime of art, “art become life,” artification, art-like, play

1. Introduction

This article is divided into three parts. I first discuss “artification” and some issues arising from and around this term, and then present Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “aesthetic regime of art” and some related themes. Finally, I bring together artification and the aesthetic regime of art in order to ascertain whether we can find some common conceptual and theoretical terrain, or at least some compatibility, between them or only dissimilarity and incompatibility. In this closing part, I also discuss whether the two notions, in spite of what appear to be insurmountable differences, are, or could be, of significance to each other and to the theoretical framework supporting each of them, or that they arise from completely different theoretical and even practical positions, suppositions, and dispositions, and therefore do not have anything in common.

Before I dwell on these issues, let me explain that my frame of reference will be both recent (modernist) and contemporary art, the main feature of which appears to be indeterminacy of its expressive, creative, institutional, and aesthetic attributes. At the same time, this is also art that, in its post-colonial instances, is a formation and creation of nineteenth-century European culture and its emerging social and cultural institutions. The two pivotal but opposed philosophical authors articulating this strand of thought on art and its philosophical reflection are, of course, Kant and Hegel. Contemporary art furthermore encompasses non-European art. An unlikely aesthetic source, André Malraux, observed in 1957 that around 1900 Europeans ceased to regard “primitive” artifacts as ethnographic curiosities and began to look at them as “art”:

The metamorphosis of the past was first a metamorphosis of seeing. Without an aesthetic revolution, the sculpture of ancient epochs, mosaics, and stained glass windows would never have joined the painting of the Renaissance and the great monarchies; no matter how vast they might have become, ethnographic collections would never have surmounted the barrier that separated them from art museums.[1]

This signifies that since at least a century ago, Western art, together with its indigenous and non-Western similes, has been preparing the stage for the current situation, where all forms and instances of art coexist within a myriad of art worlds. These art worlds themselves exist and coexist in a temporal and cultural flux in which only the general term ‘art’ retains its permanence. Today, once a work is designated as art, it hardly ever loses this designation. This then means that an enormous, universally acclaimed although perhaps also ignored archive of past art exists in various art and culture institutions. At the same time, contemporary and recent art exists in our perception as “art,” but is devoid of the same artistic permanence that traditional (representational) art has enjoyed. In contemporary art, it is increasingly the “process,” or the “event” of the artistic act, including its contextual placement, that makes a work into a work of art. In contemporary art, modern and contemporary aesthetic and artistic criteria apply.

Therefore, the perception today is that we may no longer speak of the aesthetic experience of art but of an overlapping aesthetic and artistic experience, with the “artistic” being essentially linked to “political, moral, and ethical judgments [that] have come to fill the vacuum of aesthetic judgment in a way that was unthinkable forty years ago.”[2]

2. Artification

Let me turn to artification. If I understand the term correctly, ‘artification’ covers the broad terrain of artifacts, events, and processes that are initially not regarded as art but may acquire such designation, to a greater or smaller degree, at a later time by appropriating or acquiring some art-like features. This, I hope, at least partly sums up Ossi Naukkarinen’s and Yuriko Saito’s description of the term in the introduction to this volume. They write: “The neologism refers to situations and processes in which something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word is changed into something art-like or into something that takes influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing.”[3]

This programmatic description raises three interrelated issues:
(a) The first (to which I will return in the third part of this essay) concerns “art in the traditional sense.” In my view, this is essentially or primarily art that can be recognized as such, that is, representational art. This may mean that the term does not include art that is non-representational, and most certainly not art that is art only in its “becoming,” in the sense that it is attempting to broaden the existing agreement and understanding of what counts as art. Here I am referring to art that is still attempting to be recognized as art in the institutional sense. It seems that the phrase “art in the traditional sense” intends to limit art primarily to institutional art so as to avoid situations where just about anything could be regarded as art.

My dissenting opinion would be that what is interesting in art is precisely the “excess” of art in its becoming art, in contrast with art that is already art and has been assimilated into the institution called “art.” This idea is also the dominant position of any avant-garde art, be it that of the classical avant-gardes or neo-avant-gardes, with the theory of the avant-garde of Peter Bürger in his Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), along with that of Jean-François Lyotard. These represent perhaps the most obvious instances of philosophical theory highlighting the nature of such “becoming” and the transformation of non-art into art. This tradition, or project, emerged first with anarchism and then continued in the avant-garde activities of the twentieth century. Accordingly, a “theorist of anarchism understands art as an experience. . . . He struggles for a spontaneous ‘art en situation’ that depends on the moment and place (Proudhon).”[4]

An important strand of the philosophy of art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus interprets art as authentically art only as long as it is still striving to attain the status of art, thus paradoxically losing its nature of authentic art once it is relegated into the cultural archive called the museum and art history. Or in anarchist terms and later avant-garde ones, “The artistic act is more important than the work itself.”[5]

(b) Contemporary art is most frequently not concerned with the intentions of the artist. A work, just like any commodity, acquires its own life and intent, which is why the import of a work is on the side of consumption and not creation/production. If some of the crucial questions of art fifty years ago were, “What does the work mean?” and “What did the artist/author with his/her work intend to say?,” then after the death of the artist or author and the deconstruction of his or her status as a Cartesian subject, such issues seem to have become redundant, also due to numerous other poststructuralist and postmodern claims. It is now as if the work itself speaks. If this was not the predominant case today, then the issue of artification would be best qualified as an issue about creation/production as approached and (re)solved by various theories of creativity linked to anthropological Marxism, on the one hand, and to the tradition of la poïétique as developed half a century ago by the French theorist and artist René Passeron, on the other.

We find ourselves now in the middle of the second issue that emerges from the description of artification as related to the “influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing.” In the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, creation was essentially represented by art and thus was opposed to repetitive and non-creative manual work associated with the industrial epoch. Today we no longer regard art as an exclusive or paramount form of creativity; with the development of the post-industrial society and its individualized forms of work, the issue of creativity has, at least for the time being, lost much of its relevance. This, of course, does not relate to “art in the traditional sense of the word,” which retains its nature and, it has to be underlined, import for society. I want to note here the important but often insufficiently known successful efforts and practices in Finland to integrate art into education and art education into a general project of human well-being.

The presupposition emerging from the programmatic description of artification described above is that “artistic ways of thinking and practicing” are somehow different from the non-artistic ones. Such a statement would be true if we did not proceed from a general notion of creativity, wherein artistic creativity would be but a specific form of creativity, which also encompasses everyday activities and all those that can, with some measure of evidence, be called creative. Probably the greatest commodification of creative practices emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1980s with “creative industries.”

If we were to use the notion of creativity and creativeness as something typical of art and of describing “artistic ways of thinking and practicing,” then this would facilitate the integration of art into a general theory or philosophy of creativity. We would then be able to regard art as the paramount instance of creativity, with its other forms being seen as its lesser instances. Of course, such a viewpoint primarily concerns an artwork regarded from the position of its author. But does it really? Is this not a case of “art in a traditional sense of the word,” for it requires the link between the artist, the artwork, and the audience (the public)? This viewpoint depends on the supposition that “creative” art is art that is appreciated by the public. It is a position that, at first sight, is very distant from contemporary art and its art worlds, although also presupposed by them, and accords with the positions and practices of modern art during the first half of the twentieth century when it was the dominant artistic form.

(c) There is also the reverse side of the issue of artification: “Something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word [and] is changed into something art-like” can also appear under other kinds of conditions and circumstances. Consider the tradition of British “Arts and Crafts” started by workshops initiated by William Morris in the middle of nineteenth century and which advocated reverting back to medieval craftsmanship.

Screen, John Henry Dreale (designer), Morris & Co (manufacturer), 1885-1910

Think, too, of the later Jugendstil (Art Nouveau, Liberty Style), which followed a similar utilitarian aesthetic tradition, or of the introduction in Germany, at the turn of the century, of innumerable workshops that followed in the steps of that tradition in Great Britain. (British success was so astounding that in 1896 “the Prussian government sent the “cultural spy” Hermann Muthesius to England on a six-year mission to study the secrets of British success. Upon his recommendation, workshops were introduced at all Prussian handicraft schools and modern artists appointed as teachers.”[6])

Alfons Mucha – F. Champenois Imprimeur-Éditeur (1897)

The aim of such activities was the “cooperation of art, industry, and crafts in the ennoblement of commercial activity.”[7] It was also from this tradition that the Bauhaus arose. Related cases of art willingly accepting a utilitarian function are those of Russian constructivism[8] and, to some extent and in a different way, of Italian Futurism.

Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky (1919).

Gino Severini 1912, Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, oil on canvas with sequins, 161.6 x 156.2 cm (63.6 x 61.5 in.), Museum of Modern Art, New York

3. Rancière’s “aesthetic regime of art”

Jacques Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime of art is of interest here. The dominant schema, explained in his numerous works, is that a new “regime” of art, namely the “aesthetic” one, emerged with romanticism and Friedrich Schiller, although sometimes he mentions authors who predate romanticism, like Vico or Winckelmann. Rancière argues that this regime of art is still continuing, thereby supplanting both modernism and postmodernism, since both are purportedly theoretically insufficient. In his view, modernism is problematic, first, because it lumps together such disparate authors and works as Adorno and Futurism, and second, because it “wants to hold onto art’s autonomy but refuses to accept the heteronomy that is its other name.”[9] He finds postmodernism problematic because it purportedly only reverses the logic of modernism, offering (through Lyotard, one of the main adversaries of Rancière) the sublime and the unpresentable as the two main features of postmodernism.[10]

Instead of notions of modernism and postmodernism, Rancière introduces the notion of an “aesthetic regime of art.” Its purpose is to replace both modernism and postmodernism, which Rancière considers obsolete and erroneous terms. In his opinion, “The aesthetic regime of the arts, it can be said, is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label ‘modernity’.”[11]

In the aesthetic regime, the criterion of art is no longer technical perfection, as in the representative regime, “but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension.”[12] Furthermore, the aesthetic regime of art resembles Fredric Jameson’s “cultural dominant,” for although it is purportedly the dominant regime in the last two centuries, it is admittedly not the only one to exist in this epoch, for it is supplemented and often in conflict with the previous two regimes, the “ethical regime of images,” and especially the “representative regime of art” which immediately precedes the aesthetic regime. What is also typical of the aesthetic regime of art is that it is “the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the art, subject-matter and genres.”[13]

As we can see, Rancière’s agenda is to offer his “regimes” as a novel taxonomy that is intended to supersede the present dominant one of the tandem modernism and postmodernism, something that is without doubt an ambitious project. Rancière’s open-endedness of the aesthetic regime primarily implies the obsolescence of the “end of art” theories. In this it somewhat resembles Friedrich von Schlegel’s revolutionary attempt to bring into competitive proximity two art formations of his own time, namely classicism and romanticism, with the latter seen as a continuing process. Romantic art was to strive towards ever higher accomplishments, a view at odds with the recent and dominant viewpoints on the decline or even end of art, such as those of Hegel, Heidegger, and especially Arthur Danto. Rancière’s non-Hegelian view allows for no temporal closures of various regimes and for no totalizations.

One of Rancière’s points of departure is Aristotle, with his claim that man is “political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all the animal has is a voice to signal pleasure and pain. But the whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice.”[14] This is the point where politics is brought into Rancière’s philosophy. Democracy is the possibility and the practice of making oneself heard. By making ourselves heard we become political beings: “Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals.”[15] The distribution and redistribution of the sensible are also accomplished by art. In the realm of art similar mechanisms as those used in politics are at work, for they are “two forms of distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime of identification. There are not always occurrences of politics, although there always exist forms of power. Similarly, there are not always occurrences of art, although there are always forms of poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance.”[16]

Throughout Rancière’s oeuvre, Friedrich Schiller is singled out as one of the pivotal references for his political philosophy and aesthetics. It is the concept of “play” or play drive (Spieltrieb) that is especially important here, for it brings together “art of the beautiful” and “art of living.” In Schiller’s view, which developed also as a critique of the French Revolution, play is of special importance. As he explains toward the end of the fifteenth letter in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.”[17]

According to Rancière, play “is any activity that has no end other than itself, that does not intend to gain any effective power over things or persons.”[18] “Play” is a new form of distribution of the sensible, an activity with no purpose except itself and with no intent to exert power over others. An artwork is “given in a specific experience, which suspends the ordinary connections, not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and sensibility.”[19]

It is not my intention to discuss Rancière’s philosophy and its various themes in detail. I have touched on only a few issues that could be relevant to our topic. Let me end this part by observing that, in Rancière’s view, artistic autonomy and heteronomy are always intertwined, with the aesthetic experience being autonomous and the creation of art heteronomous. In a way, Rancière’s theory, like that of some of the Romantics, echoes the ancient Greek conflation of art and community, that is, the organic consubstantionality of art and the life of the polis.

4. “Art become life”

In an exhibition in the spring of 2011, in the entrance hall of the Research Center in Ljubljana, where I work, one of the works consisted of a canvas over which the statement “Public Art is for the Birds” was written in big letters. The sentence, of course, brings to mind the artist Barnett Newman who, in a statement made famous, exclaimed that “Aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the birds.” Since its enunciation around 1952, this claim has been reiterated on innumerable occasions. Its original addressee was Susan Langer, and its intent was to denigrate attempts to introduce semiotics and linguistics into art criticism and aesthetics. It was also often interpreted as criticism of the beautiful on the part of Newman and his embracing of the sublime, although its most frequent interpretation was that of a criticism of aesthetics as such. Be that as it may, for Newman aesthetics obviously was not relevant for art and did not aid in establishing its significance. This, of course, drastically changed in the decades that followed, for today authentic art appears essentially dependent on theory.

Barnett Newman

But in the 1950s this was not the case, nor is “public” art usually considered “authentic art” today. Instead, in the eyes of some or perhaps many, public art is nowadays often regarded as a type of art, if not “semi-art.” Proper or authentic contemporary art is assumed to be that which is radical, in the sense of subversive and critical of society or of previous art. In both instances, it is the modern and modernist tradition that questions public art and continues to do so, in spite of many well-known instances of modern and postmodern public art, such as that of Henry Moore, Richard Serra, and Anish Kapoor.

Anish Kapoor, World

If our vantage point is radical art, then, in our opinion, public art today may well be left to the birds and their multifarious activities on pieces of public art. In the eyes of the creator of the work exhibited in Ljubljana, public art may best be left to the birds, for it is not an authentic form of art that would be of genuine artistic concern. From this perspective, public art today may thus very well be seen as a form of artification, that is, an integration of mostly site-specific works into natural or urban ambiances. This was always a feature of public art, but today it is also such art that appears somewhat inauthentic. And this is the essential problem with artification, that people may regard it as inauthentic, especially if it is interpreted as something “art-like.” In the Western tradition, kitsch is something that pretends to be art-like; it aspires to be art-like, but that is as far as it gets. It is fake art. As soon as it crosses the border into the realm of authentic art, leaving fake and kitsch behind, art re/distributes the sensible. It offers something new: it “speaks” instead of being mute and without a voice.

By gaining a voice and starting to speak and express oneself, an authentic artist effects a redistribution of the sensible and broadens the borders of what is perceived and sensed. It is a new “voice” to be heard or seen, in short, experienced, which is another way of designating the mechanism whereby a person becomes an artist and the work an artwork.

Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres in Terminal 1 Pier F at Toronto’s YYZ airport

Henry Moore, standing next to his sculpture Working Model for Oval with Points (1975)

Of course, art that is happy with its subordination to another purpose or agency cannot attain its proper purpose, which is one of the reasons why artification encounters difficulties when grappling with art’s assimilation. Only by “playing,” by having a purpose without a purpose, is a man “wholly man.” We may assume that such “play” and its creations are appreciated by the artist as well as by the public, although the relationship is by no means a stable and a predetermined one.

There are numerous cases when a work causes great satisfaction, in the sense of “play,” to the artist but very little to the public. Amateur works are frequently of such nature. There is also the opposite situation, such as when an acclaimed artist makes a simple sketch, which for him is mere amusement, while for the public at large it represents a little masterpiece. Which is it? On the other hand, in modern art there are innumerable cases of art that was art for the artist as well as for the public. This is even more the case in representational art. There, the “quality” and artistic value are relatively easily defined. As we see, art is given various kinds of reception, and especially today our “imaginary museum” is filled with very disparate objects and phenomena. Nonetheless, a salient feature of modern art is not only its variety but its semantic openness and its faith that it is the public that should accommodate the work of art and not the other way around.

Why is it necessary for art to be accommodated by the public? Because (and in this we can follow Adorno) authentic art and culture require effort to overcome the resistance made to it. “Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them. …Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through.”[20] Interestingly, in instances where art attempts to imitate creations made according to the demands of the public, such fake art remains authentic art, just the opposite of kitsch. Take, for example, the project of Komar & Melamid’s “Most Wanted,” where the two artists created a series of paintings based on a survey of public preferences of the motifs, formats, and colors of individual paintings.[21] In spite of formally following the procedures of the market, the works actually functioned as any other authentic works of art. This illustrates that while artification as a transformation of art into non-art, or of non-art into “something art-like,” may well work as an abstraction, it depends, in fact, on a variety of other factors.

Komar & Melamid’s “Most Wanted,”‌ USA

Komar & Melamid’s “Most Wanted,” Italy

Komar & Melamid’s “Most Wanted,” China

Still, it appears that there are times when non-art may turn into art and the other way around, without endangering the artistic and aesthetic status of art, but the contrary. I refer to examples of what Rancière calls the project of “art become life.”[22] The project is consubstantial with the aesthetic regime of art. It already inspired, in their dreams of artisanal and communitarian Middle Ages, the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was taken up again by the artisans of the Art Deco movement, hailed in their time as producers of “social art,” as it was by the engineers and architects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus, before again flowering into the utopian projects of situationist urbanists and Joseph Beuys’ “social plastic.”[23]

Wekbund, 1914 exhibition poster

Herbert Bayer, Postcard No. 11 for the Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, summer, 1923

Joseph Beuys, In difesa della Natura. Exhibition view at the Venice International Performance Art Week (2014). Photograph by Samanta Cinquini.

Although artification is said to concern “art in the traditional sense,” it would appear that while some of the movements mentioned above produced works of craftsmanship and thus probably belong to that gray area between the realms of utilitarian production and its aesthetic features, there is no obvious contradiction between the two. In these instances, utilitarian and aesthetic functions and features are conflated seamlessly, even opposing and thus relativizing the old aesthetic belief that a utilitarian object must lose its practical function if it is to attain an aesthetic one. Art Deco or Bauhaus chairs, lamps, architecture, and cutlery are practical and aesthetic; they are non-art (having a practical function) merging with art (having an aesthetic function). Instances of such utilitarian aesthetic works can also be found in Russian constructivism and productivism; in Italian Futurism, with objects ranging from the “anti-neutral clothes” of Giacomo Balla to the architectural sketches of Antonio Sant’Elia; in the “paper architecture” of Lajos Kassák and the more recent “architecture of nothing” by Gábor Bachman; and in the coffee cups, passports, and armbands of the Slovenian artist collective Neue Slowenische Kunst.

Giacomo Balla,anti-neutral clothes

Antonio Sant’Elia

Gábor Bachman, Architecture of nothing

Neue Slowenische Kunst

In brief, the conflation of art and non-art, or the passage of non-art into utilitarian aesthetic and artistic objects, occurs all the time and, as the cases just mentioned illustrate, it is definitely not limited to art in the traditional sense but is as often created by avant-garde artists. In such a context, the issue of subordination of art doesn’t arise; form usually follows function. It is this terrain that could also be relevant to artification.

Before the advent of the aesthetic regime of art, that is, the period of artistic modernity and postmodernity, Mimesis separated out what was art from what was not. Conversely, all the new, aesthetic definitions of art that affirm its autonomy in one way or another say the same thing, affirm the same paradox: that art is henceforth recognizable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics—by its indistinction. . . . In short, the specificity of art, finally nameable as such, is its identity with non-art.[24]

It is this problematic statement that serves as the conclusion of this essay because it reveals the limits of Rancière’s otherwise useful and important enterprise. Theories of modernism and postmodernism point out certain essential characteristics of the art of the last two centuries, a task as yet not accomplished by the “aesthetic regime of art” that lumps together art of impressionism with abstract art and Duchamp’s projects. Put differently, the art it highlights and comprises is even more disparate than Adorno and Futurism. My reservations are directed also towards some of the other tenets of Rancière’s theory, for the aesthetic regime of art is an interrelated notion within his philosophical framework. Nonetheless, I think that this criticism does not weaken the argument that the project of “art become life” remains valid, both in Rancière and elsewhere, when referring to artification and utilitarian creations of certain traditions and endeavors, in addition to aesthetic avant-garde movements and their related radical projects.

Aleš Erjavec

Ales.Erjavec@zrc-sazu.si

Aleš Erjavec is Research Professor in the Institute of Philosophy, SRC SASA, Ljubljana, and Professor of Aesthetics in Ljubljana University and University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia. His main interests are aesthetics, contemporary art theory, critical theory, and philosophy of culture. He is currently preparing a book on “aesthetic revolutions.”

Published on April 5, 2012.

Endnotes

[1] André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux (Paris: NRF, La Galerie de la Pléiade, 1957), p. 27.

[2] Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51-79; ref. on p. 77.

[3] Ossi Naukkarinen and Yuriko Saito, “Introduction,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 4, 2012.

[4] André Reszler, L’esthétique anarchiste (Paris: P.U.F., 1973), p. 6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933, (London: Taschen, 2006), p. 10.

[7] Quoted in Bauhaus 1919-1933, p. 12.

[8] See, for example, Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer. Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October, Vol. 30 (Autumn 1984), 82-119.

[9] Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 68.

[10] See, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 28-29 et passim. Rancière frequently uses “modernism” and “modernity” synonymously.

[11] Ibid., p. 24.

[12] Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 29.

[13] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 23.

[14] Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 24.

[15] Ibid., p. 25.

[16] Ibid., p. 26.

[17] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 80.

[18] Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 30.

[19] Loc. cit.

[20] Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. by Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 232.

[21] See Painting by Numbers. Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art, ed. by JoAnn Wypijewski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

[22] Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 38. Of course, the project of “art become life” carries another meaning, namely the unity, or mutual support, of artistic revolutionary and social (political) revolutionary projects.

[23] Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 38.

[24] Ibid., p. 66.

Parvaneh Etemadi in an interview with Parviz Barati from Sharq Newspaper

Translated by Roya Monajem

Parviz Barati- According to Parvaneh Etemadi, she has acquired Bahman Mohassess’ taste and Jalal Al-Ahmad’s courage. She is Frank. Yet, frankness is just one of her personality. She challenges the current form of knowledge and cognition and expresses far-fetched concepts with new modules, which provokes positive and negative reactions to her approach. Last year, her name appeared on the 11th list of 500 artists of the world together with four other Iranian artists, Farhad Moshiri, Reza Derakhshani, Ali Banisadr and Shirin Neshat. Each year in October FIAC – International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris – together with Art Price – the most important source of art market in the world- publish a report which is a criterion for analysis of the situation of contemporary global art from economic and artistic point of view. In the last Tehran Art Auction, one of Etemadi’s ‘untitled’ works was sold for 240 million Toumans. Etemadi usually shuns interviews. However, all this together with a more important pretext of the fiftieth anniversary of her artistic career was the motivation for the present interview, thanks to Shokoufeh Malek-Kiani.

Parvaneh’s Studio

Barati (B)-One of the less known angles of your work is the painting classes you held for 25 years starting from 70s. When did these classes actually start and from where?

Etemadi (E)- They were first held in a studio in Khaneqah alleyway in Saidi Street. My workshop has always been my home, but at that time, considering myself as a professional painter i set up a painting studio which later became my workshop. What i mean is that those interested in learning painting or buying my works came directly to me.

B- Why there?

E- By sheer accident. An acquaintance let me use his property which was an old printing house as a studio. He was a fair person, as I had no income at that time. So our contract was a painting in return to each month’s rent. When he decided to sell his property, I moved to here in Yusefabad district where i had two desks, five easels and that was all. I guided my pupils in the way they were and not in the way i was. Some loved my colored pencil paintings so much that they just wanted to paint like me. I advised them to at least make their copies more meticulously. They were free to use any material. I just observed them and helped them in practice. I taught them the technique of ‘seeing,’ noticing similarities and differences, shifting the phenomena to another place and another time in their minds and how art is a continuous course of discovery and invention. In order to practice that we sometimes looked at the objects upside down to liberate ourselves from habits and instead take other things into account.

B- So in fact you established an “anti-art-college”…

E- Where I was, no matter what you call it was not an academy, but rather a workshop where anybody with any amount of knowledge and any vision could work and evolve, and it was these inner changes which fulfilled and encouraged them. No doubt, their good exercises were exhibited at Seyhoun gallery and in this way they could pay their tuition, their working tools and material, it was like a booty. In this way they were acquainted with the various ways of becoming professional. I did not teach art history, because i thought that would add to their expectations and would dissuade them in the sense that they would imagine they are not talented enough. They approached art masters like saints, as though they had come from another world for creating such masterpieces. In addition, when there is all this confusion and misunderstanding between the artwork, artist and interpreters, how could I be sure of my own interpretations.

I was happy with my pupils. Every day I would see the world from their points of views and was amused. A few of them who did well later, like Avish Kherbreh-zadeh who won the gold medal of Venice Biennial or Reza Danshmir or Sadeq Tirafkan and a couple of others taught me as well. I reflected upon their questions. I had to be familiar with their beliefs, feelings and views to be able to walk with them and reach some conclusions. They too were happy working with me, but there was no reason to stay with me, instead they had to depart with love to pursue their own individual way.

B- Apparently, it was not easy to get into your studio…

E-Yes, there was an entrance exam.

B- How did you test them?

E- The way they dressed themselves was important for me. Nobody had to look better than others. It was not a competition in ostentation. Honesty with a simple smiling dialogue, mutual trust and even the sweetness of the food they made was the test.. In short, personal pupils are tested constantly in an individual way. Some arrived with a reactionary mind wishing to learn painting. They would say we have studied drawing, and now we have come to learn painting.

I talked to them about how the scope of drawing extends to food, fashion design, and a lot of other things… It was only then that they took the point. Sometimes I was forced to assess the degree of their creativity by asking them to instantly make a dish of celery, potato and onion. If Picasso could not make fried eggs, he had to eat his art.

B- How long did they continue their training?

E- 25 years, but of course not all of them. To tell you the truth, they could stay as long as they liked, but for 25 years I carried out all this work with them shoulder to shoulder.

B- Did you give them a certificate?

E- No. They achieved financial and spiritual success. That was the best and sweetest certificate possible.

B- Did they attend art college simultaneously?

E- Again, to tell you the truth, I did not accept art college students, because they expected too much of art, whether of their own or Art per se. I tried to choose the less experienced and younger ones.

B- They came to you when very young?

E- They were of any age. For example, there was a middle-age woman with her husband who owned a factory.

B- How old were Reza Daneshmir or Avish Khebreh-zadeh when they started their lessons with you?

E- Ms. Khebrehzadeh was 13. Her father brought her here. There was also a 12 years old girl who came with her mother and they both worked. Daneshmir was at that time studying architecture at the university.

Qandriz, Qandriz Hall

B- Before setting up your own studio at Sadi street, you were active at Qandriz Hall?

E-That goes back before Qandriz. That was when I was studying at College of Art and Architecture. I remember one day when I went to the university and Ms. Behjat was our teacher, she told me, you better leave the college as soon as you can and pursue your own path. Of course, she had a good point there. The Art college ruined one’s taste. I used to fail or just pass the exams, while my works were regarded exceptional, hard to compare with the works of others. I left the university and joined the painters at Qandriz Hall, which was the opposite pole of Tehran University. I was proud that I was the only female member of the Hall. To make it short, in search of real art i worked with them shoulder to shoulder, and maybe even harder than them. Whenever an exhibition was postponed, I would try to fill the gap and compensate.

B-Analyzing the artistic changes of 60s and 70s shows that three paradigms of Nationalism, Leftism and Traditionalism played a significant role in general development of Iranian Contemporary Art. From this perspective, the relation of Qandriz Hall with the left trends was noticeable. Qandriz Hall was somehow against the general nationalist policy which was one of the most fundamental doctrines of Pahlavi Rule, particularly Secular Nationalism which was an important component of Pahlavi era. Don’t you agree?

E- Your question reminded me of Romantic films of the Resistant forces against French Fascism and Nazis, the forces which were made up of Partisans and Artists with Romantic Revolutionary relations…Dear Mr. Barati, when I was working at Qandriz Hall, we would talk all nights about conceptualism and if any energy was left was spent on analyzing the materials of Carlos Fontana and Wassail Kandinsky, finally going home exhausted, but fulfilled. The next session could be showing our works to each other, their meticulous dissection and critique…

B- Why was Qandriz Hall against Saqakhaneh Movement?

E- To tell you the truth, I never liked Saqkhaneh Movement. If there were such a thing as Saqakhaneh School, what it was doing was copying compositions on magic, superstition and… having enchanting visual effects, appearing very native and original in the eyes of foreigners. If we work in a contemporary way, what have we to do with superstitious or traditionalist traditions?! Unless we are producing works which tourists would love.

B-Qandriz members used to say that they are looking for a revolutionary art, is it true?

E- Basically, an artist is a revolutionary, revolution lies in the artist’s essence. Revolting against old structures, modifying them in the hope of reproducing them. Certain arts have a consumption period and are gradually overthrown by the passage of time and the change of circumstances.

B- Were you still connected to Qandriz Hall, when you founded Parvaneh’s Studio?

E-Two years before the revolution, Qandriz moved from Jomhuri to Bucharest Street, Argentine Square, and I became the manager because others were too busy. I convinced others that we needed to sell works and use the percentage on the expansion of our activities. The Hall lasted two years, but we decided to close it down during the martial laws enacted before the revolution.

Differentiation of Art and Creativity?

B- You differentiate Art from Creativity?

E-Yes.

B- Did you believe in that when you taught children?

E- With children, there are other pedagogic methods. 8-12 years old children with whom I worked, needed to learn and know about their natural surroundings before they could learn what Art can be. I used that to teach them, just to stimulate their personal curiosity, holding their interest through practical amusements. After going through this training, as their mothers usually informed me, those kids had developed an deeper interest in Natural Sciences. Even if those kids did not become Artists, they were at least attracted to another world. Many carry the name of artist, and produce so-called artistic works. There are clients which buy beautiful works to decorated their homes with, but we do not know whether these works are by a creative artist or a sly artisan. That is where the art professional plays the role of using his/her technical skills to make the distinction. A creative person develops an obsession toward the object of her/his inquiry, which will not leave him/her alone until getting somewhere.

B- Why did you close your studio?

E- I was tired. I taught as much as I could and went on my own way, making my colleges of “The Dowry of Fairy Princess.” I used the bad prints of my colored pencil works, as my material, turning all those colors and forms into the figures in outfits dancing in the wind, and held an exhibition in Niavaran Cultural Center, and some were sent abroad.

B- The variety of media used in your works, from colored pencils to video and cement has a significant role. Did you advise your pupils to do the same?
E- Ah, yes. I always have regarded and regard animation as the future of painting. I sent a couple of them to the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults to work with Nafiseh Riahi to learn the techniques. Avish has integrated animation in her solid drawings very well. They have surely worked in other fields and media too. In my class, to become a painter was not the imperative.

B- Wasn’t it really necessary to become a painter?

E- No matter in what they were most talented, they displayed its artistic aspect.

B- Weren’t you interested in multiplying yourself?

E-(with a laughter) I don’t even know what to do with myself.

B- Your son Mehrdad, was he in your studio from the beginning too?

E-Yes, he was grown up among them.

B- Did you publish any “call” for your classes?

E- There was no need for that, because i did not have time to go to the Ministry of Culture for permission. After a few years of work, the ministry sent me a first degree certificate which is still in one of the drawers there. In other to join my classes, the recommendation of an acquaintance was enough.

B- How much was your tuition fee?

E- From 800 to finally 10,000 Toumans per month.

B- Did you give any certificate to your pupils?

E- (with laughter) Do I have any certificates, myself? Certificates do not produce real sportsmen or artists.

In the Presence of Bahman Mohassess

B- You were Bahman Mohassess’ pupil. Had he the same approach in teaching?

E- I had given him this role. I always told my pupils that it is you who learn. I don’t teach you anything. Without having any receptors for something, one can not learn. One always learns from one’s own abilities. The teacher reminds one of something and the rest is collected in one’s mind. When Mohassess had classes with me, he would sometime bring a friend or a company and while i was drawing, they talked. True that my hands were busy, but my ears were not idle either! Later he would laugh and say, when he received the envelop containing his tuition fee, he always went to Naderi Cafe with his company and spent it there.

B- Where did Mohassess live?

E- In the second floor of his mother’s house in Safi Ali Shah district. He came to our house to teach.

India, Mohassess and Mysteries

B- When did you first discover India?

E- At 18 or 19, after reading two or three books, I fell in love with India. One of them was Nehru’s “Glimpses at the World History,” and the other I don’t remember its name. The first time I landed in India, I felt the smell once stepping out of the airplane. A blow of humidity, sugarcane, cotton and spices hit my face and my feet sank down. Colored starched turbines and Java tree which had purpled the air, kept me there. In those trips to India, I came to know the world of Indian artists and we carried out some joint paintings, which turned out to be very successful.

Painting with Colored Pencils

B- How did you discover colored pencils?

E- Bahaman Mohassess used to say there should be an easel and a box of 6 colored pencils in every studio. Even if the artist works on the floor, on a desk, wherever. In my studio, there already were colored pencils and i began to work with them, and playing with them was pleasurable and calming. My old pupil, Mehdi Jadali too worked very well with them and had successful exhibitions in Tehran and Dubai. I don’t think anybody else would have the courage and perseverance to work with them anymore.

B- Did you sell your works to art galleries?

E-No, at the beginning there were actually no art-galleries. Later, anybody who got bored would open a gallery in their garage. I sent my colored pencils works to Abi Restaurant in Chalus Road, letting them to hand there for a while, but I sold them in my studio.

B- What do you think of art at present?

E-The world is changing and art is changing with it. As the Indians say: it is the age of Kali’s Resurrection, the goddess of destruction and creativity. No doubt, a renaissance will emerge out of all this demolition and ruin, carrying a bag of discoveries, innovation and creativity on its shoulder.

Source: Sharq Newspaper, 16 April 2017

Source: ArtNet News

By Ben Davis, February 2017

A couple looks at artwork by Parviz Tanavoli, “The Prophet, 1964” at The Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

This week, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) rehung its prized Modern galleries, swapping out works by greats like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso for works by artists from the Muslim-majority countries affected by President Trump’s travel ban.
It’s not exactly as if MoMA has draped itself in a “Muslim Lives Matter” banner. Still, this rapid response, conceived by curators Ann Temkin, Jodi Hauptman, and Christophe Cherix over the weekend of cresting outrage over Trump’s executive action, stands out as an unusually direct statement on current events for a major art institution—appropriately enough, since this is an alarming time. The Art Newspaper reports that the curators plan to integrate still more works in coming weeks.

A man looks at artwork by Iranian artist Tala Madani’s Chit Chat (2007) at The Museum of Modern Art on February 3, 2017 in New York City. Courtesy of Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

The first wave of new artists are all either of a generation of post-war modernists—the Iranians Siah Armajani (b. 1939), Marcos Grigorian (1925-2007), Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937), and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (b. 1937), plus the great Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930)—or more contemporary figures: the architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2015), the painter Tala Madani (b. 1981), and the photo-conceptualist Shirana Shahbazi (b. 1974).
Consequently, their artworks are technically out of place where they appear, in MoMA’s Modern galleries, which are mainly devoted to the earlier part of the 20th century. Chronologically, the works should either be in the galleries opposite Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, or displayed with the more recent art.
The logic of their placement lies in the need to make a statement: The Modern galleries are where MoMA keeps the crown jewels. Inserting the new works alongside the museum’s foundational treasures gives a certain kind of symbolic weight to the inclusion. It interrupts business as usual.
I might, in a different mood, have questions about the curatorial choices made. For instance, Madani is known for small paintings depicting scenes of patriarchal brutality. Her hand-painted two-minute animation, Chit Chat (2007), installed opposite expressionist canvases by Chagall and Kirchner, depicts two of her characteristic subjects—balding Middle Eastern men, cyphers of a more general patriarchal authority for her—conspiratorially arguing, overseen by a devilish figure. At certain points, they puke yellow onto each other, as if literally overflowing with nastiness.

Lobbing such a work into the debate over the Muslim ban seems odd, since it could easily be used, out of context, to illustrate some ugly stereotypes about Iranians.
On the other hand, consider another of the added artworks, Shirana Shahbazi’s [Composition-40-2011] (2011), a large photo of three colored spheres on a black background, inserted into the galleries normally devoted to Marcel Duchamp. The connection, it seems, is that Shahbazi’s work shares a heady puzzle-character with the Frenchman, which seems apt.

Shirana Shahbazi’s [Composition-40-2011] (2011) on view next to Marcel Duchamp’s To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918). Courtesy of Ben Davis.

Shahbazi’s earlier series of photos, titled “Goftare Nik / Good Words,” had a more direct documentary feel, depicting modern life in Iran. Yet she was already blurring the line between documentary and set-up photos, and wrestling with the stereotypes a Western audience projected onto Iranians (“It seems to strike people as a very touching or moving matter that a woman with a veil should be smoking,” she said of the reaction to one picture. “I wasn’t aware of how touching it could be for a Westerner to see that. To me it is completely normal.”) I’ve always read her later, willfully inscrutable style of work, including the one inserted here, as a reaction to this, an attempt to frustrate her viewers, to force them to see themselves trying to make sense of a picture.
In other words, Shahbazi’s photo-conceptual work can be interpreted as representing a distrust in the Western audience’s ability to distinguish the nuances of representation—the same nuance that the inclusion of Madani’s grotesque animation demands.

In the end, it seems obvious that MoMA’s gesture is a blunt one because it is responding to a blunt, unrefined discourse. The statement is: You want to devalue people from Muslim countries? Well, we value them! The curators acted fast because the conversation was urgent. That seems worth applauding.
I do think, however, that there’s more to say about this act, and the history behind it.
The story that MoMA was built to tell is the story of Euro-American modernism. All by itself, this story is very much one of immigrants and refugees: Duchamp hopped the Atlantic to get clear of WWI; Willem de Kooning came to the US as a stowaway; Josef and Anni Albers fled the Nazis to the US; Arshile Gorky was a refugee from the Armenian Genocide; the list goes on.
Yet this is a story of mainly white European immigration. And one of the unintended side effects of MoMA’s emergency rehang is to remind you that there are other, non-Western modernisms, which have only been imperfectly incorporated into the story it tells.

Which brings me to the artists I was most excited to see here, El-Salahi, and the cluster of Iranian artists who found their creative voices in the early 1960s.

Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Mosque (1964). Courtesy of Ben Davis.

Seeing them highlighted is terrific, even if the way they are deployed doesn’t do them full justice. El-Salahi’s small black-and-white canvas, The Mosque (1964), is placed in the Picasso galleries, intended to play off of the Spanish artist’s interest in African art. But the lone, small work gives only a hint of the scale of El-Salahi’s achievement or his vision, the proximity to better-known Cubist masterpieces only accentuating the relative scarcity of familiar aesthetic context for his work.
Similarly, the Iran-born Charles Hossein Zenderoudi appears via a large work on paper in the Matisse galleries, which is meant to make sense because of the Fauvist great’s interest in Islamic decorative art. But the mellow tones of Zenderoudi’s K+L+32+H+4. Mon père et moi (My Father and I) (1962) look a little muted next to the famous exuberance of Matisse’s The Dance, one of the world’s most iconic paintings.

Visitors look at K+L+32+H+4. Mon père et moi (My Father and I), 1962 by Iranian painter and sculptor Charles Hossein Zenderoudi at the Museum of Modern Art on February 3, 2017 in New York City. Courtesy of Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

Like I said, it’s all better than nothing. But in a different world, giving the full due to these artists could make a truly vital point right now.
El-Salahi was one of the fathers of the Khartoum School in the Sudan (along with Ahmed Shibrain and Kamala Ishag). They brought a modernist freedom to the canvas, but self-consciously welded it with Islamic imagery and local vernacular culture, including decorative patterns, Quranic verses, and Sufi poetry.

“We had a problem then that separated the contemporary artist from the local public,” El-Salahi recalled in a previous interview. “I personally felt that a bridge had to be built to close that gap between the two parties.”
Zenderoudi, Tanavoli, and the other Iranian figures here are generally known as part of the Saqqakhaneh movement. The term “Saqqakhaneh” refers to Shi’ite shrines, small alcoves with a water dispenser where people leave religious offerings, decorated with various kinds of metalwork and devotional objects.

Parviz Tanavoli’s The Prophet (1964), with Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) in the background. Courtesy of Ben Davis.

Their mission was to create a strain of indigenous Persian modern art, welding the vitality of Islamic folk culture with various experiments. Indeed, if Zenderoudi’s color scheme doesn’t attain the unfiltered sensuality of Matisse, that is because, as Hamid Keshmirshekan has argued, it is very deliberately meant to evoke the characteristic tones of Iranian religious folk art: gold, green, ochre, orange, and red.
Both the Khartoum School in Sudan and the Saqqakhaneh movement in Iran would pioneer a turn towards “calligraphic modernism,” finding in calligraphy a tradition that could be organically developed into new forms of abstract art. More than that, though, what they shared was the spirit of region-wide ferment in the 1960s era, what Iftikar Dadi calls this the “heroic age” of “nationalist modern,” rejecting the idea that they had either to reiterate static tradition or be imitators of European innovations.

In Dadi’s words:
“The new culture was to be individuated, yet collective; it was to be completely modern in the sense of being in dialogue with artistic production in the industrialized world, yet it was also mandated to represent local histories and lived practices that were hitherto suppressed; and, above all, the new culture was to be emblematic of national specificity.”

The point is this: These artists are important as examples not just because they are very accomplished figures who also happen to be from Muslim-majority countries. Given its proper historical context, their art rebuts the “clash of civilizations” stereotype of Islamic culture as chained to a past that is innately hostile to being integrated into the present.

We can’t have enough of those examples now. MoMA has started a conversation. It seems more urgent than ever not to leave it there.

Farairan’ Note: You can read the first news of this important exhibition at the following link: http://farairanonline.com/News/NewsDetailEn.aspx?src=24480

Source: Akademie der Künste, Berlin

In times of uncertainty, art and culture become free spaces to transform cultural differences and political conflicts. “Uncertain States”, the Academy’s main autumn programme, opens up a space of artistic resistance to the loss of cultural memory, and to violence and xenophobia.

This artistic research, which relates the present dramatic situation of refugees to the historical experience of flight and exile between 1933 and 1945, focuses on the fragility of individual and societal conditions triggered by wars, poverty and terrorism. Approximately 50 selected objects and documents from the Akademie der Künste archives of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Valeska Gert, Lea Grundig, Lilian Harvey, Heinrich Mann, Bruno Taut, Kurt Tucholsky and others are juxtaposed with and related to contemporary art works reflecting today’s experiences of crises and flight, instability, violence and loss. The works on show are by 32 artists including Francis Alÿs, Reza Aramesh, Ayşe Erkmen, William Forsythe, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Sigalit Landau, Marwan Kassab-Bachi, Maziar Moradi, Graciela Sacco, Nasan Tur, Micha Ullman and Arkadi Zaides.Selected objects and documents from the Academy archives of, among others, Walter Benjamin, Valeska Gert, Heinrich Mann and Kurt Tucholsky, find their equivalent in the current experiences of crisis and flight reflected in 35 contemporary artistic positions, including works by Francis Alÿs, Ayşe Erkmen, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien and Arkadi Zaides.

Uncertain States is an exhibition which investigates the significance of memory and narrative within processes of social and cultural transformation through art. By combining an experiential space created from objects found in the Academy’s archives with an exhibition of contemporary art and lectures it creates a thinking space (Denkraum) for scholars, activists and artists.

In an era of grave uncertainty fuelled by the destabilising state and social order in the eastern Mediterranean region as well as terrorism and new forms of nationalism and racism in Europe, artists take up the responsibility for the “History of the Other”, for communicating in an open and differentiated way where our own artistic position is located in relation to the other.

The fragility of individual, societal and political conditions, triggered by wars, poverty and terrorism, are the focus of an artistic investigation, in which the currently dramatic situation surrounding the refugee movement makes reference to historical experiences of flight and exile between 1933 and 1945.

This involves dealing with such concerns as collective traumatisation, the loss of identity, empathy and the attempt to understand, and the experience of profound precariousness. Through their works, visual artists offer a platform not just for sharing and exchange, but also with the potential to transform experience. For this reason, the exhibition is structured around two equally essential elements – political, social and cultural studies research and debates as well as a series of remarkable documents and objects from the Akademie archives presenting artists’ memories during conditions of states of emergency in Germany between 1933 to 1945. Together, in the media of film, video, photography, sculpture and painting, these elements create an interplay of discursive, documentary and narrative contributions.

Revolver owned by Kurt Tucholsky, after 1926; photo: Nick Ash

Passport issued to Walter Benjamin, Berlin Grunewald, 10 August 1928; photo: Nick Ash

Heinrich Mann’s pocket calendar, February 1933; photo: Nick Ash

Ammunition box with personal documents from Ella Jonas-Stockhausen, no date; photo: Nick Ash

In this short compilation of this great event, we will deal only reproduce what is said in the catalogue about the two participating Iranian artist. For more information visit the website mentioned at the end of the page)

Maziar Moradi, from his 1979 series

Maziar Moradi is particularly interested in people and their search for identity – a search which can falter in the face of radical societal and political turmoil. His series 1979 traces the blows of fate suffered by his family during the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). Here, many of Maziar Moradi’s family members are exemplary for the fractures and dramatic change experienced by nearly all Iranian families in these troubled years. Maziar Moradi has elaborated key re-enactments from those scenes which his family described, and then captured images of the scenes with the people involved as the performers in their own stories. In conversations held over months, he researched the details of individual experiences. Photographs taken in Iran show family members re-enacting these experiences – images that become ciphers of a family now scattered across the globe by political and cultural upheavals.

Maziar Moradi, from his 1979 series

Maziar Moradi, from his 1979 series

Born in 1979 Iranian artist Maziar Moradi’s photo series 1979 comprises 37 works reconstructing the life journey of his family who fled their home in 1985 during the Iran-Iraq War. To create the series, Moradi, who based his work on intensive research with those involved, decided to use staged photography at the original sites of the family’s escape. Through his method of personal, authentic re-enactment, he has not only created impressive photographs in the service of memory, but also triggered a process of working though the trauma of flight. The images become symbolic codes for a family that today, due to political and cultural upheavals, are scattered across the globe. Moradi’s works is on show in the section called Cultural Memory as Resistance.

Action 117. Viet Cong Prisoner, Thuong Duc, January 23rd 1967, 2016

The Iranian artist Reza Aramesh adopts a similar strategy in his monumental triptych Aktion 117 (2011) in which the gesture of the suppressed is projected into a black-and-white photograph of the baroque interior of Louis XIV’s Versailles. In all his works the artist demonstrates a profound knowledge of the history of art, film and literature of both the orient and the occident. The mass media images from war zones and photographic reportages form the raw material for his numbered series of silhouetted figures. The actions 175–179 are generated from decontextualized snapshots of prisoners in crisis regions across the world, but this abstract outline remains in a subordinate position that is completed by photo prints of landscape images. The constant representation of violence in the mass media can induce a sense of fatigue as we move as voyeurs among the group of silhouettes, encountering our own mirror image. Aramesh’s anonymous figures become protagonists in his exploration of the mechanisms of violence. His works is on show on the section called Narration as an Act of Decolonisation.

Between the Eye and the Object Falls a Shadow (2008)

Born in 1970 in Ahwaz, Reza Aramesh is a painter, photographer and sculptor. He takes his war photography motifs from archive documents, as well as press, Internet and social media reports on the conflicts in Vietnam, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea. But instead of bloody bodies and violence, Aramesh shows invisible human suffering, with his works often recalling the poses of martyrs. In its sheer monumentality, the triptych Aktion 117 creates a direct connection to the image narrative in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles – but orchestrated with refugees. In this way, Aramesh creates several often contradictory associations: poverty and wealth, the beauty of the body and of the space, intimacy and public space, Versailles as the epitome of absolutism in Europe set against colonialism and its long-term consequences. (for more information about Reza Aramesh, see Reaz Aramesh featured artist at Farairan-online)

Walking in the darkness of a promised light (2011)

In addition, a series of lectures and special events will address current political questions on themes such as neo-colonialism, the causes for flight and migration, and the new rise in nationalism in Europe, posited from within the context of cultural and artistic positions. A thinking space will be created through lectures, debates, concerts, film presentations, performances and theater, turning the “Uncertain States” into a thinking and action space in which artistic positions are linked to current discourses.

The speakers in the “Discourses” lecture series include Nikita Dhawan, Natasha A. Kelly, Grada Kilomba, Claus Leggewie, Michael Lüders, Katharina Lumpp, Norman Manea, Chantal Mouffe, Jochen Oltmer, Gesine Schwan and Rita Süssmuth and Armin Nassehi, the German-Iranian sociologist.
.
Born in Tübingen in 1960, Armin Nassehi is one of the most prominent Sociologists in Germany. The 1960 born son of a German and an Iranian questions the so-called ‚traditional society’. In his speech he will focus on the chances that can result from the society’s “disintegration“, triggered in part by both forced and voluntary migration.

His research primarily focuses on the sociology of culture, knowledge and politics. Aside from his work in the university context, Professor Nassehi is also active as a journalist, speaker and consultant. Since 2012 he has been the editor of the cultural journal Kursbuch.

DISKURSE, a series of lectures and discussions, addresses today’s key issues. Europe is facing challenges such as xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. What are the causes of this new fundamentalism? How can the growth of right-wing populism and racism be curbed and overcome? How can immigration policies be improved? And what role does art have to play in coping with the crisis?

“Uncertain States’ exhibition and Events which opened on 15 October 2016 will run until 15 January 2017.

For more information see: http://www.adk.de/de/projekte/2016/uncertain-states/pdf/Uncertain-States_Booklet.pdf

Terry Smith

Part One
Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.

—Willard van Orman Quine

1
Philosophers often add “-ism” to a term in order to highlight a distinct approach to a fundamental question, that is, to name a philosophical doctrine. For example, when it comes to universals,

There are other definitions, but the point about the use of “-ism” to name a philosophical doctrine is clear. For art critics, curators, and historians, however, “-isms” have somewhat different purposes: they name movements in art, broadly shared approaches that have become styles or threaten to do so. During the heroic years of the modern movement, when critics, artists, or art historians first added “-ism” to a word, they usually meant what the suffix usually means in ordinary language: that The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy tells us that “Conceptualism is a doctrine in philosophy intermediate between nominalism and realism that says universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.”2x is like y, even excessively so. Often with ridicule as their aim, they highlighted a quality twice removed from the source of that particular art, from its authenticity. Thus “Impressionism” and “Cubism,” neither of which names what is really going on in the art to which it refers: each takes up a banal misdescription and then exaggerates it into a ludicrous delusion on the part of the artists. The success of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes led to a plethora of “-isms” that gradually lost these negative connotations and become almost normal descriptors. By mid-century, anyone could generate an “-ism,” and too many artists did so in their efforts to link their unique, often quite individual ways of making art to what they, or their promoters, hoped would be market success and art historical inevitability. When Willem de Kooning, at a meeting of artists in New York in 1951, said: “It is disastrous to name ourselves,” his was a lone voice, quickly silenced by the tide that named all present Abstract Expressionists.
By the 1960s this kind of naming had become so commonplace, so obvious a move, and such a sure pathway to premature institutionalization and incorporation, that many artists rejected it, to avoid being comfortably slotted into what they regarded as an ossified history of modernist avant-gardism. In the 1970s, for example, artists driven primarily by political concerns consciously blocked efforts to designate their work as belonging to a “political art” movement. Yet for some artists, long excluded from any kind of historical recognition, this was a risk worth taking: feminist artists emphasized their feminism, for instance, precisely because it connected their practice to the broader social movement to vindicate the rights of women.

As the artists most acutely aware of the powers and the pitfalls of exactly these processes, conceptual artists refused to embrace the term “conceptualism” during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. They were, however, happy to use terms such as “conceptual” for their work, because questioning the concept of art was precisely the main point of their practice. As we shall see, they foresaw that the tag “Conceptual Art” would inevitably be associated with their work, and thus tie it too closely to art that had already resolved its problems. Their goal was to keep their art (practice) problematic to themselves by keeping it at a (critical) distance from Art (as an institution). They therefore sought to prevent the precipitous labeling of their art by adopting one or both of two strategies: insist that the term “conceptual” be applied so broadly (describing any art no longer governed by a traditional medium) as to be meaningless, or so narrowly (indicating only language-based art that dealt with Art per se) as to be offensive to almost everyone.

It is a nice paradox that the term “conceptualism” came into art world existence after the advent of Conceptual art in major centers such as New York and London—most prominently and programmatically in the exhibition “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s” at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1999—mainly in order to highlight the fact that innovative, experimental art practices occurred in the Soviet Union, Japan, South America, and elsewhere prior to, at the same time as, and after the European and US initiatives that had come to seem paradigmatic, and to claim that these practices were more socially and politically engaged—and thus more relevant to their present, better models for today’s art, and, in these senses, better art—than the well-known Euro-American exemplars. I explored a variant of this idea—that conceptualism was an outcome of some artists’ increased global mobility—in my selections for the “Global Conceptualism” exhibition, and in my catalogue essay, “Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand.”3 Retrospection of this kind has also shone spotlights on what were once regarded as minor movements in Euro-American art (Fluxus, for example).

The question posed by the exhibition “Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980,” presented at the University of Toronto Art Galleries in 2010, is whether a similar valuing structure might be applied to certain strands in art made in Canada from the 1960s to the present. Even though Canadian artists were conspicuously absent from “Global Conceptualism,” certain artists have since been valued as contributors to the international tendency. Thus the exhibition asks us to look in more detail at work of the time made throughout the regions of Canada and consider whether perhaps this valuing can be extended to them. There is no suggestion that this art was nationalistic—on the contrary, it was everywhere based on skepticism about official national culture-construction. The implication is that regional conceptualisms existed—that is, that conceptualist developments (in the broadest sense) occurred differently in each of the distinct regions of Canada. Again, the implication is skeptical: in every case it is about regionality in transition, not a self-satisfied parochialism.

Triggered by remarks made by some of the key artists back in the day, I wish to revisit the terms “Conceptual art” and “conceptualism” as indications of what was at stake in the unraveling of late modern art during the 1960s and in art’s embrace of contemporaneity since. I will do so by asking what conceptualism was before, during, and after Conceptual art, and I will show that there were at least one, usually two, and sometimes three conceptions of conceptualism in play at each moment—and that these were in play, differently although connectedly, in various places, at each of these times.

Josef Kosuth, Art as Idea as Idea (Meaning), 1967. Photostat on paper mounted on wood.

Let me begin with the question as seen from within orthodox art historical narratives, as a matter of the meaning of style, a concern of art historians. I start from before Conceptual art was named as a style, before the term “conceptualism” had any currency, to see what might count as Conceptual art in that circumstance.

Ian Burn, in conversation in late 1972, said of Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea works:“If they were made in 1965 like he claims, they are Pop Art. If they were made in 1967–8, when they were exhibited, then they are among the first conceptual works, strictly speaking.” In his 1970 essay “Conceptual Art as Art,” Burn gave these works this latter dating and characterized them as key examples of the “strict form of Conceptual Art” because they were analytic of the nature of art, their (minimal) appearance being of the most minimal relevance.4 Why did an artist with such a critical attitude toward orthodox art history’s puerile dependence on style terms apply such crude criteria to the work of a close colleague?5

Kosuth’s response was outrage at applying such anti-conceptual criteria to such work: he was an art student who had the ideas but not the resources to realize them; by the time he did have these resources a few years later, everyone (including Burn) was dating their work to the moment of conception—immediacy was the new currency.6

Josef Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965.

In one sense Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) is Pop-like in that its statement about what constitutes a sign is all there, all at once, and obvious, as in your face as Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, but without the fascinated irony that informs the British artist’s perspective. To an observer outside the US sphere of cultural influence—or, more accurately, at its waxing and waning borders—One and Three Chairs might seem to offer viewers an open choice as to which item seems the most attractive constituent of “chairness,” thereby reducing spectatorship to supermarketlike art consumption, and artmaking to the provision of competitive goods.7 To the extent that this is true, Conceptual art that turns on overt demonstration or the instantiation of an idea (as does much of the better known and easily illustrated work—think Baldessari, Acconci, or Huebler) shares something with what might be called ordinary language Pop art, that which recycles the visual codes of consumer culture.

But the matter does not end there. In my view, the invitation to look in One and Three Chairs is at least as subtle as it is in key works on this subject by Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol in its conceptual questioning of what it is to see, what an image might be, what an idea looks like. These artists regularly juxtaposed photographs and objects such as actual chairs (in Rauschenberg’s Pilgrim, for example), or evoked black-and-white photography and overtly displayed the tools that made them (Johns’s Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963, for example). Warhol’s Dance Diagram (“The Lindy Tuck-In Turn-Man”), 1963, is an appropriation of an illustration, but it is also a demonstration of what constitutes a visual sign, especially when displayed, as he preferred, on the floor. Indeed, Warhol now seems the most nakedly conceptual of artists (in this pre-Conceptual art moment), precisely in his instinct for setting out one visual idea at a time, in showing an image as an idea, in making artworks that plainly demonstrated how visual ideas achieved appearance in the culture, in the visual culture, in popular imagination, in unArt, in America. The idea-image, for him, was in David Antin’s brilliant perception, a “deteriorated image.”8

Warhol, Dance Diagram

Joseph Kosuth, Art as an Idea

Rauschenberg, Pilgrim

There were of course many others striving to picture the many dichotomies afforded by the idea-image interplay that was taking shape at the time: a random list must include Guy Debord, with his films such as Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) and his collaborations with Asger Jorn; concrete poets of all kinds; Jim Dine; Kaprow, with his early happenings; Ed Ruscha; and many others, all of whom converge with Pop in certain ways, although they, like the artists mentioned above, were on a track much more interesting than that which can be encompassed by that term. In Canada, Greg Curnoe’s work throughout the 1960s offers a fascinating instance of a figurative painter, alert to the stylistics of Pop and flat color abstraction, yet, like Kurt Schwitters, drawn irresistibly to the potency of words and texts as they occur in the flow and stuff of everyday life. Add to this a Wittgensteinian consciousness that we are all products of our language-worlds, and an interesting outcome is assured. Thus, in Westing House Workers (1962), the names of a group of laborers are stamped out on a sheet that seems taken from a factory cafeteria notice board, while Row of Words on My Mind #1(1962) stamps out a set of names of people, things, promises, and so forth, that seem as random as anyone’s everyday ruminations. By 1967, however, Curnoe had evidently seen tautology-based conceptualism (either through reproductions or via the agency of Greg Ferguson): Front Center Windows (1967) is a blue vertical rectangle stamped with black letters that describe a façade in the language of a builder’s report, while Non-Figurative Picture (1968) is a vertical column stamped with the letters of the alphabet.

These examples tell us that the question “Is it Pop or Conceptual art?” is at best a provocation (as it was for Burn), and at worst a badly formulated misunderstanding of the deeper stakes of both kinds of work. Rather, we can see that various kinds of conceptualization inspired the most inventive artists of the late modern era, and that the conceptual qualities of their work were among its most important. This is the first, the most rooted, sense in which the three ideas of what it is for art to be conceptual could count as one idea: the term “conceptual” as an adjective is most fitting to this sense. Quite properly, this basic usage precedes any real usage of the terms “conceptualism” and “Conceptual art” in art discourse, as these are derivative from it. It permits us this proposition, the first part of a proposal that I advance—with full awareness of how paradoxical a gesture it is—as “a theory of conceptualism”:

1. At its various beginnings, conceptualism was a set of practices for interrogating what it was for perceiving subjects and perceived objects to be in the world (that is, it was an inquiry into the minimal situations in which art might be possible).9

Dan Graham, March 31, 1966.

These remarks combine elements from three recent lectures. The first was delivered on November 27, 2010, at the conference organized by Barbara Fischer, director of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, in association with the exhibition “Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada,” shown at the University of Toronto Galleries during the preceding months. The second, dedicated to the memory of Charles Harrison, was delivered at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, on March 8, 2011, as part of a series on Global Conceptualism organized by Sarah Wilson and Boris Groys. The third was presented on April 14, 2011, as part of a conference titled “Revisiting Conceptual Art: The Russian Case in an International Context,” convened by Boris Groys and organized by the Stella Art Foundation, Moscow. I would like to thank all those concerned.

Terry Smith

is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2010 he received the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA) and the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award (Commonwealth of Australia). He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural winner Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Prize, 2009),Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002), The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011).
Footnotes:

1

Cited on a file card from the catalogue/exhibition by Gary Coward with Arthur Bardo and Bill Vazan, “45°30’N-73°36’W + Inventory ,” Williams Art Gallery, Montreal, 1971.

2

Simon Blackburn, ed.,

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996.) Oxford Reference Online.

Oxford University Press, posted April 8, 2008.

3

Terry Smith, “Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 87–95.

4

Ian Burn, “Conceptual Art as Art,” Art and Australia(September 1970): 167–70.

5

During the 1990s, Burn became acutely aware of what he saw as the growing disjunction between the histories of art written by art historians and what he saw as the historical work, on both art and history, being undertaken in certain works of art: “While any image or object can be fitted into many historical discourses, it cannot be at the expense of the historical discourse within the image itself.” (Ian Burn, “Is Art History Any Use to Artists?,” in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1991), 6.) To Burn, artists created that discourse less as picturing of it (as if it were a parade occurring at a representable distance), more in the way they composed their works, in the disposition of elements internal to each work. Sidney Nolan and Fernand Léger were prominent examples: in one of his essays, Burn showed that Nolan used some compositional ideas of Léger’s not to create a local modernism, nor to modernize his own art by imitation, but to negotiate a reconception of what landscape might mean in Australian art and history. “Sidney Nolan: Landscape and Modern Life,” in Burn, Dialogue, 67–85.

6

Conversation, New York, March 27, 2011.

7

An observation made by Boris Groys in a seminar at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, March 9, 2011.

8

“Before the Warhol canvases we are trapped in ghastly embarrassment. This sense of arbitrary coloring, the nearly

obliterated image and the persistently intrusive feeling. Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear.” David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement,” Art News (Summer 1966): 58. Cited by Leo Steinberg, see Harrison & Wood , 953.

9

I first published these propositions, under the heading “A Theory of Conceptualism” in “Conceptual Art in Transit,” chapter 6 of Transformations in Australian Art, volume 2, The Twentieth Century – Modernism and Aboriginality

(Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002),127. They may be found in a nascent form, but applied to the Art & Language group only, in my essay “Art and Art & Language,” Artforum XII, no. 6 (February 1974): 49–52.