Farhad Moshiri
Sohrab Mohebi
I am not a chair or a table. I’m more like a couch…that can also be a bed[1].
In 1999, inspired by old ceramic jars he had seen in Shiraz, Farhad Moshiri started a series of paintings, later known as the jar paintings. By early 2000 these large canvases of ceramic pots inscribed with texts drawn from popular sayings, had found their place on the walls of most better-known art collectors in Tehran. Coming out of a kooche-bazari (colloquial speech) the pots had written “The past is past” or “only you” on them while the rendering of the works made subtle hints to Saqqakhaneh School of the 1960s and 1970s. Moshiri’s tongue in cheek evocation of Iranian modernism, while giving visual references to calligraphy and khat-naghashi (calligraphy-painting), were playful comments on the relationships between the visual, textual and the oratory. While most experts looked at Moshiri as a novice in the ring of Iranian painter/calligraphers, his work had the sound of streets and honk of khavar trucks, the appearance of a misplaced Saqqkhaneh idea and touched upon the line between poetry and moetry (sher o ver = rhythmic nonsense). In a way, it could be said that these works were also about the notion of making work about painting/calligraphy or Saqqakhaneh school- a predominant brand of Iranian art making. In his works, Moshiri succeeded to create a situation where the very notion of art historical reflections (for instance in the case of jar paintings) itself is embedded in the work and the viewer is at once encountering the work and a posture of criticality. It is this notion of criticality as a posture or a position among others, such as locality, irony or contradiction that separates Moshiri’s work from most of his contemporaries whose brand of critique dominates the work and the work does not go beyond plastic manifestations of the statue quo.
Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz and while he was not old enough to exactly engage with the work of Merce Cunningham, Stockhausen or Iannis Xenakis who all performed under the rubric of Shiraz avant-garde festival between 1967-1977, he remembers people laughing about ‘high art’ in Shiraz[2]. Around 1979 Moshiri moved to a Los Angeles suburb and later enrolled in CalArts at the time when artists such as John Baldassari and Michael Asher were on the faculty. After about eleven years, around the time when Iranian filmmakers had started cruising the red carpets of every major film festival, Moshiri thought it is time to pack and go back.
He first showed his jar paintings at Fereydoun Ave’s 13 Vanak gallery, a small space that since early on has showed most of the artists who now have a place in the international contemporary art scene. Later in 2004, for an exhibition in Italy, Moshiri exhibited his first embroideries, and in 2008 his “Love” embroidered in Swarovski crystals broke the auction record for a painting by an Iranian artist.
Although Moshiri is now mostly known for his unexcelled auction sales, but his influence on the Iranian art scene goes beyond art’s marketability. At the time when a few artists in the country were preoccupied with cheap exotica and obsolete identity politics with rather conservative use of medium, Moshiri’s palette went beyond paint tubes.
The notion of displacement becomes central to many works by Moshiri. Displacement, as opposed to contradiction, which has become a source of one-liner art productions of many artists who have become mere illustrators of ready-made juxtapositions of Iranian contemporary life. This displacement could be within the institution of painting itself, such as the pottery pieces, where the artist looks at Saqqakhaneh for instance, or it could be a gold covered mobl-e estil (stylish furniture) and boombox installation at a white cube space- works such as Cradle of Happiness. Moshiri’s art both uses ethnic marketing strategies and their critique and a touch of ironic self-reflexivity is his icing on the cake. By incorporating the distance in the work itself, which at points might approximate cynicism, Moshiri gives concept a sculptural presence. He would make planes out of carpets, outlines corpses with cakes and writes poetry with detergents.
[1] Bidoun, Fluffy Farhad, Negar Azimi, Issue 20. Spring 2010.
[2] Bidoun, Fluffy Farhad, Negar Azimi, Issue 20. Spring 2010.
