The NY Times had an interesting article about two Muslim artists based in New York: Asma Ahmed Shikoh and Negar Ahkami. You can see more of their work on their respective websites. I hope to be able to check out the exhibition on my next trip to the City.
I was really struck by Ahkami’s remarkably unique stylistic achievements. “The Fall” is a fascinating example. Among Shikoh’s works, I thought “Self-Portraits 1, 2 & 3” (or, the Statue of Liberty as a desi bride, a pregnant woman, and a mother with child) are quite interesting. Her “Beehive” is also an interesting project that involved collecting nearly a 100 actual hijabs mailed to her by women who wore them. As I examined a close-up photo of the ‘cells,’ I was thinking the piece could raise interesting questions about the currency of the headscarf as a ‘fetish’ in contemporary material culture.
While browsing some random blogs I came across a post on the adventures of artist/academic Hasan Elahi, who once had to deal with a false alarm at the FBI, which eventually gave him the idea for a ridiculously interesting project: putting up his whole life on the internet! On googling for more on this guy, I found that incidentally, The Colbert Report had him as a guest on the show just a few days ago: check out the wildly funny interview! The logic is impeccable:
If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says [Wired]
I have to admit, nearly the same thought crossed my mind the last time I was flying back into the country and had a rather frustrating encounter with my “special registration” officer at the airport. Elahi’s work, nevertheless, raises some very thought-provoking questions about the intersections of the virtual and the real, and the meaning (and economics!) of privacy and intelligence in the cyber-age. Check out his website: www.elahi.org. There are pictures of all the meals he’s eaten over the course of three years, all the airports he’s been through, and (check this) all the toilets he’s been in! (Looks like he’s in Europe right now).
The senior project of an art major at Yale has waged a storm of controversy across the nation. Chances are, you too (will) find it pretty shocking and/or disgusting. Surprisingly, I didn’t–but we can discuss that later.
For now, I thought I’d offer my take on the Shvarts affair. Firstly, if you aren’t yet aware of the “facts” or details, here’s the YDN article that made the story public three days ago: “For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse.” A follow-up article reports the University’s official statement on the matter, claiming that Aliza Shvarts did not actually do all that stuff. The next day, Shvarts responded with an explanation, reasserting that she did do it. The YDN reported further that the University claims that Shvarts told them she would deny it if the University made her “confession” public. But Shvarts claims that the University is lying to save its reputation.
There’s a reason why I’m making this a he-said she-said story, rather than going into the graphic details (which you can learn anyway from the internet: including any of 400+ news items or 1,900+ blog posts!). I think the key issue here is epistemological: how/do we know whether she did or did not do the inseminations/abortions she claims she did. More importantly, does that even matter? I don’t think so. (more…)
Filed under: Artistique
Ceci n’est pas une boîte. (By Lake Travis, near Austin, TX. January 2007)
Filed under: Artistique
This photo is part of a small exhibit currently on at Northeastern University. I was so struck by it, I spent nearly five minutes studying just this one picture: the Barbie print on the child’s shirt, the smiling woman on the left — most likely the mother, the gaze of the young man in the center, the mundane destruction all over in the background. I realized later that this was actually the least grim of all the photos in the exhibit; in fact, it’s hardly grim. The woman who captured this shot, Rania Matar, spoke briefly last night about her experience in Lebanon last summer. She happened to have arrived in Beirut with her four kids on the very day the war started, literally hours before the airport was bombed! When they fled across the border to Syria soon afterwards, she couldn’t help but promise herself that she had to go back, to document in photographs what the media never shows us.
The exhibition, called “History Recalls,” brings together the work of four different artists, three of them of Iranian origin. It focuses solely on the human face of war, explicitly rejecting any political reference. But more importantly, the works featured on the exhibit actually span over two decades: from the Iran-Iraq war to the Israel-Lebanon war last summer. In themselves, the different photographs and drawings were hard to tell apart; there’s no way to know which one’s from Lebanon, which one from Iran, which one from what war. As if they’re all part of one narrative. And hence the byline: “History Recalls: And Nothing Has Changed.” Same wars, over and over again. Same destruction, same human suffering.
And that is what I was reflecting on last night as I was leaving the exhibition. On the subway train on my way back home, I went back to Kiran Desai’s Inheritence of Loss, and soon came across the following passage, which describes a moment in the midst of intense civil unrest. I was so struck by it, I spent nearly five minutes re-reading it.
On the road to the market, the trees were hung with the limbs of enemies — which side and whose enemy? This was the time to make anyone you don’t like disappear, to avenge ancient family vendettas. Screams continued from the police station though a bottle of Black Label could save your life. Injured men, their spilling guts wrapped in chicken skins to keep them fresh, were rushed on bamboo stretchers to the doctor to be stitched up; a man was found buried in the sewage tank, every inch of his body slashed with a knife, his eyes gouged out…But while the residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all. Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with the stench of unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock, by neighborly irritations, to feel hunger skipping like a little mouse inside a tummy and return, once again, to the pressing matter of what to eat… There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice — the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event. (p. 295)
I shuddered, and had to close the book for two minutes to ponder quietly, before continuing to read. Alas, the mundaneness of it all!
Last Saturday, I had the chance to go back and finish a tour of “Cosmophilia,” an Islamic art exhibition currently on at the Boston College museum. The exhibition, featuring items on loan from a Copenhagen-based collection, was curated by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom — two very well known names in the history of Islamic art (I wasn’t aware that they are at BC!). What I liked most about the exhibition was the depth and width of its scope of representation, in a fairly small scale: they had items from 8th century Syria and 10th century Spain to 18th century India. They even have a magnificent lion-headed doorknocker from 11th century Italy! The above piece of calligraphy, which is part of “one of the largest manuscripts of the Koran ever made,” comes from Samarkand, around the year 1400; it was commissioned by the notorious warlord Timurlane (known as much for his brutality on the battlefield as for his patronage of the arts!), and was copied by artist Umar Aqta (“Umar the Amputee”), who lost his right hand and therefore wrote with his left! I just learned from Wikipedia, that:
“According to legend, Omar Aqta, Timur’s court calligrapher, transcribed the Qur’an using letters so small that the entire text of the book fit on a signet ring. Omar also is said to have created a Qur’an so large that a wheelbarrow was required to transport it. Folios of what is probably this larger Qur’an have been found, written in gold lettering on huge pages.”
The above, then, is a page from that legendary manuscript! It spans 45 x 98 cm, and that’s just two lines of text!
As someone who spent much of his late teens dabbling in calligraphy, this is naturally the genre that interests me most. Nevertheless, the exhibition had ample samples of pottery, textile, miniature paintings, and sculptures. I would say this was the best one-hour crash course on Islamic art one could hope for! The well-chosen samples quite effectively represent the vast range of what the curators define as Islamic art: “a term coined by Orientalists, refers not only to the arts made for the faith of Islam, but also to all arts created in lands where Islam was the principal religion.” Which means, of course, that not only was much of “Islamic” art produced in “secular” contexts (contrary to a common Western misconception), but also that a lot of it was the work of Christian, Jewish or Hindu artists and artisans.
Unfortunately for Bostonians, the exhibition will end on December 31st. It will then go to University of Chicago’s Smart Museum (on display from February to May, 2007), so I urge those of you in that area to make use of the opportunity! The New York Times, by the way, had a great review of Cosmophilia.
In a world where atrocities happen on a scale that would have been unimaginable prior to the twentieth century, we must contend with the inadequacy of language, whether visual or textual, to account for the horror of these experiences. What is the use of art, poetry, or, we might add, criticism, in light of these events? Theodor Adorno grappled with these questions when he commented that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. In contrast, Anselm Kiefer suggests the possibility that through art we can begin to be redeemed from these horrors.
I mentioned liking Anselm Kiefer‘s Zim Zum at the National Gallery of Art in DC last week: it was the last stop on the 50-minute tour I took, and according to the guide, “one of the most difficult pieces” in the gallery. It apparently depicts the moment of creation, though also with allusions to the Holocaust, and the post-War void in German society. For me, it evoked a strong resonance with existential angst. Unfortunately, because of the type of materials Kiefer used to construct the piece, a picture of it does not approximate the actual experience. Incidentally, while in the library last night I randomly came across an article about Kiefer in the journal Comparative Literature, and felt the urge to copy the introductory passages from it as a possible stepping stone to further reflection. The author continues:
But because Kiefer’s philosophy relies on art’s representation of even the most reprehensible perspectives of history, he places some heady responsibilites on his critics — both to decide if “good” politics is essential to “good” art and to assess whether Kiefer’s art reflects “good” politics, even if it is “good” art.
… Kiefer’s work is now understood as contirbuting to a discourse on post-World War II German nationalism and iconoclasm, and it is partly this subject matter itself, in the wake of what sholars have termed Germany’s “cultural amnesia” about the Holocaust, that lends Kiefer’s work such edge. But Kiefer’s work is made precarious not only because he takes up the same Romantic painters that the Nazis used for their propaganda, but also becuase the epic, heroic, and Romantic qualities he exploits in his works are key elements of narratives that have historically perpetuated the oppression of marginalized peoples: they enable the illusion that there are clear delineations between good and evil, self and other, violent masculinity and subservient femininity, German and Jew.
From pp. 24-5, Bonnie Roos, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early Margarete and Sulamith Paintings,” in Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 24-43
Filed under: Artistique
On Tuesday and Thursday, before and after the day of the conference, I had a good many art-intense adventures, exploring a few of the many museums in DC. I got to check out the Smithsoanian Institute’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, the National Museum of African Art, and of course, the National Gallery of Art (the West Building, the East Building, and also the Sculpture Garden).
It was a great experience finally being able to directly behold one of my favorite paintings: Picasso’s Nude Woman of 1910 (although I hardly understand anyting of cubism!). Amongst the several other works of Picasso in the Modern Art collection of the East Building, I also liked Still Life [1918], and Harlequin Musician [1924]. I loved the wire sculptures by Alexander Calder, Anselm Kiefer‘s Zim Zum, and many other pieces that I don’t even remember!
The highlights of the West Building include the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci [1474], apparently the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in America. There were also a whole bunch of paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, Manet, Monet, and Cézanne, as well as the many sculptures by Edgar Degas. The most intriguing to me were the two Rouen Cathedral [1894] paintings by Monet: images never convey the effect achieved by the strokes of paint on the actual painting. One could stand there for hours just comparing the two paintings, studying how Monet distinguished between the one impression from the other in which he shows the same facade in sunlight.
Another highlight was the almost iconic Orientalist painting by Renoir, the Odalisque [1870]: a huge and stunning reminder of the male Orientalist fantasies of harem women.
There are two great ongoing exhibitions in the West Building, so make sure to check them out if you are in DC: “Master Drawings from the Woodner Collections“, and “The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art.” The former is particularly interesting, because it displays drawings, as opposed to the final paintings more familiar in art galleries. The exhibition even features some drawings by such great figures as Boticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Ingres and Picasso.
In the Sackler Gallery, I was thoroughly enchanted by the Fountain of Light exhibition, displaying Islamic metalwork from the Nuhad es-Said Collection. The exhibition space is amazingly serene, the setup is great, and the captions provide copious amounts of information. And of course, the works are simply breathtaking. The incense burner shown here is perhaps the most elaborate and well-known piece in the Nuhad es-Said collection — it truly is a marvel — but I also enjoyed looking at many other fascinating items, including two 14th century kaaba keys.
The Smithsonian has an impressive collection (see pics) of Islamic art, and I suppose we only get to see a part of it in the Freer Gallery, but even that I did not have enough time to absorb properly.
The African Art Museum is another incredible treasurehouse! But unfortunately I was so exhausted by Thursday afternoon, my feet refused to carry me around any more, and so I couldn’t pay much attention to everything in the museum. But whatever I saw was enough to leave me amazed.
Filed under: Artistique
Posters on a Prague bulletin wall depict the city’s intense cultural life: concerts, operas, art exhibitions and what not.
I discovered it when browsing through DVDs in Blockbuster, and I loved it. It came out just over a year ago, but I hadn’t heard ever of it – although most movies that I truly like I do come across by mere chance. Admittedly, many people might find it rather slow and boring, but given my obsession with historical settings, I found it a fascinating glimpse into 17th century Dutch society. But more than that: it’s about art. The story is based on the book by Tracy Chevalier, in which the author tries to imagine a possible story behind Johannes Vermeer’s well-known work, Girl with a Pearl Earring. I was familiar with the painting, though I don’t remember when and where I had seen it before, and I didn’t think much of it until now. The movie explores several layers of tension: between social classes, between artist and patron, master and servant, husband and wife. Scarlett Johansson was the perfect actress for the character: quiet, thoughtful and introverted (and, some facial resemblance to the actual girl in the painting). There’s one scene which raises interesting questions about the girl’s hijab. A religious Protestant, Griet refuses to take off her headcover, but I think we kind of get the impression (or not) that the artist was truly able to paint her because he caught a glimpse of her hair while she was changing into the scarf (“You saw inside me!” exclaimed Griet, when she first saw the portrait after it was done). Historically though, Vermeer’s subject is believed to have been wearing a Turkish turban, a motif common in other European paintings, such as Jan van Eyck’s Man in a Turban.
