Is it possible to re-think the idea of art space, as we know it in its common practical and institutional realm, through considering in turn the very particularity of circumstances that define the practice and discourses of art in a place? This was the general motivation for Pages to initiate a discussion with artists Barbad Golshiri and Shahab Fotouhi, and social-cultural researcher Hamed Yousefi. The conversation took place in the spring of 2007 in Tehran.
Pathology of art space [an Iranian case]
Pages(P): We’d like to begin our talk on the general theme of the present issue, the space of art. Our perception of this space could be very extensive: It could be an exhibition, a magazine, an art work, or even a discursive space. So, perhaps we should ask: In the present situation and conditions in Iran, in what places and times could such a discursive space of art be found?
Hamed Yousefi(HY): This question presents us with the twofold issue of the public and private domain. Over the last twenty-odd years we have had the experience that the public domain does not belong to us. In a 10 to15-year period, intellectuals and artists of the preceding generation were quite disinterested in the public domain and totally denied it because its tendencies and ideals had nothing to do with their own (except for a group of classical leftist intellectuals who have still focused on the working class and the like, and to whom the masses were important.) After those 10-15 years, in the 1990s and 2000s, there is a kind of desperation and negative reaction to the masses and their beliefs. That is, if in the 1980s everybody ignored the public, today some take an opposing position. That’s because it is tiresome to see that the public spaces are closed either by the government or by the custom for so much of the time. But the interesting point is that the private domain plays the role of public space for us now. We have private domains that we share with others and convert them into public spaces with controlled access. Such spaces are mobile or open door private domains. The spaces of some galleries are in fact private, and it is hoped that only a few people will enter them.
This strategy creates a space for us that could somehow be described by the term circle. I think whatever artistic dialogues and creations we have had in recent years have been somehow related to these circles. We use the term circle here but circle, coterie, etc, have all one foot in the universities, in the public spaces, and this is not consistent with the features of these circles.
Barbad Golshiri (BG): To what extent do you consider this issue peculiar to Iran? In Russia, for example, the Bakhtin circle was acting in the same way. The collective activities of Medvedev, Voloshinov and Bakhtin – with their severe criticism of the early years of the formation of the USSR – had forced them out of the public domain. Their works were read, for example, in France, but they were hardly known in Russia. We can compare this with many works that are not presented in Iran. What is more striking in Iran than in other countries, at least as far as I have seen, is the division of the spaces of the exhibitions to inside and outside of Iran...
HY: By circle, I mean a space the place of which is not visible to all. At present, we have two Tehrans. One is what we can look at from above, as if from a helicopter, with its plan drawn by the state. But this plan also has lanes and by-lanes that we can only find when we take a tour on foot. And this is the other Tehran.
Until a while ago, artists and intellectuals denied issues of public or ordinary affairs or regarded them as unimportant. But now recognition of such issues has itself become a topic. We now accept that the Iranian experience of modernity is the very bricolage of things we see on the streets and at home. Before that what we call modern art denied those other domains or had nothing to do with them. But they are now present in the art works, even if its just a formal presence in the overall aesthetic.
P: Can it be said that there had been a kind of gap between the visual arts and the public domain that has somehow been filled?
HY: You see, the gap is still present, but perhaps now there is a kind of awareness of the gap; an awareness of the presence of something out there, although the boundary is still maintained. There is a kind of motivation to recognise the public and their issues. If you look at the pre-leftist literature (before the leftist thoughts were introduced in Iran, that is, in the constitutional era between 1906-1920) you will see that despite what is often said of the intellectuals having tried to establish relation with the people, they believed that perhaps the same people are the stupidest and silliest in the world. This is clearly an ambivalent attitude. After that period, leftist tendencies became dominant and the issue of people became important. As for the present situation, I feel that it is similar to that of the constitutional era: There are attempts to recognize people while nobody strives to actually address them.
Shahab Fotouhi (SF): You mean, to treat the public as the subject of work?
HY: Yes. Exactly... and especially when the aesthetics of art becomes influenced by popular aesthetics.
SF: But what is important is how this subject is dealt with. Perhaps the only recognizable trend in this regard is the works related to kitsch art, which get their raw materials from popular culture. For this reason, they might seem to carry a social sensibility, but I think this is a forged sensibility. It is not that these works don’t really belong to their origin. But because their arrangement is so simplistic and petty that they actually do little more than take a series of objects from the Friday market into the gallery. It’s as though such works are the discoveries of tourists who happen to live in Tehran, with a mere visual relationship with culture. There are artists who libel the banality of kitsch with an intellectual gesture but practically earn their living through it because, economically, such works communicate well with their petty bourgeois buyers who are profoundly interested in such culture.
P: It seems – from this discussion – that the visual art society in Iran on the one hand isolates itself from the public domain, creating what it cannot find in the public space in the private space of its “circles”, and on the other hand, it has tried to establish a relationship with that very public domain during the present decade. The question is in what discursive level does the relationship with the actual social circumstances of this domain take shape. Apparently in practice, this relationship is more of a formalistic nature and one with rather the superficial appearance of the social conditions. If this is true, it is an obstacle or delay rather than a real relationship with the public domain.
BG: I believe that the only artists who have been successful in entering the public space are those like Farshchian; these artists are courtiers, in the fullest sense of the word. No painting has ever been so often reproduced in the public space as Farshchian’s Ashura. Among our colleagues too, those who have yielded to the mainstream ideology have been able to occupy more public space. I mean participation in exhibitions such as Spiritual Art, Resistance Art, and Flight and Endurance. And the rest of us have dealt with the society in a meta way. We criticized or even libeled a class (I don’t mean a social class), we now look at from above. This is an excessively subjective encounter. In fact we find ourselves absolved of the misery around us and become something like belle spirite.
SF: I don’t know how similar your idea of delay is to my own. For me, we are almost socially conditioned to understand things superficially, as in a Hollywood movie. In a Hollywood film the events are clear and the subjects more outstanding and dramatic. There is no complexity and ambiguity. Everything is richly colored and exaggerated. So primarily, the artist becomes involved in the major political and social issues, like hijab, censorship, war, and terrorism that although are true, have become clichés. The artist must first get rid of the dramatic appearances to get to the deeper layers, and this causes the delay.
P: Do you mean that the delay may be there even before the artistic process of creation, and outside of the space of artistic practice? Which in the artist’s initial encounter with an issue would automatically cause delay in coming closer to its more complex and hidden layers?
HY: What is meant by this delay here?
P: The delay mentioned earlier is the delay between the presented image (which may be touristic or formalistic) and the external reality of that image. But the delay that Shahab talks about is more complex and also more interesting. In fact it is a delay imposed from outside into the space of artistic practice. The point is that the current policies also deal formalistically with the social issue. As with the hijab, perhaps the hijab itself is not of much importance; it is a form and an appearance, or a device for a different agenda. But we see that sometimes artists have not had the required awareness, or have not wanted to search beyond the form and look at the complexities behind it. In fact the artist is always a step behind the policy makers of the day. This is that delay in the artistic practice incorporated from outside.
HY: Of course, since 9/11, most of the artists are really a step behind what is happening. I mean the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and most importantly of all, 9/11 itself. Perhaps this is why political themes have surfaced more in art all over the world. Of course, if today’s intellectual is concerned with politics, he or she does not deal with the political issues in their general concepts as the intellectual of the 60’s did. Now the intellectual deals with it as an element of his or her daily life.
SF: Although it may seem that it is quite clear why the condition is more difficult here, I think it is at the same time not really so clear why it is more difficult. The whole scenario is always deceptively simple. On the one hand the recent policies have influenced the artist’s life here, but on the other hand it could be said that it has not had any influence. To ask, “had we been given any particular thing before which is now withheld from us?” can be the beginning of the question what is the prime predicament here and where does it lie? This seems to be like the pressure of the air, there is no doubt that it exists but we do not feel it particularly and are not aware of its effect.
P: So, we can’t always relate the dilemmas in the course of Iranian visual art to the effects of the policies of the day? If we see moments that are problematic, or that we can’t identify with, this hasn’t always been related to politics?
BG: Essentially, I think the government is the smaller part of the problem. The people also adopt these policies. The fact is, a lot of people implicitly agree with them. The Iranian family itself is in many cases a scaled-down modal of the government, enforcing its policies. This is particularly true in regard to social issues such as equality, or the rights of men and women, which is our most important issue. In the domain of art too many people’s preferences are the same as the government’s. They prefer the national funds to be spent on a banal TV serials rather than being spent on an art that would question their beliefs and presumptions.
P: What we see is an inclination to merely consider the appearances and the façade of issues, both in art and policy making. Can we imagine a condition that is beyond such formalistic tendencies?
SF: Or, how can we take a step beyond that delay? If we want to think of the analysis of the condition here, those who are active in the field of humanities must usually be more engaged in this issue. But we see that in this field too there are the same problems as in the field of visual arts. Once Hamed and I talked about creating a space in which a dialogue between the practitioners of the field of art and humanities might be possible. The question was how these two fields could establish a relationship and whether there are people who have worked on the present condition of the country which have resulted in a noticeable theoretical product. Essentially, what conditions do such theoretical and art productions require? Finally we should ask, particularly in case of the visual arts in Iran, which in its modern meaning, its history goes back only as far as the 60s, how just is it to expect its sudden development?
BG: It is right to expect the arts to undergo a sudden development, wehave models for this. The difference between us and the countries that fought for democracy for at least 2-3 centuries is that most of them did not have a model. In France, for example, when they began to demand a republican political system, they didn’t have a model to follow right away. And today, we know that Greek democracy was more a legend than a model worthy of realization. In other words, today we can benefit from the art criticism of the past centuries. It is not that we have to be history-centered. I mean we don’t have to literally follow the course of Western history step by step, for example, since Marcel Duchamp’s period until now, so that the modern movement becomes our own historic root. Besides, I consider it a good omen that we are deeply separated from the previous generation of modern art in Iran, and that none of us have had a teacher here. We neither become nostalgic nor do we have any commitment towards our predecessors.
SF: No, I don’t think that those models would always be useful here. I think that they have been shaped by conditions that it would not be so easy to use and make our own here.
BG: That’s right. I don’t say, for example, let’s open a Cabaret Voltaire or form a group like the Vienna Actionists. The fact is we do have models. We must study these models and use them in the fullest sense of the word – just like the experience of colonized nations. Indeed I have more questions than answers: What must be done with these models?
HY: The classic statement of Seyed Ahmad Fardid, “The summit of our history is the footnote of Western history” is perhaps not improper here. The story is still the same, only with the difference that today any new discourse that emerges in western thought and art would be instantly known because there is now the possibility of immediate contact. And in a next stage some artists or intellectuals would feel, “Oh, yes. This is what we were looking for” (the exact sentence that Morad Farhadpour wrote after his first encounter with Alain Badiou). In this identification with the space of Western discourse, the kind of relationship would no more be an adaptation or pure influence. But at the same time these individuals do not recognise themselves as members of a community here because there are no particular communities or circles. In fact they find themselves belonging to a universal identity rather than a national one. They merely try to thematically incorporate their national identity.
Thus the emphasis on the differences is almost irrelevant. As if the sloganist (or even somewhat colonialist) feeling that we ourselves are the very West, and that the merging of north, south, east and west has somehow become a reality.
SF: But I think the geographical boundaries are still important and there is still a great difference between intellectual space of here and the West.
HY: It is only in method that we are different from Western or European artists.
SF: The difference is more profound; it doesn’t only lie in the method.
P: This common discursive space you are talking about in reality does not exist. There are a series of global policies that impose boundaries –though this imposition is often in the framework of politics and economy – which would not leave artistic practice uninfluenced. Additionally discourses are always different because of the condition of their production, and thus their components and languages are different.
SF: If the discursive spaces were the same, this would still be an indication of the dominance of the West. In this case there is in fact no dialogue. Even the attention of most of the art institutions in the West to the art of marginal countries is quite calculated. What they want of us is an art with the universal language and a local dialect; something that is easily understandable for them and at the same time has an exotic attraction. Dialect means mannerism here, which is useful in marketing. In fact, holding biennials in faraway places often follows the same tendencies, like opening new McDonald branches with local workers.
HF: Essentially, the West has propounded the question of preserving our identity; the question of identity constitutes a great part of our discussions. The West is trying to answer this question (about themselves and about us – through orienalism). And we too are trying separately.
P: In practice the questions here and in the West are totally different. Besides, the idea of the two spaces of discourses as being one is not a view that can deliver an understanding of the conditions. If we take these discourses as merely consisting of general and universal questions, of course they can be the same in many levels. But such questions do not take us close to the daily reality of the two spaces. When the questions are more specific and closer to daily reality, differences become then more evident.
HY: There was a time when the concern of local art and science was very new. For example, Ehsan Naraghi thought that nativism was an Iranian concern and that if we solve this issue we could achieve an Iranian identity. But later it came out that the origin of that issue was not at all Iranian. It was a Western issue, and that we were, for example, influenced by the German intellectuals (refer to Ali Mirsiasi’s Negotiating Modernity in Iran). Therefore, this discussion is totally outdated. Even within the Islamic Republic of Iran there is no talk of, for example, native science or Islamic science.
SF: When we talk about the native we always imagine a non-Western nativness. Native art is the art of the Southern countries of the world because the local issues of the West have become universal. If an American artist talks about Dick Cheney’s homosexual daughters, we already know it, but if someone talks about Iran’s 1953 coup d’état, nobody would know anything about it on the other side of the world.
HY: But everybody knows what a coup is and what the overthrow of a democratic government means. Every artist can refer to the history and culture of his or her country.
SF: Everybody knows what a coup is but how many people in the world know Mossadegh? Of course the present mechanism of the world exhibitions do not provide the opportunity of introducing the cultural background of others.
BG: But European artists rarely have such concerns. If you consider the Middle-Eastern artists, you will see that they are all engaged in their own problems and historical and political conditions while they are not necessarily native artists. Most of the issues in their works are not primarily local.
The 1953 coup is both an Iranian and an American issue. But actually it is considered as an Iranian issue. Today, 9/11 is a universal issue but the shooting down of the Iranian passenger plane [by the Americans] is considered a local Iranian issue, just in the same way that Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Homer’s Odyssey belong to the universal culture but Sadegh Hedayat’s Blind Owl and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh belong to Iranian culture. I, who have chosen the name Odyssey-I for my project of recent years, owe to the universal culture but if Rostam appears in my work, I will be an Iranian and a dutiful son of Cyrus the great. Look at the musique de monde, which is an accumulation of the exotic products of the southern world.
[...]
P: Returning to the question at the beginning of our discussion, how can an art space with its extensive meaning be imagined in the present Iranian condition?
SF: I think what we need, in terms of art space, more than focussing on the physical features of the space, is primarily a space of dialogue. This is a very simple, but at the same time complex, issue.
HY: Do you mean creating a space for critique?
SF: Yes. The question is how this space of dialogue could be formed. Dialogue does not necessarily have to have a specific place.
Another point, which is important for myself is that this space should not remain only in the field of visual art. I, as a visual artist need Hamed Yusofi, who is practising in a different field, to participate in my discussion. How can various people participate in such dialogues, get down to common issues and continue?
P: The domain of visual art in Iran lacks a historical thought which is particular to itself – something that cinema or literature has had, for example. This lack is the cause of most of the misunderstandings that arise during discussions about art. This may be because the relation of the artist with his or her historical and contemporary conditions is not precisely addressed. Perhaps what renders a dialogue productive is careful apprehension of the conditions that could engender a kind of mutual understanding. Perhaps it is from here that a dialogue can turn to a kind of discourse.
HY: In order for a dialogue to turn to a discourse, we need institutions. The institutions could be those circles, that is, those private circles.
P: As discussed before, there is a tendency among some Iranian intellectuals to keep away from this present condition, which, naturally, prolongs the disconnection into the level of thought and reflection. The question is how a space of dialogue can eliminate such a disconnection. In other words, could we anticipate that that circle, which is a quasi-public space or an open door private space, be one day held in the public space? Can there perhaps be thought of forms and devices required for such presence?
HY: It is exactly for this very reason that institutions become necessary. Finally, there must be some other urban spaces in addition to the galleries, museums, and magazines.
SF: At present we are in a phase in which we don’t know how long it might take. It is the pathology of the status quo. This is a phase that must be passed in order to reach something else. We have had people in the field of cinema who devised an important trend in the late 1960s and in the 70s that can now be effective in analyzing the present state of cinema and in finding new ways, but unfortunately there is no such objective example in the field of visual art. That is, we neither have a brilliant period in our history of visual art, nor do we have very distinct artists. Moreover, when there is no place with a system for art production, and, as for the present educational system, it has no possibility of development, how long should we wait for an extensive change?
BG: It is true that the reason why the development of visual art is subject to delay and literature is not, for example, is the poverty of the educational system. You are not supposed to know anything of the visual arts before high school or art school. If you go to an art school they ultimately teach you how to draw a pot. If they want to be very kind to you, they would also introduce you to abstract painting. At the universities, the best teachers are those who have not yet gone beyond formalism. The next generation that, especially, studied at free universities were those who just wanted to get a degree. In these places we do not deal with theoretical discussions. We are faced with the lack of theory in art educational environments. That is, one who studies art does not study aesthetics and philosophy of art. His or her utmost effort would be to memorize art history. Art cannot create a discourse by itself. If we deeply understand the meaning of discursive space, we will see that if we don’t create a relationship between art production, art critique, art theory, the art market, and art policy, we will not achive any discursive space. There is still the credulous (or foolish, if you will) myth that the painter should lock himself up in his studio to begin creation – as if working in the vacuum. The political and social circumstances are totally ignored. Among many contemporary Iranian artists, the politics of art, art theory, and contemporary aesthetics are considered to be the things that damage the fragile innocence of the artist.
SF: I don’t think that under the present conditions visual art in Iran has the power to perform a miracle. It can criticize itself, or try to find some of its own faults. But if it is to take a great step, I am doubtful if it can manage it. That is because the problem is not merely that we have a poor art university and that the art market is closed. It is also because, essentially, the kind of contemporary art that we are talking about has only been practised over recent years (since Conceptual Art, an exhibition at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art). Before that, art had been practised only in its modernist sense and even now there are not many people who have much recognition of today’s art. Therefore, I think it is still necessary for artists to go to the West to gain knowledge about the art environment and then come back to work here.
P: But we have had periods in the history of art when artists went abroad and came back after a while without any significant result.
SF: In my opinion, we have a comparatively better understanding of our conditions, part of which we owe to the experiences by artist from previous generations. When an artist like Parviz Tanavoli, who was an eminent figure of his time, went to the West, he was not influenced by the dominant art trends of that time and continued the same formalistic experiments after he came back to Iran. That is because those experiments were fresh for him and the art climate of Iran at that time. Whereas today our conditions are quite different, and if someone now happens to have the same experience of traveling to the West like Parviz Tanavoli, he would certainly not maintain such a historical distance.
P: There are people who have done significant work in other fields such as literature and cinema in the recent decades, having understood and analyzed their contemporary conditions. As for the field of philosophy, people like Morad Farhadpour, Seyed Javad Tabatabai, and others are doing important work.
HY: I won’t make any comments about Javad Tabatabai, but if Farhadpour’s efforts have been fruitful, the reason is that he is acting like an institution. He personally holds classes, reads articles with the participants, translates, and has a publisher who publishes his works.
SF: Well, what has been the result of these efforts other than some translations?
BG: Farhadpour has written an article saying that the most important thing presently done in Iran is translation.
P: Pointing to such activities in other fields shows that in many cases people have the desire to establish institutions, whether at the individual level, as a group, or as a center. Why haven’t such attempts or tendencies occurred so much in the field of the visual arts?
BG: We have had some institutional attempts. We had an exhibition under the title Conceptual Art at the museum of contemporary art, which had no relevance to conceptual art. However, it caused a discussion that could, of course, not be called a discourse. The outcome was that whatever odd things in art were called conceptual art, the museum of contemporary art became a place for those artists – including us – who didn’t want to do things that were conventional in society. The budget was apportioned to different activities, and in addition to the exhibitions there were also theoretical activities such as lectures and conferences. Anyway, if we compare the effect of the museum of contemporary art in Khatami’s time with its current monopolistic condition, to see whether the circumstances of art has changed, the answer is yes. The number of exhibitions of Iranian artists in foreign countries has increased and the artists spend more energy on projects outside of Iran. However, it is not only the uniqueness of this institution that has caused the present state of contemporary art in Iran. As we said, education is a major cause of the problems. Education of visual artists in Iran is limited to graphics, painting, photography, and sculpture, and our artists’ associations haven’t gone further than this. In these places – that have the responsibility of education and creation of a discursive space – there is no room for the artists like us because we do not solely belong to any of these branches.
SF: I think leaving the country could be a solution, this is because if Farhadpour believes in translation and has had some achievements, it means that the development still begins with having a link with the other side of the world. In the first place, we must see how much of the translations that are done in Iran are in the field of the visual arts, and if people in this field are really concerned about it. Also, in the field of visual art, there is a big difference between being present at an exhibition and watching the work at close range or looking at art works through the Internet. This is really different from translation in the field of theory. Besides, even an Eastern European artist would think that if he or she was in Western Europe they would be much more in the midst of events, let alone a person who is living in a marginal country. I think primarily, gaining knowledge about contemporary art is a very important factor.
BG: I think if the idea that Shahab started with about a year ago for initiating an art space is continued and realized it could become an alternative space in the fullest sense of the word.
P: But Shahab himself speaks of leaving [the country].
SF: I think the function that this would be at the borders of a pathological examination - where the space has the function of examining the malfunction (pathology) within the present cultural condition.] What solution it would adopt, even as a proposal, is not something that the present crowd within the art environment is capable of.
P: Why should this art center seek a particular proposal or solution? Why can’t this center, on the basis of the recognition of its condition and symptoms, attempt activities that it thinks could be productive, in ways that it thinks would be effective?
SF: The question is how much these ways are known. By a proposal for a solution I mean a search for possible ways. To find that way we need knowledge and this knowledge is not what any one can achieve through their own internal contemplation. Contemporary art defines itself in relation to other elements. Every serious move requires the correct knowledge of the present condition.
P: What defines contemporary art, wherever in the world, is the relation it has with the condition in which it has been produced. The question is not who defines contemporary art. Every art is defined by its condition and the factors that determine that condition. The activity of such a center begins exactly at this juncture and its model is not necessarily Western. It is obtained through the process of pathological (examination). If the pathological (examination). is performed properly and is reflected in the art work, then it can have the potential of becoming a discourse.
SF: That process, which must be carried on from the pathological (examination) to art creation, is something that has concidarable examples. After studying these examples, what is gained would be, in all probability, totally different from its Western models. But to achieve this difference requires a knowledge of those approaches.
BG: The only thing I can say here is that now it is not the time to leave; it is not the time to go and to learn, and come back. We are now in a transitory period that began in Khatami’s time but has since become harsher. I believe we must stay and interfere in all its aspects because I don’t think that we can even predict the coming month. Also I insist that reflecting or at least consuming such spirits of the time (Zeitgeist) in art work is not something one can easily forgo. Personally, I can’t stand out of our history, just watching its changes – whether its progress or its decline.