Art History Final Paper

In the “transnational art world of today,”i many artists would balk at being essentialized by art historians and critics identifying them with their geographical origins, ethnic backgrounds, gender performances or any other mostly uncontrollable external marker of identity. Non-western artists, especially, are victim to this process of identification by western viewers and critics of art. Placing the artist within a specific social, political or cultural frame is limiting in a globalised art world where artists wish to be seen as artists, foremost. Defining an artist as a “woman-“ “Chinese-“ “middleeastern-“ artist, or any other essentializing label, is promoting a neocolonial agenda which prevents artists from transcending their local context and being considered as equal participants in the global art world. With this caveat in mind, I here present three artists: Shakir Hassan Al-Said, Shirin Neshat and Shahzia Sikander. Although these are three artists which are grouped together based on geography, religion and similarities in cultural background, my intention is to present them individually each as artists active on the global stage creating work that transcends boundaries, especially that between local and global. Although they are influenced by their local context and much of their work is deeply relevant to those situations, at least two of the artists (Neshat and Sikander) have spoken about the primacy of the personal in their work over the social or political.ii While they do not deny the political or cultural implications of their works, as Neshat has said it “has very much been affected by personal experiences.”iii This focus on personal experience attempts to place their work in the frame of human experience rather than culturally specific experience. It makes the work more accessible to people unfamiliar with the context of its production in an un-exoticizing way.

In a global world where east and west are more and more aware of each other, drawn closer together, the constructed differences seem to be amplified by this nearness of difference. All three artists discussed here span cultures and represent distinct hybrid identities which draw them out of their specifically local context. Whether they intend to or not, the works of these artists all address issues of identity and difference, focusing on the “shifting nature”iv of the boundaries which define these differences and help to construct local as well as hybrid identities. All three also make use of traditional modes of visual expression (especially calligraphy), but by modernizing these traditional forms they even articulate the border between the traditional and the avant-garde. Their use of calligraphy as a signifier of visual rather than linguistic meaning places their works within the ‘anti-writing’ school. The three artists exhibited here are originally from Iraq (Al-Said), Iran (Neshat) and Pakistan (Sikander). Despite significant differences, these three countries share important cultural facts. Most notable is that all three nations are primarily Islamic, if not officially Islamic. Although three different languages are spoken in these three countries (Arabic in Iraq, Farsi in Iran, Urdu in Pakistan), the Arabic script is used for writing all three languages. This has to do with the holy text of Islam, the Quran. The Quran is written in Arabic and is considered the very word of God, imbued with a religious significance beyond that attributed to the Christian bible. Officially the Quran is not to be translated into any other language than Arabic or it loses its holiness. For Muslims speakers of other languages, then, the Quran is often recited without any understanding. In fact, even for native Arabic speakers, the Quran is often not understood since it is written in a 1500 year old fossilized version of the language, radically different from the

varieties of Arabic spoken today. For people in these cultures, then, the written word represents something both very religiously important but also unaccessible to most people. Since most people are unable to understand the literal meaning of the text, the written language takes on a separate visual meaning. The script is a powerful signifier of religious and cultural identity. In Pakistan, especially, this power of the written language is invoked to distinguish Urdu from its nearly identical sister Hindi in neighboring India. In Pakistan Urdu is written in the Arabic script while in India Hindi is written in the Devenagri script. In their work these artists commonly draw on this powerful function of the written language to signify identity and difference. By further stripping the script of any linguistic content they reaffirm its sole function as expressing visual meaning. They are following a long tradition of calligraphy which “transforms brushwork from a signifier of literary meanings to a signifier of visual meaning.”v They are actually completing this transformation, totally removing any literary meaning and focusing only on the symbols as “signifier[s] of visual meaning.” Sikander, for example, fills her works with beautifully painted but meaningless lines of Arabic and Devenagri script (see figure 1). These vary from recognizable characters and what appear to be legible words to brush strokes which only resemble calligraphy in their shape, but which in fact are not clearly letters at all. By repeating these lines of script she strips away all linguistic meaning and reinforces the “visual meaning.” The script here serves as a signifier of Pakistani/Islamic identity vis a vis Indian/Hindi identity. By taking away any real linguistic meaning, Sikander transforms the written language into a new type of symbolic language. Along with other repeated images in her work (cowboy boots, soccer balls, etc.), the repeated

lines of script are used to “write” in this new “language” about the “shifting boundaries” that define cultural difference. Both Al-Said and Neshat also make use of the Arabic script. Just like Sikander, they make use of script as a series of linguistically meaningless but visually meaningful symbols. Figures 2 and 3 show representative works of the two artists in which they make prominent use of the script. In the work in figure 2 Al-Said minimally inscribes two symbols, the letter ba’ (b) and the number 8. On the surface this combination makes no clear linguistic sense, and it is easily interpreted as only some symbol of Arab/Iraqi/Islamic identity. When the letter 8 is understood as its literal equivalent, ha’ (h), the two symbols together form the word hub, ‘love.’vi This does not seem to have any clear significance in the painting, however. More significant is that the mixing of numerals and letters here “obscures the word being conveyed . . . elminat[ing] the semantic meaning of his work.”vii Unlike Sikander’s use of Arabic script, however, Al-Said’s use does not seem to be such a strong signifier of identity. According to Byrne, the aesthetic form of the letter and numeral are valuable aside from any literal or symbolic meaning. Her claim is that Al-Said wants to draw the viewers attention to the beauty of the form “as it is, rather than what it represents.”viii It is difficult, though, to deny any symbolic meaning related to Arab-Islamic identity. Whether this was Al-Said’s intention or not, especially for a western viewer the Arabic letter and numeral immediately elicit ideas of the exotic middle-east. Figure 3 shows a photographic self-portrait of Neshat. Here she has inscribed her body with Persian poetry written in the Arabic script. Although this is actually legible script, unlike the totally illegible script in Al-Said and Sikander’s work, for most viewers

of the work who are western non-Farsi speakers the poetry is unintelligible and “literally marks the body as an exotic ‘other.’”ix From the point of view of a western non-Farsi speaking viewer of this work, the use of script is the same as Al-Said and Sikander’s in terms of written language stripped of linguistic content. The focus here is again on form rather than content. While the script screams ‘other!’, the artist confronts the viewer, gun in hand. This gun contrasts with her veil which also marks her otherness. It literally divides her face in two, representing her split identity as American and Iranian, and pointing toward the dichotomies of “conformity and revolt, passivity and protest, submission and resistance.”x She presents her conflicted, hybrid identity this way in an attempt to “De-orientalize” Iran.xi Similar to Neshat’s use of veil and gun to draw attention to false binaries used to construct cultural difference, Sikander and Al-Said both in their own ways draw attention to boundaries and borders between ‘us’ and ‘other’. Through repeating images of both eastern and western cultural icons (soccer balls, Hindu gods, cowboy boots and hats, Arabic and Devenagri script, etc.) Sikander develops a symbolic language to articulate the “shifting boundaries” of difference.xii Al-Said, on the other hand, makes use of wall cracks to focus our attention on depth rather than length or width.xiii This crack “incorporate[s] Iraq’s history”xiv by referring to changes in the surrounding walls which must have occurred to create the crack. It can also be understood metaphorically as a reference to the gaps that create and the walls/boundaries that reinforce difference. His use of the crack, like Sikander’s use of her constructed symbolic language and Neshat’s juxtaposition of paradoxical cultural symbols, expresses the deeply embedded problem of difference which is always at play in our constructions of identity.

Historically, literacy has only been enjoyed by the very privileged elite of most societies. This has caused “writing … [to] inevitably become a privileged means for power and dominance; its form and content are constantly manipulated for such purposes.”xv The artists exhibited here are attempting to re-appropriate and use writing to resist the power and dominance of the west. By focusing on the symbolic significance of written language to express religious, political and cultural identities and juxtaposing these symbols with western iconography (Sikander) or non-stereotypical behavior such as the direct gaze and gun (Neshat) these artists are resisting the colonial attempt to exoticize. They are attempting to “de-orientalize” themselves and their language with an artistic expression of difference and the boundaries that define it.

i

Shahi, Kimia. “Shirin Neshat: Images of Identity.” 2008. Desai, Veshakha. “A Conversation with Shirin Neshat and Shahzia Sikander.” (http://www.asiasource.org/arts/Viewpoints1.cfm) iii Ibid. iv http://www.irobase.com/slingshotproject/v2/?ikId=2076 v Wu Hung, “Anti-writing,” Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, Chicago: Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 1999: 36-41. vi Byrne, Kelsey. “Inspiration from Tradition.” 2008. vii Ibid. viii Ibid. ix Shahi, Kimia. “Shirin Neshat: Images of Identity.” 2008. x Ibid. xi Ibid. xii Williams, Nicholas. “crossing boundaries, constructing language.” 2008. xiii Byrne, Kelsey. “Inspiration from Tradition.” 2008. xiv Ibid. xv Wu Hung, “Anti-writing,” Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, Chicago: Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 1999: 36-41. ii