Contemporary Iranian Art

From the Street to the Studio

Talinn Grigor

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780232706
• eBook ISBN: 9781780233093
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In the first comprehensive look at Iranian art and visual culture since the 1979 revolution, Talinn Grigor investigates the official art sponsored by the Islamic Republic, the culture of avant-garde art created in the studio and its display in galleries and museums, and the art of the Iranian diaspora within Western art scenes. Divided into three parts—street, studio, and exile—the book argues that these different areas of artistic production cannot be understood independently, revealing how this art offers a mirror of the sociopolitical turmoil that has marked Iran's recent history. Exploring the world of galleries, museums, curators, and art critics, Grigor moves between subversive and daring art produced in private to propaganda art, martyrdom paraphernalia, and museum interiors. She examines the cross-pollination of kitsch and avant-garde, the art market, state censorship, the public-private domain, the political implications of art, and artistic identity in exile. Providing an astute analysis of the workings of artistic production in relation to the institutions of power in the Islamic Republic, this beautifully illustrated book is essential reading for anyone interested in Iranian history and contemporary art.

THE STREET

1

God is beautiful and [he] loves beauty.

Hadith, Sahih Muslim 1:275, The Book of Faith

On 1 February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s plane landed in Tehran. Mehrabad Airport, where the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic Revolution arrived, had been commissioned by the Ministry of Finance at the pinnacle of Reza Shah’s secular reign in 1937. Completed in 1958 by the famed Iranian architect Mohsen Forughi, this modernist white building, punctuated with typically Bauhaus-style balconies and Corbusian horizontal windows, had served as the gateway to Iran and an icon of the Pahlavi monarchy (illus. 4). The last king of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah, and Imam Khomeini had missed each other in its grand hall by a fortnight. It was here, during his first public speech, that the latter accused the former of having ‘ruined our land’.¹ He vowed to ‘pluck out the roots of monarchy’ and ‘to cut the arms of foreigners’ from Iran.

Much of the visual culture created after this avowal intended to undo the foundations of the aesthetics that the architecture surrounding the imam represented. The aim was to eliminate the imperial past and to remove colonial meddling from not only Iranian cultural life but from Iranian life tout court. Imam Khomeini intended to replace secular royal symbols that had created the ‘Pahlavi man’ with markers of Islam that would give birth to the ‘new “Islamic” man’.² The imam’s vision of an Islamic society was predicated on the technique of replacing the culture promoted by 54 years of modernist reform with a new culture inspired by Islam, what I would call a sort of representational replacement. During the three decades following February 1979, Iranian art mirrored the foundational ideology of Imam Khomeini’s unborn religious republic. It also proved to be the most decisive tool in the implementation of this aesthetic substitution.

The referendum in March 1979 and the constitution of 1980 established the Islamic Republic of Iran. Revolutionary art, or rather this representational replacement, was conceived to remove the secular and modernist cultural environment, the parameters of which Pahlavi reformists had established in the 1920s.³ It also aimed to solve a theoretical predicament that the new theocratic republic faced. The propaganda art catered to the ideological dilemma of the political system that governed it: that the raison d’être of the official religion of Iran, Shi’ism, is advocacy for the oppressed in the status of the opposition. Among many others, Imam Khomeini famously had declared that ‘Shi’ism is a school of oppressiveness’ (shi’a maktab-e mazlumyat ast). From the outset, the leadership of the revolution recognized that the Islamic Republic needed to maintain a hold on the production of an environment wherein the legitimacy of a religious republic would be perpetuated. The creation of a certain anti-elitist, anti-avant-garde visual culture became pivotal to the preservation of the post-revolutionary status quo.

4 Mohsen Forughi, Mehrabad Airport, Tehran, 1958.

Since then, the state has maintained a firm command of its self-representation, on the politics of representational replacement, through the development of a populist visual environment. The tensions between the ‘Islamic’ and the ‘Republic’ are not only reflected in policies towards the arts, but remain a major structural debate among the leadership and the people of Iran. As the cultural historian Shiva Balaghi notes, the ‘people’s authorship over their cultural destiny’ guaranteed by the constitution of 1980 on the one hand, and the resolve to ‘use culture to promote an Islamic morality’ on the other, linger at the core of the contradiction within the Islamic republic.⁴

During the 1980s, the state produced a pictorial discourse that aimed to (re)acculturate the masses based on Shi’a-Iranian moral principles. The formulaic reproduction of extant styles, the sentimental appeal to emotions and a didactic purpose assigned to art formed a separate aesthetic and ethical system that set itself apart from and against the art promoted by the ousted Pahlavi dynasty. The art that the revolutionaries reacted to was characterized by the Western-oriented, Tehran-centred modernist and vernacular movements of the 1960s and ’70s that went hand in hand with the secularist, individualist and nationalist ideology of the ancien régime. The generous patronage of the arts by Empress Farah Pahlavi, was particularly significant. From the start of the revolution, this avant-garde art that was so closely associated with the fallen monarchy was shunned. As in many revolutionary examples in history, using the language of academic realism and populist symbolism – in the case of Iran, Shi’a iconography – a new visual language was institutionalized.

Post-revolutionary Iran remains the one state in the Muslim world where there is a sustained and systematic visual discourse that penetrates most aspects of public, private, cultural, sociopolitical and religious life. Iranians, regardless of their religion, class, gender, occupation or status, are exposed to this visual material. While not totalitarian by any means – one of the tenets of the republic is respect for private property – that visual culture fulfils a fundamental task in contemporary Iranian identity formation. Members of the society are consumers of this provocative visual environment. With the shifts in political tides since 1979, the relationship between the Iranian state and propaganda art has gone through several mutations. These, in turn, have impacted the intertwined and mirroring dialectics of public/private, street/studio. The four political phases of the Islamic Republic have been periodized by the four major figures that led them: Supreme Leader Imam Khomeini (r. 1979–89), President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (r. 1989–97), President Mohammad Khatami (r. 1997–2005) and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (r. 2005–13).⁵

The revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq, led by Imam Khomeini, gave birth to a new visual environment that aimed to cleanse (pak-sazi) the monarchical and Western traditions. It also attempted to create an Islamic community (Persian ommat, Arabic umma) through a synthesis of Shi’a signs and narrative with revolutionary iconography. This period saw the use of urban squares as sites of protest and control and the evolution of revolutionary graffiti and posters into official propaganda murals. The Islamization of the revolution forced by the ideological cause of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) was pivotal to a shift away from leftist revolutionary to Shi’a iconography and subject-matter. They were meant to rally the war effort and keep the revolutionary fervour alive.

The end of the war and the death of Imam Khomeini in 1989 ushered in the Era of Reconstruction (baz-sazi) led by President Rafsanjani. He launched economic and infrastructural reforms that aimed to rationalize governance, which in turn introduced the notion of ‘beauty’ into the post-war social matrix of reconstruction. The lay Islamic intellectuals of this period, including artists, toiled to create quality works that would open up a space for artistic expression and at the same time remain loyal to the tenets of the constitution of a Shi’a-Iranian republic. They intended to emancipate artworks from the burden of representational replacement, but preserve art’s ideological function as an agent of social betterment. In other words, art could not be superfluously for its own sake, they maintained. It needed to be committed to the larger ideological agendas, as Imam Khomeini had proclaimed.⁶

The concern over artistic expression moved centre stage with the watershed election in May 1997 of President Khatami, who spearheaded the ‘reform era’. His presidency was premised on the effort to form a civil society and an opening up of Iran to the rest of the world. He called this the ‘Dialogue among Civilizations’ (addressed in chapter Three).⁷ The official promotion of the arts, both domestically and aboard, served as an instrument of political reform. Khatami’s ideological agenda was, in effect, a restructuring of the revolutionary pictorial discourse. To sponsor artistic freedom and to beautify the built environment became hallmarks of not only his administration but the reform movement at large. The resuscitation of state-owned museums and the opening of hundreds of private galleries went hand in hand with urban beautification (ziba-sazi) projects. This included the establishment of thousands of neighbourhood parks in urban centres and the transformation of the revolutionary mural tradition from a political propaganda art to a light-hearted, playful aesthetic.

The election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2005 denoted a paradigm shift in this strategy of signage. His conservative administration halted Khatami’s various reform programmes and brought to a standstill the domestic artistic activities that had been gaining momentum since the 1990s. The beautification of cities now took on a different meaning. Neighbourhood mosques began to replace neighbourhood parks, while on the streets, the walls of buildings turned into visual battlegrounds. From Imam Khomeini’s pak-sazi via Rafsanjani’s baz-sazi to Khatami’s ziba-sazi, the dialectics between the street and the studio in Iran came full circle. The presidential election in June 2009 – during which pak-sazi revisited the street walls – was yet another expression of this inter-pollination of art and politics, between the strategies of political and pictorial discourse.⁸

Revolutionary Walls

On 1 May 1979, Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran to celebrate International Workers’ Day along with ‘the true spring of freedom after the 2,500-year-old monarchy’.⁹ A decade later, in 1990, the day was quietly marked by well-choreographed, state-funded indoor assemblies. This shift was a result of how the city’s streets had been accomplices in the revolutionary struggle. The contestation of public space was itself an act of revolt.¹⁰ The Tehran that enabled a mass uprising that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah and ended the institution of Persian monarchy was the same Tehran planned and implemented by the king’s father.¹¹ Reza Shah’s urban renewal of the 1930s was predicated on the implementation of broad avenues flanked by multi-storey buildings that connected to each other in large open squares. The nineteenth-century fortifications along with a substantial amount of the urban fabric in the heart of the city were levelled to create open spaces, including wide avenues, urban squares and municipal parks.

These urban policies had several physical and symbolic purposes: easy military access to the dense areas of the city; easy movement of goods and capital; the creation of modern infrastructural and communication networks; unification of space that would encourage cultural homogenizat...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE
• 1 THE STREET
• 2 THE STUDIO
• 3 THE EXILE
• EPILOGUE
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index