Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
September 18 – December 7, 2002
A groundbreaking exhibition, Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture examines three discrete but interrelated aspects of Iranian art of the 1960s and 1970s. Co-organized by New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Between Word and Image presents over 100 rarely exhibited works—fine art, revolutionary posters, and black-and-white photographs. Introducing American audiences to modern Iranian art, Between Word and Image also sheds light on the many ways that visual culture both reflected and affected the 1960s and 1970s, two decades which saw dramatic changes, such as the politicization of Islam and the 1979 Revolution.
The first section of Between Word and Image features approximately 30 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Grey Art Gallery's unparalleled collection of modern Iranian art. Adopting an increasingly social role, Iranian modern artists grappled with questions of how to reconcile their contemporary sensibilities with their Iranian heritage. Inspired by classical Persian poetry, calligraphy, and miniature paintings, they also appropriated images of Shiism, the dominant form of Islam in Iran. Also exhibited are 34 striking black-and-white photographs from the 1970s by Abbas, an Iranian photojournalist living in Paris and a member of Magnum Photos, the world-renowned collective. The exhibition concludes with a selection of revolutionary posters by both professional and amateur artists who merged calligraphy, graphics, and rhetoric in order to convey abstract ideologies. These three elements—art, photographs, and posters—furnish an important opportunity to rethink the notion of modernism in a non-Western culture.
Shiva Balaghi, Associate Director of the Kevorkian Center, observes, "The construction of modernity in Iran was an act of resistance and creation. It entailed seeking out new ways in which the arts could engage social and political concerns. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian visual artists began to appropriate the traditional role of the poet as Iranian society's conscious and all-seeing critic. In this sense, Iran's visual culture of this period is an archival record of the social and political problems that were emerging; it serves as the artistic pre-history to the Iranian Revolution of 1979."
"The arts serve as a testament to creativity as well as a historical record of upheaval and crisis," notes Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Between Word and Image allows us to learn more about modern Persian art and to begin to understand how a country that was heralded as a paragon of universal modernization underwent an Islamic Revolution whose message was steeped in localized imagery demanding an idealized return to the past."
The modern Iranian works housed at the Grey Art Gallery—part of the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Asian and Middle Eastern Art—comprise the largest public holding of Iranian modern art outside of Iran. Amassed by Abby Grey on numerous trips to the Middle East and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s to promote artistic exchange, the collection includes major early works by the most prominent Iranian artists such as Siah Armajani, Parviz Tanavoli, and Hossein Zenderoudi. One work, Sealed Letter, a 1964 drawing by the noted large-scale public sculptor Siah Armajani, who now lives in Minneapolis, links calligraphy with the highly revered tradition of Persian poetry as a form of social critique. As in Heech, 1972, by sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, the abstract forms simultaneously constitute both word and image. In addition to featuring the Grey's holdings of Iranian art, the show includes several key works lent by New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The second section of the exhibition features photographs by Abbas that provide critical information about Iran in 1970s, when he returned to his native country to produce a photo-essay examining the social and economic changes brought on by the country's rapidly expanding oil industry. One visit coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution. Between 1978 and 1980, Abbas took hundreds of photographs, providing startling and vivid views of Tehran and its citizens caught up in the throes of a whirlwind. Some have become iconic images. An avid diarist, Abbas views his writing as an integral part of the process of making pictures. The show at the Grey juxtaposes excerpts from Abbas's diaries with his photographs, recalling the Persian tradition of illuminated manuscripts. As Balaghi notes, "As in that tradition, Abbas's words and his pictures can stand alone, but they develop a more textured meaning when taken together as a single art form."
Finally, the Iranian revolutionary posters shown in Between Word and Image offer another fascinating glimpse into modern Iranian visual culture. Composed of bold forms and intense colors, such as red (identified with Marxist liberation movements) or green, black, and red (significant in Islam), and usually incorporating calligraphy, these posters were ubiquitous throughout Tehran during the uprising. Made between 1978 and 1980, they were used as props in mass, choreographed street demonstrations and also covered the many walls of Iran's cities, often defacing public monuments built by the Pahlavi regime as symbols of its authority and grandeur. As government agents tore them off or covered them with paint, protesters would replace them with replenished supplies. Many of the posters allude to battle scenes from the Koran or classical Persian poetry. In one image, the raised arms of defiant militants merge with calligraphy proclaiming a defiant slogan, "There is only one God," against a vivid red background that both signals bloodshed and alludes to the red tulip, an icon of classical Persian literature. In another, an anonymous artist juxtaposes a black-and-white silkscreened portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini against an abstract, brightly colored background, clearly referencing the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose portraits of the Shah and the Queen hung in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Still others collaged newspaper images by photojournalists such as Abbas. Here art, reportage, poetry, and politics became enmeshed in a distinct form of visual culture.
As Fereshteh Daftari, a co-curator of the exhibition, observes, "Iranian modernism, like many of the culturally specific modernisms that emerged around the globe, was not synonymous with the one constructed in the West. Both nationalist and internationalist, it looked inward as well as outward. In art its languages included realism and abstraction, but formal issues were not its primary problems: the fundamental questions addressed by Iranian modernism had to do with the notion of identity."
Between Word and Image was co-curated by Lynn Gumpert and Fereshteh Daftari in consultation with Shiva Balaghi, Peter Chelkowski, and Haggai Ram.
GREY ART GALLERY, NYU
www.nyu.edu
