December 12, 2019
There could not have been a better introduction to Iranian-born, US artist Shirin Neshat than watching one of her videos, Rapture (1999) early on in the extensive retrospective of 30 years of her work, currently on exhibition at The Broad in L.A.
Everything, but everything was binary in that experience. You sit between split screens, having to turn your head to the left to see one part of the video installation, to the right to see the other and never the twain shall meet. The left side depicts hundreds of women, the right the equivalent number of men. The females, cloaked in black hijab or chador watch, often passively, pray, are mostly silent except for an occasion of ondulation, disperse and eventually send a few of their own on a rickety boat into the depths of the Atlantic ocean (filmed in Morocco.) The men, in identical black pants and white shirts, run the length of a citadel, canons and all, climb to the roof, sing, feast, display some hierarchical order and are generally active, eventually waving en masse to the departing women from afar.
Think of it as Buñuel meets Herzog, and I mean that as a compliment. Sort of. It was visually dramatic, exquisitely staged and choreographed. The binary themes of female/male, activity/passivity, departure/arrival, even a dreamlike state vs reality that are central to all of her work, were right upfront. The video brought the issues of gender differences and religious intolerance to the fore with a sledge hammer, black and white for all to see, and yet leaving enough room for ambiguity that even the most fervent feminist could leave the screening room with an inkling of hope. Maybe.
There was that nagging thought – and one that repeatedly crept into my brain while taking in this comprehensive exhibition – as to whether we have made any progress away from the orientalist lens applied throughout history to members of non-western cultures, those exotic figures from a different world. The forced head movements between screens had me wonder about disconnection, the separation of them vs us, but also about how our gaze is steered, often away from taking in the whole picture; the staged costuming and movement of the people evoked a sense of directorial control that was reminiscent of its colonialist counterpart, chador replacing the nude bodies of those Seraglio paintings of yore as a mirror image of exotic otherness.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Neshat is superb in the way she creates visual scenarios, employs melodrama to make a point, ingeniously cashing in on our fascinations. She is powerful in her story telling and quite sensitive to contemporary concerns with exile, gendered existence, the interplay between political power and religious fervor. And she has whatever it takes to become a successful female artist in a male dominated world, never mind her exceedingly dainty, feminine appearance, dangling designer jewelry, heavy make-up and all. More power to her!
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She also has a story that is carefully tailored to underpin her art. Raised in Iran in a middle-class family in the 1950s, sent to catholic boarding school in Tehran to get a westernized education, she came to the US at age 17 in 1975 to go to college and later grad school to get her MfA. Discontent with her attempts at making her own art, she moved to New York city and worked at the side of her partner for over 10 years, tending to a cultural meeting point The Storefront for Art and Architecture. Those years were not exactly exile – that only began with the political changes in Iran prohibiting her return, and she has certainly refrained from visiting there for the last decades, now openly declaring that she never wants to go home, even if it were politically possible, and intends to leave nostalgia for the place behind.
Her first large project in the 1990s after a visit back home after years that included the revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iraq war, propelled her like a rocket into the successful realms of the art world. The photographic series Women of Allah depicted veiled women with guns in various positioning, often looking directly at you in regal and defiant ways, overlaid in carefully applied calligraphy citing Farsi poetry, often by women poets. No longer object of stares but agents of their own gaze, these women, photographed between 1993 and 1997, projected strength, particularly in the juxtaposition of tenderness, when coupled with children, with rawness, when harnessing the weaponry, another one of those binary plots.
The writing across the bodies of the subjects felt like a membrane to me, a distancing device in the sense that the language cannot be deciphered by this Western viewer, but also as a protective barrier against too much exposure of the body parts it covered. If we could read Farsi, we would learn that two very contrasting poets are projected onto the different subjects:
“Farrokhzad’s imagery from the pre-revolutionary Iran, controversially sexual, Western, a modern rebel thirsty for life—and Taherzadeh, the new regime’s idol, utterly alien to the artist, Muslim, traditional, Eastern, revolutionary, daydreaming about martyrdom. In Untitled (1996), the woman is the object of desire, her face covered with Farrokhzad’s text. In Speechless (1996) and others employing Taherzadeh’s text, the woman willingly becomes the revolutionary sacrifice: motherly, subjugated, utterly secondary.”
While I looked at these determined faces I wondered about how the historical development in the 30 years since these photos were taken would change our reaction: if I knew these women were involved with ISIS, would I see a triumph in their courage to join the fight? If I was a Kurdish female fighter, now raped and killed for participation in a singular social experiment of gender equality, would my Iranian sisters, fighting for the right to veiled themselves again, feel like enemies or allies? Does a change in contemporary context alter the poignancy of contemporary art?
Does a change in politics alter the way we describe a country? I was reminded of one of my favorite travel books of all times, Terence O’Donnell’s Garden of the Brave in War, that describes life in pre-revolutionary Iran in the countryside, introducing world views quite different from our Western perspective and yet assuring a sense of shared humanity. How would he have depicted the contemporary state of affairs?
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Neshat has won countless awards for her work, among them the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Grand Prix at the Kwangju Biennale (2000), the Visual Art Award from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York (2002), the ZeroOne Award from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize from the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2005), and the Lillian Gish Prize in New York (2006). Her contributions to important collections can be found here.
The early photographic explorations were soon joined by videos and feature films, media that I find frankly much more interesting and a better match for her strength of creating visual drama, and also requiring deeper thinking than her portrait work. The exquisitely mounted exhibition at The Broad meanders from room to room, large spaces that provide breathing room for the XL portraiture. There is something about the size (and the repetitious use of calligraphy obscuring faces across 30 years of work) that eventually strikes as dangerously close to gimmicky.
The strong emotional impact of the first series, in other words, was not matched for me in later work, now staging subjects from other countries, often by major commissions, in Egypt and Azerbaijan. People propped up in studio arrangements with photographers present (Larry Barns being a frequent and outstanding collaborator), lighting assistants bustling, and Neshat directing pose, are asked how they feel about poverty or what home means to them (the little things like mother’s food, it turns out to little surprise.) Capturing their tears in front of the recording group feels invasive to me, if not exploitative, and the size of the portraits prevents any sense of intimacy with the subjects.
Much more impressive is work that contrasts the smallness of humans, almost always women, with the largeness of landscapes or architectural molochs. The stills anticipate what the video installations confer: a striking sense of visual exploration of psychological states.
The Broad excels in placing the small auditoriums where the videos are shown in-between the spaces for photographic work – it is almost like breathing room provided, except that your breath is sucked in and held from the tension elicited by these films. It is as director that Neshat succeeds most, on both the emotional and intellectual level. (Unclear, why that did no transfer to her first major directing role in an operatic setting – she was called to direct Aida at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2017, an opera with a love triangle and political and religious oppression, right up her alley, one would think. The showcase production with Muti conducting and Netrebko in the main role was lauded, but Neshat’s directing ruthlessly panned by the critics.)
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Neshat does not consider herself a political activist. Politics affect her, though, and she talks freely about being exposed to racial profiling immediately after 9/11 and then again since the 2016 election that confronted her with more explicit racism in her own private experience. Her recent work (Roja and Land of Dreams) turns to explorations of living as an exile in the US, providing astute social commentary on trauma and war as experienced by all sides, but also linking to her feeling that she is not welcome in either culture or place.
When asked if she considers herself a feminist she answers indirectly: “If someone asks me that and they often do, I give the question back to the audience. Do they think I am? Yes they do, so I take that, it’s ok with me.” Her recurrent emphasis on the dichotomy of women being extremely fragile and vulnerable vs extremely strong and defiant might need a closer look in the context of feminist theory. The implications of gendered realities in her work, however, are fascinating and if you have a chance to see this exhibition, make sure you do!
Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again
Oct 19 – Feb 16, 2020 The Broad, Los Angeles, CA
