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Shirin Neshat: Islamic Counterpoints
Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Amei Wallach
In a highly productive three-year period, Shirin Neshat has produced a series of stark, visually arresting films that reflect the tensions of Muslim society and her own conflicted role as an Iranian woman living in the West.
Islam in its practice is specific to time, place, tradition, history, national culture and political circumstance, yet very few interpreters of any of its myriad forms have gained a following in the West. Leaving aside Salman Rushdie, whose views are, to say the least, contested, Islam's explicators consist of a handful of academics, not all of whom agree with the most visible among them, Edward Said; a few novelists, most notably Naguib Mahfouz; and a new generation of immigrants and children of immigrants, such as writers Ahdaf Soueif or Hanif Kureishi.
What, then, is the allure of Shirin Neshat? In the past three years, the Iranian-born artist has leaped into the international art circuit with generally highly praised video installations at the Venice Biennale (where she won a Golden Lion), the Carnegie International, the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Lyon Biennial and the Kwangju Biennial. She has also had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien and the Serpentine Gallery in London. A survey exhibition organized by the Musee d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, opened there in late September and will travel to Minneapolis, Houston and Miami. "Logic of the Birds," Neshat's first collaborative project involving live performance, is being presented this month at The Kitchen in New York. Lately she has participated in international film festivals as well.
Neshat's iconic exploration of the heart, mind and psyche of Islam is increasingly analogous in its visceral intelligence to Frida Kahlo's encapsulation of her own culture. She succeeds in being at once specific in subject matter and epic in expression, practicing an intricate alchemy of image, locale, action and music.
Her three new videos, which debuted at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in late spring, are for the first time single-screen presentations.[1] Diverse in narrative and form, they both substantiate her achievement and suggest explanations for her ability to mesmerize her audience. The settings range from sun-scorched rocky shore to village square to domestic interior; the action from individual to communal; the atmosphere from neorealist to gothic; the images from a mass of women in black chadors to a single face in close-up. At the opening, on a hot night, the crowded viewing spaces were sweaty and smelled of socks. But almost everyone stayed put from beginning to end of each video (the longest is 11 1/2 minutes), despite the lure of the restless partying just outside the door.
A Landscape in Black and White
Neshat began to develop her mature body of work at the age of 33, following a 1990 trip back to Iran, her first since the 1979 revolution. Now a stranger to her culture, she was struck by the sight of women in the head-to-toe black chador that had become required attire in the wake of the revolution and had literally changed the landscape.
In Iran the chador has long been political territory, claimed, rejected and reclaimed by battling ideologies. Viewed as an emblem of backwardness at the start of the century, it was abolished in 1936. In the 19608 and '70s, as the increasingly corrupt Pahlavi dynasty induced disenchantment with Western modernization, donning a chador became a feminist declaration of emancipation from stereotypes of beauty and the tyranny of the international cosmetics industry--akin to bra burning in the U.S. Under a 1983 (postrevolution) edict, however, it has become a kind of prison uniform, denying sexuality and individuality. The symbol of rebellion today is lipstick worn with a chador, as the Iranian-born scholar Farzaneh Milani discovered on a recent visit.[2]
Neshat had experienced the first two permutations of the chador's signification before her father sent her to study in California in 1973. On her 1990 visit she discovered the third. Back in New York, where the chador has yet another meaning as a repellent artifact of political repression and what scholar Leila Ahmed calls the "most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies,"[3] she clothed herself in a chador, had herself photographed, and wrote militant feminist Farsi poetry over the parts of her body that showed (hands, feet or face) for her first mature body of work, the "Women of Allah" series. She chose the black and white of early Alfred Hitchcock and classic Life magazine documentary photos for the glamorous rigor of these works. In Allegiance with Wakefulness (1994), the most widely reproduced image, the calligraphy decorates the bottoms of her bare feet, which are propped like Diane Arbus twins to our view, a gun barrel thrust between them.
This is work best understood as performance art and closest in impulse to Anselm Kiefer's 1969 "Occupations," for which he traveled to European historical sites and had himself photographed giving the Nazi salute. If Kiefer was, in a sense, assuming personal responsibility for his Fascist heritage, Neshat was testing her own response to the cataclysmic history of her nation and to the Western reaction to it. In both cases, the artists rehearsed their conflicted inner lives through their own bodies, with this essential difference: as an immigrant and a woman, Neshat inhabits both worlds, teetering between past and present, Western and Eastern, stereotype and deconstructor of stereotypes.
