Brothers, what happened to her shirt in the thick of the night?What was her sin? Tell me. It must be asked.Don’t keep it a secret, if you hear anything about it.
- SIMIN BEHBAHANI | “Twelve Fountains of Blood”
In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap, and in a strange way—as is very well shown by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the title of one of the chapters of Le Visible et l’invisible—entrelacs (in-terlacing, intertwining). There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of the double sides that the function of vision presents, that is not manifested to us as a labyrinth. As we begin to distinguish its various fields, we always perceive more and more the extent to which they intersect
JACQUES LACAN | “The Line and Light”
There are no chador’s in Tannaz Farsi’s The Points of Departure, no women dressed head to toe in black, no women with guns, no references to oil or to war, no explosions or threats of explosion, no rapes, murders, or drone-assisted assassinations, no lashings, executions, or torture, no stonings of women accused of adultery, no hit-and-runs, no suicide bombings, no fountains of blood. There is no sensationalism, also no sentimentality, no pity, no self-aggrandizement, no admonitions, no autobiography, no con-fessions. The artist’s intent is not to represent or restage reality; nor is it to dislodge the secrets of the dead from their hiding places and subterfuges; nor is she particularly interested in directly challenging Western ideas about Iran, about women, about Iranian women.
The Points of Departure 2017 , Installation view, Linfield Gallery, McMinnville, Oregon
Elegant, formal, understated, impersonal, demanding, challenging, resistant to easy readings, the installation is a work whose full significance might initially escape the casual visitor unfamiliar with stylized codes of political resistance, unaccustomed to confronting the potency, and danger, of political symbols, particularly in political regimes and administrations where to speak one’s mind may mean unemployment, imprisonment, punishment, banishment, or even death. The artist can say whatever she wants without censure, but the meaning of what is said is modified both in the saying and the hearing and is also, quite possibly, compromised, diminished, undermined, inverted, twisted, or turned upside down, without any necessary element of malice, ill will, disregard, or oblivion. Such mispri-sion is the great risk inherent in taking on fraught subjects.
Accordingly—indeed, necessarily—The Points of Departure is distinguished by a certain vigilance (wakefulness, watchfulness, reticence) and, objectively speaking, an unrelenting iconoclasm that entails not the usual smashing of idols, their mockery and mutilation (2) but rather more subtle manifestations of the reformist spirit, including eschewing images when they might seem to be called for (3) or where they might be particularly efficacious; refusing images, particularly powerful or maddening or explosive images that might work to further hatred, bigotry, injustice, or just more stupefaction, or which increase power in heinously hypocritical fashion; or simply averting one’s eyes when in the presence of the lurid, the violent, or the insane. One senses throughout a radical distrust of the image as such, a wariness and rare discrimination. The installation (landscape, interior panorama, time machine, labyrinth, trap) is composed of four distinct elements, four material unities, without mixing or contamination of the constituent parts or, for that matter, any obvious connections between them either. In each component, the artist attempts to carry out a political and religious transvaluation of well-known, often ancient, symbols of power, dominance, and martyrdom through a complex series of ritualistic operations that, alternately, decontextualize and recontextualize, deconstruct and reconstruct, deform and reform, literalize and symbolize, freeze and unfreeze, torque and countertorque, crack and mend. The work is carried out with great subtlety and an almost surgical precision despite the force required to break down, break open, and break apart the dense control centers of a firmly entrenched symbolic order resistant to gradualism.
If you walk into the exhibit without noticing what you’re doing, you might end up on the floor, entangled in a large sculpture situated about a foot off the ground—a three-dimensional translation, deformation, and slight rotation of a premodern Islamic star-and-polygon design, its subtle lines rendered in steel. The sprawling structure, the centerpiece of the exhibit, is based on a design from the late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Topkapi Scroll, (4) a rare and exquisite collection of 114 geometric designs, only a few of which seem to have been actualized on the walls and domes of Timurid-dynasty Iran. Their successful translation from three dimensions to two, from the spatial to that which has been “set free from space,” to quote the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, (5) has long been of interest to scholars, and with no small degree of amazement, for it is unclear how such translation could be accomplished, particularly with such skill and beauty. In a remarkable display of ingenuity, the artist has taken one of the designs, geometric arabesque #28, and rendered it in three dimensions, eliminating or stretching out the contact lines between the stars and polygons that constitute the design and increasing the residual spaces between them such that they no longer form airtight shapes in and of themselves: deformation as political act. Color (orange, red, white, and gold) increases the articulation but remains intentionally muted. Stronger colors would have indicated completely different aims and preoccupations and, perhaps more importantly, might have undermined the concern with form as such. Again, this is an artist who is not interested in subjectivism, who eschews the confessional, the personal, and the psychological almost altogether. Yet #28, Topkapi Scroll resembles nothing so much as it does a skeleton, a broken animal or collapsed body, that is, a subject, its powers of suggestion being located entirely in the form itself as it undergoes its own deconstruction.
Units of Movable Earth (detail, one month after installation)20171,000 species tulips, soil, vinyl sacks. Installation view, Linfield Gallery, McMinnville, Oregon
Even the tulip (indeed, especially the tulip)—the major Iranian symbol of martyrdom and an emblem of the country itself since the 1979 revolution—is subject to reinterpretation. According to mythology, a crimson-red tulip is said to bloom at the site where the blood of a martyr has been spilled. In Units of Movable Earth, the artist has forced a thousand species tulips to bloom at the spring equinox and the Persian New Year, but their color, while predominantly red, is spread across the spectrum, sug-gesting a symbolic shift or drift in meaning, an expansion of value. This hijacking of the natural is no mean feat given the fact that most spring ephemerals, even in the wild, are said to have at their disposal but a small window between the melting snows and the heat of summer to blossom. The quick, confident efflorescence of such organisms, following “the caprice of the organic,” (6) is made perhaps less capricious but certainly more precarious through their transplantation in a gallery, where, untouched by sun and rain, they still manage to reach skyward.
The artist has accentuated the tension between the natural and the artificial, idealism and abjection, the apparent and the real, by nesting the bulbs in clear vinyl bags that work like a split-shot or ant farm, revealing a netherworld usually kept out of sight and out of mind. These are clearly not your typical houseplants, displayed in enameled planters with all signs of their origins covered over with river rock or polished glass, nourished by high-potency plant food administered on the sly. Instead, the viewer half expects to see worms, ants, and centipedes spilling out of the newly disturbed earth. Units of Movable Earth suggests not only the ambiguities of exile and the high price required to maintain second lives of every variety, but also the most basic kind of denial required to continue living at all: a kind of perpetual fire-jumping. From here, it is perhaps not a huge step to the various cults and cultures of martyrdom: from the Judeo-Christian insistence on suffering as the sign and imprimatur of a serious person, as put forward by Susan Sontag in her essay “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer”; (7) to the one willing to die for his or her beliefs, whose major witness is said to be God or the angels, as the seventh-century Arabic rendering of the original Greek notion of the martyr suggests; (8) to contemporary, heavily militarized versions of the idea that are closer to suicide, homicide, or their fusion.
The artist is interested not only in the way that tropes and symbols can induce certain manners of thinking, feeling, and being—serving as a powerful, unifying aesthetic, if not a form of domination—but also in the way in which space in and of itself can induce such states. The point of departure for Strata of Empire (Relic) is thus architectural, the world as sculpture. Its focus is the ancient city of Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire, founded by Darius I in 515 bce—a city without any representations whatsoever of females, as the artist likes to point out, the one exception being a lioness and her cubs. In an act of supreme irony, the city that shunned entirely the exaltation and immortalization of woman was, according to Greek historian Diodorus, destroyed at the suggestion of a woman. The details of the story are too complex and too numerous to recount here, but following a triumphal if drunken banquet thrown by Alexander the Great, who had managed to conquer Persepolis three months before, a hetaera named Thaïs, an Athenian, is said to have suggested that the city be torched by the hands of women as revenge for the burning of the Athenian Acropolis and the Temple of Athena 150 years earlier—an idea that the Macedonian king actualized on the spot with the help of his soldiers. (9) The artist has taken an image of her right arm, sleeves rolled up and ready, and reproduced and mirrored it in order to form a strange, uncanny composite. Her hand clutches a large chunk of gray limestone, the remnant of a capital possibly from the ruins of the palace hall called the Apadana, renowned for its massive columns. It is her “throwing arm,” as she says, and one feels, indeed, that rocks may be coming. In many respects, the acephalic self-portrait, only an apparent contradiction, strikes one as the originary point of departure for the whole show, serving, as it were, as the index of the gaze of the artist herself. Directly to the right is situated a smaller framed photograph of the rock, its stark solitude reinforcing its status as magical object, fetish, and instrument of protest, a means of further undoing.
Strata of Empire (Relic) 2016. 48 x 44 inches. Digital print
Strata of Empire (Vestige) 2016. 28 x 44 inches. Digital print, undershirt
Across the expanse of the gallery, the eye is drawn to a long line of seventy-seven names belonging to major Iranian feminist figures—teachers, scholars, artists, poets, theologians, satirists, and martyrs. Mounted on the wall in apotropaic gold, they practically demand candlelight and ritual, almost eight thousand miles from home. The names include Simin Behbahani (1927–2014), poet and “Lioness of Iran”; Qurrat al-’Ayn (1817–1852), the Babi theologian known as Iran’s first “suffrage martyr,” as she was strangled to death with a silk scarf; and Bibi Khanum Astarabadi (1858–1921), founder of the School for Girls in Tehran and a writer best known for her book The Vices of Men, a scathing, satirical response to the “evil natured man” who penned The Education of Women, a set of recommendations for how women should behave. (10) The artist has transliterated the Persian names into English, using a font of her own creation made entirely of rhomboids, the measuring devices used in traditional Islamic calligraphy to ensure proportional perfection, their diamondlike form said to reproduce the shape of the pen’s nib pressed to paper. The characters are kerned exactly, an equivalence reinforced by the extreme regularization of the characters, each of which has been awarded its own allotment of space. The Names stretches across the back corner wall in perfect linearity, suggesting order, gravity—calmness, even—in the face of punishment or death. No curves here, rather more geometry, organicism having been banished. The words are barely separated from one another—a defense array. There is no feeling of mediation or authorship or propriety. It is as though the artist has made a pact with the women she has immortalized, agreeing to be their channel, a pure medium. Indeed, if one word could describe the body of work of The Points of Departure, it might be purity, a strict and meticulous absolutism both in intent and execution, unclouded by emotion.
The Names ( detail ) 2017. 28 x 480 inches. Polyester film. Installation view, Linfield Gallery, McMinnville, Oregon
Among the martyrs is Nedā Āghā-Soltān ( 1983–2009 ), a young theology/philosophy student at the Islamic Āzād University who was shot through the heart (11) as she stood at the edge of one of the protests carried out in 2009 by the Iranian Green Movement in response to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged election rigging. Video footage of Āghā-Soltān’s death immediately went viral and was seen by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Indeed, the young woman’s death is commonly said to be the most widely witnessed death in human history. (12) Reading accounts of her death, reportedly at the hands of a sniper belonging to the Basij, the large Iranian volunteer paramilitary militia originally established by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 (and today one of the forces of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution), (13) one gets the feeling that the twenty six- year-old was simply too beautiful, too insolent, (14) indeed, too alive, to live. (15) “The night opened like a black tulip in the sky,” writes Behbahani in her poem “Opium of False Promises,” “concealing crimes and secrets.” Here, at the end, we must mention one last element of The Points of Departure that belongs to another register, with different rules obtaining altogether. Wrapped ceremoniously around the right edge of the frame of the Persepolitan rock of Strata of Empire (Vestige) is a thin black cotton shirt fringed with delicate black lace.
Worn, torn, and stained, it is an undershirt, to be exact; and, other than the flowers, it is the only thing in the entire exhibit that breaks the high formalism of the work as a whole. Owned by the artist’s mother and, more recently, by the artist herself, the slender bit of cloth is a relic, consecrated by touch. It confronts the endless and wearisome aspirations of power, the violence and greed, with the fragile, the forbidden, the happily ephemeral, with news of a different reality, now and to come. Vanquisher of death, antidote to delusion, sovereign entity, subject to no one and no thing, such intimacy constitutes in and of itself a threat and affront. It is everything that power fears and everything power is not. It constitutes the kind of point of departure that is also, without trying to be, its own point of arrival.
Notes
1. Simin Behbahani, the most prominent female poet of Iran, died in 2014, in Tehran. She had been interrogated and barred from leaving the country for several years prior. For English translations of her work, see the collection A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems, edited and translated from the Persian by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa. The entirety of “Twelve Fountains of Blood” can be found on p. 43 of that book. The shirt, according to the translator, is an “allusion to Qoranic/Biblical Joseph and to the bloody shirt which the jealous brothers brought back to Jacob as proof that Joseph (abandoned in a well) was killed by a wolf.”
2. See Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 461.
3. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2003 ), 295–300.
4. See Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Trust Publications, 1996 ).
5. “ Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity.” See Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock ( Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997 ), 4.
6. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 20.
7. Susan Sontag, “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador imprint, Macmillan, 2001 ), 39–48.
8. See E. W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon ( London: Williams and Norgate, 1872).
9. Diodorus Siculus, Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather, vols. 4–8 ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1989 ), as found at Tufts University’s remarkable Perseus site: http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0060.tlg001.perseus-eng1:17.72.
10. Artist’s notes.
11. Āghā-Soltān’s death concludes Persepolis 2.0, a reworking of Marjane Satrapi’s original graphic novel Persepolis by two young Iranians living in Shanghai and writing under the pseudonyms Sina and Payman, as a protest against Ahmadinejad’s disputed election. The ten-page work can be seen here: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090710234936/http://www.spreadpersepolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06 /Persepolis_2.0.pdf. For the single-volume English translation of Satrapi’s original, see The Complete Persepolis (New York: Pantheon, 2003 ).
12. “ Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition candidate for president . . . called [Āghā-Soltān] a martyr on his Web site. ‘A young girl, who did not have a weapon in her soft hands, or a grenade in her pocket, became a victim of thugs who are supported by a horrifying intelligence apparatus.’” See Nazila Fathi, “In a Death Seen around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests,” New York Times, June 22, 2009.
13. Basij, or the Mobilization, is short for the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed, and consists of several million volunteers, with a significant part of their mission devoted to moral policing. For their role in the 2009 protests, see Angus McDowell’s “Iran’s Basij Force: The Shock Troops Terrorising Protesters,” Telegraph, June 21, 2009.
14. One thinks of these lines from Simin Behbahani’s “It’s Time to Mow the Flowers”:
It’s time to mow the flowers, don’t procrastinate.
Fetch the sickles, come,
don’t spare a single tulip in the fields.
The meadow’s in bloom:
who has ever seen such insolence?
15. See, for example, the work of the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz—or, in a different context, the work of French historian Jules Michelet.