Popular wisdom has it that one cannot judge a book by its cover. Holding Koorosh Shishegaran: The Art of Altruism in my hand, I skipped that piece of conventional wisdom. Looking at the front cover, I felt spellbound by the black-and-brown, ribbon-like brushstrokes spiraling against a white background. Like a letter from an asemic, non-semantic alphabet, it awaited unrestricted symbolic interpretations. Undoubtedly, an unusually prodigious creative imagination was at work here.

At the top of the back cover, a series of interwoven black-and-brown rope knots evoked different kinds of primal phantasies. A sense of visceral ambivalence and a touch of uneasiness emanated from them. Beneath these vaguely ominous-looking twirls, reminiscent of coiled barbed wire, there was a quote. It was from the eminent contemporary Iranian graphic designer, colorist, and painter Koorosh Shishegaran himself, who had done the cover illustrations:

I read the passage as a prefatory note to Koorosh Shishegaran: The Art of Altruism (hereafter The Art of Altruism). Edited by Hamid Keshmirshekan, the book contains five chapters, each providing a knowledgeable critique of Shishegaran's works. As an ensemble, the chapters explicate the manifold implications of the artist's numerous creative stages of development during times of drastic political upheavals in Iran from the 1970s to the present. Each chapter of The Art of Altruism carries a probing assessment of the artist's work in the light of his persistently transformed and transforming political proclivities and aesthetics. The editor also includes a significant and useful section, “Art Works,” including 300 color plates of Shishegaran's paintings and drawings. The extensive and wide-ranging illustrations are prodigiously informative. They properly complement the five chapters of The Art of Altruism and confirm the acuity of their evaluations.

The “Art Works” section also makes manifest how Shishegaran anchors his emerging political commitments and aesthetic interests in his prolific artwork. Based on his own lived experiences, he offers his viewers and critics his comprehension of the place of art in our broken world. He commenced his career as an artist with an idealized political sense of the potential of worldwide redemption. However, his artwork bears witness to severe attenuation if not negation of his initial utopian world, making us feel often alienated, and anguished. Yet Shishegaran succeeds in making his artworks available to anyone who is willing to enter into a visual dialogue with it and go through an essential free interpretative process. In this sense, the act of viewing his artistic oeuvre, mainly in its increasingly abstract form, leads to a new, unlimited series of interpretations and its endless meaning-making possibilities.

I think it is in the light of these free participatory meaning-making human capacities that Shishegaran defines his ultimate rebellion against the illusionary certainties of the political and the ideological. His disillusionment, however, stops short of negating the possibility of the salvation of human life in freedom and justice. Far beyond the daunting exigencies of our ordinary everyday life, Shishegaran keeps his faith in as-yet-uncharted territories of our lifeworld, anticipating our creative explorations. As an authentic artist, he still holds visions of alluring possibilities of these vast, benign, indeed hospitable spaces.

The five chapters in The Art of Altruism deal in detail with these matters in Shishegaran’s political and artistic engagements, in both theory and practice. In the first chapter, “The Crowd, the Truth, the Artist,” Hamid Dabashi cogently takes aim at the problematics of the political in contradistinction to the aesthetics. He proposes to situate Shishegaran's artistic journey through the political turbulence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Iran. Conceptually, Dabashi situates this non-Hegelian dialectic of the political vs. aesthetics within the philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmidt's The Concept of the Political. Along with Schmidt, Dabashi states, “the distinction between friend and foe is the cornerstone of the political” (5). Given Schmidt's basal concept, the political can only fulfill itself in total adherence and conformity. The political is then hegemonic and therefore inimical to the symbolic and the figurative that aesthetics requires. Hence, fidelity to the political becomes a commitment to the eradication of the individual, which generates a “crowd mentality.” Consequently, the “crowd mentality” declares itself the “foe” of the artistic truth. In its purest form as “crowd mentality,” it shuns the pursuit of the hitherto unknown territories as so many subversive acts of trespassing. Aesthetically considered, “the crowd, ‘the public’ and ‘the people’ all correspond with the untruth” (9).

However, as Dabashi incisively reminds us, “The artist may opt to ignore, bypass or disregard the political, reaching out for the quintessence of something beyond it,” which would be tantamount to “becoming not just apolitical, but irrelevant” (5). Hence, the political life ineradicably lodges itself within our lifeworld. Dabashi delves into Shishegaran's artistic response to this veritable dilemma in pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian political history in the various stages of his artistic enterprise. He follows Shishegaran's progress from modernism to his current theories and practices of abstract line drawings (khat-khati in Persian) inspired by Persian tradition of the calligraphic arts. I think of it as a form of linear abstract expressionism.

David Galloway, in his chapter “Art without Borders: The Apprenticeship of Koorosh Shishegaran,” focuses on the artist's substantial culture of education, apprenticeship, and inspiration in modern and post-modern Iranian visual arts. Galloway brings his considerable knowledge of Iranian modern art to examining the influence on Shishegaran of the profuse and varied culture of visual arts in Iran beginning in the 1940s. This welter of artistic influences has nurtured Shishegaran's career as an innovative graphic artist, colorist, and painter. His original theories and practices of visual arts emerged from the seminal culture of painting in Iran after World War II.

It would seem to me that as a visual artist Shishegaran has remained free of any discernible internal strictures except his political altruism, which by definition exceeds limits. His artistic endeavors disclose a horizon of liberation and productive imagination. By definition, such art is mercurial, lively, and open-ended, accompanied by a primal dream of open horizons.

Within this realm of imaginative freedom, Galloway makes manifest how from the early 1970s onwards Shishegaran has changed, and advanced as an artist. He went beyond his modernism in portraits of his parents, with a light touch of surrealism added, to phenomenological hermeneutics of “Appropriation of Works of Great Artists Series.” Then in succession came “postal art,” created and sent to various individuals and intuitions; poster “Art + Art,” “K. Shishegaran’s Works: Shahreza Ave. Itself,” a mode of conceptual art reminiscent of the works of Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov of the Moscow Conceptualism School. Finally, from 1985 onwards Shishegaran has practiced abstract Scribble, or line drawings, which I think of as a form of abstract expressionism.

Hamid Keshmirshekan's chapter, “The Trajectory of Koorosh Shishegaran’s Artistic Phases from Utopianism to Aestheticism,” provides perceptive accounts of Shishegaran's evolution as a visual artist from his initial proclivities toward political avant-gardism and self-denial to aestheticism. Keshmirshekan explicates the ethos of “self-sacrifice” in Shishegaran's concept of art put in the service of socioeconomic justice to semi-formalism and then a form of individualized art for art's sake. Regarded from this perspective, Shishegaran's artistic trajectory appears as fraught with complications as it is creatively rewarding. For his utopian phase in itself was a matter of artistic formal composition of the visual rather than a mode of, say, socialist realism and its ideologically claustrophobic vision. As an antidote to such oppressive enclosures, Shishegaran ultimately reaches for intentional disclosures without boundaries that form an ensemble of subconscious doodling or “Scribble Lines”—so dear to the late Fields Medal winner theoretical mathematician Maryam Mirzazakhani. As an artist‒intellectual‒adventurer, Shishegaran in due course finds the freedom he has sought all his life in linear art. Yet his linear art segments and sequences, have far-reaching consequences. They invite the viewer to daring exploits of new visual experiences and interpretive knowledge.

In the relatively early stages of Shishegaran's experiments Alireza Sami Azar, in “The Finite Line: A Critical Analysis of Koorosh Shishegaran’s Modern and Conceptual Quests,” locates an inclination toward atavistic “scrawls [which] may have roots in the earliest painterly experiences of humanity, originating perhaps in the early childhood experiences of ‘painting’” (43). Sami Azar puts forward an exceptionally insightful observation on the cognitive-affective considerations of linear painting in Shishegaran's artwork. Beginning with a non-dimensional point, similar to figure 0 in mathematics, the finite line hints at the possibility in its potential of forward and backward infinite expansions. Essentially, one might refer to doodling as a semi-conscious linear activity, a significant primordial tendency.

Like any creative work itself, a point hovers between being and nothingness, between zero and potential development into a finite that has length and can indefinitely expand bi-directionally. A combination of lines, often with color added, make two- or three-dimensional images similar in function to Rorschach inkblocks, an additional temporal dimension brought to it by the painter and the viewer’s consciousness. The whole viewer-response process makes visible at once ontological and its correlated psychological realities, which prior to it might have remained invisible forever.

In the concluding chapter, “From Altruism to Nihilism: The Art of Koorosh Shishegaran,” Abbas Daneshvari adroitly applies a multidisciplinary approach to Shishegaran's equally multifaceted phases of artistic development. From within this expanded vision of dialogic language of matters visual and scriptural, he brings new sensitivities to our appreciation of Shishegaran's artwork. Overall, this multidisciplinary approach conceptually complements and rounds out the preceding chapters in The Art of Altruism while keeping its own cohesiveness intact. Daneshvari points out that in the 1970s Shishegaran's compassionate political tendencies as a man of the left make his art evolve from the bottom up. The artist forces himself to adopt an accessible methodology, putting his artistic productions in form and content within the reach of the many.

Daneshvari also emphasizes that in Shishegaran's early political and artistic activities his “themes were minimally ontological” (54). That is to say, as an artist he was not concerned with the abstract, multi-referential and symbolic in his art. Rather he consciously stopped at the level of the particular and uni-referential objects (the ontic) and their representations. Later, he would join the objective visual images with words as scriptural images. Furthermore, in this early period Shishegaran introduced an unconventional method of distribution of his art, such as “Postal Art, Motto Arts, Art+ Art, For Today, False Art, and Freedom of the Pen (Freedom of Expression)” (53). His method of dissemination of his artwork was democratic in itself and altered the established formal modes of display of visual artworks through exhibitions at museums, art galleries, and art shows.

Ultimately, however, Daneshvari locates a dialectical synthesis between the objective and subjective, or the ontic in Shishegaran's nonrepresentational work in his abstract ribbon-like and finally linear drawings. However, Daneshvari considers this further artistic abstraction as a nihilistic effort. I associate this specific mode of abstraction as “nihilism” with the void that initially heralds the birth of all works of creative imagination. Nothingness, in this context, constitutes the invisible that simultaneously precedes the particular-universal in the arts. Such nothingness then becomes the matrix of creative activities and becomes part of our verbal and nonverbal language, in whose fold our lived world finds its ontological expression.

I find Shishegaran's entire career evocative of Joseph Conrad's reflection on seeing as at once a visual act and an act of understanding. Conrad wrote, in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” New York: W. W. Norton, 1979, p. vii). The Art of Altruism introduces Shishegaran as an exceptional artist who honors us generously with his desire to make us see our lived experiences and see through them through the intermediation of his artworks.