Growing up on the West Coast as a first-generation American with European parents has undoubtedly impacted my world view. On a trip to Boston in my late teens, for example, I learned that California, a relative newcomer to the nation, is notably less concerned with class status and august lineage than Massachusetts. Moving to the Midwest to attend graduate school, I looked to my family's roots to study early 20th-century Western European modernism. My focus shifted to contemporary art when, in my first post as a curator, I was hired at New York's New Museum, where I remained for eight years. Leaving the New Museum in 1988 to work independently, I consulted for a year for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA). This assignment provided an opportunity to research contemporary artists and the art scene in Japan, as at that time MoCA was looking at ways in which to orient itself on the Pacific Rim. It was then that I encountered head-on issues arising from the inherent superiority which was ascribed to Western art, both in Europe and the United States. When, in 1997, I was appointed director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University's fine arts museum, I found that the NYU Art Collection possessed not only a solid selection of New York School works but also the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art. How does a curator, trained in western modern art history, approach and understand the largest grouping of modern Iranian art – over 200 examples – outside of Iran, as well as some 110 modern Turkish and 80 modern Indian works? I describe this challenge in my essay “Observations on the Global and the Local,” written for an exhibition that I curated in 2016 which looked at some key works by two modern pioneers in the Grey Collection in the context of three generations of Iranian artists. In the essay – from which the following text has been excerpted – I address how, over my tenure at NYU, I have learned and grown from my encounter with Mrs. Grey's collection:
Global/local. This binary, of course, brings to mind a host of others: center/periphery, international/provincial, us/them. The list could easily go on. “Global/local” appears to be the current favored iteration in art world lingo, just as we now reference “art centers” in the plural form. For a century and a half, only one art “center,” or “capital,” dominated, relegating the rest of the world to the margins. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was Paris. After World War II and with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, New York took over.
While there has been some progress in the art world, including the adoption of newer preferred terms, substantive changes have been slow in coming. The North American–Western European art axis still dominates, growing in recent decades to incorporate a broader swath that encompasses not only Paris and New York, but also Los Angeles and Chicago in the United States, London in the U.K., and Berlin in Germany. It has extended, over the last seven years or so, to Dubai in the U.A.E., the first non-western city to become a major art market destination. Certainly, this more inclusionary expansion to multiple centers is driven in part by the art market and, as has often been discussed, by the precipitous increase in the number of art fairs and biennials around the world. Nonetheless, the Euro-American notion of an intrinsic synergy between “originality” and the avant-garde still prevails. In 1990, in an essay about the expanding interest in contemporary Japanese art, I described a Catch-22: “If Japanese artists, while certainly aware of western art practices, employ a similar vocabulary, they are labeled as imitative and unoriginal. If they use traditional mediums and iconography, they are characterized as retardataire and conservative.”Footnote 1 Fumio Nanjo, then director of Nagoya's Institute of Contemporary Art, elaborated that since contemporary Japanese artists had not been part of the international art circuit of biennials and art fairs, their work was “often rejected because it is unfamiliar and because it resembles existing ways of working in the West… . Japanese artists are not accepted if their work is either too Japanese or too Western.”Footnote 2 A chief goal of Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran is to explore this phenomenon as it applies to three generations of Iranian artists.
The global/local conundrum is not new. As early as 1974, in an essay titled “The Provincialism Problem,” Australian art historian Terry Smith observed that artists living far from international centers experience “tensions between two antithetical terms: a defiant urge to localism (a claim for the possibility and validity of ‘making good, original art right here’) and a reluctant recognition that the generative innovations in art, and the criteria for standards of ‘quality,’ ‘originality,’ ‘interest,’ ‘forcefulness,’ etc., are determined externally.”Footnote 3 Even today, artists working outside the dominant North American–Western European axis must perform a delicate balancing act, creating their work while navigating a tightrope from which they could easily fall, and be deemed too imitative and derivative on the one hand, or too specific and local, that is, not of “international interest,” on the other. Complicating matters is the fact that if contemporary artists from the Middle East and Asia do refer to regional traditions, they are often critiqued for capitalizing on exoticisms associated with Orientalism.Footnote 4
A number of exhibitions have addressed just this dilemma, among them Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions – promoted as the first comprehensive group show of Asian artists ever organized in the United States – which opened in 1996 at the Asia Society Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.Footnote 5 A few years earlier, the anthology Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific described itself as “the first major publication to survey the contemporary art of the Asia-Pacific region.”Footnote 6 In her introductory essay, “Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity,” the book's editor, Caroline Turner, raises a number of provocative questions, noting that contemporary art of the region “is a product of tradition, historical cultural encounters, the confrontation with the West in more modern times, and the recent economic, technological and information changes which have pushed the world towards a ‘global’ culture and greatly accelerated those interactions.”Footnote 7
This predicament is by no means confined to Middle Eastern and Asian artists. When I organized a show of contemporary African art and textiles at the Grey in 2008, I came across this anecdote recounted by Yinka Shonibare, a world-renowned artist born in Great Britain and raised in Nigeria, who moved back to London to attend art school:
I started to make work about global issues because I saw myself as a global citizen… . One of my tutors came into my space and said, “Well, you're African, aren't you? Why aren't you producing authentic traditional African art?” And of course, given my background [of having grown up in a middle-class home in Lagos], the whole notion that I would understand the concept of some pure African authenticity, or for that matter that such an expression would be expected of me, I found utterly shocking… . That was when I realized that the idea of loyalty or allegiance is always imposed by others from the outside.Footnote 8
Inside/outside. Another binary. Certainly an appetite for and awareness of art outside the mainstream is still growing. When I first moved to New York in the late 1970s, a number of galleries had just begun showing work by German Neo-Expressionist painters and by Italian artists, including the “three C's”: Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi. Previously, there had been a dearth of exhibitions of work by contemporary European artists, to say nothing of shows by previous postwar generations. That Germany and Italy still appeared “exotic” back in the late ’70s seems ludicrous today. Since then we have experienced successive waves, dare I say fads, for the work of artists outside the dominant axis. These include – in roughly chronological sequence – artists from Spain and then, in a major shift, from non-Western countries such as Japan, China, and India, and from Latin America, including Cuba. Most recently, it's the Middle East.
This makes sense, given the current turmoil in the region and the tense political relationship between Iran and the United States, which often dominates news reporting. Since 9/11, an interest in and awareness of this large region has rapidly escalated. A recent show featuring artists with roots in the Arab world was Here and Elsewhere, at New York's New Museum in 2014. Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni, two members of the curatorial team, stated:
The cultural specificity of “Here and Elsewhere” is not so much an essentialist framing of the work of artists who, to varying degrees, are connected to the Arab World. It is rather a refusal of a pluralist, neoliberal paradigm that reduces difference in the name of a universality that only recapitulates the homogenizing forces of the global economy.Footnote 9
Bell and Gioni seem to be hedging their bets – the show focuses on artists of the region, but the curators’ efforts should not be seen as making generalizations about shared characteristics that would “capitulate” to global economic concerns. Instead, they note, they want to present “a diversity within a specificity.”
Interestingly, the word “Arab” does not appear in their title, nor does the term “Middle East.” This was also the case for Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, organized by Fereshteh Daftari at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2006. In the accompanying catalogue, Daftari warns against the rush to categorize well-known artists such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander as “Islamic.” The Islamic world, she notes, covers an enormous expanse, from Indonesia to the Atlantic coast of Africa. In examining the work of seventeen artists living and working outside the Islamic region, who share neither nationality nor religion, she, too, strove to avoid overarching homogenizations or generalizations. Instead, she prominently quotes esteemed art historian Oleg Grabar, who defines Islamic art simply as “art made in and/or for areas and times dominated by Muslim rulers and populations.”Footnote 10 Art historian and NYU professor Finbarr Barry Flood observes: “The problem of where to locate Islamic art stems, at least in part, from the peculiarities of the term itself, an invented rubric that must accommodate a vast array of artistic production stemming almost 1,400 years and spanning every continent.”Footnote 11
Indeed, the terms “Middle East” and, to a lesser degree, “Islamic,” are fraught with controversy. At a 2009 symposium at Tate Britain and Tate Modern that I attended, titled “Contemporary Art in the Middle East,” the first session focused on how the Middle East is defined: “Can the Middle East be understood as a fixed physical entity or is it a dynamic and shifting definition, moulded by changing historical, social and political realities? What role does the diaspora play in defining contemporary Middle Eastern culture?” Nearly every speaker challenged the term. Geographer Derek Gregory traced its historical origins to France and Britain, and mentioned Edward Said's definition of “Orientalism” as the space of the exotic. Artist Yto Barrada bemoaned the fact that her Moroccan passport limited where she could travel, and Syrian photographer Issa Touma decried the lack of resources and the clichéd media coverage of a “bloody Middle East.” Curator Catherine David noted that she preferred the term “Arab,” as it is neither religious nor ethnic. Art historian Salah Hassan observed that Muslims don't speak in one voice and criticized curators who rush to show “good/moderate” Muslim art. Exasperation and frustration permeated many of the talks, with participants lamenting that similar discussions have dominated discourse for much too long and noting that the need for more accurate terminology and vocabulary had not even been clearly identified.Footnote 12
Such fraught terminology does not offer any easy solutions. When, after an eight-year remodeling project, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's former Islamic wing re-opened, it did so with a new, rather unwieldly name that is, nonetheless, much more precise: Arts of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Today, visitors to museums’ historical Islamic art collections are expressing a desire to learn more about the specific conditions – geographical, cultural, historical, and political – in the countries represented. Responding to this new interest requires a major shift away from traditional museological approaches, which have tended to focus on the work of art as an aesthetic object and on its provenance.Footnote 13
And then there is Iran. The Persians, of course, are not Arabs. This accounts for the “Iran and” that often appears in book and exhibition titles, as with the recent She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World.Footnote 14 Nor, again, is the term “Islamic” universally accepted when referring to contemporary art – especially that from Iran. As Fereshteh Daftari comments in a recent essay addressing some of the criticism that was unleashed at Without Boundary:
Viscerally connected to a national identity in formation centuries before the arrival of Islam and the Arab conquest, Iranians resent their historical position as what today would be termed “subaltern.” Opposition to the term Islamic finds further justification when you consider the contemporary political conditions in Iran – very different from, say, Egypt before the Arab Spring, where opposition to repression came from religious and not secular quarters. In Iran, to name an Iranian artist Islamic is to identify him or her as being in alliance with state ideology.Footnote 15
Daryush Shayegan has written eloquently about how Iran came to occupy its special position:
It is one of those countries which, having been Islamicised early on in the overwhelming thrust of Islam in the seventh century, knew how to preserve its ethnic and linguistic identity. Deep down, Iran remains a world at the crossroads of two great continents of thought; on one hand it looks obliquely towards the East, its language and immemorial myths associate it with India and the Indo-European world and, on the other hand, its position of bordering upon the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and its conflicting relationships with ancient Greece render it incontestably a neighbor of the West. Placed between these two worlds, Iran has played the role of privileged intermediary.Footnote 16
I began this essay by describing how contemporary Japanese art in particular, and Asian art in general, was regarded in the early 1990s. Not only was non-Western contemporary art then easily relegated to binary oppositions of either too international (read: derivative) or too provincial (read: not of interest), but art by previous generations, from the earlier 20th century, was almost never discussed or taken seriously. Alexandra Munroe, now the Guggenheim Museum of Art's first senior curator of Asian art, noted:
One reason it is so difficult for Westerners to approach and integrate Japanese contemporary art is that we lack a critique and methodology for evaluating non-Western art. Avant-garde work produced in Japan since 1910 has been ignored by traditional scholars of Japanese art because it is considered nontraditional and non-Japanese in its medium and style. Yet it isn't incorporated into the modern Western canon.Footnote 17
The discipline of art history has been slow to encourage the study of “early modern” and “modern” art of non-western countries – which these days can still indicate art from the 15th century onward – thus unintentionally promoting Orientalist approaches. Former Asia Society President Vishakha N. Desai observes:
This kind of privileging of the ancient past was an important aspect of the Orientalist legacy, where the “non-changing,” distant, and “pure” non-Western civilizations could provide a perfect foil for the dynamic, ever-changing, progressive, and industrialized West and serve to justify the colonial presence of the “superior” West in Asian countries.Footnote 18
Desai's observation applies also to modernisms in the Middle East, where relatively few publications have addressed art of the 19th and 20th centuries until very recently. Indeed, Flood has persuasively detailed the especially complicated historiography of the study of Islamic art, noting that in art-historical survey texts, Islamic art is generally described as ceasing to exist after around 1800. The ramifications of such views are significant and, as Flood says, “The location of Islamic art in a valorized past from which ‘living tradition’ is excluded, amounts to a denial of coevalness with the art of European modernity.”Footnote 19
I experienced this firsthand after I assumed the directorship of the Grey Art Gallery, NYU's fine arts museum, in 1997 and began to explore the world-class modern artworks in its Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art, which includes some 200 works from Iran.Footnote 20 Five years later, in 2002, the Grey mounted the landmark exhibition Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture, which was accompanied by the book Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution, which I co-edited with Shiva Balaghi.Footnote 21 Although I didn't realize it then, I now know that I have been extremely fortunate to learn about 20th-century Iranian modernism from the Grey's outstanding collection. Helping me to understand the intricacies and complications of Iranian modernism was Fereshteh Daftari, then an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art. As co-curator of the show, she penned one of the first overviews of 20th-century Iranian art in English, in which she presciently stated that Iranian modernism warranted more attention:
This other modernism, like many of the culturally specific modernisms that emerged around the globe, was neither synchronous nor synonymous with the one constructed in the West. Its impulse being at the same time nationalistic 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.Footnote 22
From Balaghi, then associate director of NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, I learned about the tumultuous history of 20th-century Iran. As she noted about the art represented in the exhibition Between Word and Image:
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 ’70s, 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.Footnote 23
Eleven years later, Daftari and art historian Layla S. Diba co-curated Iran Modern at New York's Asia Society Museum. Accompanied by a substantial volume with numerous essays and reprints of significant historical documents, the show brought together a number of works that had never been seen in New York, and responded to the rapidly accelerating interest in Iranian modern art. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War, and with U.S. government sanctions, it has been difficult, if not nearly impossible, to see modern Iranian art outside Iran. In an important development, however, a number of Western museums – among them the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries – have begun collecting both modern and contemporary Iranian art.Footnote 24
To comprehend 20th-century Iranian art, it is essential to examine specific sociopolitical and cultural conditions, an undertaking that exceeds both the limits of this essay and my qualifications. What is quite apparent, in the words of art historian Hamid Keshmirshekan, is that the twentieth century is a “crucial period in the art and culture of Iran, when the legacies of tradition and modernism were being critically evaluated and reviewed.”Footnote 25 One concept that dominated intellectual discourse in the 1960s was gharb-zadagi, which has been translated as “Westoxication.” Simply put, promoters of Westoxication encouraged Iranians to “Westernize” as thoroughly as possible. In contrast, the sunnat-parastan, or traditionalists, resisted everything deemed exotic. Between these two extremes, as Keshmirshekan says, came a moderate response from those who realized that change was inevitable.Footnote 26 He also notes that Iranian nationalists emphasized the Persian language (versus Arabic) as a link to the country's pre-Islamic past.Footnote 27 With the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and the Iranian Revolution, the situation changed dramatically.
In her 2014 overview of the contemporary Iranian art scene, Talinn Grigor divides post-revolutionary visual culture in Iran into three categories: “The Street,” where official art, sanctioned and sponsored by the Islamic Republic, exists in the public domain; “The Studio” where artists, galleries, and museums linked to the private domain operate; and “The Exile,” composed of Iranian artists working abroad and concerned with diasporic matters.Footnote 28 Grigor discusses the global art market's impact, most specifically in Dubai, which now attracts collectors and arts professionals interested in non-European, non-American art and is home to an annual art fair and a branch of Christie's International.Footnote 29 An important paradigm shift, she proposes, has taken place. For artists working in Iran or in exile, the burden is “to produce art, good art, interesting art, art that appeal[s] not to identity politics, not to beauty, but to the intellect… . Iranian artists are now creating groundbreaking art both despite and because of the West, the Islamic Republic and all ideological trends that make processes of art itself.”Footnote 30 In other words, Grigor considers questions about what is Iranian in an Iranian artist's work passé and irrelevant.
Afterword
In late June 2019, when I was asked to contribute an essay to the Spring 2020 “Special Focus” of RoMES, the world was a different place. One of the questions the editors posed to me was “What are the artistic achievements/ struggles in a climate of global volatility?” It is difficult to imagine that they would have guessed how relevant their question would be a year later. Since mid-March 2020, the world has been gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, on May 25, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by a policeman and, a few hours earlier in New York's Central Park, Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was threatened by Amy Cooper (no relation), after he politely asked to leash her dog. Words were exchanged and then, as he recorded the interaction on his phone, she called 911, claiming falsely that “an African-American man is threatening my life.” That Amy Cooper was white goes without saying. Since then, protests against police brutality and systemic, institutional racism have spread globally. Art museums, the Grey among them, have issued statements in support of Black Lives Matter, promising to show more artists of color, and to make their staff and boards more inclusive. Part of the challenge to realize the first - exhibiting more artists from diverse backgrounds - is access. Education on and an introduction to work by Middle Eastern artists is essential and I commend RoMES for participating in the dialogue and providing reflective and critical commentary on modern and contemporary art from a region that has, for too long, been overlooked and dismissed by the mainstream art world.
