Multilayered Meanings in Iranian Art
MARK SPELMAN on his new exhibition at Project 78
I first recall seeing what you could broadly call ‘Persian Miniatures’ when I was installing a show in Dammam, KSA. I still go back and forth to install artwork there. It’s an important place to me, for many reasons.
When I told people I was going to the Middle East to work I was met with a typical response, laced with prejudice and an underlying sense of Western superiority. In spite of more global cultural exposure, this remains. To me it was an opportunity to see art to which I would not ordinarily have access. The discovery of the miniatures was a part of this.
The miniatures are deceitfully tricky: the ornately painted borders seem to exist only for themselves – a skilful patterning and rendering of cloth butting up against wonky angles and lack of reliably straight lines. The flattening-out of perspective brought to mind dried flowers pressed in the pages of an old book. They elicit a joy for drawing, for looking, for seeing and trying to replicate things, especially natural objects. Above all, I liked the idea that these are a collaboration between skilled artisans: the guy who would do the flowers perhaps working on one border with the pattern guy waiting next to him, and the lad who draws the trousers sitting in the corner.
They were intended as illuminations for manuscripts, drawn and painted just to be bound and kept hidden; stacked on darkened shelves with the pages slowly discolouring from the edges inwards. At first I thought them unsophisticated, but I realised quickly that this wasn’t the case. They had been excised from manuscripts, mounted and framed for a gallery, but that didn’t mute their narrative, even if you had to work harder to understand it.
They also felt proletarian, in spite of the subject matter of historical moments: battles, conflicts, celebrations of stature and the rise of great figures (I’ve always disliked the idea of the heroic or the Saviour in art).
JUXTAPOSITIONS, CONTEXTS, AND ENQUIRIES
Frivolously, perhaps, I thought that it would be fun to copy them, but in doing so also to represent scenes of the life and people I was working with. That new art horizon was in its own way a kind of battle or land-grab; the importation of a cultural idea that was unrelated to its environment, and often in contradiction to it. These contradictions are the foundation of these drawings. At what point does celebration become appropriation? And does that really matter if you’re borrowing an aesthetic from an ironic culture that elevates Jeff Koons’ disco rabbits to an obscene value quite unrelated to their physical or artistic merit?
My drawings are essentially juxtapositions of environments, subjects and objects. They are about things that shouldn’t be there, and are an enquiry as to why they are. They are about the oil-and-water effect of cultural tension that can only exist in certain quarters, the navigation of new territories, politically, culturally and artistically. Mostly they are love stories; for a place, an idea and for people. They are narrative works that speak of moments soon lost to time, much like a page removed from a book and shorn from its original context.
There is heroism in them, but like all the best heroes they are the unwitting and unwilling, the smaller voices that don’t vie for attention but instead pass by without fanfare, making life more bearable by existing, rather than by a leading example.
Mark Spelman’s exhibition You Weren’t There is showing at Project 78 Gallery, Norman Road until 25 July
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