[Nettime-ro] For your attention

[bory@xmail.com]

Bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Books site and thought you should see it.

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Note from Bory:

Mi s-a parut interesant de vazut ce se mai intampla shi-n alte partzi decat in Vest (nu ca ash fi un mare fan al Estului ;-) )
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Books site, go to http://books.guardian.co.uk

The hidden face
Iran is the last place you'd expect to find modern art. But it is home to one of the world's great collections - and a public that is keen to understand it. Anna Somers Cocks gets some surprises in Tehran
Anna Somers Cocks
Friday August 09 2002
The Guardian


A short while ago I was listening to a New York Jewish woman artist, Joyce Kozloff, lecturing on feminist art. So far, so predictable. The amazing thing about it, though, was that we were in Tehran and nobody was treating it as anything special - that is, unless you considered the vast number of artists and students (more girls than boys) who had crammed into the lecture hall. I asked some of them afterwards why they had come, and they said that their teachers could tell them nothing about what was going on in art in the west, but now they were going to look up on the net all the artists that had been mentioned. 

It was the fourth day of a conference on postmodernism, and I was already used to the idea that I had to revise my view of Iran. We had exercised a modicum of self-censorship in our lectures, leaving out slides of naked bodies or descriptions of the wilder forms of sexual politics. Nonetheless, discussion of cybersex and sex-change operations did not raise a ripple. Nor did the anti-authoritarian nature of contemporary art as a whole.  

There was only one sticky moment, and a very revealing one. A slide went up of a Russian photographic work that showed the Reichstag digitally altered to carry the dome of a mosque, and with a caravan of desert folk on donkeys trailing in front. An embarrassed silence fell over the auditorium, and then a woman shouted in English: "Islam is not a nomadic religion." She was saying: "We are not a primitive people", and (subtext): "We are not Arabs."  

Here was evidence of Iran's pride in its ancient, independent culture, its almost-as-ancient aversion to the Arabs, and its current belief that it can be both modern and Islamic. This last idea was explained to me by Zahra Rahnavard, the politically well-connected chancellor of Iran's women's university, who compared Iran to Japan. The Japanese are modern, she said, but they also have their own traditional ways of living.  

She went on to give me a lecture on feminism in Iran and to tell me what a feminist she herself was. It seems that more girls than boys go to university, and they can study exactly the same subjects (I met one girl who was a railway   engineer). In the recent elections, women took many of the seats, though there are still fewer jobs for women and they are less well-paid. But the Prophet is on our side, she concluded firmly: Mohammed said that next to prayer and perfume he loved women, and she was using this argument against the mullahs.  

In Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art, where our conference was being held, I saw boys and girls going around together like students anywhere, and there was no system of controls on who came to hear us. I asked a group of girls about the veil, a source of great irritation to us women lecturers from the west. They were resigned, yet not entirely hostile to it. Even if the police did not make us wear it, they said, our families would, but at least it protects us from being seen as sex objects, as in the west.  

The conference had been organised by the museum and the philosophy faculty at Tehran University and was the first of its kind since the revolution of 1979. Since President Khatami came to power in 1997 there has been a deliberate liberalisation, which, as in the old Soviet Union, is being led by the world of the arts. Khatami, whose subject is the philosophy of aesthetics (which might explain why, during an Iranian TV interview, I was asked the rather unexpected question,   what did I think about the role of aesthetics in contemporary life?), has also been a minister of culture, and it is he who is encouraging this greater openness.  

Sami Azar, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, clearly has a leading role in this. He is an architect, with a doctorate from Birmingham University, and has been given responsibility for all the visual arts in Iran. Azar told me: "Mr Khatami is the one who has raised the issue of dialogue and discourse instead of exporting revolutionary ideas which suggest that the truth is just with us... He has become a symbol of collaborating with others, an idea that has always existed in Persian civilisation."  

It is difficult to judge the extent to which Khatami is having to fight the conservative mullahs on this issue, but in the world of the arts, at least, it seems to be plain sailing for the moment. Last year the museum held its first exhibition of Iranian conceptual art. Azar admits that he had expected problems, since many of the works were ideologically explosive, but not even the hardliners complained. "Maybe they have come to terms with the new inclination of the art community and have learned that they cannot close the door any more," he says.  

Certainly, demographics are not on the side of the elders: 70% of the population is under 30,   and many of these, at least in the towns, are highly educated but with poor job prospects. This combination makes social change likely, and this will take place more easily under a flexible and tolerant regime than under the traditionalists. Khatami may be hoping that the arts will prove a safety valve in the meantime.  

Following instructions, Azar is building bridges with the west and has lent to recent exhibitions of Gauguin, Warhol, Alexander Calder and the surrealists. He is sitting on one of the great forgotten collections of 20th-century western art, assembled in a frenzy of buying by the empress's brother in the 1970s. Everything is still there in store, apart from one in de Kooning's  Woman series, traded a few years ago for some sheets from the greatest illuminated manuscript in Persian art, the  Shahnameh.  

We were taken into the store and shown racks of Picasso, Ernst, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Pollock, Kandinsky, de Kooning, Warhol, Bacon and many more. One magnificent Bacon triptych of 1968 featured two men in bed together, and I asked Azar whether he could ever hang it in the galleries. "It would be provocative," he answered, "but I could get away with it." Two minutes later we saw a Pop art work with a faint pattern of a woman in a bathing costume: "Now, that I couldn't show," he said with a smile. The next exhibition, will, however, be of the Pop works, and Azar is also in discussion with Iran's most famous artist in exile, Shirin Neshat, about an exhibition of her works next year.  

After a week, I flew back with Iran Air, where the first verse of the  Koran appears on the screen before the safety instructions and the rigorously headscarfed stewardesses are as unsmiling as their sisters on the old communist Aeroflot. The official face of Iran remains severe and uninviting. The reality within is quite different, however, and it would be useful if more politicians, particularly from the US, went to see for themselves. We might then avoid such idiocies as George W Bush's "axis of evil" remark, which can only derive from an ignorance of Iran's independence of mind, its separate cultural tradition from the rest of the Middle East, its interest in the west, and its longing to be accepted as a modern country. 

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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