Decreation, Potentiality, and Willpower in Iranian Contemporary Art

Occasionally, to engage with art and culture, we have to suspend the faculties of judgement that privilege empirical reasoning and logic. Art asks us to extend our imaginations to truly appreciate a story or a concept. On the face of it, this approach to artwork, which is experientially connected to ideas of child’s play, seems to justify a perception that art belongs at the periphery of social action and identity.  Yet, as the works of contemporary Iranian artists, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Parvis Tanavoli demonstrate, these kinds of encounters can have significant consequences for the constitution of identity, on both an individual and social level . Through each of their practices, these artists have presented visual forms as way to to rethink the value of ambiguity, and possibility in our lives. 

Monir Farmanfarmaian (b. Qazvin, 1922- d. 2019), whose work features at The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Modern, fuses the traditional Iranian art form of mirrored mosaics (Āina-kāri, آﯾﻨﻪﮐﺎری) with American Abstract Expressionists and Minimalist influences. Her most famous works consist of mirrored installations, which draw inspiration from mosque architecture and the symbolism of geometric shapes; though, she refutes a strict reading of her practice as a progression of traditional forms of Iranian culture. The resistance to a conclusive origin and meaning of her practice is a theme that runs throughout Farmanfarmaian’s work. 

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Untitled, 1976, Mirror glass, stainless steel, plaster and wood, 127.6 x 78.9 x 4 cm, Tate Modern, London

Her sculptures are made up of interlocking geometric mirror shards, arranged into mosaics with irregular forms and surfaces. The artworks facilitate an interplay between the simplicity of polygons and the disarray  of the artwork’s environment (including the viewer), reflected in the fragments.  For Farmanfarmaian, the geometry of the work extends from the temporal world towards a visualization of an idealistic order, a conceptual notion that contrasts with the corporeal world reflected within this strict geometry. 

In Untitled, 1976 (on view at the Tate Modern), Farmanfarmaian uses an assembled of geomatrically coherent mirror shards to interrogate the relationship between the viewer and form of the work. Perhaps anticipating the relational aesthetic theory of the 1990s, Untitled is autonomously mesmerizing, but when viewer begins to interact with their reflection, watching their own movements distorted by the surface, the artwork takes on a new dimension outside of the geometric order of the work, the autonomous object augmented with the quality of disorder and chance . Without the potential of the interaction between the environment surrounding the work and the form of the work itself, the work would be bound to the discipline of its geometry . This exploration of the value of potentiality in an artwork, and the role of the viewer in it, informs a provocative quality of the practice of Farmanfarmaian and her contemporaries .

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written about the unique sensation of recognizing something that could both ‘be’ and ‘not be’ . What Agamben was interested in was not the choice between two possible actions, but the potential to refrain from adhering to a set path of action at all. For Agamben, the ability to consider both the potential ‘to be’, and the potential ‘not to be’, has the power to undercut the conceptual structures underlying injustice and objectification. Untitled appraises the magnetism of regularity and order; it challenges such structures by infusing the experience with the capture of its surrounding environment. In Agamben’s writing, this characteristic is labelled ‘decreating’, the act of emphasizing the conceptual threshold between doing and not-doing . The geometric structure of the work exists in the abstract, but in our experience of the work, the underlying structure is only revealed in the way it distorts the image of the viewer and environment. In recognizing the disorder of one’s movement and form in the order of the geometric forms, Farmanfarmaian heightens the experience of the geometry; the structures are in dialogue with the chaos and irregularity of our own image and action, our own nature, as it is constituted in that fragmenting .  

This heightened receptivity  encouraged by Farmanfarmaian asks what role that one’s choice of action, one’s will, has in the reception of this work; it  invites its beholder to imagine the mirrored object, without the contrast of disorder, chance and colour interacting and elaborating on the form. The artwork asks the viewer to visualize one particular way of experiencing the work, founded in order and mathematics, and contrasts that idealization with a reality that is chaotic, but also dynamic, charismatic, and soulful. 

Shirazeh Houshiary (b. Shiraz, 1955) further scrutinises the idea  of potentiality in her work. Houshiary was born in Iran, and now works and lives in London. Like Farmanfarmaian, she resists the geographic classification of her influences. The development of her work is shaped by Persian poetry and the spiritual quests of the Sufi, though this offers only a glimpse into her practice. Ultimately, she seeks to resist the homogeneity of meanings and influences. In works such as Portal, of 2018, presented at the Lisson Gallery (London) in 2018, Houshiary plays with the perceptions of her viewers. From afar, Portal appears like a colour-field painting, the composition made by organic tonal shifts across the canvas, a turmoil brought on by her technique of moving pigmented water across the work.  With a more careful glance, one realizes that the ostensibly smooth surface is marked by an array of shapes that form a web across the canvas. Houshiary imposes her own design on the elemental pattern of colour, emphasizing symmetries and geometries that combine into a visual expression of intention and whim .

Shirazeh Houshiary, Portal, 2018, Pigment and pencil on black Aquacryl on canvas on aluminium, 120 x 120 cm, Lisson Gallery, London

People tend not to want to connect the idea of anarchy with order. It is easier to engage with a world where our roles, and the roles of the material we engage with, are delineated and characterized. Where things are either this or that rather than this or not this . Houshiary’s works are not entirely predictable and not entirely unpredictable . The creativity of these works comes from its ability to disconcert the will of both the artist and the viewer: the artist in the creation of the work; the viewer in the consolidation of the image into a specific agency . What would it mean to start to analyze the role of willpower in our actions? What would it mean to start choosing not to be anything, instead of choosing to be this or that?  These are the questions that these works call to mind. 

Parviz Tanavoli, Chair VIII, 2009, Heech and Chair series, Bronze, 14.5 x 11.5 x 4 cm

The acceptance of all but also none in particular , is a significant aspect of the practice of both Houshiary and Farmanfarmaian. In their works, the unpredictability of vitality  breaths into the rigid wilfulness of geometry. Parviz Tanavoli (b. Tehran, 1937) grounds these ideas in his sculptures, many of which belong to a series of work he calls Heech (ﻫﯿﭻ written in its calligraphic form ـحﻫ) which he began in 1965. Like Houshiary and Farmanfarmaian, Tanavoli values ambiguity, particularly in the context of human perception. The Persian word heech translates to ‘nothingness’. His sculptures, such as Chair VIII, 2009, combine the calligraphic figure of the word ‘heech’ with abstracted forms of common objects. Tanavoli reclaims objects that have become so codified as instruments that they have lost some of their intrinsic variability, a variability that has the potential to shape lives and experiences. Chair VIII resists the codification of itself by the viewer  it is nothing. In this work, the will of the subject to attempt to limit the potentiality of what that object might be to a single definition is called into question . Tanavoli shifts the emphasis of his examination to the viewers’ perceptions of the work. This exploration of the codification of the material has implications  for the engagement that people have with other things , personalities, places, and with themselves.

The work of Farmanfarmaian, Houshiary, and Tanavoli are concerned with alternative possibilities. For each of these artists, there is a freedom in having a recognition of the power of choosing ‘to do’ or ‘not to do’ . Giorgio Agamben believed that through an act of decreation, and as these artists express it, viewers have the opportunity to step back from the passive acceptance of situations by critically considering their role in determining which possibilities can exist, don’t exist, nor will exist. What these works achieve is a reordering of the way we perceive the choices available to us. These artists' question the presuppositions that people hold about willpower and possibility, illuminating a way of thinking that can bring us to a different manner of engaging with the world.