BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Arthur C. Danto

More documents

Recommendations

Info

you’ve done four films. What were you doing before the films? BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Arthur C. Danto 5/17/10 1:58 PM SHIRIN NESHAT I graduated from UC-Berkeley in 1983 and moved soon after to New York City where I quickly came to the conclusion that art making wasn’t going to be my profession. I felt what I was making was not substantial enough—and I was intimidated by the New York art scene. So I worked to earn money and took courses in various subjects. Soon after I met my future husband, who ran the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative space in Manhattan. I dedicated the next ten years intensely to working with him at the Storefront, and that became my true education. Storefront functioned like a cultural laboratory, the program was quite cross-disciplinary; I was constantly working with artists, architects, cultural critics, writers and philosophers. This exposure eventually led me to think about myself as an artist and I wanted to make artwork again. During those ten years I made practically no art and what I did make I was quite dissatisfied with and eventually destroyed. So it was only in 1993 that I began to seriously make artwork again. AD And those were photographs? SN Yes, I thought photography was the most appropriate medium for my subject as it had the realism that I needed. In the 1990s I finally began going back to Iran. I had been away for over ten years—since the Islamic Revolution. As I traveled back and forth a lot of things started to go through my mind, which eventually led me to develop the work that I have. My focus from the beginning was the subject of women in relation to the Iranian society and the revolution, so I produced a series of photographic images that explored that topic. AD I was talking just last week with Susan Sontag, who said that, in her view, the Iranian film movement is the most remarkable in contemporary cinema. That’s quite an extraordinary claim. How do you account for that? SN I agree with her. I am very inspired by the new trend in Iranian cinema. In my opinion, it has been one positive aspect of the revolution, as it has in a way purified Iranian culture artistically by eliminating Western influences that had deeply infiltrated our culture. Before the revolution, Iranian film followed similar standards as in any commercial Western film, much of it was filled with superficiality, violence and sex. After the revolution, the government imposed severe codes; filmmakers had to reformulate their ideas, and as a result a new form of cinema was born that thrived in the midst of all the governmental censorship. These films have been successful for their humanistic, simple and universal approach. They reveal so much about Iranian culture without being overly critical. The pioneer of this generation of filmmaking, Abbas Kiarostami, is showing his most recent film, The Wind Will Carry Us, in New York starting in July. AD Let me ask about your first films. When you began to show them here were they more or less conventional, linear films with a single screen . . . or did you begin with the double-screen format right away? SN Turbulent was my first cinematic film. Prior to that, I had made a few videos which I consider very different; they were video installations, very sculptural, with no specific narrative, beginning or end. AD That was video as it was understood at that time: something projected on a wall, a nonnarrative, free play of images. Did you have sound? SN Yes, sound was always an important part of my work. AD And was it always music? SN Well, I had made some very simple rhythmic sounds with my own voice. For example, one of the pieces I made in Istanbul was of a woman—me, actually —running in four distinct types of spaces and projected on four screens, simultaneously. And in a piece called The Shadow Under the Web, I made a sound with my own voice, something between breathing and singing, repeated in different time signatures. I improvised it as we were recording. In Anchorage, which was a single projection, there was a combination of chanting and a very simple song, and again, I improvised. AD You composed those songs spontaneously? http://bombsite.com/issues/73/articles/2332 SN Yes, on the spot at the recording studio. 2 of 10 AD There must have been a moment when the ideas that began to be expressed in Turbulent came to consciousness. You took a shift, a change in direction; did you feel yourself on the threshold of something quite different? I remember seeing some
with my own voice, something between breathing and singing, repeated in different time signatures. I improvised it as we were recording. In Anchorage, which was a BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Arthur C. Danto 5/17/10 1:58 PM single projection, there was a combination of chanting and a very simple song, and again, I improvised. AD You composed those songs spontaneously? SN Yes, on the spot at the recording studio. AD There must have been a moment when the ideas that began to be expressed in Turbulent came to consciousness. You took a shift, a change in direction; did you feel yourself on the threshold of something quite different? I remember seeing some photographs of you with what seemed an antique sort of rifle. Where do these fit in? SN The first group of photographic work I produced in 1993 certainly reflected the point of view of an Iranian living abroad, looking back in time and trying to analyze and comprehend the changes that had taken place in Iran since the revolution. It was the approach of an artist who had been away for a long time, and it was an important turning point for me artistically and personally, as it became more than art making but a type of journey back to my native country. I was deeply invested in understanding the ideological and philosophical ideas behind contemporary Islam, most of all the origin of the revolution and how it had transformed my country. I knew the subject was very complex and broad so I minimized my focus to something tangible and specific. I chose to concentrate on the meanings behind “martyrdom,” a concept which became the heart of the Islamic government’s mission at the time, particularly during the Iran/Iraq War. It promoted faith, self-sacrifice, rejection of the material world, and ultimately, life after death. Mostly, I was interested in how their ideas of spirituality, politics and violence were and still are so interconnected and inseparable from one another. But after a few years, I felt that I had exhausted the subject and needed to move on. I no longer wanted to make work that dealt so directly with issues of politics. I wanted to make work that was more lyrical, philosophical and poetic. AD It did come across as didactic, and, in a way, rhetorical. SN There were a lot of problems there with the issue of translation, literally in terms of the writing I was inscribing onto the photos and in cultural misreading. I must admit, when I made this group of work, I did not have an audience in mind. I had never exhibited before and had no plans for it. Eventually, when I did have an audience, I felt conflicted as to how I might go about translating ideas that were so entirely based on non-Western rationality without compromising their authenticity and meaning. Looking back at this work, I do see the problems but it was an honest attempt to reconnect and raise important issues in regard to my culture. I reduced my references in order to get a handle on the subject of martyrdom, but perhaps a lot got lost in between. I felt strongly about moving on, making work that, while ethnically specific, could allow wider interpretation. AD Something that touches on what one might call universal human nature. SN Exactly. AD That’s the feeling I have with those works. SN By this time, you have to understand, my relationship to the subject, my understanding and feelings about the revolution had all changed. When I first arrived in Iran, I was really taken by everything and desperately wanted to belong to the Iranian community again. It was almost a romantic return to Iran. Turbulent was the first work that no longer had the perspective of an artist distanced from her culture; it dealt with an issue that belonged to the present and revealed a new sense of intimacy and familiarity between myself and the subject. By this time, I had a pretty good understanding of the way in which Iranian society functioned. I had been traveling to Iran frequently and was working with an almost entirely Iranian crew. http://bombsite.com/issues/73/articles/2332 3 of 10
Page 1: BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Art
Page 5 and 6: the music she performs breaks all t
Page 7 and 8: BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Art
Page 9 and 10: SN Yes. BOMB Magazine: Shirin Nesha

BOMB Magazine: Shirin Neshat by Arthur C. Danto

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?