Katrin Nahidi

Saqqakhaneh 
Between Avantgarde andPahlavi Court. (working title)

In my dissertation project I want to concentrate on the Iranian art movement Saqqakhaneh, which was founded in the 1960ies. The sculptor Parviz Tanavoli and the painter Hossein Zenderoudi were important representatives of this group. Folkloristic and religious elements of folk art, which they were combining with modern means of creative expression served the Saqqakhnaeh artists as inspiration to develop their own, Persian artistic language. In this respect it was not a definite group, whose aims were grounded in a manifest. Saqqakhaneh means a common aesthetic strategy based on Shiite iconography. The group was named by the art critic Karim Emami and it means public drinking fountains, their walkable inside was decorated with different pictures and functioned as places of popular piety. Some of the painters, like Hossein Zenderoudi and Faramaz Pialaram built their work on the medium of calligraphy to achieve abstract-expressive or geometric-abstract artistic works by formal experiments.

Through the protection of the empress Farah Diba this art movement emerged to an officially acclaimed style. The support by the court was leading to the establishment of galleries, festivals, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. This is how Tehran became a pulsating art-metropolis, which was also very attractive to American and European artists. The Saqqakhaneh artists aimed at installing a modern artistic language, which was deeply rooted in their local culture. The 'Iranization' became one of the key factors towards the construction of a national visual identity. In some of the discourses the modern artists are appreciated neither from a national nor an international perspective because non-European modernity is often supposed to be not more than an imitation. The protection and distribution, promoted by the court doesn't make this movement appear very avant-garde by the reason the idea of avant-garde as imperative counterculture is deeply rooted. Especially remarkable is the fact that the Islamic Revolution in 1979 was also tending to construct a genuine Iranian-Islamic identity of the country. This is why the revolution could unify differing political, ideological and religious sights. One of the most important elements of the revolutionary propaganda has been the visual seduction by posters, murals and ephemera, like chewing gum wrappings.

In my dissertation I want to research the artistic quality of the artist group Saqqakhaneh, which takes an ambivalent position between avantgarde and medium for legitimation of power of the Pahlavi-monarchy to carve out their meaning for a global and regional art history. On the basis of aesthetic criteria the innovation becomes considerable. They used the concept of modern art in a formal way, but by using strategies of adoption, demarcation and translation they created their own reconfigurations, which one can see in the revolution posters.

The beginning of modern art in Iran is often dated with the foundation of the academy of art in 1940 under the direction of the French architect and archaeologist André Godard. Many of the Iranian artists studies abroad. For example Parviz Tanavoli spent some years in Italy. He was the student of the Italian artist Marino Marini. Hossein Zenderoudi has been living since the 1960ies in Paris but because of his mobility he has always been an active part in the Tehran art scene. Due to international interdependences the US- American patron Abbie Weed Grey could gather a respectable collection of the works of the Saqqakhaneh artists, which is preserved in the Museum of New York University. In the 1970ies Karl Schlamminger, a German artist was teaching at the Academy in Tehran, in his courses he employed the Bauhaus teaching model of Johannes Itten. Many exhibitions presented foreign artists. Probably the most spectacular event was the annual Shiraz Arts Festival, which took place in the antique coulisse of Persepolis. Famous artists like Merce Cunningham and John Cage were attending and performing. These are just a few samples to prove the transcultural flow and the cultural transfer (in both directions) in modern Iranian art. It shall be researched how these interrelations affected the art and the artists. In a certain way my dissertation-project is connected to my master thesis. At this, I examined Shirin Neshat's movie Women Without Men under the focus of the specific Iranian discourse of exile. After an intensive classification of articles and exhibition catalogues I realized that contemporary art from the so-called Middle East is always considered as a contemporary phenomenon and a distinct signal of the success of globalization. But how can we seriously research Iranian art without knowing almost anything about their local tradition of modernity? It seems that contemporary art from Iran, Iraq or the Arabian States evolved from an assumed historical vacuum. Speaking about contemporary art from the Islamic World often includes the use of theories based on Cultural Studies, but a classification within a regional art history is carried out very seldom. Why even the discipline of Islamic art history doesn't deal with the 20th and 21st century explains Finbarr Barry Flood in his critical survey about the historiography(1).

The enormous presence of modern and contemporary Islamic art has necessarily leaded to the reflection of non-Western modern art. As well as the orientation of art history towards a global art history brought up research interest for non-European art. But a methodical overview of regional art histories is still a desideratum. In my dissertation I want to look closely at the concept Saqqakhaneh, the themes and ideas of the protagonists to anchor this movement in a regional and global art historical frame. The current state of research is sparely and contains mostly articles and exhibition catalogues. Until now there doesn't exist a relevant scientific publication. Due to the close linking of Saqqakhaneh to the Pahlavi state the art wasn't very much appreciated after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Some of the works belonged to the private collections in the palaces and have been destroyed or confiscated. Several artists had been forced to leave Iran and to live in exile. At the beginning of the years 2000 Saqqakhaneh experienced a kind of renaissance. The Museum of Contemporary Art was holding group and solo exhibitions as part of the program Pioneers of Iranian Modern Art.(2) 2002 works from the Abby Weed Grey collection were shown in New York accompanied by a very well balanced exhibition catalogue with contribution by Shiva Balaghi, Fereshteh Daftari and Peter Chelkowski(3). For autumn 2013 the Asia Society is planning an exhibition entitled Modern Iran. Various exhibition projects refer to artistic paragons, e.g. the catalogue „Iranian Contemporary Art", which was edited by Rose Issa in 2001(4). Illuminating is also the book by Hossein Amirsadeghi „Different Sames. New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art" because the development of modern art in Iran is here from the 1920ies until now retraced(5). However the mentioned overviews are very short in their texts and descriptions.
The movement Saqqakhaneh is always refered as pathbreaking initiative, but the main focus is still contemporary Iranian art, which also includes migrants and exiles.

To find a good access to my subject I am going to work with various methods because the topic is manifold and rarely researched. The interpretation of the different primary sources (articles, interviews and exhibitions catalogues) needs to be systemized with general theories of modern art, cultural transfer, transculturalism and postcolonial studies. The works of the artists are going to be in the center of my research to verify on the basis of the formal aesthetic art historical method the before mentioned theories. Since a couple of years art history tries to find a global perspective and overcome its Eurocentric view(6). Contrary to the often represented idea that non-European modernities are not more than derivatives of a western exported modernity the British art historian Kobena Mercer states that processes of cultural transfer and cosmopolite diversity have been essential for artistic production in the 20th century(7). But also the Iranian discourse about modernity which contained debates about west-oxidation and strategies of demarcation has to be reconsidered as it can be found in Jalal Al-e Ahmads book „Plagued by the West (Gharbzadegi)"(8).

1. Flood, Finbarr Barry: From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art. In Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, 31-53. London, New York, 2007.
2. Mojabi, Javad: Pioneers of Contemporary Persian Painting. Tehran, 1998.
3. Balaghi, Shiva und Lynn Gumpert (Hg.):Picturing Iran. Art, Society and Revolution. London, 2002.
4. Issa, Rose: Iranian Contemporary Art. (Kat.-Ausst.) Barbican Art Galleries and Booth-Clibborn, London, 2001.
5. Hossein Amirsadeghi (Hg.): Different Sames. New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art. London, 2009.
6. To name just one written example: Elkins, James: Is Art History Global? London, 2006. Also the professorship „Asia and Europe in a Global Context", installed in 2009 at Heidelberg University.
7. Mercer, Kobena: Annotating Art's Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts. London, 2005.
8. Al-e Ahmad, Jalal: Plagued by the West (Gharbzadegi), Translation: Paul Sprachman. New York, 1982

Sub project C
Heir to the Hybrid Moment: from Tradition to Modernity in Non-Western Visual Arts