There are no limitations to contemporary art. Minimalism, portraiture, landscape, print, lithograph, oils, drawings, sculpture, video or whatever, the artist seemingly has no prescribed limitation. Of course a reviewer would like to be drawn to the work, even excited by it.
Looking Every Which Way – Harriet Zinnes
There are no limitations to contemporary art. Minimalism, portraiture, landscape, print, lithograph, oils, drawings, sculpture, video or whatever, the artist seemingly has no prescribed limitation. Of course a reviewer would like to be drawn to the work, even excited by it. Since unusual talent itself is not always forthcoming, the result of an artist’s endeavors shown in a museum can be if not boring at least questionable. An exhibition too can raise questions as does the exhibition "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" at the Museum of Modern Art.
It is praise-worthy for a museum to present work by 17 artists "who explore contemporary responses to Islamic art." History is certainly drawing us to it and clearly the 17 artists from diverse heritages reveal how origin may or may not matter in art. Perhaps in this day of globalization and omnipresent video heritage may not be the significant aesthetic pull. As Homar Bhabha asks in the catalogue to the exhibition: "What are the historical terms and aesthetic conditions that govern cultural transmission in a world of global disjuncture and displacements?" Shown here are Algerian, Egyptian, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian, Lebanese, Pakistani, Palestinian, Turkish and American, a worldview. But how much does a viewer glimpse from the works shown of such global disjuncture and displacements?
There are 34 works in the exhibition dating from 1993 to 2005 in various mediums organized by Fereshteh Daftari, an assistant curator at the museum. Almost as if the curator wants to make unimportant the ethnical origins of the artists, she writes: "The exhibition reveals what the artists share: a tie based not in ethnicity or religion, but in their way of revising, subverting and challenging all aesthetic traditions they deal with, and revealing the idiosyncrasies of their personal approaches." But perhaps that is exactly the problem. Is it enough to organize the exhibition around five themes, namely text and calligraphy (with artists Ghada Amer, Rachid Koraichi and Shirin Neshat), beyond miniature painting (with artists Raquib Shaw and Shahzia Sikander), variations on textiles and carpets (with artists Mona Hatoum, Mike Kelley and Shirana Shahbazi), questioning identity (with artists Jananne Al-Ani, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad and AMarjane Satrapi) and spirituality (with artists Kutlug Ataman, Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne, Y. Z. Kami and Bill Viola). Is it enough when the result in the works shown to this viewer at least seem less strongly arising from their own cultural origins than from the omnipresent Western infusion of artistic modes. Is there a collision or a collusion of modes of artistic formulations? Perhaps at least in Shirin Neshat’s work we are more alerted to a non-Western tradition as she tattoos the skin of her warlike women with decorative bodily ornamentation that resembles, we are told, that used in the Indian festive ritual of mehndi.
This is certainly an exhibition to ponder and question even as Y.Z. Kami’s portraits with their closed eyes tell us about exhaustion and loneliness of selves without boundary.
