Veils, gold, calligraphy

• Last Updated: October 23. 2009 2:14PM UAE / October 23. 2009 10:14AM GMT

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie considers the mixed crop of new books surveying Middle Eastern art practices.

In early October, the Dow Jones news agency warned that the emerging market for Middle Eastern art was crashing, with prices falling by as much as 50 per cent. Matthew Girling, a chief executive with the auction house Bonhams, said the global financial crisis had hit the market particularly hard because it was still so new, and because its collector base was still so thin. A week later, Bonhams staged a sale of contemporary Arab, Iranian and South Asian art in Dubai; the results supported this prognosis. The auction fared reasonably well, raking in $1.8 million (Dh6.6m), but this was nowhere near the mark Bonhams made in early 2008, when its Dubai debut earned a thumping $13 million (Dh47.8m) and broke 33 world records in one go, charting some of the highest prices ever paid for Middle Eastern art.

It is too soon to tell whether this drop in prices signifies a market correction or a bubble bursting. But that probably isn’t the most interesting question. More to the point: How did the market for Middle Eastern art heat up so quickly, and why? Five years ago, it was a nonexistent category. Now it is a commodity. What changed, and to what effect?

September 11, 2001 is a convenient place to start the story of how interest in art from the Middle East developed. But in the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer were gaining prominence in the art world by showing their work in powerhouse galleries and high-profile biennials. Later on, artists such as Walid Raad and Emily Jacir attracted considerable critical acclaim. Before 2001, all five of them were already stars on the merits of their work. Sure, there was noise about their biographies and backgrounds. But they were unknown to each other and working in very different ways.

Ghada Amer was primarily a painter layering muscular, abstract expressionist brush strokes over delicately tangled threads in a peek-a-boo routine with drawings of women in auto-erotic poses. Mona Hatoum, with her deep roots in performance art, was making sculptures and installations that commented on power, domesticity and the industrial prison complex. Shirin Neshat’s photographs and film work could be read, with some generosity, as an embellishment on Cindy Sherman-style role-playing and self-portraiture.

These artists were not clumped together as Middle Eastern artists until after 2001. This made sense: what they shared was incidental. In the near or distant past they had come from a part of the world that was vastly complicated, egregiously misunderstood, faintly exotic and – given a certain convergence of factors that had little or nothing to do with art – in the news all the time. In the 1980s and 1990s, that was not enough to create a curatorial area of interest, much less a sales category.

But that changed after September 11, the war in Iraq, and the so-called war on terror. These events and the discourses they engendered did not in and of themselves lead the international art world to the Middle East. But the mainstream media probably did, albeit indirectly. Against the fear-mongering of, say, Fox News, curators, critics and collectors began to seek out the more nuanced narratives afforded by contemporary art. For some, it was a search for balance and a more complex picture of current events. For others, it was about discovering art’s capacity to make sense of trauma . The experiences of artists from Beirut to Baghdad suddenly offered important lessons for the world.

Unfortunately, although the art world’s visitors to the region in the early years of this decade said they were looking for artists whose work would complicate or contradict stereotypical images of the Middle East, the artists whose work they found often conformed to those same stereotypes. Moreover, plenty of impresarios came to the region to pad sales catalogues and support what would soon be perceived as the nub of an emerging market. For them, the work needed to “look” like the Middle East, or at least some half-baked, abstract, neo-orientalist, harem fantasy of the Middle East – veils, calligraphy, embroidery and gold.

In the last seven years or so, disparate artists have been gathered into groups and presented as collective representations of the region. This has happened through sprawling exhibitions, from Catherine David’s Contemporary Arab Representations and Jack Persekian’s DisORIENTation to Without Boundary at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Arabise Me at the V&A and Unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The pioneering artists from the 1980s and 1990s have been piled onto the bandwagon of Middle Eastern art, and made exemplars of “the scene” at its best. In reality, there is no such thing as the Middle Eastern art scene. But for better or worse, the group shows – whether strong, thoughtful, crass or confused – created the illusion otherwise.

When it became clear that there was also, to put it crudely, a lot of money in the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf, the making of a scene turned into the creation of a market. Galleries opened, magazines launched, the auction houses moved in and art fairs materialised. Prices went crazy for a while. Now, despite evidence that the market for Middle Eastern art is tanking – or perhaps because of this – the publishing industry is getting in on the game.

In her introduction to Contemporary Art in the Middle East, Nat Muller, an independent curator who divides her time between Rotterdam and Beirut, comments on the generation of Middle East-themed shows. “Perhaps [they] are a necessary evil,” she writes, “yet if we want to lay out conditions of focusing on a contemporary practice, we have to look further and beyond identitarian markers of ethnicity, politics and geography, important as they may be, and let the art first and foremost speak for itself.”

What Muller does not say is perhaps books like Contemporary Art from the Middle East are a necessary evil, too. The past year has seen a pile-up of slick, large-format coffee table tomes on Arab, Iranian and Middle Eastern art. For anyone familiar with the dearth of available resources on the histories of artistic practices in the region, this cannot but be a good thing. We need books like this.

For there are no standardised textbooks on the subject, and monographs devoted to individual artists are few and far between. Earlier compendiums – such as Edouard Lahoud’s bilingual L’Art Contemporain au Liban, published in 1974 – have either fallen out of print or failed to reach audiences broad enough to ensure revised and updated editions. Those interested in learning more about Middle Eastern art are left with a smattering of exhibition catalogues, articles and online resources. This does not bode well for the creation of new museums, cultural infrastructures and credible arts institutions in the region. Who will staff these initiatives? From where will they earn their experience and expertise? The dearth of documentation is also potentially dangerous because it means the foundations of interest in Middle Eastern art are unsteady, vulnerable to misinterpretation and oftentimes theoretically and historically unsound.

As Nada Shabout and Salwa Mikdadi write in their introduction to New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, “The ‘art boom’ started backwards in the Arab world. The art market flourished in the oil-rich Gulf states... before the art support systems set in. The ‘boom’ euphoria spread before school curricula, museums, art critics or even art scholars began to grapple with the relevant questions.”

That would imply that books like New Vision intend to work toward the proper beginning, grapple with the relevant questions and begin to build the support systems so badly needed. Although they differ from one another in selection and scope, all of these new books address the desire for more scholarly, art historical points of reference. If that is their ambition, then do they succeed?

Success would mean that these are the books students and scholars have been waiting for – sweeping, authoritative, comprehensive histories of modern and contemporary art that do for this part of the world what books like HW Janson’s History of Art, HH Arnason’s History of Modern Art or Art Since 1990 (by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin HD Buchloh) did for American and European art. Readers might spar with these narratives and their authors, but they can trust the integrity and objectivity of their sparring partner. The doorstopper-sized books on western art were made by university professors, and for university students. Set apart from the market, they carry the weight of academic excellence and editorial integrity.

The trouble with the new books on Middle Eastern art is that despite strong contributions from scholars, their genesis lies outside of academia, and it shows. At best they entertain and add a few texts to the disjointed library of material on Middle Eastern art. At worst, they repeat the mistakes of the reductive group shows – throwing together random lists of artists with Arab or Iranian names and passing them off as curatorship or worse, canonisation.

If these new books are not useful for students and scholars, whether formal or informal, then who are they for? If they are just enormous adornments for the coffee table, then maybe they are the film left over from the froth of an overheated market. Maybe, more cynically, they are part of a concerted effort to broaden the collector base for Middle Eastern art. (If they buy the books, then maybe they will buy the art.) Or maybe, more cynically still, they are status-makers, good-looking books for galleries to use (we represent this artist), for collectors to boast (I own that one), or for auction houses to list in catalogue entries detailing critical reception and provenance.

Commenting on an earlier but similar coffee-table book (Galerie Enrico Navarra’s In the Arab World... Now), the artist Hassan Khan wrote: “The book presents its readers with a seductive blend of capitalist-driven modernism and the exotic erotic. It presents its artists only in relation to their assumed ethnic affiliation; it becomes difficult to see them any other way. Although this is a technique that has made many a fortune – the Chinese example being the most striking yet – it has failed to acknowledge artists as producers within the very centre of contemporary discursive practice.” In the Arab Word... Now, he adds, “teaches us more about the idiosyncrasy of the art market than about the ‘Arab world’ of the title. It is a market (especially in its emerging sector) that lacks the confidence to allow creative forces to operate outside its control.”

Do the new books fare any better? As an exhibition in book form, Rose Issa’s Iranian Photography Now is terrific. It features the work of 36 artists, and emphasises old-school photojournalism. After a brisk introduction by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and a swift, stage-setting essay on the history of photography in Iran by Issa, the only texts to be found are statements by the artists themselves. Readers are left to engage with the works directly, guided by Issa’s personal selection, which is based on her long and largely unsung years as one of the most experienced dealers and curators working in the field. Art history it isn’t. But if you buy Issa’s aesthetic – if you appreciate her fondness for the high-contrast, street-style, black-and-white photography of, say, Peyman Hooshmandzadeh, Mahmud Kalari and Seifollah Samadian, and are willing to ignore the decorative kitsch on display – then Iranian Photography Now is a pleasure.

Transit Tehran is also a gem, not for students of art history but for those who love urban culture in all its expressions and forms. Edited by Malu Halasa and Maziar Bahari, the book includes artworks, essays, political cartoons, feature film frames, short stories, narrative non-fiction, hip-hop lyrics and more. Transit Tehran is the second instalment in a series – the first was Transit Beirut – and it looks and feels less like an exhibition catalogue and more like a hefty issue of a (very well crafted and conceived) magazine celebrating a succession of cities. Of all of the books under discussion here, it is the least complicit in the market for Middle Eastern art.

Just as the coherence of Iranian Photography Now stems from its concentration on a single medium, the strength of Transit Tehran lies in its engagement with urban life and lore. All of the works included speak to some aspect of the city. They are not burdened with representing the nation or the region. Readers are freed from postulating about what the Middle East is and what it means. You like a mad metropolis? This book if for you.

That is not to say that the problems with Contemporary Art in the Middle East, New Vision and Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art are only those of corralling up artists to stand in for geographies. That argument doesn’t need to be retread. The other, newer problem is the schizophrenia that splits these books in two. There are the essays, and there are the selections of artists’ works, and rarely do they match up in meaningful ways. The former dampen the market hype with sober analysis, while the latter add fuel to the fire.

Contemporary Art in the Middle East opens with four essays, then sprints through examples of works by 45 artists, and ends with a bifurcated appendix, revisiting Edward Said’s Orientalism and rushing through interviews with eight “major figures operating within the region” – including Rose Issa, Negar Azimi (a senior editor of Bidoun), Savita Apte (chair of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize) and John Martin (the director of Art Dubai) – few of whom live in said region.

Inexplicably, the artists discussed in the opening essays are not the same artists whose work is later shown. Nat Muller’s introduction highlights the artists Oraib Toukan, Larissa Sansour, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, among others. Lindsay Moore’s text on feminist modes of representation zooms in on the work of Zineb Sedira. An essay by TJ Demos on desire, enactment and site-specificity focuses on the work of Emily Jacir. Suzanne Cotter’s careful consideration of the documentary turn explores the work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari. But in the 45 profiles that follow, none of those artists appear. Why?

Muller’s essay in particular is tasked with doing intellectual gymnastics and curatorial contortions to justify what turns out to be an incoherent and haphazard book. Her text is full of valuable insights, but it raises a number of questions – how artists in the region see themselves and their work, how they use cities as metaphors, how they grapple with representations of conflict – that fail to find resonance, to say nothing of illustration, elsewhere in the book.

The most obvious problem is the selection criteria. It is not remotely clear anywhere in Contemporary Art from the Middle East just how the decisions on which artists to include have been made, or by whom. The artists are not presented in a discernible order, nor are there palpable themes (subtle or otherwise). But there are, of course, veils, calligraphy, embroidery and gold. Forty per cent of the artists are Iranian. Twenty per cent are represented by or have shown with The Third Line. The gallery’s logo appears on the acknowledgements page.

An unsigned foreword describes the book as marking out an artistic map “through a process that favoured inclusion over exclusion” to produce “a collection that defies fixed categories, shifting instead through different artistic registers according to more subtle themes. It is a surprising, sometimes contradictory, yet structurally navigable collage of visual material that reflects the personality of the region itself.” That is not one dodge but six. The effect is to paint the Middle East as a region alluring but impossible to rationalise or know.

New Vision – the product of a collaboration between a scholar, Nada Shabout, and a curator, Salwa Mikdadi – is clear where Contemporary Art from the Middle East is murky. In their introduction, Shabout and Mikdadi define their terms, lay out their structure, explain their criteria and share their motivations – alongside their misgivings – with great honesty.

The challenge behind New Vision, they write, was “to develop an art historical context that would allow for the construction of several contemporary narratives, and be capable of presenting the contemporary practices of the Arab world as part of a continuum”, rather than a novelty. The book goes a fair distance toward achieving that through five essays tackling terminology, infrastructure, collecting practices, visual culture and the historical relationship between the region and its diasporas. It offers a chronology and an extensive bibliography. It features the work of 67 artists, along with profiles of 23 galleries and arts initiatives. But while Shabout and Mikdadi claim that the book is “curated” to the extent that all of the artists explore “historiography, categorisation, representation and archives”, the following pages do not flesh out those themes. The artists are arranged alphabetically, with rough-and-tumble biographical sketches alongside images splashed on the page (there is some sloppy captioning as well). Some of the artists most active in the region in the stated areas of interest – history, archives – are absent. The result is a glorified yearbook, an incomplete telephone directory stripped of contact details. Try as they may, Shabout and Mikdadi do not, in the end, swap standard market treatment for scholarship.

With 114 artists, Different Sames feels the most comprehensive of the lot. Hamid Keshmirshekan’s long and lucid essay traces the history of art in Iran from the Safavid and Qajar dynasties to the present day. It also elucidates the extent to which Mohammad Khatami’s brief tenure as president set off an explosion of artistic and intellectual activity. But what follows is not an illustrated account of that history. It is another phone book. (New Vision and Different Sames are part of a series, which includes one forthcoming book on contemporary Turkish art, and another on patrons and collectors in the Middle East.)

How many of these books will be used to educate the next generation of art historians, critics, curators, administrators and managers? Probably very few and possibly none at all. New Vision is a good candidate, but given its heft and its price, it is unrealistic for students on a budget.

There was a time when the trickiest debate about art history in the Middle East concerned authenticity. The canon had to include artists who supported a cause, be it postcolonial, anti-imperial or Arab nationalist. Now, the issue at stake is authority. Who has the authority to craft a canon and write the region’s art history? Who can be trusted? Whether they have benefited from it or not, contemporary Arab and Iranian artists are deeply suspicious of the international interest in their work. Few will be convinced that these books are anything more than market fodder. It might be time for the market to give it a rest, and for the region’s educational institutions to step in and take over.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer for The Review in Beirut.