Keepers of the flame

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: November 15. 2009 4:47PM UAE / November 15. 2009 12:47PM GMT

Al Quoz is bleak, dusty, hard to get to and harder to leave, especially if you need to hail a cab at midnight. Let’s not mince words: the place is an industrial estate surrounded by building sites, next to a motorway, in a desert. It’s a testament to the enthusiasm of Dubai’s art crowd that Al Quoz vernissages achieve the turn-outs they do, although “enthusiasm” seems a mild word for what blew through the Meem Gallery’s latest opening last Monday. “We had 500,” its proprietor Charlie Pocock tells me the following morning. He looks pummelled: Meem is the size of a couple of squash courts side by side. It is not built for rock-show hordes.

Still, what do you expect when you put Abbas Kiarostami and Parviz Tanavoli on a bill together? Between them, they triggered an Iranian renaissance, one whose heirs continue to dominate the Middle Eastern cultural scene, even now. Tanavoli resurrected a sculptural tradition whose previous practitioners were the heroes of folk tales. Kiarostami became one of the most inventive voices in world cinema, maintaining fruitful sidelines as an art photographer and a poet.

Their show serves as a joint retrospective, covering three of Kiarostami’s clearly delineated periods as a photographer and two of Tanavoli’s most enduring sculptural themes. I met the pair of them at the gallery to discuss their long, shared history – they first crossed paths at university in Tehran – and the parallel development of their art. Tanavoli, who lives for part of the year in Vancouver, spoke in English. Kiarostami spoke Farsi, translated by Tanavoli’s daughter Tandis. Despite this language barrier, the conversation flowed freely over the place of poetry in their work, the difficulties of functioning as an artist in Iran, and how they both started out in fields they were no good at.

“I think I turned to filmmaking because I couldn’t paint,” Kiarostami recalls. “I was a very bad painter. I completed a four-year course in 13 years” – this at the fine art school at Tehran University.

“I used to see Parviz there all the time. Even though he’s not that much older than me, for some reason that I never understood, when I was student he was already teaching.”

Tanavoli remembers it slightly differently. “He was very interested even then in filmmaking,” he says. “And then I was a sculptor… And I knew of him, he knew of me, and then of course when the revolution came we were separated like lots of other people.” Tanavoli, a major figure in Iran’s pre-revolutionary art world, decided he would be better off leaving his home. “The art school closed down and artists were gathered and many of them left the country, as I and my family did too,” he says evenly. “The revolution – they had certain principles. They didn’t want to recognise the artists of before the revolution, which I was… And so we were completely put aside and we were not good any more.”

Kiarostami stayed put, waiting out the hiatus in his film career. “After I graduated from university I started working on commercial films, which introduced me to the mechanism of filmmaking and cameras, and from there I started making short films for children,” he says. “And then the revolution; no cinema, which was a great time in my life because that’s when I started studying photography.”

He would take long walks, seeking refuge in nature. The pictures he took en route were originally intended as “souvenirs to show to family and friends”, but soon he started putting together suites of variations on a single theme. The Meem show contains examples from his Snow, Rain, and Roads series – landscape photography rendered alien by tricks of composition and contrast.

In one shot, the furrows in a ploughed field swirl like a magnified fingerprint. In another, a flock of birds wheels over snow-blanketed mountains. For a long time Kiarostami liked taking pictures through rain on a car windscreen, keeping the droplets in crisp focus and letting the world beyond dissolve into melancholy abstraction.

“A lot of these pictures were taken when I was scouting for locations for my films,” he says, which might go some way to explaining the obsessive recurrence of subject-matter. And in a different way, the style is a byproduct too.

“I owe this largely to my lack of knowledge about filters and cameras and lenses and whatnot,” he says. “When I make films, the cameraman sitting behind the camera is a professional cameraman… When I take pictures, due to this lack of knowledge, I just take pictures and see what turns out of them without really the use of the filters. The nature that I capture is not exactly what a professional photographer would capture. Especially with the snow scenes, the snow pictures, I find that the pictures turn out a lot like watercolour images in Japanese artwork.”

Kiarostami is being slightly disingenuous here: even when he makes movies he has often left room for a kind of technological serendipity. In his film Close-Up, documentary scenes play out in silence because of a faulty microphone. Ten was shot using two cameras fixed in position on a car dashboard; the actors drove around improvising unsupervised and Kiarostami stitched the resulting footage into a finished narrative. As he says of his snow pictures, quirks in “the natural mechanism” of the camera, as well as the nature of the subject, are allowed to shape the finished artwork.

This elevation of the mechanical within the creative process chimes in an interesting way with the symbols that Tanavoli has spent his career refining. His two most recognisable subjects are called Heech and Poet. Heech is “nothing” or “nothingness” written in Farsi script, a glyph resembling the numeral “3” with a pair of eyes.

In Tanavoli’s bronzes, nothingness presents as an occasion for endless invention and permutation. Heech is distorted and personified, here shown perched on a chair, there worming its way through a cage or twining round its double in a lover’s embrace. Far from carrying any connotation of despair, Heech is flexibility and vitality itself. Flaubert once fantasised about writing “a book about nothing… held together by the strength of its style”; Tanavoli has built a career taking the Frenchman at his word.

Yet his other great subject, Poet, at first appears as an emblem of rigidity and confinement. Poet is represented as a lock, a cage or other contraption. One sculpture in the Meem show, entitled Poet and the Cypress Tree, looks like a gun placement with a folding shovel clipped to the side of it. mints the forms into which nothingness bends itself? Not quite.

“I find the poet a free man,” Tanavoli says. “He can fly wherever he wants, can go anywhere and think of anything, and he has no bounds in his thoughts or in his mind. And in the meantime, the poet also lives in the society where he has to struggle for a lot of this. It’s not that he’s free and can do whatever he wants to do. So some of this symbolism, like locks or cages, is what the poet is struggling against.”

But the poet’s struggle has not, historically, been as difficult as the sculptor’s. “During the Sasanian, during the Achaemenian” – that is, in the pre-Islamic era – “we had great sculptors, and some of those stories still remain and some of those sculptures still remain and can be seen. But after this, poetry kind of replaced the sculpture in Iran.” Hence the priority that Tanavoli’s work grants to the written word. “It bothered me very little that we didn’t have sculpture,” he says. “I thought poetry is so rich, I kind of use that as a source of inspiration, and became a sculptor with a poetry background rather than a three-dimensional background.”

Poetry, Kiarostami reminds me, is part of Iran’s social fabric. “Grocers and butchers and even carpet dealers all use poetry in their everyday lives,” he says. “As artists, if we don’t use poetry in our work, I think we have done a disservice to our culture and to our backgrounds.” Kiarostami has published a good deal of poetry himself, of course – “I sometimes do delve into that, yes,” he says wryly. I ask if Tanavoli has ever been tempted to try his own hand.

“I used to,” he says with a laugh, “but it was such bad poetry that I gave it up. I’ll tell you a little story just to give you some idea.” As a young man, he explains, he got into a correspondence with a carpet dealer about the traditional tribal carpets of Shiraz (Tanavoli is an authority on traditional Iranian handicrafts and has published several books on the ethnography and archeology of rug-making). At the time he fancied himself as a poet more than a scholar, and so, inspired by the carpets the rug dealer had shown him, he says: “I wrote this poem, a few verses. And I sent it to him.”The carpet dealer leapt at this invitation to lyric dialogue and proceeded, the sculptor says, to put Tanavoli’s attempt to shame. “He returned my letter with pages and pages of poems,” the artist remembers. “Just the carpet dealer. I was so embarrassed I cannot tell you.”

Despite this chastening experience, Tanavoli believes that a grounding in all the arts is important. “Today I would advise my students to learn poetry, to learn music, even if they want to become sculptors,” he says. “A good artist is an artist that understands music, that understands poetry, that is knowledgeable about his work, about his universe, about other cultures. I think that is today to become a universal artist.”

Kiarostami echoes this advice. “Once you know the notes you can play any instrument,” he says. “You can switch instruments as long as you know the notes properly.” Perhaps more importantly, you can appreciate excellence in another field.

“I have enjoyed Kiarostami’s artwork immensely and they sometimes have been a source of inspiration for me,” Tanavoli says. “His work is very minimalistic, but people don’t realise how much effort does it take to get there, to be so simple, and to be so plain and easy to understand and to enjoy. And I am working towards that too. It’s not that easy; I don’t know if I have reached it or not, but I want to reach where he has reached and I want to be there someday. I love it.”

“Our mediums are different but we both understand each other’s work,” says Kiarostami. “The beauty of our relationship is that we hardly ever discuss anything. We don’t need words to communicate.”

The evidence of that is on show at the Meem gallery until February 10. It is worth the trip.