7
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
Gregory Minissale
This essay examines how contemporary Pakistani, Indian, Middle Eastern and
diaspora artists interpret principles of anti-illusionist painting based on common
sources: the miniature art of Iran and India in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Such art featured flatness, linearity, saturated or “hot” colour, abstract
design principles and a conceptual approach to visuality. By looking back to
“local” traditions of miniature art and utilising these traditional anti-illusionist
techniques, these contemporary artists also engage with the principles of
modernist anti-illusionism, flatness of form, linearity and the abandonment of
perspective and academic painting. Thus, contemporary artists from Pakistan,
India and Iran attempt an interesting threefold deconstruction of traditional
miniature art, modernism and postmodernism. The works of these artists are
evidence of a wide dissatisfaction with Orientalist art history that places EuroAmerican culture at the centre and the rest on the periphery in a technical and
progressivist hierarchy of values.1 Anti-illusionism mediates art histories in
productive ways. The works examined in this essay are localised, isomorphic
examples on the margins of Euro-American art historical teleology yet, with a
panoptic window onto (and a place in) a global history of meaning.
Anti-illusionism has been claimed by Euro-American modernism and
postmodernism as a complex field of signs but without any recognition that such
a field extends beyond Euro-American art histories and artistic practices.2 Many
1
Edward Said called Orientalism a negative inversion of Euro-American culture and a
way “to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient” Edward Said, Orientalism
(London: Penguin, 1978), 78.
2
For the self-reflexive aspects of Greenbergian formalism and its legacy, see Madeleine
Schechter, ‘Theorising Modernism in Art: Puzzles of Formalist Aesthetics and the
Heritage of Romanticism’, Assaph: Studies in Art History, vol. 6, 2001, 269-274. See
also, David Joselit, ‘Notes on Surface, Towards a Genealogy of Flatness’ Art History,
2000, 292-307, an attempt to translate modernism’s formalist rhetoric of flatness into
postmodernist Euro-American polysemy but enclosed within the realms of a selfreflexive Euro-American art. For anti-illusionist devices, including flatness in traditional
Indian art, see the work of A. K. Coomaraswamy in Roger Lipsey, ed., Coomaraswamy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); for anti-illusionism and a discussion of
flatness and the condensation of space in Islamic art, see Gregory Minissale, Images of
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contemporary artists who work outside Euro-American painting traditions
recognise what traditional Euro-American art histories consistently ignore: that
the formal qualities of anti-illusionist painting in addition to complex
ideological applications are consistently found in painting traditions long before
Euro-American modernism. But because Picasso and Matisse, among others,
exploited the “naive” and “primitive” anti-illusionism of non-Euro-American art
in the early twentieth century, contemporary artists who engage with premodernist anti-illusionism in Asia, Africa or South America using kinds of
illusionism that carry with them a surprising range of cultural and aesthetic
specificity are seen as derivative of these founders of early modernism.3
The issue of self-reference, excluding non-Euro-American narratives appears
endemic to Orientalising Euro-American art history, especially in interpretations
of formal, philosophical properties of abstract art. The gaze of Orientalising art
history is interiorised, the globalising gallery and museum system supported by
Euro-American academia and publishing houses interpret and project everything
from otherness to flatness through its own lens, but a lens that must be turned on
itself through illusions of otherness, to obtain value. In the same way, eulogies
to modernist anti-illusionism create the reflection of a Euro-American art
history turned upon itself as a mirror that allows it to ignore the world. Artists
and critics of non-Euro-American art have learnt to ignore this reflex the hard
way, instead finding local applications of anti-illusionism within their own
histories.
In this essay I will attempt to construct a short alternative history of antiillusionism in seventeenth century India and Iran in order to see how this
provides an intelligible interpretative framework, as well as source of inspiration
Thought: Visuality in India (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) and Alexandre
Papadopoulo, Islam and Muslim Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). See also,
Amna Malik who explores flatness both as a form of global and local mediation in Shirin
Neshat’s work in this volume.
3
“One of the great Eurocentric prejudices in the critique and history of art is its complete
undervaluing of this production as ‘derivative’ of the west.” Gerard Mosquera, ‘The
Marco Polo Effect’ in Rasheed Araeen, ed., et. al., The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture
and Theory, (London: Continuum, 2002), 270. For example, Pakistani artists “looked to
Europe for inspiration, albeit choosing outdated movements as their model” Marcella
Nesom Sirhandi, Contemporary Painting in Pakistan (Lahore: Ferozons, 1992), sleeve.
Of Zahoor-ul Akhlaque, one of Pakistan’s greatest artists, Akbar Naqvi writes,
“”Zahoor’s uncritical dependence on America was no different from the underpinning of
our own culture…” Akbar Naqvi, Image and Identity, Fifty Years of Painting and
Sculpture in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 452. There are
numerous other, long and irrelevant passages on Euro-American art in this book that
create an impression of the dependence of Pakistani artists (and historians) on Western
art history.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
117
for contemporary artistic practice. The use of anti-illusionism by contemporary
Pakistani and Indian artists, all with clear attachments to the legacy of Mughal,
Safavid and provincial styles of miniature anti-illusionist painting demonstrates
significant social and cultural reinterpretations of anti-illusionism,
demythologising it as the sole intellectual project of Euro-American cultures. I
hope to reverse, to some extent, the concept of the global gaze looking out from
the “West”, interpreting the local gaze from its point of view, to change the
direction of the gaze so that Euro-American anti-illusionism may be seen not as
the primary form of anti-illusionism in the world but from the perspective of
local histories and traditions as just another form of anti-illusionism in a
pluralistic art history. This is where the mediation of art histories can take a
challenging and vital turn. These artists in a sense are “making western culture
from non-western sources, and therefore transforming it towards a deEuropeanization of contemporary culture”.4
It is my argument that contemporary anti-illusionist techniques in
particularly successful contemporary works of art interplay with several cultural
traditions referencing different histories, and engaging with the hegemony of
Euro-American value systems. This globalising value system is sustained by
stereotypes of intellectual, formalist supremacy: a star system of artistic
geniuses of the avant-garde, whose work is conveniently transformed into the
new symbolic capital of Euro-American galleries, museums, auction houses and
the stock market with the help of marketing, advertising and academia.
This means making a notional map of routes through the space of antiillusionism. In so doing, there emerges an individuation that resists the wrongly
perceived (and globally projected) concepts of formalist universalism.
Contemporary artists reference and inscribe their history of (and dialogue with)
anti-illusionism in the material of the artwork that is not isolated from the social
and cultural context of artistic practice. The art and art history that traces these
inscriptions resist the incipient anonymity of formalist discourse. Though many
preserve their rights to engage with formalism from a variety of approaches,
their work is not reducible to this discourse. They take the route of cultural
difference and local resistance to homogenizing categories of modernism and
falsely unifying rubrics to reformulate a new vision of the global. Moreover, this
is achieved through recombinant elements of irreducible difference and
hybridity, dissonance and consonance.
For years, Persian and Indian artistic traditions were systematically denuded
of their anti-illusionist abstract power, their voice, by the narratives of numerous
art histories that sought to reduce the art of these cultures to an image of naïve
4
Referring to the work of José Bedia. Gerard Mosquera, ‘The Marco Polo Effect’, 270.
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or childish illustration.5 The multi-faceted role of anti-illusionist representation
as part of a complex pictorial language that gave form to philosophical concepts
was silenced. It was only allowed to speak of its own failure to reproduce the
technical expertise of high art, a blundering yet somewhat quaint lack of selfawareness.6 Thus on the one hand, according to the mythologising binary of
Euro-American art histories, there is the dark and sluggish silence of Orientalist
anti-illusionist representational power, plunged into enigma by the EuroAmerican gaze, and on the other hand, the bright and illustrious anti-illusionism
of Bernard, Gauguin, Picasso and others, which articulates an intelligent gaze,
and this, despite its flatness. In such a scheme, oriental flatness is passive-mute
and Euro-American flatness, active-eloquent.
As part of the disempowerment of non-Euro-American artistic traditions of
anti-illusionism was the development of several other stereotypes that were
allowed to predominate: that pre-modernist, naive anti-illusionist art was
betrayed by the slavish imitation of illusionist painting techniques (aerial
perspective, sfumato, etc.) when these became available to Indian or Iranian
artists when they became exposed to European works of art in the later
seventeenth century. In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich tried to show that
illusionism was an ongoing tradition, a set of inherited practices called
schemata, which affect individual artistic practice.7 Illusionism, best seen in
academic oil painting was viewed as a series of minute technical innovations or
pictorial effects, the marks and signs of artistic sophistication and linear
progression (in nineteenth century terms). This attitude has often plagued
judgments on Persian as well as Mughal art and art from non-Western cultures
generally. Certain painting techniques used to manipulate illusionism were
adopted by Mughal and late Safavid artists from the European tradition, yet this
was seen as in some way a culmination and refinement of earlier artistic
objectives and desires rather than the deliberate, intellectual play of illusionism
with anti-illusionism. In other words, Western art histories systematically
distanced the “oriental” artist from his or her intellect; not only did the artists of
5
The belief that the Persian tradition of book illustration does not deserve complex
literary or art historical investigation is exemplified by Basil W. Robinson writing about
Persian painting, that it “may become dehumanised by attempts to exalt these direct and
uncomplicated book illustrations to some rarefied metaphysical plane” B. W. Robinson,
Fifteenth Century Persian Painting: Problems and Issues (New York: New York
University Press, 1991), 79.
6
See for example, Milo Cleveland Beach, Early Mughal Painting (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 17-18. For detailed discussion of this point see
Minissale, Images of Thought, 1-50.
7
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960).
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
119
Iran and India uproot their charming anti-illusionist traditions, they did so for an
mediocre kind of illusionism learnt from second-hand European examples.8
From the point of view of modernist art criticism and nineteenth century
academic painting, Indian and Iranian art is decadent.9 The adoption of
illusionist techniques used alongside anti-illusionist representational devices
was seen as eclectic, confused and insincere. Rather than seeing this interplay as
a form of intellectual experimentation or the negotiation of cultural identities,
this art is impure. The most offensive example of this view is Alexandre
Papadopoulo who sees the synthesis of Indian and European art as “disastrous”
and writes that they are:
Two contrary aesthetics on a single surface, within the same microcosm, [which]
can never settle into a tolerable marriage but must forever quarrel and end by
destroying each other.10
It is the accrued attitudes of this kind of art history that are brought to bear on
the viewing habits of many Europeans and Americans today when they view
contemporary art that appears in some sense familiar to them and in other
senses, different. Familiarity breeds contempt and enigma otherness, both
attitudes are blind to the negotiation between illusionism and anti-illusionism as
a form of intellectual play and cross-cultural exchange. Blind also, is the viewer
who cannot see that the object of his or her viewing in many examples of in
non-Western art is the history of his or her own gaze, scrutinised and
questioned, framed by contemporary artists and reflected back. The cultural
syncretism represented by the interplay of illusionist and anti-illusionist
traditions in art of the early modern period was always considered a result of the
potency of Western cultural influences, or its obverse, the pollution of Indian,
Persian or Islamic purity by European art forms and techniques.11 Both views
8
In Mughal painting techniques of “modeling, of shading, of landscape recession, which
were learnt from European paintings and prints…had not yet been fully worked out."
Jeremiah Losty, The Art of the Book in India (London: British Library, 1982), 76.
9
See, for example, Mildred and W.G Archer, where the anti-illusionist palette of the
painters of Oudh, is heavily criticised. Here Indian painters had "violent recourse to
mauves and purples, flaming reds, dark heavy greens…it is as if a hot exotic quality—a
touch of fevered brilliance—had infected the style on its arrival from Delhi earlier in the
century and so exactly had this quality matched the corrupt luxuriance of the court."
Mildred and W.G Archer, India, Painting for the British (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1955), 60.
10
A. Papadopoulo, Islam and Muslim Art, 125
11
“…however much one wishes that delineating influences were a neutral exercise, in
the context of colonialism, it becomes difficult to ascribe influences in a way that does
not automatically presume the inferiority of the borrower” Partha Mitter, Art and
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are patronising, representing Indian and Iranian artists as passive victims of an
external, active and aggressive artistic force, as if Indian or Iranian artists had no
independent critical judgment to exercise of their own, or had lost their
innocence or authenticity in some way. This is very much against the view that
these foreign forms and tools were rarely adopted slavishly. Simple copies of
European prints by Mughal artists, for example, were exercises in studying
technique; they were not evidence that Mughal painting had thrown out highly
sophisticated traditions of their own in favour of Christian imagery. On the
contrary, the implementation and manipulation of European techniques and
imagery, alongside Iranian and Indian pictorial conventions marked and
continues to mark in the contemporary sense, a complex and creative selection
process. By reducing illusionism to an exchange of coded technical information
between the artist and the viewer, art historians have showed themselves to be
uninterested in exploring the semantic content of illusionism, how it can
function as a myth or metaphor for example, in literary, philosophical or
religious contexts and in the visual arts.
To begin understanding non-Western anti-illusionism it is important to look
at attitudes to illusionism. From both theological and art historical perspectives,
illusionism in painting was not only a matter of techniques pragmatically
applied to enhance narrative performance, it was also inextricably linked to the
notion of illusion, and as such, functioned as an epistemological figure within
various discursive contexts: the power of rhetoric and its devices, the inferiority
or otherwise of sense perceptions and the virtues or vices of iconophilia, for
example. Illusionism, defined here as the illusory quality of visual art and
recognised as such by early modern writers and poets in India and Iran was used
as a metaphor for psychological, theological and philosophical illusion.
Illusionism was also used as a metaphor for idolatry.
Thus, at the base of anti-illusionism lies an edifice of ethical and
epistemological discourses. For centuries in literature and the visual arts,
illusionism was either represented as a form of prestidigitation in the form of an
alluring beautiful painting, or as brilliant mirror reflection of a beautiful painting
that increases the power of deception of illusionist art. In literature, and as a
corollary of this, painting was often to be associated with the talisman or
“repellent” (dur-bash) and this metaphor survives in contemporary art. The
talisman (itself painted with anti-illusionist techniques) reverses the gaze from
the allure of illusionism. Knowledge of this survives in contemporary art
practice. A contemporary Pakistani artist, Nahid Raza, uses the talisman of the
severed hand (imagine a flat, open hand facing the viewer) as a double sign, the
Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 4, 6.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
121
‘hand of Fatima’.12 This is talismanic, and it is used historically as a battle
standard to ward off the evil eye, but it is also used by this artist as a stop sign,
as a traffic warden might use the open hand. Fig.7.1. Yet, the repellent is also
used to reverse the gaze from sexualising vision, and invariably in Nahid Raza’s
work, the woman uses this gesture linking past with present, mythological
worlds with the real world of women refusing objectification, reversing the
penetrative gaze of the viewer seeking sensuous illusion. Included in this is the
distancing effect that such a gesture has, which is tantamount to the distancing
achieved by anti-illusionist flatness. The flat hand, often painted traditionally
with an eye inside it, again to repel the gaze, not only averts the evil eye in a
superstitious sense and averts the eye from the deception of illusionism; it
resists illusionist depth and reaffirms the distancing effect between the
projection of the body and pictorial surface. The talisman is an anti-illusionist
device, where illusionism is a form of self-deception. In reaffirming the surface,
and by lying parallel with it, the seeing hand claims to be the truth of the
moment and turns the eye away from the body and the body of the work. The
disassociation between material body and projected illusion or transcendence (or
the desire inherent in this projection with the sexualised gaze) runs counter to
some theorists who claim that modernist flatness mimics the surface of the
body, that the surface of the painting is the surface of the body.13 This conflation
that complements so precisely the Christian dogmas underpinning incarnation,
such as transubstantiation is exactly what is inconceivable for the antiillusionism of Mughal and Safavid painting.
Another articulation of this paradox of illusionist depth and surface
repellence is the concept of inter-repulsion, used by Georges Bataille who writes
of a masked woman (in his case a woman with a black rubber mask but one that
can so easily be extended to the veiled woman in Islamic societies) as both
perpetrator (“bourreau”) or a beheaded queen (“reine décapitée”)14 and this
causes the flux of inter-repulsion, an attraction that is repelled, and again
resurges to cause a kind of bedazzlement. This inter-repulsion also makes its
presence felt in the anti-illusionist discourse of the attraction/repulsion of the
12
For a study of this powerful image, see Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, "Discerning the
Hand of Fatima: An Iconological Investigation of the Role of Gender in Religious Art."
In Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, ed., Beyond the Exotic: Women’s Histories in Islamic
Societies (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). For other names and
interpretations of this symbol in the Iranian context, see Amna Malik’s essay in this
book.
13
Joselit, ‘Notes on a surface’ 299.
14
For a fuller discussion of this, see Olivier Chow, ‘Idols/Ordures:Inter-repulsion in
Documents’ big toes’ Drain, A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture,
www.drainmag.com, ‘Desire’ Issue, (No. 7, Sept. 2006).
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gaze engaged by the play between surface and depth in both modern and premodern contexts. In depictions of the flat, open hand in Nahid’s work, seen in
many Islamic cultures on the traditional iconic level, as a repulsive charm
against the evil eye (the writing upon it or the eye contained within it often
drawing us in, however), and also on the level of modernist discourse, the image
frees the eye from enduring depth, repelled from the illusion of depth, it beholds
the true flatness of the image.15
7.1 I am not a water melon, Nahid Raza, 1994, acrylic on paper
In Nahid Raza’s work, flat surfaces have long been used as a mirror for desire,
as the trace of psychological exchanges, where the mind extends its power over
the residual body; and as the mind controls the body, it uses paint and brush as
evidence of that control. This is one of the reasons why I have made I am not a
watermelon 1994, Fig.7.1 the object of detailed analysis later in this essay.
Painting illusionist images of the body may be seamless enactments of physical
jouissance while anti-illusionism provokes contradictions, an inter-repulsion,
where tactile senses are repelled by the cold surface of the canvas, but anti15
The reader is referred to Amna Malik’s essay in the volume for further discussion of
this artist’s work.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
123
illusionist inter-repulsion may also achieved with the residue of the ritualistic
apotropaic power of severed heads, eyes, hands: it is a different order of antiillusionism.16 And in contemporary anti-illusionist art the stubborn refusal to
read the pictorial surface as skin or the paint as body is a powerful localised
statement against the global territorialisation of anti-illusionism. Here, the antiillusionist direction is toward abstraction: the eye glances off the surface and the
mind is projected beyond the limits of representation.
Anti-Illusionism and Desire
The contrast between anti-illusionist and illusionist representational modes
provides a map upon which it is possible to trace two aspects of desire, the
sacred and the profane. This map in “traditional” Iranian and Indian painting has
provided an important source of direction for global and local, contemporary
artistic practice and visual meaning. In the next few pages, I want to trace a
historical view of the topography of desire both sacred and profane.17 This will
provide a context for analysing the work of contemporary artists who have
oriented themselves using the routes of this map.
It is remarkable that one of the most widely illustrated stories in the
miniature art of the Indian subcontinent, Iran and Central Asia is a twelfth
century poetic work, a quintet of poems, by Nizami (1141-12). The work tells us
not only of the medieval world which produced it but the generations of readers
that continued to hold it up as profound and meaningful and who sought to
immortalise the tale by furnishing it with illustrations, illumination of gold inks
and lapis lazuli, and intricate leather bindings. Some of the most highly
treasured are those copies that took years to complete, so rich and complex are
the calligraphy, illustration and decoration that accompany these texts. Besides
providing the pleasure of poetry and esoteric Sufi theology and cosmology, the
work provides a valuable source of knowledge on the ethics, aesthetics and
faith. The poetry is also fascinating because of the use it makes of the imagery
of “the painting”/ the image/ the talisman and the world of illusions and mirror
reflections, providing us with a set of clues to attitudes to the visible world that
change subtly over the centuries. Remarkable also, are the ways in which these
16
For a study of the inter-repulsion of severed heads as pictorial devices in Indian art, the
gaze turned back on the viewer, see Gregory Minissale, ‘Demarcating Conceptual Space
in Mughal Art’, Oriental Art, Vol. XLVI, No. 5 (2000) and ‘Seeing Eye-To-Eye With
Mughal Miniatures: Some Observations on the Outward Gazing Figure in Mughal Art’,
Marg, vol. 58, no. 3, March, 2007.
17
The next two pages in this section are adapted from passages in Gregory Minissale,
Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750 (Cambridge Scholars Press,
2006).
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episodes and attitudes to painting are reflected in the paintings that accompany
the poetry, a vast corpus of paintings that must easily number several thousands.
A recurrent theme found in Nizami’s quintet is the danger of seduction by
the image. In the famous romance of Khusrau and Shirin, Shirin falls in love
with a portrait of Khusrau, which she kisses and embraces, and this is clearly
associated with magic and is an extraordinary, indeed unnatural response
bordering on idolatry. This is expressed as the erosion of space between desiring
subject and desired object. It is also, at the same time, a closure of the
conceptual space between sign (the painting) and the signified (the person the
painting portrays). The act of touching the portrait is not a kind of seduction by
the art of illusionism; it is not a way of trying to establish what is real by the
confirmation of touch. The touch, the kiss, the embrace are a condemnation, an
outward sign of the fetish, a form of capitulation, when the desiring subject
realises the true nature of her loss and her inability to bring about the presence
of her beloved. It is a touch heavy with intent, with wish fulfillment and one
tainted with desire towards the inanimate object, a belief that one’s own inner
plea will somehow affect the physical universe, an embrace doomed from the
start with frustration tinged with the refusal to accept reality or the will of God.
While there are examples in Persian and Arabic literature of heroes and heroines
who fall in love with portraits (which are often embraced or kissed) this
behaviour is never explained as a result of the image’s invitation to the tactile
senses but it is always a sign of the reversal of human fortunes. The fascinating
thing about this oral and poetic tradition focused on painting as a vehicle for
desire is that it is made into a painting in order to invite the same focus on
painting as the poetic imagery. Both the literal and allegorical senses are thus
engaged in a complex interactive exercise between poetry, visual art, and
viewer.
In the Khusrau and Shirin story in particular, we deal with the picture as the
temporary embodiment of the lover, underpinned with the mechanism of
deferral of “the real” that results in the elision of portrait and sitter; this distance
is mediated further by the viewer who sees this principle instantiated in the
pictorialisation of the episode “about the painting”. This is also the desire for
possession of and dominance over the lover’s body, instantiated in the painting,
which can be realised in abstentia, through the image, turning erotic desire into
autoeroticism. The lover’s desire, expressed towards a pictorial image of the
lover illustrates the seduction of the visual senses and the capitulation of reason
in the face of an uncontrollable lust for physical beauty. The enchanted viewer
holds, touches the picture, Shirin presses Khusrau’s portrait to her lips, and
embraces it, this allows the picture to satisfy the yearning for touch and by
extension both possession and domination but this repels/attracts the viewer of
the image that shows Shirin in physical possession of the image. The lover loses
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
125
identity in the throes of intoxication, a series of mediations along the scale from
iconophilia to iconclasm. Desire is even more potent as it is directed towards an
image as a substitute for the possession of the body, awareness of which defers
desire, and yet prolongs it. The lust for possessing the image of the object of
desire is insatiable, for it is continually thwarted by the absence of the body yet
continually aroused by the image’s bringing of it to mind. This is part of the
inter-repulsion, the “magic” of the image. Anti-illusionism distances desire by
inserting a coupure of sign and signified, illusionism brings them together in the
moment of desire, the interplay between attraction and repulsion is a psychic
stalemate.
Shirin’s confusion is also explained as a result of the mystical notion that it
is possible to see oneself in the eyes of the lover. The portrait of Khusrau
seduces Shirin, so that every time she brings wine to her lips, in a vain hope to
forget him, she kisses the ground in front of the painting. This clearly associates
the seduction of a painting with idolatry. She embraces the portrait (desiring an
embrace) and her handmaidens destroy the image in an attempt to break its
talismanic spell. Similar powerful effects are exerted upon the heroes Bahram
Gur and Iskandar (Alexander the Great) in other parts of Nizami’s quintet. In
other international works of literature and painting, in the Arab Thousand and
One Nights, for example, Ibrahim, the son of the wazir of Egypt is almost driven
mad by the picture of a beautiful woman. There are numerous examples of such
behaviour towards images in Western cultures.18 In such contexts, it is common
that the picture is often shown to be the product of a ritual magic and can
therefore enchant the viewer, seducing him or her, causing them to fall in love.
It also may act as a device to summon the presence of the absent one, or it is a
curse, making the viewer fall in love with the image itself, much like the fate
that befalls Narcissus.
The relationship between the image of absent sitter and the viewer of the
image is one of reproductive imagination: for it to work the viewer uses fiction
to re-describe reality, and the world. The internal image of the lover (what the
lover cherishes) is brought to mind by the fiction of the image. It is not hard to
see how this process of seduction by the image is used by Nizami
interchangeably with a lapse in faith, returning to polytheism by way of idolatry,
which is characterised as infidelity, either through acceptance of a substitute or
idol for the “real” thing, or through autoeroticism. It is interesting that the spark
that leads to the fire is the touch. The desire for contact with the art object, or
18
In Shakespeare’s Gentlemen of Verona Proteus pleads “Vouchsafe yet your picture for
my love…to that I’ll speak, to that I’ll sigh and weep;” (Act 4, scene 2, lines 117-119).
Julia’s response is very telling: “I am very loth to be your idol, sir”.
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indeed, what it portrays is a key element in Berenson’s art historical theories.19
But where, in Berenson’s world this response indicates the success of visual art,
a psychological drive to ascertain reality, here it is cast as an aberration. The
anti-illusionist image allows for the formation of an internal visualisation
(fleshed out with memory or extrapolation, for example). However, the
illusionism of academic art relies less on the viewer’s powers of imagination. It
is an integral part of the mechanism to rely on sexualising vision, almost
routinely, and to different degrees of intensity in intention and in reception. The
reverse of this impulse is guilt or fear, utilised by example by illusionist
representations of the sacred body of Christ where the invitation to touch
becomes religious revelation, the point at which the space between the Holy
Spirit and the flesh is eliminated.20
Anti-Illusionism and Sacred Space
By turning away from the projection of three-dimensional space, the antiillusionist artist creates a flatness that is not only self-evident but also closed off
from the sensus litteralis of desire. Flatness and anti-illusionism negotiate the
space of the mind, which is not a space rolled out into three-dimensions but
closed off in the interiority of the mind. The spatial interiority of the mind is
mirrored by the interiority of the flat painting, closed off from the literal,
sensuous feel of three-dimensions.21 In Arabic, Farsi and Urdu this concealment
may be compared to the batin—esoteric knowledge or seeing, which closes
itself off from “revealing form” leaving an impenetrable flatness of surface. As
the eyes withdraw from the view of the physical world, consciousness is
diverted to the images of the mind. The three-dimensional projections of
illusionism “reveal form” and open it up to sensuous revelation (this is akin to
19
See B. Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York and London,
1896).
20
The complex relationship between the concept of the incarnation and illusionism is
dealt with by Freedberg, The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of
Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 403. Christ is the vera ikon, or,
the image of the father, made incarnate as man. This explains why images have formed
such an important point in the iconoclastic debate.
21
For Hegel, painting is in itself an abstract, introspective and therefore self-reflexive art,
signified primarily by the fact that it is two dimensional: “The reduction of the three
dimensions to a plane surface is implicit in the principle of withdrawing into inwardness,
this can be interpreted in a spatial form as inwardness only by virtue of the way it does
not allow externality to remain complete but curtails it…In painting…the content is the
spiritual inner life which can be made manifest in the external world only as withdrawal
from the external world into itself.” Hegel, Aesthetik; Werke, Vol. XV, 26f. quoted in M.
Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (Camb. Mass. : Yale University Press. 1984), 20.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
127
the opposite of batin, the zahir, of exoteric seeing). In this scheme, illusionism
is the zahir or “outing” of three dimensions, and anti-illusionism the batin, the
enclosing of it into flatness. Batin and zahir are key terms used in theological
and philosophical discourses; they represent two antithetical but often
complementary ways of “seeing” and add considerably to our understanding of
anti-illusionism and illusionism with which they cooperate. Suffice it to say
here, anti-illusionism is not merely a formal vocabulary of technical devices
used to redescribe spatio-temporal phenomenology but is also intertwined with
mythology and cultural memory.
Anti-illusionism also has a place in another paradigm: in theology and
speculative philosophy. And the following is important to keep in mind in
understanding some uses of anti-illusionism in contemporary art. The wahdat
al-wujud or the “unity of existence” of the philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240)
is one of the most important intellectual traditions that dominated how Iranians
and Indians conceived of the visible world for centuries. This posits a one, true
reality originating in the divine principle. All phenomena are illusions of this
invisible, unrepresentable divinity; in other words, creation is a form of selfconstitution, whereby the divine principle creates “creation” from within itself
figuring forth the otherness of form and matter in three dimensions. Existence
intervenes in time and space, from outside of these dimensions. The unity of
existence underpinned the fundamental cognition that the visible world has no
reality in itself (much like the “world” anti-illusionism), but was a copy of the
original world of archetypes existing in the mind of the divine principle far
away from the world of mere sensual understanding. Western writers have
interpreted the wahdat al wujud as a form of pantheism. However, whereas
pantheism sees God in everything, and so everything in a sense is worshipped,
implicit in the traditions of the wahdat al wujud is that everything is an illusion
and only the invisible, divine principle truly exists.22 The concept was widely
dispersed amongst the myriad Sufi movements and poets burgeoning
22
Hegel made one of the clearest distinctions between these two modes of thought:
“Either the divine is conceived as the creative force of the world, immanent and revealed
in all phenomena. In this case, phenomena are exalted by art as revealing the immanent
divine. This gives us the art of mystical pantheism…Its essential feature is that it sees in
all phenomena of nature and mind, the indwelling and habitation of the divine. On the
other hand, the divine may be conceived as negating the world, as the supreme reality
before which all finite things flee away, perish, and are as nothing. All phenomena are
then used as testifying, by means of their own essential nothingness, to the greatness and
glory of God.” Walter T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel. A Systematic Exposition
(London: Macmillan & Co., 1924), 456.
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GREGORY MINISSALE
everywhere in India from the fifteenth century onwards.23 But even earlier in the
poetry of Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi (d.1289)24 famous in Mughal India for popularising
the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabi, we see some of the most expressive interpretations of a
tradition of the wahdat al wujud and we are provided with a clear idea of how
such a doctrine could form the basis for a whole world view, colouring
perceptions of visuality, art and the visible world:
Look closely and you will see that the painter’s fascination is with his own
canvas…each image painted on the canvas of existence is the form of the artist
himself. 25
The whole show is but one lone puppeteer hid behind his screen of art. He tears it
26
away and reveals himself alone and all illusions vanish into nothing.
It is notable that the self-realisation that the poet describes, which comes
from tearing away illusion, is clothed in the language of seeing and creating
images. The painter and the puppeteer are both meant to stand for the prime
mover. The use of metaphor in this way is predicated not merely as a poetic
device but on the basis of an ontological correspondence (the greater act of
creation setting forth a cascading hierarchy of lesser acts of creation that echo
it). Anti-illusionist art re-presents flatness as flatness, it closes itself off from
deceptive illusionist projections in order to contemplate “truth to materials” or
the reality of the moment. But note that, once the batin the secret of the
universe, the divine principle has been revealed, it is immediately transformed
into its opposite, the zahir, the revealed. Anti-illusionism turns into illusionism
when the inanimate pigment on the flat surface acquires form in the mind of the
viewer, when this cold tautness becomes anything more than what it is by virtue
of the insatiable desire for anthropomorphism. The paradox of batin and zahir,
one the principle of concealing and the other revealing, one becoming the other,
is a mirror reflection of another paradox: anti-illusionism and illusionism.
Where the physical eye detects flatness in anti-illusionism, the mind’s eye
projects the illusion of roundness of form, then the physical eye becomes blind
23
Through such figures as Muhammad Gisudaraz, (d. 1422), Anne Marie Schimmel,
Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1975), 351.
24
Even today, the words of ’Iraqi may be heard in the songs of musicians in Multan,
Pakistan. See Anne Marie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (Leiden: Brill,
1980), 33.
25
William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson, trs., Divine Flashes:Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi
(London: SPCK, 1982), 77.
26
Chittick and Lamborn, trs., Divine Flashes, 103.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
129
to this flatness, and a hyperspace of sorts is created one that has been rather
clinically exploited by the phenomenology of Op or Gestalt Art. The mind is
lost in the flux of two and three dimensions. Where the physical eye detects the
projection of roundness in illusionist art, the mind’s eye is blind to the flatness
of the surface. But still, anti-illusionism closes off from revealing three
dimensions (and reveals itself as flat and impenetrable), while illusionism opens
up to the illusion of three dimensions.
Another dominant mystical tradition that had vital links to anti-illusionism
was based on the Sanskrit Hindu Yogavasisthamaharamayana, (the Jog
Vashisht).27 This is a poetical work, which focuses on Vedantic philosophy, and
significantly, the illusoriness of the physical world. In the Jog Vashisht,
sculptures, carved reliefs, pictures and reflected images are described as a means
to indicate the true nature of reality: all other external appearances are
deceptive. Divine knowledge is described as a stone and creation and created
forms as pictures carved onto that stone, but which are, in essence, made of the
same material as that stone. This principle is active also in the philosophy of the
wahdat al-wujud. For the wahdat al-wujud there is only one true reality and one
indivisible unity of consciousness and the world. All its manifestations,
including ourselves, form an elaborate system of metaphors, or signs leading
back or pointing to the origin of creation, the divine artist. The flatness of antiillusionism shows us the “stone” from which reality is made, its material and
concrete part, it manifests and makes evident the flatness of the page or canvas
and does not seek to disguise it by projecting the deception of flesh, contours,
relief. It is “what it is” and shimmers from paint, pigment and material to image
in the blink of an eye. The image inscribed upon this flatness is none other than
this flatness, yet this self-constitutive reality mirrors the self-productive
capacities of the mind producing concepts within itself, which it uses to describe
itself. Again, alternative, local understandings of anti-illusionist art emerge
when we begin to dig deeper into the cultural specificity of abstract thought
beyond the geo-aestheticism of Euro-American explananda of anti-illusionism.
Anti-Illusionism in Contemporary Contexts
So far, we have seen that the anti-illusionist tradition in non-Western contexts
demonstrates some major departures from Euro-American conceptions. 1. Antiillusionism can encompass the qualities of a flat, shadow less and linear world
27
Perhaps because of his own personal interest in the work, the Emperor Akbar ordered a
Persian translation of this around 1597-98, and there is an illustrated copy in the Chester
Beatty Library, Dublin, with 41 illustrations dating from 1602. The work was also highly
valued generations later and was autographed by Shah Jahan and by his son Dara Shikoh
who translated many Sanskrit texts.
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GREGORY MINISSALE
and in so doing can cooperate with traditional myths about apotropaic efficacy.
2. The interplay of anti-illusionism and illusionism is comparable to the contrast
of batin and zahir respectively, esoteric, hidden knowledge contrasted with the
belief in external appearances. 3. Anti-illusionism presages self-reflexivity,
where the mind becomes aware of its own envisioning, and engages a distancing
effect or ecstasis from the sensus litteralis.28 4. Anti-illusionism appears as a
powerful presence in transcendent philosophies. It is with this background of 14 in mind, not with the formalist preconceptions of modernist anti-illusionism,
that we are able to approach the work of contemporary anti-illusionist painters
who use anti-illusionism for a complex diversity of messages.
Nahid Raza
Beyond the perennial Euro-American and somewhat self-indulgent claim that
painting is dead, it is enlightening to see how painting can in fact, bring residues
of cultural memory to the surface in the reverie of execution, tapping traditions
of the dreamworld of mythopoetry. Nahid Raza’s work is often simple and flat,
a few elements reduced to rudimentary relationships, yet they possess the
haunting allure of a trancelike withdrawal from the fatuous and easy illusionism
of academic art. Anti-illusionist face, hand, sun, moon are used in different
configurations to achieve an iconological power, the flatness of these notations
follows the trace of an apotropaic tradition but without the artificial invocation
of an archaising symbolism of say, Adolph Gottlieb’s early pictographic abstract
paintings. In I am not a watermelon Fig.7.1, a woman appears to sit, eyes closed
in a window frame or more intriguingly, in front of a mirror with a watermelon
in her lap, hand held up, hailing the viewer (who may be the subject herself).
The posture reminds one of the padmasana or lotus position in meditation, the
hand held in such a way as to be redolent of the Buddhist hand gesture (mudra)
of Abhaya, denoting the appeal to fearlessness, although this is usually with the
right hand. Yet, if this image is a mirror reflection (it is undoubtedly a selfportrait), then this call for fearlessness is addressed to the artist, as well as to the
viewer. However, the hand held up in this manner is powerfully polysemic in
other ways: it is the open hand of artifice, of labour, and of self-reflection, fixed
to the anonymity of black almost like a handprint; it reasserts the flat frontality
of the picture surface. It is a transcultural gesture of hailing strangers to disarm
them with a show that one has nothing to hide, and we have discussed how it is
used as a talismanic charm in connection with repellence against the penetrative
evil eye, but it also signifies blamelessness, the open palm holds nothing, it is an
“open sign” a self-reflective symbol, as many talismans are. Another example in
28
See Minissale, Images of Thought, 200-253.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
131
this vein is drawing the eye against the evil eye, or forms of witchcraft that use
symbols of parts of the body to affect corresponding parts of the body.
In more violent scenarios, the flat, open hand signals a plea for mercy, for
cessation of violence, and yet is also the sign of unspeakable terror. It is this
ambiguity between active repellent or protest and passive sign of capitulation
and victimisation that underpins the equivocal portrait by Marcus Harvey of
Moors child murderer Moira Hyndley Myra (1995) is formed from white, grey
and black stenciled handprints of children. The anti-illusionist talismanic
repellent and its ambivalent power are evident here, also, so far away in time
and place.
The open palm with a red circular disc extends the polysemy of the open
hand to include woman-as-bride (red henna is placed on the hand in the
marriage ceremony), the link to the red of the melon is that she is exploited and
plundered, like the fruit, and left as a husk after she has been used. This is also,
however, a bloody hand, the hand of vengeance, or the hand of a victim, and one
is strongly led to the conclusion also, that the artist has dared to broach the
unspeakable in traditional in Islamic, Iranian and Indian subcontinental cultures:
here arises the unavoidable interpretation of menstrual blood, associated with
the redness of the melon. The crescent moon of the melon’s husk turned up,
activates associations with the menstrual cycle (another frequently used symbol
in the artist’s work). This strong association acts as a counterbalance to the red
(setting) sun of the West, placed over the head of the subject like a bindi or
ritual spot. The flat surface of Nahid’s painting is often pierced in this way by
the inter-repulsion of a psycho-sexual third eye/bindi of Indian tradition. The
bindi or coloured spot on the forehead, here externalised from the picture space
in the margin as a thought in the realms of the imagination (alam-i mithal),
represents the head chakra, which prevents the loss of "energy", as well as
providing spiritual protection against the evil eye, it also has inter-repellent
values and reminds a woman of her marriage vows.
The red orb of the sun, which appears to be reflected in the open palm of the
hand on the right, is at the zenith of the image, and the melon pointed up is at
the nadir, together they reinforce in a triangular cyclical movement (enforced by
the reduction of colours to the simple triadic red, black and white).29 The
mythological chain often signified by theorists such as Mircea Eliade here is
blood, sacrifice, the colour white (the shroud), sun, moon, pearls (note her
earrings), which so often in many cultures are tied in as symbols for the cyclical
moon and its relationship with the sea and with the female principle, hidden in a
29
There may well be a reference to modernism here also: one is also reminded to the
upturned melon that features so prominently in the iconic Demoiselles d’Avignon by
Picasso (1907). I thank Celina Jeffery for pointing this out. The equivocal title, I am not
a watermelon, both denies the metaphorical power of the melon and engages with it.
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GREGORY MINISSALE
shell in the sea, but open also, as the moon is hidden by its waxing and waning.
The artist has added to this archetypal visual and dynamic mythology, however,
the discourse of anti-illusionism. The anti-illusionist flatness of the hand is a
sign in itself, but making it an illusionist hand (a sleight of hand) would have
risked obscuring the various levels of meaning it conducts. The hand is
strangely detached with an iconic power; the woman’s arms by her side make
her appear to be imprisoned in a cycle or network of symbols and their
interrelations. Add to this, the framing devices of outside/in and inside/out, a
principle of margin construction of centre and periphery used in Mughal and
Persian art, we have the re-presentation of the painting as a painting, the sign as
sign. With the joined eyebrows of fourteenth and fifteenth century Iranian
Timurid art (referred to in poetry as crescent moons), the closed eyes visualise
that which is outside of frame: Woman sees beyond the visible world to esoteric
wisdom within. This kind of eye is known as the chashm-i barzakh, which
allows her to see into the mythological world that is represented (externalised)
as her vision. The painting is a dream, or a mystical vision (and a vision of
someone having a vision). Her closed eyes look inward to esoteric wisdom
(batin) and away from outward appearances (zahir) and explanations. The flat
hand hails the threshold of mythopoetry by pushing back the prosaic gravity of
illusionism. Anti-illusionist painting, mystical vision, mythology, praxis and
personal testament are bound into a visual experience that demands significant
adjustments in ways of seeing and ways of not seeing. This is part of the
mobility of the painting.
The Post-Miniaturists
Does the short history of anti-illusionism that I have sketched here allow us to
attempt readings of other contemporary artists’ works? One could cite a number
of Pakistani artists in the twentieth century who have engaged in important and
lasting dialogues with the miniature tradition, Nahid Raza is one of them but
there is also Zahoor-ul Akhlaque, Tassaduq Sohail, A. R. Nagori, Najmi Sura
and many others. More recently, a number of diaspora artists, or artists
otherwise linked to Pakistan, India and Iran have exhibited in the UK and the
US and have continued this tradition30 often expressing their resistance to
nationalist or cultural reductionism by embracing hybridity and postmodern
ambiguity in their works. I have grouped them together here under the term
30
The following is an analysis of two exhibitions on in 2006 at the MOMA show,
Without Boundary—Seventeen Ways of Looking, and Beyond the Page, Contemporary
Art from Pakistan at Asia House and the Manchester Art Gallery, 2006. Many of these
artists were educated in the fine arts department, National College of Arts, Lahore.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
133
‘post-miniaturists’ because it seems to me that, for the time being, they have a
common pool of references to miniature art but their work is beyond: more than
miniature art. They are not a group, as such, yet they sometimes appear to share
affinities even in the wide diversity of mediums and styles their individual
responses take them, which are very much rooted in the contemporary. From
individual perspectives they balance the global and the local in their work,
trying to question tradition, ethnicity, identity and the nature of representation.
Raqib Shaw’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (2003) is virtually impossible to
reproduce without traducing the work badly, such is the fine detail involved in
the work.31 It joins several visual traditions and concepts in a remarkable vision
of space. The brilliant shadowless palette is an ingenious reappropriation from
the well-known sixteenth century Shah Tahmasp Shahnama (the so-called
Houghton Shahnama many pages of which are housed in Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York). Within a spectacular marine world that morphs into a lush
jungle from one of Rousseau’s works are nested monstrously composite animals
with hypnotic symmetries that seem to stretch and change the more one looks at
them and the more they devour each other. This is a whimsical use, perhaps, of
the theme of hybridity but taken to fantastic extremes. Raqib Shaw has
practically produced what many art historians have thought for years, that there
are varied routes to the horror vacui and many kinds of South Asian miniature
art shares much with art of Hieronymous Bosch and Acimboldo. But lumping
these superficially similar visual aspects together is a form of Orientalism that
sees the Other as teeming wildness and lack of rationality.32 Like these
examples, Raqib Shaw’s work seems to possess the virulent energy of the world
under a microscope. Here also is a glimpse of nanotechnology and microbes
with fractile edges, a micro-universe that mirrors the explosive constellations of
the uncharted heavens.
Animal and plant kingdoms collide with satellites and hybrid stars. Antiillusionism here takes the traditional miniature and explodes it into thousands of
fragments of fantasy. Batin and zahir are continually giving birth to each other
in this frenetic work. The huge expanse intimates the agoraphobia of creation,
the revealed, incalculable vastness of life, and then there is the devil in the
detail. Space explodes and implodes, yet all is wrought with the strict discipline
of anti-illusionism. The work is fascinatingly everywhere and nowhere, a nonplace, strangely reflective of the non-space of his work, a play on chaos and
symmetry, wild abandon and miniature control, cycles within cycles of
31
The work is online at the Victoria Miro Gallery website at http://www.victoriamiro.com/artists/26,biog/ accessed 16/12/2006.
32
For a development of this point, see Gregory Minissale, ‘An Introduction to
Representations of the Horror Vacui’ Drain, A Journal of Contemporary Art and
Culture, http://www.drainmag.com/ Horror Vacui Issue (No. 8, Apr. 2007).
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GREGORY MINISSALE
ferocious animal fecundity and death. Yet behind the illusion of an authorless
universe of pulsating rhythms and chaos is evidence of the mind describing
itself, the mind that produces everything in an intelligible system of relations in
this immeasurable plenitude. There is something both sacred and profane about
the work, the obsessive ritual of detail and labour, evidence of mind over matter,
yet it appears as a vision also of the infinitude of matter. Moreover, the vastness
of this created universe is all anti-illusionist, the wahdat al wujud is given a full
range of extensions with references to microcosmic and macrocosmic existence
but all is an illusion behind which the artist’s mind is active.
This may also be said of the untamed and surreal work of Shazia Sikander
(Pleasure Pillars, 2001) where elements of miniature art extend into animal
dreamscapes.33 The artist is well known for intuitively engaging with the
structures of the miniature tradition as places to inhabit personal cultural
memory, with a myriad references to art history. Fleshy Weapons, 1997, has the
trompe l’oeuil foregrounding of Dali and the vast desert backdrops for which he
was famous, but there is also the interplay of shiny surfaces and matt finishes of
James Rosenquist’s more abstract works, The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed
of Light, 2000, which also, incidentally, references a swirling horror vacui of its
own. Yet these are only references among many others in her work and the
overall aim seems to be to address flux, concepts of becoming, shift and change
in the world. In an artist’s statement, Sikander writes:
I am interested in issues that relate to the hybridity of the human experience.
Identity is fluid, always in flux, and meaning constantly being reconstructed.
[…]My work is both on paper and drawn directly on architectural surfaces. The
shift in scale, from the miniatures to the murals also breaks the preciousness of
the small paintings rendering the wall works confrontational and ephemeral. The
dichotomy of both the experiences allows me to explore and push the boundaries
of drawing resulting in the 'in-between' zone where issues about space and time
are also constantly redefined. Boundaries are blurred and the minimal abstract
nature of a Muslim aesthetic is contrasted with the expressionistic, sensual, sexual
elements of Indian painting. Such juxtapositioning and mixing of Hindu and
Muslim iconography is a parallel to the entanglement of histories of India and
Pakistan especially in how history simplifies the visual in terms of both—a
visuality that I feel does not lend itself to simplistic dissection and separation.34
In this way, the artist’s composition, techniques of juxtaposing images and
different media from diverse cultural traditions, and the restlessness of her antiillusionism are all factors that have their origins in, and yet at the same time
instantiate and represent, processes of nomadism, hybridity, polysemy and
33
See her work at www.ShahziaSikander.com accessed, 16/12/2006.
http://www.visualarts.qld.gov.au/apt3/artists/artist accessed, 26/02/2007.
34
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
135
change
in
identities
and
relationships. Not only are we
dealing here with discrete images,
or fragments of them, but also the
ways and means of disposing them
in relationships to each other that
constitute the flux and motion of
identity and cultural memory of
which she speaks. The exuberance
of both Shazia Sikander and Raqib
Shaw’s work finds a synergy in the
art of Nusrat Latif Qureishi who
also graduated from the National
College of Arts, Lahore. While
motifs are taken from Indian and
Persian miniature art, they appear
suspended in non-place where
geographical
specificity
and
orientation are removed. Isolated
motifs, cropped and isolated body
parts from Mughal and Safavid art
are overwritten by scrolling
arabesques from other media.
Another artist who is part of this
7.2 Aisha Khalid, One Point Perspective
reignited, interest in classical anti2001, mixed media on wasli 24.5x18cm.
illusionism is Aisha Khalid. One
Courtesy Corvi-Mora
Point Perspective (2001), Fig. 7.2
exemplifies the tension that exists between iconophilia and iconophobia
attempts to elide both. The play on words here is on “perspective” for the
painting gives us many opportunities to formulate divergent viewpoints and
meanings. On the literal level, the painting presents an image of a figure
standing in the corner of a room wearing a burqua, a veil that young second or
third generation British-Pakistani women in London insouciantly refer to as the
“Darth Vader outfit”. Many of these full-face veils have grilles embroidered into
geometrical shapes through which women can view the outside world. These
echo the geometrical grilles, called jali-work, pierced marble or sandstone
screens that separate male from female quarters in Mughal palaces and in
mosques, allowing women to view and not be viewed. Aisha Khalid inverts this
binary of the viewer and the viewed by presenting her image through the
intricate geometric tessellations of an embroidered veil, and so the viewer’s
perspective is reversed, he/she is put behind the veil in order to see the world as
136
GREGORY MINISSALE
the woman in the burqua sees it (this is comparable to the mechanism in
Velasquez’s Las Meninas where the viewer appears to take the position of a
fictive other who views, or addresses the painting). One Point Perspective
shows us the world seen through the eyes of the veil, looking at a woman in a
veil in the corner of a room.
Peering through the perspective of the veil transforms the viewer’s
awareness; it creates a disassociation of surface qualities and literal image
presented as a three dimensional space (a figure in the corner of a room). Like
pointillisme or mosaic, the mind shifts from atomised focal points (“the flat
surface”) to reassembling the image. Yet this disassociation is also a shared
space, the shared gaze, the elastic space of desire that allows for a cycle of
projection and return, where figurative art dissolves into abstract art only to reemerge, and where tradition and modernity occupy the same space. The use of
the veil as a pictorial construct is also an intertexual reference to the poetic and
theological metaphor of the veil as something that divides outer truth (the
literal—zahir) from inner truth (reality behind appearances—batin). When one
can see through the veil (and be aware of the lace pattern of the veil itself) one
experiences the blurring of another binary: the freedom of projection beyond the
veil and one’s imprisonment in the phenomenal world, here and there, external
and internal joined in a continuum. Also revealed and concealed is the idea of
the body and the idea of embodied desire, the desired and desiring body, all
mediated by the interplay of illusionism and anti-illusionism.
Aisha Khalid inverts the false binary, modernist flatness/traditionalist veil,
so that we have modernist veil and traditionalist flatness. Modernism’s search
for multiple perspectives in the revealed moment is a replay of an ancient
mythos. The process of the concealed-becoming-revealed challenges several
binaries two levels: intellectual (modernism/traditionalism, literal/abstract;
illusionism non-illusionism, concealed space); spiritual (here/there,
sacred/profane, transcendent/immanent) and collapses these levels into
polysemic flatness. Gazing through the veil allows for both series of binaries to
be seen at the same time, effectively cancelling them out. The ability to ‘think
beyond the veil’ by combining insider and outsider experiences, crossing out
binaries, is a superposition where one can experience the overlapping of
cultures, temporal perspectives and “double-exposures”; to be in two places at
the same time, to be (t)here in the politics and experience of diaspora. Aisha
Khalid’s picture is a veil that opens and closes binaries; it is itself a layering of
polysemic transparences energised by a vital resistance to fixity. Yet
importantly, on a literal but no less powerful level, the emergent identity, the
body of a woman is lost in the cross-politics of high theory.
The veil is both transparent from the inside and inscrutable from without.
One succumbs to the rhythm of paradoxes where revealing and concealing,
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
137
distance and nearness, public and private, exterior and interior, sacred and
profane, “East” and “West”, global and local, modernism and traditionalism all
appear as shimmering avatars of the same image. The global and local aspects
of this painting not only merge, they enter upon another plane, into a fourth
dimension where flatness and depth merge, one seen through the other. Here,
both are traceable and obliterated in a process of destruction and renewal. The
elision of binaries symbolised by the morphing of flatness with modelling, and
their respective “appendages” illusionism with anti-illusionism, traditionalism
and modernity, et. al, are tied in with other issues such as feminism, censorship
and sexual identity. The image reaches back to the discourse of batin and zahir,
it is strategically poised in the discourses of desire, and in its play between
illusion and anti-illusion allows for considerations of the wahdat al-wujud, the
unity of existence that posits the visible world both external and internal to the
veil, as an illusory binary. The surface is not a skin but a flat inanimate field of
territorializing geometric patterns, a screen through which emerges the batin of
a painted veil, a veil of paint, a painting veiled, drawn across it. In Khalid’s
complex work, we ponder illusions of illusions in the waxing and waning of the
batin.
Continuing with this intensity is Rashid Rana’s Veil I-III, 2004, Fig.7.3,
which is at first glance a triptych of burqua-clad figure; we see only a close up
of the geometrically patterned lace that covers the eyes. Closer up, the image
fragments into a mosaic of digital images taken from the Internet, each of these
is to varying degrees pornographic. A computer programme considerably aids
Rashid Rana in the construction of his images, which give the illusion of collage
but are in fact the manipulation of computer subroutines automatically selecting
minute images to make up a larger pre-selected one. Rashid Rana’s skill is
entirely in the selection, not execution of the image; and this is a serious
departure from any previous traditional artistic modus operandi. There are
issues here to do with intellectual property and automatism in their encounter
with the creative imagination of the artist. The image is not only a reference to
the almost viral and anonymous duplication of visual images found on the
Internet but the recursive algorhythms35 used to form the image mimicking the
pixel technology that lies at the substructural level, where constituent parts are
seen making larger patterns. As Raqib Shaw’s tadpole plenitude, the vastness of
Rana Rashid’s universe of digital images that constitute the image of the veiled
woman menaces the frail optimism of individual identity, even the viewer’s,
whose gaze is fragmented into the pictures of a thousand lives. The relationship
to the wahdat al-wujud is the substructural reality that underpins the illusion of
35
Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in
which the function being defined may be used within its own definition. The term is also
used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way.
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the image of a veiled woman. Yet even these pixels, the stuff of which “reality”
is projected are also illusions. As images based on the invisible substructure of
7.3 (Above) Rana Rashid, Veil I (of three), 2004, digital print. The image below is a
magnified view of the pornographic images that make up Veil I. Courtesy the artist and
Green Cardamom.
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139
pixels, they conceal with illusions the unfolding within itself of the same
material of which they are made: the veil is an illusion made up of a number of
smaller illusions. Echoes of the wahdat al-wujud that all is an illusion, resound
in the heterotopia of the image, in the constant deferral of identity.
Modern technology is used here to constitute an icon of some Islamic
traditions, the veil, and the countless dehumanised images taken from
innumerable contexts (constituting another non-place) small images that make
up “an identity”—which is not there, and both pornography and the veil are
shockingly juxtaposed as iconic, polar opposites of East and West, sacred and
profane that feed off each other and reinforce each other’s fear of each other.
This gains strength from the fact that the veil cannot satisfactorily be reduced to
the outward sign of victimisation or religious piety, for it is in constant
negotiation as a polyvalent sign whose meaning depends on contexts, not
absolute values; it denotes a nexus of social relations and nuanced mediations.
Yet there is also a powerful inter-repulsion of visualities here, conflicting
worlds sustained by the new talisman of the digital age: the pixel.36
The underlying continuum (that both images are computer generated)
suggests that they are both made of the same substance, a method of
construction that lies at the root of these binary opposites but unites them at the
substructural level: both cooperate in their own distinct ways to obliterate the
identity of women or identity itself. The trinity of Veil I-III on the level of the
surface and also in the contours (or Deleuzian folds) of the illusionist image
both trap woman in the mother-whore complex, allowing no other plane of
existence. At a crude level, the equation of woman, veil and reproduction of
sexual imagery reduces all to anonymity, the veiled body, hidden, made private
further dissolved into the surface pattern, the sex acts that form the “body” of
the work are sometimes cropped of arms, limbs, faces, made public yet still,
they remain without identity. Pornography here is seen as a paradoxical
exteriorisation (or interiorisation) of the veil, but in both cases, individual
identities are lost in the retracing of desire. Pornography is a woman’s veil
viewed from the outside, or a woman’s imagination viewed from within the veil,
from the point of view of the wearer. Which side are we on? The public view of
the veil, the private views of coitus are reversed in the work of art, this is at least
the overt (zahir) interpretation, for a considerable literature has developed about
the unsaid and ambivalent iconography of the veil, in crass Orientalist paintings
and media images, the veiled figure becomes an exoticised fetish, the more it
36
The official US Army camouflage combat suit for the Gulf War is pixelated, I believe
that this is a form of image manipulation, supposed to signify technological futurism, yet
it also manages to bring to mind the idea of a degraded image, that all we see is an
illusion, a virtual reality scenario behind which there is authority and control.
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GREGORY MINISSALE
hides the more potent its sexual promise appears. Also to be considered is the
enigma of sexual desire behind the veil: the covert sexual desire it conceals from
view, yet hiding the eyes allows for the freedom of viewing without being
viewed doing so.
There are also a great many ambivalent readings. It is not clear at all that the
wearer of the veil is supposed to be made of these pornographic images because
s/he is experiencing them in the mind’s eye or whether they are projected onto
her by the mind of the viewer. And this adds considerably to the potential for
interactive experience with the image and the interaction between overt (zahir)
and covert (batin) interpretations. The viewer is charged by the power that flows
from the encounter between illusionism and anti-illusionism to cover or reveal,
denude or restore. When the viewer approaches the image of the veil he or she
unveils the illusionism of the folds of the veil to see the anti-illusionism of how
the image is made, of smaller pornographic images, desire reveals desire, the
impression is that by lifting this veil one undresses the figure to reveal other
layers of reality that fragment desire into a thousand shards. Moving forward
undresses, and moving backwards redresses the elusive identity (with the optical
mixture resetting the image), and in modernist discourse this is expressed as the
unveiling of illusionism by anti-illusionism, or by revelation of how the image is
made. Again, the veil of desire is held between illusionism and anti-illusionism.
There are various ways of surpassing the veiling and unveiling binary,
however, by holding both in suspense. In this scenario, the figure is neither
revealed nor covered, instead, the image can be read as a tower block of
windows, a city of lights, thousands of computer screens through which we see
many moments of life, each a flicker of life, all built up into a cloak of eyes, the
image of the veiled one, a hidden bride-god in whose vast and incomprehensible
train is encrusted everything: sacred, profane, light and pixel, moment and sigh
in every phenomenal fold of existence and as anonymous as the total sum of
images and words on the Web. Art in the age of digital reproduction is where
the single moment is parodied by the conveyer belt automatism or
(in)authenticity of the images and their non-place, and also in the obsessive
desire of their assemblage, which implies a manic and bludgeoned psyche,
doomed to repetitive infinity, a sexual vertigo of sorts.
In One-point Perspective and in Veil I-III the observer who turns his or her
gaze upon the veiled figure (and in the latter is forced to become the voyeur of
pornography as a fait accompli) is in turn, viewed by the figure behind the veil.
This brings into play the sexualised gaze aimed at the veil, through the veil, yet
turned in upon itself. The penetration of the veil cooperates with the penetration
of the gaze and this cooperates with the modernist formalist discourse, where
surfaces and planes are stripped bare of volume, or where the latter appears to
resurface, this is none other that the interplay of illusionism and anti-illusionism.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANTI-ILLUSIONISM
141
In both cases, viewpoints are made relative, instead of subordinate to a fabled
absolute, one-point perspective. These relative viewpoints shatter the viewer’s
singular vantage point and allow him or her to assume various, fleeting viewing
perspectives (and concomitant interpretations). Ultimately, one begins critically
and self-reflexively to analyse the viewing process itself. Focus on the details
and one sees the modern world of pixels and the Web, step back and an icon of
Islamic traditionalism comes into view, one can see the woman as sacred mother
or sexual animal, they are both aspects of an identity, and this image not only
allows us to reflect upon our own will to interpretation but the relativity of our
own globalising, subjective worldview.
Anti-illusionism is a form of nomadism. All the work I have mentioned
here, even that dating from the sixteenth century with which I began, engages
the viewer in a continual adjustment of focus, where one world comes into view
through another. Anti-illusionism goes beyond the territorialization of formalist
discourse to a polysemy that is both kinetic in it optical effects and multivalent
in meaning. One might even venture so far as to say that the former is a
representation of the latter. The superposition of anti-illusionism, where spatial
and ideological binaries meet and dissolve is also, (t)here, where the global
worldview is seen through a local lens, and turned back upon itself, shattering
the illusion of the singular eye ray seeking truth, into a network of relative
perspectivisms, in the relations and contexts of things, not in frozen vantage
points.
Our minds are most creative and subtle when we share in the widest possible
diversity of psychological and cultural forms and viewpoints. The global
“background” is the plane upon which we fold our localised selves, yet, lest we
forget our lessons from anti-illusionism, this foreground and background
relationship is far from a settled resolution.