Biancamaria Scarcia Site Talk Transcript
Think, say, produce images: the partial point of view of an Islamist.
This is a transcript of the talk Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti gave on the 19th of November 2007 at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venice. The talk was one of six 'off-site' presentations with invited collaborators that formed part of Christian Capurro's "Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette" project in "Think with the Senses-Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense" at the 52. International Art Exhibition - Venice Biennale.
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Certainly it is very unusual that one who tries to study Islam over many years wants to interact with an artist like Christian Capurro, whose creations break out of a mould.
Two preliminary remarks. The first: probably, what I am going to say is not what everyone could be expecting when talking about Islam. The fact that Islam, as the saying goes, would not love figures, would not love images, would not be iconic is a prejudice, a commonplace, whereas there is an extremely rich literature on the fact of how Islam had produced representational art. Therefore, the aspect I would like to focus on is not this one, and the only thing that is maybe worth saying is that it is true that Muslim places of worship must not have images. The second: how I met Christian Capurro and why I got interested in his work. He wrote to me after reading a very short article of mine on the 'unseen/unvisible' in Islam, published in an English-Italian art review. I was surprised that I did not know a little more about the work he was going to show at Venice Biennale.
I was immediately puzzled by the way the author called his work: Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette. Etienne de Silhouette, as an historical person, meant little to me. I had to look up in the Encyclopedia and, then, I knew he was a French minister of the seventeenth century, interested in portraits/silhouettes. The word "Silhouette" struck me. Why an Islamist can be struck by the word "silhouette"? This word is very evocative for one who deals with the Orient in general, and with the Muslim Orient, in particular. Some examples. All the representations of a woman in the Islamic culture, especially the ones provided by the mass-media, are silhouettes. They are veiled; what represents them is not their body; it is a sort of a trait that should allude to something, something that may have to do with gender, but that remains quite undetermined. Then, more important, the word 'silhouette' evokes stereotypes, and mostly of what is called 'orientalism', particularly in the field of arts, is based on stereotypes. Think of Ravel's Shahrazad or of a great number of vanguard painters who, in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, had the "Orient" as the main subject of their works. 'Oriental' men or women were depicted as silhouettes. The dervish or the dancer were figures, drawn lines; one could be distinguished by the other only for some small details, such as the colour of their dress, white for the dervish, often bright gold for the dancer. The gender, when emphasized, had mostly a depreciative meaning, like in the case of prostitutes. My first reason of interest was generally professional.
Then, I read about the origins of Capurro's work, and I was stimulated in a more precise direction: is there something peculiar to Islam in "thinking, saying and producing images"? All the preparatory work he did was a way to "think images". In his presentation he quotes one of the magazine eraser's phrase that says: "I arrived to a point when more I worked on my page, more this became like the one of an ordinary man". In my view he was saying that the distinction, the distinctiveness, the individuality of a product became less perceptible the more one focused on it. Islam could present an extraordinary theoretical paradigm.
In Islam, God did not create man to his image and resemblance, but man and nature were in the mind of God before time. Near God there is a table that is seemingly empty, seemingly smooth, while on this table holds the imprint of His creation.
In our culture where God creates man to his image and resemblance, the man has the possibility of relationship, of reference, of self-reference. Man can think of himself and he can see the other. In Islam instead, to some extent at least, the relationship takes place in a pattern, needs a trace, and is not three-dimensional. Consequently, the whole Muslim artistic visual output does not recognize three-dimensionality: We can, of course, refer to a previous Byzantine tradition, but, if so, the issue is conceptually different.
The challenge of the artist consists in putting together his perception of God's idea of what he wants to represent: a man, a horse, a rose, a nightingale and the image that he will produce of man, horse, rose. God's ideas are universal while every man, every horse, every rose is a punctual result of God's creation. God, in Islam, creates atomically, not once forever, and, of course, consequently, the creative action is exclusively divine. The artist cannot imitate God as a creator. So he will try to produce the prototype of a man, of a horse, of a rose. The prototype includes all the elements that make the image comprehensible and recognizable by those who look at it: the representation is purposely generic, even though the artist had in mind that man, that horse, that rose. The Islamic miniatures which illustrate a text are very coherent with such an approach. If you think of a miniature, you realize that not only is there is no three-dimensionality, there is no perspective, but that apparently every 'portrait' is always the same. That is, the horse is always made the same way; the warrior can be recognized by a number of common elements; the tree is that certain thing. Every image reproduces a model, is a prototype. There are details, but only for an exercised eye like the eye of another artist. Common people will see in that image what the text says, and only through the text the prototype will represent that king, that tree, that warrior. There is another way to explain such a procedure. The reality is not only what you can touch, see, and feel through the five senses. The dream, in Islam, has its own reality, sometimes more real than the physical one. Dreams are positive. They represent the intermediary world between earth and what is beyond it. In a sense, the prototype alludes to the kind of dream's concreteness. To us 'prototype' sounds negative - not in Islamic culture. It has in itself all the potentialities of a symbol, and in the same time all the qualities of reality.
In Islam, words produce images, especially when the words become material through the voice. God hears more than sees, and the Koran is above all a reciting: word said to someone who hears it. It becomes a book, but a book that first must be recited with a loud voice, heard and transmitted through hearing, and only afterwards can it be read with the eyes. Images take shape through words which must be pronounced. God, when He talks about himself, makes use of images embodied in pronounced words:
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! God doth guide whom He will to His Light: God doth set forth Parables for men: and God doth know all things. (XXIV, 35)
There is no need to explain the quite evident symbolic meaning of every word of the verse. Significantly, God is light, the element par excellence that at the time was conceived as both visibile and immaterial. Nature, or, to be precise, all what is not human has an important presence in the Koran. The text insists that God wanted the world to be beautiful. Beauty is essential; God himself is beauty; better, is the Beauty. Words can represent it. The essence of beauty, as in the minatures, is told by a fixed range of images, which are expessed by words. We face again a prototype. The fact that it is a literary one does not change the core of the result. Take the following lines of a poem in which the author, the poet al-Khwarizmi who lived in the XIV century in what is now Turkey, describes his beloved:
Thou are a slender tree.
Thy face - the face of the moon.
The rose dazzles in thy presence, thou, fleet spring shoot.
When I kiss someone, I kiss the memories of thee.
Thou have a pearl in the ear.
It is Venus that confides in the Sun.
Under thy curls - a face that seems a young anxious bird
That went astray into the claws of a hawk.
As in the miniatures, details, if discovered, can give us information on him or his cultural context. But the main purpose is to present, to who hears his verse, the prototype of beauty in such a way that the object of his love can be the Beauty. The elements/words used to describe the beloved/God are taken from the other two worlds: the animal world and the plant and mineral world. We have the rose, the tree, the shoot. Then we have the pearl, that refers to Venus, to the star, the sun, the bird, the hawk. All of them are assumed as the objective standardized representation of the entire category they belong to. To avoid trivialized traits is essential. In fact, the human body is not really described, but this becomes the highest way to represent the human. Just to give a very commonplace example, on the one hand when a traditional Muslim talks about his wife, even the name is too intimate: she will be in his speech 'Madam' or 'the family'. On the other, the scripture is not only one of the most cultivated Muslim visual arts, but also the most noble one. Traits, words and beauty are intertwined in order to veil the flash that even images, however prototypical, can, somehow, suggest.
But let us go back to Capurro's art.
From the perspective of my domain, Islam, which is the worthiness of the body? What is the body? Does it represent anything by itself, does it have any value of its own or is it a go-between of something else? Islam has made an attempt to put together the two things: the body as the expression of the soul and the body as a value on its own. When we talk about the body as a value on its own, we see its worthiness in the way God presents himself as the Creator. The Koranic God creates atomically, meaning he did not create once and for all, he continues creating. The Koranic God is particularly interested in the female body, in its potential to recreate. The intervention of God into the uterus of the woman is conscious, announced, said, explained. In this case, the body, as it is, is positive. Still, how come Islam covers the bodies? When we talk about the veil, that is excellent as a form of silhouette, the fact that it touched only women is absurd. The nude does not belong to the Muslim world. Men did not imitate the Western fashion and kept their fashion; they were as covered as women are today. The headwear, all sorts of turbans, the Mullas that you see wearing priest clothes, in fact was the usual Muslim outfit in the past. So why all this negation of the body? The body is positive; meanwhile in our culture it is always flogged. One should not have had a body. A great part of the poetry I read to you before could easily be interpreted mystically, where the body of the beloved teenager that is described that way can be the closest way to describe God. And this reasoning is always valid. Why all this contradiction that makes us come back to what was said before, the body which is so appreciated is, at the same time, so denied? Note well that even in the representations of animals and all living things, like tress for example, if we go back to the stereotypical matter, the human is somehow hidden, veiled. It is true that the body is merely a container, a passage for the soul, and in this we once more have the mediation of saying.
Consequently, to produce images, images of the human body, can be conceived, today and in the past, otherwise. The alternative that the classic Muslim culture suggests is based on this paradox: to deny or to avoid the image of the body is a way to exhalt it. In an Islamic religious context it means that every single body, since created by God, has a value of its own, not only as a 'dwelling' of the soul. This is why the body must be protected in its physical concreteness.
I could suggest such a view as a good key to understand Muslim's behaviours if such behaviours were not ourdays strongly manipulated and adulterated. We have to find in the same betrayal of their own culture the reason for the fact that was not the Muslim world, as coherently as it could be, the cradle of some expressions of 'modern art'? With my question I intend simply to stress the fact that Capurro's work must be particularly meaningful if it was stimulating for somebody like me in my professional field.
Before I finish, another thought: what is the maximum expression of image? I am about to say a very daring thing that maybe our author will not accept, but I think that somehow this expression lies in an empty page, that is, rather, the fruit, if I may say so. It is that programming moment when the programs are cleaned up to make space for another scripture. This fact of emptiness gives you another possibility, that the expressive way often passes through the image in the mirror, because the mirror can be interpreted as that empty page, that can receive a lot of images - each of them moving aside and making space for other images -, thus, working as a symbol and as an instrument, just like the programming remark I made.
I am convinced of the fact that Islam played a major role in promoting modern culture, which is proved by this idea of a different but extremely multifunctional possibility to imagine an image, to think an image, to say an image and, thus, to produce it in absolutely different forms; and not only through the idea of a body that is realistically intended only as an imitation of nature instead of recreating and resuggesting it. That is why I consider the artistic idea as the main point and I am particularly grateful that it was an artist who felt this tuning in the couple of lines I wrote about the invisible in Islam. I would like to thank him for this.
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In response to a question from the audience (not recorded):
I guess I have already answered this question somehow, but it seems fair to me to insist on this matter again. If the body is made by God, from a certain point of view - and this is only a banal explanation - remaking the body means starting to compete with God. But this is indeed a banal explanation, the one that you will hear from an Islamist who will say today: "I can't do it". In fact, this is what the theoretical Muslim elaborations say on beauty, on the body, on nature, and all the other related things. I have based my explanations on the Koran, because only relative to the Koran it is possible to measure whether one is inside or outside the Islamic conception. I think this happens mainly because the body is a lot more expressive - too expressive to be expressed. One of the things that Capurro was questioning himself was how much the image can say about itself. Seeing his works is very complex. Somehow, they are not easy to seize: just like what I am trying to tell you. It is not easy to transmit it in this immediate manner, it requires a reflection.
Which is the body that really expresses the self in the most modern and complete meaning of the term? It is not merely that thing we used to call "the Soul", and mainly because the soul is not quite the functional word for our mentality at this moment. So, which is the body that expresses its individuality, that expresses the individual? The body itself cannot do this. For instance, I could feel inside of me, in my feeling myself that I may not correspond to myself completely. My photograph very often disappoints me; I don't always recognize myself in it. Considering this - I am mentioning again the turnover of the mentality that normally is characteristic to Muslims - the silhouette is better than denying, than mystifying, a real individuality. The beauty, in fact, is never said: one has to have a Greek nose, or, like in India, the most beautiful foot is the one that has the second toe longer than the other toes. That is a canon. Because the body wanted by God is like this and must have an explanation that the body is not always able to express. That explanation is the fact that you are an individual made of two pieces. One piece is wanted by God in that particular physical manner, and the other piece (I am using the word "piece", which maybe a bit ugly or vulgar; I leave it up to you to find another more cultured, more elegant word for it) is the inside of you, is what you are, an individuality.
Thus, the canon of beauty cannot pass as the explanation. It cannot be said that it must be this way. The body that is not beautiful cannot have this canon. The same thing can be said about any body, including a monstrous and a deformed one. If you use the canon to represent the body as the body, you are fixed to a dimension that does not allow a way out, because who does not have that body is out. This is a rather theological, philosophical explanation. Obviously, as it always happens in all the cultures, including ours, it is the passage between the most elegant explanation and the most banal one. If one asked a Muslim why their women wear a veil, he would say: "because they are too beautiful to be seen". But let's not go into these rather folkloric matters. This philosophic vision, this way of comparing oneself to physicity, grants to physicity a limiting element comparing to the idea of true image, that is what we are interested in - his path, for instance. The true image can pass through a physicity that should be so elegant, so much one plus one plus one. Each one of them should become a code. A code or a canon. This probably is only done by God. He does it with everyone of us.
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