Anish Kapoor at MoCAUP Shenzhen

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Many of the early abstractionists were influenced by spiritual movements of the early 20th century. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art you can see that a goal of abstraction was to find a way to reach deeper into the individual viewer, bypassing the mediation of the human intellect, and getting right to the pithy stuff where real inner change and human development could occur. However, abstract artists presumed a capacity for discernment and change in us which we just do not, perhaps, possess. An abstract piece still has to be analyzed for the work to have any effect. There is no getting rid of the mediation of the intellect in art. Nobody has yet to point out that Kapoor speaks to this tradition of the use of color as a potentially direct transformative force in the viewer. Everything about his use of color and form seems to be an experiment to retain and not abandon the idealism of the early abstractionists.

The pieces that one initially sees in the Shenzhen show are based on ritual objects covered in bright red and yellow pigments. One can easily recognize, for example, the shape of a Buddhist stupa. Has the powder been sprinkled over the objects in an attempt to super-enrich them? It is as if the meaning of the form has lost its value and color must step in to reach and transform the viewer. Or has the powder emanated from the objects themselves? Physical structures purported to have spiritual functions are being transformed through the addition of color. Color becomes the element possessing a transformative capacity on its own, independent of form. Colors do, in fact, act upon us without mediation – red, for instance, excites our heart rate while blue calms it. The implication seems to be that the more intense and pure the primary color, the more intense the interaction – perhaps those who believe that art can change folks for the better are still looking for color which does not merely excite or inhibit us, but which also can change us. There is a definite element of humanism in Kapoor’s work, and he seems to hope against hope that color can finally do the trick.

We then transition to blue experiments with negative space – what looked to me like a beggar’s bowl on the wall and a void or vulva opening up within a panel. The vulva, in spiritual art, represents the fulfilment of a “male” endeavor or quest. In esoteric art, penis or phallus-shaped objects represent a desire for a type of spiritual fulfilment. Here the vulva is painted in a deep, soothing, healing blue. Kapoor wants his work to be mythic and so he creates a mythic vulva – the vulva to end all vulvas. This is THE fulfilment of the spiritual quest, the perfect combination of symbol, form and color. The penis is desire, the vulva is fulfilment. There is nothing more mythic than the two sexual organs of humanity representing the culmination of a spiritual quest in hot and cool colors.

Some of the more famous artists in the world these days, e.g. Kapoor, Kusama, Pistoletto, use mirrors in their art as the mirror serves as a type of symbol for processes within our inner reality that present and enable us to examine and potentially work on our motives, emotions, desires and cognition. In a review I wrote on the work of Pistoletto, I pointed out that a mirror reflects light to present a reality divorced from reality. Real stuff divorced from reality is the stuff of symbols and images that we often work with to understand what is going on inside of ourselves and to potentially change problematic aspects of our inner lives. So the mirror can represent this capacity we have to create and use a reality divorced from reality and the problems this may result in as we might move farther and farther away from ourselves in the reflection of ourselves. Kapoor’s experiments with mirrors seem to imply that the capacity we have to capture and work with inner truth may be flawed, but that the flaws can also be discerned, so there is still hope of individual transformation. Working with our inner reality to ensure our human development does not involve a straight-forward process. It involves the collecting of information from a flawed collection device which may be divorced from the real substance of experience.

Kusama uses mirrors to create a sense of infinity, freedom and eternity. Pistoletto uses mirrors to draw the viewer into the art itself and show the possibilities for each viewer to create and interpret his own narrative. Kapoor’s mirrors often present what engineers call “negative reinforcement” – you turn a light switch off and expect the light to go off, but you get something unpredictable. You go to Kapoor’s mirrors expecting a straightforward process and things become skewed, engendering a feeling of amazement and unease. We experience a divorce between the expectations of what we should perceive and what is being presented to us. Is there a deeper process to be tapped in to, beyond direct perception and the mediation of the intellect and our capacity to create symbols, which would allow for a graceful transition to a more humane life?

Kapoor’s mirrors are not the only pieces in the show which indicate he may be referencing problems inherent in our inner reality concerning our understanding of ourselves and attempts to change. The monumental piece My Red Homeland presents what can only be called a procrustean industrial process which does not correspond to any real industrial process. It is the process of flattening for the sake of flattening and not for profit or material processing. It is an imaginary industrial process meant to approximate an inner process perhaps beyond our control, perhaps within our control to stop. A large metallic arm protrudes into an area of thick glutinous red stuff and flattens the red stuff into a large circular form as it rotates. Someone at the show told me the red stuff looked like a type of sugar he had seen in India, others stated it looked like raw meat. Regardless, we see a pre-established process, not of our creation, to crush the organic and present a pleasing pattern in its place.

In the portion of the show dealing with Kapoor’s designs for grandiose structures, we see some common themes. Indeed, one piece is called Dante and one has to wonder to what extent Kapoor was influenced by the Divine Comedy. Much of these monumental structures involves ascending and descending. You have active, positive, phallic space and passive, negative, vulva-like space. It is as if Kapoor feels we should be surrounded by these monumental images of rising and falling, of bringing one closer to or pushing one farther away from paradise. The monuments we should be building should be monuments representing the highest ideals pursued by artists – based on the belief that we can all be so much more compassionate and effective in our efforts to change ourselves and others for the better.

Fashioned from Nature - Design Society (Shenzhen), from the Victoria and Albert Museum (Summer, 2021)

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The irony of Fashioned from Nature is that this is such a beautiful show about the destruction the fashion industry has wrought on the environment. This is not a comprehensive look at fashion from 1600 to the present, but, instead, the show uses samples of clothing from 1600 onward to look at how nature has been exploited and harmed to effect beauty, marketability and extravagance in our clothing. Indeed, an irony within the irony is that beautiful images from nature have often been design elements inherent in the production of clothing which harms nature.    

The show reveals that even before the Industrial Revolution clothing and fashion were manufactured in often wasteful and lavish manners. We see, for instance, a dress for the royal court of London requiring materials from several geographical regions, including mines in Bolivia where an indigenous population was used as slave labor. Later in the exhibit we see that, these days, in order to manufacture one tee shirt, even more geographical locations come into play than for that dress. The desire each of us feels to look and feel good has hampered attempts to reign in the fashion industry’s unhealthful relationship with the environment.

It was the international trade networks established by the UK, and wealth generated from these networks, which allowed the Industrial Revolution to expand rapidly and the textile industry was a chief engine in the growth of factories, population and pollution of the air and water. The consumer economy developed in the UK (where cheap, mass-produced goods replaced hand-made production) magnified the waste and extravagance already involved in the production of clothing. Thus, the fashion industry has become one of our chief polluting industries, currently producing a massive amount of carbon emissions and consuming and contaminating vast amounts of our water.

The goal now in the fashion industry seems to be to try to go back to square one and begin producing longer-lasting clothing without the harmful waste of water and production of waste usually involved. And the show reveals how each major material in the production of clothing has presented problems. The dyeing of silk released massive waste pollutants into water supplies. To obtain flax fibers in order to produce linen, stalks had to be weakened through soaking, thus polluting sources of clean water. The processing of wool produced wastes that went into river systems. The bleaching of cotton caused the first acid rain. Cotton also exhausted, and continues to exhaust, water supplies as a “thirsty” crop. Hundreds of gallons of water go into the production of just one cotton dress shirt. The fashion industry has also contributed to the over-hunting of animals and there are examples concerning whales, beavers, wolves, seals, various types of birds, crocodiles, snakes, lizards and even beetles in the show.

The show does shift, ultimately, in a more optimistic mode as a number of recent innovations in the manufacturing of clothing are presented. We learn that more environmentally friendly clothing is now being produced by designers using longer lasting fibers like linen. Recycling has now also become a big trend as hundreds of thousands of tons of old clothing often go into world landfills. The current recycling trends not only involve old clothing but also the use of plastics. Production of flax only using ground water and rain is a method more ecologically friendly than cotton. Various well-established fashion companies are also lauded for producing cotton products using less water and leaving less of a carbon footprint. Yet, 1) free trade outsourcing using low-wage labor in countries with minimal environmental regulations, 2) new groups of consumers in developing countries and 3) the ease of e-commerce are still ensuring non-sustainable fashion production.

This show will definitely alter your perception of fashion and clothing and even compel you to take a closer look at how you consume and use clothing. It poses the question of whether anything can overcome the human vanity which has propelled this industry forward. As the world becomes more rich, and fewer are left in poverty, the need for attractive fashion will only grow. The conundrum for the fashion industry is how to meet this burgeoning need while significantly reducing carbon emissions and the pollution of our water supplies. Can attractive and durable clothing actually be produced sustainably at bargain prices so that people will effortlessly buy in to the sustainable clothing movement? Relying on individual conscience to promote this movement may not be enough.

This show was curated by the Victoria and Albert Museum and runs through June in Shenzhen - the Design Society is the exclusive Chinese venue. Indeed, an additional component to the show about traditional Chinese clothing materials and sustainable design in China has been added to the exhibit by the Design Society. If you are in China, hop on a highspeed train and take a look at it. If you are not in China, I hope this show can travel to your city as well. This is the type of exhibit that compels one to address a major social/environmental issue while examining one’s own behavior. There are not enough exhibits as meaningful as this one.

 

 

 

This review was also published on the website: The Good Men Project https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/review-fashioned-from-nature/

This review was also published in E The Environmental Magazine https://emagazine.com/review-fashioned-from-nature/

Thank you to both of those excellent platforms for carrying this review. 

Showing Truth to Power: Diane Victor at David Krut Projects, Manhattan (January 2018 Wall Street International)

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After years of addressing political corruption and the tenacity of various social evils in her native South Africa, Diane Victor arrived in the USA for a residency project just after the Trump inauguration. In the lithograph Little Dystopia (2017), one of two lithographs she made at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Connecticut, we see an older, paunchy, white man, in a business suit, seated in front of a diorama-like community, with a dreamy look of gratification on his face. He seems to have created such havoc that sharks circle the area around which he has dominion. He has added entropy to a system requiring humane vision and guidance. He wears a dunce cap, while the scarred woman next to him holds a laurel wreath behind his head as she takes a selfie with the powerful man. To his right are the huddled masses, passively waiting on the sidelines, unnoticed by this guy absorbed in his own scheming. They are the overlooked, powerless consequences of his base desires. But, is that really a dunce cap, or might it be, à la Goya’s The Inquisition Tribunal, an auto-da-fé hat for a heretic about to be burned at the stake?

Indeed, is the woman taking the selfie in order to document a corrosive influence in her life or does she want some of the absurd prestige of this man to rub off on her once she posts the image on social media? We see much of this type of ambiguity in Victor’s show at David Krut Projects, New York. In the other lithograph she made in Connecticut, Showing Truth to Power (2017), a man in a Hawaiian shirt is photographing a type of raging colossus. Is the man smiling because he has finally visually captured the quintessence of greed and corruption in such a compelling manner that change has to result? Or is he merely pleased to be in the presence of the self-righteous and self-absorbed celebrity that currently makes the world go ‘round?

The question of whether a knowledge of evil reflected back to evil is sufficient to change evil seems implied here. Are we spending too much time capturing images of and documenting evil instead of taking more effective action against it? Do we, paradoxically, derive so much gratification from knowing we can perceive and document evil that we stop short of the much more difficult work of changing it? Are we thinking, perhaps, that there is a division of labor in the output of social progress and we all get the easy part of photographing evil, while the harder part of actually bringing about justice and peace is supposed to be picked up by someone else? That particular help-wanted ad stays unanswered? And what is so difficult about changing evil – perhaps we do not want to commit to the unromantic principles of pacifism and non-violent resistance that are really required? To me this might be the message Victor has more strongly added to her body of work since coming to the USA and witnessing our current political carnage.

Also in the show are some recent “smoke-drawings” by Victor done at a residency in Brooklyn arranged by the gallery. These are drawings accomplished using the technique of “fumage” – capturing the carbon soot from candle smoke onto paper (which has to be, obviously, suspended face-down in the air with the burning candle under it). The process of drawing or painting requires a use of a deliberate and active force on paper. Fumage becomes a type of action-art in which the artist refrains from the traditional use of force to create. The process becomes more about reception than expression. Indeed, the process is so delicate compared to drawing or painting that the carbon soot can easily be smudged or removed from the surface of the paper and the piece must be framed immediately after completion. In the process of fumage you are also subverting the second law of thermodynamics in that you are harnessing chaos to a creative end. What should lead to a waste of energy is channeled into a recycling of what might have been lost. So the artist’s choice of using this less aggressive form of creation perhaps mirrors a choice social progressives in the past often made to renounce the use of force as being an ineffective means to bring real change. These works also possess a more ghostly and unearthly quality due to the effects of this process.

The smoke drawings can be very enigmatic. In A little matter ignored (2017) we find a relatively straight-forward political parable in which a man in a suit seems to have engaged a group in such an intensely distractive dialogue that they simply do not notice the elephant in the room. In a work, however, as mysterious as Giorgione’s Tempest, Circus lives, spinning truths (2017), we see a figure on horseback from whose finger 5 skulls emanate while a mother and child surrounded by hyenas and an alligator look on. Perhaps the skulls represent the unwelcome truth that things are just not getting better, despite previous promises, and that there is no indication that things will. A horse is often used as a symbol of transition in art, and this horse is just not moving. It is more of a platform than a horse. The woman and her child are surrounded by threatening creatures (in-between hunger spells) and the performer does not ride in with optimistic omens.

In The man who lost his head we see smoke rising from the left side of a man’s head as if he has been shot by a high impact bullet, blood and gore being propelled outward. Yet the man has such a serene expression on his face that we should probably not take this image so literally. The smoke rising from him may represent his overcoming or releasing of aggression or hatred or some other painful but compelling inner response which had been preventing his humane development. Or, since Victor seems to invite multiple interpretations in many pieces, this smoke rising out of him could be his basic life force – the serene look due to his escape from having to be complicit in a world of corruption in desperate need of a type of deliverance we may no longer find ourselves so easily able to believe in or effectively work for.

This current show at David Krut Projects, New York, runs until March 10th at the Chelsea location: 526 W. 26th Street, Suite 816. In conjunction with this show The Brooklyn College Library is also hosting some pieces by Victor spanning the years 2009 – 2017. That show will close on March 2nd.

Trump's Life without Art... Twit: a Show by Deborah Nehmad (January 2018, Wall Street International)

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When foreign folks in New York City ask me what the basic difference is between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the USA, I jokingly tell them that Republicans are evil while Democrats are corrupt. Why are Republicans evil? Well, their core principle is ‘survival of the fittest’ – which means those who inherit a lot of money survive and prosper while everyone else suffers and dies before their time. Everyone should take care of him/herself and whatever is good for business is good for America.

During the Great Depression a Republican president (Herbert Hoover) said that he was not going to help Americans who were hungry or out of work because government assistance makes 'the people' weak. Yes, there is nothing stronger than a guy who inherits millions of dollars, is profligately irresponsible, has no self-restraint, chickens out of military service while the less privileged go, employs a vocabulary that would embarrass a 4th grader, and manifests an overweening sense of malice toward anyone who does not look as if he belongs at an exclusive white country club. Which brings us to the current president of the United States: Donald J. Trump.

Deborah G. Nehmad has a show currently at Kim Foster Gallery in which she has collected and graphically represents numerous tweets from President Trump. Each tweet reflects what most of us who love art have aspired to overcome – human life at its most base, arbitrary and unexamined.

The tweets reveal Trump as someone with no capacity or desire for self-examination or self-control. This is a life without art and without the underlying impetus that drives many of us to art – to better understand ourselves and our world to ensure that we can rise above the random and arbitrary; to develop meaning and work toward humane change in ourselves, others and the world. The tweets show that the ideal of not returning evil for evil was abandoned by Trump long ago, as he was apparently taught as a child that there are only two types of people in this world: killers and losers (Norman Vincent Peale be damned). His tweets displayed by Nehmad are works of art about a life devoid of art and what one is left with in its absence. It is an installation about a “loser” who will not even try to observe, judge or change the worst in himself.

Trump simply cannot say 'no' to any urge or desire he feels, perhaps because Trump was a child of the Eisenhower Era, which was an era when consumerism and debt first began fully dominating the daily life of average Americans. This was a period of time when self-restraint and self-reflection were recognized as not being good for the economy and many Americans began abandoning the long-cherished values of thrift and moderation. You were not supposed to examine your emotions, motives, desires or thought processes, you were supposed to consume, live comfortably, get a gray flannel suit, buy a house, mow your lawn, get a lucrative job that conferred respect upon yourself (whether you actually did anything meaningful for others or not), pay your taxes, support your corporation.

It was this overall attitude that the beatniks, the hippies and the 60s youth movement rebelled against – yes, the 1960s, when Trump deftly avoided such political and personal awareness but tragically suffered from those bone spurs which prevented him from manifesting any macho heroics in the rice paddies of South East Asia. Unlike his more enlightened peers, Trump seems to have embraced the worst of the Eisenhower Era, forgetting, perhaps, that the Civil Rights Movement also took off during this time.

Sometimes his emotions lead him in one direction: “FoxNews totally biased and disgusting reporting!” and then the other: “FoxNews – totally gets it!” In these cases Nehmad has the contradictory Twitter birds attacking each other. The president of the USA is clearly not a person in control of his own life, but someone who drifts from one provocation to another. “Why isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the fake news networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up – FAKE.” “The travel ban should be far larger, tougher and more specific, but that would not be politically correct!” “Bad people are very happy!” “When someone challenges you unfairly, fight back - be brutal, be tough – don’t take it. It is always important to win.”

He is incapable of understanding his own wrongs but seems capable of attacking and judging others for their faults and errors, not being able to wrap his brain around the concept of self-assessment, but still able to pontificate and give advice, often not realizing the irony involved. “I hate bullies!” “Perhaps Obama’s biggest shortcoming as president is his failure to unite the country.” “Be tough, be smart, be personable but don’t take things personally. That’s good business.” “Don’t give in to anger. It destroys your focus on goals and ruins your concentration.”

In the other part of the show Nehmad continues her focus on the effects of gun violence in the USA. As in previous work, Nehmad looks for ways to involve the viewer on a deeper level than one might be involved or affected by news reports or statistics. Therefore, she redesigns the American flag around the theme of gun violence. 50 circular targets represent each state and each target is punctured or stressed depending on the number of mass shootings in that state. The stripes of the flag either represent the prevalence of murder through firearms or, on alternating stripes, suicide by firearms. One can clearly see that the number of handgun-assisted suicides is quite large and a neglected aspect of the Second Amendment debate. To use the American flag in this manner is also to imply, perhaps, that the current flag does not adequately represent the over-riding values of the country that elected Donald Trump as president. We do not seem to value the concept of being able to handle our rage. The election of Trump and gun violence almost seem to go hand in hand. Trump is a popular culture celebrity and our popular culture revolves around the objectification of others and the resolution of problems through force. Guns exist to help facilitate or give license to our rage – against others and ourselves. An amendment allowing the purchasing of guns in a country’s Constitution is almost an admission that this is not a society built around humane personal development that can resolve conflict.

Nehmad has also done some needlepoint pieces of QR codes. If you download an app to read the codes through your smartphone, statistics reflecting gun violence against children for the 12 months following the Sandy Hook massacre pop up. Nehmad explained to me that she wanted this to be a type of mother’s approach and protest toward the fact that after the shooting massacre of over 20 kindergarten students by a mentally disturbed young man, basically no meaningful response was taken in the USA. BY using the QR codes, she seems to mock the consumerist nature of a culture that allows us to readily buy weapons to kill children and implies that it is more profitable when folks attack each other than when they try to understand and live peacefully with each other. The industry of the gun manufacturer is more important in the USA than the safety of developing children.

Yayoi Kusama Infinity Boxes at David Zwirner Gallery, Chelsea (December 2017 - Wall Street International)

The concept of infinite repetition is a center-piece of Kusama’s work. As a child she suffered brutal treatment at the hands of her mother and visions of the infinite appeared to her as a consequence of this suffering. Therefore, the essential element of the artist’s identity and work might be understood as an ordered and systematic response to cruelty which takes the form of a vision of infinite perfection that can cover the universe (and sources of pain within it) but not change its nature.

This approximates, perhaps, the vision we tend to have of therapeutic recovery or the elimination of psychological pain. When one reaches a state of peace, where one can deal with memories and actions that once caused inner pain, the once external causes of pain become harmless. Kusama renders benign all possible elements that might cause pain, through her patterns. She has even covered herself and others in polka dots, in the past, since we are the chief source of pain to each other.

We live in a universe which had a birth and which will have a death; a universe for which the questions: "How could something come from nothing?" or "How could something always have been?" cannot be answered. We live in a constant state of entropic decay and our lives are a continuous struggle for self-justification and a search for meaning and validation in a dream-like, grim and often ridiculous state. This too becomes benign and these questions are muted by the polka dots.

Perhaps this is why the artist has said repeatedly that her art is an attempt at self-obliteration. The infinity of the polka dots is an offering to her public, an offering of a therapeutic obliteration for those of us suffering due to the callousness, indifference or outright cruelty of others. The creation of her pieces allows the submerging of her identity into a meaningful process, revealing the source of psychological pain to be based on rigorous attempts to retain identity and selfhood in lieu of surrendering ourselves to the goddess of mercy. In the very creation of the polka dots, in her effort to offer peace to others, Kusama surrenders to compassion and this, alone, eliminates her pain.

In the creation of an infinity of dots there is a loss of self which subsumes the component parts of humanity and the universe which cause pain, replacing them with a deep understanding and mercy which destroys the essence of pain and is reflected in a self-generating and endless pattern. Kusama is saying that forgiveness is possible, an end of suffering is possible, we no longer have to harm or be harmed. The polka dots are a forceful “NO!” to being in complicity with that which causes pain; we refuse to be either victims or victimizers. This is also why the artist’s work is often performative in nature. The process involved is essential to the work, not the final product. The artist David Judd once even went so far as to say that a painting by Kusama is a result of her work and not a work in itself.

This also helps to explain why Kusama's spaces in galleries, especially in NYC from 58 to 68, have been totally defined by art. It was her desire to create entire environments of repetitive patterns because this is the type of life we need to surround ourselves with. This is what the world might look like if we reach that stage of remission and kindness. We can insulate ourselves in these benign patterns and attempt to structure a world accordingly. These are not the patterns from Marat through Marx to Mao that have been tattooed onto reality to forge new forms of corruption.

Kusama’s work also follows from her observation that clusters predominate in nature. If you go to a field you often see clusters of flowers and if you look to space you see clusters of stars forming clusters of galaxies forming clusters of super-galaxies. In nature, clusters of flowers form because they are competing in a life or death struggle against each other for space and resources. Animals cluster because it improves their survival chances against predators. Galaxies cluster due to fundamental laws of physics concerning gravity and momentum. Kusama’s polka dots cluster for their own palliative reasons – they are as natural as birds, social groups and galaxies. 

Snow Forest: Farhad Moshiri at Perrotin New York (December 2017 - Wall Street International)

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Farhad Moshiri has quipped that “serious” does not get you anywhere. Therefore, in his current show at Perrotin New York, Moshiri continues to exploit an extreme and often absurd relationship that can be constructed between messages and their means of delivery. He has been interested in what happens, for example, when a means of expression is quite elegant, laden with tradition and powerful, but it conveys schlock while, conversely, a message is powerful and deeply meaningful, but it is conveyed through kitsch. Imagine the Chicago Symphony Orchestra doing Barry Manilow, or Justin Bieber doing MacBeth.

A lack of adequate meaning for a powerful means of expression and a lack of gravitas for a serious message used to be two hallmarks of bad art, but with Moshiri they have become ‘found flaws’ comprising deliberate choices in his work, to add extra layers to his visual art vocabulary. Indeed, the retrospective of Moshiri’s work running concurrently at The Andy Warhol Museum, in his “Go West” show, is, in large part, a celebration of how pop art has relished and exploited the extra layers of meaning that a flawed relationship between means and message can confer.

For “Snow Forest”, Moshiri discovered that, in Iran, hand embroidered pictures to be hung on living-room walls, using cheap, plastic beads, has become all the rage among urban housewives. Of course, this is a medium that would be severely frowned upon by most folks predisposed to go to art galleries. Folks who embroider using such cheap beads are not going to speak about whether what they do is more gestural or figurative. They tend to make decorations for their living rooms – these are folks with little or no formal artistic training who are complete outsiders to the “serious” art world but who take pride in being able to engage in a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that yields images they can be proud of having made.

This type of cheap bead became the material Moshiri chose to use to convey his snow forest images, which he took as photos in Iran many years ago. The challenge for Moshiri was to take this type of bead as something that has negative artistic value, and to make it something folks on the Lower East Side would take seriously. Moshiri used what he calls ‘found persons’ (housewives) to do this embroidery for him to aid in giving extra meaning to these beads. So Moshiri appropriates, frankly, what might be perceived by his peers as ‘bad taste’ as an element in his art and as long as everybody can agree that the beads are deliberately chosen for their negative value, this ‘counter-value’ presents a type of contrapposto providing an extra layering of meaning absent when one does not move beyond traditional limits in regard to the relationship between meaning and expression.  

Moshiri uses photographic images of trees after a snowstorm which he took and stashed away with other images from which he periodically draws from. He seems to have chosen the trees because he was looking for something that would be opposite of the idiom of plastic, something that plastic would not readily point to as a working element in the piece. In his 2009 “Life is beautiful!” or “Comfort” pieces, in which these words were spelled out in giant cursive writing using lots of knives stuck in the wall, the knives militated against the message and created a type of symbolic Stroop Effect of conflict and irony. Thus, like the knives, the cheap plastic and the trees initially militate against each other. You do not tend to think of anything beautiful or serene when you reference the knife as an element of interpretation in a piece and this dissonance also applies to the relationship of plastic to snow and trees.

Through knives spelling out “Life is beautiful!” or “Comfort” one is forced to try to intuit a relationship between elements of expression and content that immediately clash. After some reflection, one can conclude that perhaps such a paradox does exist and the discord perfectly conveys something worth recognizing – there is a type of serenity that can be effected through force, violence or the threat of violence which can make life serene and beautiful. Military spending in the USA accounts for 54% of federal discretionary spending. The American lifestyle of self-absorption and ease, which is spreading throughout the developing world, comes at this heavy price. Indeed, there might even be an analog for our inner reality as much allegorical literature points to various dilemmas to humane development which are resolved through a type of struggle, conflict or violent purging of something evil. So this confrontation between material and message represents something; it becomes the perfect mixture of elements to convey the paradox represented.

The contrast between the beads and snow-covered branches requires a similar process of interpretation. Upon entering the gallery, the black trunks and branches stand out more starkly against their white background due to the shiny beads. Ironically, these cheap beads become an excellent means to capture the contrast of white and black inherent in silhouettes of the branching process. An attempt to capture the essence of the photos of the forest through the embroidered beads thus also points conspicuously to the hubris of imitation which reveals itself more clearly the more accurate imitation becomes. As imitation of the trees, snow and sky reveals itself to be a fraud, so a genuine desire for the lost experience of the woods on a snowy afternoon comes to the fore.

Yet, again on the serious side, Moshiri has also spoken of searching for possible statements that do not get confused when transported from one culture to another. The beads also create a two-dimensional flatness that encourages the viewer to look at the trees and branching as a type of ‘found calligraphy’. In 1999, when Moshiri was first starting out, he became famous for presenting common and trite Farsi phrases (tantamount to “Have a nice day!”) in lavish and splendid traditional calligraphy on images of ancient pottery. This means of communication possessed the clout ready to deliver a momentous observation potentially concerning the loss of Persian values or identity, but instead it transported the hackneyed: thus more powerfully conveying the loss in cultural authenticity represented by the partially damaged pottery.

Here, I would argue, the beads and their lack of cultural clout become imbued with humility and humanity, through the realization that married women, potentially restricted in their lives through the severe religious culture of Iran, perhaps at home much of the time in a traditional family, spend hours of their lives to create this work. The judgment of bad taste is, therefore, revealed to be an aspect of cultural elitism and the beads impart an immense amount of empathy and fellow feeling to this found calligraphy. The lives of the women subsume the cheapness or tackiness of the beads and insinuate a part of their very lives to the work. The found calligraphy of the trees and branches becomes a type of especially humane calligraphy which can be transported among cultures, because it is a calligraphy, perhaps, of our inner reality and shared humanity as well as the shared humane values that have pervaded the best of all cultures and peoples throughout history.

Language applied to our inner reality is often clumsy and metaphorical in nature, using objects and relationships between objects from the outer world to approximate experience. This written script is therefore layered through the embroidered beads with dignity and respect. It is calligraphy comprised of the basics involved in the process of introspection and the process of burgeoning self-awareness that leads to more compassionate behavior. This is a universal calligraphy which attempts to retain traces of appearing, disappearing and changing experience one feels to be of consequence and inherent to reflecting on the human situation. It is experience and inner change revealed through movement, space and density. It is mark-making meant to collaborate with memory as a way to commemorate but also to push one forward.  It is a cross-cultural calligraphy to, if nothing else, keep hope alive that life might be beautiful, and that there is a deep comfort to be born out of non-violent and nurturing action among our fellows.