3 - The Discourse of Neo-traditionalism: Reflecting the Past into the Present

Summary

This chapter aims to provide an understanding of the concept of neo-traditional art in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. It concerns the period in modern art in Iran when there was an increasing tendency to confront conflicts between past and present and when the quest for a ‘national’ artistic identity coincided with forces of modernity. This resulted in the formation of a modernistic approach towards prevailing traditional local visual culture: neo-traditionalism. Herein Euro-American modern artistic methods were a required but not necessarily adequate element in the shaping of this art discourse. This process ultimately involves re-contextualisation of the different forms and sources from Western modernism and traditional materials of the artists’ own culture. I argue that the main aim of this approach – similarly practised in many non-Western worlds and particularly in the MENA region – was to reflect a modified version of modernity carried out within other political and cultural domains of Iranian life at the time. It was in fact a negotiation between the universal and the particular that resulted in a neo-traditional art. This art attempted to re-examine and reinterpret the formal value systems that govern art, typically signified by a set of style markers and techniques. A forward-looking modernist approach in nature, neo-traditional art was engaged with reinterpretation of past values – here largely through formal readings – meant to legitimise a claim to authority over the future. This approach was based on the idea that there is a possible constructed quality of all modern traditions, unlike the haphazardness of customs legitimated in part by their isolation and independence. This movement, which had been theorised and conducted by the cultural elites and the political vanguards of the time, combined revival and invention of tradition: a hermeneutic exercise conducted on the materials of the past to make them compatible with the needs of the present. Conscious appreciation of national and cultural identity coupled with celebration of national art was in fact the response to the recurrent debate on the vitality of ‘national heritage’ and its representation in Iranian culture and art. The artists, intentionally or reflexively, were profoundly influenced by their contemporary intellectual, cultural and political climate, referring to social aspirations focused on nationalist sentiments. Along with the postcolonial Middle East, at an intellectual level, the neo-traditionalists aimed to create a synthesised form of modern art that fuse past pictorial heritage with modern aesthetic language of art.