4 - Discourses on Post-revolutionary Art: The 1980s and Early 1990s

Summary

This chapter examines the major discourses on art and artistic production after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. My examination is divided into two periods; first, that of the immediate aftermath of the revolution from 1979 until the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988; and the second, from 1988 until the 1997 presidential election. I argue that the effects of the revolution and its socio-political and cultural impact on artists and artistic trends in Iran should be analysed in two ways: by examining first the debates on revolutionary art, and secondly, the practical ramifications of the cultural policy of the state, which together brought about a set of fundamental changes in artistic enterprises. I examine the Islamic Republic's official discourses and their role in the development of new post-revolutionary artistic trends. I then explore the key artistic trends and genres within the socio-cultural context of post-revolutionary Iran and consider the impact of the revolution on the formation of the notion of motaʿahhed (namely, committed to revolutionary aspirations) art. I look further into the 1990s and the re-emergence of the intellectual and artistic preoccupations of the pre-revolutionary generation, mainly from the 1960s, and will examine the relationship between their thoughts and those of the earlier modernist movements.

Discourse of Revolutionary Art

The 1979 Revolution was clearly one of the major turning points of Iranian history. The political ideology of activists in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s, inherited from nativism, populism and anti-imperialism, allowed for an extensive coalition of both leftist and Islamist political groups and individuals to challenge the Pahlavi political system which resulted in the revolution. Through the post-revolution power struggle, however, the other fronts were gradually removed from the scene by the Islamists who reserved full control of the new revolutionary, now religio-centric, system. The utopianist notion of ‘returning’ to an imagined authentic Islamic self, advocated by the romantic intellectuals of the previous decades, was now fused with the global revolutionary struggle against Western and particularly American imperialism. Thus, one of the main messages of the revolution, imbued with localised imagery, was the demand for an idealised return to the past.