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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2020
This excerpt was originally published in Global/Local: Six Artists from Iran, 1960–2015 (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2016) to accompany the exhibition of the same name on view from January 12–April 2, 2016. I thank Laurie Duke and Allegra Favila for their help with excerpting it here.
1 Gumpert, Lynn, “A Distant Mirror,” ARTnews 89.3 (March 1990): 137Google Scholar.
2 Quoted ibid. Nanjo is now director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
3 Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem” (Artforum, September 1974), reprinted in Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 201l): 3, and quoted in an informative article by David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi, “Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development,” e-flux journal 65 (June 20, 2015), http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/provincialism-perfected-global-contemporary-art-and-uneven-development/. Hodge and Yousefi comment on Smith's assertion that New York artists, too, can be viewed as provincial since “the overwhelming majority … exist in a satellite relationship to a few artists, galleries, critics, collectors, museums, and magazines.” Ibid. As a Californian who moved to New York in 1978, I felt that many New Yorkers had a very narrow view of the art world and thus themselves demonstrated a kind of provincialism.
4 A foundational text for the then-emerging discourse of post-colonialism, Edward W. Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) was a pioneering study of the political subtext of the romanticization of Eastern cultures by Western artists and writers.
5 “Groundbreaking Asia Society Exhibition Unveils the Dynamic World of Contemporary Asian Art,” Asia Society, press release, 1996. The show featured works from South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and India.
6 Turner, Caroline, ed., Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993), xiiiGoogle Scholar.
7 Ibid., xiii-xiv.
8 Yinka Shonibare, “Of Hedonism, Masquerade, Carnivalesque and Power: A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor,” in Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (2003), 166, quoted in Gumpert, Lynn, “Re: Contested Territories (Exhibiting Contemporary African Art),” in The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art, ed. Gumpert, Lynn, exh. cat. (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2008), 86Google Scholar.
9 Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni, “Here and Elsewhere,” in Here and Elsewhere, ed. Massimiliano Gioni et al., exh. cat. (New York: New Museum, 2014), 22-23. The curatorial team also included Gary Carrion-Murayari, Helga Christoffersen, and Margot Norton. In her foreword, New Museum director Lisa Phillips notes that Here and Elsewhere is the first New York museum show of art from and about the Arab world.
10 Oleg Grabar, personal communication with the author, in Daftari, Fereshteh, “Islamic or Not,” in Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 10Google Scholar. Daftari also cites Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973).
11 Flood, Finbarr Barry, “From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art,” in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, ed. Mansfield, Elizabeth (New York: Routledge, 2007), 32Google Scholar.
12 For more information and video recordings of the symposium sessions, see http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/contemporary-art-middle-east. Also see Daryush Shayegan, “Tamed Schizophrenia,” in Entfernte Nähe: Neue Positionen iranischer Künstler / Far Near Distance: Contemporary Positions of Iranian Artists, eds Shaheen Merali and Martin Hager, exh. cat. (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004), 118-23.
13 See Benoît Junod et al., “Introduction,” in Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-first Century (London: Saqi Books, 2012), 12. This volume of informative essays emerged from the conference “Layers of Islamic Art and the Museum Context,” held at the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, January 13-16, 2010.
14 The 2013–15 exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue (Boston: MFA Publications, 2013), was curated by Kristen Gresh and organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; after Boston, it traveled to Stanford University's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
15 Fereshteh Daftari, “Introducing Art from the Middle East and Its Diaspora into Western Institutions: Benefits and Dilemmas,” in Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses, ed. Hamid Keshmirshekan (London: I. B. Tauris, in association with the London Middle East Institute, SOAS, University of London, 2015), 191.
16 Shayegan, “Tamed Schizophrenia,” 119.
17 Alexandra Munroe, quoted in Gumpert, “A Distant Mirror,” 137.
18 Desai, Vishakha N., “Beyond the ‘Authentic-Exotic’: Collecting Contemporary Asian Art in the Twenty-first Century,” in Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Altshuler, Bruce (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 106Google Scholar.
19 Flood, “From Prophet to Postmodernism?,” 34. Ironically, he observes several paragraphs later that “one consequence is that unlike surveys of European art, which proceed in a linear (and more or less teleological) fashion from cave painting to minimalism and beyond, in surveys of Islamic art it is axiomatic that the advent of modernity heralds the end of art.” Flood also informatively discusses issues he characterizes as the “vagaries of ‘Iranian art’” and, more specifically, of recent exhibitions and texts on art of the Qajar dynasty that was in power from the late 18th century until 1925.
20 For more on Abby Weed Grey, see her The Picture Is the Window, The Window Is the Picture: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: New York University Press, 1983); Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, Inaugural Exhibition, exh. cat. (New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1975); Gumpert, Lynn, “Reflections on the Abby Grey Collection,” in Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution, eds Balaghi, Shiva and Gumpert, Lynn (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 17-19Google Scholar; and Shiva Balaghi, “Abby Weed Grey and Parviz Tanavoli,” December 2008, www.greyartgallery.nyu.edu, “Collections” page. See also Susan Hapgood, “Abby Weed Grey, Indian Modernism, and the Vicissitudes of Cultural Exchange,” in Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection, exh. cat. (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2015), 13-40; the catalogue is available as a PDF at www.greyartgallery.nyu.edu, “Publications” page.
21 Balaghi, Shiva and Gumpert, Lynn, eds., Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Feresteh Daftari, “Another Modernism,” 81-82.
23 Quoted in Grey Art Gallery press release for Between Word and Image, July 1, 2002. See also Balaghi, Shiva, “Iranian Visual Arts in the ‘The Century of Machinery, Speed, and the Atom’: Rethinking Modernity,” in Balaghi and Gumpert, Picturing Iran, 21-37Google Scholar; and Gumpert, Lynn, ed., Modern Iranian Art: Selections from the Abby Weed Grey Collection at NYU (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2013)Google Scholar, available as a PDF at www.greyartgallery.nyu.edu, “Publications” page.
24 Both Venetia Porter at the British Museum in London and Linda Komaroff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have been actively collecting modern Middle Eastern art for their respective institutions. Similarly, Maryam Ekhtiar and Sheila Canby at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Massumeh Farhad at the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries have been acquiring modern and contemporary art. How these works are incorporated into museums such as the Metropolitan and LACMA – which have modern and contemporary art departments – raises interesting questions. For more, see Junod et al., “Introduction,” in Islamic Art and the Museum, 12-15.
25 Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi Books, 2013), 9.
26 Ibid., 11.
27 Ibid., 12.
28 Grigor, Talinn, Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 13Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., 200-08. Also relevant here, of course, is Abu Dhabi and its development of Saadiyat Island, which includes branches of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Louvre, and other major museums.
30 Ibid., 235.