Khosrow Hassanzadeh. The Man Who Gets Away With It.
Tirdad Zolghadr
2006
2006
Khosrow Hassanzadeh. The Man Who Gets Away With It.
Khosrow Hassanzadeh. The Man Who Gets Away With It.
نسخه فارسی
One hot summer afternoon in 2004, I was writinga Frieze Magazine “City Report” on Tehran, and decided to visit KhosrowHassanzadeh in his studio in the hope of assembling some professional gossipand collect a soundbyte or two, something that could sum up the Tehran artscene in a fittingly journalistic manner.[1]I remember leaning back on his late 19th Century Ming Dynasty chaiselongue, which decorates the far end of his workspace, eyeing the display ofsplendid Safavid spittoons and Qajar embroideries, sipping on Hassanzadeh’s favouriteVanilla Darjeeling and wondering how I could work all this scenographic detailinto my article. Some would say arts journalism is superficial as well assensationalist by nature, being a market lubricant more than a serious tool forcritical contemplation, but it has the benefit of allowing for sociologicaldetail as well as formal analysis without being obliged to tediouslyinvestigate the relations between the two. Moreover, it encourages wanton,brutal value judgment over gracious restraint, contrary to artist catalogues,which, much like wedding speeches and obituaries, call for cordial ovation andacclaim, rather than polemics of any kind.
And surely enough, Hassanzadeh, on thatparticular summer afternoon, perhaps because he has published widely innewspaper columns himself, gladly obliged, by summing up the local art circuitin words that were as condescending as they were perceptive, brilliant, andextremely funny. This was the kind of intellectualized arrogance, notabene,that you have to “pull off”, that you need to “be someone” to get away with. Toutter words of such violent perspicacity, you need to be a downright icon, thetype of person of which they say he “inscribes itself within the dialectics ofinside and outside even as he tests the limits of those dialectics”. This isnot just a matter of local-and-global, of Frequent Flyer aroma checked by neighbourhoodknow-how. Nor a mere question of conflicting engagements that are played outagainst each other, without granting any particular project - be it a personalengagement, a show, or a new piece- priorities of any kind. Nor it is simply anissue of a George Clooney chin and a streetwise swagger. But a combination ofall those things and more.
Since I am not that kind ofman, being a mere art world seasonal guest worker, a typical freelance curatorwithout any neighbourhood links or streetwise authority of any kind, I cannotpossibly repeat what Hassanzadeh told me, as relevant as it was to local artand global culture as we know it. Particularly within the context of thiscatalogue. But instead, I shall limit myself to roughly informed speculationson what difference it would make if the artist at hand was writing this essayhimself. In simple terms, the question that seems relevant to me is: ifHassanzadeh is a Tehran-based artist who engages with popular traditions (as hesays he is), how can this engagement travel beyond a “popular” context, intothe confines of European shows with ethnographic subtexts? Even if we were todisregard the international venues, how to account for the fact that theHassanzadeh environment consists not only of popular painting traditions butalso of an art scene that it is deeply bourgeois in temperament, fraught withcareerist competition, terrifying nose jobs, self-righteous gallerists, andold-school critics who cannot tell the difference between reading a paintingand imposing an annoying grid of symbolic correspondences, “I’m old enough totell you that this-means-that and this-here-actually-means-that”.
If in literature, the authorial persona has –in some ways at least - withered away into critical insignificance, in thearts, it seems the artist is still standing strong as an authoritative figureon the hermeneutic horizon. This becomes obvious when we consider how both one’sprovenance as well as one’s professional status and curriculum vitae form thecrucial criteria that decide on an artwork’s interpretation. But to beperfectly honest, it is also patent when we meet the artist, be it over VanillaDarjeeling, or over cashew nuts and cheap champagne at an opening, thisradically changes one’s approach in ways that would not affect theinterpretation of a movie or a novel. Art’s inherent ambiguity leaves noalternative but to accept the near impossibility of separating these things.
Transcultural occurrences, where artists cometo embody societal realities, simply help make this anthropomorphic approach toshreds of paint and paper, glass and celluloid, more visible. But theventriloquy of artistic intentions exists absolutely anywhere, whenevercurators grapple for easy solutions to tricky questions of audience response,and even in extreme cases of formalism, when the is artist perceived as an idiotsavant, the intention of whommust be unearthed by a Greenbergian analyst, motivation and intentionalitypersist; “while the off-grey is an allusion to the early X, the recurrence oftriangular motifs underlines the artist’s anxiety of influence with respect toY, and please note that artist decided to frame this particular piece in fake mahoganyonly in 1966, when…” etc.
The authorial question isperhaps all the more complicated when it comes to painting, seeing as paintingis increasingly expected to justify itself as a medium. For better or forworse, “Why are you still painting?” is a question with more zeitgeistianweight these days than “Why are you still doing installations?” No doubtHassanzadeh’s early portraits are spectacularly strong, his War series grippingly morose, andhis later forays into pop psychedelia intelligent and seductive. But aestheticmastery aside, what, one might ask, is the motivation for painting in an age ofthe spatial, the photogenic, the Found Object, and the rule of concept overtechnique? Perhaps, one might say, there is such a thing as the wrong question,the kind which corners the interviewee in a lose/lose situation. Perhaps thisline of reasoning only recognizes the potentials of painting with respect to aHigh Art narrative of medium-specificity upheld in select socioprofessionalcircles that aren’t the most exciting people to discuss art with in the firstplace.
That said, no matter how we would inscribeHassanzadeh’s work within any international traditions whatsoever - as a shrewdreinvention of Magical Realism, a reinvention of Pop Art ready-mades, anexample of activism or artistic critique, the vague notion ofasking-the-wrong-question persists. Is this, too, a matter of this artist’sparticular persona? In the aforementioned Frieze article, for example, I very much succumbed tothe interlocutor’s aura. “Not everyone,” I blustered, “sees the Islamicrevolution as a disadvantage for the arts. Painter Khosrow Hassanzadeh has abiography so dramatic and allegorical it is bound to satisfy any postcolonialenthusiast: from Islamic militant and war soldier to fruit bazaar vendor to aninternational career in the arts. ‘It was a tabula rasa, a degree zero,’ heexplains. ‘Art used to be exclusively for local elites and New York galleries,then suddenly everyone was claiming to be a painter – including myself. It wasdemocratic chaos.’”[2]
So instead of saying,‘Hassanzadeh uses a variety of different media, including copper and wallpaper,paint and photography, silk-screens and Photoshop, and counts Baselitz and Aghdashlooas influences,’ and so forth, I reconstructed him as some kind of icon, my onlyexcuse being that it would be easy to sensationalize Khosrow even more than Iactually did, and my one merit lying in the fact that I refrained from doingso. For I did not even mention Khosrow’s impressive forays into movie actingand Land Art, his passion for water polo and bareback horse riding, the tattooson his forearms (“Mother” and “Metallica”), nor even his rumoured affair withTabriz millionaire heiress Masha Laa. Nor, indeed, did I refer to his 50 Centmachismo, his notorious candour towards political decision-makers – “did youwin your PhD in a raffle?” – and towards friends and colleagues, includingmyself, whom he regularly accuses of Orientalism and worse.
Interestingly, over the lastfew decades, the notion of artistic autonomy, of the artwork partaking in anaesthetic genealogy that transcends local context, has persisted alongsidenewer notions of art as a historical reflection of an ideological context. Asvarious critics have pointed out, autonomy and context are in stark contrast,yet the tension between the two needn’t be as dramatic as some would like tohave it. Particularly once we assume, for example, that “autonomy” needn’timply an abstract, shimmering totality, but a strategic attempt to temporarilydisregard the pressures of mainstream ideologies and financial pressures, asin, for example, even a simple conversation between colleagues, over, perhaps,a simple cup of Vanilla Darjeeling.
The current crisis in painting and the interpretation thereof has led towhat some call a positive opportunity “beyond self-evident justification”, asituation that could provide painting with a “renewed conceptual basis”.[3]This makes all the more sense when we consider the widespread, sneakingsuspicion that artistic autonomy had better not be abandoned completely, lestwe regress into ethnography altogether. After all, if notions such as autonomyor artistic intention have been around for so long, they cannot be disregardedas intellectual superstitions, arbitrary abstractions alone. For in this case,abstractions such as “nation”, “religious folklore” or “class culture” – allrelevant in Hassanzadeh’s case – would need to be thoroughly debunked as well.
Surely, if art is never an attempt to minimize misunderstanding, anartist cannot be expected to be see-through, sincere and streamlined either. Inother words, an artistic intention or an artist’s biography cannot be a merereflection of a particular context, nor a heroic “transcendence” thereof (nor,as it happens, a combination between the two – a dialectic of the kind wouldlead to Kunstwollen- the artist painting High Art with his blood – whichactually haunts all sorts of internationalist approaches to this day). Rather,one might define an artist’s link to context - whether this context is definedas “a bourgeois art scene”, “war”, “murdered prostitutes”, “aunts and uncles”,or “religious pop” - as a rupture that is unavoidably ineffective. Anincomplete rupture or fissure - a fissured fissure, if you will – which willnot offer informative data, but conveys narrative splinters and conceptualshifts that do tell a story nonetheless.
On the said summer afternoon, after my Darjeeling atHassanzadeh’s studio, we made our way to an uptown opening on his Suzukimotorbike, and I was for some reason reminded of a series he’d once started andthen abandoned, called Orientalist, a study of the figure of the Western explorer,juxtaposed with motifs from ancient Persia. I asked Hassanzadeh whether, as amatter of fact, rather than wag the finger at Western explorers, he shouldn’tconcede that many locals were Orientalists themselves, in the worst sense ofthe word, upon which he answered that he was, actually, if anything, an“Occidentalist”, studying the patterns of his Western admirers rather thananything remotely Oriental. So in other words, most of his work, although anexploration of popular techniques, was ultimately a play on the phantasmagoriasof the West. But he may have said something entirely different altogether,because at that precise moment, his Suzuki was dodging a construction site onFerdowsi Avenue, and moreover, Hassanzadeh does have an annoying tendency tomumble, particularly when he has a cigarette dangling suavely over that GeorgeClooney chin of his, so there really is no way of knowing what the man wassaying. Perhaps the answer is somewhere else in this catalogue.