7 - Seismic Shifts across Political Zones in Contemporary Iranian Art: The Poetics of Knowledge, Knowing and Identity

Summary

This article is a study of the poetics of knowledge and identity across the two political zones that have defined Iran's cultural and historical conditions during the past seven decades. The changes in aesthetics and in the weltanschauung across these zones are so radical that one is often surprised by the styles and contents of the emerging arts that have also manifestly reflected the rapid transformations in Iran's political and cultural life. The arc of change moves from a profound need to be identified with European and American modernisms to the grand spaces of wistful recognition of signs from Iran's glorious past, and later, to an ontological perspective that undermines, deconstructs and questions all instruments of knowledge from language to rationality and history. In this regard, Iranian contemporary artists are more in line with the attributes of Western postmodernism. Yet, these attributes are often expressed through non-Western morphological structures. Looking back on this short span of cultural history one has to admit that no reasoning could have possibly foreseen such dramatic transformations. Clearly, the so-called logical forecasts of the early 1970s regarding the fate of contemporary Iranian art turned out to be radically different from what is presently at hand. However, whatever the dialectics of this process may have been, the seismic shift in the arts of Iran by the late 1980s is undeniable.