In 1971, the then queen of Iran commissioned Parviz Tanavoli, a young artist in his 30s, to make one of his signature bronze sculptures for the palace of the shah. The tall, majestic bronze statuette depicts the word heech, which means “nothing” in Persian. Its message in relation to the shah’s grandiose rule was ambiguous, to say the least.
Tanavoli received a phone call soon after – he was summoned to explain what his work meant and clarify its meaning in writing. The aspiring sculptor, who had studied fine art in Milan on a scholarship from the shah’s government, thought he was in trouble.
“When I got home, I locked myself in my room and wrote as quickly as I could,” he remembers. “I explained that it had to do with my inner self, it had nothing to do with him.” In the end the shah was satisfied. In fact, a few years later, during a reception with US president Jimmy Carter at Niavaran palace in Tehran, he complimented the artist whose work he had once queried.Since that early panic, Tanavoli, Iran’s most renowned living artist and the most expensive Middle Eastern artist at auction, has made – in his own words – at least a few hundred heeches, some leaning on a chair, others standing next to each other like a couple. There is a club of heech owners, one of his close friends claims. His wife boasts a pure gold heech necklace and a ring. Some friends have been given heeches as birthday presents.
But Tanavoli’s range extends much further. The sculptor is having an artistic resurgence: he held his first US solo museum exhibition this year, and some of his other works are on display at Tate Modern in The World Goes Pop exhibition, highlighting the influence of pop art outside the western world. Back in Iran, where he spends half his time, he has discovered he is not forgotten despite the post-revolutionary suppression of art.In 2001, the director of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art gave Tanavoli, who was by then living in Canada, a surprise call. “Would you like to come back and have an exhibition in Iran?” Tanavoli remembers him saying. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “What has happened?”Tanavoli left Iran a decade after the 1979 Islamic revolution. He was not allowed to exhibit or work and could not even leave the country for a long period. But the cultural opening up that began in the late 90s under the reformists was for real.
“I accepted it right away. They wanted to do a big show of my work and they did, the biggest show of my life,” he recalls. “I thought I was completely forgotten because a new generation had appeared and to this new generation our names weren’t even mentioned and our work wasn’t shown. How could they have followed me?”
The reception he received proved him wrong. He has since travelled back and forth to Iran. Alongside painter Bahman Mohasses and illustrator Ardeshir Mohasses, who are both dead, Tanavoli was recently voted one of Iran’s top three modern artists in a poll conducted by a journal.
His artistic schooling began in 1952, when the first school of sculpture opened in Tehran and he was at the front of the queue to register. Tanavoli continued his education in Italy and when he returned home, the government helped him rent an apartment in Tehran’s Abbasabad district as his private atelier, which he called Kabood. It became a hub for other young artists and was the birthplace of the Saqqakhaneh school, a neo-traditionalist movement.
Saqqakhaneh, one of the earliest manifestations of Iranian modernism, is “the first culturally specific modernist group of note whose works were influenced as much by Shia Muslim folk art, as by pre-Islamic art and international formal strategies”, according to the Asia Society, which has exhibited Tanavoli in New York. The term was first used by Karim Emami, an influential Iranian scholar and critic, in a newspaper article in the 60s. “Before us, artists were proud to follow Picasso or Cezanne, but we were different, we had our own schools, our own art,” Tanavoli says. “I didn’t want to follow westerners, we wanted to be more Persian, so I used all the tools around me: locks, grills. Gradually I created my own anatomy, anatomy for an artist of an Islamic background.”
There has been a consistency to Tanavoli’s art since his first serious works in Milan, not in shape and form but in themes, often inspired by local bazaars, shrines, religious signs and neons. “One verse of [Persian poets] Hafez or Rumi was enough to change my blood circulation,” he says. “This poetry was so inspiring I didn’t need to go anywhere else.”
The locks and chainmesh that drape around Shia shrines were a huge source of inspiration. “When I was a child, locks were my only toys,” he says.Tanavoli is also a collector and has the largest quantity of tribal arts in Iran. He has everything from Persian steel, locks, tribal textiles and weaving, to tribal bags, horse covers and floor covers.
Are his abundant references to Shia symbols a sign that Tanavoli is embracing religion or criticising it? “I am not a religious man,” he says, “but Islam, although it made bans on imagery and materialistic shapes, instead left a great treasure of other art.”
The idea to make the first heech came after the failure of his first major show in Tehran in 1965, when the gallery owner closed it down after a few days. One of the works on show was a handmade Persian rug which, in the words of one reviewer, was cut in the middle to make room for a toilet ewer, “a scatological object most common and most rejected in the Iranian domestic psyche”.
Heech was a response to that exhibition: “I was disappointed. I thought I could not continue like that – nobody liked my works [in] those days, not even intellectuals. I didn’t hear even one compliment. They hadn’t seen things like that.” He adds: “The word heech alone, it’s not that heech is just ‘nothing’, it’s a lot of things, as far as its meaning is concerned and as far as its shape is concerned.”Although the Iranian authorities have confiscated some of Tanavoli’s works in recent years during a dispute over his house in Tehran, he is optimistic about the country. He is particularly impressed by female artists. “I have faced extremely great talents, especially the females,” he says. “Females are on the rise in Iran; this is a new phenomenon. They didn’t have much chance in the past but today they want to express themselves – the problems they are facing in the society – and art is the best way.” Today, he says, there are female poets who express themselves 10 times better than someone like Forough Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most prominent 20th-century poets.
His recent million-dollar successes at Christie’s and Sotheby’s haven’t changed his life, he says. “I am still the same person, the same man, and none of my lifestyles have changed. I still wear the same suit, the same shoes, even the same house and we have the same family.”
But he says: “I like to be the ambassador for the culture of my country. The media is one-sided sometimes, they show the bad side of the news, but there is also a good side and this good side is not covered enough. I think it should be covered equally, if it is covered, people can make a more accurate judgment themselves.”
No comments:
Post a Comment