This seems an interesting site with games based on the news:

Go here to check it out.  [Thanks to James McGirk.]

by Stefano Carboni

3QD contributer Alta Price had the good fortune of working with Ülku Bates and a team of scholars and curators on the exhibit Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries. We posted a link to Holland Cotter’s recent review of the show in the New York Times, and the exhibit remains open to the public until April 26 at Hunter College. The accompanying catalogue includes several essays and detailed entries on each object, and we are pleased to present here the introductory essay by Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Stefano Carboni.  

In the field of art history as well as in most disciplines, from political to anthropological to historical studies, the terms East and West are for the most part interpreted as a dichotomous pair. Only in the relatively recent past has it become politically incorrect in the “Western” world to view the West as morally and culturally superior to the East. This is not to say that the same sense of superiority was not felt in different times, for example, by the Chinese empire in relation to the “barbarians” of the west.(1) But the history of Europe and Asia in the past two to three centuries has much to do with colonialism and the exploitation of natural and human resources in favor of industrial development and augmented wealth in the Western world, inevitably bringing forth issues of supremacy and arrogance, control and authority, as well as anthropological and artistic curiosity. The rapid development of the disciplines of philosophy, history, sciences, archaeology, and art history in the post-Enlightenment era in Europe, combined with the inability to communicate constructively with their counterparts in Asia, contributed to widen the gap to the point that even today top-notch scholars from Japan, China, and India are educated in European and American universities and apply the art-historical parameters established by the various Gombrichs, Panofskys, and the like.(2)

    It is now usually understood that the geographical classification of East/West is culturally charged from a Eurocentric point of view, and that the East we refer to in art-historical terms represents Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Asia—that is, the great traditions of Japan, China, and India in particular. As a matter of fact— even if it makes perfect sense that Western Asia, the Near East, and the Middle East play a fundamental role in the present discussion—non-specialists often don’t know what to make of Islamic art, where to place its geographical boundaries, how to differentiate between religious and secular, or how to fit it into the complex configuration of art history worldwide.(3)

     An adequate general definition of Islamic art has been repeatedly suggested by a number of scholars who have also emphasized the fact that the adjective “Islamic” perhaps remains a not entirely satisfactory term—but still the most synthetic and acceptable, and I concur with them—to define this discipline of art-historical studies. Basically, Islamic art can be defined in an admittedly elaborate sentence as “the art produced for the most part (but by no means exclusively) by Muslim artists and craftsmen beginning from the seventh century of the Common Era in the areas of Asia, Africa, and Europe that were for the most part ruled by Muslim leaders, and that was produced for the most part (but by no means exclusively) for Muslim patrons and a general Muslim clientele.” The awkward repetition of “for the most part” and “by no means exclusively” is meant to emphasize not only the multicultural and multi-denominational facets of Muslim society and the strong presence of Christian and Jewish patrons and artists throughout the centuries,(4) but also that there existed a common artistic vocabulary that extended beyond those facets and thus allowed a collective understanding of architectural forms, object shapes, calligraphic patterns, and surface decoration. Islamic religious art, from mosque buildings to copies of the Qur’an to mosque furniture, was of course exclusively meant for Muslim patrons and for Muslim consumption; this, however, does not mean that its aniconic expression dominated the overall production of Islamic art. On the contrary, the majority of the works of “Islamic” art are of secular nature and include a large number of figurative works, from illustrated manuscripts to painted ceramics, from three-dimensional bronze figures to enamel-painted glass.

Because East/West is plainly a geographic dichotomy, it is the nebulous boundaries of Islamic art that become particularly germane in this case. This is also what I find to be one of the most peculiar, stimulating, and exhilarating aspects of the study of this field. These changing boundaries represented uninterrupted but porous frontiers in which constant exchange, interaction, and cross-effects took place both within the confines of the Islamic world and between Europe and Asia, all through the intermediary of Islamic art. The best-known examples of exchange and mutual fostering between the Islamic border regions and their neighbors are the development of the arts in the Iberian peninsula (al-Andalus) from the eighth to the sixteenth century and the contacts among Muslims, Christians, and Jews;(5) the familiarity and adoption of Islamic art forms and techniques by the Normans in Sicily (twelfth to thirteenth centuries);(6) and the impact of the Eastern-Asian traditions on Islamic art under the Ilkhanids (Mongols of Iran and Iraq, 1256–1353), which lasted for centuries.(7) Within the Islamic borders, a good example is provided by the migration of Iranian Safavid artists to the court of the Mughals in India and their initial influence over the development of peculiar Indo-Muslim and later Indo-Portuguese styles across the subcontinent, including the central plateau of the Deccan, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.(8) Many more examples, however, could be mentioned, including those that involve the relocation of artists across continents; the transfer of works of art through diplomatic exchange, commerce, and looting; and the crisscrossing traffic of high-quality trade goods, textiles, literary works, languages, religions, and ideas.

     In a recent project, I sought to demonstrate the ways in which trade, political acumen, and incessant diplomacy, rather than conquests and consequent changing borders, could also provide for centuries of continuous cultural and artistic exchanges between the Islamic powers controlling the eastern and southeastern Mediterranean coasts and the Most Serene Republic of Venice, one of the major European political players for almost a millennium.(9) In this case, it was the Venetians who initially imported, learned, absorbed, imitated, and re-elaborated the artistic, technical, and technological traditions of the Islamic world and eventually—because of the expanding and exciting horizons of the European Renaissance and the contemporaneous shrinking prosperity of the Mediterranean Islamic powers, in particular the Mamluks—reversed the trend and conquered the export market of luxury goods. For the pragmatic Venetians, who enjoyed a constant diplomatic presence and established communities of merchants in the Near East, therefore, East/West was not perceived as a dichotomy; it was a way of life, a source of wealth, and a familiar place.

     The so-called period of the Islamic empires usually refers to the emergence or the full establishment of three powerful entities in the Islamic world—the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals—from the sixteenth century onward. The Ottomans (late thirteenth century through 1924) controlled most of North Africa, including Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean coast reaching inland as far as Iraq, most of the Arabian peninsula including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, all of Anatolia, and most of the Balcans and eastern Europe. The Safavids (1501–1722) ruled over all of Greater Iran, and the Mughals (1526–1858) dominated a large part of the Indian subcontinent including parts of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is roughly at the beginning of this period that the European Renaissance boomed and that the rule of the Ming dynasty in China (1368–1644) was at its apex. This was also the moment, however, of the unstoppable emergence of the politically stronger European powers in the business of world trade. Amassing great wealth, these European powers quickly dominated or at least controlled the sea routes of Southern Asia and Africa (not to mention the Americas) and thus entirely bypassed the traditional Mediterranean passageway for Asian-European trade from which the Islamic world had benefited so greatly throughout the centuries in their role of middlemen and brokers. The British, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian empires established a strong economic, political, and diplomatic presence along the sea and land routes, forever changing and upsetting the parameters of communication and exchange between Europe and the Islamic world.(10)

    This exhibition, titled Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, seeks to explore the ways these parameters of communication and exchange functioned at a time when the European presence had fully established a powerful political grip in Mughal India, a forceful diplomatic and economic stranglehold in Qajar Iran (1779–1925), and a subtle and almost flirtatious political and cultural influence over a weakening Ottoman empire, the de facto eastern neighbor of the European powers.(11) The exhibition grew out of a curatorial-studies course—conceived by Professor Bates from Hunter College and initially co-taught by me—on “Occidentalism” in Islamic art. The “reorientation” mentioned in the title of the exhibition was certainly preceded by a period of “disorientation” in the Islamic world, at least in terms of artistic direction, which can be analyzed differently and diachronically in each of the three empires.

    In India, the European presence at the Mughal court made itself felt at an early stage during the period of reign of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), a time when his keen interest in world religions encouraged him to seek the advice of non-Indians and non-Persians. Eventually, this resulted in a flow of Christian Catholic and Protestant prints and paintings from Europe to India that affected Mughal art on different levels. The most noticeable and superficial effect was the straightforward copy or imitation of Western subjects and compositions, or at least the incorporation of several of their elements, such as puffy clouds with putti in the sky. On a deeper level, the development of true portraiture, which became highly regarded as an artistic subject in the Islamic world for the first time in India and turned into one of the hallmarks of Mughal painting, was unquestionably stimulated by the well-established European tradition.(12)

    In Iran, the presence of European visitors at the Safavid court in Isfahan began to be felt as a sort of exotic attendance to garden parties and drinking sessions, as illustrated in tiled wall panels from the early seventeenth century.(13) It quickly moved on, however, to motivate a more genuine interest in Western techniques and compositions, to the point that Muhammad Zaman, one of the most important Iranian painters of the second half of the seventeenth century, may have traveled and spent time in Europe. The later Qajar period pays full respect to European painting not only by adopting portraiture as a means to further political agendas and a cult of the shah’s personality, but also by adopting large-size oil paintings on canvas for these purposes. The early development and technological advances in photography further fostered this interest in the West. Qajar art is indeed an interesting, sometimes odd, mixture of nostalgia for the ancient Sasanian past and a presumptuous and anachronistic glance over the courts of Europe; it is almost as if Fath cAli Shah (r. 1797–1834) saw himself as the embodiment of both Shapur II (r. 309–379) and Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) at the same time. The Qajar guise, however, expressed the contemporary Persian longing and effort to be an active part of the “big world,” recognizing that progress, development, and wealth came mostly from the Western countries.(14)

    The Ottomans in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, seemed to lose the self-confidence that the Qajars were trying hard to demonstrate. Declining politically, the Ottoman Empire was progressively losing its former splendor during this period, and the sultan and his court must have felt the pressure at the borders and economic weakening keenly. In a changing market economy that included a shift of goods exported from the West to the East, the Ottoman court and the royal entourage pretended to remain at the zenith of their power and influence by building the Versailles-type palace of Dolmabahçe in Istanbul and by surrounding themselves with lavish imported European furniture, furnishings, and objets d’art, inaugurating what has been described as the rococò period in Ottoman art.(15) In Istanbul, artists never developed an interest in adopting and adapting portraiture or oil painting on large canvases, although they demonstrated a curiosity in landscape painting, city views, and marine panoramas (unlike their Persian and Indian colleagues) in addition to photography.(16) But it was mostly at the level of luxury arts and crafts, particularly silverwork, metalwork, and glass, that the connection with Western art can be demonstrated more accurately, especially as an effort to “send back” to the European market objects that met the same taste with a diluted Ottoman flavor.(17)

    East/West therefore becomes a shifting terminology according to the different periods, geographical centers, and cultural points of view. Within the Islamic world, as in all cultures, one’s position is always perceived as central. In the Qur’an (seventh century C.E.) we are reminded that Allah, the Light of the heavens and the earth, is compared to a “ . . . lamp enclosed in glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous. . . . ” (Qur’an, 24:35, translated by Yusufali, my italics).

    At the opposite end of the chronological spectrum, ayatollah Khomeini referred to the United States as the capitalism of the West and to the Soviet Union as the socialism of the East during the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s. Therefore, one of the most important goals in Iranian foreign policy, still largely valid today after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was to prevent political, economic, and cultural reliance on both Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, thus looking only at Islam for the right answers.(18) This concept of “neither east nor west,” initially a mere political slogan, had some success and has entered the world of mainstream literary works, such as Christiane Bird’s recent book Neither East Nor West: One Woman’s Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001).(19)

    In the arts, this position should be interpreted mostly in a geographical sense but still as a central one. The Islamic world was a throughway between the East and West, and artistic ideas, patterns, shapes, and designs were often retained, studied, understood, and transformed into the language of Islamic art. Sometimes, they passed through without being noticed. During the periods of most fruitful exchange, the Islamic areas took up an important radial role of diffusion of the arts, either from the central cities of the various caliphates and sultanates or from the peripheral centers closer to the borders with the East and the West.(20)

    “Occidentalism” and “reorientation” are just two facets of this broader issue—facets that have, however, been largely neglected in art-historical studies mostly because they correspond to a late phenomenon in Islamic art and a slightly uneasy one due to the Western contribution to it. Thanks to the present exhibition and catalogue, I am happy to witness that time has come to address this fascinating aspect of Islamic art.

Notes

1. In China, depending on the period and reigning dynasty, there was a rather sophisticated system of classification of “barbarians” or “outsiders” based on the four cardinal points of the compass.

2. See in particular Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (1955) and Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1968), and Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (first edition 1950), The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of the Decorative Arts (1979), and Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews (1987).

3. In addition to a widespread poor knowledge of the Islamic world and its history, its peculiar geographical distribution makes it an uneasy fit into the traditional classifications of art history. Classification has ranged from attempts to incorporate it into the medieval European world (in the early part of the twentieth century) to the continental concept of “Asian” art where, however, it always plays a marginal role.

4. In relation to the arts, the active role of Christians and Jews in a predominantly Muslim world is firmly established through written sources and patronage.

5. See, for example, Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, eds., Convivencia. Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, exh. cat. (New York: George Brazille in association with The Jewish Museum, 1992), with its bibliography. A more recent example is Cynthia Robinson and Layla Rouhi, eds., Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004).

6. Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ernst J. Grube and Jeremy Johns, The Painted Ceiling of the Cappella Palatina (Genoa: Bruschettini Foundation for Islamic and Asian Art, and New York: East-West Foundation, 2005).

7. Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni, The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002), with its extensive bibliography.

8. Among many published works, see Daniel Walker, Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997); Ashok Kumar Srivastava, Mughal Painting: An Interplay of Indigenous and Foreign Traditions (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2000); Ebba Koch, ed., Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Rosemary Crill, Susan Stronge, and Andrew Topsfield, eds., Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing, 2004).

9. Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (Paris: Gallimard, distributed by Yale University Press, 2007).

10. Cultures of the Indian Ocean, exh. cat. (Lisbon: National Commission for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries, 1998); Gauvin A. Bailey, The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India, 1580–1630 (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1998); Jay A. Levenson, ed., Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2007).

11. A general view of this period in relation to the three late Islamic empires and their artistic relationship with Europe can be found in Stephen Vernoit, Occidentalism: Islamic Art in the 19th CenturyDiscovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Eclecticism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006).

12. In addition to the sources listed in note 8, see, among many, Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak, The Akbar Nama of Abu-l-Fazl: History of the Reign of Akbar, Including an Account of his Predecessors, trans. H. Beveridge (New Delhi, India: Ess Ess Publications, 1985); Barbara Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami (London: British Library, 1995); and John Seyller et al., The Adventures of Hamza. Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, exh. cat. (Washington, DC, and London: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in association with Azimuth Editions, 2002).

13. One of these panels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art representing European foreigners was published most recently in Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, Le Chant du monde. L’art de l’Iran safavide 1501–1736, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée du Louvre Editions and Somogy Editions d’Art, 2007), no. 120, p. 359.

14. See, among many, Layla S. Diba with Maryam Ekhtiar, ed., Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1998); Julian Raby, Qajar Portraits (London and New York: Azimuth Editions in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation, distributed by I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1999); Frederick N. Bohrer, Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran, 1870–1930 (Washington, DC, Seattle, and London: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and University of Washington Press, 1999); Irina Koshoridze, Layla S. Diba, and B. W. Robinson, Qajar Portraits / Kajaruli portreti (Tbilisi, Georgia: Shalva Amiranashvili State Art Museum of Georgia, 2004); Willem Floor, Wall Paintings and Other Figurative Mural Art in Qajar IranMuraqqa’e Sharqi: Studies in Honor of Peter Chelkowski (San Marino: AIEP Editore, 2007).

15. Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth CenturyIstanbul 1900: Art-Nouveau Architecture and Interiors (New York: Rizzoli, 1996); Diana Barillari, D’Aronco Ottoman Architect. Projects for Istanbul 1893–1909. Restorations, Projects, Books, catalogue 1 (Istanbul: Istanbul Research Institute, 2006).

16. Engin Çizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1919 (Istanbul: Haşet Kitabevi, 1987).

17. Particular mention in this respect should be made of the glass production in Beykoz near Istanbul, on the Bosphorus; see Fuat Bahramoglu, Turkish Glass Art and Beykoz-Ware (Istanbul: Publications of the RCD Cultural Institute, 1976).

18. See http://countrystudies.us/iran/101.htm.

19. Published by Pocket Books, Washington Square Press, New York, 2001.

20. Oleg Grabar has addressed some of these issues in a number of articles and essays, five of which were recently collected and published again in Islamic Visual Culture, 1100–1800. Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, vol. II (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Variorum, 2006), pp. 381–441.

Bibliography

Bailey, Gauvin A. The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India, 1580–1630. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1998.

Barillari, Diana. D’Aronco Ottoman Architect. Projects for Istanbul 1893–1909. Restorations, Projects, Books. Catalogue 1. Istanbul: Istanbul Research Institute, 2006.

Barillari, Diana, and Ezio Godoli. Istanbul 1900: Art-Nouveau Architecture and Interiors. New York: Rizzoli, 1996.

Behrens-Abouseif, Doris, and Stephen Vernoit, eds. Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Eclecticism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006.

Bohrer, Frederick N. Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran, 1870–1930. Washington, DC, Seattle, and London: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and University of Washington Press, 1999.

Brend, Barbara. The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami. London: British Library, 1995.

Carboni, Stefano, ed. Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797. Paris: Gallimard, distributed by Yale University Press, 2007.

Çelik, Zeynep. The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.

Çizgen, Engin. Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1919. Istanbul: Haşet Kitabevi, 1987.

Crill, Rosemary, Susan Stronge, and Andrew Topsfield, eds. Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton. Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing, 2004.

Cultures of the Indian Ocean, exh. cat. Lisbon: National Commission for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries, 1998.

Diba, Layla S., with Maryam Ekhtiar, ed. Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925. Exh. cat. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1998.

Floor, Willem. Wall Paintings and Other Figurative Mural Art in Qajar Iran. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2005.

Grabar, Oleg. Islamic Visual Culture, 1100–1800. Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, Vol. II. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Variorum, 2006.

Grube, Ernst J., and Jeremy Johns. The Painted Ceiling of the Cappella Palatina. Genoa: Bruschettini Foundation for Islamic and Asian Art, and New York: East-West Foundation, 2005.

Johns, Jeremy. Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Koch, Ebba, ed. Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Komaroff, Linda, and Stefano Carboni. The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002.

Koshoridze, Irina, Layla S. Diba, and B. W. Robinson. Qajar Portraits / Kajaruli portreti. Tbilisi, Georgia: Shalva Amiranashvili State Art Museum of Georgia, 2004.

Levenson, Jay A., ed. Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2007.

Mann, Vivian B., Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, eds. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. Exh. cat. New York: George Braziller in association with The Jewish Museum, 1992.

Mubarak, Abu al-Fazl ibn. The Akbar Nama of Abu-l-Fazl: History of the Reign of Akbar, Including an Account of his Predecessors. Translated by H. Beveridge. New Delhi, India: Ess Ess Publications, 1985.

Raby, Julian. Qajar Portraits. London and New York: Azimuth Editions in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation, distributed by I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1999.

Rastegar, Soussie, and Anna Vanzan, eds. Muraqqa’e Sharqi: Studies in Honor of Peter Chelkowski. San Marino: AIEP Editore, 2007.

Robinson, Cynthia, and Layla Rouhi, eds. Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004.

Seyller, John, Ebba Koch, and Wheeler Thackston. The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India. Exh. cat. Washington, DC, and London: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in association with Azimuth Editions, 2002.

Srivastava, Ashok Kumar. Mughal Painting: An Interplay of Indigenous and Foreign Traditions. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2000.

Vernoit, Stephen, ed. Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950. London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000.

__________. Occidentalism: Islamic Art in the 19th Century. London and New York: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997.

Walker, Daniel. Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997.

Stefano Carboni is Curator and Administrator in the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Visiting Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. He joined the curatorial staff at the Metropolitan Museum in 1992 after completing his graduate studies in Arabic and in Islamic Art at the University of Venice and his Ph.D. in Islamic Art at the University of London. At the Metropolitan Museum he has been responsible for a large number of exhibitions, including the recent acclaimed Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 (2006-2007). His publications include authoring and editing several exhibition catalogues, among which are Glass of the Sultans (2001); the prestigious Barr Award–winner The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Arts and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 (2002); and Venice and the Islamic World; another major publication is the catalogue of the Islamic glass collection in the National Museum of Kuwait (Glass from Islamic Lands. The Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum, 2001). He lectures widely in the museum and outside and teaches courses in Islamic Art and Curatorial Studies on a regular basis at the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU), Hunter College (CUNY), and the Bard Graduate Center for the Decorative Arts in New York.

Annelies Strba. Nyima 221. 2005

Photo on canvas.

More here and here.

Peter Dunn has launched a national news aggregator:

The Daily Source, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the public, has launched the beta of a news Web site that brings high-quality news and information from around the Internet to the public daily in a single place.

“We scour the web for high quality material – so our readers don’t have to,” explained founder Peter Dunn. “Most people don’t have 20 hours in their day to spend searching for high-quality news, so we do the work and put it in one spot for them.”

Editors at DailySource.org scan over one thousand publications including daily newspapers, television network sites, news magazines, journals, blogs and others. DailySource.org also gives readers easy access to establish links to other news sources, including local papers, a favorite sports site, or any sites of their choosing. The site allows seamless contact with members of the media and elected officials, and information on over 850,000 non-profits one can donate to or volunteer for.

Readers have the ability to rate the quality of articles they read, volunteer in various ways, email articles to friends, or submit links to articles they think are worthy of consideration for the front page. With all the features and opportunities for interaction, DailySource.org represents a new experience for news readers.

The site has a paid staff of experienced journalists from around the U.S. including Yvonne Lee, who prior to joining the Daily Source won an Emmy for her work covering September 11 for CNN, and Vince Winkel, who has won 20 awards for excellence in broadcast and online journalism while working for places like CBS, NPR, CNN, and the BBC.

More here.

Andrew O’Hehir in Salon:

As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ’60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.

Stalags thrived for a few years and then disappeared, banished to the memory hole as a massive cultural embarrassment.

More here.

Lise Abrams in American Scientist:

Our ability to use words is a critical part of our species’ mastery of language. In practice, that mastery comes down to saying what we mean without having to think too much about it. When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops.

Suppose you meet someone at a party. A coworker walks up, you turn to introduce your new acquaintance and suddenly you can’t remember your colleague’s name! My hunch is that almost all readers are nodding their heads, remembering a time that a similar event happened to them. These experiences are called tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) states. A TOT state is a word-finding problem, a temporary and often frustrating inability to retrieve a known word at a given moment. TOT states are universal, occurring in many languages and at all ages.

People resolve TOT states using a variety of methods. Some are conscious strategies, such as mentally going through the alphabet to find the word or consulting a book or person. However, the most common method for resolving TOT states is an indirect approach: relaxing and directing one’s attention elsewhere. The missing word suddenly comes to mind without thinking about it. These “aha!” moments are known as “pop-ups.” The purpose of this article is to explore the cognitive processes that cause pop-up resolutions and to document changes in these processes with healthy aging. The ability to resolve TOT states changes significantly in old age, which is particularly important because older adults have more TOT states than do younger adults.

More here.

Here is Bill Viola’s “An Ocean Without a Shore”:

In The Sydney Morning Herald, an interview with Viola:

Video artist Bill Viola first came to Death Valley with a friend in 1973. A child of the green summers and freezing winters of New York, he had just graduated from university. He was 21, a student of religions. He stood in the middle of a salt flat, simultaneously inconsequential and enveloping, and felt his horizons extend.

“For the first time in my life I felt like my senses were liberated,” he remembers. “I felt completely open. I felt part of me was going out that hundred miles to the mountain range and encompassing that whole thing. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

“At a certain point I became frightened. I felt like the landscape was so vast, if I got lost out here, they would never find me. And God could come down and [as if I was] a little bug, just flick me away.

Eric Reeves in The Harvard International Review:

Darfur’s staggering figures make the question of international response all the more exigent: hundreds of thousands already dead; 2.5 million displaced, most losing everything; and 4.2 million human beings dependent on the world’s largest and most endangered humanitarian operation.

Answers are at once numerous and complex—and bluntly obvious. There has simply never been any stomach to confront, in effective and concerted fashion, the ruthless tyranny of the NIF. The regime came to power by military coup in 1989, deposing the elected government of Sadiq el-Mahdi and deliberately aborting Sudan’s most promising chance for peace since independence. Yet there have never been coordinated economic sanctions targeting the NIF leadership. There have never even been effective diplomatic sanctions, although the UN nominally imposed them in 1995 following the NIF’s role in the conspiracy to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. On the contrary, commercial and capital investment in the Khartoum-dominated economy has been massive, coming from Europe, Canada, and Asian countries, primarily China.

Moreover, Khartoum has never faced a serious threat of non-consensual military action to halt genocide, even in Darfur, where the realities of large-scale, ethnically-targeted human destruction have been consistently and unambiguously reported since 2003.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s history of American English departments, has just been reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition (Chicago, $19). Published at the height of the culture wars–it came out a month before Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind–Graff’s book brought a cooling sense of historical perspective to the inflamed passions of the moment. We’d been having the same arguments, it turned out, since universities started teaching English literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. The positions may have changed, but the issues had not. Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists, but across the barricades of each revolution, the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, “literature itself” versus historical context.

What’s happened since?

The Royal Shakespeare Company in staging the whole of the History Cycle, 8 plays in 72 hours.  Colin Murphy on the performance in Le Monde Diplomatique:

I couldn’t sleep last night. They kept on coming. Kings, rebels, ghosts, traitors. In my mind’s eye, at 3am, they marched again, spoke, warned. Richard the Second, vainglorious, doomed. Henry the Fourth, stout and fierce, his purchase on the throne tenuous. Falstaff, hale and hearty, but cut through with self-deception. Warwick, twin sword blades slicing the air. Henry the Fifth, the hero king. And Henry the Sixth, almost mystical, his eyes suffused with the loneliness of absolute power.

For twenty-four hours I sat in their company, through eight of the History plays of William Shakespeare, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) back to back across a weekend in Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon (1). The feat was unprecedented: the same company of 34 actors performed 264 roles across 72 hours, in eight three-hour plays.

Over breakfast in my B&B, we wondered whether there was any possibility of redemption or sympathy for the hunchback Richard the Third. At lunchtime I strode into Stratford in search of a quick sandwich, and saw one of the cast breeze by on her bicycle, presumably doing the same thing. During an interval, a man leaned deeply into a stretch against a tree outside. At night, we retreated to the local pub, The Dirty Duck, attempting to quiet the voices in our heads with pints of ale, found the Duke of Exeter and Earl of Warwick there ahead of us, and fell into conversation with them about their roles and the plays.

From The Washington Post:

IDA: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

Ida B. Wells was in England in 1894 when she heard that white Southerners had put a black woman in San Antonio, Tex., into a barrel with “nails driven through the sides and then rolled [it] down a hill until she was dead.” The 31-year-old Wells, a black Southerner, was seasoned to the widespread phenomenon of mob torture and murder that went by the shorthand “lynching”; in fact, she was abroad on a speaking tour denouncing it. Nonetheless, she shed tears over the latest “outrage upon my people.”

Her call to speak out against lynching had come just two years earlier, when a Memphis mob murdered her close friend and neighbor Thomas Moss. The incident started as a dispute among white and black boys playing marbles, but it quickly evolved into an excuse to murder Moss, a successful businessman who was drawing patrons away from a nearby white grocer. White Southerners explained to Northerners that they lynched only when they had to: when black men threatened, assaulted and raped white women. Wells was determined to expose that lie.

Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time. ·

More here.

From The Guardian:

A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones.
It was Dostoevsky who first espoused the notion that if God is dead, everything is permissible. It became one of the founding tenets of existentialist philosophy, but until reading Carole Seymour-Jones’s excellent new biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I hadn’t quite realised the diabolic glee with which this pair applied the belief to their daily lives. Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew.

For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others. It was their radical answer to the outworn convention of marriage: in achieving total transparency with each other, they hoped to experience the true freedom of essential love. ‘To have such freedom, we had to suppress or overcome any possessiveness, any tendency to be jealous,’ said Sartre. ‘In other words, passion. To be free, you cannot be passionate.’ They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.

De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day.

More here.

…

At the Un-national Monument Along the Canadian Border
William Stafford

…………………………………………………………………………………
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………..
………………………………………………….
Painting by Richard Herman

…

In the early 90s our own Morgan Meis founded the brilliantly innovative arts collective, Flux Factory. He remains its uninterrupted president. (When I told Morgan recently that I wish I were president of something, he advised me to declare myself president of 3 Quarks. 🙂 Anyhow, here is a nice article about Flux:

Ben Davis in Artnet:

When people ask me what my favorite gallery is, I always answer Flux Factory. This has been the case at least since I first reviewed a show at the energetic Long Island City nonprofit-cum-artist collective, a solo exhibition by the very-cool sculptor Paul Burn, back when I wrote the culture page for the Queens Courier.

Sadly, I might have to make a new choice. Flux Factory has just opened what looks to be its final show in its current space, aptly titled “Everything Must Go.” The MTA has announced the eminent domain takeover of the block to make way for a rail link to Grand Central Terminal.

“Shitty,” is the answer Flux Factory’s Stefany Anne Golberg gives when asked how the group feels about this state of affairs. “The MTA has made this about as difficult as they could.” Information has been impossible to get, she says. “We’ve known about the possibility for two years, and then it’s just like, you’ve got 90 days to clear out.”

Golberg, one of the Flux Factory’s core members along with Jean Barbaris, Morgan Meis and Chen Tamir, says the organization is looking for a new building. It is likely, however, that after “Everything Must Go” closes, the 18-odd artists who currently live and collaborate in the space will disperse.

More here.  [Photo, taken by me at a Flux party, shows Morgan with his wife Stefany.]

Also check out this video from the New York Post about Flux:

ON JANUARY 29, 2008, an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for public comment. The drilling in question (a “wildcat,” or speculative, operation) calls for a series of exploratory wells to be sunk, using equipment on floating barges, some 3,000 feet into the lake bed of an area called the West Rozel Field Prospect—a parcel in the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake leased in 2003 from the state of Utah by Pearl Montana Exploration and Production, a Canadian oil and gas company. The site lies approximately five miles southwest of Rozel Point—roughly halfway between Gunnison Island, a wildlife sanctuary that is home to one of the world’s largest breeding populations of American white pelicans, and Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt and earth that is Smithson’s most famous, and Land art’s most celebrated, artwork.

more from artforum here.

In 1988, Princeton University accepted an orphan with an eye-catching résumé. Seventeen-year-old Alexi Santana hadn’t been to school but had picked up his education while working in Utah as a cattle herder, a construction worker and a racehorse exerciser. He had read Plato while sleeping under the stars. He could be reached only by post office box, he said, because his home address was the Utah-Arizona line. It all sounded very romantic, very Huck Finn. He also had outstanding SAT scores. What clinched the deal, though, was that Santana could run like the wind, and the Princeton track coach saw him as an invaluable addition to the team…

Then the roof caved in. In February 1991, Santana was spotted at a Harvard-Yale-Princeton track meet by somebody who knew him from, literally, another life. The truth came out: Alexi Santana was more than 10 years older than he claimed to be and wasn’t even Alexi Santana. His real name was James Hogue, a serial impostor who had been born in Kansas and delayed his entry to Princeton because he’d been in jail for theft.

more from the LA Times here.

Nothing about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views — who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an “illuminated Freemason”; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Whether in legal briefs or op-ed articles, we are as passionate about religion as the founders were. Unfortunately, our passions make for a lot of sloppy and willful historical thinking and writing. In “Founding Faith,” Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious Web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Louis P. Masur in Slate:

In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston’s Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little different than Birmingham.

See the whole photo-essay here.

[Thanks to Manas Sheikh.]

Andy F. Bryan in McSweeney’s (via Mind Hacks):

Me know. Me have problem.

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?

Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?

More here.