As the Walker-organized exhibition Siah Armajani: Follow This Line nears its conclusion at Met Breuer on June 2, 2019, we share an essay from the exhibition catalogue by art historian and filmmaker Hamed Yousefi.
In 1957, nearly three years before he immigrated to the United States, Siah Armajani created Night Letter #1, a collage on paper composed of handwritten texts, miniature drawings, stamp seals, and gold leaf. The internal division of the page into multiple rectangular sections accentuates the work’s reference to the classical Islamic art forms of miniature painting and bookmaking. Rethinking Iran’s historical past and reappraising its traditional arts have played key roles in the country’s self-invention. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century a local intelligentsia had turned to the popular, vernacular cultures and artistic heritages of Perso-Islamic civilization in order to reimagine a “modern” Iran. In this way writers, poets, activists, and thinkers provided the public with a coherent narrative of the nation’s past: a linear progression leading inexorably from Iran’s ancient imperial glories to an “advanced” future, mediated by a nationalist bourgeois revolution. Contemporary narratives of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 testified to the ubiquity of this teleological concept of time: a national public had awakened from its lengthy slumber, faced up to the despotic Qajar monarch, claimed its rights, demanded liberation, and coa-lesced into a united political community marching into the future.1 Armajani’s reworking of historical and Islamic art was linked to the broader movement of Iranian nationalism in similar fashion. The text occupying the central block of Night Letter #1 unambiguously spells out the work’s political commitments, reading: “Mossadegh’s way / Oil is ours / Independence is ours / Freedom is ours.” Nonetheless, five decades after the Constitutional Revolution, the nationalism with which Armajani aligned his work differed from that of the early twentieth- century bourgeois intellectuals. By 1953 it was no longer possible to assert broadly that the nation was advancing. In August of that year an Anglo-American plot forced out the democratically elected premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, and the shah returned to the throne, restoring Western control over the extraction of Iranian oil.
Armajani became closely involved with the resistance movement that emerged in the wake of the coup, and the works he produced in this period are intimately bound up with his political activism. It is, however, crucial to note that unlike early nationalists who saw the awakening of the Iranian public as imminent and the progression to the future as uninterrupted, in Night Letter #1 the centrally placed, red-circled slogan—“Hear our cry!”—directs us toward a different political landscape: a landscape introduced by the text’s celebration of Mossadegh and populated by figures like the nationalist champion wrestler Gholamreza Takhti (1930–1968), whose name appears at the top of the work.2 Here Armajani’s nationalism speaks to, if not for, a plaintive, halted nation, unlikely to recover from the 1953 coup. The viewer addressed in this work is not one embarking on a march toward liberation but a wounded body whose cry for help punctuates the overall composition of the work.
Since they were first exhibited in 2011 at Meulensteen Gallery in New York, these early works of Armajani’s have re-ceived little critical attention. A few short texts have discussed them as historical pieces, but there is no sustained analysis or recognition of their significance in light of his subsequent practice. This is largely because of the heavy use of Persian and their layered references to cultural and political life in 1950s Iran. An in-depth reading of three of these works—namely Night Letter #1, Night Letter #2 (1957), and Wall (1958)—reveals that Armajani’s early two-dimensional works were as preoccupied with embattled national publics as his later three- dimensional works whose political stakes are clearly legible, explicitly invoking histories of slavery, anarchism, and polit-ical uprisings. These early works adopted a very different formal idiom, however, generated by intertextual references and in dialogue with modern Persian literature. This is to say that the celebrated aspects of Armajani’s later work were already at play during his formative years in Iran and can be traced back to the collages he produced while still a student.
THE PUBLIC: RESISTANCE AND RESURRECTION
Although Armajani’s early works primarily recall the classical Islamic art of bookmaking, they do not necessarily communicate information as print cul-ture is traditionally expected to. A surface of paper or cloth, usually no bigger than a folio, supports a thick layer of collaged media and ready-made objects. The works convey a sense of the painstaking crafts- manship that prevailed in traditional arts; in this case, however, this labor man- ifests as disruptive, creating disturbance and uncertainty rather than compositional coherence and aesthetic elegance.
While Night Letter #2 incorporates writing and invites reading, the heavy-handed use of script often makes the text illegible: words are cut mid-phrase; passages are scratched out or traced over; layers of folded and collaged paper obscure images and text. At the same time clues embedded in the piece offer glimpses of insight. A few lucid words on the middle right of the frame reference a poem by Hafiz (1350–1390), and a few lines in the boxed text on the left can be traced to Rumi (1207–1273). It is likely that a literate Persian viewer would identify the Rumi poem and could read the entire text after this initial recognition. Both instances rely on synecdoche, or the assumption that simple fragments from a poem suffice to recall the entire work. This process of “reading” relies on the mode of call and response, evoking an audience with a shared cultural, pedagogical, and literary heritage, its parts calling into being a collective that recognizes and replies through the device of a fractured canon.
Rather than beg the question of the existence of a whole from a series of fragments, Night Letter #2 and other early works define fragmentation as a vehicle of communication and a platform from which to restage the collective.
Discrete elements remain disjointed in these pieces, as if they don’t belong to the same compositional order. The interruptions and breaks inherent to the disruption of text and image in Night Letter #2 are exacerbated by the procedural violence implied in the creation of the work. Multiple marks of red sealing wax sear the image with traces of cruelty as though the hot, blood-like material had been insensitively and crudely pressed into the surface of the paper.3 Such procedural violence is also detectable in the roughly stitched pieces of paper that are buckled and blotted in parts because of the ink’s diffusion into the fiber. As a result, this and other works from the period present traces of traditional (now framed as “national”) modes of artistic expression such as miniature painting, calligraphy, and poetry in such a way that these syntactically different mediums disintegrate into one another (rather than joining up and forming a harmonious unity). Pages of a classical Persian manuscript, in which miniature paintings and calligraphy and poetry celebrate the dreamworld of mytho-historical Persian identity, reemerge in the collage as if out of the nightmare of Iran’s political modernity. The wounds they bear serve as allegories for the tragedy that has befallen the nation. This approach stands in stark contrast to the work of early Iranian nationalists who sought the revival of traditional arts as foundational to the nation’s envisaged communion.
The title Night Letter (in Persian, shab-nameh) makes the political stakes of both eponymous works conspicuous. Shab-nameh is a genre of modern Persian political writing that dates to the Constitutional Revolution, when rebels and revolutionaries took advantage of the cover of night to distribute antiestablishment statements anonymously. In the aftermath of the 1953 coup shab-nameh gained a new currency among the resistance. As communicative propositions, however, Armajani’s night letters are useless. What drew him toward this genre was more likely the literary form of night letters and their mode of address. Unlike “day letters” (in Persian, rooz-nameh, which actually means “newspaper”), which communicate information directly to an assumed readership, night letters are coded messages. They do not simply disseminate information to the public but “call upon” individuals to break out of their solitude and become a public. Night letters thrown into shops in the Tehran bazaar invited merchants to join the revolution and subvert the king. The force of the night letter lay not in what it said but in the extent to which people were willing to invest and engage: to respond. In that sense night letters prefigure Armajani’s understanding of the meaning of public art and the necessity of generating a public to receive it. As he wrote years later in “Manifesto: Public Sculpture in the Context of American Democracy”: “The art in public art is not a genteel art but a missionary art.”4 That is, just like a night letter, it aims to dialectically create the public with which it expects to engage.
Armajani says that he envisaged his works as more than mere artistic interpretations, despite their communicative distortions. “Rah-e Mossadegh” (Mossadegh’s way), written at the center of Night Letter #1, was also the name of the secretly produced newspaper of the resistance movement in the 1950s. Within the body of the work, both Night Letter #1 and Night Letter #2 are registered as part of a larger series of serially numbered shab-namehs. The text under the previously mentioned “Hear our cry!” in Night Letter #1 reads, “Shab-nameh no. 33 Tehran.” The top part of Night Letter #2 is similarly marked as “Shab-nameh no. 69,” whereas the lower part of the same work is “Shab-nameh no. 157 Tehran.” According to the artist, these works were conceived for manual or mechanical reproduction, to circulate in the physicality of the urban space within the structural political economy of night letters in Tehran during the 1950s.5 Armajani’s interest in the revolutionary mode of address proposed by the form of the night letter runs parallel to the theological concept of “resurrection,” which we see here politicized in the appropriation of Israfil, the archangel of the trumpet in Islam, appearing at the top of Night Letter #2. It is said that when the Last Judgment comes, Israfil will blow his trumpet and resurrect the dead, and we might read Armajani’s citation similarly: as intended to resurrect a defeated public. The work formally manifests this call for resurrection in its demand that the viewer create meaning—whether through the values of traditional art or through traditional organs of the public sphere—rather than taking it as given. Just as night letters subverted an official order, Armajani’s rebellious collage works inverted national art in their appeal to create a new national public.
RETURN OF THE REAL:
AVANT-GARDE REFLECTIONS ON IRANIAN NATIONALISM
In his collages Armajani physically im-ported vernacular objects and signs such as talismans, stamp seals, street graffiti, and political slogans, thereby populating his work with the “real” and bridging the distance between his seemingly esoteric art and the reality of postcoup life.6 The more the multiplicity of these outside elements interrupts the unity and harmony of the works’ composition, and the more they refuse to be subsumed within the rubric of a homogenizing whole, the more necessary it becomes for the viewer to treat them as discrete elements. As a result the early collages demand that found objects be read separately, while the compunction to trace each back to its origin in the world reinforces the work’s connection to the real.
Found objects in Armajani’s early collages amount at times to a synecdoche for Tehran’s urban space, paralleling his use of poetry in the same works. For example, in Wall, a traditional architectural arch is depicted as a canvas for street graffiti. A thread that moves across the work and rests at the top left corner is twice accompanied by the scrawled phrase “follow this line”—a reference to a popular urban joke frequently seen on the walls of old neighborhoods in Iran.7 This playful celebration of city life is immediately politicized by what looks like a street sign, a small rectangle on the top right side of the arch that reads “Dr. Mossadegh Street.” Five years after the coup the exiled national hero’s forbidden name at the forefront of the work is unmistakable.
Adjacent to this sign, another reads “Khajoo Alley,” which appears at first as an inconsequential street name but on further examination reveals itself as an added element, made in a different- colored material and included at a later stage, as if to hide something underneath. This element recalls the normalization of political order in the aftermath of the coup, symbolized here by the imposition of a new element that presumably covers up a forbidden reference. Our journey of following the line between the work and the real world thereby takes an unexpected twist as soon as censorship—a determining element of postcoup life—is introduced. Now we are given a clue that we must read through the fragments and between the lines to see what the artist cannot afford to say openly.
A similar approach to literature is evidenced in Wall, this time in reference to a much more contemporary work and situated within a new architectural space. A twice-repeated line from a 1954 poem by Shahriar (1906–1988) describes the poet’s melancholic return after thirty-five years to Tabriz, where he finds himself an alien in his own hometown, wandering “like a mummy” in search of life and love.8 The quoted line is, of course, enigmatic and unclear, but the metaphors are recognizable: “Through an ajar door / sleepy eyes of a radiant tile / twinkle fading fast / then twinkle more.”9 If we are motivated enough to research and unpack this coded reference, we can find and read the entire poem, and this little corner of Armajani’s work suddenly opens up onto another side of urban space, marked by Shahriar’s detailed, elegant descriptions of alleys and cafés. Urban space—hectic, bustling, run-down, suppressed by the political order, and punctuated by signs of joy, hope, and despair—is thereby reproduced as an experience in the format of the collage through a multiplicity of semiotic references. In the absence of a shared forum for public discourse and contribution, this becomes an alternative way to imagine a new national space, activated by a public that is willing to engage in an active mode of readership. (Shahriar’s poem, in its entirety, as published in the poet’s collected works, was appropriated by Armajani in another work of the same period, Oil Belongs to Us [1957].)
Persian literary modernism, from which Armajani drew much inspiration, was similarly defined by its response to censorship. Iranian poets developed a distinctive mode of coded language—laden with cryptic political metaphors and characterized by suffocated, stuttering diction—to reflect the stifling experience of political suppression.10 The poems by Hafiz and Rumi cited in Night Letter #2 offer strong political messages. Rumi’s poem, for example, complains about the tyranny of the pharaoh and looks for heroic liberators, thus corresponding to a frequently used political metaphor about the battle between the shah and Mossadegh:
My heart is weary of these weak-
spirited fellow-travellers; the Lion of God and Rustam-i Dastān are my desire.My soul is sick of Pharaoh and his tyranny; that light of the countenance of Moses son of ‘Imrăn is my desire.
Last night the shaikh went all about the city, lamp in hand, crying, “I am weary of beast and devil, a man is my desire.”11
Such politicization of classic mystical poetry was common in the postcoup years, and Armajani adopted this resistance strategy popular among the Iranian intelligentsia for his own works.
There is, however, more to Armajani’s relationship with modern Persian poetry than the content of any particular poem. Politicized poetry was an irreducible dimension of postcoup intellectual life in Iran, and its impact on him can best be seen in his formal interest in coded communication. In order to bypass state censorship, these poems required a particular kind of active engagement, demanding that the audience read through the metaphors, against the grain of their first-level appearance. (For example, instead of speaking directly about postcoup dictatorship, the poet would refer to the darkness of the night, thereby complicating the relationship between romantic imagery and political analogy.) A similar demand to read beyond the first layer of meaning defines Armajani’s artistic practice, ubiquitous in his later public artworks, in which, for example, architectural details function as clues directing us to social and historical incidents.12
Armajani nonetheless maintains a critical distance from modernist poetry by refusing to extend it any special treatment vis-à-vis the broader horizon of cultural production. He subverts the hierarchy of high and low art by weaving Persian literary modernism into informal vernacular culture, treating both equally. In Wall, for example, a nonsensical folk song is scrawled dramatically in the hasty style of children’s graffiti immediately underneath the neat calligraphy of Shahriar’s refined modernist poem. Blended into the folk song, another mischievous quote from the street reads: “Do not draw a line on this wall. Be civil.” These last words could be addressed to whoever drew a line across either the wall or the artwork, but they might also refer to Shahriar’s poem, identifying it as graffitied on the represented wall and so, ironically, “uncivil.”
COLLAGE VERSUS PRINT: REVOLUTIONARY TIME
Armajani’s equation of elite modernist language with lowbrow street art is an indication of his political problem with “modernism,” which for him proffered a homogenizing language, suppressed dissent, and assimilated differences for the sake of uniformity. This was, at least to some extent, the record of the Iranian modernist movement by the mid-1950s. In short, during and after the Constitutional Revolution, Iranian intellectuals saw themselves as on a mission to create the nation as an imagined community of shared cultural heritage and coordinated
temporality. As Benedict Anderson has argued, the linear concept of progres- sive time, central to the creation of the nation as an imagined community that transcends historical events, was a function of print capitalism. Newspapers and periodicals gave legitimacy to the people’s version of Persian—as opposed to the Persian of the elite—and, because they were published at regular intervals, helped people imagine themselves as part of one community, synchronized through a shared clock and calendar.13 This is seen, for example, in Sadegh Hedayat’s work on Iranian folk songs. In the 1920s Hedayat (1903–1951), a pioneer of Persian literary modernism, collected, edited, and published folk songs from across the nation. Some were later per-formed and broadcast daily on national radio, which meant that every morning Iranians began the day by listening to the songs of their fellow countrymen, thereby acquiring a sense of community without ever meeting the majority of their compatriots. Moreover, they did so through a modernist and thus allegedly “advanced” idiom. (Armajani appropriated Hedayat’s work on folk songs in Songs #1 and #2 [1957].)
Iranian nationalism had withered by the time of the 1953 coup. As suggested above, when he was creating his first works, Armajani found the modernist project of advocating for the nation as an undivided community to be insufficient, even in the face of British and American imperialism. In 2011, when his early works were exhibited in New York, Armajani wrote a statement that demonstrated the extent to which he saw the nationalist modernist project as flawed. After describing the horrors of the postcoup crackdown, the artist chronicled his own involvement with the resistant National Front and his regular trips to southern Tehran. For him the poor areas of southern Tehran challenged images of a united nation that were constitutive of an earlier phase of Iranian nationalism. In southern Tehran, he wrote, “thousands of the dispossessed, downtrodden and oppressed were strangers in their own city as they had been made to feel diminished and insignificant. They were judged and condemned by others for the way they dressed, talked, walked and believed.”14
Ultimately Armajani understood the crisis of Iranian nationalism after 1953 as twofold. The coup embodied the colonial attack on Iranian democracy. At the same time fatal divisions existed internally between distinct economic classes and social groups. To imagine the nation as fully integrated and homogeneous was to paper over the failures of the modernist project in creating a real, organic unity. Instead Armajani’s works represented the country and its heritage as wounded and fragmented, not only in order to reflect the crisis of political representation or democratic rule but also with the aim of highlighting divisions that carved up the nation between economic classes: the rich of north Tehran versus the dispossessed of the south, or the erudite and elite versus the uneducated and common.
Armajani’s avant-garde efforts to dissolve art into life were a critique of both modernism and nationalism, the two being, of course, deeply intertwined in this context. His patchy, fragmented collage works responded to the modernist celebration of unified form, while his distinct interest in the urban working class allowed him to offer alternative images of the nation in which otherwise subordinated social groups might eventually be offered a chance at representation. Armajani avoided romanticizing southern Tehran, however. As his statement demonstrates, he was interested in the urban working class not because of a presumed “authenticity” but as evidence of the modernizing project’s failure to create a unified entity. As such, his work not only rebuts early Iranian literary modernism but also stands in sharp contrast to the modernist movement that was supported by the royal family and that flourished in Iranian visual arts during the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after Armajani left Iran, a group of pioneering modern artists “discovered” southern Tehran as the site of authentic Iranian identity. Chief among them, Parviz Tanavoli and Hossein Zenderoudi appropriated working-class talismans and lowbrow calligraphy. In the aftermath of the coup this group of artists, who became known collectively as the Saqqakhaneh group, became torchbearers of the official discourse of “modernism with Iranian content.” It can only be a sign of the triumph of the postcoup ideology that in the current historiography of Iranian modernism Armajani’s early works are frequently classified under Saqqakhaneh.152
What is particularly revolutionary about Armajani’s critical approach to the modernist discourse of Iranian nationalism is his unprecedented use of the medium of collage. The preference for collage over print mirrors his partiality toward night letters over newspapers: while newspapers played a constitutive role in synchronizing the nation around the idea of progress, the night letters were a true radical force behind the creation of the revolutionary public. Instead of the homogeneous, empty time of print capitalism, collage allowed Armajani to bring together multiple notions of time by creating an image of the present that was also equally an image of the future (utopian egalitarianism) and the past (national heritage)—in Anderson’s words, “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.”16 Moreover, the opposition of official print to makeshift collage pointed to economic class divisions within the society. Even though most Iranian modernists pursued grammatically refined articulations of Persian language, disseminated and legitimized through print media, Armajani was interested in the language of southern Tehran, which he found “hasty and rushed sometimes leaving the syntax behind.”17 For him southern Tehran testified to the failure of the idea of “progress,” exposing it as a national myth run dry. Collage was the right medium to reflect this exposure.
Through collage Armajani subverted the modernist unity of the whole and replaced it with “hasty and rushed” compositions that “left the syntax behind” and celebrated the autonomy of the part. Although he was deeply concerned with Iranian nationalism, his work opposed what might be considered the romantic idea of national identity manifest there. Thus he distanced himself and his work politically from the appropriation of nationalism by the Iranian monarchy. At the time a majority of Iranian modernists received patronage to produce works that subsumed working-class religious iconography under the syntax of highbrow modernist aesthetics, treating this iconography as secondary to their own modernist ideals. Armajani, in contrast, remained committed to working-class culture, respecting the internal integrity of the latter as politically oppositional to state ideology. In a later work called Prophet Ali , produced in 1963, after he had left Iran for the United States, Armajani took a religious poster that he had acquired in southern Tehran and inscribed text over its central figure. The text is written in haste, as if through a process of improvisation. One statement is boldly clear, however: the year 1963 imprinted on the figure’s forehead. That is a crucial date in the history of Iran between the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution. In that year the future leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, made his political debut with an inflammatory speech attacking the shah, which instigated mass protests, especially in poorer areas of the country, including southern Tehran. In Armajani’s work the religious iconography of working-class design is returned to its actual political significance, instead of being reduced to aesthetic surface appearance. In retrospect, considering the unfolding of events during the Iranian revolution of 1979, we can say that Armajani’s early works were prophetic—although not divine. He offered profane illuminations, informed by class consciousness, materialist history, and inversions to the cultural temporality of artistic lineage.
Notes
1 These metaphors were frequent in contemporaneous narratives of the Constitutional Revolution, such as Nāẓem-al-Islām Kermāni, Tārikh-e bidāri-ye Irāniān, ed. Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang-e Iran Press, 1978).
2 Gholamreza Takhti was an Olympian wrestler and a contemporary national hero who was also a political activist and a supporter of Mossadegh.
3 Similar visual techniques can be seen in some of Armajani’s later text-based works, for example, Warren Report (1965).
4 Siah Armajani, “Manifesto: Public Sculpture in the Context of American Democracy” (1968–1978, rev. 1993), in Siah Armajani: Contributions anarchistes 1962–1994 (Nice: Villa Arson, Centre national d’art contemporain, 1994), 62; reprinted here.
5 Siah Armajani, interviewed by Clare Davies, April 20, 2017.
6 In his seminal work The Theory of the Avant-garde, Peter Bürger identifies the avant-garde as the self-criticism of the institution of art in the bourgeois society because of its dissociation from the praxis of life (22). He writes, “The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art—sublation in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form.” Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 49.
7 “The high walls of traditional Tehrani houses often acted as a canvas for children to write on as they made their way to and from school. Typically, they drew lines along the walls of their route and wrote the words, ‘follow this line.’” Venetia Porter, “The Persian Period, 1957–1964,” in Siah Armajani: An Ingenious World, ed. Ziba Ardalan (London: Parasol Unit, 2013),18.
8 Shahriar was from Azerbaijan province in Iran. He wrote poetry both in Persian and in Azeri Turkic. Although Shahriar’s best-known Persian poems are in the classical format of the ghazal, he also sympathized with the modernist cause. The poem quoted in Armajani’s Wall is in fact written in free verse (shi’r-e no’).
9 Mohammad Hossein Shahriar, “Moomiaee,” in Divaan, vol. 3 (Tehran: Khayyam, 1960), 125–36 (translation mine).
10 One of the most compelling accounts of the development of modern Persian poetry under postcoup censorship is offered in Reza Baraheni’s introduction to his God’s Shadow: Prison Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
11 Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi, trans. A. J. Arberry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 80.
12 For a case study of Armajani’s work in this regard, see Valérie Mavridorakis, “From Armajani to Sacco and Vanzetti: Mediations on Anarchy,” in Ardalan, Siah Armajani, 51–59.
13 “The members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6. This technologically facilitated process is what Anderson calls the creation of the nation as an imagined community in the age of print capitalism. Here print stands for various tools of mechanical production and distribution of information, including photography and radio.
14 Siah Armajani, artist’s statement for the exhibition Siah Armajani: 1957–1964, Meulensteen Gallery, New York, September 8–October 8, 2011; reprinted in this volume (p. 380).
15 For a brief discus- sion of the politics of Saqqakhaneh, see Hamed Yousefi, “ART + ART: The Avant-garde in the Streets,” e-flux Journal, no. 82 (May 2017).
16 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.
17 Armajani, artist’s statement, Meulensteen Gallery.
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