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A Painfully Honest Portrayal of Beauty

Dominic Zaffino — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 20:45:59 +0000

Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm)

The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is still present. Leaving aside beauty’s bifurcation into the sublime and the beautiful, its historically malicious tactics,[1] and its reduced role to something nostalgic and irrelevant, what interests me is beauty’s moral dimension, in particular, its capacity to “intensif[y] the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries.”[2] With beauty as a starting point, my aim in sharing this picture is not to arrive at a singular meaning, but rather offer a formal investigation that highlights the beholder’s essential role in the viewing process in an attempt to understand, as scholar W.J.T. Mitchell wishes us to contemplate, what pictures want.

Tracey Emin is a multi-media, conceptual artist loosely affiliated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group that rose to prominence in the 1990s for their sensationalist art and entrepreneurial spirit. Throughout her oeuvre, Emin has expressed “how it feels to be a woman” through motifs of bodily absence and alienation.^[3] These themes can be seen in indexical artworks such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), My Bed (1998), and Death Mask (2002), among others.

The diaristic and the confessional, in which Emin’s work is so often read, is a response to her fraught upbringing. Her father, having a second family, abandoned Emin when she was young, leaving her family in poverty. She was raped at the age of thirteen and guiltily underwent two abortions in the early 1990’s, all which contribute to the unsettling quality her works tend to evoke. Like a Cloud of Blood is no exception; it was one of her first paintings after recovering from bladder cancer.

While all artworks mentioned can imply the absent body of Emin, a re-embodiment need not belong exclusively to the creator. Confronting solely the artwork, such an absence would invite the beholder to perform an “unselfing,” signaling a search beyond the singular and autobiographical for real and/or imagined others. As a characteristic of being in beauty’s presence, one’s selfish concerns vanish and direct themselves outward toward the concerns of others.

Elaine Scarry, in her book, On Beauty and Being Just, describes beauty as something sacred and unprecedented, an unexpected greeting that turns one to stone in its presence. In our reverence or in our staring, whether prolonged or for mere seconds, the sheer conviction of beauty causes a search for truth and opens one up to the world, people, and things. Enthralled by beauty, with its life-affirming and life-giving qualities, it makes one vulnerable and curious, inciting a desire to create or replicate, hence Scarry’s position of beauty as the basis for education.

She also acknowledges that beauty resides in the particulars, in this instance, lines and their formal relations. Building upon this notion, a line, or mark, is a present absence. It traces a moment in time, a past event that is no longer. This event is the all-too-ephemeral present structured and informed by our emotions. The individual mark, like time, constitutes such emotions. As latent forms of expression they require a close reading, or preferably, a greater visual attentiveness, a request quite at odds with the diminished attention spans yielded by the digital age.

In the painting, Emin’s lines are unsettling and convey a range of conflicting emotions. They appear rushed, scratchy, agitated, and frantic, fading when the ink runs out. Most are deliberate and aggressive, applied with a confident force, others affectionate, hesitant, and slow. Each individual mark, short or long, thick or thin, faint or distinct, implies a form of release, and along its journey can possess a different tone, personality, pulse, or intensity. The soft swell of the figure’s lower back along with the gentle curvature of its left knee compete against quick strokes of agitation, giving the impression that these caressing lines of self-care are meant to calm moments of pent-up frustration and/or uncertainty. Furthering this tension, forceful smears of deep magenta double at the top of the figure’s head and between its legs, forging a distressing mind/body connection. Comforting this upsetting scene are broader supportive swaths of muted pinks and white that sit below and cushion the contours of the figure, the very fibers of its being.

Yet not all marks can be attributed to the human hand. Seemingly taking on a will of their own, bloody streams of pink angst permeate the figure’s body and seep through the canvas, the figure’s perceived world, for pain slows time and invites loneliness. Solely belonging to one’s self, pain closes one off from the world. That said, the alienating nature of pain also unites people by virtue of all having experienced its effects.

Beauty’s long held correlation to truth affirms this figure’s fragility and pain. The exigencies of line, their perseverance and visceral tensions not only prompt but demand an engagement with the image and the environment that produced it—our world. In addition to conveying memories, consciously or not, the lines of this embodied image carry the artist’s silent and palpable presence. While the urge exists to ascribe Emin’s traumatic biography to the figure, an image extends beyond personal experience. It takes form from a wealth of collective imagery both real and fictive which an individual internalizes, recalls, and imaginatively transforms into an image of their own.[4] Regardless of whether this body belongs to Emin, there appears a tempering of the artist’s raw mental state on display, a coming to terms with the ghostly body before her, wishing for it not to disappear. Through the use of line, Emin builds up this body through traces of its painful past while simultaneously recognizing its need for care and compassion.

The figure’s vulnerability is further manifested by the gaps in the contours of its body, which the beholder fills in to repair the body to completeness. Although these interruptive gaps hint toward the figure’s disappearance and its slow decay into the affliction it suffers from, they also aid in the contour lines becoming ever more acute and in need of suturing. Becoming involved in the figure’s making, our eyes offer a form of nourishment. Sealing the body, clothing it in flesh, we animate the figure, lifting and removing it from the ground it was confined to. In our looking, wanting to empathize and care for this figure, we open ourselves up to the image, which, in turn, opens itself up to us and reciprocates a nourishing gaze. In this sense, the beholder gives life to the image, and the image affirms life for the beholder. With this reciprocal act, in our shared state of vulnerability, it allows us to reach a place of understanding wherein the figure’s world and our world become one; its burden is our burden.

Furthering this notion, the figure’s fleeting hand reveals a desperate impulse expressing a need, a want, or a desire. The chaotic manner in which these faint hurried lines are displayed—literally wearing themselves out—denotes multiple attempts to no avail. In addition to signaling a loss, the desperate gesture refers to its own vanishing. As if on its last breath, these fading lines are given a greater intensity, a felt sense of urgency. The figure’s frantic search leads one to hypothesize the what: a form of relief? a recovered self? bodily autonomy? longing? acknowledgement? a human’s touch? The beholder, however, via sight, has already provided a response to the figure’s plea, thus ending its search. Our restorative gaze acts as a metaphorical helping hand. Our vision is a haptic vision, a liberating recognition that attempts to pull this figure into existence, to rescue it from its lone state. It is a visual act that wishes for the figure, in a sense, to get out of its own head.

Beauty, Scarry asserts, demands a sense of “moral urgency” that comes with an urge to preserve and protect. The sketch-like quality of the image, its flattened perspective, the figure’s instability and human scale, and the visual weight of the medium atop the figure that ungraciously assists it further toward the bottom of the frame into nothingness and despair, adds to this sense of immediacy.Effectively weakening the power of the beholder, the image compels one to offer a more secure and nurturing environment, to reverse its downcast horizon. One must remember that a work of art is the objectification of human experiences; hence, we not only preserve and protect the artwork for its beauty, but its ability to express the beauty of being human and feeling alive, which extends to human rights and equitable justice. Scarry explains this urge as the “particular” manifesting itself into the “distributional,” that is—after succumbing to and identifying beauty—the need to share and convince another of the beauty they see in an effort to adjust another’s perceptual error (e.g., this essay). If such distribution is successful—meaning a population’s agreement on what is beautiful—actions, such as implementing new laws, would be upheld, and shouldered by a community, thus leading to a more just society.[5]

Having fortified a sense of solidarity with the figure, meeting it on equal terms, Emin’s work can be said to redirect claims of individualism toward helping our fellow man. Her work unabashedly embraces the less admired fundamental conditions of being human: vulnerability and dependency. Moreover, her telling of women’s stories through art—taking into account her own—can extend to a woman’s plight, the violence perpetrated against them, and reproductive rights, all of which the literal and metaphorical pressures of magenta come into play. Making explicit reference to female sexual anatomy and perhaps its inner bodily functions, these pressures direct attention to the mental and physical afflictions that plague these two sites. With this in mind, the previously mentioned streams of pink angst, which bleed down the canvas in unison, could be said to perform the dual role of signifying “period positivity” while acknowledging women’s slow and mentally draining fight for equality. But more to the point, and as Emin reminds us, “we all bleed.”[6]

Ultimately, what Emin’s work achieves—which all art should strive for—is that it provokes questions. Or put another way, demands answers. Art and our encounter with it presents a negotiation. Its aim is not to provide solutions, but to bring one closer to truth. Its ambiguous nature offers shared experiences and sustenance. While we all seek predictable and stable lives, it is art’s instability that we cherish, its ability to rattle our realities and awaken our cognitive faculties. To some, this is poppycock, hence the demonization of liberal arts and humanities programs in universities across the nation. But as we inch closer to climate catastrophe and a world where so-called “obscene” books cease to exist, all the while contending with an automated society run by AI, humans may soon be relieved of their critical thinking skills and agency and instead prescribed a permanent role as spiritual healers in search of new ways of knowing. So, in this not-so-fictional dystopian state, having the ability to master the art of close reading and engage in matters beyond the surface may come in handy after all, for being able to see beauty in the flatness of the everyday or take pleasure in the commonplace may be all we have left. “The question, maybe,” as cultural critic Megan O’Grady engaged with, “has never really been whether or not art can heal us but rather to what extent we have the courage to heal ourselves.”[7]

It is Emin’s visceral venture into the unknown, her artistic process akin to a healing touch, which brings a pleasure that exceeds pain and offers one the courage needed for an uncertain future. Like A Cloud of Blood, at once poignant and consoling, heavy yet tender, endeavors toward a humanist ideal of acceptance. Asserted through resistant lines of conviction, the painting’s confessional quality assists in bolstering Emin’s claim that “Honesty is beauty.”[8] Beholden to this picture’s beauty, which can paradoxically be expressed as a distracted contemplativeness, helps remove us from the everyday while simultaneously bringing it into greater focus. Our intimate encountering and animation of this supposed “dead matter,” complimented by an appreciative and empathetic viewing, enables the beholder to share in emotional time with this figure and adopt its calls for human betterment and relief for those in need.

While I have expressed that a sympathetic entering into an alternative world can birth new perspectives, growth, and understanding, the choice ultimately rests with the beholder to see this figure as a static, mute image or a living image. But in seeing the beauty of the latter, such a view can be adopted and directed toward the injustices and human sufferings found throughout our world. I, of course, acknowledge that my close reading may be viewed as speculative and subjective—although pure objectivity is just as illusory—but in my dialogue with this picture, perhaps this is what it wanted all along: to be seen, heard, and valued on account of a beholder’s inquiry, an attempt to understand its point of view and what it asks, or possibly, demands of us.

Notes

[1] Eric Michaud, “Self-Mimesis and Self-Portrait Gods,” in The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 49-93.

[2] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 57.

[3] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women,” YouTube, March 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MqFXvdYrJw.

[4] Hans Belting, “The Locus of Images,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 37-61.

[5] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 9-16, 65-67, 74-75, 80-82, 86-119.

[6] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

[7] Megan O’Grady, “The Artists Bringing Activism into and beyond Gallery Spaces,” The New York Times, October 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/t-magazine/art-activism-forensic-architecture.html.

[8] Sotheby’s. “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

Under the Shadow: Islamic Horror and Shadows of the Djinn

Azadeh Ghanizadeh — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 18:06:58 +0000

In the last 25 years, the American media landscape has been flooded by stories of war and conflict in the Middle East. In the perspective of many American spectators, the Middle East is a chaotic and even frightening place full of terrorists and extremism. While such terrors exist in the Middle East, attending to the intersection of colonialism and war can tell a different tale of terror in the region. In this post, I analyze how this plays out in the 2016 Iranian horror film Under the Shadow where the arrival of an American-made missile in 1980s-Tehran brings with it a haunting by a Djinn.[1] The film provides nuanced commentary on the history of the Middle East which acknowledges that regressive readings of the Islamic faith domestically have been worsened by outside economic meddling by British and American corporate interests. Not unlike Jordan Peele’s now canonical Get Out (2017), Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow is part of a wave of films describing the horrors of inequality and racism in a globalizing world that serves the needs of modern, European, industrial societies while robbing the rest of the world’s people of basic means of subsistence.[2]

The titular shadow refers both to the rise of mandatory veiling laws and the continued colonial interference by British and American oil companies—interference which has disrupted and continues to disrupt the socioeconomic stability of the Iranian people in a modern, rapidly industrializing world. The film weaves together criticism of this economic theft and the development of toxic misogynistic habits from within to show how these forces feed off each other. For instance, the demonic entity—or djinn—that appears after the arrival of a bomb is shown in an Islamic veil, or chador, reflects the anxieties that Iranians continue to feel about the role of religion, spirituality, and native consciousness.[3]

Under the Shadow opens with Shideh (Narges Rashidi) who learns that her university appeal process has been denied and that she can’t go back to school to finish her doctoral studies. Shideh’s political activism during the Islamic revolution has disqualified her (it is implied) because she is a woman. In this opening scene, the university’s cleric tells her, in harsh and uncompromising terms, that she will not be admitted to university. In this scene we see two different participants in the 1979 revolution who are now on opposite sides of the newly born Islamic republic contending about gender roles. During this conversation, just before he determinedly denies Shideh entrance to the university, the cleric and Shideh’s eyes are both drawn to a window where the audience sees a bomb exploding in the visible distance. Once brought back to the matter at hand, we learn that Shideh is officially barred from attendance. The timing here is crucial. In this scene, we are shown how sexist tendencies in one community can be multiplied by the imposition of a chaotic situation from outside—in this case, from British and American petroleum interests and the wars and instability they had instigated.[4]

Iran is not unique in its fate as a cash cow for advanced industrial societies whose consumption patterns have outrun their own stocks of natural resources. Many people have written about how the profoundly unequal allocation of Earth’s resources is the real reason behind most world conflicts even if many descriptions in popular media focus on culture and religion as primary causes instead.[5] The messiness of global connections are again and again reviewed from both an anti-sexist and anti-colonial perspective in Under the Shadow. The film makes it clear that these sexist mentalities were already there long before outsiders came to snatch up the petroleum, but the theft of such resources has made it much worse.

Concurrent with this critique of colonialism, the film addresses internal sexism in a number of scenes throughout the film such as when Shideh’s landlord accuses her of failing to lock a garage door, implying that because she is the only women in the building who drives a car, it must be her negligence causing the problem. Later in the film, Shideh’s husband makes a vague claim about how Shideh is neglectful of their daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), and advises that Shideh should behave in a more conventionally motherly fashion. Under the Shadow shows the many faces of sexism inside a society that has contradictory ideas about women’s competence in both public and private spaces while also—and very importantly—noting that these problems are informed by, and multiplied by, incessant outside meddling. When a community is under threat, policies are sometimes made to pander to male frustrations that generate a sense of security in the public. When the Napoleonic Code was put into force in France during the wars of 1848, for example, women were stripped of their individual liberties and authority was consolidated into the hands of men. Similarly in Islamic history, when the newly-formed Muslim community initially fled from their place of origin, Mecca, to a neighboring city Medina, something alike to the Napoleonic Code was put into place. Amid the drama of founding a new religion and fleeing their place of origin, the new Muslim community encountered hostility and harassment from the people of Medina, particularly towards Muslim women. When asked for a suggestion, the prophet famously told women to stay at home. Centuries later, sexist Muslim men who don’t read their own histories or holy books use this statement to try and control women.

The example of the Napoleonic code from modern French history and the 6^th century example from Islamic history share a similar thread: communities under threat often pander to male frustrations as a peace-keeping tactic.[6] This phenomenon is a recurring theme in Under the Shadow. After the missile lands on the roof of the apartment building (without detonating), it leaves a rupture in the ceiling through which the aforementioned djinn enters and exits the world of Shideh and Dorsa. After being spotted by Dorsa, the djinn engages in a campaign of fitna against Shideh and Dorsa. The Islamic notion of fitna refers to “civil strife” and is rooted in the first civil war in the history of Islam, the one that erupted soon after the death of the prophet (PBUH), and the one which continues to haunt the Muslim community through ongoing Shia/Sunni tensions.[7] It is important to note that the Iran-Iraq war broke out two years after the 1979 Islamic revolution when Saddam Hussain made territorial claims on Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province and the Reagan administration armed and aided both sides (Iran and Iraq) during this conflict. This is a textbook example of fitna where colonial powers prolonged and amplified a war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis.

Just like this fitna that the Reagan administration stirred between Iran and Iraq, the djinn hides Dorsa’s doll and starts telling Dorsa that her mom has taken it away. The djinn also hides Shideh’s workout cassette, which Shideh later finds in the garbage, implicating Dorsa as she is the only other person in the house. The sowing of fitna, or civil unrest, in this household alludes to the strategic and calculated fitna imposed on Iran and Iraq by the Reagan administration and acknowledges how imperialism from outside and sexist bias from within can feed on each other. While Under the Shadow critiques sexist oppression in post-revolutionary Iran by focusing, in some sense, on the private sphere, it folds the narrative into a larger social and historical event (the Iran-Iraq war), to describe the impact of imperialist intrusion on internal social development.

As the djinn’s aggressions escalate throughout the film, Shideh flees her home forgetting to wear the newly mandatory Islamic veil. She is promptly picked up by revolutionary guards and sent to jail where she is reminded, by yet another cleric, of her main duty in life: to guard her modesty. With this dark turn, Shideh and Dorsa are sent back into the private sphere to a now escalated haunting. In their second attempt to escape this home that has now become a prison, the djinn seizes Dorsa, and Shideh throws herself into an attack on the djinn, creating the most visually striking scene in the film: Shideh is shown drowning in the fabric of an Islamic veil. This heavy-handed symbolism makes a clear statement about women’s struggles in the Islamic Republic while avoiding criticisms that categorically denounce Islam and suggest that Iranians see themselves as pseudo-Europeans instead.[8] Perhaps most importantly, this film’s critique of the Islamic Republic acknowledges the influence of interference from more powerful and wealthy countries. With a critique anchored in native ideas and mythologies, this diaspora film gives a nuanced reading of the crises facing Iranian people without rejecting what remains sacred to many Iranian people who don’t find themselves in European culture which is, after all, a culture that does not easily accept outsiders and differences.In its very title, Under the Shadow, provides a double-edge criticism of internal sexism and external imperialism by highlighting how women’s situation in post-revolutionary Iran is always informed by both: the shadow is a demonic entity haunting the splitting of society into public and private spheres and the shadow is an American-made missile sold through Israeli channels.

Now, in January of 2023, Iran continues making headlines for the current popular protests erupting in the streets of the nation and the media continues to focus on culture and religion as if it is totally separate from historical struggles and ongoing trade wars. Despite this, Iranians are making their will known to the authoritarian clerical regime that has so miserably failed the promises of the 1979 revolution as they crack down on protesters and brutalize their own people who are protesting an economic situation that has left half of the nation in poverty. Meanwhile, the Western media continues to focus only, perhaps obsess over, the image of the veil.

[1] The Djinn are entities from Islamic theology said to inhabit an invisible world that exist parallel to the one inhabited by human beings. Of the Djinn it is said that 30 tribes exist and walk on land, move in fires, and fly in the sky, et cetera.

[2] For a brief history of the third-world struggle, please see Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third-World or Anour Majid’s Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World.

[3] The chador is a covering that conceals the entire body, except for the face, and is worn within or outside the home. The in-home chador is usually made of colorful and floral fabrics and is the veil of choice during prayer. The outdoor chador is normally all black or navy blue and is almost always worn by women who work in public service. The djinn in this story appears in an in-home chador perhaps emphasizing the ways that the private sphere of the home became such a major enclosure for women in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

[4] Like many regions in the Third-World, British and American corporate interests have dramatically re-shaped the destinies of entire nations as British and American governments either stood by tacitly or actively aided in maintaining these corporate interests. In the case of Iran, the British government enabled William Knox D’Arcy’s brazen theft of Iranian oil and American business interests motivated the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of a democratically elected secular leader (Mohammad Mossadegh). For one small glimpse and altogether depressing look into this history, please see The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century by Giuliano Garavini.

[5] Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis provides this kind of reading of current world crises.

[6] In the case of this famous statement by the prophet, as Fatima Mernissi notes in her book The Veil and the Male Elite, the city of Median in which the young Muslim community had taken shelter was under siege when members of the prophet’s household were being specifically targeted and harassed by unwelcoming locals. So, when new Muslims in this new experimental community came to the prophet about the harassment of women, the prophet made a comment about women staying at home. For a detailed account of Islamic history written from a feminist perspective, please see The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam by Fatima Mernissi (85-101).

[7] The “Ummah” means global Muslim community in Arabic. “Peace Be Upon Him” is invoked by believers who speak the prophet’s name.

[8] Marjane Satrapi’s brilliantly illustrated and iconic Persepolis has some subtle and not so subtle moments of Eurocentrism that I discuss at length in “Global Mobility and Subaltern Knowledge” available online via Peitho https://cfshrc.org/article/introduction-to-the-fall-2022-issue/.

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