Without boundary : [brochure] seventeen ways of looking : the Museum of Modern Art, February 26-May 22, 2006 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Shifting Boundaries: How to Make Sense of Islamic Art
There has been little change to definitions offered for the term “Islamic art” in the last 40 years. Alongside literary definitions, readers are presented with visual examples and sub-categories to help understand what the term might be applied to. With discussion on the understanding of Islamic art continuing to present day, we look to why ambiguity still exists. In searching for an answer we review some of the most popular definitions cited in recent literature, with a number of examples referring back to the writings of Oleg Grabar in 1973 - a time when Islamic culture was still predominantly associated with Muslim lands. We also examine some of the influences on sub-categorisation within Islamic art based on these definitions and consider the validity of these in light of the contemporary Islamic art scene in places such as Britain, where there is a large and growing Muslim diaspora. We ask, who is in the position to determine whether an artwork is “Islamic?” The artist, curator, or historian? Finally, we aim to clarify ambiguities surrounding the term “Islamic art” whilst also proposing a contemporary understanding of existing definitions in light of the views from all stakeholders, including those whose views are yet to be documented – the artists.
Echoes and Identity: What is contemporary 'Islamic' art?
Exhibition curated for Trinity Grammar, Kew, Melbourne. 'Islamic' art is a vast field. It can include objects, artworks and architecture from the seventh century to the present day, from all around the world. It is challenging, spectacular and vigorously debated by artists and art historians. Today, very few artists describe their work as 'Islamic'. This digital exhibition suggests ways in which 'Islamic' art might be re-imagined. It is a matter of echoes and identity.
The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field
The Art Bulletin, 2003
When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergraduates could read. When we started teaching the subject nearly a decade later, there were still none, and we had to make do with stacks of photocopied articles and chapters assigned from one book or another in an attempt to present students with a coherent narrative. So little survey material existed that even graduate students had difficulty getting a grasp on the whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publications. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes implied that Islamic architecture ended in 900 C.E. except in Egypt, where it suddenly stopped four hundred years later in the middle of the Bahri Mamluk period, although the Mamluk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architecture in many lands besides Egypt.' The venerable Survey of wieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance.7 Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant-but not sole-religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not comparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked. And what about art? Islamic art is generally taken to encompass everything from the enormous congregational mosques and luxury manuscripts commissioned by powerful rulers from great architects and calligrapher-painters to the inlaid metalwares and intricate carpets produced by anonymous urban craftsmen and nomad women. However, much of what man)y historians of Islamic art normally study-inlaid metalwares, luster ceramics, enameled glass, brocaded textiles, and knotted carpets-is not the typical purview of the historian of Western art, who generally considers such handicrafts to be "minor" or "decorative" arts compared with the "nobler" arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. While architecture is as important in Islamic culture as it was in Western Europe or East Asia, visual representation, which plays such an enormous role in the artistic traditions of Europe and Asia, is a relatively minor and limited component of Islamic culture, and sculpture is virtually unknown. In sum, then, the term "Islamic art" seems to be a convenient misnomer for everything left over from everywhere else. It is most easily defined by what it is not: neither a region, nor a period, nor a school, nor a movement, nor a dynasty, but the visual culture of a place and time when the people (or at least their leaders) espoused a particular religion. Compared with other fields of art history, the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars." Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying Islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth.9 There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "Islamic," and the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it. Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world. In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture.10 This all-embracing view of Islam and Islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism." This twentieth-century view, enshrined in countless books, is all the odder considering that there is no central authority that can speak for all Muslims, although many might claim to do so. No matter what newspapers-and many books-say, there never was, nor is, a single Islam, and so any attempt to define the essence of a single Islamic art is doomed to failure.1' To the 1970s Western views of Islam and its culture were formed in the crucible of colonialism, as foreign powers expanded economically and politically into the region during a period when traditional local powers-notably, the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mughals in northern India-were weakening. Colonialism was not limited to Western European imperialists. In the nineteenth century the Chinese and the Russians absorbed the Muslim khanates of Central Asia. The Chinese province of Xinjiang (literally, "New Territories") was carved out of Silk Road oases controlled for the last millennium by Muslims. The Russians, who sought warm-water ports, pushed south into Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Colonial expansion, which was initially motivated by a desire for raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, was enormously complicated in the twentieth century by the discovery of huge deposits of petroleum throughout the region, from the Algerian Sahara through Kurdistan and the Arabian Peninsula to Sumatra, and its consequent development as the world's major source of energy. These global events had several ramifications for the study of Islamic art. For at least a millennium, European travelers had brought back souvenirs of Islamic handicraft and given them new meanings. Itienne de Blois, commander of the First Crusade along with his brothers Godefroy de Bouillon and Baudoin, returned to France and became patron of the abbey of St-Josse near Caen. He apparently brought back with him the glorious samite saddlecloth made in northeastern Iran for the commander Abu Mansur Bakhtegin in the late tenth century (Fig. 1), for it was used to wrap the bones of the saint when he was reburied in 1134.12 The spectacular rockcrystal ewer made in Egypt for the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz (r. 975-96) must have had a similar history before it became a prized relic in the treasury of S. Marco.'3 During the sack of C6rdoba in 1010, Catalan mercenaries probably looted the
International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2022
This book focuses on 'perceptual culture' of the Islamic world and the sensory experience when engaging with the world, including what we call art. Shaw explores a wide range of sources, intertwined with the Islamic lived history and its intellectual sphere, which includes religious texts, Sufi treatises, poetry, etc. Like her approach to the topic, her selection of sources is controversial. In chapter one, 'The Islamic Image', the argument is about the image prohibition in Islam, an inaccurate assumption which has been repeatedly underscored by modern scholars. By stating that what we think of Islam affects our understanding of the image in Islam, Shaw discusses how the lived history of Islam, 'in which Islam regenerates its meanings, in which culture and perception form', makes a difference in our opinion of Islam, that is usually based on the story of its foundation (pp. 34-36). By going through various Islamic texts and discourses, Shaw points out the relationship between the perceptual culture with intellectual culture, faith and Sufism. Through examples of different uses of image in Islamic world, Shaw explains how the absolutism of an image prohibition emerges more from modern scholars and their blind reference to the Quran and Hadith without studying the Islamic culture and its history as a whole (pp. 46-48). Shaw argues that a study of historical sources shows that the concern regarding images related mostly to those which were considered polytheistic or suggested idolatry and distracted the believer from the One God (p. 44). Shaw believes that Islamic commentators focused on 'inward-looking' aspect of the mimesis; arguing that for early Islamic thinkers, image is a mean of 'internalizing the real' rather than showing or representing the real (p. 56). The second chapter, 'Seeing with Ears', explores the 'pre-modern Islamic discussion of music to trace their inheritance of antique understanding of mimesis' (p. 57); and the connection it makes between human and the divine. Through the Sufi and philosophical discourses, Shaw describes how the meanings conveyed in music create images in the mind and dress its spirituality because of its impact on the heart and soul and engaging the recipient with the divine (pp. 64, 66). Shaw explores different opinions of Muslim scholars and Sufi orders about music and where it stands 'between transcendence and transgression' (pp. 70, 71). Some thinkers indicate audition as a path to spirituality and the divine, but others disdain it because it was usually accompanied by sinful acts such as drinking. Shaw discusses the association of wine and music in Islamic poetry and paintings, concluding that it is not possible to analyse it within conventional universal art-historical methods which rely on rationalism. The third chapter, 'The Insufficient Image', starts with an important question: 'if music was understood as producing images in the soul, then how were visual images understood to communicate?' (p. 79). This is illustrated by a story from Nizami, 1 on the impact of music on the soul, with related allegories from different sources. In the second section, by interpreting an illustration of this story, the writer compares the 'value of sonic and visual mimesis' (p. 79) and by going through different opinions of Islamic commentators concludes that music is probably superior to painting because of its direct connection to the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches
The Journal of Art Historiography June 1, 2012, vol. 6 (Special Issue on the Historiography of Islamic Art and Architecture, guest-edited by Moya Carey and Margaret S. Graves), 2012
The article examines the shift in the field, since the 1970s, from a predominant focus on the early period of Islamic art and architecture in the 'central zone' of the Fertile Crescent to a broader chronological and geographical scope. This shift has contributed, among other things, to a change of emphasis from artistic unity to variety, accompanied by an increasing diversification of concepts and approaches including dynastic, regional, media-based, textual, theoretical, critical, and historiographical inquiries. The article seeks to address the unresolved methodological tensions arising from the expanded scope of the field, along with concomitant anxieties over the fragmentation of its traditional 'universalism'. It begins by outlining the premises of still prevalent approaches inherited from the construction of the field during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a field rooted in the entangled legacies of Orientalism, nationalism, and dilletantism. The article then reviews recent statements on the state and future of the field before turning to personal reflections on challenges posed by its expanding horizons and its relationship to the Museum. “The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches,” in Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, Gerhard Wolf (London: Saqi Books, 2012), 57-75. (Electronically reproduced in The Journal of Art Historiography, June 1, 2012, vol. 6; Special Issue on the Historiography of Islamic Art and Architecture, guest-edited by Moya Carey and Margaret S. Graves, 1-26).
LIBRI: Kitap Tanıtımı, Eleştiri ve Çeviri Dergisi, Journal of Book Notices, Reviews and Translations, 2019
Perhaps the earliest of European terms employed to describe the religious art-the works of Islam, Islamic Art, describes through this term a work as having been made, (In the manner of ) The Lord. The term employed from the 14th c. onwards in a variety of forms include: Rabb-esco, Ar-Rabb-esco, Orabesco, Rabask/Rabesk/Rebesk, Arabesk, Arabeschi, Rabesca, Rabescato, Rabescare, Rabeschi, Rabesci, Rabiscu, Rabbesco, Rabbiscu, Rabesch, today, most frequently written, Arabesque. This term records an Arabic word which was brought into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Sicilian, and a word which directly relates the name of this type of work to the Arabic word Rabb, meaning Lord, and which was then combined with the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese suffix- esco, hence, with the Arabic article, ar-rabb+esco, or, without the article, rabb+esco, today the term, Arabesque. In consequence, to state as Blair and Bloom do, that, “There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as “Islamic”, and the notion of a distinctly “Islamic” tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it." is a statement that is simply incorrect. It was a term employed by Muslims to describe to others those works that were made "in the manner of the Lord", meaning in the manner prescribed by the Almighty, through the expression of iktisāb, that is, Islamic Art. For a different modern opinion concerning the term ""Arabesque" see: Met. Museum. N.Y., Department of Islamic Art. “Vegetal Patterns in Islamic Art. "It was not until the medieval period (tenth–twelfth centuries) that a highly abstract and fully developed Islamic style emerged, featuring that most original and ubiquitous pattern often known as “arabesque.” This term was coined in the early nineteenth century (sic.) following Napoleon’s famed expedition in Egypt, which contributed so much to the phenomenon of Orientalism in Europe and later in the United States. Arabesque simply means “in the Arab fashion” (sic.) in French, and few scholars of Islamic art use it today (sic.)."” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vege/hd\_vege.htm (October 2001) As also, “The first is the identification of the “arabesque” (a term coined in early modern Europe) (sic.) not only as the epitome of Islamic art but also as the epitome of the ornamental.” In the Ed(s): Finbarr Barry Flood; Gülru Necipoğlu. Companion to Islamic Art of 2017, Vol. 1, page 26. file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/Frameworks_of_Islamic_Art_and_Architectu.pdf Dini sanatları, İslami eserleri ve İslam Sanatını tanımlamak adına kullanılmış belki de en eski Avrupa terimleri, bu terim aracılığıyla bir eseri Tanrı’nın yolunda yapılmışçasına tanımlar. Terimin 14. yüzyıldan itibaren farklı kullanılış biçimleri ile karşılaşılır: Rabb-esco, Ar-Rabb-esco, Orabesco, Rabask/Rabesk/Rebesk, Arabesk, Arabeschi, Rabesca, Rabescato, Rabescare,Rabeschi, Rabesci, Rabiscu, Rabbesco, Rabbiscu, Rabesch ve günümüzde sıklıkla kullanıldığışekli ile Arabesque. Bu terimin Portekizceye, İspanyolcaya, İtalyancaya ve Sicilya dilinegeçmiş Arapça bir kelime ile birlikte, bu türden bir eserin ismini Arapçadaki Rabb, Tanrı, kelimesi ile ilişkilendiren bir başka kelimenin, İtalyanca, İspanyolca ve Portekizcedeki ‘-esco’sonekiyle birleşerek, Arapça bir artikel ile birlikte ar-rabb+esco, veya artikelsiz rabb+escoşeklinde oluştuğu, günümüze de Arabesque (Arabesk) şeklinde geldiği görülür. Sonuç olarak, Blair ve Bloom’un yaptığı gibi, “On dördüncü yüzyılda herhangi bir sanatçının veya haminin İslam’ın ortaya çıkışından bu yana kendi sanatının ‘İslami’ olduğunu düşündüğüne yönelik hiçbir kanıt yoktur; ve giderek Atlantik ile Hint okyanusları arasındaki topraklara yayılan ‘İslami’ sanat ve mimari geleneği kavramı, bunu tanımlamak için üretilen terminoloji ile birlikte geç on dokuzuncu ve yirminci yüzyıl Batı akademisinin bir ürünüdür” demek en yalıntabir ile yanlıştır. Bu terim, Müslümanlar tarafından başkalarına her şeye kadir/Allahtarafından emir buyurulan minval anlamına gelen, iktisāb, yani İslam Sanatının dışavurumuaracılığıyla ‘Tanrı’nın yolunda’ yapılmış eserleri açıklamak için kullanılmıştır.