From the WSJ Opinion Archives

LEISURE & ARTS

The Mullahs Kept Quiet
Tehran exhibit of modern British art avoids political shocks, but still awes.

BY MELIK KAYLAN
Thursday, April 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

TEHRAN, Iran--Purple ceramic doughnuts, an installation of 10,000 roses, a crucified skeleton: Seen in any gallery or museum in London, New York or Tokyo, such things might be dismissed as the standard flotsam of "edgy" art in our time. Here, however, they actually looked daring. The occasion was "Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture," at the Tehran Museum of Art, an exhibition organized by the British Council to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. A survey of 61 works by 15 artists from Henry Moore to the present, it was the first major exhibition of contemporary Western art since the fall of the shah, and featured work by some of the most terribles of British art's enfants, such as sculptors Damien Hirst and the Lebanese-born Mona Hatoum.

To make matters really edgy, the show, arranged when moderate political voices held sway, ultimately opened on Feb. 24--two days after rigged Iranian national elections returned a packed Parliament of conservative Islamists. The exhibition also came in the wake of the shooting of a British Embassy employee in Iran, British demands that Iran hand over suspects in the Argentinian synagogue bombings, and, not least, during the continuing presence of British soldiers in Iraq. How might the locals and, more to the point, the authorities react?

The mullahs kept quiet, and the show ended last week after a noisily popular run. Thousands crowded in during the first few days; thereafter it drew a record 600 visitors a day on average. The British Council's arts director, Andrea Rose, and the museum's head, Ali Reza Sami-Azar, had shrewdly ensured that the work set off no hidden mines. For example, they kept out a wheelchair and rubberized crutches by Ms. Hatoum for fear of offending Iran-Iraq war vets. Also omitted were Mr. Hirst's sliced-livestock-in-formaldehyde sculptures or works by his contemporaries the Chapman Brothers, whose specialty is life-size sculptures of naked children with genitals in place of their noses. And while the duo of Gilbert and George were included, they were represented by relatively innocuous 1970s works, rather than their more recent scatological pieces.

Still, the show retained plenty of potential for controversy. The museum's poky foyer opens onto a circular mini-Guggenheim atrium where the visitor encountered the first shock. Hung directly below two large portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei, guardians of Islamic virtue, was Mr. Hirst's "Resurrection" (1998-2003), a human skeleton posed as if on a crucifix.

According to museum officials, other works affected Tehranians more. From earlier decades, for example, the 1980s artist Bill Woodrow ranked high with his sculptures. In one, an American Indian headdress is fashioned from strips of metal torn away from, yet still attached to, a washing machine and a car door. To the Western eye, this now looks witty enough but hardly earth-shaking. Yet two young female art students in the room deemed the work "amazing and funny" and said that they "never saw anything like this before" and that much of the show should be purchased and allowed to stay. Other visitors, talking in general, echoed them, saying that "this is what the world is doing--why aren't we part of the world?" Though some felt they could let go of Gilbert and George's geekily pensive self-portrait photo panels.

Tehranians were apparently most affected by the increasingly contemporary works you discovered as you progressed through the show, which was, once you passed Mr. Hirst, organized chronologically. Foremost among these was Anya Gallacio's "Red on Green," a "process work" (according to the artist) consisting of a room-length, rectangular arrangement of 10,000 roses on the gallery floor designed to decay during the show's duration. A cluster of girls said it was "sad and poetic in an abstract way."

From this generation of artists came the work likeliest to provoke uproar. Ms. Hatoum projected a video of her internal organs onto a dinner plate at a table set for one. The title? "Deep Throat." No doubt the mullahs missed the title's artsy allusion to an old porn film. Yet they also tolerated Iranian-born Shirazeh Houshiary's video installation of powdery supernovas dissolving away to the semi-abstracted sounds of the muezzin's call to prayer. Or was it the lowing of an ox? Or ecstatic keening? One older woman responded in strong English to this reporter's uneasiness with "Iranian women are risk takers. They've had to be for the last 20 years. You close one door, they open another."

To this, and to the entire show in general, one waited for the obvious question from an isolated society, a question that the West has lost the ability to ask--namely, "Is any of this art?" Yet, perhaps to an ancient culture where abstraction is nothing new because religion has sporadically outlawed figurative art, the question seems superfluous. It's clear that the curators cleverly deflected potential censors by avoiding sexual content altogether. Without that, they had no critical handle on the show's content. One local paper came close to disapproval in noting that the art was not familiar to Iranian custom, but media opinion stayed overwhelmingly positive. The mullahs, it seems, are in the business of leaving the door to change partially open--and from the Soviet experience we all know where that leads.

Mr. Kaylan last wrote on reality shows on Arab television.

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