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Beauty in the Shadow of Violence

October 7, 2001

By HOLLAND COTTER




I DON'T go to museums to relax or to be soothed. I don't go
to be reassured that civilization still stands. I go with
other needs and expectations. I go to be stimulated, to get
the latest news from the distant past, to be made to think,
though not necessarily to think easy thoughts.
Drop into any gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
with your eyes open and you're bound to encounter at least
a few gloriously made objects with disturbing meanings,
fabulous things made for terrible reasons: political power,
greed, repression. Art is tough, complicated stuff. It is
always talking, hustling, pushing agendas, and it needs to
be talked back to, to be questioned and argued with as well
as praised. If you just warm-and-fuzzy it or "genius" it,
you're selling it, and yourself, short.

This equally applies to work that addresses the most benign
and expansive side of the human spirit. Such art is also
manipulative and in some ways even more complex. It wants
to discompose your inner life, push you, however gently,
beyond yourself, to places you can't go on your own. You'll
find this dynamic at work everywhere, in African sculpture,
in early Italian and Netherlandish painting, in Chinese
calligraphy and in that vast, paradox-rich reservoir of
ideas and feelings known as Islamic art.

It's not surprising that people who love Islamic art often
love it more that any other art. I know that feeling well.
And it's important to say so now. Several exhibitions of
Islamic material - the three largest of them at the Met -
are on view in New York this fall, a rare occurence. And
all of them arrive in the shadow of violence that has given
the very word Islam a volatile, negative edge.

The fact is, most Westerners know little about Islam,
though it is all around them. The religion is practiced by
a quarter to a third of the human race and is the fastest
growing faith in the United States. But more than a creed,
Islam is a state of being and a hugely diverse,
ever-changing international culture, which seamlessly
unites the spiritual and the secular, the religious and the
political, the extravagant and the austere.

One way into that culture is through art, though access is
not without problems. Lack of information is one of them.
Although scholarly study of Islamic art has certainly grown
in the West in recent years, English- language textbooks
are still few. Big museum shows are infrequent and are
almost always confined to work of the distant past, though
Islamic art is a vibrant continuing tradition.
Comprehensive public collections are rare, and where they
exist they get little foot traffic. One can usually be
assured of solitude in the Met's stunning Islamic
galleries.

So far, the Islamic work that has most consistently gained
an audience in the West is of a certain kind: secular,
imperial art, like the "miniature" paintings produced in
Persia and Mughal India. This makes sense: their
action-adventure narratives and lavish production values
are time-tested box-office gold. The three Met shows - one
of metalwork (through March 24), another of glass (through
Jan. 13), a third of Mughal jewelry from the Kuwait
National Museum (it opens on Oct. 18) - should also do
well. The types of objects are familiar; the workmanship
beyond exquisite. The jewelry is likely to be an especially
popular draw. Let's just say it sparkles plenty.

In contrast to this extroverted fare, however, other kinds
of Islamic art discourage casual intimacy, at least for
non-Muslims. Much of the early classical work seen in
museum collections, notably calligraphy, is a product of
what is, after all, a religiously based civilization. And
at the visual center of that civilization is not a
personality or a story but a book called the Koran.

The Koran is the word of God, or Allah. In the early
seventh century, Islam holds, it was orally delivered
through the angel Gabriel to an Arabian merchant, visionary
and political activist named Muhammad, who considered
himself the seal on a line of prophets - or to use his
word, messengers - that included Abraham and Jesus. The
revelations were committed to memory by his family and
friends and collected after his death. The resulting text
is viewed as unalterable and universally sufficient: God
will not change, so his words will not change; everything
real radiates from them, every question is resolved in
them.

Like Judaism and Christianity, other monotheistic
"religions of the book," Islam regards its book as the
book, the last word, the concluding volume. Its view of
history is bookishly linear, with a beginning, a middle and
an end. And because the foundational document is often
ambiguous and contradictory - retributive one minute,
intoxicatingly poetic the next - it is, like the Bible,
ripe for legalistic interpretation. (Buddhism, to take a
contrasting religion, has no such book; indeed, the Buddha
seems to have thought carved-in-stone ideological
statements a bad idea, a source of trouble.)

But in addition to being a compilation of words and ideas,
the Koran is a visual icon, to be touched and displayed in
special ways. Some Korans, in fact, were made solely to be
looked at, not read. Because the holy book was revealed in
Arabic, Arabic is the sacred language of Islam, with its
own mystical traditions. (Technically, the Koran in any
other language is not the Koran.) And because the book was
preserved and disseminated through exacting hand-copies,
calligraphy took on tremendous spiritual, political and
aesthetic power.

Calligraphy has always been considered Islamic culture's
artistic pinnacle; to some conservative Muslims it is the
only genuinely Islamic art. It accounts for some of the
most astounding work ever done in the art of the book, and
as the vehicle for transmitting the Koran it continues to
play a crucial role in sustaining a global Islamic
community. An inscription from the Koran in Arabic is one
of the few things absolutely required to make a mosque a
mosque; whether the structure itself is an airport-size
hall in Dubai or in a storefront in Paris or Brooklyn
doesn't matter.

For Westerners not fluent in Arabic, which is most
Westerners, one of Islam's defining aesthetic achievements
must always stay at a certain remove: it's as if you can
see the written word but you can't quite hear it, can't
viscerally feel it's pulse, its vibration. And as it
happens, the other medium to which Islam made an
audaciously original contribution, architecture, is also
difficult for Westerners to experience first hand. Most of
the greatest early examples are in Africa, Asia and the
Middle East.

Yet there is a third distinctive art form that can be found
and savored wherever Islamic art is shown: ornament, and
specifically a versatile language of vegetal, floral and
geometric designs.
To the jumpy, channel-surfing Western eye, these apparently
symmetrical patterns, which can be extended forever and
have no goal, give an impression of stasis, of nothing
happening. But if you pay attention - and Islamic art
requires attention and time - you start to see that that
"nothing" is not only subtly varied and modulated but also
constantly refashioned and revised to fit different forms
and surfaces. It is woven into carpets, painted on pots,
worked out in tiles on the prayer niche of a mosque. It
spills across dinner dishes and ivory boxes; it is picked
out in gold filigree on a brooch and twines like tendrils
around household utensils.

In the West, "art" is a category of special, glamorous
things - paintings, sculptures - set apart from other
things. Islamic culture blurs such hierarchies. Instead,
everyday objects are exalted; exalted objects are for
everyday. Their functions and meanings are often
free-floating, determined by context alone: a glass pitcher
could be for domestic or liturgical use; an alabaster
screen for a harem or a tomb. Over, around and through
everything the ornamental patterns fall like a sheer,
open-weave net, breaking up solidity, contradicting
gravity, binding everything together.
Why this obsession with ornament? There are theories. Islam
prohibits the use of the figure in religious art, though
the Koran says nothing about this. Possibly the motives
were political. A still-new religion needed a "look" to
distinguish itself from an image-intensive Christian
culture. The use of flexible, nonhierarchical ornamental
patterns, along with fluid calligraphic inscriptions, was
an ideal solution, and it carried its own resonant cultural
symbolism.

All-over pattern composed of countless individual,
interlocked parts, each giving birth to the next, offered a
visual equivalent of Islam's holistic, integrative world
view, one that advocates control of mind, body and space,
and that sees the faithful as all part of a single unity.
The fact that abstract design is adaptable to any context -
sacred or secular yet always sending out the same cultural
signals - also had meaning.

In a culture that is simultaneously this- worldly and
other-worldly, a Muslim is always a Muslim whether
worshiping in a mosque or dining at home. In a sense the
whole world is a mosque in which, wherever you are, at
certain times, you kneel facing Mecca and pray. And the
mosque is itself a multitasking structure. It can serve as
a prayer hall, a school, a bank, a library and a social
service center.

Ornament has ethical and metaphysical dimensions as well.
In the way it visually atomizes solid structures, it not
only serves as a metaphor for earthly transience but also
answers to Islam's deep-seated indifference to, and even
rejection of, materialism, its view of the physical world
as both a mirage and as a veil obscuring the face of God.

Obviously, such ideas don't underlie, or at least aren't
obvious in, every aspect of Islamic art and life. Mughal
jewelry is very much about its carat-measured look-at-me
thereness. Nonetheless, the antimaterialist strain is real
and pervasive. It is deeply inimical to certain features of
the modern West, notably its overwhelming seductive and
aggressively exported consumer-material culture, which is
perceived to be undermining and invalidating other cultures
with values very different from its own.

Such differences, and the long-festering tensions and
resentments they inspired among a band of zealots - a
fringe group of Muslims who claimed to act in the name of
the religion but chose to ignore Allah's defining
self-description in the Koran as merciful and compassionate
- contributed to the cataclysmic events in New York and
Washington. And neither the West nor the Islamic world has
a hope of recovering from the damage done in any
constructive, humane way without profound transformations
in thinking on both sides.

If you look, you can find the seeds of zealotry in Islamic
art just as surely as you can in Christian art: in
exclusionary emblems, in flashes of messianic fervor, in an
insistent control of objects and images that can be used in
many ways. What you will also find, though, are the tools
of transformation: generosity, patience, intellectual
alertness, a thirst for balance and a trust in the fragile
beneficence of beauty that is both actively utopian and
utterly reality-based, as the experience of art should be.



http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/arts/design/07COTT.html?ex=1003464172&ei=1&en=caf05518962b9754



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