This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . 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