2.
Araeen’s art production offers the welcome proof that from early on he pursued the great project of performing an outsider artist’s visibility in a dominant Western art world or, to phrase it in other words, his intention to develop alternative strategies for changing the narrow limits of the “System.” In the 1960s, this meant rethinking the minimalism that prevailed at the time. At this stage, he may have hoped to embrace and also to transform Western modernism before changing the strategy of his activities in the early London years, including a public performance where the environment was the essential part. Such was the case with The Floating Discs from 1974 where the water was to carry away his objects, even out into the open sea. Essential was the interaction with the public, who were meant to launch the discs. It was an important move to abandon the closed profile of the art installation in the minimalist sense. Instead, he intended to open the creative act in terms of real movement: This also meant to create a new public that was invited to participate.
In a commentary that he wrote in 1974,(21) he states that the “changing relationship is my basic concern, the significance of which does not lie in mere beautification of the environment but to create an environment that reflects new ideas and concepts.”
In the time span from 1978, the year of the “Black Manifesto,” until 1985, Araeen produced many different series of self-portraits that come as a surprise among his abstract and structural works. They are not only different in that they are representational, but they also openly address the question of “Otherness.” They show a non-Western face that raises the problem of identity in the art world. One of the self-portraits was chosen for the cover of his book and thus directly connects with the title Making myself visible, even when such visibility would imply an unwelcome and insulted face. Araeen may today regard this part of his oeuvre as an episode or even as non representative, but it illuminates much of his writing in a most convincing way. His printed face, as a stereotype, represents an ethnic self that is attacked as an artist-invader in a Western space. His own interventions were left to overpaintings or insulting texts, as if they had been written on or smeared over a poster in a public space.
The portraits appear in the years when, in Pakistan, the regime had turned to reinforcing the country’s Islamic faith. One example refers to a newspaper report of such fundamentalist acts, and the text is pasted around his neck. The title A long afternoon (22) is borrowed from the same newspaper article. Of a series of nine self-portraits, all but one disappear under a thick layer of overpainting as if they were blackened out. The one visible face among this configuration of stereotypes seems to have been left as an open question. Another work, where the nine heads (minus one) are covered by whitewash, refers to a museum visit in Lahore where the artist discovered the note: “A painting exposed after removing British white-wash” and pasted it to the picture, as if it were a museum label. He seems to imply that non-Western artists have been subjected to a “white-wash” by a British brand of art history.(23) In a third work, again with nine heads, called Coloured, (24) in the end, the gradual darkening of the image of the self seems to expose a “Black artist,” which is Araeen’s formula for the ethnic artist.
Sometimes his face seems to have been attacked by an invisible crowd. In one case, the face is torn into two halves, much as the title is split into “Art” and “History.”(25) The fissure implies that Araeen could do art, but still would not enter official modernist art history. As in other instances, the strategy is ironical and subversive. The face that appears on the cover of the 1984 book represents the one who struggles to “make myself visible.” The graffiti across his face, reading “FUCKING DRUNK,” “BLACKS OUT,” or “PAKIS GO HOME” provides the impression that this head is subjected to acts of aggression by a public both Western and resting outside the art world. The inscription in an earlier piece asks the question: “How could one paint a self-portrait!”(26) given the uncertainty of the artist’s identity. The picture was made for John Moore’s Liverpool Biennial in 1978, but was returned from the committee with the decision “not accepted,” which Araeen then pasted on the work. In fact, a self-portrait is under such auspices a contradiction in itself.
The so-called “Ethnic Drawings”(27) counterbalance the portraits with inscriptions in Araeen’s native Urdu, whose Muslim writing reveals a cultural dilemma. Even his face seems to be a violation of a Koran mentality. In one of four drawings, the face is an empty surface that fills up with writing. In another case, the face is blinded and carries English words among those in Urdu. The artist wanted to “satirise those who by adopting their stereotypes (ethnicities) seek their careers in the West.”(28) There is a lot of irony involved when Araeen admits a dualism between his ego and his supposed ego. The wide and surprising range in his use of the topic of “self-portraits” proves the complexity of his artistic strategy in which even apparent borrowings from the repertory of Western type “art history” have been subverted to unexpected messages.
Another new type of work that Araeen had presented in the 1989 exhibition Les magiciens de la terre a year before makes its first appearance in a retrospective of the Ikon Gallery at Birmingham.(29) They seem to hide their destination as art understood in the exclusive sense of art’s autonomy and self-reference. Instead, they seem to address an audience different from that of the (Western) art world, even if this remains a fiction, a fiction pointing to the dualism between exhibition space and the political sphere. The nine panels, which in their serial arrangement remind us of their early minimalist production, this time include photographs and what seems to be an ornamental background. Golden Calf, an early example from 1987(30) juxtaposes, as Desa Philippi writes in the catalogue, “Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe … with the silkscreened photographs of what appears to be a crowd of mourning Iranian women, while the center is occupied by the single image of a dead Iranian soldier lying in a pool of blood.”(31) The photograph of the Iraq-Iranian war has been taken from an Iranian newspaper that accused not only the Iraq enemy but also American imperialism. The four Marilyn Monroes, against the human reality of politics and war, look like an artificial and empty message from an indifferent art world. The work seems to unmask the violence in a divided world where the West is represented both by its global media (Marilyn) but also by an art icon (Warhol). The Western art fetishes, as free trade commodities, are contrasted with the reality of the contemporary world. Araeen’s visual material, as Desa Philippi adds, is accustomed to traversing “the discourses that designate him Other and his work ‘ethnic’ (while indicating their limits), and a space is mapped where inscription beyond entrenched dichotomies becomes possible.”(32) The four “Green Paintings”(33) show monochrome green surfaces in the corners while the remaining sections are arranged cross-wise and present images from the mass media. Texts, in addition, describe the political message inherent in such works. The first of the “Green paintings” that he selected for Peter Weibel’s exhibition Inklusion:Exklusion from 1996, juxtaposes five photographs showing pools of blood on the street with a green surface in the corners that makes reference to what is a holy color in Islam and is also the color of the flag of Pakistan. This double religious and national connotations also characterize the photographs: “The blood was left after the slaughter of goats for the festival of Eid-udaha, commemorating Abraham’s sacrifice.”(34) Beside one of the pools of blood a little flag reads “Long Live Pakistan.”(35) The strips of Urdu writing beneath the five photographs look ornamental to a Western eye. But they were taken from newspaper headlines in Urdu referring to Nixon’s visit to Pakistan and to the arrest of Benazir Bhutto.(36) Thus, the texts place such a work in the context of contemporary politics. The work has a complex stratification of semantic meanings. It addresses the imagination of people in Pakistan, but in fact it was exhibited in London where it had to be mediated. In Pakistan, it would have been unfamiliar as a work of art.
To quote John Roberts, “Araeen reworks elements of both his own culture and his ‘adopted’ one as a form of ‘cross cultural mapping’ in which the voice of the subaltern is shown as no less split across the spaces of representation than that of the Western subject.” We here encounter the falsity of “the myth of Modernism’s distance from traditional cultures. By juxtaposing the conflicting ideological spaces of the ‘primitive’ (photographs of blood spilt from the ritual slaying of animals during the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Azha) and the ‘Modern’ (the use of an organizing grid patter and inclusion of a painted green apnel in each corner as in the manner of high-Modernism) Araeen destabilizes their respective orders of identification.” And Araeen is quoted as stating that the two spaces are upside down or dialecticized. “The ‘primitive’ periphery is cleared of all traces of expressionism (bloody ritual) which then is transferred to the central space (a cross/Ad Reinhardt). The Modernity of Minimalism is thus ‘restored’ to where it came from, Islamic culture, which remains fragmented (four parts) and occupies corners of the dominant culture.”(37)
Araeen finally left the gallery space when he managed to hang twenty large billboards in the streets of London and one in Potsdam.(38) They were originally called Golden Words but he renamed them Golden Verses when he was commissioned by “The Art Angel,” a public art sponsoring agency in London in the time of the controversy around Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.” The billboard shows an oriental carpet that is filled in the center with three lines of an inscription in Urdu. This work antagonized not only a Western audience, which became intrigued by the illegible writing and the symbol of oriental culture, but also managed to antagonize an oriental audience who could read the verses praising the white man and his civilization. We read in English letters surrounding the carpet: “White people are very good people. They have very white and soft skin. Their hair is golden and their eyes are blue. Their civilization is the Best civilization. In their countries they live life with love and affection and there is no racial discrimination whatsoever. People are very good people.” The model for the carpet, which today is owned by The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., is a work from Andalusia, made about the same time when, as Araeen remarks in a letter, Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain.(39)
At a time when Rushdie’s novel was drawing counter-demonstrations, Araeen’s work also became the target of violence. Let us quote from a recent letter: “In the London East where there is a large Asian population, it was attacked by the use of some metal instrument and damaged; in one of the northern cities, it was burnt down by a Pakistan group with a graffiti in Urdu reading: “white peoples are bastards.” Near Victoria in London, it also came under attack by the National Front with a question: “What’s it all about, bongo?” Afterwards, Araeen himself chose this insult as the title for his next work. He appropriated the violent response for himself and thus reacted to a “clash of civilizations,” to use the title of Samuel P. Huntington’s book. Obviously, the public space rather than the art market is his arena of choice. The “museum as arena,” the title of the Bregenz volume, would not be an obvious choice for him, either in the West or in Pakistan.
