Corpus Anarchicum by H. Dabashi

Author:H. Dabashi [Dabashi, H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Violence&#8212, Suicide bombings&#8212, Human body
ISBN: 9781137264145
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Published: 2012-09-24T07:00:00+00:00

A Bodily Resurrection

Today the possibilities of the bodily resurrection that Shirin Neshat photographs are taking place in full public view and on the site of two crisscrossing passages: bodies taking their cultures to task, and cultures taking their nations to the globe. The global view though confuses the two, taking one for the other and ignoring the organic root of the two in each other. In his review of the Santa Fe biennial, Ralph Rugoff opted to showcase Shirin Neshat’s video installation “Rapture” as an example of what he termed “migratory artists” crowding “circus-like surveys…[of] an internationalist ethic.”1 As Rugoff noted, “the international biennial has taken center stage as the dominant exhibition format for presenting new works,” and even more important, showcasing “an internationalist ethic” has become “in itself a prerequisite for creating a truly contemporary art show.” That may indeed be the case, but to what end? Rosa Martinez, the Spanish curator of Site Santa Fe, calls the exhibition in her New Mexico space “Looking for a Place” out of her conviction that “the most innovative art seeks to break out of institutionalized spaces.” If European museums at the turn of the last fin de siécle in the nineteenth century were the substitute pantheons of high European bourgeoisie replacing the palaces they had vacated of power and churches they had declared dead, these international biennials at the turn of this fin de siécle in the twentieth century are now rightly the sites of immigrant artists no longer at home where they were born but seeking to turn the lemon of migratory labor into the lemonade of creative art.

Rugoff credits Shirin Neshat with having “developed a hybrid vernacular capable of simultaneously addressing her different audiences” and points out that many of her colleagues at the Santa Fe have failed to do so. The question, though, remains: what precisely is this “hybrid vernacular” that is capable of addressing multiple audiences? Does Shirin Neshat indeed manage to speak to more than one audience? And who might these audiences exactly be? Iranians? Migratory (the so-called diasporic) communities? Globalizing capital and labor, of the sort that The Financial Times chronicles? Neshat’s audience(s) cannot of course be considered her compatriot Iranians inside their country because, as Rugoff rightly notes, she “cannot be shown in her native country (Iran).” As for the globality of Neshat’s art, the term conceals much more than it reveals. What it reveals, though, is quite crucial. The globality of the predicament that embraces and informs Neshat’s art supersedes such binary opposition as East-West (or Islam and the West)—terms that have for long distorted the circularity of capital and its culture. The globality of our predicament, which is nothing new, though recently aggravated, cannot any longer be collapsed into convenient but misleading categories. To be contemporary is to be global but global in terms constitutional to the circularity of capital (and labor) migration and the culture it equally forces to be migratory. The global also means the immediate suspension of all the

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