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Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking
Museum of Modern Art
February 26-May 22, 2006

Amanda H. Brown

Tucked into a small exhibition space on the third floor of MoMA from February 26 to May 22, 2006, the group show Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, curated by Fereshteh Daftari, explored the ways in which the term “Islamic” can be used to designate the work of a disparate group of contemporary artists. The goal of questioning the usefulness of a term encompassing artists of varying nationalities, geographic regions, and even religions was announced at the outset in the introductory wall text. The “core” group of artists, as the introduction referred to them, comprised artists from the Islamic world who now live and produce work elsewhere. Many of these artists, such as Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum, are regular fixtures on the ever-growing circuit of mammoth international exhibitions. Additionally, the question of what constitutes Islamic art was complicated by the inclusion of two non-Muslim American artists, Bill Viola and Mike Kelley, whose included works reference Islamic spirituality and traditional art forms, respectively. The exhibition was admirable in its stated attempt to analyze the usefulness of a general rubric often used in recent discourse but perhaps insufficiently questioned. Whether this goal worked on the level of actual curatorial practice, however, is another matter.

As outlined in the exhibition brochure and catalogue, the artists in the exhibition were grouped into four main categories designated by the curator: ‘Text Versus Calligraphy,’ ‘Beyond Miniature Painting,’ ‘Looking under the Carpet,’ ‘Identity in Question,’ and ‘On Spirituality.’ No wall graphics, however, informed the viewer of these groupings. It was only through by the accompanying brochure that one could become aware of the subcategories upon which the arrangement of works was based.

Hung on its own wall, the first work that the viewer encountered was Shirazeh Houshiary’s Fine Frenzy (2004) which draws upon an Arabic calligraphic tradition but translates it into a contemporary, universal idiom with no visible evidence of the Arabic text with which the image is created. Houshiary built up layers of text in white pencil and then selectively erased the markings to produce an abstract image that appears to simultaneously emerge and dissolve. The work’s prominent position at the entrance to the show emphasized that while the selection criteria for the artists in the show was primarily ‘identity’ based, one of the main lenses used for viewing the work was formal. While Daftari placed the work within the context of text and calligraphic traditions, it also fit with the exhibition’s emphasis on a sense of spirituality unbound to direct references to the tenets of Islam. Furthermore, the prominence given to Houshiary’s formally beautiful and spiritually evocative abstraction also proclaimed the show’s avoidance of anything politically controversial.

The majority of Without Boundary was devoted to examining the ways that contemporary artists re-engage with, re-invent, and subvert traditional Islamic art practices. The section on carpets provided several salient examples of the difficulty of using the term ‘Islamic’ for contemporary artists. Mona Hatoum’s 1995 Prayer Mat made of needles references the Islamic prayer mats that must be oriented towards Mecca (Hatoum herself is in fact not Muslim but a Christian born in Lebanon and currently residing in Europe). A similar prayer mat piece by Hatoum was concurrently installed with the permanent collection of contemporary works on the second floor, where it is viewed not in terms of identity politics but post-minimalist aesthetics. Further complicating the question “Islamic or not” was a contemporary rug made in Iran, which of all the works in the show most closely resembled a traditional Islamic work of art. The rug, however, was designed by American artist Mike Kelley following a reproduction of an Ottoman carpet in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kelley replaced the red background with green, however, to evoke his Irish heritage, and also substituted the central medallion for a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign.

In works belonging to the category ‘Identity in Question,’ most treated identity in terms of gender, ethnicity, or religion, as in Jananne Al-Ani’s photographs of herself, her mother, and her sisters in various states of adorning veils. On the other hand, the Atlas Group/Walid Raad’s neo-conceptual Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes To Bury Ourselves (2002) tackles the identity question in a more universal fashion in terms of true/false identities and fictional personas. The Atlas Group itself is actually a fictional collective consisting solely of Raad. In the work on view, photographs from the 1950’s purportedly document Dr. Fakhouri, a Lebanese historian who gave documents to the Atlas Group, in front of various European monuments. Fakhouri, however, is a fictional character created by Raad, and the man in the photographs is most likely his father.[1]

Unfortunately, one of the strongest works from the “On Spirituality” section was not in the main exhibition space but a little out-of-the-way gallery on the second floor. Those who noticed the small signage indicating that the show continues and find their way downstairs were rewarded with Istanbul-born Kutlug Ataman’s 99 Names, a 2002 video installation, which the artist describes as recording his visceral response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Five separate video screens show the artist in various states of a self-induced trance that mounts in intensity across the five monitors. The video panels were suspended from the ceiling at various angles and staggered in height and distance, so that the work functioned both as a video to be watched and as a sculpture that must be engaged by moving through the space.

In mounting an exhibition that highlights artists working in a contemporary idiom born outside traditional European/North American centers and placing them on equal footing with their American colleagues, the MoMA showed that it had made significant strides since its widely criticized exhibition, Primitivism in Modern Art of 1984, which set up affinities between “primitive” and modern art but completely ignored the development of modernism within the countries designated as primitive. Focusing on artists born in former colonial and/or post-colonial countries, areas of the world either previously ignored by Art History or treated as a marginal, exotic ‘other,’ Without Boundary presented a curatorial model heavily influenced by postcolonial theory. Indeed, the inclusion in the catalogue of an essay by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha made the connection with this methodology explicit.

With an introductory wall text proclaiming that it approaches the included artists with an emphasis on individual rather than collective identity, Without Boundary also engaged with a recent curatorial interest in a ‘post-identity’ theoretical model. Uptown at the Studio Museum, Harlem, Thelma Golden’s group show of African American-artists, Frequency, closed just before the opening of Without Boundary at the MoMA. The show was a follow-up to the influential 2001 exhibition Freestyle, which promoted the term ‘post-black.’ This time around, Frequency’s wall text declared its selection criteria to be artists who challenge the label of ‘black artist,’ “preferring to be understood as individuals with complex investigations of blackness in their work.” Precedents of this type of show also include the 2000 exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, whose inclusion of the term “Post-Latin American” in its title signified a desire to move beyond readings of Latin American art based solely on assertions of national identity.

Walking through Without Boundary, one could not help noticing that the show seemed to avoid any artwork that could be construed as politically controversial, despite the fact that the recent history of the Islamic world has been marked by political struggles and violence. The work in the show that most directly engaged with recent history is Iranian-born Shirin Neshat’s photograph with ink, Speechless, of 1996: a woman with a gun barrel in place of an earring, with a poem celebrating martyrdom by the contemporary poet Tahereh Saffarzedeh inscribed on its surface by Neshat. The accompanying wall text, however, served to soften the effect of the work, summarizing it as “noting the social class newly empowered by the revolution.” Certainly not every artist from the Islamic world is or should be concerned with political issues in his or her artistic practice. Yet in light of curatorial choices at play in the MoMA’s exhibition, it is hard not to wonder if certain decisions were made more to avoid controversy than to give an accurate view of an artist’s body of work. Emily Jacir is best known for work that deals with the way Israeli checkpoints and border crossing restrictions affect the lives of both Palestinians and Israelis. At the 2004 Whitney Biennial, some angry visitors asked for their money back in response to Jacir’s work that documented herself using the privileges of her American passport to carry out the wishes of Palestinians around the world who have limited or no access to their homeland. There is no such risk of angry viewers of Jacir’s piece in Without Boundary, a two-channel video installation that shows the similarities between comparable businesses in New York and Ramallah. While the majority of The Atlas Group/Walid Raad’s oeuvre concerns itself with the way violence has shaped the recent history of Lebanon, his work in Without Boundary, though fascinating, was a bit anodyne compared to the piece in the MoMA’s own collection documenting Beirut car bombings or, for that matter, much of the work on view in the Walid Raad/Atlas Group exhibition concurrently on view at the Kitchen in Chelsea.

The inclusion of American artists in Without Boundary was commendable for its attempt to complicate the question of what constitutes ‘Islamic’ art. The show, however, presented a rather uneven balance between artists from Islamic countries and Western artists, making the inclusion of the two Americans seem like an afterthought or a superficial gesture. One cannot help but wonder if the exhibition was originally subtitled Fifteen Ways instead of Seventeen Ways, and whether at the last minute the two Americans were added to make the show seem less narrow in its examination. It also seems strange that these two additional artists were both American, given the international breadth of the exhibition as a whole. Surely this cannot be because only American artists are influenced by Islamic art, as Italian Francesco Clemente’s paintings in the style of Persian miniatures would have fit just as well in the exhibition.

While Without Boundaries tried to question the usefulness of the term ‘Islamic,’ it is only through reading the curatorial texts that the questioning became clear. On the actual level of simply looking at the works in the show and the way they were organized, one remained unaware of the exhibition’s goal. Even with the cursory inclusion of the two Americans, the exhibition read as one of many identity-based shows that have appeared in the last twenty years. In the end, the strength of the show lay not in its overall curatorial conception and ambition but in the quality of many of the individual works on view. Furthermore, with many artists in the show enjoying major art-star status, the more pertinent question may be not how useful the term ‘Islamic’ is, so much as the use-value of exhibitions that use identity or origin as selection criteria in an increasingly decentralized, global art world. Certainly religious and ethnic identities are still worth examining, but on the level of curatorial practice as opposed to rhetoric, Without Boundary did not succeed in its attempt to offer a viable, non-essentialist alternative to the old identity-politics formula.

Amanda H. Brown received her MA from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and has worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a Research Assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is currently in the PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Endnotes

[1] Fereshteh Daftari, “Islamic or not,” in Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 22.