Are We So Afraid Of The Cultural Richness Of Islam?
By Philip Hensher, The Independent (London), 02 February 2001.
TATE MODERN's first big show, Century City, is an interesting idea that doesn't quite work. To pick on nine cities in various parts of the world at different moments in the 20th century, and try to convey the spirit of a time and a place is a good sort of idea, though I'd have liked it more if we weren't expected to approve of all these places. (Why not Mussolini's Rome?) And in practice the exhibition is killed stone dead by the fatuous decision to have music playing in many of the rooms, making it quite impossible to concentrate: have you tried to look at Juan Gris while Petrushka is heading at full pelt into the "Danse des Nounous"?
But though many of the exhibition's failings can be regarded with indulgence, as we have grown used to putting up with the usual curators' whims, there is one question hanging about the show which strikes me as rather a bigger blindness, and one which reveals that we ourselves can't see that we have a real problem in looking at the world.
It struck me when, leafing through the catalogue, I came across an essay by the German scholar Joachim Schloer, entitled, without any evident irony, "How Urban Culture Was Saved in the Levant". Mr Schloer's answer, it turns out, is Tel Aviv, and his essay is a mildly interesting exploration of the migration of European Jewish modernism to the state of Israel. But go back to that title, and read the essay again; there is absolutely no mention of any other cities in the region. No Beirut, no Damascus; it is as if Tel Aviv were built on the moon.
The fact that German scholars, since the war, have felt a moral obligation to talk like this about Israeli culture should not disguise the fact that this is rather a disgusting performance. But it is in tune with the exhibition as a whole, and with a general attitude in our culture. There are nine cities here, and a serious attempt has been made to go beyond Europe and North America: Lagos, Mumbai, Rio and Tokyo are among those featured. But what remains absent is any suspicion that the Islamic world might have anything to interest us. It is passed over in lordly silence.
I'm not recommending that the Tate should have presented the official kitsch that passes for contemporary art in Saddam's Baghdad, or the gilded tat of Gulf States architecture. However, to omit so gigantic and fascinating a part of the world is preposterous. Cairo is far more interesting and rich as a cultural fact than 1970s New York, or Lagos. Contemporary art from Pakistan can be splendid, as everyone knows. Most valuable would have been a few rooms about Tehran, before and after the conversion of Iran and the return of Khomeini from exile; the Shah was interested in international contemporary art, and, in some respects, we have to accept the awkward fact that the rule of the ayatollahs resulted in a flourishing of national culture.
Some expat Iranian artists, such as Shirin Neshat, have made a mark; would a curious investigator have found some admirable artists and calligraphers still living there to supplement what we already know, that there is a magnificent school of Iranian film directors?
But let's face it - we're just not that interested. We prefer to take it on trust that there was nothing worth looking at in the Levant until Tel Aviv was founded; we are convinced that the only good Islamic artist is one like Shirin Neshat, fiercely critical of its culture, not one who works within its traditions.
I don't think this is racism, particularly: it looks more like terror. Islamic culture, unlike many non-European cultures, is as rich and intellectually subtle as our own, and that can be pretty frightening. Saul Bellow once, casting doubt on the claims being made for non-Western culture, said that he would be glad to read the Proust of Papua New Guinea. He had a point, in some ways, but anyone who knows about Islamic culture knows that there are, indeed, writers in Arabic who are Proust's, or Chekhov's, equal. They refuse to be regarded as our inferiors in any way.
More than that, many of the best things in Islamic culture don't refer back to European styles, but emerge from its own traditions. The cultures that the Tate has chosen to explore in this show don't have that breadth, or length of history, and it's easier to make Lagos look fun than it would be to explore post-war Cairo. So let's just ignore it, shall we? To ignore it, however, is to admit that there are items that won't go into our multicultural shopping basket.
Some things appear to: Rio can cheerfully be summed up as beach, "The Girl From Ipanema", Niemeyer and some jolly bright abstracts. Cairo, Tehran, the whole Islamic project, resolutely refuse to be summed up like that.
What we must accept is that this is the fault of our superficial interest in people who aren't European; it is, in a way, a testament to the complexity of our great cultural rival. Sooner or later, we are going to have to start talking to them. It does no good to pretend they don't exist.
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