This essay appeared in the accompanying publication to Thing, Aura, Metadata. A Poem on Making. at The Museum of Contemporary Photography of Ireland in Dublin (July 5-28, 2019).

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Since 2008, Contemporary Art Daily has been regularly publishing high-quality documentation materials from exhibitions in a range of different venues across the art world. To visit the website, no matter how shortly, has become a habitual task of many artists and art professionals wherever they are based. Although operated by a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles, the website and its sister online projects are mainly funded by advertising partnerships and annual sponsorships forged with an international (mostly North Western) batch of commercial galleries listed in their directory or featured in the larger banners on their homepage. It cannot be denied that CAD [Contemporary Art Daily] does not exactly represent (as in document) the art world, but in fact projects a particular configuration of what an art world can be. I am not claiming that there is no outside to the contemporary art world as pictured by CAD, but it seems like a curious act to analyze its interiors and study the production and operation of an image that carries a particular promise of an art world.

The CAD universe of projects, initiatives, and nonprofits is involved in a certain degree of worldmaking, which demands a careful look at the particularity of certain visual elements that are at the center stage of how this world is realized in its own image. This most importantly includes the installation shots of contemporary art exhibitions that are produced and consumed in various parts of this world. To better understand and tentatively describe the visual protocols, operational standards, or the metrics and aesthetics of this world, a certain task of pattern recognition needs to be performed on the kind of installation shots that can be found on CAD, among other similar websites. This task is predicated upon the typical and generic features that not only identify installation shots but also potentially manifest the larger set of conditions that underlie their production and circulation. Pattern recognition is therefore intended in the expanded sense of detecting abstract schemes running through various elements and materials of an apparatus that sets certain relations into action and blocks certain others. In this sense, it stands in a historical lineage with other studies that share similar concerns.

In his 1976 essay, the artist and writer Brian O’Doherty draws a parallel between the evolutionary history of the interior content of paintings and the history of their exterior conditioning when hung on the wall, a relationship that tied the picture plane to the white cube. The myth of the picture plane and its systems of illusion were long dominated by the easel picture and its rule of perspective and conventions of framing. “The discovery of perspective coincides with the rise of the easel picture, and the easel picture in turn, confirms the promise of illusionism inherent in painting.”¹ By holding a totally insulated space within itself, the easel picture stood as a self-sufficient entity, carrying the interior space across the exteriors. It was a window onto a world that was only there when looked at through the window frame. The frame of the image, the size of which often followed the conditions of portability, acted as a means of setting boundaries in the space, but also facilitated certain vectors of movement through and across layers of spatial configuration. The tendency toward boundaries went on to define a dominant 19th century sentiment, which also left a lasting impact on the design of museums and art spaces as heightened and detached chambers. As O’Doherty writes, “the frame of the easel picture is as much a psychological container for the artist as the room in which the viewer stands is for him or her.”²

In fact, when the surface that was once lent to illusion was distanced from the wall and received a certain delineation, in the move from murals to easel painting, the picture plane got tangled in an inter-dimensional tension. The tendency to extend toward the outside space put pressure on the frame that defined the territory of depth. Illusionism and its dependence on the sense of depth was forced to face the flatness of the picture plane and reconcile with its outward extensions. This tension was brought to surface by the modernist objecthood of the late 19th and early 20th century. But the attention to the opacity of the picture plane did not entirely replace the desire for illusion. Illusionism was in fact “literalized,” writes O’Doherty, narrating the “transformation of literary myths into literal myths.” ³ A “technology of aesthetic flatness” was established. The trajectory of O’Doherty’s narrative follows the history of how this technology, as manifest in many visual experiments conducted by the late 1960s, moves onto a wide-ranging set of dimensions in the space and employs a variety of surfaces.

While illusion, hitherto confined to the extents of the frame, permeates the space, the installation shot, technically a subcategory of documentary photography, appears as the image that conventionally puts a frame around the space for the experience of art, the space that is the experience of art. Installation shot, as an imprint of a space amalgamated with myth and illusion, replaces the easel painting, floating across an unprecedented number of surfaces, layers, dimensions, and interfaces. So the processes of visual and material literalization, ushered in by modernist encounters with the picture plane, advance a visual membrane thin enough to transmit the illusion and thick enough to hold itself together, grounded in the space it would in turn try to dematerialize, to turn into a space of virtual embodiment and mythical figures. “As the vessel of content becomes shallower and shallower [following the techniques of flatness], composition and subject matter and metaphysics all overflow across the edge until, as Gertrude Stein said about Picasso, the emptying out is complete.”⁴ The space turns into a myth of the matter, in a limbo between raw and processed, natural and manmade, and ultimately human and nonhuman. The installation shot is a metaphorical paradox of modern visual cognition, as O’Doherty writes:

The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannekins [sic] for further study. This Cartesian paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there –– one of the major services provided for art by its old antagonist, photography, the installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space. In it an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a salon painting of the 1830s.⁵

In a 2013 essay, the curator Sohrab Mohebbi identifies a similar Cartesian complex, although considering the frequent appearance of figures in installation shots. His focus is on certain patterns that recur in one image after another, postures that take on a role again and again, the role of the contemplative viewer in the detached space of art. “In this way thinking becomes a performative act with identifiable formal properties — similar to Rodin’s man with one hand curled back, resting under his chin. My acquaintances [in installation shots] are transformed into nonhuman, inanimate accessories to the works of art in front or around them. Or perhaps the onlooker’s act of watching is meant to represent looking without seeing, contemplation void of thinking, the performance of theory without discourse, the demise of the Cartesian figure who thinks and therefore is.”⁶ And while O’Doherty sees the installation shot simultaneously as a “service” provided by photography, a spatial (literalized) metaphor, and the bearer of certain ideal qualities of the easel painting, Mohebbi brings it full circle by suggesting that “one can consider exhibition-as-medium one of the forefathers of photography, and draw an analogy between a photograph’s approach to its subject and a display’s relationship to its content. As such, in an installation shot, the two media come together in an almost tautological manner.”⁷

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However, the politics of temporality as figured in installation shots is as consequential as the ways in which spatial relations are reworked by these images. The structural chronotopes of an installation shot can be traced back to how the myth of the white cube, as O’Doherty shows, served as a chamber where “an illusion of eternal presence was to be protected from the flow of time,”⁸ an attempt to preserve the status quo of social and aesthetic values in a state of timelessness. Similarly, Mohebbi argues that “there’s a difference between documentation and installation shots, where the former—a byproduct of performance art—represents art as an event, and the latter shows art as eternity… We document happenings, events, and performances to show that something took place somewhere, at some point in time, as art, whereas in the token installation shot of works in a white cube, nothing ever happened, nor is anything ever going to.”⁹ There are instances, however, where these two types of image blend, one atemporal and the other attached to a particular moment in time.

Shortly after the proposition of bringing the royal collection into public view at the Grande Galerie, Hubert Robert was appointed Garde du Muséum in 1778 while a resident artist at the Louvre. The landscape and architectural painter assumed all the tasks classically associated with a curator’s function: inventory of the collection, acquisitions, supervision of restoration, and participation in the refurbishment of the building — which is reflected in his pictures of the exhibition spaces he lived in and worked on.

His two paintings from 1796, both exhibited at the Salon of the same year, can be seen as early formations of today’s ubiquitous installation shots, and what makes them even more interesting is how they reveal the temporalities that such images engender. Refurbishment Project of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre displays the gallery interiors in a resolutely sharp perspective, paintings hung frame to frame and skied from floor to ceiling, statues on pedestals or in dedicated niches, the public dwarfed by the monumental scale of the space, walking around and pointing at art works, and a handful of copyists in front of masterpieces — among whom is pictured Robert himself, carefully studying Raphael’s Holy Family. This picture, although recalling the legacies of Renaissance illusionism and its representational precision, is not an actual view of what the painter could have really been looking at while making sketches. Carrying an evocative title borrowed from architectural language, the picture is Robert’s proposal for renovating the gallery that was at the time a long hallway with neither divisions nor decor, dimly lit by narrow windows. It was a call for the prospective division of the gallery into several bays by a system of niches surrounded by ionic pilasters, heavy architraves, and a coffered, vaulted skylight. A pendant to this painting was Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins, which depicts, from a slightly different point of view, the same hallway with the same propositional details in place but in a state of ruin — the sky and other natural forces having intruded and replaced the artworks. Here, again, Robert has pictured himself, but while making a drawing of the Apollo Belvedere.

Both of these pictures are stylistically similar, and are both (art) historical materials through which one can track the life of an institution along hectic moments of social and political change. Their artist, however, is driven by forces of speculation, positing spaces of experience in relation to near and far futures. His picturesque style, pertaining to pseudo-antique scenes that brought him the nickname Robert of Ruins, simultaneously marks an end to centuries of institutional development and projects another beginning upon the ruins. It is in this nascent moment that Robert makes a typical Renaissance statement on art historical ancestrality and the formation of artist-subjects, by turning away from modern masterpieces toward ancient classics. He imagines himself outlining the future of his practice by resorting to the few remaining originary forms and figures, and not by attending to the reality of the future he has envisioned. The space opened up between these two picture planes addresses the future as if it is given, bound to eternal retrospection. An understanding of history and the conditions of progress are held up by the constant reincarnation of classical ideals.

Fast forward to the contemporary time and the standard computer-generated architectural rendering can function just like a documentary photograph. The super-realism of these post-photographic documents supersedes historical illusionism and reaches a state of flattened temporality. Modeling softwares are also used when planning exhibition spaces, and, in the hands of the curator, they come to serve as more than a tool for trying to figure out where to put what. Even the writer who is commissioned to write the customary exhibition essay deals with certain visual materials that seem to involve a certain degree of “futures trading,” as the critic Jennifer Allen once put it. Speaking of her role as an art writer, she points out how exhibition views and installation shots function as part of a forensic orchestration around documentational images and the words they accompany or are accompanied by, be it a caption, a short description, a review, or a catalogue essay. However, there is a distinction to be made: “Whereas the exhibition review is oriented towards the topical present before becoming an archival document, the catalogue essay is a foray into science fiction –– not only anticipating the future, but also treating what’s to come as if it has already taken place.”¹⁰ The writer who is commissioned to write for an exhibition hardly ever gets to see or experience that which others would conventionally read her essay as an immediate companion of. She would nonetheless have to rely on “a wide array of visuals that attempt to prefigure the exhibition,”¹¹ including maquettes, stitched-up JPEGs with no sense of scale, architectural plans, crude SketchUps with silhouette figures, and hasty hand-drawings on a piece of napkin or the back of a matchbox.

While they appear only temporarily, installation shots are the teleological archetype of all visual materials that approach a look at contemporary art. An installation shot, as a particular kind of photographic material, has decisive visual features in common with a phantasmic post-photographic rendering. Not exclusively a matter of documentation but a model based on a set of typical or generic criteria, the average installation shot does not only serve as an imprint of some experiential setting preceding it, namely an instance of contemporary art incarnate. Each installation shot itself can also serve as a blueprint for simulating that which will or could be identified as contemporary art. In this sense, the distinction between reviews that are written in retrospect and essays that are written in anticipation in fact stems from a singular state of trans-temporality that is embodied within the model of installation shots, whether captured or generated, as capable of mediating both past and future experiences.

The spectres of a globalised contemporary art can be identified by a particular temporal tendency for constant transition from being retrospective to being prospective, from documentation to projection, and back again. The contemporary idea of originary forms is caught in the arrival of installation shots from the future and their ensuing perpetuation in the transit lounges of exhibitions: Spaces of experience, exemplifying a contemporary sense of transience, are required merely for ensuring an abundance of installation shots, and for facilitating the automatised reincarnation of what has already been thrown into the future as the projection of an upcoming project. What happens between each departure and every landing is similar to the undergoing of a morphing technique, a recombinant pattern laid across the soupy shades of grey that open up, like decimal gates, deeper and deeper in between every white and every black and only find sharpness and contrast in the temporary teleology of an installation shot. The shape of contemporary art practice, the formation of its syntactic geometry, seems to be best traceable not in the general and wildly omnipresent use of the word “project” but in the exercise of specific variations of prōicere, its Latin root: to stretch out or extend, to throw away or give up, to defer or delay, all ever until further notice.   

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1. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1986), 14.
2. O’Doherty, 18.
3. O’Doherty, 23.
4. O’Doherty, 22.
5. O’Doherty, 15.
6. Sohrab Mohebbi, “Caught Watching,” Red Hook Journal (February 2013). [https://ccs.bard.edu/redhook/caught-watching/index.html]
7. Mohebbi.
8. O’Doherty, 8.
9. Mohebbi.
10. Jennifer Allen, “Futures Trading,” Frieze 126 (October 2009). [https://frieze.com/article/futures-trading]
11. Allen.

Scrolling through over five thousand posts and reposts on Shabahang Tayyari’s Instagram page can take a lot of time. In the course of regular shitposting, some images crop up regularly. There are several posts in which large italicized letters are set against royal blue and chartreuse green backgrounds, filling the frame with phrases like, “Country of Pistachios and Losers,” “Country of Saffron and Sycophants,” and “Country of Rugs and Whores.” Elsewhere, similar compositions are overwritten with different lines: “Country of Allah and Kitties,” “– of Dumb and Dumbers,” and “– of Peppers and Sperms.” 

Tayyari is an artist, writer and curator from Karaj, a city in the suburbs of Tehran. His homegrown exercises in meme-making couple a dark sense of humor with a contested sense of belonging. His way of addressing the riddle of identity is to situate it as a riddle that might seem solved once everyone, no matter where from or what their background, posts the same viral image on the same online platform. His Instagram roster of verbal and visual miscellany displays fascination and frustration with certain modes of identification and agendas of representation in contemporary art, vernacular culture, and popular avenues of digital circulation. He approaches these categories and their respective practices with both apathy and drama, which, though perhaps cynical, carries a bold sense of entitlement. This is negativity conceived as a task, post-internet pessimism at full force. 

Tayyari’s references include the Bauhaus via Josef Albers, whose color theory has long been a fixture of visual arts studies in Iran. Yet his approach sarcastically takes on notions of digital enchantment — “I’m gonna build a Mosque on Tumblr” — and professional disillusionment: “Let’s be MFA Forever.” In another image, Tayyari shows a detail of a work with the Thatcherite slogan “There Is No Such Thing As Society”; and elsewhere, he features solid colors inscribed with texts like “Art Basel Chechnya” or “Kabul Biennial.” All of this presents an aloof critique (if not outright mockery) of inter-scalar agendas of representation, from a particular location toward a trans-regional or global horizon. Targeted in his work are the social media mandates of efficiency and mobility, which demand an image be recognizable in under two seconds, regardless of context or authorship.

At the same time, Tayyari inspires us to ask: How does provincialism survive the internet? Is it possible that contemporary art is particularly functioning as a conduit for the persistence of provincial standpoints? Maybe the internet and contemporary art can be used interchangeably in these questions. This is about how art professionalism mobilises technological affordances on a planetary scale while cultivating a focus on micro-situations, points of origin, and background stories. This might speak to how one simultaneously inhabits various scales. But it certainly points to how planetary operations can allow for the smooth movement of ideas and currencies without altering the segregated or isolated materiality of certain locations and subjectivities. 

In their essay on “the role of provincialism as a major aesthetic and infrastructural component in the history of twentieth-century modernism and its transformation into contemporary art as we know it,” David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi argue that “provincialism has actually been neoliberalized.” To explain this they set up a correlation between abiding disparities in institutional and educational access and an individualized, hyper-competitive mode of sociality. “While twentieth-century modernism was so often characterized in its different national guises by the formation of avant-garde movements, the sociality of contemporary art is that of a dispersed network of competing individuals who never cohere into a historical subject with the capacity for collective resistance.” Tayyari responds to this set of problematics by attempting to gather tokens of belonging and identification within and across different cultures or subcultures — and on different scales and platforms. He then shows how these narratives, once having achieved the status of legible representation, start feeding into orders of dividuation and competition, market-driven interaction, and commercialization.

For the past few years, Tayyari has been exhibiting works and curating shows often at Delgosha Gallery in Tehran. His most recent solo exhibition there, Bored Family 2, was in December 2017 and included a collection of wall pieces in different mediums and materials. As if a blockbuster proudly announcing its comeback, the title of the show references Tayyari’s previous solo exhibition at the gallery in 2016. The main leitmotif of the works was a set of Rorschach-like shapes laser cut on cardboard, a material that invokes packing and moving from one place to another as well as the handmade props often used in street protests. Their graphics derive from the logos of black and death metal bands, like Darkthrone or Defeated Sanity, laid over another to form “something gothic,” as Tayyari puts it. Each might also resemble “an old sign carved on the walls of a cave.” These tentacular and slimy forms are built upon a mix of pseudo-organic imagery, religious iconography, and ornate calligraphy, all held together in a state of semi-symmetry. The oversaturated cluster of marks carved on the surface also suggest something like a mask, concealing what lies beneath — as does a nickname on an online forum. 

As is often the case with Tayyari’s work, a curious air of anecdotes surrounds the graphics, adding to the inherent esotericism of metal. From an aesthetic and social viewpoint, being able to decipher a metal band’s logo qualifies a person as being in the know. As a teenager in early 2000s Karaj, Tayyari saw metal aesthetics as a matter of fashion and lifestyle. Despite not having much familiarity with the breadth of the genre, its musical lineages, or even the content of lyrics, he saw it as a way to “make an identity out of something I had no idea about.” And after all, It wasn’t as if he could have gone online — or anywhere in Iran, for that matter — to buy a ticket for a metal gig, since the genre is widely associated with satanism. Tayyari and his friends found that hilarious but also useful as a means to connect with the local underground and even cultivate their own groupies. 

Among the venues that Tayyari has been frequenting for years is a “game net” owned by a friend in his neighborhood. LAN computer gaming centers, once booming local businesses, are often left to circles of friends who gather to socialize, smoke, drink, listen to black and death metal, and play Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft. They usually play against each other, as slow internet speeds make it difficult to play online. “They see you, they shoot you, and it’s only then that you get to see them,” Tayyari explained. “That’s how slow it can get.” 

Stratification within networks is also reflected in the verbal elements of Tayyari’s work, which include quotations credited to “unknown” sources. Some are in fact crude translations of slogans from TV commercials, like “with Iran Radiator who goes to cave.” Another, which reads “sea of sorrow has no shore,” is taken from a modern Iranian poem by Rahi Mo’ayyeri. In the 1960s, it was adapted by the popular musician Habibollah Badi’e for a song by Banoo Roya. As Tayyari writes in his text for the exhibition, the sentence can often be found in prison tattoos, or as a lyrical phrase commonly cited in Telegram groups. But highlighting translation as a means of alienation rather than communication brings poetics back to the surface. 

The contours of the landscape suggested by the “cave” and the “sea” find more definition in another laser-cut caption, “in our colony depression is an option.” It sounds odd enough to be a translation, but isn’t one. It is additionally odd because while Iran or, in fact, ancient Persia is remembered in history as a once colonizing force, it has never been an actual colony. But perhaps there is another geographical imagination at work, as cities such as Karachi, Qandahar, and Bangkok are summoned in other works of the series, suggesting a trans-regional horizon that radiates from within cloistered localities. In the background of musical subgenres that emerged in the late 1970s, the provincialism problem is nominally addressed via an evocation of non-Western trajectories that branch off historical postmodernism. In this, Tayyari looks for peculiar instantiations of the cultural ur-logic of today’s communicative consumerism, as figured on a regional register, as an intermediate between local and global scales. It is not a matter of whether depression was opted in for by locals or exerted upon by a global force. The point seems to be that a community can be depressed and yet cultivate a sense of agency, perhaps the agency to conceive of an option. Instead of a direct nod to postcolonial histories of exploitation and alienation, the sentence makes a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that even the worst of all shared feelings, figuratively speaking, can function as a basis for upscaling one’s sense of belonging and cohabitation, particularly in a way that might obliterate the material basis for undesired feelings.

Somewhat similarly, some theoretical takes on black metal situate it as a “negative form of environmental writing bearing on a world that has become blackened.” The works in Bored Family 2 reflect an approach that is both sarcastic and post-apocalyptic. Their poetics gesture toward some ruinous compositions that seem to have outlived the delicate and complex structures of inherited modes of networked communication, of collective identification and representation. This amounts to a form of the gothic within information architectures and the cultures they uphold. By tracing the aesthetics of “info-goth” in existing local, regional, and global networks, Tayyari showcases the disparities within them, and punctures his own coming-of-age narrative. 

Furthermore, neon tubes and throwing arrows dot the white walls; dull lines of light are undermined in the overlit white cube and a primitive technology takes aim at haphazard targets. These elements seem to extend the chain of aphorisms that address the absurdities of internet trajectories. Other works in the series include small prints overlaid with gouache paint, gesturing toward the aesthetics of advertisement. Facial mask meets corpse paint, replicating the story of fringe identities assimilated into mainstream consumer culture. A line on the tubes of facial mask reads, “microwave was a psycho mom.” This phrase reflects unreasonable entanglements between the histories of domestic violence and modern household appliances, evoking the tragedies that pop up on millions of news feeds more often than one would or should expect. 

Tayyari also makes zines, mostly color laser printed on regular A4 paper and folded in half. Some pages from these publications look like sketches, similar to those on his Instagram, for larger works. They are easy jokes that have that memetic charm to pass from hand to hand, whether on social media, as a modest, small-circulation collectible, or later from one curator or dealer to another. The venues and means of online communication are not simply carriers of what is already created offline. They are the sources, if not resources too, of Tayyari’s activity, and their aesthetics continue if there would be enough reasons, or resources, to materialize them IRL. Such extents of liquidity both point to a generational ability of adaptation as well as a survivalist approach necessitated by precarious conditions of living –– Delgosha, after all, specializes in painting, which is still a relatively much easier medium to sell. As Anselm Franke and Anna Teixeira Pinto have pointed out, survivalism might in fact naturalize the conditions of precarity in the digital age, rendering them inevitable. In this sense, they speak of the “digital native,” a post-internet poster child that inhabits the aforementioned double bind of liquidity, as a figure that “masks a sociopolitical loss (the decline in living standards) as an evolutionary gain (millenials have an adaptive advantage).” They continue, “these figures reconcile the imperatives of self-reliance and individualism with the current social immobility and cultural atavism via a universalization of survivalism and the weaponized psychology from which it springs.” 

However, what sets Tayyari’s practice apart is exactly a cynical approach toward universalist agendas, found not least in the professional protocols of global contemporary art, including the fair and biennial formats. His focus is more on the maneuvers that are and can be shaped across an ongoing shift from national identity to digital nativity, to cross Hodge and Yousefi’s analysis with Franke and Pinto’s observation. There is a key parallel between Tayyari’s treatment of metal and how Chechnyan art moguls, for instance, might treat contemporary art via Art Basel. The parallel between the persistence of provincialism and the formation of “the ‘tribal’ martialized imaginary of the self-fashioned digital natives in the urban jungle” is accounted for from a non-universalist and particularly regional viewpoint. He demands us to not see his work in a post-internet lineage that flows from New York to Berlin to Athens and then to Tehran. Neither is his reference to a regional viewpoint limited to a given image of the Middle East. Instead, Tayyari propels us to use the tools at hand to conceive of other geographical imaginations and think of unheard-of trans-regional junctions that can account for other links between global registers and lived localities. 

References

• David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi, “Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development,” e-flux journal #65: Supercommunity (May-August 2015).
• Scott Wilson, “Introduction to Melancology,” in Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology (London: Zero Books, 2014).
• Anselm Franke and Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Post-Political, Post-Critical, Post-Internet: Why Can’t Leftists Be More Like Fascists?,” Open! (September 2016).

Published in the joint publication of THE SPARK IS YOU: Parasol unit in Venice at Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello (May 9–November 23, 2019) and Nine Iranian Artists in London: The Spark Is You  at Parasol Unit, London (May 22–September 8, 2019).

This lecture was delivered at “The Twilight Symposium: Science Fiction Inside Colonialism” organized by e-flux journal and La Colonie, Paris, February 2019.

→ Toward A Comparative Futurism

Published on the occasion of Bahar Noorizadeh’s solo exhibition Governance Machines and the Future of Futures at Mercer Union, Toronto (Nov 2019).

 

Excerpts from my contribution to Ahmad Makia’s artist edition ZIGG: Superficial, November 2018.

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[To Ahmad] Your remarks made me think of, once again, the necessity to question existing vocabularies and reinvent their future anteriority, realizing their functioning as hyperstitional entities, bringing about new normals, indeed. However, we often and mostly cannot but stay with existing vocabularies and familiar tropes and try to reinvent them from within. A new terminology is in fact a non-neologism or a heretical transvaluation, only appearing after the fact. So, while questioning the nature of facticity, we need to engage with unprecedented facts that can reiterate and reinforce past neologisms anew, or fulfill their future-oriented inherence. In the words of Kodwo Eshun, in his Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths in 2017, this is to retro-currently join the thread of those (non-)neologisms that

“are actually forms of life… The names of and for aesthetico-political positions that operate by disagreements and differentiations, that make claims that must be argued. Each of these is not so much a term as a war of and over interpretation, a stance that aims to intervene in cultural politics, that fashions itself to articulate discontent, to focus despair and depression into theories to live by, theories that are embodied, theories that live in us, and through us, and with us, and on us.”

Recently, at the launch session of Ethnofuturismen at Volksbuhne in Berlin, I addressed such “forms of life” through the notions of “temporal climates” and the “chronosphere.” 

Each temporal climate has its prevailing time patterns, which constantly influence and are influenced by other climatic times, their histories as well as the velocity and frequency of the course of their events. To follow the routes of transformation that tie various temporal climates together is to move along their exponential divergence from initial conditions, that is, from supposedly localized situations to planetary scales, while remaining enmeshed within a mutating earth system whose transformation can be neither attributed to a single cause nor a single set of effects. This, of course, requires us to challenge the constructed linearity of historical causation to begin with, as well as the unilateral and progressive movement of time, and question the geometrical politics of such and similar abstract models in relation to the realities of our times and times to come. Moreover, “timelines” and their associated epistemologies need to be stretched sideways, letting the “planes of temporality” and “layers of time” unfold and spread out, in order for us to be able to come into terms with how little we know of our historical horizons, soon enough before they get totally closed on us, and raise our collective sensitivity toward the complex chronometries of life and labor across life forms.

“Advection” is the term used in meteorology to explain the transfer of heat or matter by the flow of a fluid, especially horizontally in the atmosphere or the sea. To couple this term with the formulation of “temporal climates” is in fact to arrive at another familiar trope, the butterfly effect, which emerged from within hard sciences and has since appeared in fields as far as extreme fiction, as well as late capitalist spoken language, given how chaotic we routinely feel the world has gone.

What I tried to address in terms of ethnofuturisms are phenomena that exist and exert their force in the manner of a butterfly effect across what, again, could only suggestively be called the “chronosphere.” This is to suggest the very complex materiality as well as the planetary expanse of temporal resources, similar to what is at stake in the currently critical condition of other terrestrial resources as well as fluid and atmospheric elements. All this demands to be collectively addressed, as that which we all have something at stake in. In addition to the aggravation of climatic and environmental conditions worldwide, and to hint back at my  there’s also the “AirSpace”, according to a 2016 article on the popular media outlet The Verge, which stands for how the spaces we pass through and occupy internationally are increasingly becoming the standardized product of corporate tech firms –– the “same old same old” of Starbucks, Airbnb, and so forth… “This new geography is the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live or co-work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere we go.” AirSpace is, therefore, an instantiation of the “infrastructure space” of 21st-century life. Accordingly, there could be the notions of AirTime and Infrastructure Time… Is there any moment we can find ourselves off the “airtime” of contemporaneity across our social-mediatized lives? Following the environmental and political crises of recent times, what would be the viable modes of engagement with today’s shared time-crisis? If the distinction between public and private spaces has been de facto “undone” by the machinations of an infrastructure space, then what are the temporal connotations of this undoing? How could we begin addressing our “public time” today?

The hyperstitional artifact of the “chronosphere,” or infrastructure time, or AirTime, is designed to address the realm through which temporal advection is regulated, that is, the horizontal transfer of the “heat or matter” of time, in all its fluidity, across our planetary history.

So let’s rephrase and repeat in order for a definition to emerge: Ethnofuturisms are those phenomena, traditions, movements, and practices that tend to address the latent coordinates of shared time patterns and temporal paracommons by means of facilitating and intensifying, technically accelerating, butterfly effects across the planetary chronosphere.

Displaying the Material History of the CIA

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Published in Cabinet 65, Fall 2017 – Winter 2018.

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“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing.” The CIA’s online Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room quotes Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The room features ninety-nine declassified documents, disclosed in 2014, that describe the agency’s covert program to facilitate the first publication, in 1958, of the novel in its original Russian. These documents appear on the website alongside millions of additional pages of material that will appeal to history buffs and UFO buffs alike.

Doctor Zhivago only appeared in Russian after English, French, Italian, and German translations had already earned it international esteem. The original, legendary samizdat has since been the object of intense study. But it was only in 2009 that journalist and broadcaster Ivan Tolstoy made allegations that the CIA had used the novel as an instrument of soft power by enabling Soviet citizens to read it. His book The Laundered Novel: Doctor Zhivago between the KGB and the CIA is crowded with claims and speculations that we know, in hindsight, to be only partially true, such as the suggestion that the agency influenced the Nobel Committee’s decision to award its literature prize to Pasternak, also in 1958.

The Zhivago example would make a perfect plotline for a classic pulp tale about the craft of intelligence, illustrating the shift from the hot, wartime climate of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the early 1940s to the Cold War–era CIA. Procedures for the public disclosure of unreleased government records were instituted as a result of the bloody proxy wars in southeast Asia some two decades later, with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) signed into law in 1966. The statute, which has since gone through numerous amendments and revisions, is still shot through with a comprehensive raft of exemptions. And with Executive Order 13526, issued in 2010, even information that meets the criteria for availability under FOIA can be exempted and reclassified upon reevaluation.

Taking one step back into the CIA’s sitemap, we arrive at the Library, where the earliest posts date back to April 2007, the year conspiracy theorists succeeded in their fifteen-year-long quest to declassify the “family jewels,” described by the agency as “almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.” On the day of their release, the then-director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, wryly stated that “most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history.” Parts of this history had already leaked right onto the front page of The New York Times in 1974 when Seymour Hersh published his article on the “huge” project of domestic espionage against antiwar forces and other dissidents.

Back on the website, another Library subpage leads to the Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), a CIA department researching the agency’s very own history, along with methodologies of the intelligence field at large. The department publishes Studies in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed periodical founded in 1955 and containing both classified and unclassified content. Sourcing material for this journal is greatly facilitated by the department’s main mandate: administering the CIA Museum.

Founded in 1972, and occupying three corridors in two buildings at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the museum is not open to the public. Access is granted only to the staff, official visitors, and those occasional reporters who succeed in obtaining security clearance.

Toni Hiley, the museum’s curator for the past fifteen years, directs the “collection, preservation, documentation and exhibition of intelligence artifacts, culture and history”—as well as the Fine Arts Commission program, which has been running since the 1960s—to “bring the agency’s history into life.” The eight hundred exhibits on display range from art works and archival prints to weapons, espionage machinery, insignia, fake film scripts, and even boot hooks belonging to William J. Donovan, the “Father of Central Intelligence” and the founder of the OSS. That is only the tip of the twenty-eight thousand items sealed in this vast collection, drawing on which the museum frequently develops exhibitions, mounted off-site in partnership with other institutions in order to “promote a wider understanding of the craft of intelligence and its role in the American experience,” again according to the website.

More than two hundred of these artifacts are highlighted online, accompanied by concise, often enigmatic and tight-lipped, captions and embedded in a framework of multifarious tags, categories, stories, and dates; some of these items are also linked to the agency’s YouTube channel for a more dynamic follow-up. Branded as a chance to “Experience the Collection” online, the experience is more comparable to an infinite Feed of disclaimers. “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet,” posted @CIA on 6 June 2014, at 10:49 am, shortly after signing up. A catchy and effective PR manoeuver, indeed—and the agency has since been regularly embedding links to an “Artifact of the Week.” Similarly, the official Flickr profile dates back to 2011, and holds an album titled “All CIA Museum Artifacts,” though it contains only 168 images in total.

However, a huge pool of captioned stuff cannot readily amount to a perceptible sense of history. In 2014–2015, CSI published a guide to the CIA Museum and its collection, a companion to all the mediating anecdotes and interactive interfaces. In its preface, A Curator’s Pocket History of the CIA notes: “History can be studied in more than one way. … Museums are where you discover history by studying things, that is, artifacts, in context. … We start with what we have in the collection and use artifacts to reconstruct the history of the Agency. The result is more impressionistic and less linear than other histories.

The Pocket History is apparently the first in a series of publications titled Notes from Our Attic, which “tells the story of the CIA through artifacts illuminating history in a way words cannot alone.” The attic turns out to be a particularly apt space to invoke for such a project. In the mid-1600s, the term began to be used to refer to an element of the classical façade—a low decorative wall right above the main cornice at the top of the entablature. By late eighteenth century, attic came to mean the interior space enclosed by such a structure; only then did the attic, that spooky room right below the roof, come into being. This move from an architectural order related only to the surface of a building to a repurposed, functional space behind the surface seems comparable to certain tropes of clandestine activity, where things are instrumentalized beyond their manifest appearance, as if an unprecedented space has been opened up behind their obvious skin, a space filled up with covert functions. Repurposed things have itchy skins, hence the utility of persistently scratching their surfaces to expose hidden intentions. The Pocket History is a guide to the question of how alternate, covert spaces are produced beneath the surface of ordinary objects when they are repurposed. But it is also a guide to the question of when, to the historical timing of these subterfuges and of their public disclosure. And moreover, it is an apologia for the why, o ften flaunting the logic of the ends justifying the means.

Well chronicled in the Pocket History is how it took only a few decades to go from Secretary of State Henry Stimson shutting down the US Army’s “Cipher Bureau” in the 1920s because it was wrong for “gentlemen” to “read each other’s mail,” to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles declaring in the 1950s that “when the fate of a nation and the lives of its soldiers are at stake, gentlemen do read each other’s mail.” An image of a vest-pocket paperback copy of the Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago, published during Dulles’s tenure as director, is featured in the Pocket History, with the caption sternly quoting from Tolstoy’s book: “Pasternak’s novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson.” Expressing no direct endorsement or objection in the face of this allegation, the caption ends by simply noting the official declassification of related activities in 2014.

There is much retrofuturistic technology to be discovered here There might be a miniature camera hidden behind a brooch or button, or a bird for that matter. The Pigeon Camera, devised by the Office of Research and Development (ORD), was used during the still-undisclosed “pigeon missions.” It was small and light enough to be carried by the bird, which flies much lower than a satellite or an aircraft, and delivers more detail than other “imagery collection platforms.” Another initiative of the ORD was the Insectothopter, an eavesdropping Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in the shape of a life-sized dragonfly. Robot Fish “Charlie,” on the other hand, was an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) developed by the Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs. Equipped with certain communication and propulsion systems and remotely controlled, such aquatic exploration too was aimed at perceiving more and more terrains of nature as bearers of intelligence.

But the more modest examples also look more cunning. Take the pair of gold cufflinks that DCI Richard Helms presented to case officer George Kisevalter upon his retirement in 1970. Embossed with the Pallas Athena helmet and a small sword, it was one of two identical pairs designed by the Chief of Station Peer de Silva, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, after his alma mater’s “Duty, Honor, Country” crest. The other pair belonged to Pyotr Popov, a major in the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), codenamed ATTIC. Stationed in Vienna and then in East Berlin, Popov wore the cufflinks from 1953 to 1959, always looking for the other pair—worn by an assignee allocated by Kisevalter, his handler—in order to confirm a bona fide connection with the CIA.

Categorized as Bodyworn Surveillance Equipment, the dress code for clandestine activity is “inconspicuous.” The artisans, technicians, and engineers working at the Office of Technical Readiness (OTR) make sure that all accessories and clothing are carefully crafted to stay unremarkable, to help an intelligence officer dissolve into the ordinary appearance of a public body. The caption for “The Well Dressed Spy” reads, “Intelligence officers … know that quality and craftsmanship have been ‘built in’ to their appearances.”

Low-tech accessories can also help you avoid contact altogether. “Dead Drops” are containers, either too unimpressive or too repulsive to attract a second glance, left at prearranged locations. Two examples are a tubular spike, easily pushed back into the ground, and a taxidermied rat, with a cavity opened up in its abdomen. Similarly, a couple of things with the organic look of corms, rhizomes, or some other kind of underground stem are titled Seismic Intruder Detector Devices, “designed to blend in with the terrain”—layers of relay sedimented deep into nature by the craft of intelligence.

The Pocket History’s last chapter on “9/11 and After” ends with a double-page image showing the scale model of the Abbottabad Compound, where Usama Bin Ladin was tracked down and killed. This model is an identical double of another kept at the Pentagon, watched in the White House Situation Room while the raid was unfolding. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) not only modeled the compound but made a life-sized mock-up of it too, to better train soldiers for the raid. Soldiers interviewed after the operation in May 2011 said that during the raid, they felt like they had been there before.

The craft of intelligence stands out from the natural order of things only retrospectively, either when blown apart by the disastrous force of an ill-fated operation, or when the prescheduled end of a given time frame is met—or when some simulation is revealed as a precursor to a future assault that has already ended. Nature serves as a camouflage for the silent growth of history. History, in return, alters nature in the fashion of retroactive legislations – to be treated as always having had effect. It amounts to the craft of sending public time spinning in a rearward direction, always looping back to the present from a forced revision of the past, again and again, one declassified thing after another, one raid after another.

Published in Spike 57.

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Tehran is not only the capital of Iran, but a microcosm of it in many respects. So it’s fair to say that the tension between public and private spaces generates the main spatial drama in Tehran. The codes of behavior can dramatically change when moving from one space to another, and there’s a whole range of often conflicting gestures that a single body should embrace through its daily movements. That’s why preferred publics might be more easily assembled in private –– a party is most often a house party. But sometimes this can make it difficult to determine which space is whose, or where one space ends and the other begins. To host the public of your choice, you are most likely to need a space of your own, but a privately gathered public is still a public and can summon the authorities, as it is and remains de facto haunted by them. The interiors of a friend’s car driving around the city can feel pretty weird in this sense. “Should I behave by the codes of a private inside or the public outside?” Well, that’s just the routine banality of living the in-between. Tinted windows can make the experience a bit more clear-cut, yet the police might stop the car and ask for a look inside.

So it is in the background of this conflicted relationship between interiors and exteriors that I, among many others, often find myself planning to leave Tehran, to get out. My general impression is that it would make a fantastic city only if you wouldn’t feel stuck in it. And anyone who doesn’t have the immediate means to leave at any moment would feel painfully pinned down. There are all sorts of external obstacles, including structural poverty and the hazards of international mobility, that can turn the thought of a jailbreak itself into an unbearable prison, with walls made of anxiety and inferiority complex. There’s been a certain municipal trend in mural designs over the past decade or so that seems to have been targeted at soothing such feelings. Surrealist trompe l’oeils, fantastical perspectives, openings onto a serene sky, and pastoral sceneries have proliferated across the many blank city walls, sometimes blending with and seemingly extending their architectural support.

But against the false impression of open skies, there’s the EXIT. Hastily but most legibly written in uppercase, this graffitti has been rapidly appearing on numerous spots around Tehran. I must’ve noticed it sometime in 2015, and soon started archiving it on Instagram, hashtagged #TehranEXITmap. When friends finally realized that I’m not documenting my own work, my inbox kept getting flooded with images of their encounters, and I’d add them to the growing map. Street walls, trash cans, bus stops, roller shutters, and traffic signs have all had their moments of encounter with EXIT. Varied handwritings betray its collective nature. It’s not egocentric or identity-oriented, but a whole attitude exhibited in practice. Although painted out almost every day, EXIT keeps mushrooming, catching the passerby off guard. You might even start looking for them wherever you go. A blunt parody of escapism, this is a silent practice of territorialization, setting the provisional contours of a shapeshifting territory. So there can’t really be a map, as EXIT is not a signpost either. What fascinates me the most about EXIT is that it acknowledges a dire urge while brutally making fun of it. It’s an extremely simple yet profoundly deep gesture, verging on the status of a worldview, which makes it even more ridiculous. Every surface is turned into a means of reflection, redirecting the suddenly engaged passerby toward their own gaze and location. Upon encounter with EXIT, you are again and again placed on the inside, as if any position before, outside, or beyond this territory is rendered redundant. How can you exit a place without ever leaving it? The kind of opening that EXIT suggests is of a rhetorical nature: the only way out is a different way in.

Published in Domus, No. 1027, September 2018.

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Nasr Theatre, located in the back garden of Grand Hotel Lalehzar, was definitely the place to go for a hip night out in downtown Tehran in the 1940s. By the end of that decade, it had already changed name and appearance to Tehran Theatre when, on 5 June 1950, its then manager and Member of Parliament Ahmad Dehghan was assassinated in the Theatre offices. Hasan Jafari, an employee of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was convicted and sentenced to death during a controversial trial, where the big elephant in the room, a plotted murder or an attempted coup, was deliberately overlooked.  

This story serves as the main backdrop to the 1998 memoir An Innocent to the Gallows, a work of personal investigation as well as an archeology of legal reports by Abolghasem Tafazoli, the lawyer who defended Jafari’s case in court. But there are many more unrecorded stories buried behind the sealed doors of old and often dilapidated theatres and cinemas around Tehran. Such an architectural body, one must remember, contains the double spirit of two lines of past events –– that which happens on as well as off the stage or the screen.

Metropole Cinema, for one, was inaugurated in 1946. One of those better-known cinemas on Lalehzar, it was renamed Roodaki after the revolution, and was eventually shut down in 2008. The design of a modest but strictly modern symmetrical grid, with a tall, projecting sign extending vertically across the facade, is only a minor legacy of Vartan Hovanessian. An Iranian-Armenian designer, architect, and civil engineer, his name is now synonymous with cement and Streamline Moderne, distinctive of a golden era in the history of urban development in Tehran.

The building once again met with the cinematic apparatus during the filming of Masoud Kimiai’s 2013 thriller Metropole. A vulnerable widow, escaping a group of hired goons, takes refuge at an old cinema, owned by two chivalrous young men. The space of the cinema is kept barely operating as a billiard club and storage for motorbikes. But Metropole is cast as both the location and a character, incarnated in the others whose stories unfold all over its ruins.

The film was an attempt to release the spirit of drama from within a forsaken sanctuary, to let the cinema live a second life, to animate its corpse, and exert the force of passion and ecstasy on those who are lured into it. Despite checkmarking some Iranian New Wave essentials, including heavy-handed dialogues, as well as crisscrossing good old Noir with oriental machismo, the film was mainly received with jeering reactions during its premiere.

Another landmark of this sort would be Radio City Cinema, which is located on Valiasr (Pahlavi) Street and was opened in 1958. Designed by Heydar Ghiai, whose other works include the former Senate of Iran (now the Secretariat Assembly of Experts for Leadership), this Googie edifice used to be embellished with populuxe neon works on the face of its giant and gentle curve. It was famous for regular screenings of fresh arrivals from Hollywood, also for the red velvet cover of its cozy chairs.

Hosted by Radio City, The Bubble, a 1966 science-fiction by Arch Oboler, was the first 3D feature ever shown in Iran, right after the international popularization of Space-Vision technology. But the transparent shield and entrapping force field that characterize the film seem to still hold the cinema captive, isolated inside a bubble, right where it is and has always been. It survived a fire in 1974, but was terribly damaged during the Revolution and, of course, shut down right after. Before being left totally abandoned, it was briefly reopened as a pharmacy in the war-torn 1980s. Currently, above its entirely glass storefront, a Bowl of Hygieia and another sign that reads “Peace be upon you, Imam Khomeini” are still hanging on the scaly facade.

Almost all of these buildings are technically confiscated properties, occasionally caught up in legal arguments between different (para-)governmental organizations, including the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation or the Foundation for Preserving and Propagating the Values of Holy Defense, on the one hand, and the Bureau of Beautification within the Municipality of Tehran, the Cultural Heritage Organization of Iran, or even some burgeoning private art institutions, on the other.

In late 2017, another campaign was successfully wielded by a large group of the culturati for the preservation of Nasr Theatre. The proposal is to turn it into the Theatre Museum, which will also come with a cafe and all the fuss. However, the spectral and the corporeal, as well as the dramatic and the mundane, had, from the beginning, populated these places together. Now the only way out from destruction, or a rusty storage, is to accept museumification. But what would be left of a cinema if the spirit of drama is exorcised? What would raise and fulfill curiosity for a night at the museum? It is the pull of imagination that seems to have vanished, and no museum can simply bring it back.