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I-Lib-Catalogue-2011.Pdf “I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been killed for the Word of God, and for the testimony of the Lamb which they had. They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on them who dwell on the earth?” Revelation 6:9-10 THEM WHO DWELL ON THE EARTH REZA ARAMESH This haunting description of unbearably grim newspaper cuttings coming to life in a REZA ARAMESH: young boy’s gloomy bedroom in the dying days of the Second World War memorably articulates the power such images can have as they seep, unbidden, into the depths of our imagination, into the very dreams we dream. In his studio, Reza Aramesh has assembled his own wall of dreams – and nightmares – in which hastily snapped photographs of ‘THEM WHO DWELL the miserable victims of war and violence from 1950s Algeria and Korea to present-day Baghdad are juxtaposed with lavish art book illustrations of gilded statues of ecstatic saints and luminous paintings of the dead and dying Christ [Fig. 4]. This ambitious and challenging range of visual sources, from the journalistic and Contemporary to ON THE EARTH’ the grandest masters of Renaissance and Baroque art, resonates within and amongst Aramesh’s meticulously crafted photographic altarpieces and sensuously sculpted icons Geraldine A Johnson of beauty and terror. Aramesh’s art is an art of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, an art in which images and objects combine and recombine to form ever-shifting screens upon which we can project our own individual visual memories and personal experiences. Aramesh himself is as much a study in contrasts as are his works: born in small-town Iran, then [The boy] finds a pile of newspapers and magazines someone’s tied up and thrown trained at Goldsmiths College in the very heart of the London art world, Aramesh’s biography is as richly textured and varied as are the sources that have inspired him. over the fence. Now and then he opens a paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war In his art, the contrasts multiply before our eyes: East and West, past and present, sacred and secular, high art and mass culture, two and three-dimensional, colour and or a crying baby or some poor fleeing [refugee] running with a mattress across monochrome, death and life. To begin to unravel these intricately interwoven strands, one turns first to the titles given by Aramesh to his works. his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it to his private room and pin it to the Fig. 4: View inside Reza Aramesh’s London studio. In his most recent pieces, Aramesh has restricted his titles to a series of numbered flaky wall….at night those….starving weeping wounded on his walls wait till [he] ‘actions’ – one could also call them ‘interventions’ – in the process omitting the very precise labels given to earlier incarnations of his large-scale photographic re-enactments. is asleep and then they dance in their jagged borders….They never make a sound Previously, Aramesh used deliberately detailed, indeed, verbatim transcriptions of press photographs’ captions for his titles. By editing, recombining and then restaging these and he always sleeps through, but it happens all the same – men throw off their mass-media images with amateur actors in the opulent surroundings of grand European galleries and palaces, but keeping the original newspaper and magazine captions, mattresses and soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground… Aramesh’s photographs encouraged viewers to compare and contrast a particular journalistic source directly with his reimagined interpretation. Thus the subtitle for Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (1991). what is now simply called Action 111 – a scene performed in the magnificent halls of the Palace of Versailles – was initially the caption related to the bleak press photograph taken in the final months of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime that had inspired the group in the centre of the composition, a standing man contemplating a figure lying prone on the ground [Figs. 2 and 3]. But such an exact verbal quotation could distract from the fact that the striking figure in the left foreground of the triptych actually had been derived from a completely different mass-media image, this one focusing on a traumatised young boy on a rubble-strewn street in Fallujah nearly a year after the fall of the Iraqi dictator [Fig. 1]. By eliminating his earlier, seemingly straightforward link between text and image and now paring down the title to nothing more than Action 111, Aramesh allows his triptych to float free from any single, specific visual or historical referent. Instead, such imposing pieces tap into our gnawing sense of familiarity with the many hundreds, if not thousands of similarly excoriating images we see day in and day out in newspapers, on television and increasingly online. Today, it may be Iraq, but the images that inspire Aramesh also conjure up in our subconscious a veritable internal slide show of 20th and 21st-century Fig. 1: An Iraqi boy weeps as people survey the damage following an Fig. 2: Reza Aramesh, Action 111, 2010. Fig. 3: Dead prisoner outside Abu Ghraib grief and horror: Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine… air strike in Fallujah, Sept. 9, 2004. [photo: Fares Dlimi/AFP] prison, Oct. 20, 2002. [photo: Tyler Hicks/ The New York Times] 14 15 Fig. 11: Reza Aramesh, Action 67, 2010. Fig. 12: Caravaggio, Deposition of Christ, c.1602-4. [photo: The Yorck project/Wikimedia Commons] Fig. 5: Some members of the Islamic fundamentalists were regrouped Fig. 6: Reza Aramesh, Action 124, 2011. Fig. 7: Diego Velázquez, Christ at the Column ����������������������������e arrested during a crossre with the police inBauchi, after the Flagellation, c.1628-29. [photo: Enrique northern Nigeria, July 27, 2009. Luis Cordero/Wikimedia Commons] [source photo: AFP, modified by Reza Aramesh] The slideshow inside our heads is not limited to the cold shock of the new, but also the warm familiarity of the old: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Velázquez. The art of these and other Renaissance and Baroque masters seems to soak through the surfaces of Aramesh’s photographs and animate the very limbs of his sculptures. Like his journalistic sources, however, the relationship is complex and multilayered, much more than a clear-cut case of direct visual quotation from a single source. Thus Action 124 references a figure Aramesh has cropped from a press photograph of religious fundamentalists captured in present-day Nigeria, but also the pleading eyes and mouth of Bernini’s marble Proserpina and the bound wrists of Velázquez’s pitiful painted figure of Christ crumpled on the floor [Figs. 5-9]. For all the contemporaneity of Aramesh’s figure, half clad in The visual and iconographic density – and intensity – of Aramesh’s work goes literally a tracksuit bearing the ubiquitous triple stripes of the Adidas brand, its historical and from head to toe, embodied in every aspect of his pieces. In Action 105, for instance, the aesthetic allusions are far more than merely skin-deep. In fact, they transform the sculpture beautiful, but essentially disempowered figure of a lithe young man instantly recalls for into a timeless icon that is no longer beholden to any single image, place or date: black the art historian almost innumerable Renaissance and Baroque images of St Sebastian, skin turns to white, female metamorphises into male, and shackles disappear, even as an bound to a tree trunk whilst his pristine body is pieced by cruel arrows, or Christ himself, intense psychology of fear and subjugation remains [Fig. 10]. humiliatingly tied to a column, about to be mercilessly flagellated [Figs. 15 and 16]. But Aramesh, inspired by a major 2009-10 exhibition in London and Washington of Spanish Baroque art entitled The Sacred Made Real, has also cited somewhat less obvious sources for this piece, such as the imploring upward gaze of Francisco Antonio Ruiz Gijón’s St. John of the Cross, like Aramesh’s figure, a carefully crafted and convincingly painted wooden sculpture, albeit of an aging saint rather than a youthful captive [Figs. 17 and 18] (Velázquez’s Christ at the Column and Fernández’s Dead Christ were likewise encountered by Aramesh when visiting this powerful and very moving exhibition [see Figs. 7 and 13]). Fig. 8: Gianlorenzo Bernini, Pluto and Proserpina (detail), 1621-22. Fig. 9: Reza Aramesh, Action 124 (detail). Fig. 10: Reza Aramesh, Action 124 (detail). [photo: Wikimedia Commons] Likewise, Aramesh’s Action 67 and Action 87, imposing black-and-white photographs staged in the lavish surroundings of London’s Kenwood House and the Rodin Museum in Paris, are reenactments of mass-media images, the former of a wounded Somali man spirited away by his comrades in 2009, the latter of a victim of the Franco-Algerian conflict being mourned in 1958. But they also evoke art historical sources both painted and sculpted, from the bruised, bloody and gradually putrefying figure of the dead Christ carved by the Spanish Baroque sculptor Gregorio Fernández to depictions by painters such as Raphael, Pontormo and Caravaggio of Christ’s equally lifeless body moments after it has been lowered from the Cross [Figs. 11-14]. Fig. 13: Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ, 1625-30. [photo: Rodelar/ Fig. 14: Reza Aramesh, Action 87, 2010. Wikimedia Commons] 16 17 Fig. 19: South Vietnamese soldiers show off a Fig. 20: Reza Aramesh, Action 105, 2011. Fig. 21: Reza Aramesh, Action 68, 2009. Viet Cong prisoner captured near Tan Son Nhut Airbase, May 6, 1968. On the other hand, a student of more recent historical events and their representation in the media would perhaps link Action 105 to very different types of visual sources with very different reverberations.
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