Footnotes for the Smiles Are Not Smiles

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Footnotes:e Smiles are not Smiles

Originally published as a lightbox on the occasion of Miael Stevensons exhibition e Smiles are notSmiles, Vilma Gold Gallery, London; Rowlands, A. Footnotes for the Smiles Are Not Smiles. In: Stevenson,M. & Titz, S eds. Art of the Eighties and Seventies. Museum Abteiberg Mnengladba & Revolver,Frankfurt (2006) p. 64-76 (English-German trans.) ISBN 386588198X


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i October 1971. e Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi threw a party. Held within the ruins of Persepolis it celebrated 2 500th anniversary of the Persian Empire,

the Shahs thirtieth anniversary on the throne and the tenth anniversary of the White Revolutionhis modern reform programme. ose invited represented the panoply of power. An

encampment of tents was constructed on the dry plateau. At the centre of Parisian decorator Jansens sumptuous tent city was the Shah and Empress apartment draped in ruby velvet

and gilded with gold. Scores of smaller tents fanned away from the centre complete with two bedrooms, two marble bathrooms and a ic siing room. Top hairdressers ew in from

Paris. Elizabeth Arden created a new makeup, to be given in kits to the guests, named aer the Empress Farah. Robert Havilland produced a cup and saucer service to be used once

by arriving guests. Lanvin created new uniforms for the court stited with over a mile of gold thread. e food and wines were Fren. Aer the banquet there was a son et lumiere

spectacle and reworks display. e whole spectacle-displayed wealth accrued from the price rises in oil. At Persepolis, the Shah moulded Persian history to his own desire. e cost of

his revisionism was anything up to $300 million. But the real cost to the Peaco ronewould manifest itself in revolution.

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Footnotes for the Smiles are not smiles

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ii We couldnt move; we were all stunned, said Gregory Losapio, 16 years old, who was in the museum with his Scarsdale High Sool class. Stunned visitors looked on

helplessly in the third oor gallery where Picassos Guernica hangs. A man drew a can of spray paint from his poet and scrawled three words Kill Lies All in foot-high leers across

the masterpiece. A man started to move toward the guy when he turned around, cursed and said: Im an artist and I want to tell the truth the student said. e vandal was identied as

Tony Shafrazi, an Iranian artist. Mr. Shafrazi was taken to the West 54th Street station house and was arged.

Source:e New York Times, Mar 1, 1974


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iii Housed at MOMA throughout the 1960s Guernicawas incorporated into the protest rhetoric of the Vietnam War. Numerous posters appropriated the painting as an

image. Anti war groups contacted Picasso and requested he withdraw the painting from the museum. e Artists Workers Coalition sought an Art Strike against war, repression and

racism.

Alun Rowlands Footnotes for the Smiles are not smiles

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iv I wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life. Maybe thats why the Guernica action remains so dicult to deal with. I

wanted to dwell within the act of the paintings creation, get involved with the making of the work, put my hand within it and by that act encourage the individual viewer to allenge

it, deal with it and thus see it in its dynamic raw state as it was being made, not as a piece of history. (Tony Shafrazi)

Source:Art in America, December 1980

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v Museums have been depicted as asylums. e works of art they housed appeared to be going through some kind of aesthetic convalescence. Separated from society they

were politically lobotomised, inanimate invalids ready for consumption. (Smithson). Institutional practices, the ruling force of political and economic factors, reveal the museum as

subject to the shiing associations of authority. It exerts and reects specic contradictions in society. e museums position as the most authoritative art institution allows it to govern

the construction of the present and projection of the future. Contemporary arts critique of the museum, even if reluctantly, still belongs to the museum. e iconoclastic violence of

the avant-garde is neutralised by the art institution. Radical transgression is no longer a break with the museum, but what we expect to nd in this modern house of worship. ese

broadside aas nevertheless recognised that the museum is an arena in whi power is secured and anowledged.


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vi e Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened its doors in October 1977. e building, a modernist vision by aritect Kamran Diba, is a cross between New Yorks

Guggenheim Museum for its entrance and the Saint-Paul-de-Vence Maeght Foundation for its exhibition rooms. e Empress Farah Pahlavi founded the museum with money fr om

the countrys immense oil reserves. e opening was a great occasion and fanfare with a guest list including Henry Kissinger and Nelson Roefeller. e collection contained major

masterpieces of western art from Monet and Gauguin to Warhol and Litenstein.


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vii e collection provides a snapshot of a period in the history of taste. is was a time in the 1970s when the extremely wealthy undertook the creation of a museum from

scrat. e artworks recall the circumstances under whi they were acquired. All art galleries and d ealers remember the museums patronage as a godsend. While Western economies

were hit with the 1974 oil crisis, the museum saved many galleries from bankruptcy. Tony Shafrazi became Empress Farah Pahlavis art advisor having established himself as gallerist

ironically representing grati artists su as Jean-Miel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

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viii By the late 1970s the New York art scene was in upheaval. Both stylistically and economically there were dierent semes of evaluation tied to competing and contradic-

tory philosophies. is emergence carried socio-political ramications that were divisive. Economically, international markets were sought to infuse the slumping art market. In this

climate art galleries were having diculties staying aoat. e average lifespan of a gallery was only one year. Even though there was a net increase in the total number of art galleries

over the decade, the fortunes of individual galleries were very precarious. e real innovations within this period happened less in the studios than in the spaces that displayed them.

e promotion of young artists, in eap recession-hit storefronts, allowed rst time gallerists, with no qualications other than enthusiasm and the ability to host a good party, to dene

a new modernism.


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ix Pimping was a highly developed art form in Tehran. Business and sex were inextricably intertwined. At the height of the Shahs excesses he insisted on making love to a

ministers daughter in a helicopter as it hovered over the city of Isfahan. Shawcross, William e Shahs Last Ride: e Fate of an AllySimon & Suster (1988)

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x Gold trades at an average of 16-17 barrels of Oil per ounce of Gold. Gold and oil traditionally have had a 15-to-1 relationship, only slipping out of congruence for short

periods of time. When the gold/dollar relationship is anored, the oil/dollar relationship remains stable as well. When the dollar/gold relationship is malfunctioning, as it was in the

late 1970s, capital is wasted as producers try to protect themselves from the damaging impact of inations and deations. In 1977 when ination began to pi up steam it reaed 9%

by 1978. Gold followed by breaking its previous high of $200. When Ination hit 10% in 1979, Gold really took o skyroeting to $500. Excitement kied in and a Gold rush mania

launed the yellow metal to its all time high of $850 in 1980.

Source:US Treasury


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xi 1974. Zadik Zadikian, ees Armenia to New York City. He befriends Riard Serra and assists in the production of his large-scale bla oil wall drawings. e rst of these

is named- Zadikian. e cultural-economic life of New York has a profound eect on Zadikian. In 1976 he covers his entire home and studio, 10 000 square feet of walls, oor and ceil-

ing with industrial gold, by pounding and gilding so as to transform it into a singularly radiant vision.


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xii Modernity in an Iranian context was a complex eld of negotiation and accommodation. In the years leading up to the revolution, religious and secular consciousness

coexisted. Artists and their galleries were lured by the Shahs vision of Iranian modernism to open galleries and publish journals of contemporary art in Tehran.


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xiii Former director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Kamran Diba, evocatively referred to this trend as Spiritual Pop Art: ere is a parallel between Saqqak-

khaneh [Iranian folk art] and Pop Art, if we simplify Pop Art as an art movement whi looks at the symbols and tools of a mass consumer society as a relevant and inuencing cultural

force. Saqqak-khaneh artists looked at the inner beliefs and popular symbols, that were part of the religion and culture of Iran and are consumed in the same way as industrial products

in the West.


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xiv October 31. 1978. Takhavoos. Koohe Noor St. 3 Rd St. No. 26 Tehran. Tony Shafrazi presents Gold Bris by Zadik Zadikian. e inaugural exhibition of Shafrazis new

Tehran gallery opened with a badrop of civil unrest and sporadic violence. Waves of rioting were a prelude to revolution. e gallery was looted. All that remained was the invitation

card that unwiingly announced the date of the revolution. e exhibition was an inadvertent witness to historical ange. e gallery closed.


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xv In the face of growing religious fervour and mounting opposition to excessive Westernisation, the Shah and Empress announcd their departure from Iran on an extended

vacation in Egypt. e downfall of the Shah and the ascendancy of Khomeini signalled a critical threat to American interests and cultural imperialism in the region. With the deposition

of the royal family the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art was seized and consigned to storage. Western art historians referred to the invisible collection as e Treasure.

e artworks were the cultural hostages of the revolutionary moment. e revolution swept aside the various forms of modernity through the imposition of an Islamic state. Pictures of

the mullahs began to appear on the walls and in the windows of shops and government oces. Some posters contained eoes of the rhetorical geometry of the Russian Constructivists

depicting red arrows smashing bla pedestals topped with symbols of the Shah and the United States. Others brought to mind Pop art. Ayatollah Khomeinis overexposed bla and

white face appears against a Warholian badrop. e posters and revolutionary paraphernalia demonstrate that a number of currents intermingled and coexisted with Islamic zeal.


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xvi Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgement every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be

commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail and be cast out with them into the res of punishment. Jorges Luis Borges, Dreamtigers


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xvii Art, especially pieces with themes that were less than Islamically correct, were displayed in private showings by invitation only Otherwise, the theocrats were relent-

less in forcing art to conform to Islamic modesty. Aer the revolution, the government even issued an ultimatum to the Museum of Contemporary Art about a large bronze statue of a

female at the entrance: Either take it down or comply. e statue was preserved by adding a crude breglass hejab to her hair and legs. Other art wasnt so fortunate. In an Iranian art-

book the ballerinas in Edgar Degas famous Dancers Practicing at the Barre were airbrushed out completely, leaving an empty room and practice bar. e tutus didnt meet the standards

of the hejab. Robin Wright e Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran. (Vintage). 2001


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xviii Among the allenges to capitalist Modernism complacency has bee n an awareness that concepts whi we consider unequivocally good- among them modernity,

democracy and individual liberty- are oen considered far more problematic in other parts of the world. Freedom appears to many in the non-Western world as a code word for the

forced imposition of a fraudulent Modernism. How salutary is modernity if it is accompanied by the erasure of cultural traditions? Perhaps the task is to seek new ways to participate

in the global economy that does not involve the torsions of free-market capitalism. e aempt is to examine the adaptation of modernism in a country that has experienced r evolution,

fundamentalism and period of reformism, to provide an account of the theoretical and ideological conicts between art and the forces of revolution.


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e Smiles are not Smiles2005Vilma Gold, London

Art of the Eighties and Seventies2006Museum Abteiberg, Mnengladba

e project is based on events surrounding the inaugural exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. is nowvery well established New York gallery began its life in Tehran in 1978. In the 1970s Tony Shafrazi, beerknown as the perpetrator of the grati aa on Picassos Guernica, was involved in the devel- opment ofone of the great fantasy collections of the 20th century Western art. With the ination in the oil price the Shahof Iran had become one of the wealthiest people on the planet. At the prompting of the Shahbanou, FarahDiba, the Shahs 3rd wife an imperial art collection was quily amassed expanding the power of the Peacorone into the art market. In Tehran a museum was built to house this collection. Being mainly Western artit epitomized the Shahs vision for the modern Iranian state. e promise of a new market was still apparentlytenable as late as October 1978. is was the date Shafrazi opened his own com- mercial gallery in Tehran. erst (and only) exhibition was Gold Bris, by the Armenian born artist, Zadik Zadikian. e piece consistedof staed, gold-leafed bris in the form of an open weave wall. By the time of the opening the Shah had losteective rule the country. Zadikians exhibition was accompanied by waves of rioting - the onset of revolution.Looting followed, the bris were lost and gallery was closed. All that remains as testimony to this importantexhibition is the invitation card. Using the scant remaining documentation a fantasy version of the Zardikianpiece was reconstructed, in a semi-looted state, along with a portion of the Tehran gallery using prop-likeconstructions.

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Footnotes for the Smiles Are Not Smiles