Bi ismillahir rahmanir raheem
as requested by robert,
Hi, this is my first post on this forum and I'm trying to find out
some information about Islamic art. I know tht there's an art forum on
here, but it won't let me post in there. Maybe a mod could move this
there, or someone else could pose this question in there for me?
Anyway,I'm just about to start a Masters dissertation on Film
Studies and my subject is Iranian Cinema, more specifically the new
Iranian Cinema of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami etc. The general
argument of my thesis is going to be an attempt to critique the usual
western analysis of these films which values them highly but in a very
politicalised way which sees them as highly influenced by Modern
Western aesthetic and intellectual traditions, comparing the alienation
and ambiguity/pluralism within them to a particular form of Western
oppositionalism (as though anything indiginously Islamic would be much
more monolithic and opressive).
In place of this analysis I'm
advocating an understanding of these films in terms of a poetic
pluralism which I'm tracing through Sufism. My aim is to be able to
trace both these Western and Persian forms of pluralism back to common
origins in Platonic and Aristotelian aesthetics which through the
diffusion of the Classical and Judaeo-Christian (and eventually
Islamic) worlds came to influence both aesthetic traditions.
Now
I've plenty of material that supports this kind of idea in terms of
film and literature, but the last element that is missing to make this
comparative dialectic between the two cultures is in terms of painting.
I'm aware that a lot of Islamic culture hasn't been particularly
interetsed in painting, and that when it has it has been more
interested in geometric patterns etc. but this is where I was hoping
that someone on this forum might be able to help me. My research into
Islamic painting hasn't got me very far, but what I'm looking for (if
it exists) is something like an equivalent to Velasquez's Las Meninas,
a piece of Islamic art that demonstrates the same kind of ambiguity and
pluralism that occurs in Sufi poetry and New Iranian Cinema. Whether it
exists or not i don't know, but I thought that if it does, someone on
here might know about it.
Any help you might be able to offer
here, even if its just the name of an artist or work would be
gratefully recieved. Thanks in advance,
Robert Geal.
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Rasul Allah (sallah llahu alaihi wa sallam) said: "Whoever knows himself, knows his Lord" and whoever knows his Lord has been given His gnosis and nearness.
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