Muhammad ZEESHAN DYING MINIATURE
My life is hanging by a thread Florence Nightingale, 1896
By Mia Jankowicz The series Dying Miniature (2008) departs significantly from most recognisable aspects of Mughal miniature painting to the extent that without its title there would be little means of anchoring this work to the genre it nevertheless discusses. The works are exercises in emphatic denial beginning most notably with the sandpaper support, the absolute inverse of the deliberately super-smooth surface of wasli. Whereas wasli enables the hairline-fine, fluid detailing characteristic of miniature painting, the sandpaper not only inhibits but actively aggravates the material of the image, in a kind of gestural violence. The strange congress of graphite and sandpaper is mutually destructive, the surfaces being destroyed as they destroy, and being marked as they mark – Zeeshan was obliged to use a number of plain old pencils, because the sticks of graphite he had bought for the task kept crumbling under the force of his drawing. The drawings are the result of a process whose violence prompts the awareness that drawing happens by a process of abrasion and residue. The only recognisably ‘miniature’ aspect of these works is their two-dimensionality and their subjects, whose stylised outlines and poses are recognisably typical. The figure, empty of detail, is a silvery, worn-down silhouette; one of the fading populace of the universe of the miniature. It is as though the genre of miniature painting has exhausted itself for Zeeshan, through overuse; in this situation of overfamiliarity, what is gained in nuance can be lost to banality. As the relentless pacing of an animal eventually wears a flat, dry path in the grass, so might the genres of painting eventually make their subject barely detectable. At the heart of Muhammad Zeeshan’s enquiry and practice for the last few years is the knowledge that that which distinguishes a form also constitutes its limits. The general trajectory of works such as Dying Miniature has its roots in Zeeshan’s earlier painting practice. Bodies of work such as Well Directed (2005) and High Notes (2005) are recognisably and methodologically miniature painting, but their content was a departure, often depicting distinctly unpleasant subject matter. Repeatedly featuring delicately bandaged or Previous pages: Dying Miniature (diptych), 2008, Graphite and bronze on sandpaper, 61 /33 cm x 84 cm Opposite top: Well Directed, 2005, Gouache on wasli, 15 x 10 cm Opposite bottom: May I...?, 2007, Gouache on wasli, 52 x 67 cm 4
otherwise concealed objects such as pistols, bananas, rats and vultures, the works alluded to phallocentrism, corruption and violence via extremely delicate, almost vulnerable renderings. Here is another conflict; the more disturbing the combinations of images, the more lyrically and compellingly they are laid down. It is uncertain whether the bandages are intended to conceal corruption, or nurse the wounds, but what is clear is the tension, as nurturing and violence tentatively co-exist. And here perhaps are the roots of the irrevocable and paradoxical link between creation and destruction in Dying Miniature. Somewhere along the way, the subject matter was beginning to overflow and even destroy the form. In 2007, Gasworks and Green Cardamom invited Muhammad Zeeshan on residency in London. As I was the curator of the residency programme at Gasworks, we had plenty of opportunity to talk as we meandered around the damp London summer. The question of how an artist’s practice, interests and assumptions take life, in varying contexts of international art, is raised nowhere more frequently than on residencies. While there is something of an international artistic neverland developing across places with highly mobile and well-funded artistic populations – transnational practitioners with a number of shared values that would seem to undermine the rhetoric of ‘internationalism’ (and, more politically, multiculturalism in the arts) – it is not easy to brush away the element of eurocentrism within the inherited values of such practitioners. The residency programme at Gasworks, in striving to invite artists who would not as automatically enter these freewheeling networks, was often faced with artists who knew what their practice meant at home (for whom, indeed, the notion of an artistic ‘home’ still existed in one way or another), and whose residencies were a process of confronting their work with the multiplicities, banalities, and excitements of London. None more so than in the case of Muhammad Zeeshan. In London, and at Braziers workshop in Oxfordshire, the differing potentialities of his practice in different contexts became more acutely apparent. In Pakistan, he had frequently been told, he said, that his work was ‘not miniature’. In contemporary art circles in the UK, this question was barely relevant anyway, Left: Flag Ceremony, 2007, Installation views at Art Dubai Projects (2008) and Braziers International Artists’ Workshop (2007), Wooden shelves, coke and pepsi cans 5
and the transgressive nature of his work – insofar as that was necessarily desirable in an art culture that produces exhibitions such as Sensation (Royal Academy of Art, London, 1997) and the Turner Prize exhibitions – was largely in question. It made sense to Zeeshan, in this situation, to exploredifferent media entirely, such as audio multiples, video, performance, and collage, producing, amongst other things the video work Flag Ceremony (2007), which was later staged as an artist’s project at Art Dubai in 2008. In these conditions it seemed as though Zeeshan could only explore his interests – including, perhaps obliquely, the limits of miniature painting – by using other media. Painting has, of course, always had its ‘deaths’, in claims reminiscent of Florence Nightingale’s deathbed assertion – which she in fact made sixteen years before she eventually expired. And the threads in Zeeshan’s paintings in the expanded field of miniature are, after all, remarkably robust. In In God We Trust (On Indefiniteness) (2008), the eponymous text of the image is rendered in painted stitches on wasli. These fine lines, reminiscent of the wraith-like hairlines that featured in many of his earliest paintings, represent the surprisingly immaterial warp and weft that holds together the most cherished ideals and structures of a society – a construct that also runs through his book work A Colligation (Isolated Facts) (2008). In God We Trust, due to be destroyed by ritual immersion in black ink, in fact survived its ‘death’ in an event that, according to one’s persuasion, spoke strongly of the robustness of God, painting, or just wasli. The thematic and gestural violence of Zeeshan’s works are not there, it seems, in order to destroy, but to renew. Survival – of process, or surviving a process – is then the strongest thread running through Zeeshan’s work. So from here on out, miniature survives in Zeeshan’s practice - even if it is on sandpaper. Mia Jankowicz is a freelance writer and curator and is currently a participant in the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. Right: In God We Trust (On Indefiniteness), 2008, Performance and installation, Ink, glass vitrine, gouache and wasli
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Rough and abrasive: critiques of the miniature By Virginia Whiles Without a hint of paint, wasli or squirrel-tail brush, Zeeshan proposes his latest work as a form of bride stripped bare. This body of work comes out of a reaction to the debate in Pakistan on the ‘death of the miniature’, a debate as regular, and almost as tedious as the western wrangling about ‘the death of painting’. Zeeshan’s experimental method employs graphite, silver leaf and copper on sandpaper. The graphite is applied meticulously through repetitive diagonal strokes over six layers. Each layer is sealed with fixative so that the eventual surface augments its silver glint to an overall slippery and shiny effect. Foregoing the smooth surface of the polished wasli for the roughness of a paper used usually to strip painted surfaces, is an ironic gesture in its reversal of the actual material process. Zeeshan’s use of such unlikely material is deliberately set up as a challenge to the mythical aura created around miniature practice today. For a host of reasons, explained, but not excused, by the need to invent an iconic tradition in times of national crisis, orthodox miniature practice in Pakistan has been manipulated into performing the role of re-assuring an original heritage through the Mughal connection. Technique has long been the mainstay of the practice transmitted through the rigorous apprenticeship system based on the ustaad shagird relationship. Although this learning process is highly prized by young artists working in miniature today, including Zeeshan – who studied with Bashir Ahmed and Imran Qureshi – production by these artists is focused on the simple fact that art-making is, like any serious research, situated inevitably in its own time. Siting art practice in the contemporary world requires a questioning of the orthodox rhetoric which perceives the preserved past as the truly authentic creation. Such an attitude is a form of orientalism in reverse, based on tenets of continuity rather than rupture.(1) Zeeshan’s new work may recall surrealist practice in that it provokes the very intrusion of otherness to attack the familiar. His reduction of form to linear contour and reduction of colour to sombre contrasts, effectively plays on the original by signalling the precise lack of the habitual visual vocabulary applied to the miniature – detailed ornament and brilliant hues. Their disturbing absence reminds the viewer of their familiar presence, at once an ironic play on similarity and difference. These pieces suggest the use of cut-outs and assemblage common to collage, where the juxtaposition of unlikely elements refutes any homogeneous representation. Zeeshan recycles traditional subject matter in all three pieces: archetypal Mughalised profiles of courtly nobles pursuing the courtly pleasures of hunting, riding or smoking sit starkly on the abrasive ground, a rough ride indeed. Might the gentle mockery, unveiled in the surface substitution of floral brocade by monochrome khaddar, imply an ethical take on the traditional miniature, a critique of its reproduction of a courtly art? Left: Dying Miniature, 2008, Graphite and gold leaf on sandpaper, 142 x 112 cm
The bold blankness of form also recalls certain imagery from pop art, a touch of neo-pop humour that could even be read as a form of post-structural simulacre, as Barthes wrote: ‘What pop art wants is to desymbolize the object...the pop artist...himself has no depth: he is merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.’ Is this a disruption of traditional representation in the avant-gardist sense or is it neo-pop as an art of consumption, wholly integrated into globalised capitalism, as Warhol often vaunted? Perhaps by appropriating the Mughal monarchs themselves, the supreme content of the commodified miniature, and setting them within such an unhomely context, these works alienate rather than exploit the fetishist charms of the traditional practice. Zeeshan’s works show how necessary the delicate balance between continuity and rupture is to contemporary practice. The Maussian theory of art considers art objects as persons or agents of change in the social rather than in the symbolic sense and there is an intuitive hint of anthropomorphism in Zeeshan’s comments on his new work: “My miniature was alive and in conversation with me...it guided me; what to do and what not to do, how to explore with it, not on it.”
(1) Gilbert Achcar, Radical Philosophy, 151: 20-30 (2) Roland Barthes, ‘That Old Thing, Art’ in Paul Taylor, ed., Post-Pop (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 25-26) Dr. Virginia Whiles is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art in London, and at the National College of Arts and Beacon House University in Lahore.
Right: Dying Miniature, 2008, Graphite on sandpaper 137 x 112 cm
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Muhammad Zeeshan Born 1980, Mirpurkhas, Pakistan Lives and works in Lahore Education 2003 BFA, National College of Arts, Lahore Solo Exhibtions 2008 Ishtehaar Lagaana Mana Hai, art project at KoCA (Kiosk of Contemporary Art), Wiemar, Germany 2008 What Lies Beneath, Jahangir Nicholson Gallery, Mumbai 2008 Profane Illuminations, AICON Gallery, New York; Rohtas II, Lahore 2007 Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi 2007 Sublime Maladies, Anant Gallery, New Delhi 2006 Beyond Appearances, Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi Group Exhibitions 2008 Six Degrees of Separation and Odd Spaces, Vasl, Karachi The Ghost of Souza, AICON Gallery, New York Drawing Process, Green Cardamon, London Unstern. Sinistre. Disastro., ACC Gallery Weimar, Weimar Germany Future: Afghanistan, Gemak/Gemeentemuseum, The Hague Art Projects, Art Dubai 2007 Does Size Matter II? Jahangir Nicholson Gallery, Mumbai Dialogue with Tradition, National Art Gallery, Islamabad Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York From Pakistan to Montmartre, Galerie Chappe, Paris Configurations, Anant Gallery, Kolkata Lila/play: Contemporary Miniatures and New Art from South Asia, Melbourne 2005 Contemporary Chronicles, Art Alive, New Delhi Segregation, Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi Love/Hate, The Third Line Gallery, Dubai Segregation, Chawkandi Gallery, Karachi Reinventing Narratives, La Galerie Mohammed el Fassi, Rabat, Morocco Khaas Gallery, Islamabad 2004 Contemporary Miniature Paintings from Pakistan, Fukouka Asian Art Museum, Japan Class of 2003, Canvas Gallery, Karachi Terror Can Not be Exterminated by War, Metropolitan Museum,Tokyo Interpretation, ROHTAS II, Lahore Creases, Rohtas I, Islamabad Nomad Gallery, Islamabad 2003 Top of the Pops, National College of Arts Selected Residencies and Awards 2008 ACC Weimar Galerie Scholarship, Weimar, Germany 2007 Charles Wallace - Rangoonwala residency at Gasworks, London 12
This publication accompanies the exhibition Dying Miniature – Muhammad Zeeshan 12 December 2008 – 6 February 2009 Green Cardamom, 5a Porchester Place, London, W2 1SY Published by Green Cardamom, London info@greencardamom.net www.greencardamom.net Editor: Anita Dawood Design: Allan Parker Photography: Vipul Sangoi © 2008 Green Cardamom © All works Muhammad Zeeshan © Texts, the authors All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with permission from the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
ISBN: 978-0-9551779-7-2 Green Cardamom: Anita Dawood, Leyla Fakhr, Hammad Nasar, Nada Raza, Vipul Sangoi, Louise Sunderland
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