A Postmodernist Reading of Art Works Based on Fredric Jameson's Ideas: Focusing on Parviz Tanavoli's Hich Collection (1960s-2000s)

As a theorist of postmodern art, Fredrik Jameson believes that historicism in modern works of art is a tendency towards history: a tendency that undermines history as well. Jameson has a different attitude towards the function of the historical object in the context of the worka of art. He shed a new light on reading the new works of art by emphasizing an ironic function in postmodern productions. It seems that the same approach can be used to read Iranian neo-traditional works. The research in hand has focused on Tanavoli’s Hich collection due to its general appreciation by the audience in last decades and tries to provide an answer to the following question: can the approach in hand, alongside the formalistic and semantic interpretations (which are not adequate enough) lead to a new understanding of these works? Is this popularity indebted to a relation between the form of the work and its historical associations? This research aims to examine Jameson’s ideas in reading Tanavoli’s works as well as finding new layers of meaning in these works. Using history as a consumable object and its nostalgic representations are the reasons behind appreciation of Hich collection. Therefore, the formalistic and semantic interpretations become less important. Other postmodern aspects of Tanavoli’s works can be realized based on Jameson’s ideas as well.