Body (Non-) Presentation in Representing the Body:The Ideological Body in The Paintings of the School of Islamic Art and Thought (Hozeh Honari (1979-1992)

The 1979 religious ideological revolution of Iran brought about a double stance towards the body and its pictorial representations, as to drawing a schism between the physiological and the cultural aspects of the body. Studying this schism is important particularly due to its significance in figuring out the features and functions of what in this article will be called “the ideological body”. Based on Hans Belting’s image trilogy and his concept of the “medium” in it, the present paper aims to investigate the schism between the natural and the cultural body as observable in the ideological body in the context of the Iranian contemporary visual culture. It is shown that this schism appears to be emanating from a dual behavior of pictorial mediality (as introduced by Belting), where the two bipolar limits of the mediality continuum herewithin called the “exogenous” vs. “endogenous” mediality come into a conflict. Through this conflict, the cultural [aspect of the] body which in pictorial terms will be defined to be chiefly the creation of exogenous mediality (i. e., the Shiite ideology’s image-making apparatus) receives glorified representations at the cost of the denial and negation or “(non-)presentation” of the physiological [aspect of the] body produced mainly by the endogenous mediality (i. e., the immediate imaging of a “self”/ an individual without the intrusion of any “other”). This schismatic bodily glorification through negation in the post-revolutionary Iranian visual culture is shown to be the most fundamental definitive characteristic of “the ideological body” the features and functions of which will be investigated in this paper in view of the paintings of the School of Islamic Art and Thought (Hozeh Honari (1979-1992)).