فصلنامه کیمیای هنر
پیاپی 29 (زمستان 1397)

Persian painting has usually been studied from historical point of views. But its formation is rooted in a specific social context. In this study, we will try to contextualize it and we will show that this social context has a crucial role regarding its aesthetic. Persian painting is an art of royal courts and it represents the life of princes combined with Persian epic legendes. This social context and its impact on the Persian painting will be studied here, showing that ordinary life of royal families is the central theme of these paintings and not, as it is said usually, the sprituality of mystical realms. The formation of the Persian painting in the 14th century is typically related to the Persian cultur ruled by the Mongols and Timûrids who tried to legitimize their kingdom by supporting the arts and particularly painting. That is why the art of painting flourished in Persia during their dynasties.

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)).

This study is concerned with the use of specific tools from Mikhail Bakhtin’s comprehensive literary work in order to investigate the notion of time/space in Bahram Beyzaie’s 1979 movie, The Crow. Employing the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope in the analysis of the movie as a cinematic text proves helpful in developing the notion of anachronotopicity, which is then utilized to investigate the workings of memory in the movie. The main characters’ utterances, as means of communication and as other manifestations of anachronotopicity, are also explored. Finally, the issue of communicating with a public (or simply another person) in the narrative of the movie is discussed through the Bakhtinian spectrum of communication between monological and open-ended utterances and its relation with the introduced notion of anachronotopicity.

A close observation of Iran-Iraq war films in the Iranian society reveals that their genres have shifted in the course of the society’s evolution. This questions the category-based principles of genre we have known so far in literature concerning film theory and necessitates a new conceptualization of genre, which can be realized with the aid of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. This theory abandons categorization in favor of functional differentiation and helps us observe Iranian war movies in their societal context. By taking a close look at the function of film in the society as one of the mass media, and through locating the concepts of memory, reality, identity and genre in Luhmann’s theory, I shall find a pattern in the mentioned genre shift which is in turn punctuated by the Iranian society’s different stages of evolution. To do so, I shall rely on a qualitative, analytical and critical method.

Gérard Genette named any relationship between one text and other texts “Transtextuality” and divided it into five categories; including intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality and hypertextuality. We have conducted a case study of four paintings of the Iranian contemporary painter, Aydin Aghdashloo by using the theory of “transtextuality”. These four artworks belong to “the Orientals” series and they depict the Qajar king, Fath Ali Shah. The completion of subject matter and data used in this essay is extracted from library, record and thesis materials and the conduction of the theme is comparative and analytical. The aim of the essay is to evaluate the reasons, which made the theory of “transtextuality” an appropriate critical method for artworks of Aghdashloo. The other aim is to study the five categories of “transtextual” relationship in these four paintings, by focusing on “hypertextuality”. The findings show that the artworks of Aghdashloo are a perfect example of transtextual relations.

Chance is a broad concept which has become an important factor in linking science and art in the twentieth century. Simultaneously, concept emerged as a new scientific paradigm in Arts by Henry Poincaré and especially Marcel Duchamp, who has affected many artists such as John Cage, one of aleatoric music pioneers .This paper investigates the differences and similarities of the chance concept in the art of Duchamp and Cage and Poincaré’s effects on them, that in this regard, employs a descriptive method and relies on library resources.
Results show that the viewpoint of Cage and Duchamp is the same in the indifference aesthetics, the provisional and the conventional nature, the importance of audience’s perceptual spaces ,and the non-existence of real infinity which is the result of the influence of the Poincaré’s thoughts on both of them and is interpreted as ‘systemic chance’ or ‘absolute chance.’ Their difference also lies on Duchamp’s scientific origins (Poincaré’s thoughts) and Cage’s spiritual origins )Zen Buddhism). Hence ,the influence of Poincaré’s thoughts on Cage can be divided into two periods :before Duchamp’s death (Chaos theory, Topology, Non-Euclidean geometry, and N-dimensional spaces )and after that( eclipse Poincaré’s Thoughts with Zen, Prajña, and Satori, )which ultimately ends up solving Poincaré thought in Zen.