Tinker, tailor, soldier

There are headless soldiers of Islam in Adeela Suleman’s second solo show at Aicon Gallery in New York City’s fashionable SoHo neighborhood.

Beaten skins of stainless steel, iron and brass are cut and mounted on walls to create mostly figurative relief sculpture. These pieces are punctuated with porcelain plates and metal daggers.

This direct quotation of violence is a new concept for Suleman, whom I knew for the more subtle and expansive sculpture (images 1, 2 and 3) that has a memorably utilitarian look; metal bowls, thalis and plates, graters, kettles, drains, strainers, pipes, drain covers, handles of all varieties and ladles soldered together to make formidable and wonderfully absurd headgear sometimes worn by the artist herself in portrait photographs; in addition to linked chains of birds to create hangings like chandeliers and screens. Though some of that familiar work is in this show, the new ingredients of violence and humor eclipse it.

[quote]Blood and blossoms have been the bread and butter of artists from Pakistan[/quote]

When they aren’t beheading each other, Suleman’s knights stand motionless and crippled, wielding a precious shield with a halo of feathered arrows (image 4); painted on plates, they may stand tied to a paltry tree, throats gushing where heads should be. Speaking of heads, there are none in this show! There must be over thirty headless soldiers in what seem to be stories of brainless bloodlust. The artist says: “I studied bloody battle scenes in manuscript illuminations but it was important to me to play a little with identity so you can’t tell who is killing whom.”

There is the spirit of the American artist Kara Walker in these reliefs (image 5). Walker works with cut-out black figurative silhouettes pasted on white walls. Like Walker’s silhouettes, Suleman’s metal cut-outs can be assembled together in many different ways. But instead of flat blackness, these constitute a labyrinth of petals and buds and saplings and cloves and paisleys and little circular dents hammered in to give the impression of lustrous and detailed abundance, including a faithful rendition of folds of fabric and skin. We’ve seen this kind of metalwork on decoration pieces, frames for mirrors and calligraphy, in poor and good taste in several classes of households in Pakistan. And there is a great merit in recognizing this, because we can see Suleman’s materials transform through her idiosyncratic treatment of them. To the average American culture-vulture, however, these may have more in common with the Islamic section of the Metropolitan Museum.

[quote]What separates Suleman's metalwork from trinkets at Allama Iqbal airport is its scale[/quote]

Some of the reliefs are symmetrical (image 6). Think truck art; a Neeli-actress-desi-mermaid-eye on one side of the bejeweled bumper prompts one on the other side or, for that matter, Rashid Rana’s now famous mirror-image suicidal video titled Ten Differences among others who work with the symmetry of reflections. (What can I say, our people seem to become captivated by geometry and mirror images!) In Suleman’s case, the potential pitfall of this move is neutralized by the addition of vines of blooming flowers and tendrils that snake (by no means symmetrically) into a tangle of curls. Casting charming shadows on the wall, they provide poetic context to the carnage. What fun is a bloodcurdling headless combat without some sweet flowers and a lemon tree sprouting its nourishing fruit? Recently, blood and blossoms have been the bread and butter of the most sought-after artists from Pakistan. Think Rashid Rana’s ode to Caravaggio-esque sensuality and bomb blast debris, think Imran Qureshi’s bloody flowerprints on the rooftop of the Met (image 7). This may be perceived as a trend. But it is an undeniable response to something very real. Just read the national news every time you shrug your shoulders and say to yourself: life goes on…

In the press release, Suleman cites as her inspiration the terror tactics of the Maburizun, an elite guard and particularly vicious section of the Rashidun army, responsible for the addition of Roman Syria and Zoroastrian Persia to the map of the Islamic empire in the 7th century. That is an intelligent and useful sound bite to put out, though it doesn’t do much for our perception of the work.

What separates Suleman’s metalwork from trinkets for tourists at Dubai airport, or indeed Allama Iqbal airport, is its scale; and what makes it contemporary is its dark humor. These aren’t precious objects of the kind associated with the widespread diaspora of little relics now largely and thankfully protected in the halls of Western Museums (painted pots and pans and braziers and miniatures and screens and holy books) from the presumably less cringe-inducing days of Islam. Installed at a height above the floor, Suleman’s soldiers loom over you, and as their steely skirts catch the spotlight, they look at once valuable and cheap, a lucrative ambiguity to have in any art scene these days. These could be scenes from territorial battles in Mughal India as much as a bad day in Karbala or Arabia much earlier, but their brain-dead nihilism especially locates them in today’s Pakistan.

Imitation Victorian porcelain plates painted with serene scenery of English hamlets and brooks and the like are painted over with Suleiman’s headless violence, sometimes to great effect (image 8 and 9). “I got them from a Sunday bazaar in Karachi. They bring the plates in huge containers, tons of them. It’s like a Landa bazaar of bartan…Then I studied bloody battle scenes in manuscript illuminations…I work with craftsmen and that has been the way I work from the beginning of my career. For this particular project I approached this guy who paints on Vespas. Vespa painting is actually a hundred times more delicate than truck art.”

[quote]The soldiers' skirts look at once valuable and cheap, a lucrative ambiguity in the art scene these days[/quote]

The fact that they’re not finished with the fineness of a picture by Abdur Rehman Chughtai saves them from becoming opaque and fatally serious. “I was totally inspired by Kill Bill. I just love the fact that it’s so horrendous but it’s also very beautiful. Death loses its horrific nature and it becomes this performance which is just there and you can watch it for hours and hours and nothing happens to you in terms of – it just provides you with entertainment.”

Some of the plates are coupled with what could possibly be the most conceptually advanced part of this show: metallic daggers with a curling, flaccid leaf for a blade (image 10 and 11). Their garish, tropical colors, glossy finish, the purple flowers and the fiery snake coiled around the handle, all of this gives them an air of theme-park whimsy. Instead of brooding on the nature of bloody religious wars, empires of the sword and their place in the brutal present, these objects complicate and question nature itself. This is the point in the show where the work stops being culturally specific, in a great way. In a press release, this would be a writer’s chance to use the now-conceptually depleted phrase ‘transcending boundaries’.