28 June 2008
i is for imam (hidden)
[Couldn't use flash here, as the picture is covered by glass]
This image is from an antiques market in Tehran. As far as I know it 'represents' (in so far as a blank-faced image can represent) the Hidden or Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who has been hidden since 874 AD and will reappear when the world has fallen into chaos and civil war. (But it might be Muhammad too, as he is surrounded by fire, like many of the pictures in the site linked below.)
According to my top Shi'ite cultural attaché in London, he is holding Ali's sword, a deadly bifurcated weapon. His face is perhaps absent because no one yet knows what he looks like (see this discussion of edicts against the representation of Muhammad, with a brief discussion of the Hidden Imam at the end).
There are many murals in Tehran, many to martyrs, some to more recent historical memory (on one visit, paintings of the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photographs lined one of the main motorways). One striking mural, which I unfortunately didn't have time to take a picture of, as everyone drives about 900 miles an hour, was of the Hidden Imam, his face covered by a sheet. It resembled nothing so much as Magritte's Lovers.
I wonder if there is some connection, whether Magritte knew of the sheet-faced Imam, or whether it was mere coincidence (or something to do with his mother's drowning in her nightgown). Either way, something deeply troubling and intriguing about the representation of the non-representable, as Lyotard once almost sort of said.
UPDATE: Joel informs me that Etienne Decroux might be of relevance here with his idea of 'corporeal mime'. Decroux defines his socialist, modernist, mime thus (extract):
"The dancer's body pulls thought after it. The mime's thought pulls the body
8. Unlike so-called "expressive" dance and "Isadoraesque" dance, we do not express our feelings with our arms, but rather with the trunk. The arms, in mime, must only act concretely: to fight or to work.
9. As opposed to nineteenth-century pantomime, we do not seem to be trying to explain something to the audience. We express ourselves despite ourselves.
In addition, while this nineteenth-century pantomime used lots of facial expressions, we use only the body and are usually masked."
Here is a picture of him:
