nalinamoses

Nov 28

The last time I was in Paris I stopped at Tati to pick up an Eiffel Tower charm to bring back, ironically, as a souvenir. I came back instead with a delicate filigree ornament of an open hand, of which I knew nothing except that it was “eastern” and that it carried some sort of blessing. I wore it on those days when I felt the need to be protected with forces greater than normal, and felt protected.

It wasn’t until I read Dare Me by Megan Abbott, a crime story set in the emotionally-charged world of high school cheerleading, that I learned that it was a hamsa. The amulet is resonant in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. Depending on one’s beliefs, the flat palm depicted is that of Fatima daughter of Mohammed, Miriam sister of Moses, of Mary mother of God. The charm has been secularized and popularized in friendship bracelets exchanged by teenage girls. It’s often paired with a small, round glass bead that represents the evil eye, which the hamsa can ward off. In Dare Me a hamsa friendship bracelet becomes a crucial plot point when it’s gifted by a cheerleader to her coach and then spotted by that girl’s best friend, who acts out. The design of most hamsas — sort of symmetrical but not really, sort of naturalistic but not really, sometimes up and sometimes down — lends itself to inspired graphic design. My own charm is smaller than a penny and astonishingly thin, with equal parts gold and open space so that it feels like a scrap of lace. It’s hard to find an expression of this icon that isn’t lovely. Even the clumsiest ones convey its essential goodness.

Oct 1

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has mounted an exhibit about Doris Duke’s Hawaiian pleasure palace Shangri La. Duke built the estate in Honolulu in the 1930’s, when she was a young woman, to house her expanding collection of Islamic art and artefacts. She built it in a broadly Islamic style, consulting designers in Iran and India to complete ornamental stone and wood work. But the estate is less impressive for its design, which is modern in plan and pastiche in detail, than for its ambition. It’s Duke’s innocent enthusiasm for all things Islamic that lights up the place.

It’s easy to dismiss the entire project as a rich girl’s fantasy of Islam, a term that’s used in the exhibit wall texts to describe any culture in the world that has come into historical contact with the religion. There are on display pieces from Spain, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and North India. One elegant wood table with white stone inlay and curved steel supports is attributed, hilariously, to “India (Goa), or Venice.” (My guess is Venice, because the ornament depicts human figures with a expressiveness that’s highly unusual for Indian art.) There are some exquisite ceramics, tapestries and jewelry, but the quality of the work is irregular. The most powerful items are large format vintage color photographs that show views of the rooms and courtyard in delirious technicolor. Here two fantasies collide: the stately, sensuous Islamic palace and the easy, idyllic Hawaiian landscape. It seems strange that Duke traveled so far away, to a place with its own marvelously exotic history, only to bring another kind of exotic to it. But I admire Duke for choosing the fantasy of Islam. For a privileged young American woman in the 1930’s, it was highly original. Walking through the exhibit, one senses that it hit her hard.

Photo by Horst from Vogue, 1966.

Dec 4

A tour guide leading a group of visitors through the new galleries of Islamic art at the Met explained that all of the works fell into four categories: calligraphic, vegetal (or arabesque), geometric and figural. After seeing the galleries I understood that all four of those things are the same. They are all about the line, and the art on display is essentially graphic.

The most powerful pieces are the manuscripts filled with text and illustrations. Sometimes a page requires careful inspection, and you fall into tit like a diorama. And sometimes a page compels you to step back so that the words, rendered in an extravagant, expressive Arabic script, collapse into a pulsating all-over pattern. The drawings of the human figure are naturalistic but not realistic. The artists were obviously looking at the body as they drew, but cared more about composing a fine, ideal figure on the page than about getting the proportions right. The scenes — of mythology, courtly life, war, and love — are well-observed but, to a western visitor, stubbornly anti-perspectival. Like so much of the artwork on display, it rests on the surface.

Dec 3

There’s been much ballyhoo about The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia at the Met. None of the artwork is new; these objects have been part of the Met’s permanent collection for decades. But current geopolitics make it important to look at this part of the world (basically, the Muslim world) more attentively. And as we do we can congratulate ourselves for learning about another culture. The Times (unintentionally, I’m sure) captured the ambivalence perfectly in the title of their review, A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty. There’s the same faint condescension in it that there was when taste-makers first looked at African art.

In rebuilding these fifteen galleries, the Met had an extraordinary opportunity to restage works with contemporary museum protocol, and they had an extraordinary inspiration for design — Muslim architecture. But the new galleries aren’t so different from the Met’s other, older galleries: smallish, squarish, oatmeal-colored rooms, with ceilings cluttered with tracklights. There are small gestures here and there to the traditions of Muslim architecture: a white marble floor with colored inlay, two rows of hanging glass lamps, a magnificent gilded coffered ceiling, and an eighteenth century house from Damascus. As some kind of proof of historical continuity, the final gallery has been finished entirely (and handsomely) by eight craftsmen from Morocco. But none of the displays have the flair of those at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which shroud each object in magic. A generic all-white environment would have served the work better, and also offered a more sophisticated curatorial view. Over one of the explanatory wall texts, there’s a grainy black and white photo of the Great Mosque at Samarra, a huge rectangular hall with a cone-shaped ziggurat in front. There’s more architectural power here, in this small image, than in all of the new galleries combined.