Medes and Persians: Reflections on Elusive Empires || Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architectureby Valérie Gonzalez

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Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture by Valérie GonzalezReview by: Cynthia RobinsonArs Orientalis, Vol. 32, Medes and Persians: Reflections on Elusive Empires (2002), pp. 266-270Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the Historyof Art, University of MichiganStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629603 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture. By Valerie Gonzalez. 134 pp., 16 pp. of plates. New York: I. B. Tauris Publish- ers, in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 2001. ?25 hardcover.

EA UTY AXD ISLAM: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture opens a new venue for the intense debate conceming the nature of mean-

ing inherent in the aesthetic vocabulary of the objects, edifices, and ornament usually included under the rubric of Islamic art.' Valerie Gonzalez's study seeks to shift the discourse surrounding this debate by turning, in addition to the body of medieval Is- lamic texts drawn on by recent scholars, to major Western theorists of aesthetics (Bachelard, Derrida, Goodman, Husserl, Wittgenstein). In effect, she seeks to multiply the lenses through which viewers, both Western and non-Western (and all, implicitly, postmodern), might approach Islamic art. This task is undertaken in part through provocative compari- sons of some of the most reified objects of Islamic art (particularly the Alhambra's parietal ornament) with works that have attained a similar status in the modern Western canon (Edward Ruschka's City [1968]; Mark Rothko's No. 46, Black, Ochre, Red over Red [1957]). If-as the author appears to suggest-one of the book's principal objectives is to stimulate discussion in the field, its goal will certainly be met.

The study includes brief analyses of a variety of objects: ninth- and tenth-century Samanid ceramics produced in and around Nishapur; a metal vessel from twelfth-century Herat; a series of manuscript illumi- nations ranging from Tabari's history to a thirteenth- century Maqamiit of al-Hariri to a fifteenth-century copy of Nizami's Khusraw and Shirin and a fifteenth- century Shahnama, both from Tabriz. But Gonzalez's most important arguments are made in dialogue with the Alhambra's ornamental program, and I therefore focus on those sections of the study. Indeed, in addition to being recognized among the growing body of writings dealing with aesthetics and Islam, Beauty and Islam should also be counted among the literature concerned particularly with Granada's Alhambra. It is the discourse surrounding this particular monument, however, that most directly compromises Gonzalez's arguments. In my opinion the Alhambra is not yet ready to sustain such an interpretation as that offered

by Gonzalez, for the simple reason that-despite recent contributions by Ruggles (2000), Ruiz Souza (2001), and especially Puerta (1990; 1997)2 -it has not yet been fully examined in the context of the culture that created it. Rather, the Nasri palace has for centuries been wrapped in the sumptuous garments of a Romanticism that, by insisting on its uniqueness, has severely hampered the scholarship it has inspired.

The issue of meaning in the corpus of nonfigural ornament most often associated with an Islamic context has become central for historians of the art and visual culture of Islam. This focus perhaps began when Oleg Grabar proposed in The Mediation of Ornament (1992) that Islamic ornament mediates between viewer and viewed, intensifying the significance of the object adorned. It also, and most importantly in Grabar's model, accords pleasure to the viewer. More impor- tandy still, the process stops with the pleasure: Islamic ornament does not, for Grabar, necessarily entail as- sociations between specific motifs and specific refer- ents. His conception of exactly what Islamic ornament "does" is universalizing, and some have taken issue with its implicit claims of relevance to all Islamic art. Prior to the publication of Beauty and Islam, indeed, Meditation was followed by two crucial studies, Gulru Necipoglu's Topkapi Scroll (1995) and Yasser Tabbaa's Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (2001). Both works, along with my recent study, seek to expand Grabar's interpretive model to include the relevance of cultural context in explain- ing the visual culture of a specific region. Also among these works is J. M. Puerta's Los c6digos de utopfa de laAlhambra de Granada (1990), which argues for the primacy of the Alhambra's program of inscriptions in the palace's overall system of signification. Gonzalez's arguments contravene Puerta's privileging of the content of the palace's inscription program.

In Beauty and Islam, Gonzalez rejects the contextually specific approach advocated by these more recent studies and makes universalizing claims similar to Grabar's. Like Grabar, Gonzalez clearly informs her readers in her introduction (pp. 1-4) that her approach will be phenomenological and ahistorical. She takes issue, however, with Grabar's privileging of the plea- surable function of (all) Islamic ornament, which for her, particularly in its manifestations as geometry and inscription, does much more than provide pleasure. Indeed, Gonzalez argues (and I agree) that in certain

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cases these ornamental devices offer gateways to higher forms of cognition.

This latter premise is fundamental to Gonzalez's interpretation of the Alhambra. Arguing for the primacy of the geometric over all other elements in the Alhambra's ornamental program, Gonzalez suggests that geometry is both principal medium (of both pro- duction and perception) and principal subject matter for the palace's entire system of aesthetic signification. It is here that we should address the specifics of Gonzalez's interpretive model. Her study deals with "the particular discipline known as 'aesthetic phenomenology"' (p. 1) insofar as it means "to understand how the mode of access to art, the mode of access to what the work of art contains in terms of art, is a phenomenological mode." This tool, notes Gonzalez, has not before been applied to the analysis of Islamic art, despite its full integration "into contemporary analytical works on art and art theory." Gonzalez feels that, despite the problems inherent to borrowing from a theo- retical field constructed without Islamic art precisely in mind, the lens offered by twentieth-century aesthetic phenomenology will be productive for viewing Islamic art. Whatever one thinks of this interpretive strategy, the arguments offered for its undertaking are valid and the points well taken.

A second concept, not specifically explained in methodological terms, seems more difficult to justify, and any possiblejustification would have to come from the realm of inquiry that Gonzalez has rejected in the first pages of her study: that of the Alhambra's context-not merely literary but philosophical, intellectual, political, religious, and social. In a word, Gonzalez (especially in chapters 3 and 4, which focus on the Alhambra) posits geometry (or, more accurately, geometries) as both the object of study and the key to unlocking the meaning of that object of study.

Having laid the foundations for a culturally agreed centrality of the phenomenon of perception (explored in chapter 2 through a close reading of the Solomonic Parable in the Qur:dn, arguably one of the study's most provocative contributions), Gonza- lez proceeds to trace this centrality into the heart of the Alhambra's program of signification, with implicit resonances for all Islamic art. In chapter 3, through an examination ofthe Alhambra's Comares hall, Gonzalez explicates another central concept of her model: that of the inherently separate aesthetic and cognitive sys-

tems offered to viewers by a program of inscriptions, on the one hand, and by, on the other, a non-iconic system of elements in which, according to Gonzalez, the geometric again receives clear pride ofplace. Chap- ter 4 elaborates Gonzalez's conception of distinct but interacting "geometries," which govern both the Alhambra's system of signification and communication and a viewer's interaction with it. Chapter 5 revis- its a much-discussed topic, that of the signification potential of inscriptions within the context of Islamic art.

Chapter 1, however-which owes an enormous debt to Puerta (1997)-feels in many ways foreign to the principal arguments offered by the study. Sec- onding Puerta's elaborate argument for an Islamic discourse on beauty, Gonzalez selects four "philosophers" as the basis for her discussion of this discourse: Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, who typifies a literal- ist or zc&hiri approach; Ibn Sina, representing a Neoplatonist view; Ibn Rushd, exemplifying the "rationalist" school based in Aristotle; and finally, Ibn al-Haytham, also classified as a "rationalist," whom Gonzalez terms a "true phenomenologist long before the term came into use" (p. 7). She observes that the thought of these four men, which is taken as exem- plary of larger trends, is inherently "medieval" in char- acter, in that it does not assume the separateness of the (aesthetic) object of study. It is "a philosophy of sensory experience" (as opposed to the science of aesthetics in the sense used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century students of the discipline), which includes aesthetic objects and knowledge "within the wider areas of various orders of questions, the ontological, the religious and ethical, and their derivatives" (p. 7). This observation, in turn, implicitly justifies turning to the works of modern philosophers of aesthetics, given that medieval Muslim thinkers provide no tools with which to approach the object of study qua in- dependent object. My primary misgiving about the model offered in this chapter is that not one of the treatises or "philosophers" discussed is in any way demonstrably linked to the chronological ancd geographical context of the Alhambra. Ibn al-Haytham's thought seems by far the most resonant with Gonzalez's phenomenological approach, yet it is precisely this thinker whose relation to a fourteenth-century Andalusi context requires the most explanation. None, however, is offered. Moreover, the four aesthetic mod- els espoused by Gonzalez's "four philosophers" are

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radically different, and it is not logical to suppose that all four would have been represented at the Nasri court at any one moment. Who, in other words, were the thinkers relevant to the Alhambra?

Medieval Arab thinkers, however-except the Ikhwan al-Safa' (p. 75), whose direct relevance to fourteenth-century Granada is neither posited nor ques- tioned-are left far behind in chapters 3 and 4, where Gonzalez discusses the Comares hail and the "geometries" of the Alhambra in terms of "abstraction, ki- netics and metaphor." Here Gonzalez discusses Necipoglu's study, mentioned above, but opines that the actual phenomenon of a viewer's interaction with geometrical ornamental language remains inadequately understood. She identifies (in line-problematically, I think-with earlier interpretations) the Alhambra as a "'conservatory' of Islamic geometrical practice" and proposes to tackle the issue of the phenomenology of geometric art based on its ornamental program.

Gonzalez uses her theory concerning the Al- hambra's geometry as perceptual "subject matter" (chapter 3) to interrogate the quasi-iconographic interpretation traditionally accepted for the Palacio de Comares (which Gonzalez implicitly criticizes as Orientalist in its application of "Western" iconographic tools to an Islamic object of study). Many scholars have used the Comares hall's program of inscriptions and references to stars and other celes- tial bodies found in its artesonado ceiling as the basis for proposing what amounts to a cosmological iconography for the space. Also important is Gonzalez's insistent distinction between the aesthetic meaning systems of inscriptions and other visual motifs employed, as she states, in completely separate, although at times intersecting, aesthetic and communicative tasks.

In order to sustain her privileging of the geometrical, Gonzalez is forced, somewhat contradictorily, to relegate other elements of the palace's program ("styl- ized vegetation, flowers, calligraphic elements and ara- besques," p. 73) to the realm of the "purely ornamental." Support for this privilegingis sought not from Nasri theoreticians but rather from Ludwig Wittgenstein's definition ofthe symbol/sign: "To a definite logical com- bination of signs corresponds a definite logical combi- nation of their meanings" (p. 46; Tractatus Logico- philosophicus, 4-466). Gonzalez uses this definition to reveal what the aesthetic/meaning systems of the

Comares hall do not do and to refute the idea that these components function as "visual symbols." Here she might have been better served by investigating discussions of metaphor and symbol available in a variety of treatises by medieval Islamic students oflanguage, such as al-Qadi al-Jujajni, Ibn al-Rashiq, Ibn al-Arif, Ibn al- Sid al-Batalyawsi, and Al-Qartajanni. Al-Qartajanni, for instance, is probably the closest to the Alhambra in chronological and geographical terms among those studied by Puerta, although others would certainly be relevant as well. The principle of multivalence inherent in the Arabic language's concept of the metaphor, in fact, would have adequately allowed for the participation of both inscriptions (in terms ofboth content and their aesthetic potential as inscriptions) and other elements of the program and would not, as Wittgenstein has done, have placed Gonzalez in the uncomfortable position of having to make an either/or choice. Also worth ques- tioning is Gonzalez's out-of-hand dismissal of the relevance ofuiifi thought to an interpretive model for the Alhambra. She is adamant about its exclusion from hers, and yet tasawwuf was quite possibly the prevail- ing devotional practice throughout the Nasri sultan- ate; the issue certainly merits further discussion.

Investigations into other contexts ofAndalusi culture (e.g., Puerta 1997; Robinson 2002: pt. 1, chaps. 4 and 5) certainly suggest that geometry was among the subjects in which those who understood handasa excelled,3 and similar principles and specialists were probably at work in the Alhambra's cultural sphere. But without proof of some sort one hesitates to posit the direct relevance of either the rasi'il of the Ikhwan al-Safa'? or any other texts in which geometry is discussed to an interpretation of the Granadan palace.

The visual apparatus that Gonzalez has chosen to support her model seems, at first glance, accurately to document the primacy of the geometrical in the Alhambra's program. Particularly striking is a sug- gested comparison between a detail of one of the Alhambra's azulejos, in which a geometrical star pat- tern is highlighted (pl. VII), and Frank Stella's Getty Tomb (1959; pl. VIII). Both images offer a starkly re- duced composition in which lines and angles-in short, geometrical forms-constitute the primary language of communication. The spell is broken, however, when one realizes the vast difference in size between the two images, as well as the significant dis- crepancies in their contexts of presentation. One

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work was designed to be hung on a wall, studied as art, and viewed in the context of other works of art in a gallery or museum. The other forms part of a much larger and organic whole belonging to a culture whose definition of "art," particularly in visual terms, is very much up for discussion. The azulejo is located on the lower third of a wall in a room in which activities took place and in which it formed part, but hardly the most significant part, of a program of ornament. Indeed, with the exception of the baths, the Alhambra's tiles were probably almost never posi- tioned at a viewer's eye level, so it is difficult to argue that they would have been a focus of exclusive con- templation. Likewise, plate V does display the promi- nence in the Comares hall of geometrical elements, particularly in the band of stars that runs just beneath the window level, but it is misleading to state that other areas of the wall ornament privilege or are governed by geometry. While the elements may be laid out according to basic laws of ordered disposition and sym- metry, it is difficult to sustain the premise that their subject matter is geometrical. Rather, similarities to architectural motifs and to textiles strike me as salient.

Privileging the geometric as the sole portal of access to the palace's program of meaning, and as its primary bearer of meaning, ultimately requires some sort of contextually grounded proof. An admitted stickler for context, I found myself wondering whether, in about 1363, geometricians and mathematicians were among those who studied and taught in the Granadan madrasa or in other sites of intellectual exchange. In- deed, the question (see George Saliba's review of Necipoglu, JAOS 1999) of whether or not the pres- ence and activities of mathematicians resulted directly in the Alhambra's geometrical complexities will probably remain unresolved until a thorough contextual study of the Alhambra during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries has been completed.

Along these lines, I must take further issue with two of Gonzalez's arguments, both rooted in the premise of ahistoricity permitted by her initial dis- claimer. The first concerns the place in the Alham- bra's system of signification of the notoriously am- biguous ceiling paintings that adorn the iwan-like spaces perpendicular to the Palacio de Comares. One painting depicts a group of obviously Muslim gentle- men who are often agreed to represent members of the Nasri dynasty; the other contains the famously

enigmatic white palace occupied by ladies and pre- ceded by a gardenlike space in which blonde dam- sels lead lions on chains, Muslim and Christian war- riors fight (or perhaps joust), and a Wild Man is en- gaged in a pursuit as inscrutable as it doubtless is unsavory. Gonzalez dismisses these paintings as "foreign" to the essentially "Islamic" visual discourse of the palace. Such claims smack of an essentialist, indeed Orientalist, agenda and are perhaps the most glaring instance of the sometimes dubious results of the choices that Gonzalez's interpretation urges us to make: "The result is that they appear as features that were added, grafted onto an independently con- ceived structure, without being integral to it. If they were to disappearfrom the building, the work of art would not lose an atom of its meaning and its aesthetic balance would not be changed" (p. 47; italics mine). We are, in effect, asked to ignore entire components of the palace's aesthetic and visual program in favor of the author's preconceived model, which privileges the geometric and the aniconic. An historical interpretation would lead one to question the presumed "es- sential" differences between "Christian" and "Mus- lim" systems of aesthetics (constructed not by fourteenth-century culture but by nineteenth- and twentieth-century art historians), particularly against the backdrop of the mid-fourteenth-century Nasri court.

The second argument I question is central to chapter 5, which opens by linking (p. 94) inscriptions ("typical Islamic art forms") directly to "the overall aesthetic question of the meaning of artistic creation in Islam." Gonzalez first takes issue with Grabar's definition of the inscription, particularly in a religious context, as potentially "iconographic" (i.e., in her interpretation, as a mere "picture-substi- tute"; p. 95). Then, somewhat contradictorily, she appears to equate the aesthetic value and signification systems of a group of tenth-century Samanid ceramics with both the Alhambra's program of inscriptions and the text appearing alongside fifteeenth- century manuscript illustrations. In so doing, she both argues a potential for the words or inscriptions to elicit, as in the case of geometry, "higher forms of cognition" while at the same time appearing to deny, as in the case of her arguments concerning the Comares hall's signification system[s], the central importance of those inscriptions' content-the meaning of their words. I find the implicit equation of the

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three groups of objects unconvincing. Moreover, while a twentieth-century phenomenologist's reading of the Alhambra would certainly assign secondary importance to the content of the inscriptions, from a historical vantage point the content of the verses is quite difficult to ignore, as is the probability of their effect on a viewer's experience of the ornamental program within which they are embedded. The nonliteral, as- sociative system of signification proposed by Gonzalez is almost certainly also at work in these inscriptions, but only a viewer unaccustomed to reading Arabic, or one not immersed in the poetic culture that was so clearly part of the Alhambra's experience for contem- poraries, would agree that their content is secondary.

Finally, some technical aspects ofthe work at times interfere with the reader's ability to digest arguments as complex as those made by Gonzalez. First, Arabic terms are inconsistently transliterated throughout. While, for the most part, these instances do not seriously compromise comprehension, they are distract- ing, and any future edition of the work should address them. Second, and more importantly, the English syn- tax is unnecessarily complex (at times, even tortured) and often seriously obscures the complicated arguments being made. A thorough job of copyediting would have made for a more reader-friendly presentation of those arguments.

Despite the reservations articulated here, however, Gonzalez poses important questions that might be productively pondered by all of us who study and teach the art and visual culture of Islam. Particular among these is this: In order for Islamic art to retain its hard-won place in art history and larger humanities curricula (its "relevance"), should we relinquish our objects of study into the hands of modern "theorists"? If so, at what point may we legitimately re- claim them? I am strongly convinced that context must be considered, for if it is neglected, if the rumi- nations of those who "wrote on the walls" of the Nasri palace are deemed "not enough" of an explanation, the viewer who is marginalized (in favor of twentieth-century theorists) is the very one for whose de- lectation the palace was constructed. This imbalance, however, is not the fault of Gonzalez's study; indeed, it is surprising, given the amount of literature it has generated, that the Alhambra's relation to its cultural context[s] is not better understood. In other words,

it is not medieval Islamic "philosophy" that is "not enough"; rather, it is our understanding of its par- ticularities at the Nasri court that is insufficient. Per- haps future investigations akin to Gonzalez's would do well to consider both the Nasri poet's or philosopher's and the phenomenologist's points of view. Indeed, I suspect that the two would reach similar conclusions, and were a majlis possible at which Wittgenstein, Goodman, Pedro el Cruel, Muhammad V, Ibn Zamrak, and Ibn al-Khatib could all enjoy a glass of wine together, a scintillating time would be had by all. E

NOTES

1. I would like to thank the members of my Spring 2002 semi- nar on mudejarismo-Brendan Branley, Damon Montclare, Eliza- beth Olton, Richard Perce, andJessica Streit-for their stimulat- ing discussion of Gonzalez's study. Many of the observations offered here reflect their contribution to class discussions.

2. Works mentioned in this discussion are: Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gulru Necipoglu, The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in IslamicArchitecture: Topkapi Palace Museum Library MS H. 1956, with an essay on the geometry of the muqarnas by Mohammad al-Asad (Santa Monica, Cal.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995); Jose Miguel Puerta Vilchez, Los c6digos de utopia de la Alhambra de Granada (Granada: Diputacion Provincial de Granada, 1990); id., Historia del pensamiento estetico a'rabe: Al-Andalus y la estetica a'rabe cldsica (Madrid: Akal, 1997); Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1065-1135A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2002);Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, "El Palacio de los Leones de la Alhambra: ,jMadrasa, Zawiya y Tumba de Muhammad V? Estudio para un debate," Al-Qantara 22 (2001): 77-1 1 1; D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Is- lamic Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washing- ton Press, 2001). Also relevant is Irene A. Bierman, Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1998).

3. See especially 'Abd Allah ibn Muhamnmad al-Batalyawsi, al- IHadi'iqfl al-matalib al 'aliya al-falsafiyah al-'awisah (Dimashq, Suriyah: Dar al-Fikr, 1988), which is demonstrably related to the Aljaferia's program of ornament and which is emphatic in privileging visual experience of geometry (in addition, however, to other elements of the program) as a contemplative tool.

CYNTHIA ROBINSON 270



Documents

Medes and Persians: Reflections on Elusive Empires || Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architectureby Valérie Gonzalez