Shirin Neshat: Rapture
By Fred Camper
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Neshat was born in Iran in 1957 but has been a U.S. resident since 1974; in 1990, 11 years after Iran became an Islamic republic, she returned for a visit and was shocked by its transformation. “I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based,” she says in the booklet for this exhibit, yet claims impartiality in her art: “I made a decision that this work was not going to be about me or my opinions.” Like most artists claiming to stand back from political and social issues, however, Neshat lets her views seep through anyway in Rapture, which she staged and shot in Morocco.
This gulf, in fact, is Rapture’s most powerful element. Neshat implicitly critiques it by placing the viewer in the middle: we occupy the space that others are not permitted to cross–though her men frequently seem to look at the women and vice versa, heightening our sense of their separation. The viewer is thus divided between male and female worlds, both of which seem constraining. The men are at once masters of and almost imprisoned by the fortress they occupy. And though the women launch a boat, it’s hardly equipped for a long journey (such as to the West); moreover, only a few women seem to get away.
McCarthy, a Chicagoan, stretches her filaments in four groups of 268 lines each, leaving gaps between the groups wide enough for one’s head. If you walk from the lines’ high to low ends within one of these gaps, the filaments “descend” to meet your shoulders–producing both a fear of damaging the piece and a subconscious hint of decapitation. But if one looks about from this position, the filaments make a plane that divides not only the room but one’s body–head above, torso below. Walking within the gap becomes a bit like going underwater and emerging. Divided into two regions, one becomes more aware of the way that all architectural divisions define not only spaces but the bodies within them.
