Moments of Glory, 2010

Is Leila Pazooki the Iranian Tracey Emin, Jenny Holzer, or a Bruce Nauman, because she has created an installation of words and light, which immediately conjures up associations with works by these artists – at least if one is a regular visitor to museums of modern art in Europe, the USA, or Canada? And who is the Indian Damien Hirst or the Asian counterpart to Cindy Sherman? The ironic work by Pazooki demonstratively does not answer such questions. Her installation is a bold reaction to such flippantly drawn parallels. The deliberate accumulation of comparisons of artists from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East with heavyweights of Western art historiography, such as Louise Bourgeois, Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya, and others shows that such analogies say more about those who make them than about the artists which they are supposedly about.
Such categorizations allow people to integrate artists in their own system of norms and values and in so doing to assert one’s cultural superiority over entire continents while protecting oneself from what is “alien.” After all, it is a lot easier to measure art against the standards that have been established in Western art historiography than to consider such works against the backdrop of the specific cultural context in which they were created, an approach that might led to entirely different views. What if – as Ashley Rawlings (ArtAsiaPacific) facetiously suggests – a reverse comparison were drawn and Marcel Duchamp was declared the Ai Weiwei of France? (KB)