Seminar:

Catalog description

The perception of Islamic art as an aniconic art is long-established and pervasive. In the nineteenth century, the idea was canonized in Orientalist discourses on the relation between race and culture by the coining of the German term Bilderverbot (lit. Image Prohibition) to denote an antipathy to figurative images seen as characteristic of Semitic peoples, including both Jews and Arabs (qua Muslims). On the one hand, this assumed antipathy to figurative art is often said to have inspired the development of characteristic art forms: calligraphy, geometry and vegetal ornament (the ‘arabesque’). On the other, it is often said to have inspired historical acts of iconoclasm, even up to our own day. Perhaps not surprisingly, both the material and textual evidence suggest a more complex, nuanced and varied series of attitudes to the production or consumption of images, marked by regional and temporal variations. In addition, etic accounts of the relationship between Islam and image are characterized by striking inconsistencies and paradoxes – at various times, for example, Muslims have been depicted as both iconoclasts and idolaters. This colloquium will explore some of these paradoxes. It will consider the kinds of materials that might serve to construct a history (or histories) of attitudes to images and image-making in the Islamic world, and the difficulties inherent in such a project. Profiting from a recent proliferation of publications on aniconism and iconoclasm more generally, we will discuss such topics as the ontological status of images, their social function and material (in)stability, concepts of abstraction, and iconoclasm and modernity.