The Black Spot: Leila Pazooki’s Aesthetics of Censorship

“What happens, when censorship is extracted from its original context? If, for example you don’t know that the image is a photograph of a page from an art book in a university library, what would you think, which interpretations would you come up with?”¹ ~ Leila Pazooki

Leila Pazooki, The Aesthetics of Censorship, Ongoing project, Mixed media. Image Courtesy: Artist.

As a 19-year-old, Leila Pazooki had her first exhibition at a gallery in Tehran with photographs of water, called ‘Hydromania’, raising the instant attention of famous filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. She moved into the opposite direction, though. Whereas he started with narrative cinema in feature films like Close Up (1990) or Taste of Cherry (1997), moving to the depiction of a piece of wood rolling back and forth in the surf at the ocean’s shore in Five (2003), she turned from these abstract beauties to a more conceptual engagement, enlarging the notion of art to the practice of research as much as to the production of a ‘piece’. The greater scope under which the artist works now – she herself calls ‘The Aesthetics of Censorship’, a term that might strike you as odd, censorship not being known for its inherent artistic quality but rather the restriction, if not elimination of art. Leila Pazooki, however, takes a more complex point of view. Starting from research in a Tehran Art University Library she began thinking of ‘the black spot’ as a means that does cover what’s painted over and at the same time develops a life of its own. This black spot does indeed make unseen what’s beneath. The spot itself, however, cannot be made unseen. It is a deliberately open act, not a touch-up.

Moreover what has actually been painted over are works of the western canon, works that display nudity in different variations. It is here that the multi-layered character of ‘censorship’ comes harping back. These books, printed by ‘big time’ art publishers like Taschen reproduce a handmade – and at the time of its creation quite singular – work of art tens of thousands of times, underscoring what Walter Benjamin so aptly called the dialectics of a Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. What the forever unbeknownst censor – he neither has a face nor a name to the beholder of his ‘art’ does, is a form of re-appropriation of this original work, making it singular again. This is even more evident in the instance of the library having bought more than a single copy of a publication. As all censorship is done by hand, no two pieces will ever be alike, even if the reproduced image is identical in both versions. To prove her point, Pazooki goes even further. While to her, being an artist certainly does not mean anymore ‘to sit down and paint’ this is – ironical as it may sound – exactly what the censor does.

What Pazooki metaphorically calls the black spot, very often is more than that. For sure there are simple cases of a black bar covering a woman’s breasts; in most cases though there is a much more sophisticated approach. In the instance of the famous Man Ray, Ingres’s Violin (1924) of a woman’s back formed like a violin the censor took the pains to paint a red sleeveless shirt over the skin, even considering a sense of perspective with the different sizes of the shoulder straps. In this instance, by the way, on top of the 3-dimensionality one realises there is a fourth dimension: time. There is a clear chronology of censorship. As the red shirt obviously was not enough, at a later stage a black bar was added to completely cover the woman’s bottom.

Much to the dismay of her professors at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Leila Pazooki has not restricted herself to pointing the finger at censorship. She contextualises these acts in the wider context of western art discourse. After all the books being censored are as often as not, publications like Compendium to Art History or Art Today implicating an overview of artistic production while actually reproducing the western canon. These books are bought by libraries in the Middle and Far East (I beg your pardon for taking a Western perspective here) for students who read art. In the end, though, the lack of creativity in compiling these books does not fall short of the lack of creativity displayed in the censor’s black bar.

Leila Pazooki takes these works back to where they came from in the first place, as in her recent show in Berlin. Having photographed the censored pages and fitted them into original 18th century wooden frames she found in London, she displays them at the gallery’s walls and in a glass cabinet – which again is an allusion to the western practice of exhibiting ethnographic items. Over the headphones you can hear the voice of a censor she has interviewed: “It hurts me to disgrace a book, so I try to do as little harm as possible”.

Her approach could be called, to borrow a term from linguistics, ‘implicature’. She is not interested in straightforward statements – much like a person coming into the room saying “It’s cold in here, isn’t it”. If you get up to close the window, the same person might say. “Oh no, I didn’t mean that, I just mentioned it’s cold.” This can be well observed in her latest work Pixelation. You will never know, what was there in the first place, it may be a demonstration or a burning house, but it may as well not. It may be in Tehran, Gaza or Lebanon, but it also may be in New York. These dots might be human beings – the individual being reduced to an unidentifiable pixel – but they might as well be not. As the artist says, at first glance the pixelation may preserve nothing but the rough surface of an image. Nevertheless, the soul will remain inherently present. It’s your job, as the beholder, to get the feeling for it.

Scrutinising censorship to Leila Pazooki is psychoanalysis of society. The black spot – to return to the term we started with – turns the covered item into what Jacques Lacan called an ‘objet petit a’, something you desire but can never reach. Feelings are covered, but exactly by way of this process they are incited. The covered item becomes an object of the beholder’s fantasy. Much like Courbet’s famous work The Origin of the World (1866), which was first bought by the Turkish ambassador to France: He hung it up, but placed a green velvet curtain in front of it. By presenting the absence of the naked body, nudity is never to be seen, but forever to be imagined.

Endnotes