Corporate art and critical theory: on Shirin Neshat

Abstract

Promotional and critical accounts of Shirin Neshat’s work fail to address what may be at stake in the work’s ability to cross the boundaries between ‘high art’ institutions and the thoroughly industrialized domain of cinema. Neither the commonalities between these two institutionalized discursive networks nor their differences appear to inform approaches to her work. And yet, there remains a strong suspicion that evaluations of the work in one of the two institutional networks are made in the light of its ability to circulate in the other one as well. Interviews, articles, catalogues and any such material that has been instrumental in creating and promoting ‘Shirin Neshat’ as a commodity has tended to assess the work’s value in terms of notions of ethnicity. Questions of ethnic identity appear to be the dominant concern also in scholarly, critical evaluations of her work. By tracing the emergence of Shirin Neshat as a presence in the US art world during the early years of the Clinton administration, and by examining how, in that context, value was ascribed to her work in the literature that accompanied its circulation, Vitali considers what may be at stake in such a ‘branding’ of Neshat’s practice. Arguing that Neshat’s photographs and installations constitute acts of communication that put the spectator at the centre of historically specific value systems, not as inherited loyalties of colour, descent and other fixed identity traits, but as subjectively mobilized symbolic systems, she proposes an alternative reading. Her intention is not to offer a definitive evaluation of Neshat’s work, but to regain the ground lost to the ideologues of the culture industry by opening up a space for critical debate in which different, more pertinent questions can begin to be asked about the significance of Shirin Neshat’s work as it functions in different regions of institutionalized exhibition networks.

Keywords:

• corporate art
• cosmopolitanism
• ethnicity
• modes of address
• photography
• Shirin Neshat
• video installations