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“Muslims to Take Over Institute for Contemporary Art”: The 1976 World of Islam Festival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Anneka Lenssen
Anneka Lenssen*
Affiliation:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

The terms “Islamic” and ‘Arab” are not ideal instruments for classifying modern or contemporary art, for they are meta-categories that can variously encompass Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. Nonetheless, as historians of modern art in Islamic regions, we seem to have inherited a longstanding commitment to Islamic art as an epistemologically unique practice that produced limitless abstract patterns and other “non-Western” visual expression. It is time to move beyond such overburdened lineages. In this paper, I aim to historicize the formulations of a specific Arabo-Islamic aesthetic that emerged in the 1970s. I do so by a study of a single event and its metacultural claims: the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976. The Festival projected optimistic countercultural options for art and civilization that remain instructive today, while the complexity of its organizing structures demonstrates the limitations of the West/rest paradigm in interpreting its artistic products.

Type
Special Section: Art Without History?
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1-2 , Summer/Winter 2008 , pp. 40 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2008

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References

End Notes

1 “Muslims to Take Over ICA” was a headline for a promotional article about a “World of Islam jamboree” held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts gallery in London in 1971. See Design 272 (August 1971), p. 17. The 1971 jamboree is a precursor to the 1976 events I discuss here. I use the phrase for my title because of its pithy promotion of the radical difference of Muslims and their aesthetics, as ready to overturn British institutional orders.

2 Shabout, Nada, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), p. 4.Google Scholar

3 See Sabini, John, “The World of Islam: Its Festival,” Saudi Aramco World 27, no. 3 (May/June 1976) for an extensive account of the events and exhibitions.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Levy, Michael, “The Twin Pillars of Islam,” Times Literary Supplement, 30 April 1976.Google Scholar

7 My emphasis. Duncan, Alisdair, “Some Thoughts upon the World of Islam Festival—London 1976,” Studies in Comparative Religion (1976), pp. 172–174Google Scholar. “Wealth” phrasing from Beeley, Harold, “The World of Islam Festival, London 1976,” Museum 30, no. 1 (1978), pp. 10–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Keeler, Paul, “Example of Islam attracts West,” The Times (London) 20 March 1975.Google Scholar

8 Keeler, , “Example of Islam attracts West.”Google Scholar

9 Latham, J. D., “The World of Islam Festival Programme,” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 2, no. 2 (1975), pp. 94–99Google Scholar

10 Goldin, Amy, “Islam Goes to England,” Art in America (January/February 1977), pp. 106–113.Google Scholar

11 Powers, Alan, “Titus Burckhardt: his ideas and influence,” Craft 156 (1995), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

12 Ibid, p. 20.

13 Blair, Sheila S. and Bloom, Jonathan M., “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,” Art Bulletin 85 No. 1 (March 2005), p. 158Google Scholar. Blair and Bloom call this approach to Islamic art “Universalism.”

14 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Final Report: Collective Consultations on Contemporary Problems of Arab Arts in their Socio-cultural Relations with the Arab World,” Hammamat (Tunisia), 22–27 April 1974, SHC/74/WS/9 Paris.

15 The artists in the list of attendees include Mamdouh Kachlan, Hatem el Mekki, Zoubeir Turki, Hedi Turki, and Joumana Husseini.

16 See “Independent Group’s Show of Very Modern Art,” The Times (London), August 03, 1964; and Paul Overy, ‘“Other Stories’, review of Signals, August 1964–1966, facsimile reprint, Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David Medalla, by Guy Brett, and Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures, by Linda Nead, in Art History 20, issue 3 (1997), pp. 493–501.

17 Lee, Pamela, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p. 95.Google Scholar

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20 Keeler, Paul, announcement in Signals 1, no. 6 (February-March 1965), p. 12.Google Scholar

21 “Muslims to take over ICA,” Design Journal 272 (August 1971).

22 Brett, Guy, “Pattern and Nature in Islam,” The Times (London), 23 November 1971.Google Scholar

23 Special Section: “Arab Renaissance,” The Times (London), 20 March 1975.

24 Hodgkin, Edward Christian, “Power and Prowess in War Create Rising Confidence,” The Times (London), 20 March 1975.Google Scholar

25 Grabar, Oleg, “Geometry and Ideology: The Festival of Islam and the Study of Islamic Art,” in A Way Prepared: Essays on Islamic Culture in Honor of Richard Bayly Winder (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 145–152.Google Scholar

26 Ali, Wijdan, Modern Islamic Art (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1977), p. 193.Google Scholar

27 Eigner, Saeb and Porter, Venetia, Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (London: The British Museum, 2006); Shabout, Modem Arab Art, pp. 81–82.Google Scholar