Representing The Unpresentable

Representing the Unpresentable

In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture and performance traditions in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the unpresentable “Babi” as the figure of Iran’s Other. In her exploration of gender and Iranian cinema, the author powerfully argues that this unpresentable image continues to haunt contemporary Iranian cinema’s representations of the nation. As cinema began to displace other forms of representation in Iran, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With insight and detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which contemporary Iranian cinema has dealt with representing an unpresentable national modernity articulated through traversals in time and space. These deeply national tropes of traversal shaped the image of the “Babi,” against which nineteenth-century Iran produced its own modernity. This highly original work, signaling a paradigmatic shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars in cultural, Iranian, or film studies.

Representing the Unpresentable

Art and Advertising

Over the past twenty-five years the relationship between art and advertising has become increasingly varied and complex, with artists appropriating the billboards and neon displays of the ad world, and advertising strategies borrowing both the tactics and imagery of contemporary art. This wide-ranging book charts key points of contact, overlap and exchange between the two fields. Joan Gibbons looks at the work of a number of artists from Barbara Kruger, Les Levine and Victor Burgin though to Sylvie Fleurie and Swetlana Heger and at cutting edge advertising campaigns including Benson's Silk Cut, Benetton's Shock of Reality and US agency Wieden and Kennedy's work for Nike. She discusses too the various collaborations and crossovers between art and advertising: the work of artist, director and creative Tony Kaye; adman turned collector Charles Saatchi and the issues of celebrity and branding that surround him; and the endorsement of art by highly branded products such as Absolut Vodka, to show that art and advertising are more mutually enriching than ever.