The Impossibility of The Presence of Movement and Temporality in the World of Iranians Painting

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD Candidate in Art Research, Department of Advanced Studies of Art, School of Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Professor, Department of Advanced Studies of Art, School of Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Iranian painting represents a world without movement, without time and also without place. Therefore, it is necessary to answer the question that under which ontological conditions it becomes possible for an artist to depict such a world, and why it may not be possible to show movement, temporality, and spatiality in this epistemological geometry. This study has been done in a historical-analytical manner, and its data has been collected through library research. With Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms theory, it was explained that Iranian painting can be interpreted as a kind of mythological knowledge of the real world. This knowledge is in opposition to scientific and experimental knowledge; mythological time is different from the linear concept of historical time. Also, scientific and geometric spatial coordinates cannot be seen here. Iranian painting, in order to preserve its foundation—namely, its adherence to a kind of timelessness and placelessness, in the first step removes the perspective of the subject or artist from his mind and then from the image that is the result of his visualization of the world; because the concepts of time and place are completely dependent on subjective perception. In fact, this is the formula that experimental and scientific understanding seeks to prove and adhere to; namely, to reach a humanistic structure that is the result of the visual perception of a human subject, and this idea is completely at odds with the ontological structure of Iranian painting. On the contrary, Iranian painting tries to emphasize an intuitive and non-rational aesthetic view; therefore, the most important and basic step in depicting the mental world is to remove the mental perspective of the human subject as the subject who knows the world and to reject scientific and experimental knowledge. The prominent point in the study of the history of Iranian painting which is generally overlooked is that it is thought that this style of illustration is specific to the representation of mythological or mystical narratives, and the artist has consciously chosen this way of representation, considering the nature of the theme. This is often assumed. Or it is believed that this form will change with the introduction of Western techniques. But it must be said that this form of representation cannot be explained by themes or techniques. Many works can be cited that contradict this assumption. The absence of time, space, and movement here is because in this mental thought everything is fluid, and there is no boundary between inside and outside, here and there, night and day in the artist’s mind. Mythological knowledge remains captive to phenomena and stops at a certain moment, because the myth lacks a tool that can go beyond this moment. Therefore, in this epistemological space, the artist is not able to record or represent the tension, movement, and becoming of phenomena—not in the sense that he cannot represent it, because here the issue of representation is not in its technical sense. Rather, it is impossible to represent movement in its epistemological sense.

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References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 30, Issue 2
June 2025
Pages 123-135

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