Fugitive Compassion
Elahe Massumi's Art of Sorrowful Joy
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On vision, affinities, and gesture. Elahe Massumi is a veritable multi-media artist. Her creative output spans video art, feature films, and paintings. These different media should not be viewed only chronologically since they preoccupy the artist at every stage of her life. She uses these techniques as different ways to engage reality and inscribe her sensitivities. Furthermore, even the singular takes in each of the three media are always “mixed” with materials from another domain. For example, animation in a feature film, or oil sticks in painting. This is so because the vision of the artist herself is heterogenous and variegated, and it cannot exist outside a fortuitous mixture. The creative process goes like this: the vision is built through affinities; the affinities in turn guide the artistic gesture; and the gesture is what inscribes the sensitivity. What exactly are these affinities then, which are so present in this artist’s work? Simply put: resistance and compassion.

 

On paintings. Massumi’s latest output is an extensive ongoing series titled “Ruminations” (2020-).The materials used are oil sticks, graphite, water paint, and gold leaf. There is an explosion of elementary adornments here: flowers, bulbs, and even more so the fragments of these forms, which adorn some latent outline of a face. Then, in a constant movement, the potential face turns celestial and ruinous in a painting that follows. These elemental forms could be viewed as stars of some distant galaxy, or as some remnants, richly textured objects, of an ancient civilization. They are intimate in their miniscule intimacy and yet immense in galactic mystery. Thus they point us both toward the future and toward the past. Toward what is closest to us and to what is most distant; toward our unknown selves.

 

Additionally, some look like things that precede form: is it a living cell or an unknown planet? No, it is only a dormant flower. Note a frame that envelops another frame: a new intelligence here spins old geometries into an exuberant dance on the canvas. As the paint dries these surfaces become three dimensional.

 

On film and video. In her movies we see a political gesture: the young woman (Roxana, 2018) as a fugitive being. She is resisting not out of pure social and political reasoning; but rather out of micro-political necessity, because of her unrestrained decency in light of the cruel and unforgiving regimes of power. For decency is the only form of modesty opposing political obscenity in a world turned upside down (our world). So fugitive-ness becomes a theme that attains a higher philosophical importance: it is to flee violent indecency, to become transient and elusive, to almost evaporate. To what end? So as to mediate the opposite: persistent will to integrity and graciousness.

 

Dark side of human nature, exemplified by cruelty and control, has always preoccupied Massumi’s art. And she found the inspiration to combat these forces in the work of Antonin Artaud, Pier Paolo Passolini, and Marquis de Sade. These authors revealed, by continually mining their internal affective landscapes, a throbbing subreality present in the social world (for example, the desire to dominate the other). Moreover, this subreality is consciously and subconsciously manifested in everyday life. The intricacy and radicality of their work revealed, on the one hand, this dark spell that envelopes human nature and, on the other, provided a response with unconventional (eccentric, even perverse) clairvoyance. The effect of this disposition of the influential writer, playwright, and filmmaker, is a specific formula: artwork as a counter-spell. It is precisely in this realm of artistic production that I see Massumi’s work. In the highest domain where art is not only a diagnosis of the ills of society, or a critique of what came before, but rather an invention of the new framework. A positive hallucination that invites us to look and, with this unalike and peculiar looking, to proceed into a universe of compassion.

 

On paintings, film, video, and installation. Despite the similarities, she has an advantage over the above-mentioned authors, since she is coming from radically different geography. Namely, from the so-called Middle East; or more accurately, from the space of Persian poetics which she embraces strictly for geometric directives. In addition, the old influences from Arte Povera and Outsider Art still seep into her work in the best way. And they reveal one characteristic Massumi shares with these avant-garde movements: humility. This inscribed modesty does not come from lack of confidence. Rather, it is summoned from hyper-sensitivity to the world around her and to the materials that she uses to construct the painterly image. Hence, there are three aesthetic worlds expressed, that is to say mixed, in her artwork: a) geometry of ancient Middle Eastern civilization coupled with b) the autochthonous African body ornamentations (especially from Ethiopia’s Omo Valley), and fused with c) contemporary post-avant-garde sensitivity.

 

Finally the essential, com-passion: from Latin com-pati, “to suffer with”. Indeed, if you look closely at Massumi’s paintings, or spend time with her video work, you will see a very special form of compassion; one that could be called - a sorrowful joy. This disposition, or passion, is how she comprehends and communicates with the world. One that she mediates. In here the world of forms is preconscious. In here we find rudimentary elements, as in a photograph of a naked man who looks like he came out of fire (installation “The Other Side”, 1993). The throbbing subreality now erupts into hope. This hope is initial, fundamental, embrionyc. It is indispensable and vestigial.  It discloses art as fugitive hope and as ceaseless rudimentary rumination. It asks us to embrace it as it embraces us, nothing more and nothing less than that. 

 

 

Dejan Lukić, PhD

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

November, 2024