Shimmering Borders
by Shundana Yousaf

Islamic Craft and Architecture Motifs in Recent Paintings of Lubna Agha

Lubna Agha's new oeuvre explores, via formal means, the revisiting of quite familiar objects of pictorial representation in the Muslim tradition. Re-representing traditional architectural elements, she reworks creative forms from an era of handicraft production. Following an important 2004 trip to North Africa and exposure to numerous motifs from pre-protectorate Morocco, the repeated and disparate encounters with Muslim architecture in different environments that dot her personal history begin to crystallize into a unified set of visual responses.

The goal of this extensive exercise has not been merely to capture the formal or picturesque quality of traditional mukarnas or moldings, but rather to develop a painting technique wherein the forms speak of their mode of production. Brushstrokes are not worked and reworked to constitute an image. Instead, each stroke is spaced out, recalling the uncounted repetitive yet individuated movements of the painter's hand. The brush moves toward the paint, then toward the surface - on which it displays only those marks that the spectator sees. This visual and spatial representation of the duration of labor needed to execute the work opens it to what Rosalind Kraus has called "the intervals of a breath."

It is precisely this same attribute in the crafts of a bygone era that Agha wishes to summon - the repetitive yet highly calculated and mindful chisel strokes of the stonemason, the high and low hammer beats of the ironsmith, the carpenter's cutting and sanding, the arch builder's meticulously calculated chipping. And it is precisely these movements that miraculously accumulate in the formation of such arresting structures as lotus water fountains, tripartite arches, ribbed domes and Moroccan columns.

Agha was trained as a modern artist, and practiced in her native Pakistan before moving to the United States in 1981. The modernist approach to art in South Asia is a legacy of the colonial encounter, which brought with it the romantic notion of the artist as an individual creator. This is in contrast to the relatively older genres - such as the miniature and calligraphy - most associated with Muslim Indian artistic practices. Until recently, these genres were the corporate productions of guilds of artists (not craftsmen) under a master. Islamic architecture has also operated under much the same arrangements, but with a mix of architects and craftsmen.

For most of her artistic life, Agha has approached painting very much within this traditional paradigmatic framework: art as a spiritual and emotive expression of the artist's inner self. However, her work has now taken a new turn. She has consciously striven to traverse the gap between modern painting's individualistic conception of art and the artist on the one hand, and the highly disciplined, abstract, collaborative arts of South Asia on the other.

In doing so, her fundamental concern has been to communicate the value that geometry and abstraction have contributed to the emotive power of traditional Muslim architecture (and other arts). She is fully cognizant of the challenges presented by attempting such translation into a medium (painting) whose history is so wound up with aesthetic theories of naturalism and mimesis. And it is maintaining the tension generated by the visual encounter of these very different media of artistic expression, each with very different logics of production, that charges her work.

The impulse behind this ambitious experiment originates in the artist's desire to use the appearance of these beautiful objects as memory triggers, evoking the mental and socio-spiritual world of the craftsmen to which their genesis can be traced. Trying to use appearance as a sign, not of mere beauty but of something that transcends it, namely the process that created these objects - yet is completely wound up in it - this attempt is what Agha struggles with in her paintings.

Agha ranges beyond painting's traditional limits in a double gesture. Not only does her project lead to an active intersection of art and craft (the object of her study and production), her works are not always designed to be hung and framed on a wall, as expected of a painting. They may be most effectively displayed on the floor, or the ceiling. As such they become integral elements of a surrounding architecture, not something that forms its background but something to which it returns - perhaps as events in an otherwise uneventful floor pattern, or turned upside down as a rosette. This simple, deconstructive gesture of unexpected exhibition reveals the entire arbitrariness of the conventions that distinguish a pattern on the floor or a decoration on the wall from a painting.

The corollary is a de-deification of paintings in this artist's hands, situating them on the ever-shimmering border of art and craft, belonging to a new territory encompassing, perhaps, painting and patterning places. This locates Agha squarely in the tradition of aesthetic transgressioners of the 1950s and 1960s, who aimed to denude the conventions of high aesthetics. And yet her attendance to the protocols of beauty defies any such identification.

Note that the critical energy and vital contribution of her oeuvre are founded on much more than just this transgressive gesture.

Another fundamental struggle (partly conscious, partly not) on the part of the artist is to reconcile two seemingly contradictory inclinations: First, the desire to build a bridge to the world in which the architectural elements she represents belongs. Second, the wish not to have her artistic role submerged in the process of forging this connection.

We must not assume a passive translation of a referent or an original preceding her creative act, but be careful to grant her role as an active aesthetic re-creator of these works. Agha, faithful to her modernist training, is insistent on foregrounding the here and now of her agency. She prefers not to be profiled as an antiquarian who only reluctantly acknowledges her modern conditions of existence, or who mutes her contemporary responses. Instead, she demands recognition as a modernist with modern aesthetic sensibilities, imbued with all modernism's lately fledged myths while irresistibly drawn to the beautiful residues of an older world she has periodically encountered all her life, first as a youth, later as an accomplished photographer—and always as an artist with an artist's eye.

A theoretical consequence of this ongoing creative experiment is to remind us that the translation is not a transmission or conveyance, and that the original is an effect of the artist's eye. These paintings make us see Islamic architecture and crafts afresh through Lubna Agha's eyes. This is, of course, not to forget our eyes.

Shundana Yousaf is a PhD candidate from the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her dissertation entitled "Wirless Sites: Architecture and Radio in Interwar Britain" examines certain aspects of the role of radio in the space of architecture and the role of architecture in the space of radio at this particular historical moment. She got her masters degree in the history, theory and criticism of art and architecture from MIT where she worked on the post-colonial attempts at designing national identities through public architecture in Pakistan. Her thesis was entitled "Monument without Qualities."