It does what works of art have always done-externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings.
Arthur C. Danto 1
Fahimeh Vahdat's powerful, stark, large-scale drawings from the series "What will befall her?" are a mirror for conscience, held to reflect the physical and psychological violence directed at women worldwide. Utilizing the format of Persian rugs, Vahdat's drawings depict one or more women against a ground of symbols and texts, poems about women rendered in Persian calligraphy. The figures are most frequently nude, without the veiling signifiers of culturally determined roles and status, with the body as a memory surface manifesting the vicissitudes to which the person has been subjected.
An economical use of line delineates the figures, with their volume implied by the judicious deployment and inflection of line. As Pliny noted:
This in painting is the most subtle of refinement . . . . to give the contour of the figures, and make a satisfactory boundary where the painting within finishes, and it is rarely attained. For the contour ought round itself and so terminate as to suggest the presence of the other parts behind it, and disclose even what it hides. 2
This is tour de force drawing, employed not as empty virtuosity, but rather as the correlative of unflinching directness for the stark horror of what is represented. It is tour de force drawing notwithstanding the relative uniformity of line weight both in the individual drawings and through the series; the somewhat mechanical character of the line suggests the mechanical character of the brutality referenced by the images, given emphasis by its sustained use throughout the series. This repetition and the mechanical character of line is especially evident in those drawings-When the Soldiers Come, I Bore You a Son, Forbidden to Read, All Has Been Taken-where elements are repeated in rasters behind the figures.
Apart from the economy of their delineation, Vahdat's drawings of the figure are drawings of the figure. Indeed, the economy of their delineation asserts their being drawn. As drawn, the works are diagrammatic: diagrams of relationships of power. As such, they evoke a situation, but in a way that obviates the status of documentary record (itself a rhetorical trope).3 The figures in Vahdat's drawings seem powerless in the situation of their oppression, yet retain a dignity in spite of the degradation to which they are subjected.
Thus in You Will Tell No One, the linear drawing of the kneeling adult woman and female child in the left middle distance is in contrast to the standing shadowy adult male figure in the right foreground. The child is introspective, her head downward and slightly inclined toward the woman, her hands protectively together covering herself, the toes of one foot over the ankle of the other. The woman, right knee nearest the image plane, left knee down, inclines toward the child, her left arm extending behind the little girl. She may be speaking. If it is the woman speaking, it is she who is the referent of the title. Or it may be the male figure, feet at the bottom edge of the picture plane facing into the image field from its lower right corner toward the woman and child who is the referent of the title. The male figure has his left arm slightly flexed, left fist menacingly clinched, with the right arm more nearly straight with the hand open, its fingers slightly flexed, as if gesturing toward the woman and child. To whomever the title refers, it is clearly the male figure that is the active and oppressive agent. While this in the only drawing in with the oppressive male agent is depicted, the same agency is implicit in the other drawings.
A clothed young girl, perhaps the same young girl, perhaps another, stands with her back to the viewer to the right of center and with her feet at the lower edge of The Fallen. The young girl in an internal spectator,4 a witness who is the surrogate of the external spectator-the viewer, looking into a pictorial field filled with tangled nude bodies, all women, receding to the upper edge of the 84 x 232 inch drawing. The low installation level of the drawing on the wall, along with its substantial scale, elides the distance between internal and external spectators. So also with Vahdat's other drawings. This is crucial, in that the engagement of the viewer in the works is central to their affecting presence.
The strategy of this engagement is likewise crucial to the work. For the work to be effective, it seemingly must to an extent deny its own status as art. That is to say that the work is effective as an intervention in the situation it addresses when it regarded politically rather than aesthetically. But to say that is to presuppose a distinction of the political and aesthetic domains. While this distinction, deriving from the distinction of practical and aesthetic judgment in Kant's second and third critiques,5 is fundamental in modernism through the enactment of an autonomous realm of the aesthetic,6 it is problematical insofar as it conduces to a regard of art as being without efficacy in the lifeworld, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. A logic not valorizing a hegemony of one term while vitiating another obviates the false dichotomy of this distinction. Such a logic, not of a dualism of oppositional terms, but in which terms are equiprimordial and equally valorized without vitiation of the other, also obviates the androcentric bias underlying the oppression of women.7