iNTroducTioN To
“The NighTiNgale’s BuTcher
MaNifesTo” aNd “VoluMe
aNd eNViroNMeNT ii”
baVand behpoor
The following two manifestos are among the earliest in modern
Iranian art. The fi rst, entitled “The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto”
(in Persian: Sallakh-e Bolbol), boldly opposes all major trends that had
come to dominate art practice in Iran by the early 1950s. Its fi ght takes
place on many fronts: against the miniaturists who considered them-
selves to be continuing Iran’s visual art tradition, against the neo-
traditionalist followers of painter Kamal al Molk,1 and against the
leftist orientations emerging in modern Iranian art. Given its
deeply ingrained sense of oppositionality, it is no wonder that “The
Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto” met with little success when it was
fi rst published in 1951.
The second manifesto, published by the Tehran-based Azad Art
Group (also known as the Independent Artists Group) for the 1976
exhibition Volume and Environment II, suggests that similar struggles
were in play twenty-fi ve years later. Most pressing for the Azad Group,
though, was its insistence that Iranian artists could be infl uenced by
contemporary art from other countries, rather than regressing along
1
Kamal al Molk, born Mohammad Ghaffari (1847–1940), was an artist of the Persian
royal court inspired by the works of classical European artists, such as Raphael,
Rembrandt, and Titian. While serving as the head of the Fine Art School in Tehran,
Ghaffari developed and promoted a naturalist style of painting that became the target
of the Iranian modernists’ struggle.
118
© 2014 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00084
a vertical line of history in search of the “essence” of traditional Iranian
arts. The two manifestos, translated in the following pages, thus ask
key questions about the relationships between local and international
histories of the arts and between what is thought a “legitimate” source
of inspiration and what is “illegitimate.” They also investigate how
best to explore and improve the communicative potentials of a local
visual culture.
“The NighTiNgale’s BuTcher MaNifesTo” (april 1951)
This is perhaps the earliest known manifesto in the history of the
Iranian visual arts. It was written at a time when Mohammad
Mosaddegh, the leader of the Iranian National Front, was serving his
first term in office as the country’s prime minister. Mosaddegh had
nationalized the Iranian oil industry one month before the publication
of this text; his actions led to a “cold war” with the United Kingdom,
whose navy in the Persian Gulf had placed an embargo on Iranian oil.
At the same time as Iran’s government struggled to nationalize the
country’s oil wealth, the general populace had high hopes of change.
The bitter enmity and distrust that had historically existed between the
people and the government in Iran was evaporating.2 The secular left-
ists, the Islamists, and the nationalists had gathered forces and were
working toward the same cause: economic independence from the
West. The devastating cultural effects of the overthrow of Mosaddegh’s
democratic government by the American- and British-led coup d’état of
1953 not only affected nationalist and leftist intellectuals, but also mod-
ern artists such as Bahman Mohasses (a painter, sculptor, and transla-
tor) and Hooshang Irani (an avant-garde poet and painter, and the main
author of “The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto”). Irani never recovered
from the blow. After the coup, he sought consolation in alcohol and
mysticism and went into silence for the next decade, until his death.
The manifesto was printed on the back cover of every issue of
the second series of a magazine called Fighting Cock (four issues
printed on a biweekly basis from April until June 6, 1951).3 The mani-
festo was signed by Gholam Hossein Gharib (a poet, writer, and
2 Under the reign of the Qajar Dynasty (1785–1925), which showed little concern over
securing national interests, Iranians had become skeptical of their state. In comparison,
the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh enjoyed unprecedented national support.
3 Mohammad Taghi Javaheri Gilani, Tarikh-e tahlili-ye she’r-e no [The Analytical History of
Modern Poetry], vol. 1 (Tehran: Markaz, 1998), 465.
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musician), Hassan Shirvani (a journalist and art critic), and Irani.
Fighting Cock was not just a magazine, though. It was initially an art
association founded in 1949 by the modernist painter Jalil Ziapoor,
who had long fought for recognition of the visual arts in a country
more interested in the literary and verbal than the visual arts.4
Ziapoor’s art group began with the objective of “fighting any type
of historicism and traditionalism which deviates from the realities
4
Among Ziapoor’s beliefs was his view that “painting has not reached the ultimate
level of art and beauty and has been very much mixed with other branches of Fine
Arts and even more so with literature and narration. The application of this theory
will set the boundaries of painting and distinguish it from other arts. Here, the real
destination of painting will be a skill and profession separate from other arts, and as
such, painting will represent itself in a broader meaning.” (“Ziapoor’s Theory of
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Jalil Ziapoor. Fighting Cock magazine logo, 1949. Ink on paper.
120
Tehran. Image courtesy of the author.
of the time.”5 The magazine’s purpose was to promote the association’s
main ideas, while Ziapoor’s atelier served as the association’s head-
quarters and a venue for holding regular lectures on art. The associa-
tion is sometimes referred to as the first Iranian surrealist group,6 but
the surrealist tendencies only emerged later, through Irani’s influence.
Ziapoor’s ideals in painting were closer to abstraction, and he acknowl-
edged surrealism only as a transitory phase in the development of art.
Painting from the Beginning up to Modern Art (1948),” in Collected Speeches of
Jalil Ziapoor (1948–1999), ed. Shahin Saber Tehrani (Tehran: MOCA and Jahad
Daneshgahi Honar), 433. I am grateful to my friend, Iman Afsarian, for providing
scans of this article.
Ziapoor’s official website, accessed October 12, 2013, http://www.ziapour.com/.
5
6 Gilani, Tarikh-e Tahlili-ye She’r-e No, 432.
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The first series of Fighting Cock magazine was published in five
issues between 1949 and 1950, with texts by Ziapoor, Shirvani, Gharib,
and Manoochehr Sheybani.7 The first series emphasized painting and
literature over the other branches of art; it also published poems by
Nima Yooshij, the father of Iranian modern poetry, whom Irani later
criticized for not being sufficiently avant-gardist.8 The publication of
the magazine was suspended for one year when officials, according to
Ziapoor, mistook the word “cubism” for “communism.”
Yet only in the magazine’s second series, after Irani joined the
group, did its extreme avant-garde tendencies come to the fore.
Considered the enfant terrible of modern Persian poetry, Irani was an
idiosyncratic figure among his peers. Born in 1925, he started work-
ing for the Ministry of Finance in 1945 and graduated from Tehran
University in the field of mathematics in 1946. He joined the navy that
same year and was sent to the UK for training; he could not stand the
military discipline, and flew to France, where he stayed for one year
before returning to Iran. While in Iran, he studied Spanish, went to
Spain in 1948 to continue his studies, and returned home in 1950 with
a PhD in mathematics (his dissertation focused on “Space and Time in
Indian Thought”). Ziapoor left the group in 1951 in protest against
Irani’s extreme artistic radicalism. Irani had begun publishing poems
that others in literary circles were unwilling to consider poetry. The
best known of them, “Indigo,” opens with these lines:
Himahooray!
Gil vigooli
Niboon! Niboon!
The indigo cave runs
Hands on ears, pressing its eyelids, hunching
Screams a continuous scream in violet.9
To Irani’s neo-Dadaist ears, even the poems of the modernist Nima
Yooshij were nothing more than mimicry of a fairly traditional (yet, in
7
8
9
I am indebted to Marjan Tajeddini and Shahrooz Mohajer for sending me scans of differ-
ent issues of the Fighting Cock magazine.
Gilani, Tarikh-e Tahlili-ye She’r-e No, 452.
In Hooshang Irani, Spicy Violet on Grey (Tehran: self-published, 1951).
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Irani’s words, “very recent”) past. Irani directed his rage at Nima
among others, arguing that Nima had compromised his poetry by
yielding to the pressure of the “leftists.”
The second series of the Fighting Cock coincided with the publica-
tion of another magazine, Dove of Peace. Sympathetic to the USSR,
Dove of Peace promoted a more conservative approach to literature.10 It
is notable that both the dove and the cock were recurring themes in
Picasso’s paintings. Across the Middle East, the name Picasso stood for
the ultimate artist and an ideal combination of political dedication and
formalist excellence. Hence, it seemed only natural that Ziapoor
designed the logo for the Fighting Cock in a Cubist style, since to the
eyes of his contemporaries Cubism was the most significant manifesta-
tion of avant-gardism.
Ziapoor had already insisted that painting be independent from
realistic or figurative representations, but it was Irani who threw his
weight behind formalism and dared to go against both the Iranian
Communists, with their social approach to art, and those who,
although formally modernist, preferred to preserve some connection
with the past. In fact, Irani’s views formed the basis for the tenth arti-
cle of “The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto”: “New art is in contrast
with all the claims of the proponents of art for society’s sake, art for
art’s sake, art for whatever’s sake.”
The name Fighting Cock is also meaningful inasmuch as there was
a broad culture of cock fighting in Iran at the time the manifesto was
published, which imbued the magazine with a nonelitist aura.11 The
title that Irani chose for his manifesto pushes this “vernacular” agenda
even further. The Persian term for nightingale has a double meaning:
on the one hand, it refers to gol-o-bolbol (the flower-and-
nightingale pattern), a term used for the decorative patterns that are
typical of Persian ornamentation (the term here also means “cheesy
and rosy”); on the other hand, similar to the English term cock, its
Farsi equivalent refers to a young boy’s genitals. The manifesto’s title,
10 Shams Langroodi, “Dove of Peace, Fighting Cock and Violet Scream,” Goharan 7–8
(Summer 2005): 12–17.
11 A similar recourse to popular culture recurs in the case of the naming of the
Saqqakhaneh School, which consisted of a number of modern Iranian artists who worked
with motifs taken from pop religious culture. The kind of art used in a Saqqakhaneh, a
religious drinking fountain, is different from that of a formal religious institution such
as a mosque.
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“Nightingale’s Butcher,” thus suggests associations with castration, a
violence matched by the text’s war against the past and its appropria-
tion of the aggressive and crude tone of Futurist manifestos.
“VoluMe aNd eNViroNMeNT ii” (ocToBer 1976)12
The second manifesto, apparently drafted by Morteza Momayez (who
today is best known as one of the main founders of modern Iranian
graphic design), was published as part of the catalog for the Azad
Group’s exhibition entitled Volume and Environment II. Held at
Tehran’s Saman Gallery, from October 17 to 28, 1976, the exhibition
occurred just two and a half years before the Islamic Revolution of
1979. In the years after the Saqqakhaneh School had gained major
critical acclaim and governmental support in 1963, modern art had
become well established in Iran. But the exhibition’s political context
was strained: two years before the manifesto’s publication, the shah
had dissolved all political parties and established a single party called
Rastakhiz (Resurrection), giving every citizen the option to either
register with the party or leave the country.
The gallery where the show took place was located in an upper-
class neighborhood of Tehran, and was known to have sold some of the
most expensive artworks among Iran’s galleries of the time.13 Indeed,
in a room adjacent to this exhibition, the Saman Gallery staged a show
of works by European artists including Hans Hartung and Pierre
Soulages. Yet, despite this apolitical context, the artworks presented by
the Azad Group were political in tone. In the previous exhibition by the
same group, Volume and Environment, two works by Momayez and
Marcos Grigorian (a pioneering conceptual artist) had been removed by
officials.14 Grigorian had exhibited a broken chair with three legs, while
Momayez had made an installation of knives hanging from the ceiling.
In Volume and Environment II, Momayez planted twenty-five knives
in twenty-five pots, with a golden pot placed higher than the others.
12
I am grateful to Reza Abedini for pointing out the importance of the “Volume and
Environment II” manifesto and for his insightful conversations. I also thank Dariush
Kiaras for kindly providing the scans of the Volume and Environment II exhibition
catalogs.
13 Dariush Kiaras, “History of Tehran Galleries: 19. Saman Gallery (Part I),” Tandis 221
(2012): 8.
14 Dariush Kiaras, “History of Tehran Galleries: 23. Takht-e Jamshid Gallery (Part II),”
Tandis 231 (2012): 20.
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Morteza Momayez. Poster for Volume and Environment II exhibition, 1976.
Saman Gallery, Tehran. Image courtesy of Dariush Kiaras.
According to Gholam Hossein Nami, one of the members of the Azad
Group, the installation was a reference to an art event called 25 Years of
Iranian Art, organized by order of the shah himself.15
The Azad Group was founded by Grigorian and included Momayez,
Abdorreza Daryabeygi, Masood Arabshahi, Gholam Hossein Nami,
Sirak Melkonian, and Faramarz Pilaram (all painters). Artists Hossein
Kazemi and Parviz Tanavoli were also members of the group, but they
later left. The Azad Group also invited guest artists for their exhibi-
tion. These included Siroos Malek, Hanibal Alkhas, Behzad Hatam,
Bahman Boroojeni, Monir Shahroodi Farmanfarmaian, Changiz
Shahvagh, Asghar Mohammadi, Ghobad Shiva, Mohammad Saleh Ala,
and Mohammad Ehsai.16 The group organized five exhibitions in total,
and each exhibition was organized around a theme: for instance, “vol-
ume and environment” for the two exhibitions noted here, the color
blue for a third exhibition, and so forth.
The raison d’être of the group was to fight the emergence of a
market-driven version of modern art, which its members no longer
identified as being progressive. They instead sought to “open a space
for the new.”17 Whereas the authors of “The Nightingale’s Butcher
Manifesto” defended modern art, those of “Volume and Environment
II” were more concerned with correcting its course. During the twenty-
five years between these two manifestos, Iranian modern art had
achieved its own character; the time had now come to critique that
establishment. The Azad artists’ critique was especially clear in their
last three exhibitions—Blue, Volume and Environment, and Volume
and Environment II—which became renowned for the introduction of
installations and ready-mades and for the generation of conceptual art
in Iran.18
What is particularly curious about this second manifesto is how
the authors reply to the accusations typically made against Iranian
modern artists: namely, that they merely mimic Western art. The
manifesto raises the problem of “the new” to a universal level while
15
“All My Roots Are Here,” interview with Gholam Hossein Nami, Shargh Newspaper, June
18, 2011, 8. It is unclear from the interview what this event was exactly.
Ibid.
Ibid.
16
17
18 As is the case with many other terms used in Farsi when discussing contemporary
Iranian art, the term conceptual art does not have the same connotations as in Western
art history. It is instead used in a broad sense as a synonym for any art that uses a non-
conventional medium.
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attacking the Eurocentrism of
local art circles in order to
defend itself: “If we look at
much of our cultural activities,
or those of other nations, from
such a superficial perspective,
we will come up with disas-
trous results: / . . . for instance,
many of the American contem-
porary art movements are imi-
tations of Dadaists’ experiences
or those of some other
European artists. / Or the
works of Picasso, the great art-
ist, are imitations of African
art.”19 The text acquires the con-
fidence typical of manifestos by
turning that accusation on its
head: if accepting any sort of
“influence” is mimicry, then
that mimicry is not restricted to
marginal cultures mimicking
the West; rather, the art world
as a whole cannot be under-
stood without recourse to
mimicry.
Morteza Momayez. Poster for Morteza Momayez
installation, 1976. Saman Gallery, Tehran.
Image courtesy of Dariush Kiaras.
The type of artworks presented in the Volume and Environment II
exhibition, as well as the tone of the manifesto and the exhibition’s
curatorship, suggest the emergence of a new way of understanding
Iranian contemporary art. In that sense, the manifesto is a start, and
one that would come to a sudden standstill with the 1979 revolution’s
radical transformation of Iran’s cultural infrastructure (not to mention
the devastating effect of the “cleansing” of universities of dissident pro-
fessors and students during the Cultural Revolution between 1980 and
1983). The manifesto also represents something of a milestone for what
19
“Volume and Environment II” manifesto, in Volume and Environment II (Tehran: Saman
Gallery, 1976), exhibition catalog.
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Marcos Grigorian. Presentation of broken-chair installation in
Volume and Environment II exhibition catalog, 1975. Saman Gallery,
Tehran. Image courtesy of Dariush Kiaras.
is known today as “Iranian contemporary art.” An interest in mass
politics while taking the elite as its audience; the symbolism inherent
in Iranian “conceptual art”; an attention to pop culture; and a self-
deprecatory approach—all of these elements connect pre- and post-
revolution art in Iran. Yet Iranian contemporary art finds itself involved
in its own struggles as it seeks to distinguish itself from the official art
favored by the Islamic Republic—an art that has rejected the cultural
policies of the previous regime, but which, ironically enough, has also
combined elements of popular and prerevolution leftist art with that of
the Iranian modernists.
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128
