The Smiles are not Smiles

2005

The project is based on events surrounding the inaugural exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. This now very well established New York gallery began its life in Tehran in 1978.

In the 1970’s Tony Shafrazi, better known as the perpetrator of the graffiti attack on Picasso’s Guernica, was involved in the development of one of the great fantasy collections of the 20th century Western art. With the inflation in the oil price the Shah of Iran had become one of the wealthiest people on the planet. At the prompting of the Shahbanou, Farah Diba, the Shah’s 3rd wife an imperial art collection was quickly amassed expanding the power of the Peacock Throne into the art market. In Tehran a museum was built to house this collection. Being mainly Western art it epitomized the Shah’s vision for the modern Iranian state.

The promise of a new market was still apparently tenable as late as October 1978. This was the date Shafrazi opened his own commercial gallery in Tehran. The first (and only) exhibition was Gold Bricks, by the Armenian born artist, Zadik Zadikian. The piece consisted of stacked, gold-leafed bricks in the form of an open weave wall. By the time of the opening the Shah had lost effective rule the country. Zadikian’s exhibition was accompanied by waves of rioting - the onset of revolution. Looting followed, the bricks were lost and gallery was closed. All that remains as testimony to this important exhibition is the invitation card - which unwittingly announces the beginning of the revolution - and one viewers written description: ‘The piece glowed like a shattered chain in the Persian sunlight having no beginning and no end’.

In the 1980’s Shafrazi went on to run one of the most successful galleries in New York.

The project unravels the aspirations of an expanding art market by presenting this earlier example of globalised free enterprise, and the conditions necessary to underpin it, set amongst the familiar art historical theme of the revolutionary moment.

Using the scant remaining documentation a fantasy version of the Zardikian piece was reconstructed, in a semi-looted state, along with a portion of the Tehran gallery using prop-like constructions.


Vilma Gold, London 29.04.05 – 28.05.05

Museum Abteiberg, Moenchengladbach 11.09.05 – 29.01.06