This is a review of Ramblings of a Flâneur, an exhibit of Polaroid or Polaroidisoid photographs by artist Arash Fayez, held at Silkroad Art Gallery from 28th May to 23 June 2011.

Let's start with the word flâneur, which {Arash Fayez} uses conceptually to pull together individual works of his latest collection. It has acquired a rich European tradition since Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) brought to it his own spin. To the Parisian poet, a flâneur was a free agent who roamed around the city without any particular objective. Detached, she nevertheless managed to connect to the city and its inhabitants through her aleatory act of rambling.

A flâneur is an urban, post-industrial phenomenon. The city is where he dwells and the act of roaming is itself his objective. What is brought about, as such, is less important than the peripatetic exercise. By extension, a flâneur lays no claim to discovery. She is autistic, suspended in cacophonous space, under the sway of a diverse regime of signs that she is unable/unwilling to compile or process. Thus, his act is suffused with randomness, of a kind that makes certainty about signs and events impossible. This lack of certainty is indeed the fulcrum on which the above-mentioned relationship with the general public rests. He offers to view that which doesn't require interpretation, doesn't bring surety and must be taken at face value.

A flâneur belongs to the modern middle class. He has time to waste. She can afford to dabble in the insignificant. His borders on dilettantism; hers is pushed by modern aesthetics, whereby the object of observation is divested of all prior knowledge and requires no particular skill set (except presence). His is a precursor to dada exhibitionism, which strove to disturb the way bourgeois life was habituated. The flâneur doesn't even set that objective for herself. She is content with loafing about. Not an idealist, he doesn't dream of a pastoral landscape. She doesn't have a desire to go back to nature. To him, the world is entirely without teleology and all aesthetics is hallowed of its metaphysical significance. As such, in a strange turn of events, she finds the essence of the primitive within the urban illusion of a forward projectile fall-from-grace.

Arash Fayez's use of the word in this exhibit is both true-to-form and paradoxical. As viewers of his (fake or real) Polaroid images, we relate to them on a simple plane of understanding and association. Some hint at nostalgia, especially the "real" (old bookstore fronts, abandoned movie houses, forsaken confectionary shop, old municipal markers, etc.). Others frame simple humorous moments (the wall drawing of a dove perched over the wreath of flowers highlighting the word "Iran" in the middle, the graffiti depicting a smiling young boy with the letters BBC added later by another graffitist, the meddling with municipal wall paintings, a sheep on the back of a van on a quiet street, etc.). No matter how we see them, however, these images tell a simple story, one that doesn't require erudition to unscramble.

Yet his flâneur is paradoxical -- he comes at a time when the middle classes are passionately embracing political activism. Belonging, as he is, by and large, to this amorphous social category, the Iranian artist found his true calling with the presidential election of June 2009. Having previously snubbed her nose at the electoral process, she participated in and later came to the streets to claim her dues once the result of the elections was announced. This marked at once a form of reconciliation with the political sphere and a shift away from bourgeois atomism and isolationism. She suddenly realized how vulnerable and precarious her life was as she stood precipitously close to the gaping social divide. He saw that he could only find solace in collective bargaining, that happiness cannot be gained through an immersion in consumer goods. As such, it was after the 2009 elections that she, the Iranian artist and the middle class, tried to reach out to her fellow citizens. 

What Mr. Fayez is proposing is a peculiar, anachronistic change in direction. He seems to be saying: "Let's go back to being a free agent, a child, someone who keeps his mind clear and his eyes open to that which takes place before him without any ideological interferences. Let's go back to the fullness of form. Let's trust what we see in presence without the hindsight of past and the foresight of future. We only need to taste the full flavor of a meaning-free now." His flâneur is immersed in from. In fact, content and form have become one. Does this constitute an organizing principle of Mr. Fayez's collection? Of course it does. These are not purely random shots. They are chosen based on their effect on the individual who is taking them, an individual sensitive to the power of forms (the artist chose these out of a roster of 400). Is our flâneur trying to say something through these images? No. Yes. No. I think the negative has the upper hand here. Of course Mr. Fayez is trying to say something. And of course he is not saying anything in particular. Let's call him a server, a bus boy, a garçon, a waiter, a host. Photography is his tray. The frame is his offer. Yes, he distinguishes between "fake" and "real" Polaroid images -- a conceptual deliberation to be sure, a menu suggestion, if you like. Yes, these images form a serving dish of universe of meaning. No, they do not gravitate around a semiotic focal point. One may justifiably ascribe a specific message to some of these photographs. We can, for example, interpret the plethora of images belonging to the religious sphere (minarets, wall paintings, domes, places of worship) to mean the constriction and overdetermination of urban spaces in a particular direction. We can also evaluate the semiology of this collection based on what is absent in them, e.g. there are no scenes of commercial culture (with the sole exception of a Victoria's Secret storefront), which is an abstraction. Like in much of the rest of the world, Iran has also succumbed to the power of the capitalist machinery of persuasion. Ads have come to dominate the cityscape with increasing frequency. Another strange abstraction in these photographs: there are nowhere any people to be seen. Watching these photographs gives us the feeling that we are beholding a deserted city, something that happens in sci-fi literature.

In the mediatic world we live in, the citizen-subject-consumer is more than ever under the sway of powerful images issued and circulated principally by corporate or statist forces, both of which strive to influence him in his isolation. There is teleology to every image that she sees on the streets, from fast-food ads targeting children, to luxury items, titillating the middle class sense of want, to state propaganda, without which it cannot give legitimacy to its burgeoning machinery of power and control.

Mr. Fayez does this through a distancing effect -- the Polaroid frame -- which influences the way we see the images: First, the thick, white frame removes us from the immediacy of the photographed scene and frees us to recreate its meaning and message. Second, we know that these are (supposed to be) Polaroid shots and this foreknowledge throws the temporal order into confusion. We are subconsciously aware of an absence of contemporaneousness, which in turn introduces an element of irreality into the picture. These are snapshots of urban landscapes taken today but they seem to operate on a different chronology. We feel a loss because not only images point to an irreal setting but to a different time. The Polaroid frame doubles the ambiguity of meaning and message that suffuses this collection but it also makes light of meaning and message altogether. It is this ambiguity coupled with disambiguation that makes these images playful. They don't take themselves seriously and that's why they are able to connect to their viewers.

Mr. Fayez's flâneur strives to dissociate the signifier-signified relationship in the visual field that dominates out lives, to allow for a distance from the influence of their forces. His snapshots are dots in children's drawing books that cannot be connected. As such, these photographs do not form a total picture. In the current volatile state, when the middle classes want to see themselves as committed agents of a better world, and when artists coming by and large from the same social background, are tuning their works to respond to that need, Mr. Fayez Ramblings of a Flâneur seem to go in an opposite direction. Ramblings of a Flâneur is a proposition to see the reality of our atomized and isolated lives.

Top Image

Poster of Ramblings of a Flâneur exhibit at Silkroad Art Gallery (28 May to 13 June 2011). For a larger image of the poster click here.