“Siah Armajani; a bridge between East and West” (intertextuality of Iranian painting in Siah Armajani works)

(2018)

Abstract

Siah Armajani, the Iranian philosopher-artist of the 1940s and an American immigrant of the 1970s, suddenly experiences the greatest cultural changes of the century by traveling from east to west. Synchrony his presence in modern traditional Iran and postmodern America makes him a bicultural artist with East-West Intersubjective relations, which reconstructs the Eastern subconscious in the Western context. 

The purpose of this study is to investigate the intertextual cultural relations in Armajani works after appearing in the new cultural text and studying how the artist’s discourse in the second space. For this purpose, the works are studied in two Section: cultural texts of origin and destination, and in three working periods, analytically-intertextually, with linguistic signs for each period.

Research shows that: A) The migration of the artist in different cultural contexts gives rise to two kinds of ideas and creates an intersubjective space. The artist, by being in the second space with expressive retrievals in visual language, seeks dialogue and the cultural language of the destination text for dialogue. B) retrievals do not diminish over time in the new text, but find a linguistic way of expression. Thus, language games, suspense, and identification are reflected more than any other component in his work, making him a hybrid artist in the third space.

Keywords: Keywords: culture, identity, migration, return, language