apparatus, both viewer and painter are abstracted from the practical and public
sphere where alone the codes of recognition operate, to become in the end
disembodied retinal reflectors.^15
Along similar lines, Grabarfinds that the similarity of the works attests to a
transcendent language of aesthetic pleasure that competes with the mean-
ing of the calligraphic text. He designates the work, a meditation on the
name‘Ali, as“iconophoric”:“an exact and nonnegotiable relationship to
an external referent whose expression is not, however, restricted to this
particular object.”^16 The object is thus a container of meaning, but also an
abstraction subject to universal apprehension.
Shifting earlier formalist approaches to‘Islamic abstraction’through
psychoanalytic vocabulary rooted in European mimeticism as developed
by Rudolf Arnheim and Ernst Gombrich, Grabar reduces the potential
interpretive framework for a premodern Muslim subject to that of being
able to literally read the calligraphy in the painting or see the bird in the
relief carving.^17 Presuming the universality of his interpretive categories,
he assumes that the binary distinction he makes between“iconophoricity”
(representationalism) and“formalism”(the abstraction of forms) encom-
passes all culturally coded aesthetic experiences. He thus elides the possi-
bility that meaning might emerge not despite but because of visual
ambiguity: meaning might inhere to the impossibility to define or limit
the possibilities afforded by sense. By asserting a universal humanism, he
forces the Other to necessarily always already be the same as the rational
universal modern subject that the art historian supposedly represents.
This betrays not only a lack of interest in the relationship between
Islamic intellectual history and artistic practices, but a broader prejudice
characterizing artmaking as a non-verbal, non-intellectual, apolitical
endeavor. It conforms to Riegl’s attempt to make art history into a science
in which physical form functions independently from living culture.
Elevating art over craft through the myth of individual genius, this frame-
work denigrates both in reducing the artist and the craftsperson alike to
inspiredfigures segregated from their intellectual milieus. It ignores the
contextual engagement of both Mondrian and the anonymous artist of the
Persian calligraphic panel.
The works do not look similar because of some mysterious transcultural
beauty, but because they reflect shared intellectual premises that root
abstraction in the mathematics of the Fibonacci series. For Mondrian,(^15) Bryson, 1983 : 45. (^16) Grabar, 1992 : 18. (^17) Shalem and Troelenberg: 2010.
272 Mimetic Geometries