Shirin Fathi - The Disobedient Nose
At The Cult of Beauty, Fathi’s photographic dyptich The Disobedient Nose was shown alongside interactable ‘research materials’ from the wider project. Nearby was a smallish gaudy, bruised painting about trans de-masculinising nose shaving cosmetic surgery, and on the other wall a large photograph of a Brazilian plastic surgeon preparing to perform a breast augmentation, he clothed in a lab coat while the patient/client/victim stands topless with scrubs around her waist. It was an uncomfortable corner.
Fathi’s portraits themselves draw on the conventions of historical figurative painting, portraiture, ‘sitting’, and in relation to gender; she seems to wear a loose baldcap along with the ruff in the left image, while being topless and apparently whitened with powder. In the right, in which she appear using more feminine (but not naked or nude) conventions, she looks away, out of the frame. The first does more for me, staring with something like the haughty gaze of a nobleman, but also possibly the challenge of Manet’s Olympia (1863) or the screen-test inexpression in Carey Young’s Appearance (2023). In all three, the sense of the sitter being subject - subjected to something, eg. the gaze - as well as the subject/object of interest is made complex by the sensation that the viewer’s gaze is returned (Young draws specific attention the mediating ‘character’ of the camera.) That this is not present in the right-hand image is still significant though; there is some sense of turning away in the combination which makes the left portrait less definitive.
The audio guide points out that the effect of referencing rhinoplasty, which relates to Iranian ‘beautification’ practices, is made with a flower petal. This tells us there is something temporary and staged about the sitting, while referencing the softness of the body and nodding again towards a traditional sense of ‘beauty.’
Most interesting, though, is the research objects which are presented alongside the two portraits. For these, Fathi has made casts of her own face from silicone, and then removed or manipulated the nose, re-stitching but not quite closing the hole. There is something like Frankenstein or Texas Chainsaw Massacre about this face, as an object. This part could be viewed as making the whole arrangement as an installation, or a mirroring of museum methods. For myself, I view them as transitional objects; as if the true research, change and knowledge takes place in Fathi in the very act of doing. To work into one’s own face must be to really confront and encounter something strange. It disrupts the sense of our being ‘behind the face’, bringing us also to our hands, eyes, posture etc. The fact that these are not presented as precious, but can be touched by the audience and thus kind of re-encountered, gives like a squidgy version of a static shock from the floor. Transitional objects
“do not reside largely in the fantasy life of the child but rather are actual objects - blankets, dolls - that function as psychic talismans - aids for easing anxiety, helping the child to sleep. Such objects, are nothing if not deeply familiar. … The transitional object is gradually allowed to be decathected, so that in the course of the years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean, in health the transitional object does not "go inside" nor does the feeling necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between "inner psychic reality" and "the external world as perceived by two persons in common," that is to say over the whole cultural field."
Through these research objects we can conduct our own primary research into the inaccessible interiority and past of Fathi’s experience. What is shown in them is not ‘artwork’ but somehow the real work, or the practice, of investigating one’s own face in relation to the contextual concern. This simple, transitory, emotionally complex gesture makes the paintings seem like a research paper appendix version to the real thing: a final outcome or perhaps a form that lures you in through convention. The immediacy of the object, combined with the story, carries an enormous charge, while being less definitively ‘about’ any one thing.
Bib
Helen Molesworth, Duchamp by Hand, Even (2018) VERLAG FüR MODERNE KUNST