Ali Mahdavi: between Flesh and Light
Ali Mahdavi studied at the École Boulle, the Cours Duperré, and Ensba for anatomy lessons, and at the Royal College of Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute. He therefore had all the tools at his disposal to develop a body of work that spans the categories of contemporary art, photography, fashion photography, cinema, and musical theater, without giving up any of his methodological rigor and expressing ever more freely his obsessions and ideals. One of the most beautiful stagings that Mahdavi ever did for the Crazy Horse, where he was the art director for eight years, was the exact opposite of what usually occurs during a striptease act. The main figure, in this instance the magnificent and mischievous Dita Von Teese, was nude… and the show dressed her. In keeping with the technique that has made this Parisian cabaret’s reputation, the nude body is a screen on which lighting effects are projected. Except in this case it wasn’t geometrical motifs that concealed her figure but rather, adapted with staggering precision, immaterial articles of clothing.(1) A flame-colored sheath dress clung to her body before yielding a plunging neckline; a corset and black fishnets molded and masked what the viewer’s eye was eager to discover ( Undress to Kill). This elegantly summarizes a theme that runs throughout the artist’s work, i.e., the struggle between the real body and its image. Don’t we just spend a large part of our lives hiding, burying, even forgetting the body we have been given behind the images we fashion from it? Limited to the privacy of pleasure and pain, the real body disappears behind its appearance occasionally to the point where we take the latter for reality, or we force ourselves to subject reality until we make it conform to the image. Are we always sure to see in the mirror anything other than the fantasy of our body (whence our disappointment upon seeing photographs for which we haven’t posed quite right and which do not correspond to that fantasy)? And doesn’t the diet we follow aim to get this body we are caught in to enter the ideal image that would deliver us from it? This confusion is excusable. Since our eyes cannot leave our head, we only see the body in fragments, some of which escape us totally. Can a contortionist see his or her back? To see ourselves totally, we are forced then to make use of images, reflections, photos, fantasies. A short film done by Mahdavi for a lingerie brand illustrates that irreducible and paradoxical distance. A woman dressed in a matching jacket and skirt enters a changing room. Viewers’ eyes are placed where the mirror would be and the woman wiggles and primps before them. But suddenly extending out and partly blocking the view of the woman are transparent screens on articulated metal arms, like the ones presiding in operating rooms and the ones the artist used for his early installations and performances. The screens act like magnifying glasses that instead of enlarging objects allow the eye to see underneath them, such that inside their frame can be seen the lingerie the young woman is wearing, or rather what she dreams of wearing. She admires herself in a mirror that is nothing less than the gaze of the other (in this instance, we the viewers) and this mirror reflection frees her and drives her wild. That is, until the screens (her fantasies) vanish and she composes herself in the jacket and skirt she never in fact re-
moved. This device of intermediary frames reminds me of the photographs of Salvador Dalí by Philippe Halsman. Large magnifying glasses bring out a bulging eye and half of the painter’s moustache, details of his physiognomy that are precisely the clues with which he crafted his image for the public eye. The image dominates to such a degree that sometimes several bodies blend in the same image. Suffering from alopecia universalis, that is, complete hair loss, following a traumatism, Ali Mahdavi hit upon the idea of photographing or filming nine individuals who had the same disorder, all dressed in the same black turtleneck and framed in the same way. The work’s title, Tous les autres
s’appellent Ali, quotes the French title of a Fassbinder film (in English, Ali, Fear Eats the
Soul). The effect is disturbing. Although the nine are of different ages and sexes, and their features are nothing alike, it can be said that at first glance, before the eye of course starts to work on telling them apart, they all have the “same image,” such is the dominant impression from the smooth face and bald head. Another series of photographs was done by projecting the portraits of different Hollywood stars onto the artist’s face; the coincidence of the two faces is adjusted thanks to subtle work on the lighting, or shall we say the aura ( Immortels). Poetic justice or payback, the artist, vampire-like, sucks the life blood from those who, by his own admission, have taken over his imagination through their roles as vamps. Commenting on these works, Catherine Francblin advances the argument of the “two bodies of the king,” as Pierre Michon has developed the idea from Ernst Kantorowicz.(2) Just as there is the earthly and mortal body of the king, and his political and immortal body, so there is the body that is doomed to decay and the death of actors, artists, and writers, but they have a mythic, immortal body. Mahdavi, who clearly has a mental penchant for synthesis, did a frightening portrait of Marlene Dietrich. It’s an authentic skull covered with a stocking on which precious stones have been applied to suggest the eyes, mouth, and hair ( Where
are you, Jo?). Doubtless the rest of the actress’s body would be today as anonymous as the skull serving as a support for this effigy. Yet the features that are indicated by the gemstones render her immediately identifiable, especially since the skull, which can be seen through the stocking, makes us aware that the actress’s prominent bone structure surely helped to imprint her image in our memory.(3) To this initial doubling, Mahdavi adds a second that is peculiar to representation, namely the body-sign, which occupies and structures a space, and the body-light, which only appears in the impalpable and fragile balance of a lighting effect. Body-sign: a group of photographs explicitly refers to Pierre Molinier. One or two models per picture, sporting masks, pose in front of a folding screen and with accessories that are the very ones that belonged to Molinier. They are wearing only black stockings and pumps. The framing accommodates just a bit of a margin beyond their extended legs, as if they determined it, and, like Molinier’s, they describe geometrical figures. On other photos a mirror placed at the middle of the model’s body creates the “spider” effect of absolute symmetry that Molinier obtained through photomontage.
BODY-SIGN AND BODY-LIGHT
It is also important to see how the artist imposes elaborate hand gestures on models, who don’t normally display them as much as their faces and figures. Here Milla Jovovich’s pointing index fingers borrow a stereotype employed in Renaissance painting, while elsewhere the contrast between light and shade gives the illusion that the two hands fanned out beneath the face either boast more than five fingers each, or are a pair of claws. Body-light. An admirer of filmmakers like Douglas Sirk, Josef Sternberg, and Michael Powell, Mahdavi has an incomparable ability to distribute light and shadow, using a whole makeshift setup beyond the frame which the perfection of the images obviously never suggests—the prosaic corporality of technique that the image transcends. On a profile that more than hints at Nefertiti’s—hair styled to stretch out the skull, eyeliner forming the perfect flick of a wing – the shadow that hollows out the cheekbone and underlines the chin heightens the angular look and almost suggests a second profile that would be a “hidden image.” A face photographed behind bars is divided in two by the reflection of one of them, but that reflection looks something like a trickle falling from the black hair. Both body-sign and body-light, a model is photographed straight on, her chest leaning to one side; a light source coming from outside points up the neck muscle of the woman, which forms a straight line exactly parallel to the section of her dress that she lifts in the diagonal of the space; the hand holding this section, the palm of which is precisely and strongly lit, seems to want to catch and recover the light radiating throughout the scene. Mahdavi has shot a number of short films, several that were fashion or advertising commissions, others that are works of fiction, and he is aiming to realize a featurelength film whose screenplay he co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière. It is in these works of fiction that themes linked with the physical body surface from beneath the glossy images, i.e., sexuality of course, but also death and even scatology. In a style that references film noir of the 1940s and 50s and its femme fatale heroines, a prostitute stabs her client ( Tapin de Noël, or Christmas Hooker); closer to today’s reality, a sophisticated lady commits surrogate incest with the young French Arab delivering drugs to her ( Forbidden Love). In the draft screenplay, which tells of the power struggle among three generations of women, the anorexic girl rejects as far as possible the body’s organic functions and dies from wanting too much to make her body conform to an image. How the organic body makes our consciousness aware of its existence and subverts the appearance we give it is a truth that Mahdavi knows well, despite—or rather short of—his fascination for the mythic bodies of Hollywood’s glory days. Brought to France from Iran in 1981 when he was still a child, the artist, during his teenage years, lost all that forms the basic protection of his body against attacks from the outside. In depictions of old, Eve is sometimes seen, as she is expelled from the Earthly Paradise, clutching a lock of her hair as if to protect herself; other times it is the end of a longer lock of hair that covers her genitalia. The young Ali didn’t have that possibility; the brutal change of countries, on the contrary, stripped him of every defense. In truth, he found himself as bare as a new-born babe. Dalí—but not only he— claimed that the artist was capable of a second birth, to be reborn from himself. My Baby Just Cares for
Me is the title of several self-portraits in which we see the artist’s bare skin swelling up to form baby Alis on his skull or belly. Skin that no longer produces hairs of any kind becomes the theme from which the artist was to go on to produce some of his most arresting works.
REAL BODY
The latest of them is once again a self-portrait obtained from a scan and a 3D print that allowed the artist to fashion a mold. The result is a latex bust, Premunition, which imitates skin down to the smallest of its pores. While the features of the face are hyperrealist, with the details of wrinkles, tiny lines, and veinlets painstakingly reworked by hand, Mahdavi has bestowed on it a head of hair and hairstyle worthy of a star. But that coif looks exactly like the skin! The lack of hair has allowed a free and supple cutaneous envelope to develop in its place. Power of the artist, who slips into the figure he admires; revenge of the bald skull, which grows and spreads out like a lush head of hair. The act I described at the start of this text ends on a symbol.The light that dresses Dita
« Prémunitions ».
Von Teese is transformed into a shower of shooting stars or sparkling spermatozoa and rush to one point, sucked up by a plughole that is none other than the stripper’s groin. The light from which the images are wrought disappears into the secret hollow of the real body.
Translation, C. Penwarden (1) This was the first use of mapping, a video projection that is able to adapt perfectly to the objectscreen. Alongside the choreographer Philippe Decouflé, Mahdavi was the art director of the review
Désirs. He also produced paintings with the guest stars, Clothilde Coureau and Noémie Lenoir, besides Dita Von Teese. (2) Pierre Michon, Corps du roi, Verdier, 2002. (3) The English Wikipedia page on the actress mentions the following: “…Dietrich withdrew to her apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. She spent the final eleven years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few… to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller… In 1982, Dietrich agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed.” Ali Mahdavi Né en 1971 à Téhéran. Vit à Paris depuis 1981 1993-1996 Styliste chez Thierry Mugler À partir de 2000 : nombreuses campagnes de publicité (Cartier, Cointreau, Dom Pérignon, Balmain, Ungaro, Thierry Mugler Parfum, Christian Louboutin, Piaget, Roberto Cavalli, Dita Von Teese Beauté, Wonderbra...) 2009-2017 Directeur artistique de la revue Désirs au Crazy Horse (Paris), et concepteur des numéros des guests stars : Dita Von Teese, C. Coureau et N. Lenoir Films : 2013 Forbidden Love (court-métrage) Expositions : 2001 Galerie Edouard Mitterrand, Genève 2003 Scout Gallery, Londres