Asian calligraphy from Malaysia, Iranian desert landscapes

Fine examples of Persian and Arabic calligraphy are on display at an Art Gallery of NSW exhibition.

Ninth century Koran leaf, AGNSW’s exhibition Beyond words: calligraphic traditions of Asia.

There is a memorable line in the Blackadder series when Rowan Atkinson says to his servant, “To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?” The remark is so striking because it sums up a profound insight: historical change does not affect or even involve all social classes equally.

In Europe, the Renaissance and the scientific revolution that followed — processes that unfolded from the 14th to the 17th and 18th centuries — profoundly transformed the lives and outlooks of urban people and the upper and middle classes, but left those of the peasants virtually unchanged. It was only when the new scientific ideas were translated into large-scale technological change in the Industrial Revolution that the lives and thoughts of the mass of society began to be affected.

The most decisive factor in this case, however, was not social rank or the distribution of wealth, but the incidence of literacy. Those who could read had access to the learning of the past, the new ideas of their own time and to wider networks of communication; and this meant not only that they knew more, but that they became self-critical, reflective, rather than taking the contents of their minds or the inherited ideas of the tribe for granted.

Thus the literate became historical and the illiterate remained virtually prehistorical, not only unchanging in the repeated routines of their lives but unquestioning in their values. Becoming historical meant asking questions and discovering the possibility of change: this was not indeed without its dangers, and the following two centuries were plagued by ideologies of revolution and radical transformation, sweeping now semi-literate masses into revolutions, tyrannies and other catastrophes.

Pages from an illuminated Koran (c.1400) at Beyond words: calligraphic traditions of Asia.

These principles can cast light on the predicament of Aboriginal communities in Australia. The trouble is that remote communities, meant to be havens of traditional life, are doomed by inherent contradiction. The values and social coherence of traditional Aboriginal culture were based on the life of a hunter and gatherer; once the hunter-gatherer life is gone, it is literally a matter of life and death to make the transition to a new one. The Aborigines existed in a state of prehistory for thousands of years, but now they have no option but to move into a historical phase, and this is why literacy is so important: it is only the educated and literate and self-critical who will be able to negotiate a neo-Aboriginal identity within the modern world.

Literacy has been confined to a minority of the population in most societies since the invention of writing about 5000 years ago in Sumeria. Early forms of writing, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics, or indeed Chinese characters, were hard to read and the province of scholars. The Phoenician invention of alphabetic writing about 3000 years ago revolutionised access to literacy, since anyone of normal intelligence could now learn to read.

Even so, it is remarkable that literacy in the West collapsed after the fall of the Roman Empire and did not begin to recover for a millennium or more. It was the same elsewhere: most Chinese could not read until recent times, and in Iran, which I visited for the first time a few weeks ago, 90 per cent of the population was still illiterate by the beginning of World War II, despite a half-century of modernisation. That has changed dramatically since, first under the Shah and then since the 1979 revolution, and today a youthful and increasingly educated population is part of what makes Iran perhaps the most interesting country in the region.

Among the most attractive features of Persian culture are its strong vein of humanism and its wonderful tradition of poetry, going back 1000 years to Ferdowsi, who programmatically set out to renew the Persian language in the face of the hegemony of Arabic, and including such authors as Saadi, Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam. What is particularly striking is the broad popularity of the poetic tradition. Poems are quoted in films and recited by taxi drivers, and the graves of the poets are pilgrimage sites. When I visited those of Saadi and Hafez in Shiraz, shopkeepers and mullahs alike crowded around, touching the stones and reciting verses they knew by heart.

The most interesting contemporary art I saw in a short visit was an exhibition of photographs of the great Iranian deserts by Mohammadreza Javadi, digitally printed on to canvas, at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, much of whose important collection, largely consigned to storage since the Islamic revolution, will be exhibited at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin from December to early March.

Javadi’s impressive desert images, in which light sculpted forms from vast hills and dunes of sand, were paired with verses from contemporary poets that I deciphered with the help of my guide: reflections on time, mortality and being that seemed perfectly matched with the deep silence of the desert landscapes.

Hanging scroll by Gibon Sengai from Hakozaki in Japan (late 18th or early 19th century).

Leaving the museum, we found a small local bazaar nearby, and among its many shops, that of a scribe. Until quite recently, and as in early modern Europe, such a man would have made his living largely by writing letters for those who could not read or write themselves. Today his work presumably mostly involves special messages for social or religious ceremonies, as well as writing the verses of poets, which hung framed in his window.

While I was there, however, he was engaged in writing a page for a client who had brought in the text hastily written on a rather crumpled scrap of paper. The scribe was patiently drafting these scrawled words in the elegant calligraphic nastaliq script, executed in ink with a traditional reed pen. The regular loops of the Arabic alphabet adopted for writing Persian can be flattened out into long flourishes, because so many letters are identified by superscript or subscript dots, and the writer deliberately avoids setting all the letters on the same line or giving each approximately the same dimensions.

Nor does the calligrapher write each word, as we take for granted, from the first letter to the last: instead, he may begin with the long sweep which is to become a central group of letters, then add smaller preceding letters and diacritical marks. Each word is in effect transformed into a visual pattern executed in a way we associate with drawing rather than with writing. Such word-pictures often take the place of images that are theoretically prohibited in Islamic art, although figurative painting flourished in the Persian tradition.

Fine examples of Persian and Arabic calligraphy can be seen in the Art Gallery of NSW’s exhibition of works from the collection of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, which also includes a display of reed pens, beautifully worked pen cases and other scribal equipment.

Given the focus of the collection, the manuscripts are mostly Korans, always written in Arabic, whose use was spread by Islamic conquest across a vast area. Over time, and amid different cultures, however, the style of writing and decoration varies widely, from the broad and almost geometric Kufic script of Egypt and North Africa in the 9th century to the dynamic, ornamental yet contained strokes of an Egyptian Mameluke text from about 1400.

The Maghrebi style of a Koran from 19th-century Morocco uses much smaller letters, fluid and running together in a seemingly informal cursive that is nonetheless full of decorative flourishes. The opulently decorated volume from Safavid Persia (1555) devotes most of the page to elaborate decorations recalling Persian carpets. A 19th-century Malay Koran is surrounded by decorative patterns that derive from India but have taken on a Malay-Javanese character; an Indian volume of the 16th century, with minimal Indian decoration, is surrounded by far more extensive commentary in Persian, then the language of courtly life and scholarship from the Ottoman to the Mogul empires, and an 18th-century Chinese Koran is immediately identifiable by its characteristic lotus illuminations.

Less familiar to most viewers will be a series of folios called siyah mashq — “black practice” in Persian — on which scribes would practise the sweeps and flourishes of the calligraphic art. Most often, these sheets were either washed for reuse or thrown away, but in 17th, 18th and 19th-century Persia, they began to be increasingly appreciated by collectors, fascinated by the mystical suggestiveness of the word, even when seemingly used without intended meaning.

The exhibition of loan works from Malaysia is complemented by a range of pieces from AGNSW’s own collection, including a long scroll by the contemporary Iranian-Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh, who has written the word for love in saffron ink, fading to white and the implication of light in the centre. Parastou Forouhar’s Persian for beginners plays with a tradition in which calligraphy becomes image, and Persian for kids offers the opportunity for visitors to try this for themselves.

There are also fine examples of Chinese calligraphy, the tradition in which writing and painting come closest and co-exist most readily because both are done with the same brush and ink, and on the same surface. Chinese — along with others such as Japanese, which adopted their characters — is also the language in which calligraphy can achieve the greatest depth of meaning, because its words are in origin pictures. Graphic variation in these cases can genuinely inflect meaning in a way that it cannot in alphabetic languages.

The exhibition also includes more recent works, notably those of Peter Upward and Brice Marden, which aspire to emulate calligraphic expression in the medium of abstract painting. These attempts are more plausible than countless other works that claim such an affiliation, but they remain ultimately unsatisfactory and it is not hard to see why.

In writing a Chinese character, every stroke is an element of signification; to elongate, abbreviate, accelerate or slow down such a stroke is to modify that signification, subtly shifting its connotation.

Conversely, the gestural movement of the brush is constrained by the boundaries of the sign that must be observed if it is to remain intelligible: from this constraint come both the potential for meaning and the purposive energy of the gesture. Without such constraint, pseudo-calligraphic gestural abstrac­tion is ultimately without content and vacuous.

Beyond words: calligraphic traditions of Asia

Art Gallery of NSW, until April 2017.

The March of the Sun: Photographs by Mohammadreza Javadi

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, until October 26.