What Is 'Islamic' Art? Quotes

“If geography and time are the warp and weft structuring (art) history, perceptual culture is like the pile of a velvet cloth that, without altering the warp or weft of the fabric, reenchants its texture and depth. It treats Islam as the Simurgh, and objects as its feathers. Like the galleries in China full of representations futilely and obsessively trying to reconstruct the bird from its feathers, the museum is a monument to our inability to feel what we are trying to represent. And yet like the three princes seeking the hand of the Chinese princess in the gallery of creation, we can also discover through objects the spirit we can never expect to pin down in our hands. With these hopes tucked in between the warp of evidence and the weft of interpretation, this book would like to quote a certain textile from a very long time ago: I exist for pleasure; Welcome! For pleasure am I; he who beholds me sees joy and well-being. This book offers complex more than simple pleasures: its many questions diverge and converge, offering iridescence to our certainties. It puts forth the pleasure of using thought as steel wool polishing our mental acumen, enabling perception beyond predetermined realities. It may be that a barzakh exists somewhere between the secular and the sacred, a peninsula of understanding in which we enter the cave of our ghurba and become in the world but not of it. If we tread lightly with a pure heart cleansed in the mirror of curiosity and wonder, it may just open its doors a bit and let us explore the glory it holds inside.”
― Wendy M. K. Shaw, What is 'Islamic' Art?: Between Religion and Perception

“The study of Islamic perceptual culture is distinct from, yet dependent on, art history. It respects the knowledge gained from a secular approach to the cultures of Islam, but questions the premise that a secularism gleaned from Christianate roots can apprehend a culture in which everything can be conceived within a relationship with the Divine. This inquiry renders contingent premises such as the centrality of vision, the role of the image, the importance of the object, the linearity of history, the centrality of matter, and the authority of perspective. In their stead, this study of perceptual culture looks to Islamic discourses for an alternative language through which to conceive the human encounter with the created world. On the one hand, these new concepts expand our understanding of Islam in its relationship with antique philosophy and neighboring religions. On the other, these methods transcend the category of Islam, providing potentially useful tools through which to develop transcultural epistemic models for global art history. Featuring the agency of works over their physicality, the study of Islamic perceptual culture expands the concept of ‘art’ to include music, dreams, visions, and mirrors, both real and metaphorical. The shift from art to perception, production to reception replaces the exchange value of the commodity with the interactive sharing of discourse. We become less what we make than how we make, and what we do with that making. Rather than annealing history in the preservation of forms, the discursive preservation of ideas enables that which has been to persist in what becomes. Bergsonian duration gains methodological centrality over Hegelian historicism.”
― Wendy M. K. Shaw, What is 'Islamic' Art?: Between Religion and Perception

“What can ‘art’ mean in a culture where the primary organ of perception is not the eye or the ears, but the heart? It requires a shift from the visible to the sensible, in which attention is directed not outwardly toward the object, but inwardly, within the heart. This shift – from the eye as an organ of (potentially rational) verification to the heart as one of (necessarily perceptual) validation shifts the aesthetic from one located between a disinterested subject and object toward an aesthetic located between an interested subject and an object made malleable through the performance of perception. The Quran scarcely differentiates between material and immaterial perception: external receptors, the eyes and ears, function indivisibly with the heart, the internal sensory organ. This enables a heart-perception of the unseen that unbalances and confuses the distinction of the senses. Whereas a visually mimetic model of representation requires light to expose material reality, in the Quran light can simultaneously show and blind, sometimes at the same time.”
― Wendy M. K. Shaw, What is 'Islamic' Art?: Between Religion and Perception