Burqas, Veils and Hoodies
Burqas, Veils, and Hoodies: Identity and representation
The veil is infinitely visual. This veil, this curtain, this cover is itself mystery, even as it is the shroud that guards the mystery.
As much as it is fabric or a garment, it is also a concept. Veils are art, theatre, illusion, artifice, architecture, masquerade, deception, alchemy, and transformation, dream, euphemism, and metaphor, depression, hallucination, holiness, emancipation, or protection, liberation, eloquent silence or holiness.
Many artists employ in their art a language that includes devices that veil, that cover, that conceal, metaphorically that protect, and that provide sanctuary. Some of these devices include the deliberate use of images that are ‘out of focus’ or a bokeh effect, or putting washes and colours over the top of images, depicting things with coverings, historically fig leafs, or leaving information out of the picture altogether etc. Veiling is a device for abstracting the real, for making things neither this or that - coverings like veils create the poetic charge in many works of contemporary art.
Also addressing concepts of revealing and concealing, theatre and the body is the trope of ‘drapery’. Drapery has been central to art across the millenia from the Ancient Greek Venus de Milo 130 – 100bc to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait 1434, Manet’s Olympia 1863, Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych 1992 through to Tracey Emin’s My Bed of 1999. Indeed ‘Drapery’ as a subject in art is a historical arena for study by art historians. Drapery’ arguably connotes ‘art’ embodying concepts of taste and the represented or absent body. Another, perhaps more contemporary reading of drapery is the allusion to abstract concepts such as femininity and pictorial representation itself. The use of drapery in an artwork represents the theatre and the artifice of art.
Another screen or cover to consider is the human face. Popularly we try and see through the eyes to some ‘within’ or we might say that a face has a frosty visage – acknowledging that a face could be veiled with a countenance or with a mask or simply make up. We say to ‘put one’s face one and use phrases such as ‘on the face of it, or we face a surface with another. The human face can deceive or protect, attract and distract or disguise (think of war paint), or we can suffer humiliation and lose face.
The theme ‘Burqas, Veils, and Hoodies: identity and representation’ is one that seeks to make complex the stereotypes that arise from deeply culturally embedded memes. The title, Burqas, Veils, and Hoodies is a somewhat provocative one, it aims to catch interest and challenge stereotypes. It is hoped that the visual art in this exhibition offers a non-didactic and poetic approach that seeks to unpick layers of meaning and cultural construction in a lively way.
The theme as well as being at the core of contemporary art practice is relevant to the suburb of Dandenong in which the Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre is situated. On the streets of Dandenong one sees costume of faith from peoples of many cultures and nations, including Sikh men wearing the Dashtar, Islamic women wearing the hijab, and a variety of different subcultural and national groups wearing the hoodie including disenfranchised youth of Anglo Saxon heritage.
The hoodie is one current fashion item that creates a secular clan membership for the wearer. The hoodie was developed in the 1930s to be worn by labourers in New York City’s cold warehouses and was popularised later by the film, “Rocky”. In the United States the hoodie became associated with skateboarders and surfers, whereas in the United Kingdom ‘Chavs’ who are stereotypically aggressive working class teenagers wear the hoodie. In more recent times the hoodie has become ‘cool’ inner city and anti- establishment.
The potency of looking at both the burqa and the hoodie in part comes from the proposed banning of both items of clothing by national governments. There have been calls and legislation for banning the burqa and the hijab in France and after recent riots in Britain, calls for the banning of the hoodie as the surveillance of the state struggles to make clear identification of the disaffected youth involved in social protests.
Kevin Braddock in Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2011 wrote: “that the real reasons why a generation of young people choose to retreat into the invisibility cloak of the hoodie and escape the harsh realities of their troubling present and dystopian future: spiralling living and education costs, a savage employment market, future living standards likely to be lower than their parents, and zero prospect of home ownership along with a collective societal suspicion of teenagers as a whole. Kids in hiding, afraid of being seen, and at the same time embodying in their everyday uniform the furtive tunnel-vision that seems to define their bleak, introspective vision of the world outlook.” 1
The veil is a highly resonant item not just within Islamic cultures but also within Christian traditions – particularly the bridal veil. Like Islamic cultures and traditions, the bridal veil goes through periods of rising and falling popularity and fashion. Over time, the Christian bridal veil became a symbolic means of assuring the husband and his family of the bride’s virtue. The lifting of the veil during the ceremony signified that the groom was “taking possession” of his wife by seeing her face. According to a Christian view not only does the bridal veil show the modesty and purity of the bride and her reverence for God, it reminds of the Temple veil which was torn in two when Christ died on the cross. The removing of the veil took away the separation between God and man, giving believers access into the very presence of God. Since Christian marriage is regarded as a picture of the union between Christ and the church, the removal of the bridal veil is another reflection of this relationship. Through marriage, the couple now has full access to one another. 2
The burqa and the hijab changed in meaning dramatically after September 11, 2001. “The gaze which viewed the veil as an object of mystique, exoticism and eroticism with the veiled woman as an object of fantasy excitement and desire is now replaced by a xenophobic or Islamophobic gaze with the veil being seen as a highly visible sign of despised difference.” 3
The veil, repeatedly has become a sign of the supposedly repressive Muslim world and implicit in that assumption is the superiority of the West in relation to that world. The veil has become shorthand to signify an extreme state of being - either repression or resistance. The West’s desire to unveil the Arabic woman is to make her an object of possession. To have access to her beauty, to break her resistance and make her available for adventure...
Malek Alloula writing in 1987 draws our attention to the likeness of the gaze from a veiled woman and that of the camera, “this womanly gaze is a little like the photographic lens” – the photographer – he knows this gaze. It resembles the lens that takes aim at everything. “Thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed; having himself become an object to be seen...” 4
To be veiled is, to some degree therefore, to be unseen, a condition of seeing that leads to both attraction and repulsion. Freud would argue that in understanding looking and desire; pleasurable looking demands a distance between the subject and the object. It is in this distance that desire is activated.
If this line of argument is pursued then the veil’s religious purpose to protect women from becoming sexual objects may be ironically subverted. The veil is very complex and often enshrines contradictory ideas. Another writer on the veil, Hamid Naficy writes: “Modesty and the system of looking which has developed to deal with modesty, veil aspects of women (and to some extent of men) and thereby creates the necessary distance that that motivates and promotes pleasurable looking...”. 5
In conclusion we can say the veil and art are inseparable. It is the artist’s task to identify the obstacles and manoeuvre through visible and invisible spaces. It is the artist’s task to insist on a diversity of and complexity of the veil.
David O’Halloran, 2013
Footnotes
1. Kevin Braddock, The Guardian, 9 August 2011
2. Corinthians 7:4 - ref; http://christianity.about.com
3. Alison Donnell, ‘Visibility, Violence and Voice? Attitudes to Veiling Post 11 September in Veiling Representation and Contemporary Art, Modern Art Oxford, UK 2004
4. Malek Alloulah, The Colonial Harem, Manchester University Press, 1987, p14
5. Hamid Naficy, “Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice and Vision in Iranian Post Revolutionary Cinema” in Veiling Representation and Contemporary Art, Modern Art Oxford UK 2004