Page 131 - ArtUnlimited

In order to affirm the value of Islamic culture Ashburn studied the
traditions and techniques of Islamic miniature painting. Her concern with
the issue of cultural tradition also led her to return to the similar European
traditions of English, French and European medieval illumination
to compare the Holy Crusades with the “Oil Crusade” of today. The
ornate Islamic decorative frames of Iraq Suite provide a remarkable
celebration of Islamic culture. They are recreations of traditional
Islamic art and beauty rendered in watercolour on paper: convoluted
patterns, exquisitely fine detail, elaborate and repetitive arabesques,
and delicate colours. william Yeats wrote before the Second world war
and defined the appeal of this kind of traditional art in his poem ‘Sailing
to Byzantium’. He evokes images of an enduring and ideal kind of art and
beauty: ‘such a form as grecian goldsmiths make/ Of hammered gold
andgold enamelling/ To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;/ Or set upon a
golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past,
or passing, or to come.’

Two major postmodern novelists have been inspired by Islamic miniatures
and the art of illumination. Both draw connections between traditional art
and questions about civilization and failures of humanitarian standards in
a way that parallels both goya and Ashburn. Orhan Parmuk, the Turkish
novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, celebrates the
tradition of Islamic miniatures in My Name is Red. He makes this tradition
the focus for a story about rivalry, murder and the threat of western
culture to Islamic culture in the Renaissance. In The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco sets his story in a fourteenth- century Italian monastery
where the monks are devoted to copying and decorating books that are
the records of a tradition of human wisdom and civilization that seems
to be under threat from the war of the Catholic Church against heresy.

Artists such as Ashburn raise basic questions. The ornate borders of the
images in Iraq Suite are the result of patience, skill and commitment.
They go way beyond the normal call of duty to produce a work of art. (Her
friends worry about how her hands and eyes survive her commitment to
minute detail and intricate design.) The aesthetic pleasure of the ornate
Islamic frames involves that sense of excess and extravagance that is
part of the tradition.

Two memorable images from Iraq Suite combine especially ornate frames
with horrific images from the Iraq war. These are two of the earliest
images from the series. In the first image ornate, golden decoration
surrounds a hooded Iraqi prisoner wired for torture at the Abu ghraib
prison. The frame is an elaborate pattern of convoluted lines, flourishes,
minute, brightly coloured, stylized flowers and insects, and blue mosaics
on a golden background; and it includes an inner frame of six different
bands of colour and ornate ornament. In the second image a hooded Iraqi
prisoner holding a child is seen through a screen of razor wire; and the
hooded prisoner and the child are set in another grand frame derived from

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