On a cloudless September day in Sydney, weightlifter Hossein Rezazadeh raises his arms to the sky in a now famous appeal to God above, before bending over and tightening his grip on his weights. Then, screwing up his enormous, pudgy face, he heaves 1,040 pounds into the air, winning an unexpected Olympic Gold.

Minutes later, defeated German favorite Ronny Weller tells reporters he cannot remember what his rival looked like, nor what his name was. “All these Iranians are appearing out of nowhere”, he mumbles. “It’s like being in a Spielberg”.

The trouble with art criticism, generally speaking, is that not only does it end up didactic and self-referential when hoping to be bold and poignant, but that it is subject to a general expectation that criticism be a form of purely descriptive aid, unearthing enlightening perspectives deep into subject matter. And yet, you needn’t subscribe to postcolonial critique or any other schools of methodic paranoia to see how texts intervene, fashion and very much obscure the object in the moment they represent it.

Criticism as we know it has academic roots in a project of consolidating national identity qua art and culture. And it is perhaps due to this ponderous modern heritage that criticism finds it particularly difficult to do justice to artwork referring to places with shifting postcolonial credentials, or that are otherwise bewildering.

As I write, I wrestle with the standards that were set by Ronny Weller on that cloudless day in late September. Waves of paralyzing humility wash over me. For to address Iranicity in the way he did was to do no less than free it of a crushing, dusty mass of accumulated semantic debris, offering a space for the emergent and the truly beautiful.

Paris, July 2001. Two photographers decide to boycott the exhibition “Regards persans”, in protest against the exclusion of a Pulitzer-winning picture of the execution of Iranian-Kurdish guerillas in 1979. Whether the two really intended to make the exhibition look like a sellout to the clerical establishment is an open question. Be that as it may, the illustrious S¸ddeutsche Zeitung, for one, was quick to publish the photograph, snickering at the Paris exhibition for its “aesthetically pleasing pictures,” then snidely pointing out that the Iranian ambassador had attended the opening.

The protesters are not the issue. Perhaps they had stakes that were clearly political, or perhaps they were simply tired of the unending euroamerican appetite for the rural, dusty charm of a magical, mysterious Orient. Ali Baba and the forty thieves. What is more relevant here is a different juncture in the reception of 3rd world art and cinema, namely when Èpater les mullahs becomes the latest in art marketing ploys. When it comes to certain choice loci in the artworld’s geopolitical imaginary, institutions that never question the aggressive nonchalance of the local Kunstbetrieb are requesting the Uncompromising and the Subversive, preferably with a pinch of Women’s Rights. Please find a clever, sexy way to condemn your regime.

The recent interest in non-Western cultural commodities has spawned a demand for spokespersons, for ethnic exiles to pat on the back. So-and-so “bravely unveils” what the “fundamentalists” would never allow to be seen. Which is the sort of thing you say if you’ve never seen the gall of what is published and screened in Tehran.

A generous proportion of the Iranian internuncios indeed stem from the field of what you could broadly term “visual art”. This brings the advantage of a certain courtly finesse. But on the other hand, at least a delegate like Rezazadeh or Freddy Mercury (another Iranian exile) would spare us the dismal, quasi-critical manicheisms of a Shirin Neshat. Or the blushing subalterns of the phenomenally successful Iranian cinÈma d’auteur; women, children and Afghani refugees in bucolic settings, discretely rebelling against society and its traditions. Just enough to provoke reprobation, but never too rude or belligerent, so as not to alienate the audience back in Venice.

This variation of the dissident persona holds only smallest demands, for he or she is perfectly at home in the outback, even when familiar with the Metropolis. The leitmotif is broad and complex, and it would be unfair to say it caters only to paternalistic fantasies regarding Iran or thereabouts. At times it appears the motif generally goes well with any collectivity that nurtures a cult of being tragically misunderstood by the Outside.

This summer, we commemorated 100 years since the death of Johanna Spyri, whose “Heidis Lehr-und Wanderjahre” was one of the most popular novels ever published. In her struggle with her elders, Heidi also wins the hearts of an international audience charmed by her helplessness, and by its own deep feelings of solidarity, and reveling in its loathing for her oppressors.

And the bulk of her story was equally set in a scenery of splendid permanence, a mythical hinterland which had long become one of Euroamerica’s favored playgrounds for technophobic yearnings and other collective, semi-conscious reveries. Yet despite the extraordinary international success of the 1880’s, in Switzerland, the book was published only in 1918, years after Spyri’s death. This may go back to the same skepticism that presently leads Iranians to distinguish between cinemaye festival, and cinemaye irani, i.e. between ingratiatory export products and the trashy, rugged imagery that is marketed within the country. Be that as it may, it seems nowadays the Confederates are no longer uncomfortable with Heidi’s emblematic appeal, building highway restaurants and other monuments to her name. “Heidiland with its famous spa in Maienfeld, the home town of Heidi with the Heidi’s House,” says the official website.

Heidi never crosses the line between anger and rage, preferring the patient suffering of the civilized in the face of ignorance, the rÈduit to the intifada, something an overall genealogy of Swiss selfhood and self-marketing would presumably confirm. It so happens that, traditionally, the Persian pendant has been far more assertive, even unmistakably imperial in character, cinemaye festival notwithstanding.

Iran’s main tourist attraction is Persepolis, the onetime capital of a superpower widely considered “the cradle of Aryan civilization”. As many a package-deal tourist will tell you, the archaeological site remains an important cornerstone for patriotic myth and pop history. Some tourists find it odd that today’s capital Tehran should sport enormous murals of pathetic war martyrs in screaming heavy-metal blood-and-gore, so clearly different to the majestic arrogance of the etchings in Persepolis. But in a way the two are complementary. Triumphalism doesn’t disappear with the martyrdom of the Iran-Iraq war hero, but is redefined as a moral victory of a people enjoying 4000 years of “civilization” over an aggressor who is at best the military superior.

As Shahbazi has pointed out herself, the murals plays a certain role in her work, though she might be better off leaving the latter as open as possible. Outside Iran, to depart from a fundamental gulf between smothered masses and sinister superstructure, and accept a more hazy division between popular and official aesthetics, is to prompt charges of “opportunism”, as theatrical as they are depressing and uninspiring.

A century after Spyri’s death, another Swiss author with a similar knack for landscape exotica gains international attention. Tom Kummer lives and works in LA, from where he peddles standard Americana: the Nevada Desert, freeways, Baudrillard, the flight of reality, the LAPD. Occasionally, Kummer would sell interviews with Hollywood celebrities to the European press. These he made up himself. His interview with Ivana Trump consisted of Andy Warhol quotations. Back in Munich, it was an open secret that Kummer had never stopped being a novelist, and that he had no stake in journalism. But the day it all “came out”, and Kummer tried defending himself with time-honored postmodern formulae, he was drowned out by a scandalized public including his former associates, and their sudden, chest-thumping homages to the lofty ethos of press and radio.

The tragic tale of Tom Kummer will hardly persuade us to fictionalize in order to show the truth. Indeed, the moral of the story goes beyond the tired dilemma between the reality of fiction and vice versa, and draws our attention to the middleman himself. The latter is caught between what German-speakers call “vertreten” (speaking for someone or something) and “darstellen” (portrayal). Tellingly, in English, the term “representation” is used for both. The semantic slippage in English is hardly the root of the problem, but it does illustrate the broader misunderstanding behind the coquettish clamoring for international spokespersons. It appears that, compared to the reality-fiction problematic, the opposition between “metaphoric” Vertretung and “metonymic” Darstellung offers moral and epistemological challenges that are decidedly more interesting. It even prompts a reconsideration of the icons of postcolonial art in the light of Kummer’s Ivana.

After all this patter on Iranian art in an international context – including the occasional cross-reference to Switzerland, where Shahbazi lives and works – I have yet to address the issue of whether her work is anything you could remotely call “Iranian”. For even if she consciously draws on aesthetic traditions that are distinctly Irano-Persian, the references are too reluctant and discrete to allow for a discussion of Iranicities in terms of miniature painting, propaganda murals and other regionalisms.

Principally, Shahbazi’s deliberately antispectacular aesthetic doesn’t offer a votum that can be conveniently lauded or condemned in, say, the feuilleton pages of a German daily. Shahbazi is always infuriated when she herself is denied the suspension of judgment she accords the objects of her pictures.

Faced with the luxury of suspended judgment, particularly when the tone is vaguely cosmopolitan, people are quick to speak of ironic insouciance on behalf of the artist. Ironic distance is indeed a convincing method for allowing a stay of judgement, especially when the idea is to escape poverty tourism and other 3rd world pitfalls, be it in the sense of globalization as an adorable, simulacral swirl of plastic glitz, or in that of celebrating sheer urban chaos.

Both trends have recently been criticized as distinctly metropolitan forms of nostalgie de la boue, and may not be seemly comparisons when it comes to the artist at hand, even if, to be fair, Shahbazi is entirely free of neither. Philosophically speaking, in any case, irony is what you get when you acknowledge that the different parts do not add up to a coherent, stable whole. Which is indeed an idea to brood over, develop, and then gingerly apply to Shahbazi’s work, something I have refrained from doing in the above pages.

It’s a shame the natural sciences should have numerous terms for breeds and phenomena that are new and unclassifiable, while the rhetoric of art and culture does not (the taxonomic term “emergent”, for instance, is popular among botanists). Which is becoming more and more of a shame. Cases such as Iran, where half the population are minors, and two thirds live in cities which quadruple ever other decade or so, are becoming the rule. In Tehran, these and other immoderate developments have prompted academics to marvel over a still unparalleled, if painfully inconclusive “experiment”, aiming at nothing less than redefining the idea of a modern civil society.

The difficulty here is to represent movement, and hope it remain recognizable as such in a context that hasn’t faced fundamental transitions in a while.