Art Paper/ International Education

Rusik Patel

Instructor Name

Art 101

20 November 2019

My Visit to a Museum

Art is the expression of a diverse range of human beings. It is in the form of auditory, visual or performing pieces that convey a certain idea based on the technical skills of the artist. It has three branches of art which are architecture, sculpturing, and painting, the latter being the most popular. Most analysts also include the medium of music, dance and motion pictures to the mix as well. It was during my visit to the Guggenheim Museum in New York that I discovered that modern art includes photography as well as literature and interactive media. It is also known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting due to an expansive collection of early modern and contemporary art.

The Ghost of Muhammad Bin Qasim by Bani Abidi

Bani Abidi is an artist born in the metropolitan city of Karachi, Pakistan. She has taken part in more than eighty group exhibitions and conducted twelve solo exhibitions of her artworks. Her photograph called The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim is currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York CITATION Ban19 \l 1033 (Abidi). This piece of art is among the long series of South-Asian political satire that Abidi is famous for in the art circles. It depicts a young man called Yusof Masih, how changed his name to Yusof Khan after his conversion to Islam. According to the display, he now rides around Karachi in a typical Arab warrior’s attire “believing himself to be Muhammad Bin Qasim”, a young Umayyad general who conquered the present province of Sindh in Pakistan.

There are political meanings to this piece of art. First, it is meant to discuss the proliferation of Arabic culture in the Indian culture of the subcontinent. In the 1980s, during the dictatorship of General Zia Ul Haq, many parents were very fascinated by the Arab culture and encouraged their children to pose in the Arabian "keffiyeh" a pseudo-Arabic person. This piece of art challenges the significance of all the national monuments of Pakistan, like the National Mausoleum of Mohammed Ali Jinnah called Mazar-e-Quaid. The description next to the photograph tells a tale of confusion of national identities.

Vanish by Pierre Alechinsky

Pierre Alechinsky was born in Belgium. He is currently living and working in France. In 1949, he formed his art group called “Cobra”, which most displayed its pieces of Art in Paris, the capital of France. It was during his first exhibition in 1954 that he became interested in Oriental Calligraphy. We can see his bend towards Japanese calligraphy all his life. The forms of abstract and concrete art are seeing merging in his work “Vanish” CITATION Pie19 \l 1033 (Alechinsky). It depicts the arrival and vanishing of the female figure in the middle of the painting. This growing shape of the female form merges into the canvas that has been roughly painted by a thick white-colored paint with a patchwork of blue lines.

This work shows several meanings as it is a piece of abstract art. First, it can be seen that all the female forms merging in the center of the canvas, showing that in essence, we are all the same. Second, it can also be seen as the journey of a person in search of fulfillment, which is often incomplete as depicted by the huge white gap in the center of the frame. Both of these explanations make sense as Pierre had a huge bend towards Japanese Calligraphy and therefore it can be assumed that he painted “Vanish” under the influence of Japanese philosophy as calligraphy is an integral part of it.

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abidi, Bani. The Ghost of Muhammed Bin Qasim. Guggenheim Museum, New York. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/31318.

Alechinsky, Pierre. Vanish, Oil on Canvas. Guggenheim Museum, New York. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/205.