Creative Masturbation: On Body, Gender and the Process of Making Art

If Marcel Duchamp’s amorphic, abstract and abnormal work of art, Paysage fautif, made entirely out of the artist’s semen, intended to poke fun at art, Nasser Teymourpour’s “creative masturbation” has the claim of being art through the denial of the ego. 

Walking into the Fitzrovia Gallery in London, the visitor is confronted with a topless female in an absurd red attire wrapped around her loins and passed between the legs. Further down, text formed by the artist’s mustache hangs from the wall. Next to that is another artwork patterned by the artist’s own semen. Further into the room, there is a “soft” installation — a sculpture using cloth, foam rubber, plastic, paper, polystyrene beads and fibers — that visitors can disfigure at will. There are photographs and paintings, one in the shape and material of a Calais refugee camp. 

Iranian-British artist Nasser Teymourpour's first solo exhibition in London stems from his own philosophy of art and his love/hate relationship with his own culture. His artworks revolve around and question the notion of the body and emphasize the actual process of making art. His zur-ḵāna (“house of strength” or "house of power") collection depicts nude women taking part in a very masculine traditional sport, even though women are barred from attending the zur-ḵāna, the traditional gymnasium of urban Persia and adjacent lands. To put it in a western context, one can imagine a bare-breasted lady in a medieval knight suit. The practice and ritual of zur-ḵāna  is somehow similar to that of chivalric code.  

Some of Teymourpour’s works mark the moment when the female body is no longer a mere biological proposition and is fundamentally transformed into a site of conflict between the male dominant culture and the female counter-culture. It is a moment when the female body is metamorphosed into a metaphor in order for a woman to claim her legitimacy. 

At the same time, much of the artist's work is about the actual process of creating and forming art, including his popular zur-ḵāna collection, which has attracted the attention of a number of collectors. They greet us with a thousand delicate dots and pale flesh tone colors to remind us of the enduring democratic will of (Iranian) women against the theocratic fixed institutions of state.

Although the utilization of text and body fluid in art is no way novel, Extremism, a piece made out of the artist’s urine, is more than just the outpouring of piss. The artist went on hunger strike in solidarity with fighters in Kobane and as a protest against ISIS extremism for a week. Using his urine — which had changed in color because of the hunger strike — he imprinted his staunch stance against extremism on paper in two languages, Persian and English, to illustrate his repulsion to extremism, be it under the rubric of Islam or Western democracy. 

Nasser Teymourpour's debut exhibition reflects the artist’s own theses on art: He is not obsessed with formal novelty and at the same time not obsessed with the body. His minimalist approach toward material makes a gesture of being an environmentalist, and as opposed to “culture industry”. Though his art is heavily influenced by Iranian culture and his immigration from Iran, he avoids being a "self-Orientalist." His art is gradually making its way into universal art in the Badiouian sense — that is, “something like being against the abstraction of money and of power.”

Curated by Monica Colussi, the House of Power exhibition is on until July 14 at Fitzrovia Gallery, London. Admission is free.