‘to do’ and ‘to be’:

To become an artist, one doesn’t necessarily have to go to an art school, in fact the untrained artists work with purer, more raw and more authentic creative impulses, driven by passion alone. Nevertheless, there is the confidence and validation you gain from holding a degree that proclaims you an artist, but does art need that testimony? Iqbal Geoffrey certainly doesn’t. To come across a noncommercial self-taught artist, particularly in Pakistan, who hasn’t had any formal art training, is a rare encounter. Traditionally such neuve innovators are located ‘outside’ the periphery of the art-circle but unlike other outsider artists, Geoffrey enjoys a great deal of appreciation and remuneration from the western art world, if not at home, and is recognized as an unparalleled phenomenon in the modern art world by British and American art critics. Though, his work is not entirely uninfluenced by artistic norms.

Geoffrey, a lawyer by profession as well as an artist, is quite a unique character, whose off-canvas activities are perhaps far more interesting than his on-canvas performance. Famous for suing people left and right and burning his finalized pieces without ever exhibiting them, to name only two examples of his uncompromising nature.

Punctuated with question marks, his antics and his work, both, are acts of rejection; of traditional ideas about beautiful and appropriate, of institutional framework within which art is received and by which it is mediated, of conventional distinctions regarding what is and is not art, of accepted views about art and artists, of sanctity of genre conventions, of boundaries, of logic, of viewers’ expectations, of authorities and hierarchies, of definite meaning, of. . . . This total destruction of ideas that have any discipline, both intellectually and physically resembles the Dadaist sensibility, which naturally makes him an artistic rebel. His vision of art, both affirms and denies Art simultaneously, in a provocative yet playful manner and poses the question; “What is art?” without necessarily attempting to answer it.

Geoffrey, an avid collector of objects and mass media imagery, uses these trivial details from his everyday life and transforms these ordinary things into private possessions, into precious memorials, into surviving traces, into witnesses, that don’t particularly reveal anything extraordinary yet tell stories about their maker/collector. Or perhaps these non-original popular images represent ‘no-thing’, perhaps they are the essence of ‘no-thing-ness’, just as a white on white painting, from his exhibition, reads ‘Emptiness’. Perhaps questioning; the meaninglessness of modern existence, or the need for meaning in Art, or what it means to empty content out of painting. This simultaneous presence and absence (or presence through absence) depicting both nothingness and limitlessness, is an exciting union of opposites that is either producing a new kind of meaning or obliterating the need for meaning altogether.

His obscure landscapes pieced together with objects/images, freed from their original context and reassembled within anomalous compositions, represent the fragmented nature of the contemporary culture, or perhaps it demonstrates that they can never be truly freed from their original context. In one moment the very banality of the everyday qualifies as Art, while in the next moment this assortment of visuals is rendered insignificant, useless or dysfunctional, asking the viewer to shift back and forth between just looking and experiencing or understanding the process of interpretation. But for most part it draws the viewer’s attention towards the playful undecided process of making rather than the subject of the work. In this union of simplicity and ambiguity, these surrealist assemblages have more of a psychoanalytic rather than aesthetic function, redefining the concepts of authorship and ownership and (following the footsteps of Duchamp, who is said to have been an admirer of Geoffrey’s) re-contextualizing existing "readymade" objects/images as Art, bypassing literal perceptions, breaking narrative expectations, surprising the viewers and asking them to fill in the gaps.

What is most remarkable is his ability to speak his heart with a rather shameless confidence, when narrating the self. The gallery space, adorned with buntings arranged from wall to wall, reading ‘I am a fan of Iqbal Geoffrey and so was Leonardo da Vinci’ together with the paintings, drawings and collages (some dating as far back as the 60s), is an exhibition of unapologetic (masturbatory) narcissism, the kind that perhaps politicians practice during election campaigns, that is sort of like a self conscious performance. Richard Avedon in an essay ‘borrowed dogs’ has expanded on this link between performance and self-portraiture, expressing that autobiographical tellings, such as self-portraiture, are ‘extreme stylized behaviors complete with theatrical conventions while performing in a very self-conscious way -filled with flattery and lies, yet truthful - lies about who they were and truths about who they wanted to be’. Employing this performative nature of autobiography Geoffrey performs a portrait of himself that is preoccupied with questions of identity; art’s, artists’ and his own (and the blurring distinctions between the three). Ironically masked with innocence and laced with tongue in cheek humor, there is a dismissal of seriousness in the work yet a severity coupled with self-righteousness towards it aswell.

But whether this self-proclaimed fame refers to the ephemerality of fame in this age of information or if it is an inquiry into artistic empowerment or if it questions the myths about the artistic genius or if it suggests that the contemporary artist no longer has to make anything, he has become his own myth or if these are simply evidences of his awesomeness, in them, one can distinguish a man who believes in what he does. Such unquestionable belief that is beyond doubt doesn’t even need to be verified (even a lie told often enough becomes the truth). Isn’t this what all Art demands; a certain sense of unquestionable belief, devotion and submission.