Siah Armajani

Charity Auction, USA, 1992
Private Collection, USA (acquired directly from the above in 1992)
Sale: Clarke Auction, Fine Art, Jewelry, Modern Design, Asian, 20 March 2016, lot 57
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Tehran, Ab/Anbar, Mass Individualism: A Form of Multitude, April 2016 

Condition: This work is in good condition. All of the elements are well intact. There are various scattered soft scuffs and a few minor dents to the wood elements. There are some minor nicks to the edges of the Plexiglas windows. There is light surface soiling and a few minor accretions noted. Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is accurate but fail to convey the convex and three-dimensionality of the work.
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Sotheby's is delighted to offer at auction a rare work by American/Iranian artist Siah Armajani. Siah Armajani was born in Iran in 1939 and moved to the United States in 1960 to attend Macalester College in Minnesota. Upon graduation, Armajani settled in Minnesota, where he still resides. Armajani advanced into an American artist of a kind we rarely find anymore: one steeped in America’s pro-democracy literary and philosophical traditions. Much of his work has taken the form of sculptural monuments, some realized on an architectural scale. Since the 1960s he has become one of the leading figures in commissioned art for public spaces, which came to fruition in the early seventies as a response to the utopian cities that were imagined during the years pre and post-World War II. The artist himself theoretically contributed to this public art movement with his manifesto, Public Sculpture in the context of American democracy (1968-1978 and revised in 1993). His work fuses perspectives, resources and solutions from different fields such as architecture, town planning, engineering and carpentry. The common theme in all his projects is construction and a search for a real convergence between function and communication. Armajani is known for his sculptural bridges, a perfect example is the present work Bridge with Three Chairs: A Poem by Wallace Stevens.  Since the 1960s he explored various forms of bridges, while at the same time inviting elements of poetry-tying the importance of bridges to the Bauhaus notions of usefulness as a beautiful metaphor for connecting people, places, and the community. Armajani is influenced by his extensive readings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who describes the bridge as a phenomenological gathering of object and idea, of “earth and sky, divinities and mortals.” For Armajani, the bridge expands beyond the notion of passage (movement from one place to another) to engage with perception (physical, temporal and spatial), cultivating civicmindedness (developing creative, cultural, and useful sculptural works for a social community), and finding meaning in language, literary and visual. In their idealized individuality, Armajani’s bridges are sculptures for the public. Armajani argues that artistic creation is more than just a vehicle for personal expression and considers public art as civic art. He aims for and insists on the use of sculpture for the service of an urban experience, like a sculpture embedded in community life, while stressing its social function and anti-monumental character.

The art critic Nancy Princethal notes that Armajani’s work and artistic consciousness are "deeply inspired by the democratic ideals of early American thinkers like Jefferson and Paine,” not to mention the theoretical work of John Dewey, especially when his series of lectures Art as Experience from 1931 are taken into consideration. In all these cases, Armajani bases his belief in self-determination and mutual responsibility. Armajani’s most celebrated public art works are bridges, walkways, and gardens, including the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Armajani’s words: “I am interested in the nobility of usefulness. My intention is to build open, available, useful, common, public gathering places-places that are neighbourly.”

Now grapes are plush upon the vines.
A soldier walks before my door.

The hives are heavy with the combs.
Before, before, before my door.

And seraphs cluster on the domes,
And saints are brilliant in fresh cloaks.

Before, before, before my door.
The shadows lessen on the walls.

The bareness of the house returns.
An acid sunlight fills the halls.

Before, before. Blood smears the oaks.
A soldier stalks before my door.

Wallace Stevens, Contrary Theses from The Collected Poems, 1954.