The Ascension of Sultan Mohammad and Its Derivation in Three Contemporary Iranian Paintings with Genette’s Hypertextuality Approach

A review of the history of the art of painting is a sign of artists' attention to other pre-existing artworks, adaptation, inspiration, or copying them. This is done for a variety of reasons, most of which can be mentioned as methods of teaching and experiencing and/or criticism and interpretation. Being Inspired by other works of art – especially traditional painting – Iranian contemporary artists are still creating modern works, that can play a significant role in bonding the contemporary art to Iran’s traditional art and transmitting the ancestors’ contents, experiences, and artistic traditions. A number of works of Iranian contemporary painters, that are painted based on a single painting will be studied and analyzed in this paper. The key question is that “how the process of incorporation from other works is being performed and what the procedure is”. It also seeks to answer the following question that “what the relation is between the image of Prophet’s ascension by Sultan Mohammad and the works created inspired by it”.
To this end and through using this method, Genette’s hypertextuality and the typology of these relationships will be used in order to study, describe, and analyze a part of Iran’s contemporary art, and to decode its features it is concluded that hypertextuality has had a long practice in Persian painting, although it has not been documented and theoretically discussed. The research method is descriptive-analytical and it has been conducted by gathering information through documentary sources and library studies on the topic of intertextuality and hypertextuality as well as direct observation of the works. The research method of this article is descriptive based on the intertextual approach of Gerard Genette. In the 1960s, it was Julia Kristeva who used "Intertextuality" for the first time, indicating the possibility of relation between different texts. Thereafter, Gerard Genette expanded the study domain of Kristeva, and called relation between a text with other texts or different from its own as "transtextuality" and subdivided this type into five categories where intertextuality was only one type. Other categories were called "arcitextuality", "paratextuality", "metatextuality" and "hypertextuality", each with their own subcategories. Of all these categories, intertextuality and hypertextuality study the relationship between two artistic texts, whereas transtextuality is the study of the relation of a text to the related hypertext. On the other hand, paratextuality probes into the relation of a text to other connected or separated texts. Metatextuality investigates the analytical relation of a text with respect to another one, and arcitextuality deals with the relation between a text and a text of its kind. This article deals with only one type of Genette’s transtextuality, i.e. hypertextuality, and will attempt to survey the potentiality of this notion in terms of studying the history of illustrations in Iran, and then will make a critical analysis of Persian paintings based on the hypertextual approach. The hypertextual relationship explores the relationship between two texts; the existence of the second text depends on the first text. On this basis, the original text and the preceding one is called the "hypotext" and the later and the new text the "hypertext". Genette divides the transactional relationship into two types of the same (imitation) and metamorphism (the variation of the original). According to this, after introducing Genette’s hypertextuality and the typology of these relationships, three works by Iranian contemporary painters (Iraj Eskandari –Abdolmajid Ghdiriyan and Abdolmajid Hosseinirad) that are created through inspiration from the image of Prophet’s ascension by Sultan Mohammad, the significant painter of the Tabriz school, will be studied and analyzed in the second part. While pointing to textual relationships, implications, distinctions and commonalities, sometimes necessarily, the contextual reasons of these differences will be taken into account, so that through a systematic study, we could get to know a part of the identity of Iran’s contemporary art. Eventually, it is concluded that using indigenous and traditional hypotexts, not only does not restrain artists’ creativity, but also, while providing an indigenous and comprehensible statement, proliferates some kind of aesthetic identity, and of course, it will be accompanied with critiques and updates.