In appreciation of what is radically novel and innovative in Mitra Tabrizian’s most recent work must begin with on understanding of what her previous work had already accomplished: for the latter provides the creative platform on which the work stands. Powered by her deep involvement in the debates in the ’80s and ’90s around subjectivity and ideology, psychoanalysis and feminism, gender, race and sexuality, and deeply informed by the explorations in photographic practice and the image which her earlier projects represented; Mitra Tabrizian has now vigorously mobilized and resumed all the ‘lessons’ of that whole body of work in order to address radically new subject matter and to attempt a challenging project – a critique of the everyday life of contemporary corporate-post-modernity and its ‘systems’ of representation.

Tabrizian’s involvement at the cutting edge of theoretical argument, which makes her work highly distinctive, is no additional or external ‘add-on’ to her visual practice. These arguments and ideas are integral to and have been fully absorbed into, her creative practice. Freud on the narcissistic and fetishistic roots of ‘scopophilia’ – the pleasure in looking, Lacan on ‘the mirror phase’, Laura Mulvey on the gendering of ‘the look’, in College of Fashion; Foucault on the constitution and regulation of ‘the subject’, in Governmentality, on the construction of the feminine through the codes and the ‘world’ of advertising; Catherine Clement, Isabelle de Courtivron, Julia Kristeva, Joan Riviere on ‘woman as masquerade’ – in the femme fatale/film noir ‘sequences’ in Correct Distance; Homi Bhabba on fetishism and disavowal in the racial stereotype, Derrida on difference, women and the black man as ‘Other’, in the narrative sequences of The Blues; Foucault, again, on the panoptic gaze of power, in that compelling, single, stereoscopic image of Khomeini’s Islamic cultural revolution and Iranian women staged as part of the spectacle of power, in Surveillance. This original body of work represents a deep and sustained engagement with ideas – with the contemporary social and political world reviewed through the subjective optic and what we may call a post-structuralist visual imaginary. The images function here, not as ‘illustrations’ or supports of already constituted concepts, but as ‘visual concept spaces’ in which ideas are worked through and ‘realised’ in a series of scenic tableaux or mise-en-scene, expanded and developed in another register – a kind of ‘thinking with/in the image’. In the new work, Lyotard and Baudrillard’s ambivalent and doom laden prophecies about the disappearance of meaning in a world of simulation provide the conceptual poles around which much of the new work circles.

This is a good example of how ‘the conceptual’ functions for Tabrizian’s work: as stimulus and challenge rather than as a constraining box. The question of whether Baudrillard is ‘right’ or not is not what is at issue here. This is a different kind of ‘work’. One can use the decline of mass politics and political participation, neutralizing of criticism, the weakness of popular resistance and the ebbing of the tide of democratic politics in the so-called ‘new world order’, without swallowing whole the strategic exaggerations of Baudrillard’s Silent Majority. One can explore visually the radical insight that the modern global economy is also (and necessarily), an ‘economy of signs’. And that the boundaries between ‘the real’ and the ‘hyper-real’ are blurring, in a media-saturated age, without falling hook, line and sinker for the proposition that reality has been wholly subsumed into ‘the sign’. One can appreciate the way contemporary politics has been thoroughly ‘mediatized’, and the logic of the simulacrum substituting for the ‘worldliness’ of the world, without subscribing to the risible – and ultimately irresponsible – idea that the Gulf War was nothing but a media event.

On the other hand, Baudrillard’s argument that when the logic of the basic axioms of the systems which increasingly govern the post-modern, corporate, ‘global’ economy are pushed to their extreme limits, they go into reverse gear, “with unpredictable and chaotic results”, beautifully encapsulates the effect on us spectators of those uncanny ‘mishappenings’ in the scenarios of, say, Beyond The Limits. The high gloss, elegant couture, glamorous settings, the hi-tech gleam, the signs everywhere of refined consumerism, money and corporate style, draw us in. This is the familiar world of exclusive advertising, corporate promotions, PR and marketing, where commodity speaks to commodity. Are these images, we wonder, not in danger of falling into the trap of what the critics call ‘the fallacy of imitative form’ – becoming, in effect, instances of very thing they are critiquing? In fact, the spectatorial ‘distances’ are, as always in Tabrizian’s work, superbly calculated and judged. Only a tiny, often almost unnoticeable, detail here and there – the size and position of the sheep (Nature as pure simulation); the bloody human organ being transmitted ‘down the line’ in a glass jar by the executives (the all-encompassing power and ‘neutrality’ of modern technology); or the hole in the head of the father lunching with his sons (the fine line between suicide and early retirement) – alerts us to the point where the otherwise self-confirming, self-sustaining onedimensional ‘logic’ of late capitalism has gone into serious default mode. Something here has, not so much ‘gone wrong’ as ‘gone only too right!’ A world without affect, an emotionally hollow, ‘indifferent’ universe, which – lacking any critical distance on itself, subjective inside or constitutive outside – has gone beyond its limits. “The crime becomes perfect when no-one notices”. The images, which comprise the projects, are indeed ‘fictive visual spaces’. There is evidence everywhere of a photographic practice inscribed by ‘the cinematic’ (she is, of course, in other manifestations, a fine film-maker); they are exquisitely ‘staged‘ – triumphs of mise-enscene. But they are also, in another, more psycho-analytic sense, ‘scenes’, in which the unconscious forces of fantasy and desire, violence and difference, obeying an alternative ‘logic’ or ‘dream-work‘ of their own, emerge into the surface of the image and freely play. These images operate as beautifully condensed narratives.

In Silent Majority, the narrative is fused into a single image of the morning crowd, hurrying out of the underground station, which yawns behind them like the mouth to Hades and scurrying to work in the great glass business canyon of Canary Wharf. Where the figures in Minimal Utopia are lifeless and without movement, the working crowd in Silent Majority is full of ‘movement’. Well dressed in a casual way, well-fed, they are not your oppressed urban office-proletariat nor ‘the crowd that flowed over London Bridge… up the hill and down King William Street’ in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. But they are represented as wholly without political agency. Quite how this is communicated in something of a mystery. It has something to do with the way the great metal arc of modern brutalist urban architecture encloses them decisively into its frame, cutting the crowd off from the light, air and open sky.

It is sometimes asked whether the political as a source of creativity in the visual arts is dead in the age of silent majorities, urban dystopias and post-modern closure. Few seem to have the ambition any longer even to try. Allan Sekula’s series on life aboard the enormous, ocean-going tankers which are the life-line of the global oil trade, is one of the few attempts successfully to find a metaphor, outside the language of the documentary image, for the new, deregulated global consumerist economy which has emerged since the ’70s. In this context, Mitra Tabrizian’s work is a bold, ambitious, innovative, singular and courageous attempt to break the silence about the directions in which the contemporary post-modern corporate world is going. And to find a new language, informed by the exploration in visual practice and theoretical argument of the last two decades, in which a wide ranging, visually challenging critique of contemporary life can be mounted.