Treffer: Jālī: "Poetry in Stone;" a Figure of Partial Seeing; a Code for Reflection.

Jālī : "poetry in stone;" a figure of partial seeing; a code for reflection. Etymologically bivalent, jālī derived from Sanskrit is both net and net-work, embroidery and the thing embroidered. From Arabic via Persian, jāʿlī is a fabrication, a forgery, the counterfeit. I use this figure of the jālī to consider the translatability/untranslatability of the category of the aesthetic more generally. In the expansionist model of the global modern, like replicates like. The jālī indexes a series of different organizing principles for "the beautiful"—perforation, partiality, pattern, and repetition. It also suggests beauty at a remove—not the jālī itself but the web of light it creates. In contrast to clarity, transparency, and revelation—the realism of the modern nude in the Western tradition for example, reflective of in nuda veritas (the naked truth), here the most delicate, refined, indeed aesthetic quality of an object/artwork would be both its partiality and its translucency. The jālī as a figure for the aesthetic also contains within it the vexed category of the spiritual and mystical (to mystify, and transitively, to obscure), and the problem of occlusion, evasion, deceit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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