Parviz Tanavoli is one of the most prominent Iranian sculptor artists and one of the founders of the Saqqakhaneh movement. He is the creator of many works of art inside and outside Iran, especially in the field of sculpture, which the study of these works reveals his preoccupation with traditional Iran. This study intends to provide an interdisciplinary reading of Parviz Tanavoli’s volumes with the psychological approach of Charles Mauron and to identify the hidden and unstudied layers of his works and, more importantly, to recognize his “personal myth”.
His works, as a leading and creative artist, should have been criticized psychologically. Psychocritique is based on the knowledge of psychology and the basic principles of this knowledge and among the various streams of psychology, it is the most follower of Freudianism. Accordingly, it emphasizes on individual and personal unconscious pronouns. One of the most important figures of psychological criticism is Charles Mauron, who, as one of the founders of psychocritique criticism, identifies and introduces four stages for the study of art and literary works. The first step is to identify imaginary image networks: by collecting and studying all of the works of an artist, the formal networks of that artist are identified. At this stage, the critic seeks to identify the common elements of an artist’s works and extract their repetitive forms into research. The second step is to identify dramatic situations: networks of imaginary images lead the critic to some still images in the artist’s work. Images that manifest themselves in different forms and in different texts. The third step is to identify the author’s “personal myth”: by putting together these still images, the face of a large, hidden image that sometimes manifests itself is formed, which is the artist’s “personal myth.” In order to determine the personal mythology of each artist, one must refer to the mythology of the artist’s own culture, and from the set of myths in each artist’s culture, it is merely one of his personal mythology. The last step is to assess the authenticity of the “personal myth” with the study of the artist’s biography: Finally, to be more confident about the result of the criticism, the results obtained from the previous stages are matched with the artist’s biography. Mauron means more of his professional life than the artist’s life. My subscription chapter is social and I am creative and I am unaware that any artist in a professional life can be scouted, not in his personal life.
With this approach in this paper, the question is, what effect does the artist’s mentality have on the dominant choice and content of his works? Is the artist directed towards his inner and unconscious consciousness with personal awareness? To answer these questions, the first part of the article first examines Charles Mauron’s psychometric approach and the four stages of his theory that lead to the discovery of the artist’s personal myth. In the second part of the article, using Mauron’s four steps, Tanavoli sculptures are reviewed step by step in order to achieve his personal myth.
The present study is an interdisciplinary study and has used the “case study” method to analyze and understand the data. Case study is one of the most common qualitative research methods and has been conducted using documentary and library studies. Since the works of Tanavoli are very numerous and scattered in museums and public and private collections; Therefore, the authors’ priority has been to select works from books written by the artist himself. However, according to the theoretical framework of the research, all the works of the artist should be studied; But this was practically not possible due to the myriad and scattered statistical population of Tanavoli works. On the other hand, according to the second step of theoretical foundations, the critic seeks to find common metaphors of the artist’s works, so the authors have chosen repetitive themes and elements from among the diverse and numerous works of the artist; After collecting and filing the information, they organized the data to answer the research question.
In addition to retrieving Tanavoli’s personal myth, this reading reveals the possibility of better understanding the works and the artist’s hidden view of the world around him and the unconscious pronoun affecting the creation of his works, an unconscious that indicates the artist’s belonging and inner searches to the indigenous and national roots, as well as the depth of the artist’s inner conversation with himself.