Memorial Urban Art as an Aesthetic Experience in the City ‒ An Aesthetical Reading of War Murals in Tehran’s Urban Landscape

Abstract

Abstract In the city of Tehran, a series of war-themed murals, often focused on strengthening the audience’s historical memory, stand out among all types of urban art. These works of art, which are generated by the government’s order and created by different state institutions, all carry political and ideological dimensions. They are considered a source of environmental qualitative assessment and recognised as a kind of ‘urban aestheticisation’; in other words, it is a process leading to the production of value according to the ‘John Dewey’ theory. Knowing that the war artworks contain a major political dimension and are mainly created by the order of the ruling governments to ‘strengthen the audience’s historical memory’, an added quality is inevitably integrated, which in the aesthetic domain is commonly known as kitsch: taking advantage of people’s standard associations and confirming them by employing proven stereotypes and clichés, as Ortlieb and Carbon (2019b) wrote. The urban landscape as an exhibition platform is therefore important as it is the context of social events and daily life that affects the audience’s perception. John Dewey defines this perception as an aesthetic experience which takes place in the field of empirical aesthetics and begins by explaining why specific objects give pleasure or displeasure. These explanations will later be integrated into a set of principles which, in turn, will join a global system of analysis, such as Fechner’s aesthetic valuations. The aesthetic experience of war urban artworks is analysed from the observation that in the creation of these works in Tehran, the government, as the sponsor, focuses on the use of the aesthetic qualities of the kitsch. The article then presents the reading of this aesthetic experience through the analysis of a selection of works, based on evaluation criteria and indicators. The interpretation of this experience is to discover the ‘quiddity’ of the evolutions which have occurred in these works from the beginning of the war until today. The following statement highlights one of the most notable results of the research: the weakening of the art position, from a promotional state that improves the urban landscape quality, into a way of showing government’s positioning concerning the paradigms of the country.