After more than a decade of living in America, if someone were to ask me what exactly America is like, I wouldn’t have an answer except to pause and say, "Wow, that's a tough question."

When you distance yourself from something, you get a chance to see it better. Being close blinds you. You become its servant. You become just like it. Repetition, repetition, and repetition. That’s exactly what the United States does. It repeats you until you forget yourself.

Andy Warhol has a work called Campbell's Soup Cans, a collection of thirty-two paintings of canned soup in red and white, each measuring approximately forty by fifty centimeters. Soups with different flavors: Cabbage Cheddar Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup, Vegetable Soup, Onion Soup, Pea Soup, Scotch Broth Soup, Meat and Vegetable Soup, Bean Soup, Cheddar Cheese Soup, Rice and Tomato Soup, Beef Soup, Asparagus Soup, Turkish Noodle Soup, Beef Broth Soup, Chicken Gumbo Soup, Turkey and Vegetables Soup, Chili Beef Soup, and Vegetable and Bean Soup. Repetition soup and repeat and repeat.

By exhibiting works by Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, there was an opportunity for me to become enthusiastic and want to know more about it. Years of living in New York, the old capital of Warhol’s empire, gave me the opportunity to visit him much sooner and easier. I could have seen what exactly that famous "Factory" in Midtown Manhattan looked like, what has happened to it, or whether there is now a place to show his works: colored paintings, headshots of famous people, and a picture of the canned soup, etc. But why didn't I go to him earlier?

Andy Warhol was born during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, when there was nothing but unemployment and hunger to show. But slowly everything changed. He grew up, went to school, and learned painting in the arms of his immigrant mother, while America returned victorious from the war. With the defeat of Germany and Japan and the beginning of the healing of war-torn Europe, the United States' economy bloomed day by day and got the opportunity to glitter as the pioneer. Andy Warhol was raised by such an America. An America where the desire for wealth, fame, lust, and beauty reached its peak. The America of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. The America of automobiles, color TV, and Coca-Cola. The Dreamy America.

There is something unforgettable about Andy Warhol's soup paintings. Repetition. Warhol was inspired from his own personal life for this collection. Twenty years of repetitive lunch. This repetition is the only American art of the fifties and sixties. The soup cans depicted by Warhol are not even carefully rendered or entirely done by hand. Most of what we see is what can be seen on the shelves of a chain store. The industrial method of printing and preparing the works, silkscreen printing, shows the mechanicality and artificiality of what is interpreted as art. When Warhol said, "I want to be a machine," it was an irony to what America had made of him, or perhaps a confession of what he liked to be. It has been more than sixty years since Warhol finished his paintings, and I ask myself today: what exactly is the difference between America in those days and the America I have lived in?

Andy Warhol traveled to Iran in the last years before the Islamic Revolution with the invitation of the Iranian representative in the United Nations, Fereydoun Hoveyda, to draw the portrait of the king and queen. In his travels, quoting from his companion and (later) his biographer, Bob Colacello, he said, “Iran surprised me. I never thought it would be so free and modern. Most of the time we stayed at the hotel and ordered caviar at a very cheap price. And in the streets and bazaars, we rarely saw a woman wearing a veil.” Warhol traveled to Iran at a time when everything is flourishing on one hand and collapsing on the other. In the period when Iran is experiencing the beginning of consumerism. However, it is so short and fleeting that everything remains as an imported and packaged product until a few decades later it becomes a short display of several works by a Western avant-garde artist on the walls of a museum.

At the time when the Western pop art movement was dominated by artists such as Warhol, Liechtenstein, and Rosenquist, in Iran, it was Parviz Tanavoli, Hossein Zandehroudi, and Faramarz Pilaram who pioneered a similar movement, a modern-traditional stream or a spiritual pop art, called "Saqqakhaneh". A movement well inspired by Iranian popular culture and national religious beliefs, it became the cornerstone set for the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. When the pop art movement in America was trying to show what there was, Saqakhaneh was trying to save everything that was to remain. I do not know how successful it was, but we still praise Warhol in Iran. Why? ‌ Perhaps more than the appeal of his art, we see it as another invitation to watch the American dream. Another delusion injected from beyond the waters that says to us, “Watch me. I am a distant dream.”

The America of 2020 is still a matter of repetition. A society that, even for me, an immigrant, creates a bubble that the world is exactly where you are and not somewhere else. The illusion that there is more than you can imagine from whatever you like. Consume untroubled. A bubble that bursts for me only on a few weeks trip to Iran when it reminds me of what I have distanced myself from. Andy Warhol was just a passenger on his trip to Iran, and I am an immigrant in my long stay in America. Andy Warhol's works were exhibited, seen, and remembered in Iran. And I will never be seen here. I stay and drown in the red and white soups I consume every day on my dining table. Cabbage Cheddar Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup, Vegetable Soup… When we frame something and nail it to the wall, we are saying, “Look. Look carefully. This might be your truth.” I do not think that the truth of Warhol’s Soup is as comprehensible to an American on his own land as it is to an Iranian citizen. Warhol’s art in America is only on the high walls of its museums; in homes, it is just a simple occurrence, a part of life. Invisible and impalpable. The time when the red and white soups take on a new shape every day, they become tastier and more luscious.

If someone asks me to write something about a painting filled with the American Dream on the walls of a museum across the waters, what would I say? There is nothing except to answer without hesitation, “This is exactly what I am living.”

spring 2021

This is an excerpt from the book published in Farsi/English, Tehran, 2021