Connections/Better Broken

My name is Navina Haidar and my job is that of a curator in the Islamic department.

We live in a world, as art historians, of half-completed things or damaged objects, but I had never articulated to myself

that in fact there were times quite often that I preferred the objects that way. We always long for the complete object or the final, perfect condition of an object, but

when I actually just took a step back and said, objects can be wonderful when they're fragmentary and intense and exciting and

evocative and stimulating because of the fact that they're not complete or they're broken or they're abbreviated in some form.

So it's a journey into a world of fragments, but one that I think leaves a lot of room for the imagination, for the inner eye to fill in that space. The idea first came to me when our department acquired

the elephant drawing. The artist didn't complete the drawing and the paper underwent some kind of trauma. The result is that you see the face and the foreparts of the elephant emerging from almost a mist, and it allows you to focus on the wonderful, loving study of the elephant's profile, and everything else fades away and sort of intensifies that elephant's face.

You sometimes get very amusing effects and that really comes across with this appealing drawing of an Indian nobleman who is seated upon

an invisible chair as he reads a book.

This very well-known series from Mughal India is actually known as The Burned Edge Series. I think it's better broken because what you're really looking at here is the scene of the passing of a great emperor and his three widows grieving next to him. And the intensification of emotion takes place very effectively, because the burn and the irregular shape of the page gives a sort of highlight to the atmosphere of the scene.

One of my favorite objects in the museum is that Egyptian sculpture of a high ranking general. It has a very dramatically diagonal break, and it makes you really appreciate the incredible polish and the articulation of the surface, so much

more when you see it in contrast against the grainy interior of that stone.

The other thing I found is that you always think of men of war or noble figures often wearing a strap or something across their body in a diagonal. I mean, there is that psychological association with that kind of a line.

And the fact that there's nothing there but you have the sense of a diagonal going across the body, to me accentuates the regal bearing of the figure.

This Torso of a Bodhisattva, the fact that it's missing so many elements actually to me makes it very close to the original ideas of Buddhism, the feeling that the icon really doesn't matter. It's what the icon symbolizes, it's the Way that's revealed to you through these human aids of beautiful sculpture. But that the deity itself, the icon itself, is just a symbol of something that's profoundly without form.

When an object is completed, it carries often with it a whole cultural context. It bears

an emperor's identity, or a craftsman's finished signature

or a function, and those become intrinsically part of the finished work of art. However, when works of art are

broken, they quite often lose that context and essentially take us right back to the much more basic human quality of

an act of creation, the hand of an artist, a universal impulse in people to create things in a certain way.

And just that essential closeness and stripping away of most of the other contexts and

taking us right back to the very heart of the

creative moment is one of the things that is often revealed when the object is broken.