[spectre] ZOOM! Art in Contemporary India

[Inke Arns]

[This comes somewhat late, but is interesting nevertheless! The ZOOM! 
show opened on 6th April, at the Culturgest Museum, Lisbon, and will 
go on till June 6. Greetings, Inke]


------- Forwarded message follows -------

> From: Nancy Adajania <nancyadajania7171 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: ZOOM! Art in Contemporary India 
> Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 08:00:08 +0100 (BST)
> -----
> 
> ZOOM! Art in Contemporary India 
> 
> This exhibition project is meant to zoom into contemporary 
> Indian art practices, the vibrant postmodernisms that it 
> embodies and the alternative modernities that it represents.
> 
> It is not intended as a national survey or an
> ethnographic exercise. Indeed, it actively questions
> the assumption of the nation-state as the necessary
> framework for the understanding of contemporary Indian
> art: instead, it foregrounds the recent developments
> that have led to a strong intertwining of the local
> and the global, as India's post-colonial trajectory
> has been crucially re-shaped by the processes of
> globalisation. 
> 
> Thus, the older model of romantic nationalism, with
> its emphasis on indigenism and national identity, is
> no longer a meaningful strategy of interpretation.
> Rather, Indian artists today operate from, a complex
> understanding of their lifeworld. Their art reflects a
> closely and rapidly networked world, and is given
> specific (and also project-specific) forms. Their
> subjects range from territoriality, ethnic violence,
> genocide and global labour distribution to new-age
> religiosity, ecological degradation, urban subcultures
> and mass culture. Their media range from painting,
> sculpture, computer graphics and assemblage, to
> performance, inter-media installation, the public-art
> platform and cyberspace.
> 
> The self-consistent post-colonial cultural formation
> is now breaking up into fragments, each developing a
> new tendency – the whole cannot be subsumed easily
> into some rationalisation or theory. 
> 
> The metaphor of the zoomed-in-detail, whether of
> body-parts or abstract cityscapes emphasises the rich
> ambiguities of viewing: sometimes the nearer you get,
> the further you seem to be. But stay with the ZOOM!
> 
> Co-curated by Luis Serpa and Nancy Adajania
> 
> **************************************
> EXTRACT FROM THE CURATORIAL ESSAY : Bifocal Vision:
> The Near and The Far In Contemporary Indian Art by 
> Nancy Adajania
> 
> 1. Curious Animals
>  
> Even as late as fifteen years ago, the idea of a
> contemporary Indian art aroused supercilious amusement
> among European and American curators: Did such a
> curious animal exist? If it did, what could it do that
> was more ‘contemporary’ than anything in Western art?
> On the other hand, how could it be more ‘Indian’ than
> India’s traditional crafts? Contemporary Indian
> artists had to navigate through the narrow passage
> between the twin demons of derivativeness and
> tradition. This absurd situation has now changed
> dramatically. First, Indian art practice has become
> radically transformed in its choice of media, themes
> and exhibition situations, during the last decade.
> Secondly, the global artworld has undergone a change
> in the same period: the dominant model of ‘centre
> versus periphery’ has been phased out, as people,
> ideas and artworks have begun to travel with greater
> ease. In this new world, where nuanced conceptions of
> otherness are affirmed rather than dismissed, Indian
> artists show in new contexts and interact with new
> audiences. Often, they choose not to show their works
> in India, for reasons of infrastructural availability
> and also because their networks of communication and
> community are international rather than local. Today,
> Indian artists negotiate the near and the far, local
> and global, as optional frames of reference, not
> static binary limitations. (1)
> 
> But this broad picture of improved conditions requires
> closer examination: Does heightened visibility on the
> international art scene automatically translate as
> readability? I fear not. For the contexts from which
> contemporary Indian art emerges, or those which it
> resists, are not always fully comprehended by
> international curators and global audiences. Our art
> still tends to be viewed from a disguised 19th century
> framework of ethnography, modulated through what I
> would call the syndromes of typicality and topicality.
> The former implies the belief that a particular
> person, idiom or form is representative of the
> totality of its society or history; the latter
> indicates the preference for privileging an artwork
> simply because it addresses the most crucial trends in
> its society at the moment of viewing. At best, these
> syndromes can support an uncritical visual
> anthropology; at worst, they reinforce the exhausted
> stereotypes of cultural incomprehension. When Indian
> artists are read through such a limiting framework,
> they are robbed of agency, of their ability to
> transcend the constraints of location and history.    
>       
> 
> There are further temptations. When subjected to the
> global viewing syndromes of typicality and topicality,
> artists from postcolonial locations such as India may
> be tempted to represent their own situation in a
> language that represents the politics of locality in a
> generic and recognisable way (Globalisation, Urban
> Conflict, Ethnic Strife), rather than in specific and
> unfamiliar ways (caste mobilisation, regional
> imbalances, genderisation of space) – so as not to tax
> international viewers with detail. But it is precisely
> the detail that rescues the politics of every locale
> from the blurring and neutralisation that
> generalisation produces. As a corollary, postcolonial
> artists may be tempted to assimilate themselves into
> the generic language of global art, picking it up from
> the blockbuster biennales and triennales at which they
> now regularly exhibit. Thus, there is always the risk
> of turning the fruitful play of near and far into a
> fruitless exchange of generalisations.
> 
> The objective of my argument, therefore, is to
> liberate Indian artists from the mutually exclusive
> conditions of near and far, and to show how they deal
> with these conditions from a newly achieved position
> of agency. This is why I have adopted the metaphor of
> bifocal vision, which carries the nuance of that
> agency, with which artists can adjust their focal
> length, to negotiate the space of potentiality between
> these extremes. The emphasis on negotiation is
> important, also, so as to preclude the fashionable
> notion that postcolonial artists are the products of a
> facile globalism in which the world has no boundaries.
> The boundaries remain; what has changed is the ability
> of former ‘Third World’ denizens to traverse them.
> 
> *
> 
> The artists showing at Lisbon’s Culturgest Museum
> represent diverse positions of art-making. I
> deliberately use the term ‘position’, rather than
> ‘identity’: although identity is a useful counter in
> resistance struggles, it becomes variously
> essentialised and naturalised, preventing further
> exploration. While an identity fixes itself, by
> definition, a position can change to suit the
> situation, since it implies a stance taken up in
> relation to available dispositions of one’s location,
> and the strategic possibilities of the operational
> context. A position thus forms a far more valuable
> basis for resistance.
> 
> The exhibition includes artists with a fine-arts
> background who make identifiable art objects such as
> paintings and sculptures, as well as practitioners who
> are below the line of social visibility in the Indian
> artworld: artists of crafts background, or
> photojournalists on assignment, who turn their
> professional briefs into personal projects. While some
> artists position themselves squarely within the
> gallery system, others work on long-term collaborative
> projects outside the gallery, working with colleagues
> in a shantytown or rural area. The bifocal vision of
> the title also refers to the possible experience of
> European viewers responding to such a show: here, they
> will see art practices that appear ‘familiar’ (the
> near) because they are relatively more ‘international’
> in their approach (those of Jitish Kallat or Sudarshan
> Shetty, for instance) – but also other art practices
> that seem ‘strange’ (the far), because these have been
> developed in response to contexts and with instruments
> that are more localised (the Cyber Mohalla Project or
> Shantibai’s sculptures, for example).
> 
> My aim is not to quantify a wide range of practices (I
> abhor the ‘we-have-it-all’ type of curatorial
> marketing). Rather, I propose to hint at slippages, at
> art practices that fall below the threshold of
> gallery-fixated art discourse in the Indian context,
> at the power asymmetries addressed  through struggle
> within collaborative projects (and which escape the
> exhausted art-historical schema of art versus non-art,
> when displayed in the gallery context). When faced
> with such practices, viewers in Indian art circles
> raise voices of doubt: Is this art or social work, art
> or craft? Through my choice of artworks, I attempt to
> problematise the idea that all these works come from a
> single coherent artworld. It would be pointless,
> therefore, for the European viewer to look for a
> common language that ties together the variegated art
> on display. As is evident, no such common language
> exists, not even in the Indian artworld.
> 
> 
> 2. The Thematics of Legibility  
> 
> During the last decade, Indian artists have borne
> witness to a post-colonial state that has lost its
> utopian promise of modernity and participatory
> democracy. This period has been marked by the
> consolidation of State power by Hindu majoritarian
> forces, their accomplishment of nuclear-weapon state
> status for India, and their discrimination against the
> Muslim minority. Such policies have perpetuated a
> catastrophic cycle of unrest, repression, terrorist
> subversion and State violence. As a result, the broad
> citizenry is alienated from the political process and
> has lost faith in the nation as a site of belonging.  
> 
> 
> In such a volatile context, the mantle of
> ‘artist-citizen’ seems inevitable for painters such as
> Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat. But Dodiya and Kallat
> do not accept this as an accomplished position;
> rather, their works emphasise the hyphenated
> relationship between artist and citizen, treating it
> as a constantly dilemmatic position, maintained in the
> space between steadfast political duty on the one hand
> and restless improvisation on the other. Is this a
> self-contradiction? Not if we shift the frame, by
> recourse to etymology. As Joseph Campbell observes,
> citing Johan Huizinga, “the Dutch and German words for
> ‘duty’, Plicht and Pflicht, are related etymologically
> to our English ‘play’, the words being derived from a
> common root. English ‘pledge’, too, is of this
> context, as well as the verb ‘plight’, meaning ‘to put
> under a pledge, to engage’.” (2)
> 
> Kallat and Dodiya renew their pledge, along with their
> fellow citizens, through play – as Campbell puts it:
> “pledging in play and then playing out the pledge”.
> Kallat indulges in serious play by painting
> disenfranchised citizens threatened by forced
> migrations and planned pogroms as figures who double
> as ghost-images or disintegrate like weak television
> signals. Kallat’s pledged play operates in different
> registers: he moves from prisoners wrapped in
> disquieting melodrama, in Humiliation Tax, to
> tongue-in-cheekiness in Hydraulic Press, where he
> deflates spectacular militarism by Photoshopping a
> newspaper photograph that shows India’s Deputy Prime
> Minster Advani (of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata
> Party) urging people to fight a fourth war with
> Pakistan. By a simple geometrical rotation, Kallat
> transforms a macho gesture into a comic-strip joke:
> the turning curve reduces Advani’s mock-heroic figure
> and words to pixellated gibberish. Having achieved
> this bloodless artistic coup, the artist creates a
> mausoleum for the departed nation in Public Notice:
> here, he offers us, on warped acrylic mirrors, the
> charred text of Nehru’s famous speech, Tryst with
> Destiny, delivered on the eve of India’s independence.
> (3)
> 
> Kallat’s act could be a funerary rite for the nation’s
> hopes, but also a catharsis by fire: the letters are
> charred, but do not die. Viewers see their own
> reflections in the distorted mirrors, become part of
> the narrative, treat the script with renewed
> attention.
> 
> *
> 
> Dodiya’s current paintings are not marked by the
> intense grotesquerie of his earlier works, where he
> conducted a post-mortem of the idea of the nation. In
> this suite, Antler Anthology, the artist plays an
> editor-scribe collecting poems in Gujarati, his mother
> tongue: poems about self-reflexivity, the ghosts of
> creation and self-doubt. (4) Dodiya’s dilemma was to
> reflect on the State of Gujarat without making obvious
> references to pogroms and displacement by big dams
> (these have been the major socio-political crises
> afflicting the region in recent times). He performs a
> political act, not by choosing overtly political
> poems, but by drawing the viewer’s attention to the
> Gujarati text, signalling a cultural ideal of beauty,
> as against the violence articulated daily in the
> media. The poems are punctuated by images of birds,
> animals and plants from varied traditions, which serve
> as omens here: the Mughal painter Mansur’s patient
> vultures, the dying camel from Abanindranath Tagore’s
> Journey’s End, a stunned giraffe by the Georgian
> artist Nikos Pirosmani, and healing Ayurvedic herbs.
> 
> Amidst these, Portuguese viewers will be surprised to
> find an image that Dodiya has borrowed from Durer’s
> ink drawing, The Rhinoceros (1515). The sultan of
> Gujarat, Muzaffar II, had presented this animal to the
> governor of Portuguese India, who in turn, sent it to
> King Manuel I. (5) Dodiya models his portrayal on
> Durer’s rhino, as an exotic species,
> elephant-contoured, covered with a carapace. Dodiya’s
> rhino is thus a sophisticated semiotic manoeuvre, a
> trope of amazement when confronted by the strange.
> Through this cheeky import-export of a rhino that is
> never actually shown except as a fantasy, Dodiya
> achieves two aims. First, he points at the constant
> portrayal of the Orient as an undefinable monster; and
> second, by transmitting this image, enveloped in his
> own painting, to Lisbon, he hints at the risks of
> intercultural communication, demonstrating how an
> image can hide, not show, a distant reality. Just
> because you see an image, it does not mean there is a
> reality behind it that you can hold. There will always
> be approximations and imaginary conversations between
> the near and the far, the artwork and the viewer….
> 
> (EXTRACT. FULL VERSION AVAILABLE IN THE CATALOGUE
> PUBLISHED ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF THE SHOW) 
> 
> **************************************

------- End of forwarded message -------

Inke Arns
http://www.v2.nl/~arns