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The Contemporary and Indian Contemporary Art: 21st Century
December 7, 2011
By Agastaya Tapha
Call it taking stock, reflection or retrospection, the basis is always mandated on distance. Criticality demands this distance. However, how does one create this distance from the contemporary? In terms of ‘historicizing’ the contemporary, there seems to be a rush to document, archive, record and register. Therefore, the establishment of an institution like the Asian Art Archive at the start of the 21st century (2000) with projects like Materials for the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990 (2000) has to be recognized as a foundational moment that carries with it many implications. It not only implies the sheer volume of art production in the region, but also the growing precedence of contemporary Asian Art at the global level. This in turn points to the close nexus between global prominence and art production. The assumed nexus could lead one to affirm rather confidently, and some way, reductively, that the early start to the 21st century has so far been good to Indian art. Skirting any debilitating open-ended debates and critical pogroms on the nature and quality of ‘good’, here it means visibility and the ascendancy of Indian art into a new dispensation, the ‘global.’ Indian art has entered the ‘global.’ Rather Indian art is now contemporary with the opening up of India to the forces of the global art world, be it in the way that some Indian artists have become successful international artists, in the sense of those who sell for large sums of money, or those whose works are collected by influential art museums and collectors. It can be said that Indian contemporary art has become part of the larger processes that structure the broader whole, of what is identified as the contemporary moment in art. Indian contemporary art has so far had to contend with representations at various biennales, triennales and art festivals across the globe, and in a more local register, with the inauguration of its own art fair, the India Art Summit in 2008. The anticipation of its own international biennale to be held in 2012 should also not be discounted. Indian contemporary art has therefore spawned a wide network of galleries, collectors and artist-initiatives and the excitability around it is being bolstered in the form of top Indian contemporary artist prizes, establishment of private museums and foundations of contemporary art and state-driven initiatives.
Much has been said about the contemporary and the vexed relationship it presents with art. In fact, the most cited reference on this issue has been the Questionnaire on “the contemporary”: 32 Responses formulated by the journal October regarding the confounding nature of contemporary art, in the theoretical elusiveness it presents and yet the overwhelming art-inflated frenzy that is driven by and on it. As summed up by the editor Hal Foster,
“The category of ‘contemporary art’ is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.”[1]
However, the paradox lies in the reality that the conceptual vacuum has given rise to a strident enterprise that has managed to institutionalize “contemporary art”, in the professorships and programs in the academic world and departments and institutions at the museums dedicated to the subject of ‘the contemporary’. The constitution of what Hal Foster calls the “apparent lightness of being” of the contemporary is also drawn from the verdant and cacophonic rushes of art fairs, biennales and such. It therefore becomes important to then pay heed to what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy considers significant to ‘the contemporary’ in art. Thus, In Philosophical Chronicles Nancy underlines the anxiety around the term ‘contemporary art’ as the intensification of the very processes that affirm the ‘contemporary’ in art.
“The season of festivals, biennials, and other art fairs and markets has revived here and there the furious quarrel ignited about twenty years ago around what we call, in a singular manner, contemporary art. The most manifest sense of this expression, “contemporary art” is to designate an art constantly in tune with its own debate, contemporary with its own questioning or its own suspension; in short, contemporary with this distancing from itself, with this intimate dissociation that one must have in order to experience oneself, in whatever domain, as the “contemporary” of something or someone.”[2]
He gauges the situation surrounding contemporary art as one that lacks sense, that “never ceases to make sense…. – at the very least the sense of this quarrel that furiously argues over its proper character in exclamations divided up among various voices: “This is art!” or “This is not art!” or “What actually is art?”[3]
In the abundance and multiplicity of processes, practices and signs that are offered by the contemporary, it seems that the art scene is indeed beset and riddled by questions and uncertainty about its very status. Then art in the contemporary is at a frontier, that at once propels as well as forestalls its culmination, thereby drawing it in a vortex of indeterminate meanings and significations. Contemporary art is then on a spin cycle mode that seems to churn every given component around an imperceptible centre. If at the macro-level it is to be believed that the forces of globalization have made borders and boundaries more permeable, then at a microcosmic level the world of art too seems to accommodate this porosity in the form of cross-cultural exchanges and cross-overs. Multiple forms of expressions culled from such a cultural platter can be seen to overwhelm and over determine as well as underrate the contemporary. However, Nancy wades through these complexities by identifying within the murky contemporary art waters, a hope for emancipation. This emancipation rests on precisely the frenzy of a bi-polar global art scene that is at once global and local, present and timeless, thus making it hard to straitjacket or dovetail the current art scene into a well-defined module. Nancy sees in the slippery terrain of the contemporary, the mounting of a resistance against conformity to a structure, or a ready system of meanings and interpretation. As the artists grapple with a world that is always in transit and new, they are no longer interested in making art as individuated agents distant from the experiences of the common world, art is brought closer to life. Nancy recognizes this as a moment of emancipation or a break from what has come to pass. Thus one can say that for Nancy, ‘the contemporary’ is laced with a desire for inclusion and acceptance, amidst the din and chaos of the heterogeneity presented by the new world.
All this points to the decentering of the modernity turf, that features prominently in the constitution of the contemporary, as perceived by the curator Okwui Enwezor in the term “postcolonial constellation” wherein “the current conditions of production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art” is hinged on “a complex geopolitical configuration that defines all systems of production and relations of exchange as a consequence of globalization after imperialism.”[4] Within the complexities of the contemporary, the rise of the Asian art scene can be seen as proof of the intensification of the “postcolonial constellation”, in that Asian artists since the 1980s and the 1990s have been part of the global contemporary, constantly contributing to the greater fund of transformations in art practice and infrastructure. John Clark in his work Modern Asian Art (1998) posits a correspondence between the emergence of distinctive Asian avant-garde movements and the socio-political exigencies.
These movements also seem to be informed by local concerns and external transferences as well as by socio-political upheavals like the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, liberalization of the Indian economy and the Reformasi in Indonesia. Along with the socio-political transformations within such “postcolonial constellations” which are of consequence to, as Enwezor puts it on “governmentality and institutionality, new domains of living and belonging as people and citizens, cultures and communities”,[5] there has been rapid economic growth and development across much of the region. The Asian economic boom in the last two decades has meant not only infrastructural extensions like support for the expansion of galleries and museums, the organization of biennales and art fairs, but on a personal level, the emergence of influential collectors for the arts; this, combined with extensive development in communication technology and the widening of the cultural net with the flow of artists and visual vocabulary across borders,[6]has contributed to making Asian contemporary art visible, global and international. Therefore, overall, the slippages of location, identity and contexts along the fault lines of the looming globalization terrain, has not only contributed to the perpetuation of the contemporary as a diverse and dispersed cultural commissary, but the participation of Asian contemporary art in this milieu, has translated into widespread institutional and market recognition for a number of Asian artists.
This can be taken as an affirmative stance not only in the sense of art production and language, but one that can have palpable consequences for the centre-periphery model of art dissemination, that puts the West as the centre of a heliocentric module from where the peripheries derive and model their modernism. Thus, one can posit that such a restitution of the contemporary within the de-centering discourse also fits into what is in academic fashion today, the debates around the multiplicity of modernity itself. Modernity as a widely-dispersed phenomenon was soundly discussed by cultural theorist Kobena Mercer in a series of books edited by her, Annotating Art’s Histories (2005-2008) where comparative approaches to the question of multiple modernisms and their mapping in the larger context of the politics and aesthetics of cultural difference were presented.
The question of modernity in the Indian context, is one that is profoundly vexed and idiomatically fissured. Modernity in India has always been subjected to contend with that which constitutes ‘the traditional’. Modernity in Indian art is seen to be predicated on what art historian Gayatri Sinha contends as, “India’s eager embrace of technology, the democratic and imaginative use of the photograph, and an alliance with international modernities” which all feed back into the conscious creation of an Indian idiom somewhere between the “street and studio, tradition and contemporary media, ideology and practices.”[7] If one were to focus on the recent “retrospective” show of Indian modernism hosted at the inauguration of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) branch at Bangalore in 2009, titled Signposts of the Times…from the collection of the NGMA, where around five hundred works from the art collection at NGMA, New Delhi were unveiled for the viewers, there was in that endeavour an attempt to encapsulate as well as insulate Indian modernity. The NGMA Bangalore website proudly states that the exhibition traces the trajectory of Indian art from the 18th century to the 21st century, wherefrom one can chart modernism that developed in Indian art as different from the West-inflected one, and in a postcolonial recovery, a modernism that developed on its own terms. The NGMA website propagates a version of Indian modernism that is closely tied to the project of the Indian nation-state. However, what needs to be addressed besides this, is the fact that Indian modernity has always been saddled with a doppelganger. The doppelganger of tradition and what constitutes the traditional is never off modernity’s vision-point. The exhibition Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/ Tensions (1996-1997) mounted and presented by Asia Society showed works from five countries: India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand. As the title suggests, the exhibition was an attempt to underline the relation between tradition and modernity, the old and the new and the ways the Asian artists mediate between them in an increasingly globalized world.
Thus, one way of getting around this issue is that it is not only modernity that has to be questioned, but it is the very criterion of “tradition” that has to be brought to the questioning pit. If one can ask “When was Modernism?” then one might as well propose “What is Tradition?” In India, Tradition is associated with an authentic and innate version of Indianness in India. In fact, the art historian, John Clark estimates that the debate on the opposition between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ dates back to the 1890s in India.[8] Tradition in fact becomes a problematic term especially when it becomes ‘traditional’. As Clark states “anything that might be termed ‘traditional’, is an invention whose ideological motivation must be questioned, as it is supposed to describe objects, rituals and values from the past that a “self-defining” group wishes to owe allegiance to and align itself with.[9] In terms of artworks, the traditional is “interrogated” to produce new variations and formal interventions, while at the ideational level, the traditional is mined to make explicit the “underlying aesthetic or religious viewpoint.”[10]
This tradition-inflected modernity can be understood in terms of Clark’s neotraditionalism and as such the tradition of neotraditional paintings came to a head with anti-colonial sentiments pervading the Indian colony, articulated through movements like Swadeshi in the 1900s in Bengal. The Bengal School as instituted by the artist Abanindranath Tagore articulated such nationalistic fervor in the 1900s via an orientalist discourse around the question of the “authentic” in Indian art, or rather insistence on tradition. In fact, one can postulate that the postcolonial formations hold forth an experience of modernity that is percepted through the axes of tradition and colonial vestiges. Concurrently in the very positioning of the avant-garde in Indian art, the complexities of modernism are explored. The avant-garde position in Indian art is recognized by art historian Partha Mitter in the moment of modernist art’s inception in India in 1922 when the first exhibition of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists was held in Calcutta, which then facilitated the use of modernist language in art by artists such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, the earliest forbearers of modernist art in India. These artists claimed solidarity with the Western avant-garde critics of urban industrial capitalism, leading them to valorize the rural as a site of the nation and resistance against the colonial power which also lead them as Mitter puts it “to engage for the first time with global aesthetic issues.”[11]
Investigation points to the fact that the modern moment in Indian art was seemingly fraught, with what Yashodhara Dalmia termed the ambivalent intent, as the art institutions that were established by the British in the mid-19th century mainly disseminated neo-classical art with the intention of bolstering the craft-making tradition of the natives.[12] Such a mix and match of the modern and the traditional resulted in the creation of an Indian native artist Raja Ravi Varma of Travancore in the 19th century, who formed part of ‘aristocratic art history’ in the social matrix. Varma’s work also provided an impetus to popular images and picture -making via lithographic studios, mostly established by graduates of art institutions like the Calcutta Art Studio in the 1880s. These studios specialized in making a wide range of prints from landscapes to religious imagery in the hybrid sensibilities of the realist western mode, and the vernacular image-making idiom. If the tradition-inflected realist mode that Raja Ravi Varma popularized in the 19th century forms one strain of Indian art history, then the other strain that Geeta Kapur identifies from the sociological praxis of the nineteenth century, is the mode that came from the middle-class landed gentry not unlike the Tagores. The Tagores were progressive and widely immersed themselves with what was considered to be ‘folk’. They exercised what Kapur (2000) terms a “pastoral nostalgia” that brought to bear within the larger framework of Indian nationalism, a certain language of art that married the folk with innovation. This project as identified by Kapur (2000) held a definitive democratic urge that translated, in the case of Rabindranath Tagore, into the creation of a pedagogical space, Santiniketan, from the 1920s, wherein successive artists like Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij furthered this vision.
Kapur (2000) extends the trajectory of Indian modern art from Santiniketan (and its manifestation of the subaltern) as part of the tripartite compositional strategy along with the artisanal basis of Gandhian ideology and craft aesthetic, heralded by A.K. Coomaraswamy, in the formation of the nationalist culture, that adheres to the idea of tradition. Extending this artistic interlude of the first half of the twentieth century into the art practices of artists like K.G. Subramanyan, whose reworking of tradition was said to be in the form of self-conscious modernist mediations.[13] The folk, as a repository of tradition, and its entanglements with modernity formed tracts for a populist modernism mediated by -Jamini Roy in the 1930s, the metropolitan interactions as evidenced in the works of Indo-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil and the collective modernist mediations in the 1940s and 1950s in the various cosmopolitan centres( like Delhi with the Delhi Silpi Chakra, Calcutta with the Calcutta Group, Bombay with the Progressive Artists’ Group and Madras with the Progressive Painters’ Association).[14]
The trajectory of Indian modernist art saw the rise of the national/modern aesthetic in the 1950s which had special affinity to the socio-political status of the Indian nation as a new formation in the post-1947 phase wherein artists like M.F. Husain, K.C.S. Paniker, Satish Gujral and Paritosh Sen articulated the modern vision of the nation to the people in the modernist lexicon. The 1960s saw the formation of the narrative-figural mode of artistic address that was instituted as a response to the Progressive Artists’ Group’s modernist interventions in the 1950s , that was seen to draw too uncritically the Western modernist lexicon. Spearheading this campaign was the Group 1890 which was formed in Baroda, Gujarat by Gulammohammad Sheikh and eleven other artists including J. Swaminathan, Jeram Patel and Jyoti Bhatt. This artistic intervention extended into the 1970s with the emergence of Baroda as a central node of contemporary Indian art especially around the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, where the linkages between art practice and theory were forged in a milieu that sought to ground itself in a narrative language for the articulation of personal and contemporary history.
Thus, by the 1970s there were perceptible transformations and shifts in the Indian art scene as artists began exploring intimate realities and their local environments, that were expressed in a reinvigorated narrative art set-up. It was in the 1980s that a move towards ‘the international’ was mapped on the Indian art scene with events like the Festivals of India at London, Paris and in the United States and the Place for People (Bombay and New Delhi, 1981) show. The Place for People (1981) exhibitions were an initiative undertaken by artists like Gulammohammad Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Jogen Chowdhury, Sudhir Patwardhan and art critic Geeta Kapur where questions of location and modernism, whether in the narratives of personal histories like the ones explored by Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammad Sheikh, or in the preoccupation with the proletarian or the subaltern as seen in Sudhir Patwardhan’s depiction of mechanics and autorickshaw drivers, were staged as a stance against what was seen as the uncritical adoption of the West-inflected modernist idiom by artists that went before them.
The 1980s were also significant to the Western discourse on modernism as two landmark exhibitions, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern put together by the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 and Magiciens de la Ferre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989 brought forth the vexed issues of location and modernism.
The 1990s saw the emergence of a new dimension in Indian art as the country moved towards greater liberalization and free market economy. Greater mobility, exposure and access to the global art scene made possible unbridled experimentations, pluralistic and multiculturalist borrowings and in a sense artistic play, as a wide range of themes, contexts and modes began to be explored.
The new conditions of being in the twentieth first century, with rapid technological advancements and larger viability of communication networks , that is presaged on the overarching frame of globalization has made Indian art more syncretic and cross-cultural. Indian art is now contemporary in the 21st century, not only in terms of temporal registers of ‘presentness’, but also in terms of inhabiting, working within and extending the modules of what constitutes the contemporary in art. Therefore, multiple contexts, themes, modes, practice, are investigated and accommodated by the contemporary in Indian art. Installations, earth-works, conceptual, performance and video art are deployed to inform and address issues ranging from multiculturalism, hybridity, fragmentation, pluralism, technology, gender and sexuality, fetish, new sensibilities, history, quotations and authenticity, personal and political identity, location and such. Also, ‘the contemporary’ means another level of engagement with tradition, as in the case of Pushpamala N.’s photo-performance works from the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000-2004) series where she takes on one form of tradition bequeathed by Raja Ravi Varma in the 19th century. As she deftly recasts herself as Raja Ravi Varma’s iconic Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth in the Hindu pantheon) which became literally the face of the goddess (as print technology of the 19th century made possible the widest dissemination of the image), she manages to doubly inscribe her work with tradition. If Raja Ravi Varma had reconfigured tradition by casting myths in a Western realist mode in the 19th century, then Pushpamala’s citation in the 21st century achieves a double reinscription as she takes on not only mythical representation, but brings to attention questions of tradition, modernity and Indian art history.
In the case of Shilpa Gupta, her works carry contemporary footprints not only in the way she deploys technology to contextualize the present, but also in their engagement with themes and issues that are pertinent to the current situation. Questions of location via the local/global binary are explored in Subodh Gupta’s steel sculptural complexes and installations that involve everyday life objects like steel lotas (pots) being cast as markers of location and identity in a rapidly globalized world that engenders the vision of a homogeneous and unified whole. Therefore, stylistic and contextual breaks and reconfigurations become part of the contemporary complex as evidenced in the works of artists like Sudarshan Shetty, Jitish Kallat, Nalini Malani, Anita Dube, Mithu Sen, Bharti Kher, N.S. Harsha, Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas Komu, Surendran Nair, L.N. Tallur, Sakshi Gupta, Raqs Media Collective and others.
In a capsule, the contemporary is no longer seen as a teleological extension of Euro-American modernity, it incorporates diversity and multiplicity from across the globe. However, the emancipatory potential that the multi-focal, pluralistic, cross-cultural and ungraspable contemporary engenders, also harbours within it anxieties around definition, boundary, limit, authority and legitimacy. The discomfort with the contemporary as it stands buffered and feted by the forces of globalization, not only recasts the same issues of local-global, centre-periphery or export-import in art in an updated and more nuanced inflection, but also proliferates a rather vexed discourse. Thus, the contemporary is accommodated or mediated through devices like elaborate investigations, postcolonial paranoia and convoluted discourse productions or through active co-operation. If on the one hand, there is a profound sense of ecstasy and optimism about the shifts that have occurred in the broadening of the global aesthetic corpus and the inclusion of the Asian contemporary within it, there also seems to be much anxiety around this frenzy, (if one were to look at the spate of archival and documentation work that is being effected around the contemporary), so much so, that Nam June Paik’s prophecy notwithstanding, the future it seems is being overrun by the now.
Agastaya Thapa
October 2011
Bibliography
- Wallace, Miranda, ed. 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery, 2010.
- Sinha, Gayatri, ed. Indian Art: An Overview. New Delhi: Rupa, 2003.
- Sinha, Gayatri, ed. Art and Visual Culture in India. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009.
- Nancy, Jean- Luc. Philosophical Chronicles. Translated by Franson Manjali. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
- Enwezor, Okwui , ed. The Postcolonial Constellation in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008.
- Sambrani, Chaitanya. Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005.
- Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.
- Clark, John. Modern Asian Art. Sydney: Craftsmen House, 1998.
- Mitter, Partha .The Triumph of Indian Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde (1922-1947). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Dalmia ,Yashodhara ,ed. Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002
[1] Hal Foster, Questionnaire on “the contemporary”: 32 Responses, October 130 (2009): 3
[2] Jean Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles translated by Franson Manjali (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 59
[3] Ibid, 61.
[4] Okwui Enwezor, The Postcolonial Constellation in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008) 208.
[5] Ibid, 208.
[6] Russell Storer, More than Half the World: Asian and Pacific Artists in the 21st Century in 21st Century: Art in the First Decade edited by Miranda Wallace (Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery, 2010) 34.
[7] Gayatri Sinha, introduction to Art and Visual Culture in India, ed. Gayatri Sinha (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009) 22.
[8] John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsmen House, 1998) 71.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, 73.
[11] Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Indian Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde (1922-1947), (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007) 10.
[12] Yashodhara Dalmia, introduction to Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, ed. Yashodhara Dalmia (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002) 1.
[13] Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000)271.
[14] Ibid. 272.
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