by Rahul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 at 15:56
At the dawn of the nineties when Contemporaty Indian Art (CIA) was born, there was a clear feeling inside some sections of us, that a new era was being ushered in. Early breezes of neo-liberalism were blowing across the sub continent. The USSR had freshly collapsed, Tiananmen Square was still fresh. The Rao-Manmohan era opened up consumption horizons for us and we kicked the moralist skeleton of Neheruvian socialism like Europe had kicked Catholic morality in the 18th century. Parallel to this global trends, Indian urban thought itself found its calling in the writings of ‘new thinkers’ like Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak.
Led by Geeta Kapur, Rummana Hussain, Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundarm a few artists and art critics in began envisage a distinctive position in international contemporary art. Armed with the power of post-colonial thought, questioning of the western modernist ideas such as formalism (which ruled Indian art academies ). Much of this newness was made possible by the confidence of working in a society that has recently emerged from beneath the shadow of a western power, and now has ready to be noticed (and packaged.) It is this combine of neoliberal utopia and post colonial identities is what we thought will be the soul of the post modern in India.
Two decades have passed since then. Rapid privatization, sharp urbanization, deterioration of communal relationships and the (out) burst of the internet seem to be the macro characteristics of this period. In terms of art history, the shift has been largely understood to have been mediatic. Installations, video, performance combined to build an aura of a new media and along which came a claim that the old media (painting and sculpture) was replaced the new in an historically linear way, almost like the (his)story of Science replacing god. On the side of this triumphant march of mediatic change, a few other shifts have also taken place. The formalism of the modernist days was replaced by the thematic and the political. Apart for the long standing tradition of Sudhir Patawardhan, by and large traditional Marxism also disappeared form this new artistic thought. The new concerns were more engendered, personal, and regional…voicing the desires and anxieties of this new wave. From all these menagerie of trends, what stood out, and made a huge impact on the future generation of art making has been feminist engagement with body, sexuality, labour and love and craft.
The shift in many ways was also stylistic. With meaning being increasingly associated medium and content, style became almost a non word in art history. Paradoxically, even as dominant narratives declared the death of old media, the newly booming economy created a huge demand for paintings. How does one paint or sculpt when the word style has lost its meaning? We soon entered a decade (2000s) where in artists were not distinguished by how they paint, but with what they paint. In the age of new media, a new style emerged in painting….the digital style. This new style was driven by the iconic image and a digital print like finish. Many art historians see the iconic exhibition ‘Places for People’ (1981) as the cornerstone for post modernism in India (Bhupen Khakhar, Sudhir Patawardhan, Nalini Malini, Jogen Chowdhury, Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur) . The exhibition opened new imaginations around narrativity and politics in art. though this new narrativity becomes the keystone for new media art, painting as such quickly deserted the narrative and moved towards the ‘iconic’. (The narrative vs iconic divide is though discredited, yet I bring it back here as a strategic assumption). Of course there were some beautiful exceptions in the works of artists like Atul Dodiya, Jyoti Basu, NS Harsha, Mithu Sen…the ‘digital finish’ and the iconic image dominated the pictoral tradition of the high post modern in India (or the post Bhupen painting tradition).
Broadly this has been the accepted narrative for post modernism visual art practices in India.
There were always scratches and fissures in this narrative. Some of them raw…almost like wounds; however this narrative has been so treasured and protected from its contradictions, that anything that troubled its’ shinny surface was dismissed as obsolete, noise…or simply dirt. Even as the art was claiming to be more democratic, personal, political, fragmented and contemporary, the language which was adopted in art making and writing, made art more elitist, urban and dystopic . As more and more public art is happening in India, the ‘public’ feels more and more distanced from the art object. Large crowds in art fairs are frowned upon in the fear that the discerning collector will get disturbed. More importantly we see a clear a clear rupture, the international language of Contemporary Indian Art seems unable to hear, or talk to the large number of artists who have not, or have refused to catch up to this change in language. Strangely even though these very artists are considered to be residual or obsolete, it is with their art that the larger numbers of art viewing audience seem to connect. Naturally, in order to protect its’ self, CIA has dismissed this situation as reflective of taste and viewing traditions caught up in old middle classism. This (not so conscious) self positioning as avant-garde, is still the biggest crisis visual arts is facing today. Is it yet time to acknowledge that instead of being a friend, the post modern is the post colonial’s biggest enemy?
As neo liberal India gets caught up in conflict resistances across the country, with our cities being increasingly viewed as colonial capitals consuming the produces stolen from the heartland, how do we react? Maybe it’s the nature of this reaction that will decide the course of art making and viewing in this country.
(I have left photography out of this attempted narrative as it has its own directions, though increasingly one does see overlays between history of photography and history of art, but bringing it into this narrative just serve as another attempt to co-opt photography within the framework of visual arts)
Led by Geeta Kapur, Rummana Hussain, Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundarm a few artists and art critics in began envisage a distinctive position in international contemporary art. Armed with the power of post-colonial thought, questioning of the western modernist ideas such as formalism (which ruled Indian art academies ). Much of this newness was made possible by the confidence of working in a society that has recently emerged from beneath the shadow of a western power, and now has ready to be noticed (and packaged.) It is this combine of neoliberal utopia and post colonial identities is what we thought will be the soul of the post modern in India.
Two decades have passed since then. Rapid privatization, sharp urbanization, deterioration of communal relationships and the (out) burst of the internet seem to be the macro characteristics of this period. In terms of art history, the shift has been largely understood to have been mediatic. Installations, video, performance combined to build an aura of a new media and along which came a claim that the old media (painting and sculpture) was replaced the new in an historically linear way, almost like the (his)story of Science replacing god. On the side of this triumphant march of mediatic change, a few other shifts have also taken place. The formalism of the modernist days was replaced by the thematic and the political. Apart for the long standing tradition of Sudhir Patawardhan, by and large traditional Marxism also disappeared form this new artistic thought. The new concerns were more engendered, personal, and regional…voicing the desires and anxieties of this new wave. From all these menagerie of trends, what stood out, and made a huge impact on the future generation of art making has been feminist engagement with body, sexuality, labour and love and craft.
The shift in many ways was also stylistic. With meaning being increasingly associated medium and content, style became almost a non word in art history. Paradoxically, even as dominant narratives declared the death of old media, the newly booming economy created a huge demand for paintings. How does one paint or sculpt when the word style has lost its meaning? We soon entered a decade (2000s) where in artists were not distinguished by how they paint, but with what they paint. In the age of new media, a new style emerged in painting….the digital style. This new style was driven by the iconic image and a digital print like finish. Many art historians see the iconic exhibition ‘Places for People’ (1981) as the cornerstone for post modernism in India (Bhupen Khakhar, Sudhir Patawardhan, Nalini Malini, Jogen Chowdhury, Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur) . The exhibition opened new imaginations around narrativity and politics in art. though this new narrativity becomes the keystone for new media art, painting as such quickly deserted the narrative and moved towards the ‘iconic’. (The narrative vs iconic divide is though discredited, yet I bring it back here as a strategic assumption). Of course there were some beautiful exceptions in the works of artists like Atul Dodiya, Jyoti Basu, NS Harsha, Mithu Sen…the ‘digital finish’ and the iconic image dominated the pictoral tradition of the high post modern in India (or the post Bhupen painting tradition).
Broadly this has been the accepted narrative for post modernism visual art practices in India.
There were always scratches and fissures in this narrative. Some of them raw…almost like wounds; however this narrative has been so treasured and protected from its contradictions, that anything that troubled its’ shinny surface was dismissed as obsolete, noise…or simply dirt. Even as the art was claiming to be more democratic, personal, political, fragmented and contemporary, the language which was adopted in art making and writing, made art more elitist, urban and dystopic . As more and more public art is happening in India, the ‘public’ feels more and more distanced from the art object. Large crowds in art fairs are frowned upon in the fear that the discerning collector will get disturbed. More importantly we see a clear a clear rupture, the international language of Contemporary Indian Art seems unable to hear, or talk to the large number of artists who have not, or have refused to catch up to this change in language. Strangely even though these very artists are considered to be residual or obsolete, it is with their art that the larger numbers of art viewing audience seem to connect. Naturally, in order to protect its’ self, CIA has dismissed this situation as reflective of taste and viewing traditions caught up in old middle classism. This (not so conscious) self positioning as avant-garde, is still the biggest crisis visual arts is facing today. Is it yet time to acknowledge that instead of being a friend, the post modern is the post colonial’s biggest enemy?
As neo liberal India gets caught up in conflict resistances across the country, with our cities being increasingly viewed as colonial capitals consuming the produces stolen from the heartland, how do we react? Maybe it’s the nature of this reaction that will decide the course of art making and viewing in this country.
(I have left photography out of this attempted narrative as it has its own directions, though increasingly one does see overlays between history of photography and history of art, but bringing it into this narrative just serve as another attempt to co-opt photography within the framework of visual arts)
