The Phantom Lady Strikes
Again I found this old unpublished essay from 1998,
written after one of those hot discussions with friends, discussing many things
still of interest today. Here it is, warts and all-
REARGUARD
My friend, artist Christoph Storz has been talking
frequently of questioning the artist’s position of being avant garde – as
someone leading society from the front into a vision of a Utopian future. He
says if imagining a technological future is one of the features of the avant
garde, perhaps that vision has been taken over by computer programmers and
people working in electronic media and communications – the artist maybe
somewhat questioning and apart from these leaps. Perhaps then he/she can be
called ‘rearguard’ or someone re-thinking, re-looking or re-assessing both the
past and the present and trying to imagine a future without the hype or the
clutter of tall technological claims.
I regard this rejection of the concept of the avant garde as
a reaction of someone living in the western context. In the Indian context,
where rights and futures are being severely contested, there is still a
progressive role for the artist to play. In fact the recent violent attempts by
the VHP to censor artists [Husain’s nude Saraswati, the recent nude Sita on
Hanuman, the vandalism of a Dutch artist’s work in the NGMA, Delhi] has brought
artists together to play an activist, progressive role in a situation of
danger. We may now question a jingoistsic nationalism but I believe that we do
still believe in playing a progressive nation building role, even we are
dismissed by a majority of our people as elite, irrelevant or ornamental.
The ‘rearguard’ concept can have another meaning in a
colonised country. We are condemned by the west to be rearguard – primitive,
pre-industrial, folkloric or under-developed. Everything we produce is seen as
either a poor imitation of the west, outdated, exotic or inscrutable. Funnily
enough, these attributes are completely internalised by our own public in our
own country: our own critics, art historians and audiences see our work in
these terms.
Till the mid 1980s many of us believed in the indigenist
position. As a student in Baroda, I wanted to make work out of Indian materials
[terracotta] and look at folk, popular and classical Indian sculpture as
inspiration for my forms. Out of this would be fashioned a new modern art that
would be able to express a uniquely Indian reality.
These ideas came from Indology, this search for a uniquely
Indian identity is a need from the natonalist days when we as a colonised
people had to define and protect ourselves from the political and cultural
onslaughts from the colonial power. Myself and many others in india began
deeply questioning this position in the late 1980s which led to abandoning the
premises of our earlier work and in some sense starting afresh.
There are many reasons for this rejection. One of the events
that made me deeply question my romanticising the ‘folk’ was the projection of
bear dancers, folk artists and street performers in the festivals of India and
Apna Utsavs in the Rajiv Gandhi era, which while defining Indian culture as
‘folkloric’ exploited both artistically and materially the folk artists with
the folkloric- as-authentic polemic. The notion of ‘developing’ and
‘patronising’ folk art seen as an authentic but dying expression seemed to be a
middle class notion where a middle class urban educated person from a position
of power and knowledge and access to financial resources played a paternalistic
role to the traditional craftsman. These imperatives never seemed to come from
the folk artists themselves.. When I was recently in a panel of an art funding
agency many of the proposals of collaboration came from urban artists wanting
to work with folk artists in order to improve a ‘dying’ art form. There were
two problems in this. These folk/traditional artists of course had no way of
directly applying for these funds because of their illiteracy, their rural
background and their ignorance. But the middle class urban artists seemed to
admit to no problems in their own practice. They wanted to solve their own
crises in theatre, art etc by patronising the ‘folk’ and thereby gaining
authenticity.
This had another twist recently when in an international conference
in Mysore, apparently the Modernist painter Jatin Das showed only works of
Indian tribal artists and proclaimed to the assembled international audience
that this was the genuinely Indian art. This kind of violently
self-flagellating, masochistic rejection of one’s own existence by a well known
modern artist is extremely disturbing.
While the folk can be described as pre-industrial collective
mass practice, there is also the problem of romanticising the popular – which
is a post-industrial urban ‘folk’ art. In a recent catalogue of the exhibition
of Satish Sharma’s collection of photographs from popular street studios from the streets and
fairgrounds of North Indian cities, he writes an extremely polemic introduction.
He claims that this popular photography is ‘truly Indian’ photography. Urban
middle-class photographers and artists who are trained in art schools based on
the western model have marginalised these people who are direct descendants of
the miniature painters. While it is important that he retrieves this material
and posits it against the glamourous photo-journalism of the India Today
variety [to which he himself belongs] and thereby broadens the impoverished
practice of contemporary Indian photography, there is a danger again of seeing
only popular art forms as expressions of ‘real’ or authentic’ experience of a
society.
This position of course is a favourite International
position for looking at cultural production from non- western countries. Street
art, poster art, film hoardings, commercial films, calendars are the only forms
seen as authentic expression because of their mass production and distribution
and use. There are several dangers in this view. One that that much of the
material may neither be imaginative or interesting, or even unique, which is
the case with the Satish Sharma collection. The other danger is that much of
the material can be extremely politically conservative and express rather than
question the status quo – which is the reason for their wide popularity. So the
romantic notion that they are really are the expression of the common man, the
underdog of society, the poor; and so therefore progressive and democratic, is
questionable.
Since the late 1980s, the Hindu Right wing in India seems to
have appropriated the Indological “Nationalist’ indigenist position which makes
it difficult for any progressive artist to uncritically accept certain old
notions of Indianness etc.
What then do we do? If we reject this earlier notion of
Indianness are we unquestioning Internationalists? The fact is that
international audiences are opening up for Indian artists in various ways – so
these are very real problems that we face today. Internationalism or globalism
as it is now called, raises many problems. Economically we can see ourselves as
victims of concerted attacks by global economies competing to grab the market.
Culturally, because of this opening up, we have suddenly become objects of
great interest to Western countries who now suddenly recognise ‘modernity’,
‘contemporaneity’ and ‘urbanity’ in us. On the one hand, we may be tempted to
exoticise ourselves to project a unique identity in the international art
world, or accept a eurocentric, universalist, internationalist view.
However therre is a way of being specifically Indian artists
without accepting the earlier indigenist position and to be open to the outside
world without accepting western hegemony or definitions. Location need not be
defined culturally as based on ancient heritage or folk forms but in
recognising India as a political entity which is a kind of circuit that
generates its own knowledges, audiences and markets. While earlier, our only
way of connecting to different regions in the world was through the conduit of
Europe or America, we now have the opportunity to make direct contact with the
art of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We then begin to contextualise the art
produced – international is certainly not universal. Even within the west, New
York art is different from the art scene in the west coast, or that produced in
London, Berlin or Rome- there are many arts, each is culture and situation
specific.
Our work then relates to our context – the needs, the
situations, the past histories and the conditions of producing art.
As we come out of an indigenist past we also recognise the
need to recognise technology and new technologies and urban realities in a new
way. The nationalist idea that India is a land of villages [statistics show
that 40% of the population lives in cities] has turned art practitioners away
from seriously looking at technology either archaic or new.
The Phantom Lady
Bangalore,1998
Bangalore,1998
No comments:
Post a Comment