The Phantom Lady
Strikes Again
The Phantom Lady looks
at the role of the artist today and sees her as a messy archivist; as a
detective looking for clues rather than a modernist hero…
THE ARTIST AND THE ARCHIEVE
Artists are like scavengers who use various kinds of
references in their work, thereby creating their own archive out of disparate
materials. They may in fact revive dead technologies to infuse them with new
life, or experiment ferociously with the latest forms of media, or put together
ordinary found objects and transform their meaning. They may accept no
watertight boundaries between genres or disciplines. And the new archive finds
creative connections between categories seen as opposed, mixing up high and
low, central and marginal, insignificant and significant, questioning
established conventions, in search for a more profound insight into what shapes
our world today.
History of the Museum
and the Archive
First, we have to see the public institutions of the archive
and the museum as 19th century European constructs, which were
created at the high point of colonialism, and closely connected to the
disciplines of archeology, anthropology and ethnography. The Great Exhibitions
that took place in London and Paris in the late 19th century were related
phenomena, which were showcases of technology and industry as well as of
colonial crafts. Native artisans were brought in from the colonial countries
like India, and made to work on site making their “authentic” crafts and
entertain the onlookers with exotic display.
(The real story was that paid agents got people from India who were not
necessarily trained in that particular craft and made them pose in native
gear.)
Museums were seen as repositories of cultural memory, where
artifacts from past civilizations like the Elgin marbles, Egyptian antiquities,
Medieval illuminated manuscripts or Mughal miniatures were stored and displayed
recalling a sumptuous golden age, or ethnographic objects collected to reveal
the primitive stages of human civilizations. These were always great
inspirations to artists and poets besides scholars, and artists were allowed to
copy the works inside the museums. Copying from originals has always been a
traditional way of learning.
Museums and archives are based on the nineteenth century
European mania for collecting, classifying, typing and listing, which was the
base of all knowledge systems of the time. The explosion of new knowledge with
the contact with new cultures with trade and colonization made it imperative to
sort out all the new information, and certainly the idea of hegemony was very
much a part of this. Many artists have critiqued the museum and its
classifications in their work, notably Fluxus artist Marcel Broodthaers.
Historically, collections and collecting have always been
contentious and dynamic in meaning. There is constantly a war between the old
Western empires and the former colonies about the objects they have stolen for
their museums – over the Peacock Throne for instance. In India, when J.
Swaminathan, artist and Director of the Bharat Bhavan Cultural Centre in
Bhopal, capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh, which has a large tribal
population, created a contemporary art museum especially for tribal art and
commissioned tribals to make new work for it, it created a huge stir. The
tribal collection has a separate building right next to the contemporary art
collection, making a very obvious attempt to move tribal art out of its status
of timelessness and anthropology into the living present.
Museums and Archives
as Cultural Memory
Talking about cultural memory, on the other hand, there is
the Curious Case of Ananda Coomaraswamy and his collection. At the time of
Independence, when the great anti-imperialist philosopher-art historian Coomaraswamy
wanted the new Indian government to fund a museum for his vast collection of
South Asian art in Varanasi, the government which had other priorities took no
interest, and miffed, he moved his whole collection to Boston, where it is now
housed.
In recent times, we have the scandal of the sack of the
Baghdad Museum during the Iraq War, when the occupying US army allowed mobs to
loot priceless and irreplaceable objects. The irony is that the collection was
made by British and Western archeologists in colonial times, which then became
the official heritage of the Iraqi people – which was then looted again to
reach Western collectors no doubt!
Again, the notion of the archive as history, and as
collective cultural memory is both contentious and dynamic as in the 2004
scandal of the vandalization of the Bhandarkar Orientalist Research Institute
in Pune by a group calling itself the Sambhaji Brigade, offended by a biography
of Shivaji by American academic James Laine
who had researched his book there ( Shivaji:
Hindu King in Muslim India ). Rare manuscripts and materials relating to
Maharashtra were burnt and destroyed in the process. Scholars have compared
this to the sack of Baghdad Museum or Sarajevo, or the destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddha – but perpetrated in this instance by misplaced nationalism. The
stand of the Institute, the custodian of history, was very interesting. It was
to call for a ban on the book, referring to Shivaji as a national “deity”, who
therefore could not be historicized.
This brings me to my own current work, where I am using
popular images of the young nationalist martyr Bhagat Singh. In calendar art,
Bhagat Singh is shown worshipping the figure of Mother India, often portrayed
like a sort of Hanuman, tearing open his chest to reveal Bharat Mata inside.
The fact is that Bhagat Singh was an atheist and a Communist, but this fact
will never be accepted in a “popular archive” of cultural memory.
Quotation
Quoting and referencing past works is supposed to be a post-
modern phenomenon in art practice, but at every “original” and innovative
moment in art history, either the past or foreign images are used and recalled.
Self- conscious quotation it would seem comes after the emergence of art
history as a discipline and the establishment of museums, collections and
archives as institutions.
Looking at Western high culture, we see that Renaissance
artists and architects in Italy actually strove to copy Greco- Roman works
which they saw as an ideal, while the practicalities and demands of the new age
with the inventions of new materials and technologies like oil painting,
perspective drawing and the optic lens transformed their work into an
expression of their age. In fact, outdated forms and technologies are
particularly rich mines for the artist’s imagination.
While discussing the idea of context transforming meaning,
it is interesting to look at Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote.
Pierre Menard, a 20th century novelist writes a word to word replica
of the original 17th century Cervantes novel Don Quixote, which, according the narrator of the story, becomes
infinitely more sophisticated because it has to be read in the context of the
intellectual and scientific culture of the 20th century. To quote from the
story, the narrator says:
“Cervantes’ text and
Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.
(More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)”
Exactly the same words take on a different meaning when read
in a completely different context – in this case, time: reading a 17th century
work as a work by a 20th century author, makes the meaning far more complex and
subtle, according to Borges.
When collectors and traders started getting African sacred
masks to France from colonies like Mali, they were a revelation to artists like
Picasso, who saw in them a very different approach to reality and the human
figure, than the conventions of Western realism. In the new context, the mask
took on formal qualities it was unaware of. (Ironically, while the cubist style
is seen as an “original” form, the African masks are doomed to ethnography, as
repetitive cultural products. Their “authenticity” however, a French collector
told me, depends upon their actually having been used in rituals. )
Quotation as Cultural
memory / the Art work as Quotation
Quotations are not a recent phenomenon- the traditional
concept of “copying” is in itself a form of quoting: the new work is invariably different from the
original. Copying creates continuity or a genre, and at the same time
invariably breaks it, as in the very act of copying, changes become inevitable.
The 16th century Turkish miniature painters in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red are confused by the
advent of Western realism. The Master Painter blinds himself with a thin
needle, so that he can “ see” better. But does this mean that he will go on
copying the old works perfectly with the most delicate inflections without
actually seeing them, or that he will inevitably create a new work taking from
the wells of his own experience?
The Arcades Project,
Walter Benjamin’s monumental work about late 19th century Paris, is entirely
composed of quotations. It is like a montage of views of the city, each view
hitting off against the others to create an original cultural landscape of
Paris, the leading European city. The book is a quest to define a civilization
by putting together all the relevant and striking things about it, as an
archive of found materials.
Mimicry
As post- colonials, we are constantly accused of “aping” and
“mimicking” Western culture, denied “originality” but expected to be
“authentic”. This denies us the right, as citizens of the world to make use of
knowledge systems available to us, which is freely given to a Western artist,
and puts us in the position of being “un-thinking”, “un- original” and
“in-authentic”.
Interestingly now, with the coming of the world wide web,
the archive itself becomes ephemeral, with a free- for- all access to unending
images.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Artist as Flaneur
The artist is a
flaneur… who walks through the labyrinths of the city with the amused and
ironical detachment of the onlooker, yet with a strong empathy which goes to
the heart of the matter. Filled with understanding, playing both protagonist
and audience, the artist dreams, and becomes the characters in the play. The street as an archive, the archive as
performed, acted out…
The artist plays the
detective probing the mysteries of contemporary life, scrutinizing the world
for clues, a narrator familiar with the secret language, the hieroglyphs of the
city. The artist is a carnivorous animal, imaginatively devouring life around,
both the banal and the profound; a cook, who creates a fabulous new dish from
the material she takes from the real world and her own inner life.
Artists are scavengers
who use varied kinds of references in their work, thereby creating their own
archives. If a traditional archive in society represents an accepted order and
historical value, the artist may take materials from genres that are not
recognized as of archival value, or invert accepted icons and redefine the
notion of a society’s dominant history.
The new archive may find creative connections between
categories seen as
opposed: such as high and low, central and marginal, insignificant and
significant, in search for a more profound insight into what shapes our world.
The pseudo- archive is
an archive formed from the artist’s own imagination. The parade of daily experiences
large and insignificant all feed into the artist’s vision. From the combination
of past images and present and imagined ones, new connections and insights
emerge. The artists’ subjective experiences and her remembered past life and
emotions form an archive from which images are drawn. These subjective,
emotionally charged images melt into the larger cultural icons. Yet all the
time the artist is rooted in the present, the urge to dive into the past is to
find meaning in the present and to understand the future: in short, to search
for a larger civilizational meaning.
Benjamin’s Arcades
Project while being nothing but a collection of quotations about Paris is a
revolutionary new work. It is a new work because of the painstaking and
profound research that has gone into it, the texture and piquancy of the
quotations selected, in the study of the most banal of materials- shops,
streets, city plans, cheap entertainments- in order to discover a panoramic
understanding of a whole civilization and time.
The artist as auteur
uses subtle shades and complexities to problematize the present and the past.
Art historical or other cultural references from literature/ music/ cinema /
theatre become alive and throb in another context or location, when the present
and past are both charged with new meaning. While rejecting the modernist
notion of originality and formal purity as a primal quality, the artist frees
herself to be inventive, play with genres, fill her work with political and
social material, and address the contemporary directly.
The Phantom Lady
September 2010
