Four Case Studies – Direction for Art and Practice in contemporary India

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The aesthetic point of view :

When visiting art galleries and talking to a few industry drivers, gallerists and directors of art spaces, they were all talking about one thing: now that the market is perceived to be down, they want to discover new talents and work with young artists. This is as much an delusion as the notion that older and more established artists are no longer active, involved and thus have no more value. Like anywhere else, people are obsessed with young and emerging artists, yet the difference is that the Indian art structure hasn’t diversified to have the intellectual and theoretical capacity to address and take advantage of the ongoing practice of more established artists and their artistic relevance.

(Maybe) this is because, art criticism and critical engagement with artworks is almost non-existent in India. Art criticism doesn’t exist as a course in art academies. Much of the writing and catalogues produced concerning contemporary art in the past decade were works commissioned by galleries or individual artists to give credit to their artists and practice. It’s hard for most to understand and acknowledge the importance and value of independent criticism and unbiased opinions. 
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. When one reads Geeta Kapur’s seminal text for the six artist show Place for People  (Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 1981 ), one witnesses a claim for a post colonial avante garde to be based on thematic figuration. She succeeded in syncing us with the David Hockney lead post Greenbergian shifts in the Euro American  art world. Armed with the power of post-colonial thought, new art and art history began questioning of the  western modernist ideas such as formalism (which ruled Indian art academies), but with it brushed aside many various other artistic impulses.  

At the same time, art history in India itself was being taken over by of cultural studies. This contact supposed that a painting or a sculpture was begun to be looked at more as a carrier of signs and not as an aesthetic domain. Such impact from cultural studies meant that meaning conveyed through pictures and the ethics of that meaning got more value than the construction of the image itself. The word ethics itself was understood in a politically correct neo liberalist way which foregrounds liberalist political correctness.

With the onset of the international market, capital and know-how India as a whole has embarked on the journey and process of gradually placing issues brought from Indian context into the larger cultural background of the world, in a lively and creative way, setting up the platform to be a part of the multi-culturalist consumption phenomenon. What we tend to forget is that art is much more exciting and alive than this ideology of political correctness contemporary curations would lead us to believe. The political correctness of the curators here is a machine that has drastically suppressed cultural memory and filtered out the content moulded in a new globalised language. Stylistic dialogues that were shaping up during Indian modernism and early post modernism (like the conflicts between the Kerala Radicals, the Baroda Narrative School, Post- Swaminathan Abstraction) were largely disrupted or forgotten.

The Argument:

How hegemony shapes commonsense cannot be explained through blanket arguments. What one did observe however was that artists increasing felt the need to think of their works in terms of an image. Art writers complimented this trend by reading the work almost literally like texts. Moreover, in sophisticated art theory the author had been declared dead, so it gradually became unfashionable to talk about the gestural, the ‘manner’ the ‘style’. Maybe this is not so problematic, as much as harm caused by our loss of skill to read an image in terms of its excess. In theory we all knew that the image has an excess that far outweighs the domain of meaning, yet the only manner in which we engaged with the excess was in terms of size. Curation too, played a key role, doing largely theme based shows, and it is only in the arena of new media that mainstream space for purely formal works were encouraged.

As the first world falls into chaos, and the focus increasingly falls onto the local, we begin to realise that the knowledge dominance of contemporary neo liberalism is being questioned on the streets of Europe and America. Also that the financial world is travelling in which evryone is confused about changing tastes, markets and viewship. The idea of the audience is shifting. Yes we are at an early stage of the shift, but increasingly some artists are coming out bolder in their journey away from the content. There have also been artists who have resisted the hegemony of spectacle and content which have straddled art criticism and practice, and there is a sudden new interest in viewing them, and trying to contextualize their practice in contemporary art.

I am going to focus on four such artists. M Pravat, GR Iranna, Saba Hassan and Sambhavi Singh, to talk about this shift in more detail. I have been seeing their work in various capacities, as a friend, as a critic, as a curator. I will attempt to layout how these shifts in practice and viewership have imprints of hegemonic shifts possibly worth investigating.