Interview with Jawar Sircar

I have been advising the procurement committee to be split up into smaller groups. You see,for museums worldwide, purchase is the last option.  You have provisions for loaning in collections. There is also a possibility of getting donations, and for that we have also offered tax breaks. All that has been suggested in great detail. Every aspect of it has been explained. I consider that NGMA could have worked harder on this.

In conversation with Jawhar Sircar, that time Cultural Secretary Govt. of India on history, contemporary art, institutions, governmental policies and future directions.

RB: In contemporary culture today, do you see contemporary art playing a role? You would be aware of periods where there were social debates about style, like in Bengal in the 1920’s and then in Bombay during the 60’s.

J S : Art as a central political theme does not seem to yet be a part of the mainstream discourse. The major focus of the political discourse, bypasses art. Art plays a role like literature in highlighting various aspects. Politics and art were intertwined right from the beginning of the last century. The focus was to collate and visualize the imagination of an unborn India. What would the Gods look like what would the Goddesses look like? All this was visualized through popular art. We broke free from the miniatures, we broke free from the elitist British academic style, with the chromo lithograph….there was a democratization of art. You move on to observe that this democratization was used to fixate images. What does a rishi look like (does he have a choti, does he carry a kamandal with him?), how do Indian men look like etc. and since then it has been a long journey into the painting of a nation.

 RB: We have seen contestations over it….

JS: Yes, there have been contestations over it. To me the best of political art happened around the Bengal famine, when you see Shomnath Hore twisting his metals, when you see Sunil Jana coming out with his grotesque figures, the works of Chitto Prashad and Zainul Abedin you see four different hard hitting political responses through art. Mind you, Bengal famine is just the epicenter of political art.

If you go into other movements you will see that, such articulation of politics through the medium of art is not influential to that degree but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen tomorrow. The criticism of art by one quarter, going against the freedom of artistic expression, is still a part of political discourse…..  

It is assumed that the freedom of expression is unbounded and art is in this very center freedom of expression.

Contemporary art, in India is today world renowned, but that is mainly through the effort of individuals.  You will also see a universalism in the language of contemporary art.

RB : There is also the question of what contemporary art is in a place like Delhi, and what contemporary art is in a place like Nagpur or Agra?  Maybe this is the perfect time to ask you what the role of a museum can be. And then to see NGMA and some privately owned museums in that light.

JS : See one problem is that the museum or the jadughar was absolutely not a part of our culture. We had a pathshala system, so the school was. Records were kept in our medieval tradition, but objects were never preserved. Maybe this is because of a deep rooted psyche that every object has a life, and beyond that it should not be retained. A museum is essentially a repository of things that have outlived their utility or it is taken to be storage of dead objects. So the museum came in only through the colonial rule and the first museum came up only in 1814 and other museums would follow only after another hundred years. So the culture of museums spreading to the grass roots is not something we can presume. For that matter, even an exhibition is not an integral part of the psyche. So we are trying to instill, or rather inject fresh shots into the DNA system. We don’t have the welcome receptivity in our cultural DNA.

However, the good news is that while our mega museums are in problems and there are many problems aesthetic, infrastructural…  smaller and medium sized museums are coming up. You should see this book by INTAC ‘The Directory of Museums in India’, it has a listing of over six hundred museums across the country.  The concept of museums will require several more decades to get into our blood system. Museums will take a lot of effort.

RB : With NGMA there seems to be an opposite development. From what I learnt (and I am too young to say it with any kind of firmness…) in the 90’s the NGMA had been much more active. The city felt that the museum was a part of its culture, there was a functional purchase committee, the museum would buy from important young artists and it would commission curators to put up shows, Geeta Kapur curated two shows in NGMA in the early stages of her career.

JS :I will put it like this: There is an initial role that an institution can play, and very soon the nation outlives the institution, the city outlives the institution.  If you look at the way cinema halls were viewed in the 1960’s, muhullas were named after the cinema hall. The cinema hall was the pride of a muhulla, the entire area was known as next to such and such cinema and then that was challenged. Newer, flashier landmarks shrouded the cinema hall and the cinema hall had to reinvent itself as a multiplex to survive socially and culturally. Maybe the museums of contemporary art will have to reinvent and restructure themselves to reach out to the people.

 

RB: We might have to consider the differences here, the restructuring of the cinema house or a mall is driven by economics and it can choose to class differentiate but a museum? Should the reinvention of the museum not be an important part of cultural policy? Maybe museums have to be opened up through policies.

JS: Yes, absolutely. I will give you a charter on which we are working, it’s called the 14 point charter and it is provided to all the museums. We have been pushing it for three years and while there has been some improvement, I must confess we have reached a stage of fatigue. This charter was first issued in June 2009 every element of the charter has been expanded though lectures and seminars to our museums specialists. Actually, it should have been the other way round. I expect our specialists to advice us on lights and temperature control not vice-versa. Most of the museum personnel are dated, and there is admittedly a laid back attitude, also there is a shortage of staff. In most government museums, more than half the posts are vacant.

What I don’t understand is why the autonomous museums have posts remaining vacant? All they have to do is to constitute a committee. Thus the Director’s role in many autonomous museums is crucial. I have found dynamic Directors in two museums but in other places I find largely lethargic directors.  They don’t allow progress.

Coming back to the NGMA, you see that since many years NGMA does not have a procurement policy. For two years the director has been told in writing to come up with a spelt out policy. June 2009 we asked him to work out a procurement policy. However the committee was not setup, later when that happened, the committee meetings were not held. We had to force NGMA to hold committee meetings. Yet even now, feet dragging is going on and there are complaints from all parts of the industry that NGMA is not procuring. To procure through spending government funds you require a certain normative to be in place. I have been advising the procurement committee to be split up into smaller groups. You see for museums worldwide, purchase is the last option.  You have provisions for loaning in collections. There is also a possibility of getting donations, and for that we have also offered tax breaks. All that has been suggested in great detail. Every aspect of it has been explained. I consider that NGMA could have worked harder on this.

We said please, and finally there were a couple of meetings, but nothing came out of them. Mind you, the artists in the procurement committee had done their job. The main problem came in the formation of sub committees. See, the senior artists are not bureaucrats, they do their advisory part, and do it seriously but beyond that the institution has to take it forward, collate all the discussions and come up with an acquisition policy. So, we put up another agency in place. The National Culture Fund and they have now come up with a fresh acquisition policy which goes beyond purchase.

Two years ago we asked NGMA to work with curators and make a panel of curators. If the concerned body is not interested in following up on the culture ministry’s proposal, there is little we can do.

RB : One final question. For us, increasingly, authentication of art is a big issue. Do you have any thoughts about it?

JS : There are two-three layers to this question. One is that if the major artists are still around, then they should be the ones ratifying authenticity of their works. Raza might be old, but he knows which works are his and which are not.  The second is the people who are the specialists and then we can also go in for chemical and spectral analysis. But see, the Ministry of Culture is not there to sit in judgments over paintings.  Yes I can make an open offer that if the art community can get their act together and come up with a proposition where an initial amount of funding is required for a consensus body that will look into authenticity; we are open to that proposition. We don’t want to handle it on their behalf. first published in the Art&Deal Magazine

curator's note /// new directions in old media:

stories from a post digital world

"Nor is it a language in any simple sense

More a loose collection of vague and continuously

evolving quasi-linguistic possibilities at work against an

historical and social background which is, itself,

characteristically unstabe."

      

(Jon Thompson, 2004), Jon Thompson, ‘Life After Death: The 

New Face of Painting’, in New British Painting, Ros 

Carter and Stephen Foster (Editors), John Hansard Gallery, 

Southampton, 2004, pp5-7

New Directions in Old Media is a two part show, which showcases new directions in art production and understanding of the process, especially working emerging artists who are engaged in dialogues over ‘formal’ and linguistic contestations. Beginning their journeys during the glory days of digital and cognitive art, these artists have resisted the hegemony of concept, 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. This new generation has also moved on from the fascination of the glossy surface and the spectacular, and are working more with the notions of aesthetic and intimate.

Central to this exhibition concept, is the idea that the beautiful and sublime symbolize something beyond  themselves which is of fundamental significance for how we understand the world – something beyond
the scope of what modern philosophy tends to regard as knowledge. This challenge to digital (neo liberal) aesthetics, opens up a perspective, from which several lines for rethinking the issue may be developed in terms of  the ambivalences of art and knowledge production in current capitalism.


Among the many developments that marked developments in field of contemporary Indian art in the
last few years (actually about a decade now) has been the dominating focus on works that prioritize
socially and politically charged subject matters over stylistic experimentation and linguistic investigation.
Artists that created social realist, political pop works that provide for and conform to a kind of collective
imagination of a Indian society have been gaining so much recognition since the late 90s. Insensitivity to
the method and obsession with materiality and social content runs through their entire practice that leaves
little room for anything else.

Why Old Media?

In the mid and later 1980s, oppositional postmodern culture was principally associated with what Hal Foster called ‘anti-aesthetic’ practices – photography, film, installation and text-based interventions. These media have since become mainstream within contemporary art. If anything, it has become one of the default options for a range of issues within contemporary culture. Although no longer culturally privileged, neither is old media judged as an intrinsically conservative or reactionary aesthetic form, and has emerged as an important platform for post-digital, post-conceptual art.

The durability of post-conceptual art through the old media suggests that its practitioners have been re-fashioning and re-defining the medium with some of these earlier histories and aspirations in mind. For a post-1950s generation, such a ‘reconstruction’ of analogue artforms is not just an act of random cultural archaeology or ritual nostalgia and there has been a recognition of the contemporary, say painting practices which are contributing to new cultural directions. These new directions in taste and cultural archaeology position old media as a vanguard act, trading not only on the medium specificity of a post-conceptual re-visitation of Modernism (the ‘language of the mark, gesture and surface’), but that it should be equally receptive  to motifs taken  from contemporary culture and older narrative traditions of image-making. The artists selected for New Directions in Old Media have a deep understanding of the analogous art as experiential attempts to image emotion and observation in painterly form. In doing so, they suggest that old media can carry a new vocabulary, which is hybrid, grungy and visceral; often imprinting within their forms ‘narratives of the personal’.

Old Media-Labour-Aesthetics: The Visibility of Labour in Post-Digital Times

Within the conventional Contemporary Indian Art production, the emphasis on manual/physical labour comes up as a kind of noise, a disturbance which takes away from the digital/conceptual art itself. This type of art which has come to dictate the art market for a long time emerged simultaneously with the global capitalism which swept the world two decades ago. Labour was sought to be omitted from the art and a clean, sterile, sophisticated, digitised practice which only projected the concept was developed. It is to the extent that the old media art practices refer to and embody forms of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the concept of abstract labour of new media.

Contemporary art’s investment in labour, analogue and old media assumes various forms and it is symptomatic of changes in the economy rather than expressive of a broader left consciousness in the arts. In other words, the rise of labour as a sign-reference in recent art does not amount to a political project, even if it indicates a departure from the staples of postmodernism and, in some quarters, the desire to provide an alternative to capitalist economic relations.

the show can be seen @ 
http://www.trapezoid.in/

Mithu Sen: Profile:2006/7

As an young, but already influential figure in the contemporary art scene in India, Mithu. Sen’s practice has drawn a lot of critical attention. Mithu Sen provides a dilemma in writing, defining and theorizing her practice, and yet the artist thrives on the ability of viewers/ critics to place her works within brackets created by concept-metaphors like 'feminism', 'sexuality' and 'radical'. In fact such bracketing fuels her belief that people feel insecure if they cannot put you in a bracket and then be able to turn around and tell you..."hey you, you are a feminist painter", or that "your works are rooted in the discourse of feminine sexuality". So that is the artist then. Over the years Mithu has consciously developed a persona, which survives in this 'age of brackets' through a play of tropes which are interwoven in her public persona, and in her works.

Linda Nochlin's seminal essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists"[1], written way back in 1971, suddenly seems like an important tool through which one can begin to understand Mithu, and her engagement with materials and aesthetics. Having been schooled in a space in which key agents of pedagogy have often (publicly) said that women don't know how to draw or carve[2], surely has had an impact on Sen's notion of materials or stylistic purity. In a sense Mithu's tryst with the term radical, first came when her persona and art, began to rebel against the monopoly that the Shantiniketan (Kala Bhavan) patriarchy had in disciplining, and formulating norms for good art. It is from those days that the artist began to use parody, satire and sensuousness as tools, though which to create traps of metaphoric discomfort. It has been acknowledged that her manipulation of found materials combine with her morbidly playful paintings to generate unusual and provocative associations around the subjects of gender, domesticity, sexuality, kitsch: themes that run through her oeuvre[3]. However, gender, domesticity, sexuality, kitsch, are thematic to her works only in the more traditional understanding of content. Rather, the artist constantly feels the need to mask her comments with the sensual, and the absurd.

"I use my self image in my works, because there are no copyright issues involved in it". This quote in a way could be said to summaries Mithu's artistic practice. It was in answer to a question about the use of her own image, whether it stops her from exploring the autobiographic. The artist refused to give a though-out answer: she used the moment to say something else, choosing to take the mind to an artist's use of found imagery and also the evolving notion of intellectual property. All said with a ‘page3’ seriousness. It is this manipulation of post modern role playing, and engagement with the surface, that defines Mithu's approach to art.  The drive to spoof is so strong, that the artist constantly feels the desire to recast her own work, subverting them in a manner that can only come through a schizophrenic detachment. This trait becomes to be more visible in her works from the time of the UNESCO residency in Brazil (late 2006), but reaches (a momentary) climax in her work ‘False Friends-2, a video installation. I a series of simple flash animations played in a loop, the artist recasts her recent works and imagery in a parody that borders on lampooning.

The artist is indulgent with her own identity, while constantly trying to transgress it. While using loaded metaphors, she refuses to let you take her seriously. If you are caught in the trope, then you are caught in the trap. Mithu creates this trap using the ephemeral dilemmas of morbidity, sensuality, the sexual and parody. The poetry emerges through the conflicting urges to be autobiographical, and constantly yearning to mask her self.  .   Many of her works seem to speak of the unconscious. Uncomfortable and trapped between the bold and the vulnerable, Mithu's works are often expressions of fleeting utopias, illusions of moments when there is no need to hide, mask or armour.

                                                                                                                                   

 

Her recent body of works, at the Bose Pacia in New York and Nature Morte in New Delhi, seem to continue recurring motifs, those that taken from within the body of work, questions the notion of female sexuality as it is theorized within patriarchal parameters.  Characteristically working across mediums, and mediatic expectations, she uses myths and gaze serotypes to deflect attention from a carefully told, yet absurdist representation of self. She ‘stages’ her own beauty of being a woman and creates allegories about pain, pleasure and desire; often using one to stimulate the other. There is sometimes a hint, pointing one to deeper darker secrets, zones between myths and experiences, containing stories about instincts of sexuality and how they inform histories of aggression. This positioning between zones of pleasure-desire-pain, anxiety-attraction, fascination-fear, is what creates the tension in her works. The quirky forms used by her confront the pain, fear and embarrassment related to female sexuality, of femininity, interiority, and eroticism.

This might seem definitive about her practice, but one comes a full circle when one is reminded that art for Mithu is at the end a fun vehicle which lets her pursue her idiosyncrasies, and maybe through  that be constantly defying our definitions of her art.

---

[1] Alex Neill, The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Language, New York, 1995

[2] Even now, in various art colleges across India, the notion of a good drawing is dominated by modernist dichotomies, which are partial towards the (allegedly) masculine.

[3] Not used here in the modernist sense of an organic body of work, the term here can signify a fragmented inorganic mass of art works, linked through modes of production and artistic agency.

Crafting a New Contemporary.

We are at a time when the word contemporary is being challenged in art and it no longer stands for a digital, conceptual utopia. It is now understood as an operative fiction and to successfully operate within it, an artist has to constantly regulate (manipulate) the division between the past and the present. Otherwise, it is almost impossible to go beyond the placid celebration of the indifference between historical and fictional narrative. Muktinath Mandal plays with this very indifference, re weaving memories into myths as he fights to hold his romanticism against the neoliberal takeover of history and memory.

 Muktinath is a one of the few (new) contemporary artists who does not pretend that the Global can easily stand for the Local, he takes recourse to re-presentation, transforming local narratives into an effective critique of contemporary progress, yet not shutting its doors on utopia.  Local folklore, religious beliefs and rituals tied to the popular, yet deeply attached to the cultural history of his childhood are integral to the artist’s imagination.  ‘Lallu, Nillu aur Mitthu’ (oil on canvas) , is a portrait of three sisters, retrieving memories of a culture when extreme happiness was felt in siblings getting new clothes stitched out of the same yarn, the excitement and shyness of going out together and the innocent conquest of desire.   The iconological and painterly detailing comes from a love, empathy and sentimentally which had disappeared from the digital, neo liberal definition of the contemporary...making it cold and alienating.  

 In terms of formal and stylist evolution, ‘In the Name of River’ (charcoal, acrylic and pastel on canvas) is a water-shed work signalling significant formal interventions in representation of imagery. It is in the photographic and post-photographic culture of the image that the contemporaneity of the contemporary is most clearly expressed. The image interrupts the temporalities of the modern and nature, alike.  Muktinath uses the medium of painting to create a subversive iconology that allows him work within the zones between myths and realities, re working personal myths into contemporary memories.  Trained in deep-rooted academic realism, Muktinath found deep connections with mediatic realism due to its connections with the popular. Yet he is one of the first artists of his generation to re define mediatic realism from a post digital, post conceptual context.  Moving away from the wallpaper like, glossy digital finish that dominated painting, the artist re defines mediatic in more local, non-urban terms. Painting thus stops being just a medium, and becomes a political act, and we see the artist increasing exposing (flaunting) the painterly or linear constructions on the surface, finding confidence to do away with the compulsion of the ‘digital finish’...tarnishing the mundane cosmopolitanism of mediatic realism through a deep affiliation with social realism.

 

‘100 Letters’ ( ongoing pen, acrylic and ink series on collected postcards), exemplifies the potential of post conceptual painting to  work within the polemics of aesthetics and politics. Choosing to mask, hide and expose; Woking with a drawing style that rembers the ‘repotage’, Muktinath challenges the notions of  objects, surfaces, archives and art. The postcards are collected from friends, relatives and family in Tulia, a village near bursting metropolis of Kolkata. Tulia, for the artist is not only home, but also a metaphor for resistance to late capitalist greed, its very existence inspiring the improbable combination of nostalgia and hope.  Electricity is yet to reach Tulia, yet it is a land of education, culture, knowledge, ethics and (sub?)alterity. 

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Rahul Bhattacharya

24.08.2012