Notes on Neo liberalism and Indian Art

Debanjan Roy|INDIA SHINING I (GANDHI AND THE LAPTOP)| Edition of 5 | 2007 | Fiberglass with acrylic paint| 27 x 46 x 30 in.

·         It is common to argue that dichotomy and polarities are out of fashion.  Moreover, nation states have been proven to have been constructed and hence in many arenas they have ceased to exist. In such a situation if one seeks to revisit the ‘global’ ‘local’ dialogue using contemporary Indian art as a case study, then the positioning of the ‘local’ suddenly seems to be on fleeting grounds. With ‘localities now being trans geographic, it is increasingly becoming difficult to position the ‘local’ within the ‘global’-’local’ debate. On the other hand, the ‘global’ is well positioned. It is clearly trans-geographic, it claims for it self a cosmopolitan identity and by and large subscribes to a life style where differences in space, time, gender, caste, sexuality, race, tend to collapse. It is this collapsed (constructed) identity that casts itself in a postmodern universalism, which can increasingly be called neo-liberal.*

• ·         To understand this neo-liberal identity, one could pose the India Shining campaign sponsored by the first BJP led NDA government(1999-2004)  with the ‘India Poised’ campaign (2006-07) sponsored by neo-liberal image building forces within in corporate India. At the core of both the campaigns lie the claim of re-presenting India in a newly shaping (reconstructing) Asia within a world which is increasingly trying to re configure itself while still being in the ‘crisis’ of being an unipolar world. How these two campaigns represented the notion of 'India' and 'development' become crucial in understanding the links between contemporanity and neoliberalism in india. Both these campaigns heavily deployed, 'scale',  'shine',  global, and the urban as both campaign strategy and and symbols for desire and progress. Though these campaingns failed badly as they did not comprehend the 'local' and the symbols of 'desire' was copy pasted from the 1st world imagination, the (this) language became the cornerstone for contemporary urban expression. 

A stadium hoisting events of the 'India shinning campaign'  and a satellite image of india during Diwali, heavily used during the 'India shinning campaign'

·         Of course contemporary Indian art (the part of which fetches the maximum prices and gets the highest degree of participation in international art spectacles, residencies etc) is constituent of practitioners who have strong (to superficial) left wing or center left ideological positionings. ‘India Shining’ was a center right campaign; I use it to argue that in matters of economic and foreign policy, there is an amazing collision between the new left and the new right. This collision has made it possible for the economic right wing to appropriate subversive Marxist concepts like ‘re-worlding’, and transformed it into something that sees the world as a constellation of cosmopolitan cities (and hence the easy manner in which the India Shining campaign get replaced yet adequately compensated by the ‘India Poised’ campaign.) This act of representing, the politics of such, the innocence of such, and (maybe) most importantly the ‘values’ involved in such can serve as key pegs as one seeks to interrogate the ‘global’, ‘local’ as polemics and conditions. 

The strong winds of neolibelisation that came to us, has only grown stronger and deeply affected our commonsense.  Recently second NDA government launched the 'Make in India Campaign' , which has been accused of being India Shinning on steroids. In the years between 2006-14 , much has changed in the global socio economic imagination. The 2008 financial crisis has lead to Neo liberalism turning aggressive and militaristic. Right now outside the restance pockets in Latin America, privatization, consumerism, war on environment, bing, and spectacle are operating on never before seen global levels. 

"The proverbial cat, however, is now finally out of the bag, for the slogan to ‘Make in India’ is an invitation to global corporate capital to come loot and plunder the natural commons, to destroy the environment, to dispossess populations made dispensable and to exploit cheap Indian labour; it is an invitation to global corporations who are being forced out of their home countries because high environmental and labour costs have been long been eating into their profits. Whether or not the notorious Lawrence Summers Memo of 1991 that talked of moving ‘dirty’ industries to the third world was a serious policy proposal or a mere sarcastic prank, the Modi government seems to have internalized its impeccable economic logic. China was the trail blazer in this regard and one can already see the devastating impact it has had on daily life in China. Even as GDP soars to the skies, daily life gets more and more insecure and violent. That is the direction that the new government has chosen to take India in the name of making India the manufacturing hub of the world. Yes, there will always be people to point out how GDP growth has meant more employment and money circulating among ordinary people at large, but these are the classically myopic economics-drunk people who have not spent a minute thinking about what all this means in the longer run." Aditya Nigam http://kafila.org/2014/10/20/make-in-india-modis-war-on-the-poor/

"On Sunday, along with German Chancellor Angela Mekel, Narendra Modi inaugurated Hannover Messe, World’s largest trade fair. In the fair top businesses from numerous countries participated. Indian P.M Modi said India is an attractive destination and his government will make it easy to conduct business and it will be place where there will not be any surprise element. Raising the pitch for Make in India, he said it is a national movement that covers both businesses and society. We have moved with speed and created confidence both at home as well as abroad. Modi told his audience, we will protect your intellectual rights. The tax system will be more predictable and also talked about new financial instruments to fund nation’s growth. Modi further added, the will to change is there and also it is moving with speed in an right direction. His last line, during the inauguration of the industrial fair along with Merkel, encouraging businessmen from both sides, he said. When the shutter comes down at this industrial fair, I wish many new doors to open."  13th April,2015 http://www.bjptelangana.org/en/tbjp_news/make-in-india-a-new-national-movement-modi

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Valay Shende, Scooter, 2007, welded metal buttons, 45 x 70 x 30 in.| IMAGE: COURTESY SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

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Art practice does not operate outside socio-political hegemony. One needs  to question whether the dominant forces of contemporary art while claiming for itself a leftist intellectual base is in fact like the British New Labour completely complicit with the right wing in matters of economic and foreign policy.  There is a claim that the fruits of ‘globalization have opened up horizons for ‘contemporary Indian art’, and that the fruits of the strategic and commercial interest shown in the newly liberalised India by the industrially advanced ‘global’ communities since the early 1990s, has had a cultural resonance on the realm of ‘contemporary Indian art’. Over the last decade or so Indian painters and sculptors have enjoyed a measure of visibility in the ‘global’ art structure. They have, more recently, been joined by installation and video artists, and artists’ active in the new digital media, whose projects have outgrown the ‘local’ limitations of production , exhibition and consumption. These young to mid-career artists have been represented (and have represented India) in major international art events, such as the, various Triennales, Biennales and (of course the) Documenta.

·         Their work has been showcased in blockbuster exhibitions organised by prestigious art societies and institutions, the dominant articulation celebrates an articulation to advocate a certain kind of post-modern Indian art, which is rich with the possibilities especially through their value within a particular definition of multiculturalism. However, even in the ideological framing of their practices there is a complete refusal to interrogate this ‘fruits of globalization’ which fellow leftist intellectuals and activists have grave anxieties about.

·         There  is a feeling in some corners that contemporary Indian art has not (yet) established itself as a major and sustained ‘global’ presence. Artists curators claim that this is modest and intermittent by comparison, for instance, with the domineering attendance contemporary Chinese art has secured since its advent on the ‘global’ scene in the late 1980s, or how east and south east Asia have recently become hubs of a much larger scale. However, very rarely do we express concerns about monopolizing of cultural capital, an oligarchic control over knowledge and resources.  We also fail to consider that China as a nation, (and not just its art) enjoy much greater attention than India does on a global scale. It enjoys more attention in the UN, Olympics, Biennales, sea trade…etc. Is it an unfair argument that ‘contemporary Indian art’ cannot locate itself outside the operative hegemony called ‘contemporary India’, and the various hegemonies that operate within it? And is this question relevant even as  (or specifically because) a newly dominant strand within ‘contemporary Indian art’ is deeply engaged with forces blurring national boundaries, taking up representational roles in ‘global art institutions’ and creating an oligarchy of power? 

·         One of the biggest problems has been that the great inflow of financial and cultural capital, have some how bypassed the grassroots infrastructure of Fine Art in India. Institutional neglect, and lack of non-institutionalized support, ensures skeletally existing library facilities, scant archives, and absolute neglect as ‘conditions’ of art colleges all over the India. The net as a medium is extremely difficult to access, and that coupled with the lack of English education, is keeping out art students from the domain of knowledge that is now dominating the multicultural contemporary art. Essentially there is not enough of the (new) money and exposure coming back to nurture, or to even have a debate with the grass roots. It does seem that the poor, peasant, and the proletariat as categories have become grossly out of fashion in Marxist thought, and with that these ‘residual’ categories seem to have lost the right to be ‘talked to’ or engage with…contributing to a collapse of the ‘local’ as a point of consideration. The ‘local’ and its ‘public’ could be the ‘inspiration’ informing the work, can even be the ‘represented’ in the works, but somewhere s/he seems to have lost the right to be considered to be ‘peer’…the work is no longer addressed to him/her.

·         Most people don't talk about it, but the most thriving days for art criticism in India were in the 1920's when a heated debate on the formation of an Indian national style was being played out amongst art journals, popular literary magazines, and newspapers. (Read Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations Cambridge University Press, 1995). Today, a critical contestation over arts in the public domain is absolutely unimaginable.#

·         Art criticism in India today essentially find two strands...in one mode the critic represents the artist like a suave court painter; the writer uses skills in rhetoric and imagination (often in collaboration with the artist) to weave and or locate a suitable context and bestow it with cultural capital. Such is the celebrated 'up market’ criticism in India, which helps to legitimize a certain kind of post-modern Indian art, which is rich with the possibilities exiting consumers through their value within a particular definition of multiculturalism. The ability of a critic is, (now) judged by how s/he can represent Indian art in international terms. Clearly the role of the critic as an aesthetic interrogator has no space within contemporary art practices, and one begins to wonder where to locate writings on contemporary Indian art, and consider its role vis-à-vis the production of the analyzable subject and look at what relation does such production have with consumerism?#

·         Print and online magazines have created space for critical art history of contemporary arts, but the print media magazines (due to reasons of funding of the high production cost), hesitate to publish interventionist, alternate writings on art.  The online magazines, on the other hand, have a greater discursive potential. However, currently they suffer from financial instability (the online publishing industry in India is yet to take off), and are yet to ideologically position themselves vis à vis the mainstream.#

• Another key critical vacuum is caused because our attention is so taken up by the mediatic aspect of new media, and we don’t seem to be engaging with what it does to language. We seem to be yet so Ruskinian in our analysis that the media is often read as a vehicle for a direct reflection of the artistic-aesthetic intentions. Especially in the context of new media art, a much more complex analysis of about how media influences language is very important. It is only such an analysis that will help us to understand how language and power operate within the contemporary Indian art society. This is also particularly important because there seems to be an erosion of the notion of the public as peer, and often we forget to make the simple connections between language and communication. Peer-hood now is something that can be found in the globe’s various cosmopolitan pockets where the vernacular (‘local’?) is mostly the ‘other’. This is more significant because new media art is a key instrument through which trans geography articulates.

  Of course this does not mean that a ‘local’ ‘global’ structure should dis-privilege the ‘global’ either. It is the tension that often keeps the balance. The strategic advocacy for the ‘local’ in this article is an attempt to keep the tension alive at a time when the theoretical validity of the ‘local’ is under intense scrutiny. Of course cosmopolitan art contains within itself radical possibilities of counter geography and the cosmopolitan centers of Asia have enabled the creation of a discursive terrain called new Asia rising from the debris of a post Cold War uni-polar world. Is it just the complacency, and the unhindered celebration of the cosmopolitan which is being rendered problematic though this article? Somehow it is also an article that seeks to realize the frame(s) one operates within seeks to understand the extent of implication within which the self dwells. 

Subodh Gupta | U.F.O | 2007 | Brass utensils | 114 x 305 x 305 cm

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* Cited from AAA>Diaaalogue > May 2007 > Perspectives  A Note on the Re-worlding of 'Contemporary Indian Art', Rahul Bhattacharya    (http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/33 )

# Cited from Short notes on art history and criticism:, Rahul Bhattacrarya (http://theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.in/2015/06/a-short-note-on-art-history-and.html)

Short notes on art history and criticism:

• Most people don't talk about it, but the most thriving days for art criticism in India were in the 1920's when a heated debate on the formation of an Indian national style was being played out amongst art journals, popular literary magazines, and newspapers. (read Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations Cambridge University Press,1995). Today, a critical contestation over arts in the public domain is absolutely unimaginable. 

• Art criticism in India today essentially find two strands...in one mode the critic represents the artist like a suave court painter; the writer uses skills in rhetoric and imagination (often in collaboration with the artist) to weave a suitable context and bestow it with cultural capital. Such is the celebrated 'up market’ criticism in India, which helps to legitimize a certain kind of post-modern Indian art, which is rich with the possibilities exiting consumers through their value within a particular definition of multiculturalism.The other is a strand of independent writing mostly seen online. this is clearly a faltering platform; with writings mostly tending to be personal attacks on artists or institutions , whimsically patronizing or dismissive. 

• For gallery and artists, the legitimate position of the critic is that of a poetic reader into artist's works...his/her role entrenched in the need to need to work within negotiations between art, display, market and cultural capital. The nexus is so complex that almost every (possibly simple), art display sale venture feels the need to generate a larger context around it…masking the more direct viewing of art as a commodity in the financial terms by trying to cast it into a garb of 'culture'.

• The space for critical intervention remains marginal, and the market/art institutions have not shown any sign of engaging with a critic author, whose voice troubles the 'route' the dominant streaks in art production and market. This has become especially true since mid-90s onwards when the space for art criticism in popular print media began to disappear and the media became more interested in reporting art either as investment or as a Page 3 cultural nouveau, elite activity.

• Print and online magazines have created space for critical art history of contemporary arts, but the print media magazines (due to reasons of funding of the high production cost), hesitate to publish interventionist, alternate writings on art.  The online magazines, on the other hand, are a more discursive space. However, currently they suffer from financial instability (the online publishing industry in India is yet to take off), and are yet to ideologically position themselves vis à vis the mainstream. 

• As of right now there is complete lack of analytical understanding regarding the critical trends in the vernacular writing of the country and until such knowledge is assimilated, our understanding of contemporaneity in this country will be severely lacking.  

• There is a lot of discussion about art and contemporary thought generated online over social media. Often in the comments to many posts, one sees a rhizomatic structure of critical analysis.One should begin a  project  and see what methodological implications it leads to. 

• After 2008 and the stagnancy in the market for contemporary art and the settling down of the mediatic fascination, there has been a lot of interests amongst the artists community to engage with critics and historians...to get into an analytical inquiry into one's own practice.  (By and large) this new direction has not yet found teeth because the artists are still very much operating with in the gallery system. As more and more alternate art practices are emerging, the relationship between the artists and the historian is being strengthend.  

• I’m reminded of an observation by Anita Dube, “When the market is at its boom, criticism is at its burst. and when the market falls the value of criticism begins to emerge"