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Works and Curations

Showing posts with label global. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global. Show all posts

Saturday, June 27, 2015

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."  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

·        


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



Duplex House in Tukkuguda HMDA approved layout
"SQUARE AVASA for elite: North Face Entrance Concept. East and West facing houses will be of equal priority where north face entrance concept is unique in our project. Individual opinion matters as East shows mental/Spiritual progress with prosperity & North Shows Prosperity with tremondous growth in monetary wise and Wealth.Recreation is plenty at Square Avasa. You can relax by the cool environs of the swimming pool or take a swim to tone your body. For those who are serious about fitness, you have the gym where you can strengthen and beautify your muscles. If you are keen on sports, there is the indoor & out door games facility where you can try your hand at different games or practice Yoga. Besides the excellent landscaping and the shimmering water bodies comfort you to the point of relaxation. SuqareMile Projects Constructions, a leading construction company with good experience and reputation for delivering quality housing" http://www.clickindia.com/detail.php?id=133633946




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



                                                     ---------------------------------------------------
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 )


Friday, March 9, 2012

A Note on the Re-worlding of 'Contemporary Indian Art'


Impulse to soar. Naxal desktop wallpaper



crossposted from http://www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter_detail.aspx?newsletter_id=33&newslettertype=archive

The editorial brief from the Asia Art Archive, asking me to write on how organisations and institutions outside India are constructing histories and simultaneously representing contemporary India and its art, left me perplexed and worried. Where does one locate 'India's' agency in self-representation? Is India, as for centuries, still being constructed and consumed by (neo) imperial powers? This nagging question repeatedly surfaced as I kept trying to write this essay. Who had the right to represent and what then are the implications of this brief?

Naxal dominated  zones of india.


Any question around the issues of representation of Indian art finds an automatic starting point in the Western academy. Much bashed, yet still shamelessly Orientalist in its quest for the Other, the Western academy is today challenged from both within and outside. A quick Google search — the only option from my 'Third World' position — shows that even today, courses, conferences, and the juggernaut of the American academy remain fixated on the pre-modern, the 'classical', the civilizational.(1) If indeed there is an interest in the modern and the contemporary, this curiosity and 'desire for knowledge' remains focused on the popular — on the glitzy world of Bollywood, 'cheap' calendar prints, and the 'exotic' 'art' of the bazaar. If courses, conferences, and academic publications are symptomatic of the West's larger interest in its 'Other', contemporary art from India does not even figure in this discourse.(2) And, of course, archives, as handmaiden to the project of knowledge making (for good or for bad), reflect this predilection. Not surprisingly, an analysis of the online documentation provided by the two primary U.S.-based archives of South Asian art — the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive and the Digital South Asia Library — reflect a disproportionately high focus on pre-modern art. Of course, there are a few (allegedly) representative images — a Husain, a Souza, and a Tyeb Mehta — standing in for the modern and the contemporary!

Tyeb Mehta, Buffalo Slayer, Acrylic on canvas


However, I cannot afford to privilege the American academy as having the sole 'right' to represent India today. The post-1990s economic boom, the software bubble, and the emergence of a South Asian diaspora in the West are playing important roles in the re-casting of Indian art. As Rajeev Sethi, a leading promoter of Indian art notes, [e]very successful economy needs a tangible celebration'.(3) In the recent past, modern art has suddenly become a symbol of success and self-confidence. Perhaps, because art adds value, in terms of wealth as well as image, the nouveau riche has (now) recognised art as a commodity, a product for investment. 'People want icons that you can show off — you can't put stocks and shares on your walls', Sethi further observes. While, on one hand, pressure groups created by today's self-confident diaspora are resisting the American academy's 'right' to represent India,(4) on the other hand, the fruits of globalization have opened up horizons for 'Contemporary Indian Art'. Not surprisingly, the strategic and commercial interests shown by the industrially advanced 'global' communities in newly liberalised India have had a cultural resonance on the manner in which 'contemporary Indian art' is produced (at home) and consumed (abroad).

Returning to the editorial brief, what then are the (imagined or real) implications of this changing socio-cultural scenario in the archiving and construction of Indian art abroad?(5) At the turn of the century, three important texts were generated which specially took up the project of representing objects of Indian art and (to various extents) also of representing the cultural context of production. I am referring here to the 'Bombay/Mumbai' exhibition at the Tate Modern, curated by Geeta Kapur, 'Edge of Desire', a show curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, and Made in India, a documentary by Madhushree Dutta, commissioned by and based on the curatorial note for 'New Indian Art: Home Street Shrine Bazaar Museum', by Gulammohammed Sheikh. In recent times, these have been the most significant showcasing/representations of objects that participate within the aesthetic discourse framed by notions of art, India, contemporaniety, politics and aesthetics(6). Though the aesthetic discourse shaping the most recent trends in contemporary Indian art claims to have located the aesthetic discourse in the zone of multi-polarity, a close analysis of the 'Edge of Desire', 'Bombay/Mumbai' and Made in India, shows this multi-polarity (only) within a neo-liberal multi-cultural framework.

This recent surge in the display of contemporary Indian art, framed through neo-liberal multi-cultural politics, within the context of 'Western' museums, is perhaps not coincidental. Powerful art brokers based in the U.S. and global institutions like the Asia Society and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt have, in their own ways, opened up a discursive space for the display of contemporary Indian art in the 'West'. Simultaneously, the rising capital force of the Indian diaspora has meant that international auction houses now take Indian contemporary art seriously. Bonham's, Christie's and Sotheby's regularly hold auctions dedicated to contemporary Indian art, with global attendance and earnings in billions of USD. Thus, in the early 2000s, when Indian contemporary art crossed the million-dollar mark, market analysts announced with a great flourish that 'finally' Indian art had come into being. There is an urgency to problematize any easy celebration of such 'coming into being'. Is this 'coming into being' then decided, on one hand, by the market value of a select few and, on the other hand, by a few exhibitions in the West that claim to be a serious stocktaking of the country's contemporary cultural heritage? These shows assert a traversing of conventional divides between the urban/fine and folk/tradition, between the high and popular. Claiming to represent the socio-political transformations in India, these exhibitions attempt to address contemporary political, social, and environmental realities.

India, like Asia, has multiple discursive values within itself. Therefore questions of authenticity would lead one to dead-end mirages. Acts of representation will always be the result of discursive relationships between the locations of the represented, re-presenter and the re-presentational context. The 'emergently dominant'(7) embodiment and representation of India is that of a demography fast getting caught in the winds of late capitalist progress, riding the shoulders of a large neo-liberal middle class that operates from cosmopolitan cities to colonize the heartland. To provide 24/7 power supply to Mumbai, a suburb goes without power for about 6 hours a day and a little deeper into the hinterland, the population faces the psycho-social trauma of poverty-driven suicides spreading through the farmlands. It does seem that the poor, peasant, and the proletariat as categories have fallen out of fashion, and with that these 'residual' categories seem to have lost the right to be 'talked to' or engaged with, contributing to a collapse of the 'local'(8) as a point of consideration.
N.N. Rimzon. Speaking Stones, 1998. 'Edge of Desire' exhibition.

Contemporary India is thus a highly fragmented identity, with steep socio-economic disparities and pockets of conflicting religious/ideological nationalisms. As contemporary neo-liberal straits are increasingly taking a neo-humanist (post-capital humanist) direction, global art institutions and agencies are becoming participants in these manifestations of continuities, totalities, constants, quantities and accumulations, evolutions, fields (disciplines) and Hegel's 'spirit of the age'. The title, 'Home, Street, Shrine, Museum', Gulammohammed Sheikh's curatorial project (conceived as a part of 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games), is both seminal and metaphoric of the manner in which cosmopolitan India is imagined. It is significant that neither 'Home, Street, Shrine, Museum' nor 'Edge of Desire' showcase (re-present) fragment constituents of India like the North East; the large tracks of Naxal-prone heartland in which the Maoist insurgency influences visual hegemonies; the extreme Dravida ideological movement; or even the moderately extremist artistic movement known as the Baroda Radical Painters and Sculptures Association. Inclusions and exclusions will always happen and though these pockets are extremely important (the northeastern and Maoist counter-hegemonies territorially occupy nearly 40% of India), as Santosh S. recently pointed out, one needs to recognize the upper-class/caste cosmopolitan bias that informs these 'forgettings' and hence inform the representations of contemporary India.(9) And of course, as an art historian, I find it perplexing that the harbingers of 'India Poised' and 'India Shining' have conveniently forgotten a larger history of equally important global art shows and political concerns that have marked much of Indian art from the 1920s.(10)
Shuvaprasanna, Golden Flute, 2005, Oil on canvas

Samir aaich. Untitled, Oil on canvas

As much as it is problematic to employ monolithic assumptions in constituting the idea of India, one similarly needs to fragment the notion of 'abroad'. For the purpose of this thematic, Euro-America (and in recent times the Far East(11)), with its constellation of art collections, dealers, institutions, and galleries, remains the key player — and thus frames my definition of 'abroad'. It is this 'abroad' that I wish to fracture.(12) While up until now my paper seems to suggest that Indian art inhabits a specific art world — that of Asia Society and the New York power brokers — a closer look further complicates this picture. Apart from the 'blockbusters' mentioned above, Indian art is now being consistently shown in private galleries across Europe and the U.S.(13) One notes that the artists and artistic practices that are promoted and consumed through these private galleries provide a distinctly different view of contemporary Indian art. It is interesting that artists, for example Samir Aich and Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya, whose works dominate the global consumption of Indian art through such galleries, are never represented in these 'blockbusters'. I raise this issue not to valorize Samir Aich and Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya but to question the omissions in shows that carry the claim of 'serious stocktaking' of India's contemporary visual heritage. Is it that these artists are considered to be functioning outside the socio-political definitions of taste, progress and other such cultural concept-metaphors defined through the hegemonic ambitions of a neo-liberal India?
Shilpa Gupta. Blame. Mixed media installation at APJ Media Gallery, New Delhi

This picture gets further complicated if one looks at Indian art promoted by Euro-American collectors such as Espace Louis Vuitton (France), Daimler Chrysler (Germany), and Ralph Burnet (U.S). The jarring slippage between the record-breaking names on the auction circuits (mostly early post-Independence modernists casting their own interpretation on Western masters such as Picasso, Modigliani and Rothko) and the artists who are today enjoying maximum visibility in international art residencies and spectacles (artists working with notions of 'new art') speak volumes in the reception of contemporary art. Why are the major collectors of early post-Independence modernists necessarily of Indian origin while it is the Euro-American collectors who promote the younger generation working with 'new art'? Is the diaspora then relatively 'conservative' in its aesthetic discourse? And why is it that corporate Euro-America prefers 'new art' from India? Though these questions cannot be answered without further in-depth research, it does allow for a disrupting of the possibility of an easy narrative of the West's construction and consumption of Indian art.
Very Hungry God by Subodh Gupta

In recent years, the world has been moving away from its long relationship with Euro-America centricism to a polycentric play of hegemonies, and it is this movement that has created space for 're-worlding'. Within this polyphony of contestations over global hegemonies, East Asia is fast emerging as a new centre (a new 'West'?). This shifting hegemonic balance has resulted in major Asian institutions like the Asia Art Archive and the Arario Gallery showing an interest in contemporary Indian art. The 2006 exhibition 'Hungry Gods' at Arario and the recent appointment of an Asia Art Archive research post for India are early indicators of this growing interest. Although this trend is too recent to be historically analyzed, even here one sees a predilection for 'new art' — an interest shared with Euro-American corporate collectors. Yet again, there are new imaginings of India, art, and contemporaniety that are informing institutions outside India and their attempts at constructing contemporary Indian art.
Footnotes:
(1) This is not a diatribe against the American academy nor is it an attempt to posit it as representative of the 'West'. I merely use the American academy as an example — perhaps an exemplar.
(2) The 'West' today does not merely signify a geographic location, but rather is a metaphor for certain ideological constellations which arise out of a 'superior' position certain hegemonies claim and are bestowed with.
(3) http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/winter2006/features/made-in-india,49,RAMA.html%20
(4) For example the recent California School Text Book debate.
(5) Being an art historian located in India, my paper does not claim empirical understanding of the actual functioning of either the Western academy or the new institutions interested in contemporary Indian art. Rather, this is an attempt to understand the politics and problematic of the 'outside' constructions of Contemporary Indian Art from the perspective of an 'insider'.
(6) Any aesthetic discourse seeks to locate high art as a vehicle for aesthetic and ethical elevation. This is in continuation of the Kantian belief that art, not science or philosophy is the road to ultimate truth. It is true that there have been serious disrupters within these continuities and contemporary notions of ethics and aesthetics are significantly removed from Kant's assumptions of them. However, both these notions still stay rooted in complex webs of power and hegemonic articulation. Significantly mainstream art theory and art practices have not been able to engage with the question of 'value' except through an engagement with the evaluation of the (new) ethical(s) and (neo) aesthetic(s) elevation provided to the subject through the viewing/participating experience.
(7) The terms 'emergent', 'dominant' and 'residual' in this paper are drawn from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, London, Oxford University Press, 1977.
(8) It is common to argue that dichotomic 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 itself a cosmopolitan identity and by and large subscribes to a lifestyle where differences in space, time, gender, caste, sexuality, and race tend to collapse. It is this collapsed (constructed) identity that casts itself in a postmodern universalism, and which can increasingly be called neo-liberal.
(9) Santosh S., presentation in panel titled 'Art and Subaltern Politics: Focus on Dalit Discourses' at symposium 'Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in India', New Delhi, 2007.
(10) Partha Miter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-47, London, Reaktion Books, 2007, for this 'forgotten' history of early to mid 20th-century global cosmopolitanism.
(11) The Far East is sometimes used synonymously with East Asia, which may be defined in geographic or cultural terms as to Russia's East, and including central and coastal China, Taiwan, Japan, both North and South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as the states and cultures of the rest of Southeast Asia.
(12) I draw my arguments from earlier scholarship on ways in which the 'Occident' as a category needs to be problematised. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press. 2000.
(13) For example, Art Pilgrim (London), Bose Pacia (New York), Collect World Art New (Rochelle), Galerie Mueller & Plate (Munich), Jack Shainman (New York) and Kala Fine Art (Austin).

Editorial disclaimer - The opinions and views expressed in the Perspectives column do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Art Archive, staff, sponsors and partners.