stories from a post digital world
"Nor is it a language in any simple senseMore 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/
