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
