Coffee with Mithu and Probir

Rahul Bhattacharya in conversation with Probir Gupta and Mithu Sen on art, art making and contemporaneity. These are two separate conversations unfolding in the same space, overlapping in time, have been woven together to construct a imaginary conversation.

(an old interview first published in Art News and Views) 

PG: I don't understand the category of Indian-ness in art.

RB: Though till 2-3 years ago I used to use this question of Indian-ness in contemporary Indian art and strategy to remind artists about a certain responsibility to the local, I now feel that its misunderstood and over used. 

PG: Yes, as an artist, I have never thought about this question of Indian-ness. When I work, it is more about what I want to do. My dialogue happens with both, the society and art history. Say for example, my paintings are so impassioned not because I want them to look Indian or western, but because I am intrinsically a sculptor. 

RB: What I'm basically looking for now is how an artist is sensitive to social, political and aesthetic questions of their own surroundings. Let me frame it this way; we produce so many catalogs and circulate it among people who are known not to read them but how many of us send catalogs to art colleges, community reading rooms, etc. there is just no concern…nobody is even thinking in that direction.

MS: Yes, you are absolutely right! The very nature of events like Nandan Mela has changed. It is no longer for people but is now an event for the gallerist. 

The conversation takes off from there and goes across various examples. Mithu, Probir and Rahul talk their way through expressing despair about the current state of affair and come to an understanding that maybe mainstream contemporary art till right now is not really interested in having a dialogue with contemporary India. From there the conversation moved to Mithu's last solo in Berlin and she talks about a cultural event in Berlin, where for a weekend a year, galleries stay open till late and museums don't have entry fee. Most of the galleries put up their best shows during this time.

As Rahul gets up to make coffee, Mithu tells Probir how hundreds and hundreds of people are out on the streets, visiting art galleries, seeing shows, discussing works etc. Probir tells Mithu that in Paris, each zone in the city has an annual festival on the same lines, so the city has about 10 to 12 such art weekends.

RB: Why is that something like that doesn't happen here? It's not that art was so disconnected from the society all the time; From the 20's till the 70's, we've had art being debated and discussed in mainstream publications. There have been public battles over styles, but somehow the connection is lost.

MS: the art world has changed over the years. Nowadays an artist cannot just behave casually, dress casually, there is an element of glamour that has crept in and is now become a criterion of how an artist presents him/herself. 

PG: The best thing is that we can still resist it. There are still a lot of us who do not play upto this expected role and have shown a deep commitment to connect their work with the culture of their contemporary society.

The conversation opens up as they talk about Probir's work with the Jewish community of Kolkata, his experience of doing art projects with school children and Mithu talks about her 'Free Mithu' project. 

The second cup of coffee gets made as they discuss the kind of public responses that have been received and what are the various urges that make them want to reach out. It becomes interesting when both Mithu and Probir cite certain kinds of education and exposure in the early youth, when the art teachers they met, the idealism embedded in them. Rahul comes back with coffee and brings forward the 'Can it be done in any corner you like?' curation and suddenly they realize that in spite of migrating in Delhi over different decades, this hand-me-down idealism has somehow linked them and influenced their pursuits as artists and writers. After Probir winds up to leave early, the conversation moves on to this notion of local and vernacular and how a majority gets left out of the discourses around contemporary Indian art, just because the discussions unfold in English. 

MS: …And sometimes the works come from very very personal zones, and this zone is influenced by the land around you, by the art that you see the people you live with. Sometimes deep personal expressions become universal and are mistaken to be global. It's only when you analyze them and maybe sometimes even psychoanalyze them that you realize where the roots lie.

With that deep challenge thrown to the art historian the conversation begins its journey of winding up…winding down…another cup of coffee gets made.

http://www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=delhi-dias&iid=1&articleid=18

NO!SE

At the dawn of the nineties when Contemporary Indian Art (CIA) was born, there was a clear feeling inside some sections of us, that a new era was being ushered in. Early breezes of neo-liberalism were blowing across the sub continent.  The USSR had freshly collapsed, Tiananmen Square was still fresh. The Rao-Manmohan era opened up consumption horizons for us and we kicked the moralist skeleton of Nehruvian socialism like Europe had kicked Catholic morality in the 18th century. Parallel to this global trends, Indian urban thought itself found it’s calling in the writings of ‘new thinkers’ like Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak.

There were always scratches and fissures in this narrative. Some of them raw…almost like wounds; however this narrative has been so treasured and protected from its contradictions, that anything that troubled its’ shiny surface was dismissed as obsolete, noise…or simply dirt. Even as the art was claiming to be more democratic, personal, political, fragmented and contemporary, the language which was adopted in art making and writing made art more elitist, urban and dystopic. As more and more public art is happening in India, the ‘public’ feels more and more distanced from the art object. Large crowds in art fairs are frowned upon in the fear that the discerning collector will get disturbed. More importantly we see a clear rupture, the international language of Contemporary Indian Art seems unable to hear, or talk to the large number of artists who have not, or have refused to catch up to this change in language. 

Strangely even though these very artists are considered to be residual or obsolete, it is with their art that the larger numbers of art viewing audience seem to connect. Naturally, in order to protect it’s self, CIA has dismissed this situation as reflective of taste and viewing traditions caught up in old middle classism. This (not so conscious) self positioning as avant-garde is still the biggest crisis visual arts are facing today. Is it yet time to acknowledge that instead of being a friend, the post modern is the post colonial’s biggest enemy?

NO!SE is an exhibition concept idea, which seeks to celebrate the stylistic reaction of a post digital aesthetics. The familiar (common) digital tropes of purity, pristine sound, images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches, marks, fissures, and artefacts. This is a fast emerging trend in music, painting, photography and sculpture. These glitches can be seen in the artworks in the form of noise (stains, scratches, ruptures and jarring sounds) which disrupts the urban cosmopolitan taste.

A new strand of underground cultural practice can be seen in the contemporary art movement, which stems from a boredom with the monotonous digital finish, the mundane cosmopolitanism of contemporary art and the visual language of neo liberal hegemony. For a long time, it seemed that contemporary Indian art had become so insulated that it would fail to respond to and evolve with the changing times.  The art of this emerging underground creates a tension in the realm of aesthetic consumption, causing discomforts  by hacking into the mainstream taste, which still carries the bias stemming from age, class, gender and sexuality.

As fashion trends change and coolness takes on a new meaning, this meaning is sought in the craziness of noise rather than the image of the ‘ideal’. By breaking the flow of the artwork, the intentional error is able to draw attention to it’s self. Eventually as the awareness of the glitch and the aberration grows in the viewer’s awareness...the NOISE begins to dominate. 

The show proposes to invite four selected artists from the list[i] to hack into the system of Contemporary Indian Art (CIA) to propose a new algorithm as the global order stands at the edge of dismantling neo liberalism.

---

[i] The long-list includes the portfolios of the following artists:

1.      Vidisha Saini 

2.      Nandan Ghiya 

3.      Hemant Sreekumar 

4.      Sahej Rahal 

5.      Paribartana Mohanty 

6.      Mandakini Galore 

7.      Mitali Shah 

8.      Preeti Agrawal 

9.      Drupadi Vatsal/Wahshat Ghosh 

10.   Sambaran Das 

tantalising/ on the brink

being pushed to the brink

yet refusing to kill each other

the lure of supreme beauty and balance

water and fire

the possible pain was known

the promises were known too

the lure of supreme beauty and balance

fire and water

tantalisingly forever close

yet elements keep them apart

the faith in beauty and balance

water and fire

almost difficult to believe

still learning hard to fly 

the faith in beauty and balance

fire and water

another you

Google image search for 'another you' lead me to this one @ http://www.thegloss.com/2012/02/13/sex-and-dating/valentines-horoscopes-love-373/

another you
the same me
another you
another you
another you
same me

i tried
keep failing
failing and falling
in everything
hold on
to hope

but it
gets angry
on me
another you
another you
same me

analog express

a show proposed to two galleries last year...a show that did not take place.

:

A new strand of underground cultural practice can be seen in the contemporary art movement, which stems from a boredom with the monotonous digital finish, the mundane cosmopolitanism of contemporary art and the visual language of neo liberal hegemony. For a long time, it seemed that contemporary Indian art had become so insulated that it would fail to respond to and evolve with the changing times.  The art of this emerging underground creates a tension in the realm of aesthetic consumption, causing discomforts  by hacking into the mainstream taste, which still carries the bias stemming from age, class, gender and sexuality.

For a post-1950s generation, such a ‘reconstruction’ of analogue art forms 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’.

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 that 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 analogue refers to and embodies forms of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the concept of abstract labour of purely conceptual art digital aesthetics 

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.

:

Aesthetics of nostalgia, loss, love and the popular

Blues has been defined in the dictionary as melancholic music of black American folk origin begun primarily in the ‘Deep South’ of the United States around the end of 19th century from  spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads, typically in a twelve-bar musical note sequence. In blues, a blue note is played or sung in a lower pitch (minor 3rd to major 3rd) than the major scale for expressive purposes.

Over the years, cultural historians have recognised Afro-American music as the primary source of chronicling black history. By the late 60s, blues genre had been thoroughly appropriated by the white elite and its circulation had become somewhat restricted in the face of rock music, which was again dominated by the white culture in its taste and sensibilities. By the '70s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement had definitely ended, but for African-Americans in many parts of the United States, the struggle for full civic and economic participation was not finished. Hip-hop culture emerged as a reaction to this and out of an atmosphere of disappointment and disillusionment in the cramped ghettos of America, which were a symbol of modern urban dystopia. Bronx, New York, where it all began, was burning with youthful angst of the Black community, but was also creating a cultural movement with the help of the newfound technology made available to them. Rapping and DJ-ing/sampling was central to the movement but it also was a lifestyle- it was a fashion, it was art- that aggressive and oppositional and openly challenged the norms set by the predominantly white male art fraternity. Jazz had refused to be on time, rock and roll had refused to be quiet, and hip-hop refused to be melodic.

Remixing the blues:         

The hip-hop culture and the trend of using samples and DJ-ing gave rise to the concept of creating remixes-alternate versions of the original song, generally with a faster beat/tempo. Remixes proved to be a success, especially in the Indian scenario. The older generation songs which had become out-of-fashion were revived and fine-tuned and a remix was born. This remix catered to the older generation (because of the nostalgia that the song induced in them) and the younger generation (which was happy to dance to a groovy beat). Thus, a song was repackaged to cater to the needs of the changing times.

Art in contemporary India also evolved in a similar fashion. New Trends in Remixing the Blues is an exhibition concept idea, which seeks to celebrate the stylistic reaction of a post digital aesthetics. There was a gradual move towards the digital during globalisation and the boom in the art market but with its collapse the post-digital aesthetics was initiated into contemporary Indian art and there was a return to the painterly. There was a growing rejection of the glossy, digitised surface in favour of a more unfinished/coarse texture of the artwork. The familiar (common) digital tropes of purity, pristine sound, images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches, marks, fissures, and artefacts which have been inspired from the trend of the almost viral spread of remixes. The disturbance was welcomed as it broke the surface tension and rendered the artwork tactile.

campa cola : nostalgia and gossip

Still remember how happy we were, the George Fernandes infused ban on Pepsi and Coke was finally lifted...by the time coke launched in India,  i think i was in high school.

still remember the cool internationalism associated with Coke, the spreading smiles on the faces of the freshly blooming neo liberal middle class.
Still remember that the soviet union had just collapsed and my aunt used to say see...(with a glee) socialism is (was always) nonsense.
Still remember  being happy that Cuba still survives.
Remember being sad that Coke bought  over Parle drinks and began disbanding their brands...sadness when they killed Gold Spot.

Remember being younger still, remember my neighbourhood granddad who used to call me home to watch TV and drink Campa Cola...then Coke came to India and the Campa Cola truck stopped comming. 

Then i hear this news ..in the form of a credible gossip. 

In those days there were no pet bottles, the glass bottle ruled, and all the companies had their recycling system worked out...but when Coke came in (saying apparently out of the fear of getting sued) , within a week they broke Campa Cola's backbone by paying higher prices and buying up their bottles from the market and just crushing them....(remember all the branding and all were printed on the bottle itself)

Within a week Campa Cola had to shut business...the entire 

learnt this over chai from an old friend. 

Childhood came running back. 

letter to my best friend (post title 2)

sometimes in the search of glory
there is nowhere to  run
deeply in love with the night
and the heavens dared
suddenly no place to hide
yet she smiled
the folly of youth
still sleeps in memories
the mental asylum
and being Robinson Crusoe
in the years in between
broke changed...so did gay
softness disappeared
still the heaven's dared
not another story was written
nor a painting done
just the rain dropped in and cared
a dead flower in my pot
while i was bathing by the sea
like the dead kitten on my lap
as i ran back home
some burials are grand
of some, one is never told
both the fire and the darkness
come and tell the story
of how the beggar prince learnt
sometimes in the search of glory
there is nowhere to run

the tap runs dry

razor sharp memories do not obey the limits of endurance
why do i reflect myself so much
could the kajal become my best friend
or are we destined to run
a smooth summer breeze blows away the turbulence
as the tap runs dry

Praying to Shiva for a husband like Vishnu

Gender relationships during our times are passing through a severe zone of appropriations and contestations. This post is not so much about our times, but a small note on the Brahmanical tradition and the stories of dominance encoded. Written in a note form, this write explores some gaps by looking at iconography.

• Shiva and Parvati when depicted in painting or sculpture are physically much more proportionate, as compared to in the case of Vishnu and Laxmi. Till the coming of Radha and Krishna (Radha was never Krishna's wife), vaishnavite iconography has shown the goddess to be proportionally a lot smaller than the god. In religious/political iconography proportionate size is directed connected to power and prestige.
  
  
  

  

  closeup of the famous Varaha panel at the Udaigiri caves. Note the proportion of the goddess (Bhu Devi) to the figure of the Varaha Devta 

• The nature of (power)  relationship between the 'god' and the 'goddess' is betrayed by some other elements apart from size. It is well known that the left part of shiva (Bamadevata) is considered the feminin side and this culminates in the Ardhanarishwara icon 

            This ardhanarishwara can easily be dismissed begin reflective of the ardhangini concept (the wife is equal and half of the man), and one can feel that like ardhangini, the ardhanarishwara actually is a soothing balm over the takeover of feminine agency.

However when one collaborates this icon with another like 'Shiva Parvati playing Chaupar' one realises that there is an excess, the husband-wife relationship allows for the wife to (mock) hit her husband for cheating in a game of dice.  (Even) this sense of equality is transgressive of the mainstream notion of an ideal wife's behaviour. This mainstream utopia is in fact reflected in the iconography of Sheshshayee Vishnu where a devout Laxmi is pressing the feet of her lord.

• Shiva in his lifestyle and appearance, in no way, fits into an ideal husband mode; yet he is the Lord worshipped every Monday in the quest for an ideal husband.  Most likely a rich settled husband like Vishnu whose feet the girl can press all her life in utter submissiveness...

• Am i making a point that in a way Shaivism is less oppressive in terms of gender relationships?  no...but less oppressive in the message of its visual culture yes...but the role of the feminine principle seems to have a chronological message. The first wave of Hinduism(Brahmanism) sweeping across India was Shaivite, and Vaishnavism was later layering (from Mathura to Srirangam through puri we have evidence of  Vaishnavism taking over from Shaivism). In almost all subcontinental societies we find this trend being a parallel of shifts from hunting-pastoral to agrarian-trade based economies. Also barring some exceptions, we see that all the medieval expansionist kingdoms adopted to Vaishnavism. It could be that Vishnu with wives like Bhudevi and Laxmi (land and wealth) is a more effective metaphor for material progress.  

Before i wind up this chain of thoughts it will be nice to stop by and admire the Madurai Meenakshi temple. For not only it is beautiful a vibrant it may carry lessons in appropriation and resistance.  The temple (in all probabilities) belonged to the local tribal goddess Meenakshi. with the spread of brahmanical culture in tamil land contestation and appropriation definitely seems to have taken place.This is encoded in the story of how shiva came from the himalayas and fell in love with meenakshi and married her...(at one stroke putting an independent tribal goddess into a subservient relationship with an alien male god). The religious texts declared the temple to be the abode of shiva. However,  even today because of local support and patronage it is the meenakshi shrine which is the larger structure in the complex, the central axis is still aligned  to it and in the temple ritual practices...meenakshi still remains central [even though the holy tank is built in front of the sundereshwara (shiva) shrine]. This meenakshi is capable of  raising her hands to hit shiva if he cheats and is not just a marker of land and wealth.






                                               

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dreams refuse to leave

  Daddy can i hold you tight
  Daddy can i shag you tonight

  Connecting with a body she had lost
  Connect with a new goal
  The better half feels like flying
  Feels like turning her fears to dust

  Daddy i know you are not right
  Daddy i wont do it tonight

  Picking up her clothes she refused to weep
  Life's angel in distress
  Somewhere down the line the winds change
  And her dreams refuse to leave

in the middle of the night

This is just an attempt to preserve 

Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker

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pls send me your direct email for post-FB communication: iaralee@CulturesOfResistance.org

Fb keeps deleting my political posts, has shut down past profiles and blocked my page during the last assault on GAZA. one can never tell how long zio-creeps and FB censorship will allow me to keep posting here! — with Mohammad Saloos.

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  Tracey Zee If you go, I go. Complete bullshit.

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  Sonya Gulzeb Lol, bunch of cowards can do such acts, Keep up the great work Iara anyway, bless.

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  Ahmed Abu Abda alkongrs39@hotmail.com

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  Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker we really cannot count on fb as free space to exchange ideas. i need to create a backup system. pls do stay in touch post fb and email me your direct contact info! iaralee@CulturesOfResistance.org

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  Rainha D'agua as WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, warned us: "We all think of the internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables. So whoever physically controls this, controls the realm of our ideas and communications."

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  Jonas Islander Get a blog to post on. I'll send you my e-mail.

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  Diana Healy Iara, please keep in touch. We are not in agreement on everything, but you remain a friend, always!!!

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  Perry Holt ...this happened with something I shared of yours, that is, it was deleted.

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  Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker yes, Perry Holt, when FB deletes my posts, all the hundreds of people who share them get the posts deleted from their walls too. the latest one was the info on isra-el killing of 4 siblings in gaza and my post describing how heartbreaking it is for par...See More

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  Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker and not only FB removed my post on israe-l killing of civilians in gaza, FB blocked this page from posting til ceasefire was announced. they can block people from denouncing the war crimes, but the info is getting spread by many and they cant stop all, so i urge people to proactively keep working. it will take all of us to get the truth to prevail.

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  At Schoeman Keep posting Iara! Info on the web cannot completely be removed, as it go out it gets distributed and read..

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  Jonas Islander Well, now when the try to censor it, I'll be ten times as determined to post it.

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  Sindie Munro Can we find another post, web share site. They are out there. Then we can tell out friends to hook up and maybe fb will be deleted after some years.