catching up with art in india

Akshay 
Rathore, 
Chorpai 
2010,
 Barbed Wire,
 Milled
 Steel,
 Wood.

Something about the white elephant in the room: what are the connections and distinctions, between art from one country and another? By all mean it will take forever to figure this out, much more than one post at least. For me the countries being compared will be India, America, Nepal, and now the Netherlands.

It is clear that tendencies in art can and are differentiated by the trajectories, histories, and traditions of art and artists that emerged in a country. Room is also made for transnational influences as artist practices are informed by artists and movements from all over the world. Presently, media allows images and news to be exchanged very quickly, and museums and especially galleries have a new found reach across countries. In her article Modernity And Its Visual Response: The Last Six Decades, Shukla Sawant (artist and academician) writes about art in India and outlines the movement of Indian artists across, inside, and outside the country's boundaries after independence; 'modern', 'folk', formal, narrative, and nature influences on their work; development of new art schools, collectives, and organizations in the country, and even the relations between 'First World' and 'Third World' countries. A highly recommendable article to those interested in Indian art!

Also, in my experience, artists from India or Pakistan, for instance, might opt for a graduate education outside their birth-lands. For me (I've studied in too many places perhaps) this process of variables, exaggerated by other instabilities or subversions and choices, suggested a terrain of communication that was constantly being re-negotiated. Painting and drawing took a back seat during my graduate career because my primary concerns of the time--language, translation, communication, hospitality, and food--were most malleable in my hands when dealt in video, performance, poetry etc.

It is interesting now, how there is such a remarkable presence of artists from India (or even Pakistan or China) in the transnational art scene. I can't say too much about the subject, because I am introducing myself to it as I write these posts. On a side note, I am starting many lists in the periphery of this posts that will gather gallery paces and artist organizations from all the countries in my network.

The images in this post are from an interesting show (by Indian or Pakistani artists? ) being held at Nature Morte in Berlin. Looking at the latest contemporary art from India is an entry point to many new discourses to me. For instance the discourse of material. I really love the use of silk in the Gahlot's 'When you leave me' (pictured below)--vibrant colors and you can almost feel the luscious stuffed organs in your hands. Even the use of barb wire in Rathor's 'Chorpai' pictured above is a visceral connection between materials and experiences for those who have slept on a charpai (khat or cot) or jumped over barb wire in India. Visceral indeed!

Suchitra Gahlot, When You Leave Me, 2010, Installation in Silk, Velvet, Glass & Steel.

studio jan 19 weaving surface

For a while I forgot where the idea in these images was going... I worked on it a little more today and remembered something new. I imagine a surface woven and detailed.

Having recently focused my energies for the development of my art practice, I face the awesome question of what exactly is my practice? This has always been a rather complicated query for me, and never have I located an answer. Arjun Appadurai, a cultural studies academic who studies globalization, writes about the cultural reproduction of self or the enculturation of a family in his essay "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" from his book Modernity at Large (thanks to my M.Phil program for linking me to all these important writers). He says,

As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or as grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile, new commodity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and rumors and fantasies about the new settings are maneuvered into existing repertoires of knowledge and practice...

It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication. As a group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai, 1997, 43-44)

Because of this constant stress of what Appadurai calls 'consciously choosing', perhaps I have forgotten that one actually doesn't choose an art practice, it in some way happens to the artist. That is the only way art can ever truly just be, and remain present, unconscious of itself.

 I have a project brewing in my mind and will keep posting pictures as and when it gets along.