It happened in Baroda last summer...

Nobody of us, some 250 people inside the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) campus, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara (/Baroda), were there on some invitation. We perfectly knew we are here inside examination halls and any concerned authority has not solicited a public presence here.

Nor was the ‘moral battalion’ that consisted of a handful local Vishwa Hindu Parishad / Bharatiya Janta Party activists as well as some ‘Gujarat Police’, was expected here.

Yet, the Moral Battalion was different from the rest of us. We saw the display of works by students of Final year (Bachelor or Masters degrees in disciplines of Visual Art) as part of their examination, and we were here as well-wishers. The moral battalion, in turn, was surely here to obstruct the examination display, and to subjugate the FFA under the Modi-fied politics that justifies a pogrom.

The trouble was first evident at about 3.35 pm on Wednasday, May 9th, 2007; when one Neeraj Jain, a lawyer by profession whose white car boasts that he is an ‘advocate’ and whose white clothes amplify it, entered the campus. A havildar from the Baroda City Police accompanied this man with a ‘Kesariya Tikka’on his forehead (enough to declare him a proud Hindu). Neeraj Jain went straight to Printmaking Department of the FFA, where a 23-year MVA (Masters of Visual Arts) student of the department had chosen to display his examination work. Whie objecting to one of Chandramohan’s works, Neeraj Jain had a short-but- heated exchange of words with the art-student. Neeraj slapped Chandramohan, and made him leave the display hall. Neeraj and his accomplices took Chandramohan downstairs, then out of the Printmaking Department Building and ultimately out of the Faculty Campus.

A group of people with still and video cameras, mike-booms with logos of local TV Channels and a hindi channel ‘Aaj Tak’, were standing in front of Neeraj Jain by 3.45 p.m. and before they asked him any questions, Neeraj Jain was happily informing them of the ‘very peaceful operation’ that he did to save public life. The brief that these reporters got from Neeraj Jain was, ‘A student has willfully molested a cross… this act of disrupting public life should not go unpunished’.

As the TV ‘byte’ was over, Neeraj Jain chose to go to his men and say, ‘ now arrest the Dean… who has given a permission to hang these obscene works? Do they teach this here?’ He also complemented his men by saying : this is perhaps the very first time that we have not actually broken anything, nor have caused any loss of property… we have this as our plus-point. So, we continue to say we will not break of vandalise anything, but will go ahead with our fight against this obscene exhibition.

The oratorial skills that Neeraj Jain showed at the campus were quintessentially marked by his being ‘in-charge of the situation’, and eventually, of the campus that belonged to a State-run academic institution. By the same time, an unnamed terror (it is very hard to name this kind of terror in Gujarat, or you end up with a constitutional functionary’s name!) had its spell over the campus, and as a measure of safety, all the halls (that contained the works of art for the examination display) were closed and locked. Confusion prevailed, and the situation, at least, had to be understood first! Every well-wisher of the FFA present at the campus then, waited eagerly for some collective decision.

By this time, the Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) T. R. Parmar also appeared on the scene. Neeraj, who ruled the roost, talked to Parmar as if he is instructing something. The demands of arresting the Acting Dean (in the absence of the Dean, Deepak Kannal) and confiscating the work objected to, were made by Neeraj Jain again, and the ACP seemed to be trying to comply. Physically, it was impossible to move the huge cross-shaped work, but the Police, under the able guidance of the ACP, were ready with an empty van.

The reporters and cameramen ‘needed some visuals’ for the story. Some of them had photographed Neeraj Jain manhandling Chandramohan, but they seemed to know these images would only ire the powers-that-be in Gujarat. They wanted to photograph the ‘objectionable work’. For this, Neeraj Jain was helpful to the media! He decided to take a press-tour of sorts, inside the department. This BJP man made his intentions clear to the ACP. The latter hesitatingly said yes, and said to the media, ‘you will go there only for two minutes… not more than that’. Interestingly, this was the ONLY sentence that this in-charge of Police Stations under this zone of Baroda spoke directly to the mediapersons.

The press-party, led by (who else than) Neeraj Jain, went inside. Once in, Neeraj also objected to some other works by Chandramohan, and yet other works by ‘some other student’ displayed at a different hall in the same building. The tour lasted for five minutes, and the ACP, who accompanied Neeraj Jain, did not object. After coming out, Neeraj Jain offered to entertain the media… ‘Come for a cup of tea’ he said, and barring some three or four mediapersons who rejected the offer politely, Neeraj Jain left the campus with the reporters and cameramen.

The din in the campus seemed to be over, but everybody knew this is not a single incident… the ‘encounter- murder’ of artistic expression has just happened, only to mark a beginning of an ‘operation’ that would repress the advocates of cultural freedom. The repressive forces would be happy only when they see an all-pervading success and subjugation of their perceived enemy.

The peace-loving artists, art students and some teachers at the faculty had a meeting which took stock of the situation. The meeting made known to everybody that Chandramohan’s arrest was against the legal procedures. The police did not even have a proper warrant, nor did they contact any authority of the Faculty. This meeting was not enough, everybody knew, and the students and well-wishers wanted Chandramohan’s detention to end. Somebody suggested that one can go in front of the concerned police station, and this suggestion was upheld by many. A draft of a complaint against Neeraj Jain’s attempts to disrupt the campus was read out to everybody who signed it.

Apparently, this draft complaint was almost neglected by the police. They refused to register it as a First Information Report (FIR) of an unlawful act, but kept it only as an ‘application’, with a condition that it is written in Gujarati, the State language.

The voluntary gathering of students in front of the Police Station also had a support from some civil rights activists. They tried to mediate, but had little success. Venkat, a friend of Chandramohan whose name did not even appear in the so-called FIR filed by Neeraj Jain, was ‘freed’ by the police, while everybody in the gathering did not understand, why in the first place did the police detain Venkat! Then, it was known that Venkat was a person who had helped Chandramohan with some technical specificities of the so-called ‘objectionable’ work of art.

‘Chandramohan has to be given a bail. We have to follow the legal procedures. So boys and girls, please do not wait here. You can expect your friend (Chandramohan) to be freed when we take him to court tomorrow (on Thursday), and anyways, we are not troubling him… nobody has beaten Chandramohan’… these stunning words came from the Assistant Commissioner of Police, T. R. Parmar. Everybody chose to believe him… for more than one hour before this, some 200 students were sitting in front of the police station. They returned their dwellings, not knowing that Chandramohan’s detention would last longer and longer.

- Abhijeet Tamhane.

The tenants of history : Bombay Art Society and the hysterias that surround Café Samovar

Borders are often a site of contests that make history. Café Samovar was born 43 year ago on the border, and continues to stay there: on the narrow passage between the Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastusangrahalaya ( previously Prince of Wales Museum) and Jehangir Art Gallery. Displeasures are not as old. They started when the Museum fenced its area with a barbed wire. By that time, the late seventies, Café Samovar was a name associated with film and art personalities. These and more well-wishers of Café Samovar protested the ugly barbed wire fence. The displeasures further grew when Jehangir Art Gallery asked its tenants, including Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar, to vacate the place. People like me, who have been visiting Jehangir, Samovar and Chemould, have chatted over the last decade about this great tenancy dispute.

‘When the Gallery was growing up, when the art scene was nascent, they almost invited us. Now they want us to go! Why?’, was the irate lament you’d hear from Kekoo Gandhy of Chemould or Usha Khanna of Samovar. Chemould gave in, and moved out of the Jehangir premises this month ‘for good’. Even before, the dinghy ‘Terrace Art Gallery’ moved out, when many of us came to know it was there… ‘Yes, for thirty years that Chetan did business with bad art’, somebody would say, and we all laughed and smoked. We all knew Chemould or Samovar could not be equated with Terrace Gallery, and when Chemould decided to move out, most of us seemed to know what loss it was to the Jehangir building, the Kala Ghoda locale. One was also happy, anyways, that the Chemould shifted to a much larger, contemporary space at Prescott Road.

Samovar now fights the lone battle of preserving the tenancy. The issue is already in court, and is sub-judice. To put things straight, the land belongs to Government of Maharashtra and who gave the occupancy rights to Prince of Wales Museum. Jehangir Art Gallery is a tenant of the Museum, and Samovar a sub-tenant. The Bombay Art Society has its very small office in the Jehangir premises, but the legislation about the inception of Jehangir Art Gallery makes special arrangements for the Society. The same legislation also states that the Society will use the Jehangir Art Gallery space for its annual exhibitions.

Things have changed since the legislations were passed some 54 years ago. Given the government’s understanding of cultural agenda that time, the Bombay Art Society under the leadership of (then young) people like K. K. Hebbar was the only trustworthy agency of change and betterment in visual art scene of the city.

Yet, last fortnight, the Bombay Art Society members had a public gathering that proclaimed ‘Samovar must vacate the space’. ‘Samovar started at a time when there was no restaurants and eating joints nearby. Now there are kiosks around the Gallery that feed the struggling artists. If Usha Khanna of Samovar boasts of having fed the stugglers way back in the 1970s, I would like to ask why are todays’ strugglers away from Café Samovar? What keeps only celebrities stand up for the Café?’ asked the speakers to a gathering of about 250 people, while the Bombay Art Society Secretary Gayatri Mehta declared, ‘the historical task of Café Samovar is over now. There is no point in still using the same space for a restaurant’. These protestors against Samovar had a so-called positive agenda: they wanted the Samovar space reclaimed for art exhibitions.

The same logic of ‘the end of historical task’ can fit the Bombay Art Society itself! The Society is no longer representative of the ‘talents in art’, nor does it command an undisputed trust in the art fraternity. To be sure, the Society cannot be stamped as retrograde, but it has, been unable to keep pace with the newer definitions of art. Issues of propriety, of ‘who asks whom to go and in what pitch’ assume an even greater importance when the matter is under the consideration of a court of law. The public meeting devised by the Society in mid-August 2007 can, at best, be called a display of hysteria. The hysteria stems from the fear of loosing one’s voice in the changing situation.

The situation changed because somebody toiled to do so. It was undoubtedly Café Samovar that valued the presence of eminent personalities. It did not discourage the ‘struggling artist’, until such artists could hardly cope with a rate-card that is not cheap by the city standards and leaves a chance only to order for an apparently lousy ‘ready tea’ to the struggling artist. Yet, Café Samovar now attracts a varied clientele that includes tourists and NRIs, lawyers and chartered accountants, the laptop-savvy yuppies and yes, some young artists and critics, too.

It became the talk of the metropolis on August 6, when some ‘noted personalities from art, media and cultural fraternity’ (read : celebrities) met the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to save the tenancy of Café Samovar, even as the tenancy dispute is sub judice. Some noted personalities went to the extent of demanding a ‘Heritage Status’ for the Café from the state government, which in its rightful capacity has duly refused to do so. The celebrities - CM meeting was so well covered by the media that the Bombay Art Society action may be seen rather as a reaction to it. The issues of ego between the Society and the Café are there, but they can be sorted out with a proper dialogue. In fact, such a dialogue has started at the informal levels. September 2007 will go further with the process. This is the juncture when people like the octogenarian Kekoo Gandhy, who happens to be a patron of Bombay Art Society, is not averse to the idea of being a negotiator between the two sides, but this remains his wish.


The court judgments notwithstanding, the hysteria is about getting a chunk out of the history. Any history of the ‘Kala Ghoda Art District’ of Mumbai would have a place for the Bombay Art Society, Jehangir Art Gallery, Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar (in chronological order). Nobody ever owns history. At present, it seems as if all these institutions that ploughed Kala Ghoda to be an Art District, are fighting it out for their place and want to reap from history here and now. These tenants of history vie for a self-contained future. And, it seems, nothing is going to stop them doing that.

- Abhijeet Tamhane

To Claim the space…

Vanita Gupta’s works always have a newer invitation, an intrigue that deserves to be taken along. It was some years back that she abandoned paint at once, and entered the territory of building her works with paper, glue and some fine cloth pieces. From there, she comes back to ‘Acrylic on Canvas’ works, recently (September- November 2006) shown in Singapore, New Delhi and Mumbai. The recent work has retained Vanita’s intense experiences in charting her own territories.

True, the recent work resembled Zen calligraphy at the first, rather hasty sight. One could even have a second, more deliberate look at the works as pieces of abstract calligraphy, done with a ‘Zen mind’: a mind that ‘gains nothing other than the realization that there is nothing to gain, and is thus more than ever in the world’[i].

So, what happens next? A debate, perhaps, between painting and calligraphy? Or, further, a complacent deception that inhabits our so-called ‘appreciation’? I would like to take a brief tour to the areas of my discontent with such complacency.

If one equates Vanita’s work to the pains and pleasures of Calligraphy, it will necessarily draw oneself to observe the black ‘stroke’ on Vanita’s milky white canvas, its solitary existence and its balanced positioning. Lauding Vanita’s effort as Zen, one can firmly point at the purity of experience, the essence of ‘the stroke’ that her paintings transcend.

Or, without overt references to Zen or Calligraphy, one might choose to look at these works as paintings, would expect the joys and highs of seeing a good painting and, most often, be fulfilled with the joys! From this position, one would are the pains and pleasures of Composition in Vanita’s work. The series of artistic decisions that she must have experience while making the work would haunt us while we, as viewers, are destined to cherish the ‘moment’ in her work. The entrapment of the moment through a series of moments would draw us to laud her works in words like ‘abstract in its most severe form’[ii].

Is there a third way? Can a viewer take some other ways of seeing, to match with Vanita’s effort to deal away with ‘habit, convenience and security’[iii] ? How far would the complacency with ‘Zen/Calligraphy’ set of our observations or ‘Composition/painting/ abstract’ schema be able to breathe with a Vanita Gupta work? If a viewer is sure, s/he gets some ‘echantment’ from the work? Can s/he spell enchantment?

I would suggest recourse to Vanita Gupta’s work as an art-historical critique. History of abstraction would give us references to Adolf Gottlieb’s brushwork or Robert Motherwell’s action painting in the 1960s, as formally relevant to her work. While Vanita, through her work, takes a position that goes far ahead of these reactions to the canonical western art history. Her work does not celebrate the existence of ‘painting’, as so-called ‘post-painterly abstractionists’ or ‘abstract expressionists’ seem to have done. Instead, her works strongly advocate an indulgence in acts like peeling or erasing the paint off canvas, not to mention the intended blankness of the canvas. These decisions make posit her work with a critique of what others did or do.

For sure, Vanita has not stopped charting territories of her own. The territories are opening up! One remembers her work in the late 1990s when she used folded paper, and left much for the viewer’s intrigue about what the inside of those folds would be like. In early 2000s, she continued her approach without resorting to folds. Her work now shows a strategy for claiming the space without actually using it! The nothingness and the wholeness, the Shunya and the Poorna seem to be revered in all her approaches, while her relation to these values has grown over time.


-- Abhijeet Tamhane.

[i] Fung Yu Lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton1952 , quoted in http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/lieberman/zen.html.
[ii] Deeksha Nath, Exhibition Catalogue for Vanita Gupta, Gallery Threshold, 2006. The observation further goes: ‘ By not beginning with a form ofreference or allowing the viewer to hinge the painting on the visual and material world, through her paintings Vanita goes to the heart of aesthetic experience, pure intuitive reaction’.
[iii] Vanita Gupta, an excerpt from her forthcoming Hindi novel ‘Anshi’, quoted in Exhibition Catalogue for Vanita Gupta, Pundole Art Gallery, 2006.

Why should LaVA spread?

LaVA [Laboratory of Visual Arts] , a show that has traveled five cities in India (so far,) spread reactions everywhere. This huge installation worked like Bose Krishnammachary's critique of the existing (or non-existent) level of contemporary knowledge that India's art institutions have to offer. The show was completely interactive and had so much of choice element that, one's experience at the show would surely differ from others'. All the Books, all DVDs here were accessible, and your experience depended on what you choose to access. Nevertheless, the show had some visual content that annotated the show. The bookracks, the big and small video-screen tables and the walls, all were designed by Bose. While the furniture pieces were rendered in attractive shapes and colour, they looked casual enough to encourage you for sniffing out all your apprehensions for those gloomy grey, dusky steel or dull wooden book storages. Bose's bookracks were inviting. These shelves had an appeal of the aesthetic positions that Bose propones through his abstract paintings.

This ‘Laboratory’ was completely designed for the user. It was not only the hardware that suited as a user interface, but the Books and catalogues, Magazines and monographs, DVDs and CDs… i.e., the software, took into account the different tastes and preference areas. The printed resources engulfed almost everything under the visual art umbrella: contemporary visual art from India, US, Europe and Asia, modern and post-modern Art since 1940s, folk art, books about film, fashion, design, photography. There were books with biographical, polemical as well as educational overtones, studies that referred to surveys and details, books that you would like to share with your friends and students, or some books that you would prefer to savor in your privacy. An equal diversity of cinematographic resources awaited your time. Films ranged from Avant Garde to popular Bollywood.
The software and hardware, both served as entry points to a worldview, a positivist, optimistic attitude toward artistic expressions. Modes might be different, it told the user, but the goal for a more livable world is unequivocal. LaVA perpetuated Bose’s inclinations in more than one ways. His belief in coexistence of varying positions and different levels of understanding, that was amply proved by his curatorial initiatives like Bombay Boys, Double Enders et al, reflected in his choice of films and books. Also, the inherent rhetoric of personal-universal choice that assumes centrality when Bose curates, worked at LaVA. Bose assumed the position of a global citizen while he provided the ‘equipment’ at this laboratory and the place, while you were in it, demanded the same position from you.

The kind of response LaVA reaped, primarily underlined the absence of institutional framework to provide a site of such a wide-ranging contemporary knowledge. Then, it also provided some answers for a more responsible attitude to knowledge, atleast under laboratory conditions.

LaVA was a utopian space that chose to remain un-institutional. It happily dealt away with the institutional assumptions of perpetual existence. Instead, it disappeared when everybody wanted to visit it once again! Presicely by its ephemerality, LaVA attained the heights of a work of art. It raised spirits, it made you dream, it helped you think, but it refused the notion of serving you and being useful to you.

- Abhijeet Tamhane.

Some Notes on Political Art

Some Notes on Political Art
by "Caoimhghin O Croidheain" caoimhghin@yahoo.com
...
What is political art? What makes art political?
It is very difficult to define political art. Views onwhat makes art political can range from the idea thatall art is political (i.e. it either implicitlysupports or explicitly opposes the status quo) topointing out, for example, the obviously politicalmurals on walls around Belfast. As a way of narrowingthe former and broadening the latter I suggest here aview of political art that uses three categories:Portrayal, Promotion, or Projection.

Portrayal

In the first category ‘Portrayal’ covers art that says‘this is what happens if, is happening now or happenedin the past’. This kind of art describes events orsituations that people find themselves in as a resultof social or political structures. Any politicalperspective is implicit in the art but is alsofree-floating. For example, a painting of a white manwhipping black slaves describes a particular situationwhere the black man may say, ‘Yes! That is how we aretreated!’ yet the slave-owner may say, ‘Yes! That isthe way to treat them!’ Thus both sides can see theconfirmation of their point of view in the work ofart.

For the slaves, the ultimate effect of such art may bepositive or negative. In a positive sense it maycreate group awareness and solidarity, or, in anegative sense, it could also consolidate inertia, afeeling that nothing can be done to change thesituation. The art styles or movements of Realism,Social Realism and Naturalism could fit into thecategory of ‘Portrayal’.

Promotion

In the second category of ‘Promotion’ ways and meanstowards the resolution of the problem are presented.That is, a particular aspect of an event ishighlighted over other aspects. This aspect wouldconcentrate on the people or groups who are activelystruggling to change the situation in which they findthemselves. Thus one view of an event, that which would encourageothers or strengthen an activism already present, ispromoted over images of the event that may have theopposite effect. In this case, the politics ofrepresentation takes precedence over therepresentation of politics. Unlike ‘Portrayal’, this type of art is harder tomanipulate from an opposing point of view. Thepolitics is generally explicit and can have a positiveinspirational effect. The art styles or movements ofSocialist Realism and ‘Political Art’ (e.g. murals,banners, posters etc.) and Social Realism to a certainextent could fit into the category of ‘Promotion’.

Projection

In the third and last category ‘Projection’ refers toart that takes disparate elements and then recombinesthem to form a new image. It is an art which says‘This is what could happen or could be if ...’. Artstyles or movements such as Surrealism, collage,utopian or visionary images would fit into thiscategory. Such speculative art can have a positiveeffect of providing inspiration by suggesting ideasthat are outside one’s usual ways of thinking, and canbe implicitly or explicitly political.
For example, a picture showing the Rock of Cashel(ancient fortress in Co. Tipperary, Ireland) with aJapanese Shinkansen bullet train speeding by may be ajarring conjunction of images but suggests thepossibility of a super fast transport system inIreland. Therefore it has social and economicimplications for the Irish State which in turn makesit implicitly political.
However, like in the first category Portrayal,opposing political viewpoints can claim this image fortheir vision of the future. The same scene would beexplicitly political though, if, for example, ‘Workers of the world unite’ was written on the sideof the Shinkansen.
Thus it can be seen from the above categories that therepresentation of particular actions or the inclusionof particular types of text ties an image down to anexplicitly political perspective. The past, presentand future, with some overlapping, are also covered inthis way of seeing or defining political art.
.....
Further to my previous post on political art, anothercomment of John's struck me:
'Something about the role of the artist ininterpreting rather than documenting, perhaps?'

While I am taking photos am I documenting orinterpreting? I feel that I am doing both at the sametime. I am documenting in the sense that the image isa representation of a real event yet I am alsointerpreting in that what I choose to photograph[particular objects and places in time; particularconjunctions of objects] is highly interpretative. Howdo I separate out the two? Can I ever have control ofthe content? If a painting includes the latestMercedes car as a symbol of Ireland's burgeoningcapitalism, how do I know that a potential buyer isinterested in buying it because it represents his/herworld outlook and feelings of pride in Ireland'sburgeoning capitalism? How does the viewer know if I,the artist, included it as a type of criticism? MaybeI am not being critical but delighted with this newIreland. Does that mean that ultimately I can onlyreflect what is out there and with the passing of timethe image can be seen in its true context? [supposingof course that time is kind to my socio/politicaloutlook]. More and more I feel that I can onlyrepresent what is out there.
Everything I represent is a symbol of the now whichwill resonate differently with different people. Yetmaybe the fact of its representation makes itsexistence inescapable which is itself a form ofpolitical statement. That car did exist, and it couldonly exist because of a particular socio/politicalsituation pertaining in that society at that time.

...
I think that John is right when he says:
'But it is much harder, it seems to me,for art to be able to offer social critique - thatis, criticisms of the systems of social power andresultant structured social inequalities. Perhaps thisis due to this more important task simply being amore difficult thing to do; perhaps it is a symptom of artistic expression itself'

As an artist I have been trying to deal with thisproblem/issue for some years now. Previously I dealtwith it by offering positive images of what could bedone [as opposed to being 'agin capitalism'] byportraying people 'producing' rather than 'consuming'[eg playing music, doing traditional dance,demonstrating etc]. Then I worked on historical imagesof same and incorporated radical political leaders inIrish history. But I felt that this was becoming verylimited. I wanted to take control of the source of theimages too. It struck me that politics was all aroundme and I just had to go and find it. I went intoDublin city with my camera and looked around. Inoticed contrasts between the historical statues andtheir surroundings. I noticed Brinks vans coming outof shopping streets as shoppers went in. I saw the newAsian, African, and Russian shops on Moore streetwhich had been the domain of Irish working classstreet sellers. I took many fotos and worked on a newseries of paintings which I called 'Dublin: A City ofContrasts'. [see http://gaelart.net/].
I also tried to set out why it is hard for 'art to beable to offer social critique - that is, criticisms ofthe systems of social power and resultant structuredsocial inequalities' which I reproduce below. [It canalso be read with relevant illustrations on my artsite as well as notes on the Dublin series]

http://artcomments.blogspot.com/

The Africa Pavilion, 'Check List Luanda Pop', was an interesting exhibition of work from some artists originating from Africa - and this is my biggest criticism of it: there were pieces therein by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as well.

The New York Times: HOLLAND COTTER on DOCUMENTA

Asking Serious Questions in a Very Quiet Voice
The format of the Biennale as a profusion of national pavilions is set; Münster is medium-specific. Documenta has no such restrictions. It’s a contemporary show, but it can encompass all sorts of material. This year’s edition includes 16th-century Islamic calligraphy, Central Asian embroidery and a stuffed giraffe.
It can also take any shape a curator wants to give it. Traditionally the show has been the brainchild of a single person. There are two this time: Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, a husband-and-wife team, who issued the kind of airy-weighty preview teasers that left you ready to hate what was to come. (European “serious” often reads as pretentious to an American ear. It’s a cultural thing.)
In any case, the show sustains its reputation for being an idiosyncratic, concept-driven affair. You go to glamorous, sun-splashed Venice to party, gaze and graze; you come to gray, pleasureless Kassel to think.
Documenta 12 asks us to do a lot of thinking: about mortality, about the obsolescence of modernity, about how to live an ethical life through art. But it advances its questions quietly, and a bit too quietly: the resulting low visual impact is a major flaw. The show is every bit as socially engaged as its video-heavy 2002 predecessor, but packages its politics in a different way, in unmonumental objects and installations by undersung, not to say unknown, artists.
Many art-world insiders didn’t have a clue in advance who had been picked for the show. And after the list was announced, they basically still didn’t know, so unfamiliar were many of the names. Apart from Gerhard Richter, with a small 1977 portrait; Agnes Martin, with one painting; and the California-based John McCracken, there are relatively few Euro-American A-list figures in sight.
This is far and away the most interesting feature of Documenta 12. By being almost perversely esoteric, at least by Western market standards, it takes the usual “international” roundup in another direction, away from the New York-London-Berlin trade route. In the process it delivers something approximating a truly global array.
With around 150 participants, the roster is fairly modest in size, but its geographic range stretches from the Canadian Arctic (with the Inuit painter Annie Pootoogook) to Southeast Asia (with the Singapore-born Simryn Gill, who now lives in Australia). It includes several artists from India and more than a dozen from Africa, not all of them predictable choices, as they are this year in Venice.
Latin America and Eastern Europe, and in particular the avant-garde movements there after World War II, have a significant presence in a show that defines “contemporary” as a state of mind rather than as a date, and that at least makes a gesture toward acknowledging modernity as an intercultural phenomenon, not an export from the West.
All this is in principle good. Also good is the suggestion of an awareness that “unknown” is a relative term. The Beijing-based Conceptualist Ai Weiwei may not ring corporate bells in New York, but he is a figure of Warholian celebrity in China and a major force in that country’s neocapitalist vanguard culture.
As if to make the point that that culture will eventually be our culture too, Mr. Ai intends to take 1,001 Chinese visitors to Kassel before the show closes on Sept. 23. Antique Qing dynasty chairs (which Mr. Ai collects) are spread throughout the Aue-Pavilion, the largest of Documenta’s five exhibition sites, awaiting their arrival.
As for the pavilion itself, designed by the Paris architectural firm Lacaton & Vassal, it’s a catastrophe, and one of the main reasons the whole business comes across as visually thin and disjointed. Press materials call the chain of boxy containers the Crystal Palace. But with its undivided space, brown concrete floors and cheesy blackout curtains, it resembles a run-on storage shed, and nothing looks good in it.
A second first-time location, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, is more inviting. An 18th-century palace high on a hill over the city, it offers formal gardens, panoramic views and an enchanting approach by public tram through woods and fields. It also houses an impressive fine-art collection that makes it an apt setting for Documenta’s selection of Islamic calligraphy and miniatures.
Culturally, the presence of such works has symbolic meaning for a German city with a large Muslim immigrant population. Aesthetically, the linear patterns of the written scripts, and the stories of conflict and devotion that the miniatures tell, correspond, however indirectly, to similar elements in contemporary work.
You can see the correspondence most clearly in an installation at a third building, the Neue Galerie. There, 1,954 geometric collages inscribed with numbers by the Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) hang within sight of a delicate, grid-based painting by Agnes Martin from a decade later. And between the two comes a sublime ensemble of linear drawings from the 1970s by the Pakistan-born Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90), accompanied by a few of Ms. Mohamedi’s tiny, handwritten notebooks.
These three women lived thousands of miles apart and were almost certainly unfamiliar with one another’s work, yet they shared a visual language that had very different meanings for each. It is worth noting that more than half the artists in Documenta 12 are women, most of them alive, well and hard at work. Of the 15 artists from the United States, 11 are women, which must set some kind of record for an establishment survey. When is somebody going to write the history of modern art as the shared history it is, with men and women equal participants?
No sharing is without a political dimension. This idea is spelled right out at the Fridericianum Museum, the main Documenta site in the center of Kassel, in a magnetic installation of archival materials. They document the 1960s work of the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale and the activist collective called Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, with which she was associated.
In the same gallery are photographs of a provocative 1979 public performance piece by Sanja Ivekovic, who simulated masturbation on the balcony of her apartment in Belgrade as a parade honoring President Tito marched through the street below. (She was spotted by the police and told to cease and desist.) They are joined by images of disruptive public performances by Jiri Kovanda in Prague and intimately private ones by Ion Grigorescu in Bucharest. And in an adjoining room there are periodic live performances by 12 dancers of a 1971 Trisha Brown piece to a Grateful Dead song. Together they send a message about art as a way of performing politics, a way for the individual to engage with a larger culture and with history.
Nor is such connecting a thing of the past. The show has its share of the now fashionable kiosks inviting viewers to plop down on pillows, watch videos together and, presumably, chat about what they see. A lot less tired-looking, though, is a film project by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski that hints at what such interactions can bring.
For the film, titled “Them” and installed at the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, a youth center some distance from downtown Kassel, Mr. Zmijewski asked four groups of Polish citizens, from conservative Roman Catholics to radical Marxists, to meet and debate their political convictions in the form of a communally executed paint-and-paper mural.
The exchanges started light: an older woman paints a church; a younger one cuts through the paper to open its doors. Nice touch, everyone agrees. But pretty soon the painting, cutting and collaging grow vehement, with repeated defacings and erasings matched by verbal confrontations until, at the end, the mural is trashed. The result is an acting out of Joseph Beuys’s famous statement that “everyone is an artist” and an example of political art that further divides rather than unites people, leaving them more mutually hostile than ever.
Art and politics take more conventional forms in paintings by Juan Davila and Kerry James Marshall, two of several artists who reappear throughout the show. (Mr. McCracken, Zoe Leonard, Lee Lozano (1930-99), Gerwald Rocknenschaub and Mira Schendel are others.) Mr. Davila, born in Chile and now living in Australia, produces cryptically allegorical visions of a world at the end of its moral tether. Mr. Marshall, born in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era, addresses the complicated and compromised position of African-Americans today in pictures of direct but subtle force. In a show intent on destabilizing stardom, he comes through as a star.
There are others. The Indian collagist C. K. Rajan; the Beninese sculptor Romuald Hazoumé; Jo Spence (1932-94), documenting her furious battle with cancer; Cosima von Bonin, with her blank, goofy, templelike installation; Atul Dodiya, with an illustrated book of poetry wrapping around a room; Bela Kolarova, with jewel-like assemblages from the 1960s; Florian Pumhosl, with his spare evocation of utopian painting of the past; Charlotte Posenenske (1930-85), with sculptures shaped like heating ducts; Ms. Leonard, with dozens of photographs of shop window displays and sidewalk sales, evidence of how cultural worlds at once come together and dissolve before our eyes.
None of these artists, except for Mr. Hazoumé, with a full-size boat made of plastic fuel canisters, does large-scale, theatrically punchy work. (And some of the most elaborate pieces, like James Coleman’s film “Retake With Evidence,” were terrible.) But then, most of the art seems to have been selected precisely not to stand out, but to mesh with everything else, to subordinate individual effects to a never-quite-defined whole, to make a large show that feels like a small show, a group show that comes across as a single piece.
This curatorial ideal was distilled in an installation by Ms. Carnevale. Filling a gallery, it includes sheets of ripped plastic tacked to the wall; a salon-style hanging of photographs of found abstract patterns; videos that allude, in a funny, offhanded way, to the war in Iraq; and film projectors that project only light.
It’s obvious that something is going on here, but what? There were no instructions, no statements, no polemics, no signature style. You wouldn’t know you were looking at the work of a single artist unless you asked. Visitors wandered into the gallery, scoped out the situation and looked confused. Most moved on fairly quickly; a few settled down to see what, if anything, would happen.
That’s the dynamic of Documenta 12 as a whole. Does it work? In the end, no. The first time through, its combination of new names and forms generates an excitement of discovery. It’s so great not to see everyone you’ve seen everywhere else. On a return visit the surprise has diminished, and the installation starts to look too porous; the curatorial ideas too obvious, pedantic and confining; the work too small, private, underdone, done-before.
I felt no desire to make a third visit (though I did), particularly to the deeply depressing Crystal Palace. And yet I came away with something that lasted: an impression that I’d never seen an exhibition quite like this before, a big, important show that offered so clear an alternative to bigness, that redefined importance in so dramatic a way. That may not be nearly enough for so prestigious an event, but if you think about it, it’s a lot.

Art market hot, but nobody knows what's 'in'

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post


Want to know what kind of current art sells best? Roll the dice. Want to know what art curators like? Roll them again. In today's art world, there are as many directions as artists, and no one wants to pick among them. The market has always liked a one-of-each approach. Now everyone's bought into it.

At least that's how things look at this rare moment of stock-taking in contemporary art. For the next few months, the 52nd Venice Biennale, the world's oldest roundup of current creativity, is coinciding with the giant Documenta festival, a prestigious digest of the field that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. They're joined by the once-a-decade Sculpture Projects, a survey of public art that fills the streets and squares and oddest corners of Muenster, a medieval town a few hours north of Kassel.

In an art market that is by far the hottest ever, here's the wild range of recent work that's selling well:

$11.3 million spent on a stylish oil painting of a white canoe on a lake, by Scottish artist Peter Doig, who has been called a "quietly influential" figure. Jasper Johns is the only living artist who has ever sold for more.

$3.4 million for a giant photo of a dollar store by German artist Andreas Gursky. It is the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

$2.7 million for an installation of big spheres made of stuffed toys alongside wall-size versions of a stick-on room deodorizer, by California conceptualist Mike Kelley.

Notice the artistic principle that's governing what sells: The principle is that there's no longer any principle. The market plunks as happily for one kind of work as for its opposite.

Now look at the world's most important surveys of contemporary art this summer in Europe. Same non-principle applies.

In both buying and curating, diversification is preferred to investing deeply in one notion of what matters most in art right now. Trying to take stock of this moment in contemporary art is like doing inventory at Amazon.com: There's something for everyone, times 10 - even quite a bit that's very good - but little sense that some things matter more than others.

The art world's dominant direction is a random scattering. At the Venice Biennale, veteran curator Robert Storr has put the latest abstractions from German master Gerhard Richter near the folk-art figuration of Cheri Samba, a Congolese street artist. Both are around the corner from a huge, Japanimated video of a doll's house being flooded, which is not far from a sober installation of ephemera and photographs that document the life of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian activist and intellectual assassinated by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972.

At Documenta, curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack are giving big play to a slew of highly polished minimal sculptures by John McCracken, a 72-year-old American whose career is in revival. But the curators are equally committed, apparently, to a bevy of extra-sloppy, ugly-is-beautiful sex-themed allegories by Australian painter Juan Davila, born in Chile in 1946. You're likely to run into works by either artist sitting near a political video, a solemn black-and-white photo or even an antique Oriental rug.

People used to complain that for any work to have a chance, it had to support the narrow doctrines of the scene's most powerful arbiters. No danger of that today. The doctrines seem so meek, almost every kind of art gets equal attention. Maybe this new, noncommittal attitude is an offshoot of the strange fact that, despite all those broken auction records, no one's claiming that many of the latest pricey works will go on to matter deeply in the history of art.

Western society is bound up in the notion of consumer choice. It's as though the market's out-of-control success has made it the model that applies across the board in art.

According to old ways of thinking, the market was supposed to follow where the top end of the art world led, investing in the few artists picked out as important by experts with no money at stake. Today, it's the market that leads. It scatters its dollars here and there, then watches as the rest of us art lovers scamper to see where they have landed. Or at very least, the market watches as others imitate its scattershot approach.

Of course, any decent market is supposed to pay attention only to the price tags it can attach to things, not to the things themselves. It should be an equal-opportunity buyer and seller. What's strange about the current state of the art world is that the market's artistic laissez-faire has spread beyond the salesroom. It's as though curators, too, don't want to commit to where the market - in their case, the market for ideas - ought to be heading.

They put out a pile of varied stuff and hope to find takers for at least some part of it. Triumphant market principles - that variety is good for business; that what sells well is good - seem to take over when there are no bold artistic principles to rival them.

A tour through Documenta or the Biennale feels like a stroll in New York's crowded gallery districts. Some of the artists' names may be different. (Not for long; the galleries will soon pick up the unknowns.) But there's the same confounding range of suggestions for what should count as good.

At Documenta, for instance, curators are pushing the latest sculptures by McCracken - tall pillars or slabs, in slick lacquer or polished bronze, with the simplest of cubic geometries. But if you don't like that version of McCracken - or his 1960s pieces that the new work derives from - why not try another one?

For a little while in the 1970s McCracken made messy, brightly colored mandala paintings that reversed the fundamental principles of the glossy work he'd done before. Those are in Documenta, too, and just as well liked by its curators, apparently, as the rigorous sculptures that stand as their antithesis. Or as the work of radical Argentine conceptualist Graciela Carnevale, who invited unsuspecting art lovers to an opening in 1968, then locked them in the gallery to see how they'd break out. That moment is preserved in photographs that pop up more than once across the Kassel show.

In Venice, a video of a boy kicking a rubber skull in front of the bombed-out former headquarters of the Serbian army gets the same weight as the daily figurative doodles of a painter from Argentina, which don't seem to matter any more - or less - than the latest batch of two-tone abstractions from the brush of an 84-year-old Ellsworth Kelly. There's a kind of leveling effect that makes even the very best, most innovative work feel like just another option some artist is trying on for size. The funny thing is, this lack of focus represents a kind of trend, or at least a moment in the history of art that's different from the moments that have come before. There's an obsession with the past, given the lack of dedication to any potent view of what we need today; a new focus on good looks, given how well the market has rewarded work that doesn't even try to be profound; a last-ditch attempt, maybe, to fight the market with cerebral art that's barely even there. Yet all these feel more like the result of our confusion than promising ways out of it.



Publication date: 07-10-2007

DOING and Nothingness

Doing and nothingness

The quest for perfection, or for ‘being’ God, as Sartre argues in his seminal Being and Nothingness, is a passion of human beings, and yet they reduce Him to his external materiality. The attribution of unattributed is then a prime project, the mainstream.
‘Reading Abstract works of art’ is another such project. Do we see the ‘nothingness’ or do we react to the visual attributes that we see in the work? What is nothingness-emptyness, barrenness? Are these spatial attributes to vaccum and void, fit to be called ‘nothing’? Do we react to the Abstract or abstraction? Do we sense the presence of the absence? Or do we react to what has been done, on the canvas of paper, that we would call a work of art?
Vilas Shinde, Satish Vavare and Sheeetal Gattani make their mark in this challenged territory of meanings, readings and attributions. Each has a specific way of ‘doing’ : Sheetal works with layers of paper and paint, and the remnants of what is not in the work, make the work. Vilas Shinde, with his occasions of paint, leaves unstructured forms that refer to abundance and absence. While Satish Vavare, in his drawings that are not necessarily ‘drawn’, dwells upon emptyness and the void that fills it.
The questions of doing, for the three, must have been those of choice. Between action and patience, beween regulation and anarchy. The works be themselves because of the exercise of these choices. A viewer appreciates the choices and the impact that they have left.
Yet, the question of reading remains. To relate to the works with terms like ‘erotic’, ‘foliage’ or ‘post-industrial’ would reduce the experience to an accepted label. One may construe the ‘naming’ experience as a necessary step for the negation of the named. Thus, the ‘blossom’ or ‘foliage’ would not mean the same. Evading any tangible terms might acknowledge the transcendence of the visual, but would lead to a mute, unconsummate path of unrealized experience.
The choices are now the viewer’s. To me, the dialectic of Indian contemporary abstraction neither demands mute Vipassanas, nor verbose Aartis. Curiousity about the act doing, coupled with an understanding for truth that the painting might keep unsaid, would balance our experience. Had the truth been said out, the painting would seize to be abstract. And if it does not arise any curiousity, it lacks the delights of a painting.
– Abhijeet Tamhane

Marriage Merchandise: a post-www promo

Marriage Merchandise: a post-www promo


Sherbagh cream, Baul Balm, Taj Honey, Gateway Body Paint , Bhopal Hamam Massage Oil , Chirapunjee Mist Oil, Sindoori love… were some of the 'products' on display at Mumbai's Gallery Chemould through December. The fantastic display was a 'promotional effort' by the website, www.arrangeurownmarriage.com, the people who gave you freedom to be married and (yet) be cool!
Many said the show was fun! Perhaps they sensed the fun poked precisely at them…
Hande's show was full of subtle satire. Had it not been the slightly exaggerated, the website and the gallery 'presentation' were sure to look like a real advert.
On her website, Hande is up with the 'merchandise'
The self-implicating satire posed as if one is really selling erotic products, inviting people to share their private experiences of an arranged marriage, and thus endeavoured to support the institution of arranged marriages. What better time could it have been for this pose, that today? There was a time when arranged marriages were considered unromantic (and the arts : literature, films, theatre, supported this belief), but now when everybody knows how to 'manage' her/his life, and there is a six-sigma for every act and chicken soup for every soul, it really doesn't matter whether you have a 'love-marriage' or an 'arranged marriage', ain't it? Moreover, with the advent of WWW, and numerous 'matrimonial websites' that give a dot-com ease to find your mate, the 'self arranged' marriages are here to stay…
Hand skillfully communicated these hidden notes using PR-copywriting language. The wall texts with her works read like promo-plans first, and then at some point the reader-viewer got the exaggeration. Once the reader cracks this 'atishayokti' (exaggeration) and at times, apanhuti (cryptic allegory) code, the communication was received! The text was accompanied by sculptural, photo-based, painted, and scrapbook visuals. Of course, in the same cryptic vein as text, these works took form of 'readily-framed miniature paintings for your bedroom', ' product display', 'poster'… the visual grammar that dominates in the world that needs 'info', was subverted here to reclaim the realm of art.
Thus, on the walls, the exotically-shaped bottles supposedly containing erotic anointments (sher bagh balm et al), that would look like a product display, called for a second look when the viewer sensed they are in solid glass. The 'bottles' had no cavity, and were not bottles! Every honeymoon destination 'promo' picture (that went with the work that called the 'users' to know what natural element they belong to, according to their zodiac sign) made wicked fun of the typical photo-poses of the newly-weds in their honeymoon-trip albums. These posy images were painted over the photos. These photo-based works had some digital perversions, too. And then, they also had some purposeless 'folk-art' that was brutally reduced to embellishments.
These visual and textual subversions addressed issues that are both global and local. It surely pinpointed the longing for a life partner in a caste-and gotra-bound Indian situation, the new-found consciousness toward achieving erotic nirvana that belongs to post- www India, and the spa-savvy, ayurveda- freak culture that is (we are always told,) 'fast becoming global'.
Hande insists that her work is not complete, and her project 'arrangeurownmarriage' will go on, with more interactive features. The problem that such a satirical work would face is that those who 'interact' might lack the same purposeful reason to make fun of themselves! Otherwise, if an artist chooses who interacts and who does not, the work looses its purpose, ending up in a coterie. Let us hope Hande evades this trap.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane.

The second makeover…


In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term 'culture industry' and called it an instrument of 'enlightenment as mass deception'. They did not refer or point to India, which was a complicated case. By that time, nearly four decades after Raja Ravivarma's death, the only culture industry that would fit into Adorno-Horkheimer analysis was the litho-print industry. This industry survived and flourished mainly on the images of gods and other Hindu mythological characters. So rampant was this industry in the mid-1940s that, the term "photos of gods" was gradually being commonplace.
The "photos of gods" had, and still have their own logic, rooted in the shift from litho-print to mechanical offset. Typically, the background is blue enough, to enhance the glittery gold effect with chrome yellow and lighter shades of brown. The cyan is balanced with magentas and yellows, and black would be minimal. God, the 'subject' of these 'photos', was so revered that women would dress them up with bits of cloth, mirrors, beads and sequins. The innocent, kitsch, somewhat gaudy tasveers are a collectors' item now, and a discerning western traveler to India would typically look for gaudier gods from a street shop that sells 'photos of gods'. A society that was being stripped of its non-mechanical, craft-oriented way of production thus reclaimed the dominance of emotional response than passive consumption.
This innocent resistance gave in, and became pacified by the emergence of the emergence of film in the culture-industry scenario of India. The 'photos of gods', then, were reduced to calendar images, and goddesses would invariably look like a film-actress. The Indian masses that consumed these calendars never thought of Parvati in some 1960s calendar as an incarnation of Vaijayantimala. The realms of religion and popular medium mixed at a convenient venue of calendar, and not in the sanctum sanctorum of temples. The powers, that religion and popular media wielded, had a limited truce, wherein the iconic content in film was subjected to religion. Thus, the first overhaul, the first makeover after Ravivarma and his successors in business and art, came from films, and it did not undermine religion.
Had the Indians opted for a second overhaul in their images of gods, the way for it might have been two-fold. First, the advertising industry that has become the truest example of 'culture industry' of the day. Even the Bollywood films, in their aesthetics and technique, let alone some of its content, are influenced by the blissful path that advertising has shown. A second way might have been photoshop techniques, atleast morphing your revered elders or beloved kids in the garb of a god. The Indian society, with all its nitty-gritty of religious, social and political values, has not chosen to mend the image of its gods for a second time. The society needs its god-posters, now larger than 'photos of gods' in places stipulated for their functional uses. (Some traditional and a few creative uses, like, to prevent people from committing any 'nuisance')
In the photoshop reality of image-making that we live today, technology is smarter and easier. It can make toddlers dance; it can make gods smile at you. It can even bestow a god with your own face, or any face of your choice. The gods now can be mixed and matched. Image-making is free, while image-viewing dominates you with the values you want. While the magic of photoshop has been playing with iconic itemistations of family photographs, it has not touched the gods, icons in themselves.
Rajendra Kapse paints god-like humans, and through his morphology, creates an icon which is not a 'given' god. The gods in his oils on canvas are not 'true' gods. They can not be recognized within the parameters of Hindu mythology. Instead, the men, women and children in Kapse's 'goddy' paintings are informed by the values bestowed unto us by the realm of advertising. It is human to laugh, to grin, to greed of laddus. The pearls of enlightenment that humans achieve form Advertisements, are the power of persuasion (even Lord Krishna had less of it, when he first tried to avoid the Mahabharata war), and a seductive articulation of one's own confusions. The advertising industry has also shown the way, to many, for presenting their masculine or feminine self in a lovable fashion.
Kapse has conceived the works with titles, and the convergence leads to what a crtitic would call the dimension of sound . You feel the word in its physical utterance, and the painted image leads paraphernalia that would follow the phonetic puns. The titles like Padukanand, Selfishwar, have phonetic puns that are fun in English, Marathi or Hindi. Beyond the fun, they embed the painted image itself with a sound that seems as if, has shaped the image.The possibility of interpretative, analytical content in these titles is deliberately ruptured by vernacular wit. Here, Kapse's position confronts the classical/ traditional Indian belief-system as well as Western rigour.
It is with this localized history, that Kapse's recent body of work presents itself to the global eye.
-- Abhijeet Tamhane,
Mumbai, September 2005