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Research paper thumbnail of Extinct? —An Art Intervention by Ravi Agarwal in Delhi

Art Journal, 2018

During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History w... more During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History were directed around specimens of the country’s flora, fauna, and mineral wealth, to a single aging glass booth containing two dusty figures. Here, onlookers were presented with the “readymade” display of taxidermied vultures that were posed in the process of ripping the last fragments of flesh from a deer in front of a pasty desert diorama. Ravi Agarwal, the artist and environmental activist responsible for this “readymade” entitled his piece “Extinct?”. This paper will examine both Agarwal’s art intervention in the Natural History Museum as well as its accompanying “winged” installation that was situated in the nearby Mandi House roundabout. Broadly speaking, I will argue that Agarwal’s work generates its meaning by placing into mocking conflict three different time periods within modern Indian history – the colonial era, the national era, and the era of globalization. In this respect I will trace how, through his employment of the taxidermied vultures, Agarwal sets the deliberate policies of environmental exploitation and degradation put in place by the British during colonialism against the catastrophic results of the current neo-liberal practices. Here, special attention will be focused on the near mass extinction of vultures within India today. I will then continue by shifting my discussion to the phenomenon of India’s movement of “bourgeois environmentalism” and how it relates to, and frames, the reception of both the 48 Degrees Exhibition and Agarwal’s work. My analysis will also approach Agarwal’s art from several critical perspectives. On the one hand, I will argue that his use of the figure of the vulture, framed within the context of environmental catastrophe, represents an explicit (Benjamin-like) attempt to problematize both modernity and the concept of progress. Somewhat more diffusely, I will follow the motif of “living substance,” or otherwise put “flesh,” as it manifests within Agarwal’s art in the guise of taxidermy. Finally, Agarwal’s work will also be considered in light of several pieces from the environmentally focused practice of the American artist Mark Dion. This paper is also available through Art Journal - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2018.1495531?journalCode=rcaj20

Research paper thumbnail of Extinct? - An Art Intervention by Ravi Agarwal in Delhi

Art Journal , 2018

During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History w... more During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History were directed around specimens of the country’s flora, fauna, and mineral wealth, to a single aging glass booth containing two dusty figures. Here, onlookers were presented with the “readymade” display of taxidermied vultures that were posed in the process of ripping the last fragments of flesh from a deer in front of a pasty desert diorama. Ravi Agarwal, the artist and environmental activist responsible for this “readymade” entitled his piece “Extinct?”. This paper will examine both Agarwal’s art intervention in the Natural History Museum as well as its accompanying “winged” installation that was situated in the nearby Mandi House roundabout. Broadly speaking, I will argue that Agarwal’s work generates its meaning by placing into mocking conflict three different time periods within modern Indian history – the colonial era, the national era, and the era of globalization. In this respect I will trace how, through his employment of the taxidermied vultures, Agarwal sets the deliberate policies of environmental exploitation and degradation put in place by the British during colonialism against the catastrophic results of the current neo-liberal practices. Here, special attention will be focused on the near mass extinction of vultures within India today. I will then continue by shifting my discussion to the phenomenon of India’s movement of “bourgeois environmentalism” and how it relates to, and frames, the reception of both the 48 Degrees Exhibition and Agarwal’s work. My analysis will also approach Agarwal’s art from several critical perspectives. On the one hand, I will argue that his use of the figure of the vulture, framed within the context of environmental catastrophe, represents an explicit (Benjamin-like) attempt to problematize both modernity and the concept of progress. Somewhat more diffusely, I will follow the motif of “living substance,” or otherwise put “flesh,” as it manifests within Agarwal’s art in the guise of taxidermy. Finally, Agarwal’s work will also be considered in light of several pieces from the environmentally focused practice of the American artist Mark Dion. Paper is available through Art Journal - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2018.1495531?journalCode=rcaj20

Research paper thumbnail of Paul Klee: Protected Children, Broken Puppets and the Problematization of Modernism

Dolls and Puppets as Artistic and Cultural Phenomena (19th and 21st Centuries), 2016

The Swiss/German painter Paul Klee had a long history of affinity for the art of children. As the... more The Swiss/German painter Paul Klee had a long history of affinity for the art of children. As the scholar O. K. Werchmeister notes, it is perhaps “one of the most salient features in the artist’s work.” Whether it was through his deliberate use of a naïve, awkward, and childlike style, or through the depiction of games, animals, and toys within his subject matter, much that appears within Paul Klee’s work is clearly centered within the realm of children’s art. In fact, one of the seminal child-related motifs found within Klee’s images is that of puppets and puppetry. This paper examines a particular moment with respect to Klee’s depiction of puppets. Specifically, it considers a series of pen and paper drawings Klee produced in 1938 in which the theme of the “unstrung” puppet is deployed by the artist as a political and social metaphor. In addition to the analysis of these drawings, the paper also considers several important paintings produced by Klee during this same time period - Outbreak of Fear III and A Woman for the Gods - which I argued continued the development of the fractured puppet motif. In the mid 1930’s Klee was diagnosed as suffering from scleroderma, and would subsequently die from myocarditis in June of 1940. Previous art historical scholarship has sought to interpret many of the images produced by Klee during this time, including the aforementioned drawings and paintings, as personal statements by the artist about his own impending mortality. However, I argue that these pictures were a direct response by Klee to Nazi violence. Paul Klee had left Germany following Hitler’s rise to power. His work was vilified as “degenerate art” by the Nazis at the 1937 entartete Kunst exhibition, and hundreds of his paintings and drawings were seized. It was during this exact time period that the German fascists initiated what would become a new trend in warfare - the aerial bombing of civilians. On April 26th of that same year, the Nazi Condor Legion undertook the terror-bombing of Guernica in support of Franco’s forces. Seen as a response to this carnage, Klee’s “unstrung” puppet images can be understood as an attempt by the artist to overlay the idea of modernist abstraction with the human destruction of war. In effect, Klee’s broken puppets ask: is this severed head, scattered hand, and broken body an evocation of the abstract modernist dynamism of the human form? Or, are we looking at the crushing result of an aerial bombing? I show that, through the deployment of these late 1930’s puppet images, Klee reaches the point at which modernist aesthetics, and notions of the beautiful in art are themselves problematized by the events of history.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Reception of Photography: Between Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin

The Renaissance of Roland Barthes special issue - The Conversant, 2014

In November of 1977, a French translation of Walter Benjamin’s, Little History of Photography was... more In November of 1977, a French translation of Walter Benjamin’s, Little History of Photography was included in a special issue of the prominent Parisian magazine, Nouvel Observateur. Re-titled Les analphabetes de l’avenir, the essay was only the second translation of Benjamin’s Kleine Geschichte der Photographie to appear in French, with the original 1931 German version having been published in the Berlin periodical Die literarische Welt during the last years of the Weimar Republic. In the late spring of 1979, roughly a year and a half after the appearance of Benjamin’s essay in Nouvel Observateur, Roland Barthes completed a manuscript subsequently entitled La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, which delineated his own critical approach to the medium of photography. An English translation of Barthes’ text was subsequently published in 1981 under the title Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. When comparing Camera Lucida with this 1977 special issue, one is immediately struck by the fact that Barthes’s short book, which itself contains only twenty-five images, took six of its photographs directly from the pages of Nouvel Observateur. Recent scholarship has highlighted a number of other correspondences between the two works. However, these observations aside, there has been little attempt in the literature to follow the development, alteration, or continuity of Benjamin’s ideas within Barthes’ analysis of photography. Accordingly, this essay examines the ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s critical approach to the medium have influenced and shaped Barthes’ text.

Research paper thumbnail of Extinct? —An Art Intervention by Ravi Agarwal in Delhi

Art Journal, 2018

During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History w... more During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History were directed around specimens of the country’s flora, fauna, and mineral wealth, to a single aging glass booth containing two dusty figures. Here, onlookers were presented with the “readymade” display of taxidermied vultures that were posed in the process of ripping the last fragments of flesh from a deer in front of a pasty desert diorama. Ravi Agarwal, the artist and environmental activist responsible for this “readymade” entitled his piece “Extinct?”. This paper will examine both Agarwal’s art intervention in the Natural History Museum as well as its accompanying “winged” installation that was situated in the nearby Mandi House roundabout. Broadly speaking, I will argue that Agarwal’s work generates its meaning by placing into mocking conflict three different time periods within modern Indian history – the colonial era, the national era, and the era of globalization. In this respect I will trace how, through his employment of the taxidermied vultures, Agarwal sets the deliberate policies of environmental exploitation and degradation put in place by the British during colonialism against the catastrophic results of the current neo-liberal practices. Here, special attention will be focused on the near mass extinction of vultures within India today. I will then continue by shifting my discussion to the phenomenon of India’s movement of “bourgeois environmentalism” and how it relates to, and frames, the reception of both the 48 Degrees Exhibition and Agarwal’s work. My analysis will also approach Agarwal’s art from several critical perspectives. On the one hand, I will argue that his use of the figure of the vulture, framed within the context of environmental catastrophe, represents an explicit (Benjamin-like) attempt to problematize both modernity and the concept of progress. Somewhat more diffusely, I will follow the motif of “living substance,” or otherwise put “flesh,” as it manifests within Agarwal’s art in the guise of taxidermy. Finally, Agarwal’s work will also be considered in light of several pieces from the environmentally focused practice of the American artist Mark Dion. This paper is also available through Art Journal - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2018.1495531?journalCode=rcaj20

Research paper thumbnail of Extinct? - An Art Intervention by Ravi Agarwal in Delhi

Art Journal , 2018

During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History w... more During a 2008 citywide art exhibition, visitors to the Delhi National Museum of Natural History were directed around specimens of the country’s flora, fauna, and mineral wealth, to a single aging glass booth containing two dusty figures. Here, onlookers were presented with the “readymade” display of taxidermied vultures that were posed in the process of ripping the last fragments of flesh from a deer in front of a pasty desert diorama. Ravi Agarwal, the artist and environmental activist responsible for this “readymade” entitled his piece “Extinct?”. This paper will examine both Agarwal’s art intervention in the Natural History Museum as well as its accompanying “winged” installation that was situated in the nearby Mandi House roundabout. Broadly speaking, I will argue that Agarwal’s work generates its meaning by placing into mocking conflict three different time periods within modern Indian history – the colonial era, the national era, and the era of globalization. In this respect I will trace how, through his employment of the taxidermied vultures, Agarwal sets the deliberate policies of environmental exploitation and degradation put in place by the British during colonialism against the catastrophic results of the current neo-liberal practices. Here, special attention will be focused on the near mass extinction of vultures within India today. I will then continue by shifting my discussion to the phenomenon of India’s movement of “bourgeois environmentalism” and how it relates to, and frames, the reception of both the 48 Degrees Exhibition and Agarwal’s work. My analysis will also approach Agarwal’s art from several critical perspectives. On the one hand, I will argue that his use of the figure of the vulture, framed within the context of environmental catastrophe, represents an explicit (Benjamin-like) attempt to problematize both modernity and the concept of progress. Somewhat more diffusely, I will follow the motif of “living substance,” or otherwise put “flesh,” as it manifests within Agarwal’s art in the guise of taxidermy. Finally, Agarwal’s work will also be considered in light of several pieces from the environmentally focused practice of the American artist Mark Dion. Paper is available through Art Journal - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2018.1495531?journalCode=rcaj20

Research paper thumbnail of Paul Klee: Protected Children, Broken Puppets and the Problematization of Modernism

Dolls and Puppets as Artistic and Cultural Phenomena (19th and 21st Centuries), 2016

The Swiss/German painter Paul Klee had a long history of affinity for the art of children. As the... more The Swiss/German painter Paul Klee had a long history of affinity for the art of children. As the scholar O. K. Werchmeister notes, it is perhaps “one of the most salient features in the artist’s work.” Whether it was through his deliberate use of a naïve, awkward, and childlike style, or through the depiction of games, animals, and toys within his subject matter, much that appears within Paul Klee’s work is clearly centered within the realm of children’s art. In fact, one of the seminal child-related motifs found within Klee’s images is that of puppets and puppetry. This paper examines a particular moment with respect to Klee’s depiction of puppets. Specifically, it considers a series of pen and paper drawings Klee produced in 1938 in which the theme of the “unstrung” puppet is deployed by the artist as a political and social metaphor. In addition to the analysis of these drawings, the paper also considers several important paintings produced by Klee during this same time period - Outbreak of Fear III and A Woman for the Gods - which I argued continued the development of the fractured puppet motif. In the mid 1930’s Klee was diagnosed as suffering from scleroderma, and would subsequently die from myocarditis in June of 1940. Previous art historical scholarship has sought to interpret many of the images produced by Klee during this time, including the aforementioned drawings and paintings, as personal statements by the artist about his own impending mortality. However, I argue that these pictures were a direct response by Klee to Nazi violence. Paul Klee had left Germany following Hitler’s rise to power. His work was vilified as “degenerate art” by the Nazis at the 1937 entartete Kunst exhibition, and hundreds of his paintings and drawings were seized. It was during this exact time period that the German fascists initiated what would become a new trend in warfare - the aerial bombing of civilians. On April 26th of that same year, the Nazi Condor Legion undertook the terror-bombing of Guernica in support of Franco’s forces. Seen as a response to this carnage, Klee’s “unstrung” puppet images can be understood as an attempt by the artist to overlay the idea of modernist abstraction with the human destruction of war. In effect, Klee’s broken puppets ask: is this severed head, scattered hand, and broken body an evocation of the abstract modernist dynamism of the human form? Or, are we looking at the crushing result of an aerial bombing? I show that, through the deployment of these late 1930’s puppet images, Klee reaches the point at which modernist aesthetics, and notions of the beautiful in art are themselves problematized by the events of history.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Reception of Photography: Between Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin

The Renaissance of Roland Barthes special issue - The Conversant, 2014

In November of 1977, a French translation of Walter Benjamin’s, Little History of Photography was... more In November of 1977, a French translation of Walter Benjamin’s, Little History of Photography was included in a special issue of the prominent Parisian magazine, Nouvel Observateur. Re-titled Les analphabetes de l’avenir, the essay was only the second translation of Benjamin’s Kleine Geschichte der Photographie to appear in French, with the original 1931 German version having been published in the Berlin periodical Die literarische Welt during the last years of the Weimar Republic. In the late spring of 1979, roughly a year and a half after the appearance of Benjamin’s essay in Nouvel Observateur, Roland Barthes completed a manuscript subsequently entitled La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, which delineated his own critical approach to the medium of photography. An English translation of Barthes’ text was subsequently published in 1981 under the title Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. When comparing Camera Lucida with this 1977 special issue, one is immediately struck by the fact that Barthes’s short book, which itself contains only twenty-five images, took six of its photographs directly from the pages of Nouvel Observateur. Recent scholarship has highlighted a number of other correspondences between the two works. However, these observations aside, there has been little attempt in the literature to follow the development, alteration, or continuity of Benjamin’s ideas within Barthes’ analysis of photography. Accordingly, this essay examines the ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s critical approach to the medium have influenced and shaped Barthes’ text.