Review: Alwar Subramanium (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
The thesis puts forward close readings of Amar Kanwar's essay film A Season Outside (1997) and the multiscreen installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007) to explore how an ethicalpolitical spectatorial mode is produced in the two documentary-based artworks. The applied understanding of an ethical-political mode is derived from what Okwui Enwezor claims is a new articulation of the ethical-political in contemporary art, located in the encounter between the artwork and the spectator as an increased sensitivity to the other, related to human rights, biopolitics and the consequences of globalization. The readings of the two artworks suggest that a particular "community of sense" is produced by means of an allegorical layering of polysemic narrative structures that interlace different texts of communalism, colonialism and nationalism from the Indian subcontinent. As evoked by Jacques Rancière, a "community of sense" designates the sensory fabric that binds human beings together, thinking politics as a sharing of the sensible. The narrative techniques also draw on features of Indian narrative traditions incorporated into new art history in India, and aspects of storytelling, as viewed by Walter Benjamin. The readings propose that the image-word operations at play and a heterogeneous exchange of media approaches the allegorical qualities and paratactic logics in what Rancière terms "the great parataxis" as an organizing principle with renewed political force within the aesthetical regime. The result is a kind of community of sense where the spectator as a site of meaning-making is woven into the composition of the work to create emancipation and a politics of plurals. The textual perspective offers a different approach than previous research history regarding the artist, suggesting that a narrative approach opens the image-word relations onto another political function. The textual optics enables an understanding of how the sense community of the artwork is construed, but does not access questions of embodied perception and affect in screen spectatorship. The thesis was a part of the master's program of the research program CULCOM (Cultural complexity in the new Norway), University of Oslo. If the world is a book of words and images, it comes with an ethics of transnational reading, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The book is also a vast network of signs, and as we go along we produce text even as we are written in text not of our own making. In this fabric we are together building sense communities, attesting to the political importance of being sensed. This text of course would not have been possible without the articulations of the others. My deep gratitude goes to all those who have helped me on the way: To Amar Kanwar who shared his time and most generously let me sit watching for days in a studio in Saket, New Delhi; to Sanjay, who came by with a smile and a cup of tea; to Shomo, Ravi and Dorothea, Gargi, Julie and all the others who enlightened my restricted competence in India, as anywhere else; to Levin, who provided the shelter; to Ragnhild and Finn, who helped to keep befuddlement at bay; to dear family and friends in extended family; to Tom, who always believed in me; and to those who tried to talk me out of the venture-we all belong to the same universe of learning. The faults, however, are mine alone and, as always, serve to provide yet another possibility of understanding. CULCOM provided the grant and the abundant interdisciplinary support to set off, and IFIKK also kindly contributed to the travels of this text, between Oslo, Paris and New Delhi. Gallery Marian Goodman shared essential research material, and the images. Holly T. Monteith helped with proofreading. At the Humboldt, the late David Craven taught me a lesson or two about Hans Haacke with a most generous intellectual spirit that lives on. As a lecturer and supervisor, Ina Blom's sharp eye and thinking have been a strong presence in my attempts to access the field of art history from the present. Elisabeth Eide, as in a previous passage to Delhi, reminded me to keep the necessary grounding in political realities. Thank you for your poetic minds in the academic world. My profound thanks go to my parents, who, with unwavering support, took care of my daughter Tyra in the best of ways, which made it possible to navigate the work through its final stage.
Prajakta Palav’s practice comprises accomplished paintings, as well as empathetic community art interventions. This essay concentrates on the paintings, as well as residues and ephemera emerging from her dialogue with the people of Konkan Nagar, in Bombay’s eastern suburb of Bhandup. While it is plausible to gloss Palav’s practice by reference to Situationist or ‘relational aesthetics’, I would like to think that the more proximate and sustaining affinity lies not with readymade art-historical rubrics, but with impulses in the artist’s local ethos. I am thinking, here, of her spiritual affinity with the literature of the Bhakti saint poets and, especially in the case of this project, with the work of the 20th-century saint and reformer Gadge Maharaj, who travelled across the villages of Maharashtra advocating cleanliness; in Gandhian fashion, he cleaned dirty drains himself, setting an example for his followers. This essay of mine must be read alongside chapter 5, ‘Devolution: The Artist-Citizen Redistributes her Privileges’ (pp. 245-256) in my book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Bombay: The Guild Art Gallery, 2016), where I have engaged with this question of the readymade art-historical template versus the organically drafted regional itinerary. In The Thirteenth Place, I question the default use of a generic discourse on collaborative art, and instead, ground the evolving practices of Navjot and her artist colleagues, Rajkumar and Shantibai in Bastar, in region-specific circumstances and choices. *
Creative Reflections in Contemporary Indian Art Virtually Visible: Aesthetics and Political
• "The theory of thought is like painting," says Gilles Deleuze in the book "Difference and Repetition." 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari proposed the aesthetic theory to approach creative works like paintings and sculptures. Deleuze considers aesthetics in two irreducible domains. One is the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience. Another is the theory of beautiful as the reflection of real experience. Deleuze thinks that art is a primordial event of natural forms. The art structures don't represent the socio-political aesthetics as Deleuze has said, "representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference" 2. Art is perceived as a sensation. The sensation has three planes, "percept, affect and concept". Brain transforms a work of art into a "virtually visible" state. The effect of it results in an actual chaos. As Deleuze has said, the work resembles nothing, mimics nothing. It must 'subsist by itself', on its own, without pointing or referring back to the world outside it, which it would reflect, or to a subject which it would express. The creative work is worth on its own, it is by the essence that which stands right, that which stands: it is a 'monument' 3. Whatever be the model of expression, art stands on its own without any justification. The sensation and the effect caused by the art are preserved in them. The material that the art speaks about, when passed completely in the sensation or percept or affect, it is realised. The art and the sensation start coexisting and the relationship becomes eternal. "This eternal existence becomes a being of sensation, an autonomous compound, an affect and a percept. Affect becomes coloured, metal or stony, it engages everything in a becoming-colour or a becoming-sound, in a becoming-affect." 4 In this paper, I am going to throw light on some South Indian Artists' works. I am concerned about Deleuze's aesthetic philosophy in the space of those works and the political identity that these works generate. The art-aesthetics-politics relationship in contemporary Indian art scene needs to be addressed in terms of Deleuze's philosophy. The geographical and historical situation has to be read through Deleuze and Guattari's framework of thought. Because the theory of thought is like painting.
Contemporary Art of India--Fragments of India: With Thought, Feeling, and Emotion
The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, 2011
Fragments of India: With Thought, Feeling, and Emotion fluidity of culture and the impossibility of containing culture within a boundary-either the boundary of the human form or the geographical boundary of a nation. Banerjee's work also engages a desire to construct a productive intervention for negotiating reality through the imagination, which finds its way into the use value of artistic production.
Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.
Art and Presence: Llubljana, May 2016
The discipline of aesthetics has proposed different ideas about the uniqueness or autonomy of art, or its separation from other domains of human activity. And many of these ideas have focused on how art does this by undermining stable and habitual systems of meaning. But rather less attention has been given to another difference about art; how it is a communicative system that operates through perception and perceptual media. Using a range of examples drawn from both historical and contemporary art, including the recent recreation of the Roman arch from Palmyra, this talk will examine how art, as well as generating and subverting meaning, also matters to us in more fundamental ways. This will frame a discussion of how art can affect us viscerally and somatically, how it relates to our sense of temporal orientation in the world, and how it involves our intersubjective relation not only to others within this world, but to our historical predecessors as well. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how these perceptual foundations of art and its reception matter more than ever in an increasingly globalized and mediatized world.
Foreword to Janeita Singh's book F. N. Souza, the Archetypal Artist (Neogi Books, 2024)
After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 40s, with the imminent approach of independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighboring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, two Muslims and a Dalit. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of "the outside" in a millenia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted though that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively in three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.
Pixel, Gesture, Sculpt: Space and Perspective in Rashid Rana's Photomosaics
Bowdoin Journal of Art, 2021
Rashid Rana (b. 1968, Lahore; lives and works in Lahore) uses pixels as his brushstroke. His Transliteration (2011–) and Language (2010–) series recreate western artworks by carving paintings into squares and manipulating these fragments to forge a new, unified image. The larger unity of the recast artwork remains at tension with the smaller pixelized snapshots making up the whole’s component parts. This paper will argue that, through his fracturing of space, language, and disciplines, Rana reconsiders the linear history of art and definitions of modernism espoused by key figures in the field, from Johann Winckelmann (b. 1717, Stendal, Germany; d. 1768, Trieste, Italy) to Clement Greenberg (b. 1909, New York; d. 1994, New York). In so doing, Rana challenges how we come to view works of art: his pixelation and juxtaposition of perspectives confront the flattened, global narratives that have historically amassed around discussions of “non-western” art.
Contemporary Indian Art and the 'Semiotic Eye': Issues and Perspectives
IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review, 2014
This century has presented the arts to the scrutiny and experimentation of vastly divergent conceptual frameworks amongst artists, aestheticians, theoreticians and philosophical works. 1 All of these relate to societies, relations within it and how art as a symbol exists amidst it all in a political sense. This has been an outcome of Art theory shifting towards semiotics, cultural theory and critical theory in the humanities since the late 1970s. These developments led to some thinking about the arts. As Carrier (2002, p. 46) states: Traditional critics were connoisseurs. Gifted with an eye, good at detecting forgeries, experts in Ming dynasty scrolls, baroque drawings or Abstract expressionist paintings guided novice collectors. So long as an artistic tradition is essentially stable, connoisseurs provide good guidance. But when new, non-traditional criteria for evaluation are demanded, philosophic art critics are required. Only a theorist can explain why a Duchamp's ready-made's, Rauschenberg's 1950's monochromes, or the American conceptual art and earth art of the 1960s are art or how these artifacts should be judged.