A Fragile Inheritance

Front matter

Saloni Mathur

A FRAGILE

RADICAL STAKES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART

Preface

Introduction: Radical Stakes

Epilogue: Late Styles

NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

PREFACE

I still recall my first encounter with the works of art and critical writing by Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur that situate the central concerns of this study. I was a graduate student pursuing my MA in anthropology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. It was around 1999, before the internet and other communication technologies had revolutionized the way that images and information are available to people around the world. My thesis supervisor had returned from a research trip to India with a sampling of contemporary art catalogues — pamphlets, really — that she had collected from galleries, museums, and bookshops in Delhi. They were a gift; I knew nothing, except that I found them riveting and befuddling. Included were some images of paintings by Vivan Sundaram, featuring fantastical tropes in soft pastels of boats, journeys, and elusive female subjects, with titles like Arabesque and The Orientalist, which seemed to prompt a visual dialogue, however obliquely, with the writings of Edward Said. Within a year or two, I moved to New York to continue my studies as a PhD student, where for the first time I read Geeta Kapur, whose intense and discriminating prose seemed somehow to get under the skin of a painting or a sculpture and break open its vertiginous realities in a way that recrystallized its exquisite complexity just beyond the reach of what could be grasped. I struggled with the destabilizing formulations of her texts and made photocopies from journals like South Atlantic Quarterly and Third Text, along with coveted issues of the Journal of Arts and Ideas, brought to me by friends from India. I also photographed Sundaram’s images to add to my collection of 35 mm cardboard-frame slides, which I projected on the wall for class presentations or viewed on a light box, a major purchase at the time. What strikes me today is the preciousness that came with these modes of engagement at a distance; the novelty of an image or text that had traveled physically from New Delhi to the remote corners of Ontario or New York; the endless chain of questions that emerged from a thing that appeared out of its context in this way; and the slow gestation of ideas and responses that came from a sustained process of wondering over time. Somehow these conditions of reception and prolonged puzzlement and contemplation seem a far cry from the voracious appetites for consumption and modes of instantaneous access that characterize the new technologies and globalized circuits of contemporary art today.

The point is not to invoke nostalgia for an earlier, preglobalized set of networks for art but to clarify some of my own locations and investments in this study at the outset. This book does not represent an “insider” account of contemporary Indian art or the Delhi art world. Although it is my birthplace, I do not live in India or operate within the everyday conditions of art and activism that proliferate and thrive on the subcontinent today. I have nonetheless engaged with the creativity of these milieus intimately through travel, research, professional collaboration, friendships, and family ties over the course of a twodecade-long career in the North American academy. Thus, at the crucial core of this book is a heightened sensitivity toward the processes by which cultural knowledge is mediated and transmitted and the possibilities for connection in the realm of aesthetics across the dialectics of distance and proximity. My interest is in the critical procedures that open out a discourse about modernism or aesthetics emerging from a particular era and locale and make it available to outsiders across distance and time—that is, make its problems and questions available for others to inhabit in a way that transcends the parochial claims to “insider” or “outsider” status. These are the kinds of radical operations and effects that I see present in the work of Sundaram and Kapur and that lead not to a stable or settled point of arrival for the modern and contemporary art of the subcontinent but to a proliferation of difficulty, uncertainty, and untethered possibilities. Theirs is a model of cultural practice that has consistently sustained such effects over time and that has forged a project of critical reinvention in and through scrupulous attention to viil + PREFACE preexisting ideas and ways of seeing. To my mind, this is the opposite of the insatiable quest for that which is “new” in contemporary art, or the reductive search for the next big thing, which can sometimes dictate art’s institutional agendas. Instead, their intense mode of working entirely in the present while simultaneously calling up a relation to the past in order to give creative shape to the future serves to challenge such progressivist approaches to the history of art with a more profound and dissonant temporal sensibility. At the same time, this book actively resists fixing a stable or unchanging intellectual contribution or constructing a hagiography that idealizes its subjects. It is rather an attempt to articulate some of the difficulty and fragility of such a critical inheritance, to follow its lines of flexibility and diversity and to amplify its points of intellectual vitality, in ways that continue Sundaram’s and Kapur’s ongoing projects of radicality and diversification. To this end, it seeks not to offer the final word on their different contributions but to expand and alter the terms through which their practices have been understood thus far.

It would be a number of years before I would meet Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur or even realize that the artwork and texts to which I was repeatedly drawn represented the output of a married couple. While their careers are distinguished by many major individual projects, at times intersecting, they could not be defined as “collaborating” in any conventional sense in the manner of, say, Christo and Jeanne- Claude, or, to cite a more fraught model, Marina Abramović and Ulay. Nonetheless, there exists a powerful affinity in their different forms and modes of production, one that I have experienced in mostly uncanny ways. For instance, an idea in Kapur’s writing has often led me back to an artwork by Sundaram, and vice versa, but not because of explicit cues or direct references, though such connections do at other times exist. One of this book’s central propositions is that this elusive sense of affinity signals much more than the casual cross-communication of a couple who have lived and worked together in Delhi for almost five decades. It represents, rather, an integrated configuration whose disparate, yet focused, threads take the form of a shared commitment to critical consciousness at work. The result is less a coherent unity or a specific intellectual paradigm than a series of relays between dynamic, flexible points whose very shapelessness is the result of the rigorous, ongoing process that we might refer to as critical thought.

Coming to know Vivan and Geeta personally began a new phase of

PREFACE > ix engagement for me in the present century. In the past fifteen years or so, I have benefited from extended conversations with each of them, engaging with one or the other informally as well as professionally — as co-panelist, discussant, reviewer, even curator—and we have met on many occasions to view art and participate in conferences and workshops in Delhi, Mumbai, Kochi, Kassel, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Over time, this interaction has also become the basis for a valued intellectual friendship. But the primary challenge of this book is not merely the issue of bias or perspective, a concern that my training in anthropology, with its embrace of “situated knowledges” over false histories of presumed objectivity, has helped assuage. It is related to the fact that my subjects, now in their mid-seventies, are both more active than ever before, producing new artwork and writing with seemingly unstoppable levels of energy and intensity, which seem to complicate, revisit, and challenge previous projects, forcefully resisting the kind of circumscription or summation one might be tempted to connect to an undertaking of this sort.

Sundaram’s art is, for instance, almost unretrospective-izable. Its multifarious, at times ephemeral, performative, and site-specific forms, which the artist has repeatedly dismantled and reinvented to new ends, resists being physically collected and displayed as a single totality in the format of a conventional retrospective survey.’ Kapur’s writing, represented by an almost uncountable number of essays, is similarly difficult to harness as a whole in any non-reductive way. Its incisive essay format and interventionist spirit represent a way of knowing based in angled perspectives and contingent truth-claims, and its self-conscious dismantling of earlier ideas and analogous reinvention of old concepts to new ends also refuses arrival or summation. In both cases, every new project brings less an accumulation and more a distillation of core principles and long-standing concerns. I have come to understand this as a productive tension, but the reader who seeks a more conventional narrative—a start-to-finish artistic biography or a comprehensive account of five decades of work—will no doubt be disappointed.

To approach a cultural practice not as the mere collection or accumulation of knowledge but as an active and ongoing process of creative, intellectual activity that paradoxically deconstructs such a premise — this requires a method of understanding that is necessarily selective and alert to paradigmatic instances of this process. The critic Craig Owens once described the act of engagement with a critical art practice

X + PREFACE as an effort to “write alongside” rather than write about.” Said characterized it as a question of “adjacency,” how an author “stands to the side of, next to, or between” other works, rather than in a direct relation of primordial descent.? Kapur has similarly described her own reflexive stance as being “side-by-side” with contemporary artists in India. Studying the way in which Kapur has turned a lifetime of proximity to the visual arts into focused and uncompromising intellectual work, without forsaking the passion, beauty, and pleasure of the aesthetic sphere and its human relations, has been—in a word— inspirational. As a scholar, it has helped me learn, for instance, how to better comprehend the shape of my investments, how to find and formulate meaningful questions, and how to strive for the integrity of truthful pursuits.

Some may object that in highlighting the output of two individuals I have hitched my horse to a single cart, so to speak; that my sustained attention to these careers is not representative of the diversity of aesthetic practice in the Indian subcontinent, or worse, that it serves to eclipse the wide heterogeneity of forms in dispersed and regional, especially non-Delhi, locations. They may be partially right. Today, there are countless artists, writers, scholars, and curators addressing the broader tapestry of creative energy in modern and contemporary South Asian art, allowing a more synthetic picture of artists and activities across the span of multiple decades beyond the known historical art centers of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Baroda, to include such places as Bangalore, Kerala, Karachi, Lahore, Dhaka, Jaffna, and Colombo, to name but a few. These accounts provide invaluable overviews and strengthen the narratives for art history through research that makes the density and discrepant complexity of the aesthetic sphere visible in new ways. My study, by contrast, constructs an account of an exemplary practice and opts for sustained contemplation of selective works as a point of entry into broader concerns. It responds, in part, to the increasing preoccupation with the rise ofa globalized art world and the suspect category of “global contemporary art,” a broad, generally ahistorical banner under which the great difficulties of entire societies, their particularities and paradoxical trajectories, are too often superficially treated or wholly subsumed. It does so by favoring the methodology of a deep inquiry, by presenting large ideas in conjunction with microanalyses, and by reckoning with the relationships between knowledge and power and one’s personal investments in an intellectual field.

Kapur and Sundaram have been aware of my project for some time,

PREFACE >» Xi variously bemused, flattered, irritated, or confused by the peculiar directions my interests have taken. They are somehow constantly immersed in a major undertaking and perpetually in motion between one ambitious endeavor and the next; suffice it to say, my own study did not generally make their daily priority list. Nonetheless, our open-ended discussions about aspects of this book have been extremely valuable, leading more often than not to substantive intellectual questions and concerns. Roland Barthes famously stated that the meaning of a cultural text lay as much in its destination as in its origin, a proposition that, to my mind, opens up the fraught circuits of risk and responsibility attached to any act of earnest interpretation. That Vivan and Geeta have long embraced this Barthesian principle of multiplicity within the discursive field, seeking interpretive complexity and fragmentation over authorial coherence imposed from above, has been a major motivating factor in this journey. I wish to thank them here for supporting this effort to construct a destination of sorts, for permitting its earlier, more stumbling variations, and for indulging me in this long-term project with its possible excesses of scrutiny and the gaze. Ultimately, this book is about working through an ongoing intellectual debt. It is thus part of an unfinished process that will undoubtedly continue beyond the form taken here.

In addition, I wish to acknowledge the support of several scholarly institutions that fueled the research and writing of this manuscript. I benefited from three different residential fellowships—at the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute—which provided resources, friendships, and time to think and write within a dynamic community of scholars. I am similarly indebted to the accomplished team at the Asia Art Archive, the nonprofit arts organization based in Hong Kong, who digitized the personal archive of Sundaram and Kapur as part of their vast archiving and educational activities concerned with modern and contemporary art from Asia. Their resources, which are publicly available online, have been a great asset to this researcher, offering not merely information but also self-reflexive engagements that alter ways of seeing. As well, thanks are due to the Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation fora generous arts writer’s grant in the book category and to the Academic Senate, the Dean of Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Women at my home institution, UCLA, for providing funds related to this publication. I am also grateful to the Fowler Museum at UCLA xii + PREFACE for hosting a solo exhibition by Sundaram, co-curated by myself and Miwon Kwon, titled Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem, in the spring of 2015. Geeta and Vivan came to Los Angeles for ten days to oversee the installation and to participate in various programs, including a seminar, a public lecture, and an artist talk. The success of these events and the reception by the university community were immensely gratifying, the result of almost three years of work.

This project has had such a long period of gestation that there are dozens and dozens of people—friends, colleagues, and interlocutors, alas, too many to name—based in India, Pakistan, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Europe, South Korea, and Great Britain, who have contributed in one way or another over the years. Thank you to all of you and to the revolution of email, FaceTime, and Skype that has enabled our extended contact and exchange. I am especially grateful to Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for his incomparable sensitivity toward this project. I also wish to thank my hosts and audiences at the following institutions (in alphabetical order), where I have presented aspects of this study over a period of many years: the Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), Columbia University, Cornell University, the Courtauld Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Karachi University, the Museum of Modern Art (Ny), the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the New Europe College, Bucharest, Northwestern University, the University of the Arts London’s TrAIN Center, the University of Chicago, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Southern California, and the University of Sydney, Australia.

Lastly, and most immeasurably, I wish to thank my mother, Veena, and my sisters, Punam and Bindu, who offer sustenance in every aspect of my life. This book is dedicated with all my love to Aamir and our son, Jalal, who surround me with daily nourishment and affection, and who have generously endured, embraced, and shared in every step of this meaningful journey.

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