Navjot Altaf: Holding the Ground, Critics on Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 19Th July 2010

This text is an unedited draft on the basis of which the speaker delivered a seminar, talk or lecture at the venue(s) and event(s) cited below. The title and content of each presentation varied in response to the context. There is a slide-show below that accompanies this document. If the text has been worked upon and published in the form of an essay, details about the version(s) and publication(s) are included in the section pertaining to Geeta Kapur’s published texts. Venue Lecture: Navjot Altaf: Holding the Ground, Critics on Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 19th July 2010 NAVJOT ALTAF: HOLDING THE GROUND Her exhibitions: With Altaf in schools aetc. Links, Modes of Parallel Practice, Sculptures, BASTAR Three Halves, Dis-placed Self, Between Memory and History, Lacuna, Mumbai Meri Jaan, Water Weaving, Jagar , Various pedagogic workshops all over the world Catch Mumbai- New York photo project, Khoj: Modinagar, Khirkee scooter rickshaws, Public art Barkhamba Rd 2008 Touch, Gandhi Contents 1 Introduction (art history, projects, pedagogy, praxis. 2. On Representation ‘People’: in lieu of the (Indian) nation; displaced representation. 3. Anthropology/Locality: dialogic models 1 4. Feminist art practice: notation/abstraction 5. Metropolitan ‘communities’ /communal violence 6. Speech, Silence, Erasure 7. Global Nomadism Introduction Navjot is one of the very few artists in India who insists on the particapatory aspect of her work. This is an ideological choice that inscribes her in a distinct stream of art discourse and practice played out worldwide. Navjot’s trajectory links with precedents in Indian art in that several generations of artists have privileged locality, community, and an art-language based on material processes. Developing an empathetic (broadly) ethnographic discourse around living communities withinm but also ‘outside’m the nation-space, these artists’ work is premised (1) on the sharing of resources and terminologies between art and artisanal ‘traditions’ (Shantinketan, K G Subramayan); (2) with bringing subaltern art-making conventions face to face with an historically articulated modernity so as to see these as viably contemporaneous. (Meera Mukherjee) An even more ideological approach treats the contemporariety of historically wronged communities not only as proof of survival, but as a complementary/ contestatory quizzing of an over-determining (western/modernist) aesthetic, that must be shown to be such through expositional means—museum collections/exhibition, texts, and polemic. (J Swaminathan). (4) This field has been excavated in numerous exhibitions juxtaposing/imbrication contemporary metropolitan art and contemporary ‘folk and triabal’ art. Shown especially in international Festivals and Museum (India Songs, Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in mid-1990; NEW INDIAN ART: home-street-shrine-bazaar-museum, Manchester Art Gallery, 2002; Edge of Desire, 2005-06, Asia Society, New York--widely 2 toured across continents, including Mexico.). The field has been systemisized through a disciplined formatting of anthropology and curatorship by Jyotindra Jain during his years at the Craft Museum in Delhi—an expertise that has refigured in curatorial terms in more recent exhibitions: Other Masters of India: Contemporary creations of the Adivasis, at The musee du quai Branly, Paris, 2010 i where, contemporaraniety is claimed through a politics of anthropology rather than formal and metaphysical grounds. Edge of Desire, an Asia Society inititave, shown across continents, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Asia Society and The Queens Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2005-2006; Navjot’s participatory ethics places her with her Indian precedents and, simultaneously (and somewhat uniquely) with contemporary western art/discourse, that develops out of a Marxist critique of the culture industry (Adorno), of consumerist spectacles (Guy de Bord, 1960s, whose thesis influences Fluxus), and the consequent reification of art within/ by the designated institutions (articulated by conceptual art and institutional critque, 1980-90s). One strain of this criticality, develops an affirmative mode by engaging with locality and site, situation and participation in order to build possible ‘communities’. In the experimental, transitivity is favoured above stability; means and ends are believed to be continuous; the artist makes explicit reference to materials and modes of production, but also pays attention to the relations of production and thereby postulates a living sociality. At its further end, it holds the ambition to address a public in the sense of a ‘people’ turned into individuated interlocutors through the (hypothetically enhanced) democratization of the public sphere, so that creative practice remains open, transparent, vulnerable, and praxis is a shared ‘resolution’ as also something of a paradoxical outcome. It is also of course true that very forms and meaning of the community/ collective as being politically coherent has changed to virtual, transitive connectivities engendered via mediatic networks where the political is disbursed and diffuse and even also hypothetical—and the model here is that of the ‘commons’.ii Not an ideologue in the more speculative sense, Navjot loops herself into a process- based art practice that springs up in different part of the world —from Brazil to Italy—in the radical 60s; she then marks out the specific trajectory of 1970s feminism where conceptual and dialogic practices are emphasized, as is the virtue of supportive collectivities over established institutions. When the participatory paradigm changes in accordance with global 3 (technological and economic-cultural) networks, Navjot is positioned at the threshold. Not privileging the concept of deterritorialized (global) geography, Navjot attributes only so much weight to transcultural exchange; she foregrounds, instead, actual traversal across metropolitan-rural contexts in India. Navjot’s choice of frames can be summed up thus:: ethnographic encounter; interactive art in the public space and a consequent democratization; along with a form of self-implicating interlocution/ participation that qualifies the artist to be a voice within the public sphere. In this role, Navjot can be said to destabilize the somewhat fixed identity of ‘the modern artist’ in India, as also the neo-liberal persona of younger, global artists shaped by the art market. A good part of her practice is a form of pedagogy around the problematic of the (artist) self and (cultural) other; it takes the shape of projects connecting very different life- worlds through conscientiously constructed dialogic situations. Facing the contradictions posed by situational compulsions, authorial command and social praxis, Navjot rests her case with an ethics of interactivity that continues raising doubts, courting failure -- and persevering. On Representation Given Navjot’s sustained search for a language of communication in an expanded field of the social, and her related sense of responsible politics, I want to play between the two meanings of the term, representation: as resemblance, mimesis, potentiality; and as a form of democratic advocacy, opening up questions of representation of/by/how. Etc. As an art student and artist in Bombay in the 1970s, Navjot Altaf affiliated herself to the left student movement and thence to Marxism (thru her artist-husband, Altaf: both were members of an independent Left organization, Proyom, in 1970s Bombay). This meant, programmed representational practices within an ideological frame held in place over a century under the banner of realism. In a major industrial city like Bombay, the proletariat remains, according to fixed norms of progress, both content and addressee of realism. 4 Realism is frequently conjoined with expressionism where the artist’s subjectivity, charged with anguish, finds a rhetoric for the social malaise. A succession of artists in the 1940s ( Ramkinkar Baij, then Zainul Abedin, Chittaprasad, Somnath Hore) offer a personalizedprogressive representational mode aligned to the Left, but the agenda to always renew the critical language of representation— subsides and allows a more existential expressionism to occupy center-stage. In the 1970s, a renewed engagement with the social develops in Baroda and Bombay into what will become a fully articulated position in the influential 1981 exhibition, Place for People (composed of painters, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Jogen Chowdhury, and I, Geeta Kapur, as the critic-author of the catalogue). At this juncture, the realist/expressionist language takes a decidedly narrative turn; and political angst with its related heroism is calibrated into a range of concerns that focus on class, community and the everyday—with, however, the portrayal of commonplace lives lit with fantasy, desire and outright eccentricity in the inimitable language of Bhupen Khakhar. The youngest participant in the Place for People configuration, doctor-painter Sudhir Patwardhan, soon becomes the most steadfast artist of the realist genre in India. Working his way beyond identifactory representation, Patwardhan attempts, in images and discourse, a reflexive (self) alienation, so as to better re-present or, rather, regard the proletarian subject in his/her difficult negotiation with the

Load more