Bhupen Khakhar’, in Bhupen Khakhar, in Retrospective Exh

This manuscript is the penultimate form of the essay as it appeared in the publication cited below. The text is one stage short of the final version agreed upon by the author and editor of the particular publication. If the essay was published in more than one publication, versions of the form it finally assumed are available in the books/anthologies/catalogs listed below. Publication(s): • ‘Bhupen Khakhar’, in Bhupen Khakhar, in retrospective exh. cat., Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002. Bhupen Khakhar Geeta Kapur Strategies Bhupen Khakhar’s entry into the art scene in the mid-1960s sets up radically different representational modalities in relation to the existing tendencies in twentieth-century Indian art. It also establishes a different set of equations between Indian and contemporary western art. (1) The two-sided critique, of Indian and western modernism, retrospectively readable in Khakhar’s work may be collapsed into a single event: the ‘crisis’ within modernist art by the 1960s . But today this self-referring art-historical explanation can hardly suffice. The process of deconstructing the universalist claims of modernism, underway in postwar/ mid-century rearticulations of art and politics, has been further charged by the century-long struggle against colonialism and the volatile nature of cultural alternatives that emerge thereon. The current rewriting of cultural (consequently, literature, cinema and art ) histories will show that the decisive break in modernist art practices in the 1960s requires an inscription of the unique role of artists from outside the western mainstream. These artists have questioned, from their own historical vantage point, the fact of a modernist hegemony with the aim of loosening the hold of a one-dimensional (western) internationalism. From a third world perspective, the position of alterity comes to provide the key to a multivalent understanding of 1 modernity itself. Such a perspective, tilted in favour of India, will place Khakhar among major dissenting figures of the postcolonial world, especially with regard to the problematic of representation. From the beginning of his career Khakhar took a position against the dichotomous designation of aesthetic attitudes, as for example between avantgarde and kitsch, seen as opposed values by Clement Greenberg in his famous essay of that title. (2) Khakhar preferred the Pop artists’ option of a teasing ambivalence where the avantgarde is in actual fact produced precisely in a partnership between the popular and high art codes. And he took a decisive step forward by pushing the Pop artists’ mandate for making counter-commodities, or radical fetishes, into a full-fledged genre where a new representational agency found its own narrative form. In the Indian context there is no other way but to call Khakhar a vanguard figure thumbing his nose at high art -- its modernist aesthetic and its progressive ideology. And doing this by mockery and masquerade, literally. In the early 1970s he posed for photographs in absurd roles, wrote mischievous texts in the catalogue, donned fancy dress and held fake salon parties at his exhibitions. Khakhar sought to upturn cultural assumptions of modernist art ; at the same time, in his characteristic role as ‘double agent’, he cocked a snook at the very notion of the avantgarde by adopting the ethnographic mode of the kind of nineteenth-century Indian painter who was employed by the British in India to chronicle their stay in this ethnically bewildering and, for them, bizarre country. Khakhar thus came to occupy a peculiar ‘political’ position in the decade of the 1970s. Indian art, after its modernist winnings, was seeking a new turn and Khakhar was among those who defined that turn by opening up local geographies with mock-mythic or, more properly, allegorical narratives within the space. Without actually knowing the developing discourse around nation and subject, Khakhar acted as the archetypal postcolonial artist, establishing and inverting his relationship to the twin legacies of the colonial and the modern in Indian art. 2 Sequence Khakhar came to Baroda in 1962 to become an artist.(3) He made his first breakthrough in the mid-1960s by referring to popular art in the form of calendars and posters, ‘god pictures’ and wall graffiti. He broke the barrier of taste and introduced popular language and iconography through a cut-paste job: paper collage with enamel paint, sometimes plaster-relief on board, made up rough and ready ensembles that mimicked the wayside shrines of popular gods. He familiarized himself with the Pop movement through his studies in art history and through direct contact with (among others) a young English artist, Jim Donavan, who lived in Baroda during 1963-64 and drew everyone’s attention to the spectacle of the Indian street. The 1960s were marked by the widespread anti- bourgeois phenomenon of beat culture and India was part of the itinerary, as a place conducive for rethinking conventional lifestyles and ideologies. Alan Ginsberg stopped here, and waves of hippies poured in for over a decade. India also became a site for testing the oncoming discursive shift in cultural readings that ultimately fed the postmodern phenomenon. Khakhar was scarcely aware of the actual political radicalism of the 1960s, but in his special way he was able to sniff the transgressive possibilities in the historical moment. He imbibed these within his own art practice, naïvely at first, then provocatively enough to destabilize the modernist aesthetic as it prevailed in India . Khakhar’s own peers had just launched Group 1890; it exhibited in 1963 and saw itself inaugurating something of an avantgarde movement interested in ‘primitivist’ uses of materials and surfaces, symbologies and signs. Interestingly, this group (led by the ideologue-artist, J.Swaminathan) excluded Khakhar on the grounds that he indulged in low art and poor taste. Through his reference to street art Khakhar produced a sign system for denoting, thus signifying, kitsch. He gave his version Pop art a definite local meaning (long before the term local gained currency as a binary of global). Over and above this, he 3 historicized the phenomenon by linking it to the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of stylistic hybrids in Indian art. (4) Since the 1960s, Khakhar has himself collected contemporary popular (oil and gouache) paintings, cheap ( lithographic/ oleographic ) prints and posters with subjects ranging from genre scenes to landscapes to mythological pictures, penny-icons, and film stars. In subsequent years there has been a punctual appearance of all these languages, categorized as the popular, in Khakhar’s oeuvre, making him a masterful manipulator of the ‘naive’ image for his own increasingly more subtle forms of representation. The second phase or layer in Khakhar’s work appeared in 1972 when he developed a definite representational project. Khakhar’s emphasis now shifted from an interest in the language of popular culture to the subject appropriate to that language and, slowly, to the subjectivity that can be elicited from the depiction of that subject in the language appropriate to it. In painting what he himself called his ‘trade series’ he acknowledged the influence of the Company School paintings which were often painted in series, sometimes presented as albums, and consisted of stereotyped subjects: Indian ethnic and religious ‘types’; scheduled tribes and castes including, often, untouchables; people in varied professions including categories of humble artisans at their work. Just as a depiction of the lowly members in the social hierarchy gave the Company School paintings a documentary value, Khakhar, following the naïvely ‘naturalistic’ tradition of the historical style, provided himself with a language, with a parity in skills and, analogically and pictorially, a kind of comradeship, an unsung brotherhood, of common men. The reference is to paintings like Janata Watch Reparing (1972), Factory Strike (1972), Assistant Accountant: Mr. I.M. Shah ( 972 ). But there is a paradox here. While opening up the possibility of bringing to attention the life-world of various small- time professionals, Khakhar found himself an ironical convention for presenting the man without subjectivity, without face and without the privilege of revolutionary intent and backing. Consider a seminal painting like Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers ( 1976 ). Wrapped in humour, the artist’s viewpoint smuggled in considerable compassion (Henri Rousseau in India! ) 4 but not so much as to appear partisan in any radical sense of the word. As a result of this ruse, Khakhar was quickly seen as a satirist drawing on the account of the common man himself. In retrospect, we would do better to see him as laying the ground for a counter class-culture, one rebuking the very class of viewers to whom high art is addressed and to whom at any rate it is accessible and available. Slowly a more pointed subversionist intent did surface in Khakhar’s work which undermined not only a class-based aesthetic but certain existential presuppositions about the modern artist. The subversion was widely noticed and produced considerable discomfiture among artists and viewers/ buyers alike, but it was not quite identified for what it was until his more provocative, explicitly (homo)sexual paintings came into place. I shall speak more about this later. By the mid-late 1970s and into the 80s, Khakhar was expanding the pictorial field around and beyond his subjects and constructing a genre about everyday life in a provincial city where the townscape shades into the farmer’s fields. These paintings were often long-distance panoramic views of strange beauty where the diminutive scale of the people going about their daily chores made for a kind of charade, the inspiration for which may well have come from Khakhar’s delight at seeing Bruegel in the original during his (first ever) travels in Europe in 1976 and 1979.

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