Curating in Crisis
Chintan Upadhyay and Bose Krishnamachari have been voicing their concerns about Indian curatorial practice through their art projects for the last few years. Considering their arguments, JohnyML says that Indian curatorial practice is going through a phase of crisis; a phase of identity crisis
Chintan Upadhyay |
Bose Krishnamachari |
In August 2006 noted artist Chintan Upadhyaya gave an interview to a newspaper correspondent and there the artist said that he would be collecting dead female fetuses from the local hospitals of Rajasthan and would be using them on his canvases as an attempt to invite the public attention towards the Indian selective genocide, otherwise called female foeticide. Chintan was working towards his project, ‘Tetuan Dabaa Do’ (Strangulate It) in Rajasthan as a part of the Sandarbh Project initiated by him and hence his statement in the newspaper generated a lot of interest amongst people. The same correspondent shadowed him for a long time in order to know the progress of the project. Recently the artist came out with the truth of it.
“I gave out the statement as a part of my conceptual curatorial practice. Though, the project has not taken place anywhere, and I have not collected dead foetuses and used them on my canvases, the statement was something very real. The statement generated a lot of interest amongst the public and the very issue discussed in that interview became a curatorial project in itself. For me, that particular newspaper report was the ‘actual’ project,” Chintan says.
With this statement Chintan Upadhyay raises a crucial question; what are the curatorial projects possible in our situation? Can a newspaper report or the space given by a leading national daily for publishing such an interview be the realization of a curatorial project? “Yes, it could be a curatorial project,” says Chintan. According to him, a curatorial project need not necessarily be taking place in the material space of a gallery of a site. If curatorial projects can take place in the virtual space of internet, why cannot a curatorial project take place in a newspaper space, which normally functions as a ‘happening site’ in our day to day lives, asks Chintan.
There is a lot of grain in his argument. Anna Harding, noted curator, who headed the Creative Curating Department of the Goldsmiths College, London, once stated that a curatorial project was not always meant to be executed in the actual space. “It involves a lot of thinking. To do or not to do is the question. A curator can formulate an idea, find funds for it, negotiate with various agencies and execute the project. In case, he or she cannot find funds or the fund is delayed and the project has reached almost a point of completion, it also could be called a successful curatorial project,” Harding had said.
Between the conceptual framework of a curatorial project and its actual execution, there are a lot of things that have to be dealt with. Most of the western countries have local and national funding policies and systems that support the individual and collective art projects. India is one of the countries that do not have an active funding policy or funding agencies. There are a few agencies like Khoj International that too find its funds from the international agencies. They avail the logistics support of the local agencies and execute projects that apparently look like ‘international’ in nature.
Thanks to the absence of funding agencies, curatorial practice in India has reached nowhere so far. We still have a curatorial practice, which is gallery oriented and dominated by the commercial strategies of the galleries. In this context we could say that Indian curatorial practice is in a crisis. According to the noted cultural theorist Kobena Mercer, rethinking and the ensuing debates become inevitable only when the identity (of anything) is in a crisis. If we go by this observation, we need to check out whether Indian curatorial practice has any identity or not. What is the identity and complexion of Indian curatorial practice? Till late 1990s curatorial practice was a nebulous one in India. Any gallery could invite a one of the ‘acclaimed’ art critics of that time and asked him or her to contribute a catalogue essay, which legitimized the works that were shown in the exhibition. The catalogue essay played multiple roles; it functioned as an agency for legitimizing the consumption, a medium to explain and ‘interpret’ the works for a general public, documenting the artist and the works, and above all it functioned as a surrogate curatorial note, though many of us did not deem them so.
Like Chintan, some of the Indian artists have come forward to problematize the curatorial practice in general and its Indian version in particular. Bose Krishnamachari, an artist who has curated many shows for Indian and foreign galleries endorses the role of the ‘surrogate curatorial practice.’ “Primarily I am an artist and curatorial practice is one of the activities that I do to engage with the general art scene in India. I don’t find any problem in having writings or interviews of the artists in the catalogues that I produce as a part of my curatorial projects. By doing so, the writer does not become the curator. Considering the catalogue writer as curator is an old way of looking at it. When I curate, though I do not present my curatorial note, I remain the curator and I hold the position as a curator,” says Bose.
However, Chintan has a different view on this. “Curator is a word that is still misinterpreted in our context. Recently one of my friends from Derby, Ivan Smith came to exhibit in Mumbai and I went out to help him to put together his project in the exhibition space. Then a whole lot of people started asking me whether I was the curator of Ivan’s show. These questions mainly come from the so called ‘informed’ members of our art scene and media. Hence, in my opinion, the meaning of curatorial practice is still not disseminated amongst the Indian art scene.”
The word curator and curatorial practice (curation is still a problematic word as it has not yet got a legitimate status in the lexicon of Microsoft Word) became a point of debate when Carol Duncan deconstructed these words/notions within in the museum discourse. Duncan argued that the word curator, as far as the contemporary curatorial practice is concerned, was a derivative from the conventional museum discourse. In the traditional museums, curator did the job of documentation and preservation of the works. He lived with the museum objects and made scholarly efforts to document them using the available historical data. However, when the word curator was adopted by the contemporary discourse, according to Duncan, it came with its historical baggage. The late twentieth century curatorial practice did some effective moves to offload this baggage and redefined the status of a curator as a facilitator and arranger.
“May be I agree with what Carol Duncan has said,” opines Bose Krishnamachari. He says that he plays the role of an arranger and facilitator. Bose finds his funds from the galleries for which he curates the shows. Hence, for him funding is not a problem to think about. “I have not thought much about the funding problems as most of my projects happen in the galleries. But I am aware of the fact that India does not have funding systems. I am of the opinion that such agencies should be established for the further growth of our art scene.”
“Funding agencies or no funding agencies, I fund my projects,” says Chintan Upadhyay, who has conducted five Sandarbh Projects in various parts of India. “For me any work that I do become a part of my whole artistic self and artistic process. I consider my appearance in Page Three of the newspapers and the organizing of Sandarbh workshops as a part of a larger curatorial project. For me art is a happening thing. Through these projects I try to contextualize the role of a curator. I feel that it is a multi-tasking affair and one need to be both theoretically and practically equipped,” he says.
Multi-disciplinary interventions, evolution of curatorial practice as an academic discipline and theoretical discourses on art further force the ‘curator’ to function in a renewed realm that finds mere facilitating and arrangement redundant. Curator has to assume the role of a multi-tasker, who could not only ‘facilitate’ a project by arranging funds for its execution but also could present it within the framework of the ongoing theoretical discourse. Hence, a curator becomes a theoretician in the garb of an administrator or an administrator in the garb of a theoretician. A lot more comes along with these double responsibilities. With the process of globalization on, ‘art’ has become a frequent traveler and each of its journey demands its own logistics, right from theorizing, procurement, production, transportation, insurance to the documentation of its navigation.
As an active artist-curator Chintan is not comfortable with the idea of navigating a work of art all over the world only because it is included in some curatorial project. “I would call them curatorial tyranny. Many works of art lose their meaning and become just objects that could be understood through panel writing, when they are transported from one place to another. When you navigate a work of art all over the world, it becomes another object which looses its context in transit. Certain works are to be done in situ. A site specific work cannot be recreated in the same fashion elsewhere only because it is invited to a curated project. When you recreate it would be different work with reference to the earlier work,” says Chintan. Jitish Kallat also expresses the same concern when he asks, “What would happen to those nuts and bolts of culture, when the culture is transported continuously?”
When artist-curators have clear opinions about what the curatorial projects should look like, our so-called curators must be looking for cover. Most of the curators (one time art critics in the new garb) in India actually ‘do’ shows. They do not curate. But there is another side of it. When the projects are devised and executed within the galleries, and the fund is scooped out from its general budget, curator’s role becomes nominal. They legitimize the ‘show’ with their authorial presence. The gallery owner becomes ‘commissioner’ of the project. That means Indian curatorial practice has not moved an inch from what it was during 1990s and before.
“There is an interesting side to it,” says Chintan. “Curators, though they are working ‘for’ the galleries, with that curatorial authority in hand they become tyrannical. They approach the artist with some strange ‘themes’ and force the artist to work according to their tunes. It is nothing but tyranny. In this case, actually the curators are playing the role of the ‘real’ artists and the artists become assistants who execute the curator’s vision and lend a sign to it. It is a strange phenomenon. I am against this kind of one way curatorial projects. There should be an active engagement between the curator and the artist,” says Chintan.
Bose Krishnamachari has anti-dote to curatorial tyranny. “My curatorial projects are always open ended. I feel that the artists should have the freedom to work. I am not biased as a curator and any curator should be approaching art with an open mind. Most often curators come with a designed show. They have already made conclusions. Only way to come out of this curatorial tyranny is self-curating. An artist should be able to curate himself or herself. It would be taken as a self-deconstruction or self re-invention.” And Bose calls those foreign curators who come and select Indian artists for international projects as ‘blind curators’ and their practice as ‘rumour curating’. “Many foreign curators come here in India are totally unaware of the scene here. They are given parties and injected with biased ideas. This situation should change,” says Bose.
Perhaps, these artists present their cases fearlessly though they too participate in ‘curated’ shows within in India and abroad. However, they are not hypocrites. They have pinpointed the areas of ailment in the body of Indian curatorial practice. The debate of the players should be taking off from here rather than they go for their contact making spree during the seminar tea-breaks. |
