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Going International in the Indian Way
With more and more international players taking interest in Indian contemporary art, the complexion of it has dramatically changed in the last two years. JohnyML traces out the historical and aesthetical nuances through which the Indian contemporary art became really international.
Indian contemporary art is now international. Unlike in the previous years, the recent international auction results show that the international buyers compete with the NRI buyers to acquire the works of Indian artists. Obviously, there are certain economic reasons behind it. India, after China, has become the bullish economic force of the East and the West has finally taken notice of it. Globalization blues of the 1990s have considerably subsided and even the socialists and communists have learned to live with the results of the international liberal economy. Art is one of the fronts, where global economic participation is clearly seen, felt and appreciated. The age old dictum, ‘East is east and West is west, they never meet’ has become almost obsolete. Now the West meets the East and vice versa almost on equal terms.
Can this embracing of the Eastern art by the Western mind be reduced to the economic factors alone? What could be the historical, aesthetical and philosophical dynamics that facilitated this acceptance? What is that special trait recently developed in Indian art, which all of a sudden became a fascinating thing for the Western investors? While not discounting the economic factors, one should be looking for the historical and aesthetical nuances that help the Indian contemporary art to stand shoulder to shoulder with its western counterpart.
It was with ‘modernism’ that India made its initial efforts to become international during the mid decades of the last century. Modernism, as the general understanding goes, was an effort to discard what was classical/traditional/romantic in art. Modernism deconstructed the existing modes of art production and appreciation. In the name of scientific process, modernism as a socio-historical and politico-cultural force kept expanding its borders and embraced most of the aesthetic deviances of the time. Filtering through various stages of twentieth century art, modernism made a self cleansing effort to become a purely aesthetical process, purged of the socio-political deviances. International abstractionism led by the American artists became a by word modernism in art by 1950s and almost by chance India too became international by domestically promoting abstract art, which was no less than its international counterpart, though did not get adequate recognition in the international forums.
This lack of recognition for the Indian abstract art (and also the other forms of modern art in India) stemmed from the West’s perennial prejudice that the erstwhile colonies (third world) could only learn from the former masters but could never be equal in talent and innovation. The colonizing west had reduced the colonies into pure data and categories as the systemic categorization could help them to govern an alien population through artificial systems of knowledge possession. While the native knowledge systems suffered in this process of artificial categorization and the indoctrination of the same on to the native population, it became imperative that emulating the masters proved the worth of a population. Indian modernism in particular, and emulation of all other ‘-isms’ in general happened against this historical backdrop.
Though it was an innocent effort by the colonial and the un-theorized post colonial Indian artists, for the Western forces, the third world’s effort to be at par with the West was a reason to relegate them of recognition and importance. The West in general believed that it knew all about the colonies and the art came from these areas did not offer anything new. Ironically, the mentally subjugated populations of these areas made added efforts to outsmart their western counterparts by acquiring their systems of knowledge and categorization. In this pathetic effort to win the Western minds over, the artists of the former colonies (including those from India) excelled in all the ‘-isms’ that the West’s art history made canonical. Modern Indian art history as a discipline too followed the methodology of the West and encouraged the home trained historians to look at the ‘modern’ Indian art through the Western knowledge systems.
It was with the advent of postmodernism in early 1990s that the Indian artists dared to articulate their aesthetic concerns using indigenous knowledge systems. Though during the initial years the Indian artists followed the formalism of western postmodern art, soon they started finding their own formalism to express the immediate and pertinent. The selection of cow dung as an art material for installations and performance art by Sheila Gowda and Subodh Gupta should be seen in this context. Cow dung did not simply come as an alternative to the western materials. On the contrary, the artists deliberately chose a system of knowledge (of both the material and the context) to articulate what is postmodern in India.
Postmodernism is still a debatable notion as far as India is concerned. Questions such as what is postmodernism? Do we need postmodernism? Whose postmodernism is it, etc are heard from various quarters. However, postmodernism as a framework to place the local within the global context has somehow become successful in the Indian context. Those artists who are internationally appreciated and collected make use of the freedom of postmodernism to articulate the local not against but within the global. When the contestations with the global are reduced and the ‘global’ as an irreplaceable and irrevocable reality is accepted, the presentation of the ‘local’ demands vigorous intellectual efforts from those who are unfamiliar with the ‘given’ local aesthetics and facts.
The new aesthetics from the East disturbs the West as it finds it difficult to accommodate them in their assumed knowledge systems and categorizations. They need to make special efforts not only to understand the connotations of the given art forms but they need to really go through the materials that these artists use. What makes the Indian contemporary art interesting for them is its newness; newness of articulation and novelty of the material. Indian contemporary works come with a history of its own, clearly detached from the erstwhile dominant art history of the west. The works of Indian contemporary art present a new scenario of history; a history which does not carry the baggage of the ‘colonial’ and the ‘post colonial’. This history is an immediate history, of success and failures within (but not against) the global field of competition, co-habitation and survival.
The west looks at this new history of a new economy with a lot of curiosity. They look at the interfaces of the urban-rural aesthetics from India, how it merges with each other to face and to be in the global field. The vinyl bindis of Bharati Kher, the steel assemblages of Subodh Gupta, the massive bulbs and threatening butterflies of Sunil Gawde, the smart alec babies and the dead female fetuses of Chintan Upadhyaya, the contemporary miniature of absurd stories of Manjunath Kamath, the ghost transmemoir installations by Bose Krishnamachari, the sculptural takes of Riyas Komu and so on demand the western minds to learn more about Indian contemporary art. Once they had made the Indian artists infants. Now the Indian contemporary artists make the west to become curious like infants. However, when someone says, Subodh Gupta is Indian Damien Hirst or Chintan Upadhyaya is Indian Andy Warhol, none can help but wonder about our rate of growth.
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