[Reader-list] response to Shuddha

[jagan shah]

Dear reader-list,

If in the future, there is such a world as Shuddhabrata Sengupta
envisions, then please make out a gate-pass for me. I want in.

I am not so sure, however, if I will be traveling to another place,
another space or an other world, that I have been promised, that still
needs to be imagined. Perhaps I will remain where I am, in the current
world, as it becomes forever contemporary.

If the artist's life is to be the material that the artist will work
into
the products of his/her art, if the 'content' of their art is existence
itself, and even if the 'form' is completely subject to their desires
and realities, if that art will be self-expression itself, a perpetual
work-in-progress, then we will have to let the word 'art' make a
discreet exit from our lexicon. But we know how once admitted, the word
has no exit. 'Art' is always already a trace of things
and words from another time. Other desires, other realities.

Mr. Sengupta's desires are the stuff of revolution, and to that extent
must resonate in many hearts on this mailing-list. He describes a dream
of human beings sharing the elusive joys of existence, the efflorescence
of the spirit that they all desire but seldom experience. A good dream
to dream. I see the point about the crisis of art today, held hostage by
institutions, separated from everyday life. I agree that the cloistering
of art and art practises has not
helped the world any. I vehemently support the restoring to art its
power to transform into the sublime, the horrors and joys of the world.
But if the artist is not to be in conflict with corporeal and spiritual
realities, if his "attachments to the sensible, rational ways of dealing
with an insane world that we inhabit at present" are forever severed,
then would not the artist, as artist, find himself redundant? Will the
artist become a tripper in paradise, rendering
with stylus or pen or brush or whathaveyou, reveling in the bountiful
pleasures of being?

I once asked MF Hussain why people make art, and he said because art is
everywhere, it is in the spoon, in the kerchief, the chair and the
walking stick. Perhaps he was recalling that same modern vision that
could see the sun shine even in a coffee spoon. But I could not get him
to shine a light on his self, to engage with himself. His art and his
being are sans all conflict. No irony, no doubt. Imagine that, at the
auction of a vulgar black and red painting
dedicated for those who suffered the Gujarat earthquake.

I trust that Mr. Sengupta, desiring a close relationship between
revolution and art, will have no patience for Hussain. If ever the
technologies at hand today create the informed and free world that they
promise oh-so-much, and if human beings retain the ability to think,
feel and act, then I hope that their art will indeed be in their spoons.
But I hope that they will not need the category of art
to recognize a good spoon. Or an artist to make one.

The future holds even greater self-reflection and analysis than before.
When after the human genome has yielded its secrets, and for the decades
before it does, we will become hyper-aware of our human condition. In
such times, artists will still be speaking in tongues, blurring
boundaries and testing limits. For the limitless is still only a vision,
as is the vision of art without limits. If the artist had no
constraints, then the artist would have little to do, I think. For, like
poetry, art also reveals, exposes and analyses the conditions of our
existence. The artist (regardless of pedigree, fame, skill and other
things that we discard in the egalitarian future) is both maker and
theorist, worker and philosopher, perfomer and audience. As we
understand it today, art is a conscious engagement with the world.

Let the artist remain as adversary of his/her time and place. Let the
critical function of art remain. Let the artist be different from the
manager. We need both. The artist-manager and manager-artist. The
revolutionary artist and the artist revolutionary. Let not art be a
matter of desire, but a consequence of habit. Imagine a world where the
conflict between aesthetics and ethics is not erased, for neither can do
without the other. Imagine where the languages that are spoken by the
artist are comprehended by all, not just by a fluffy
gaggle of gregarious aesthetes.

I believe that future art is already upon us. In a world where
nipple-piercing enjoys an interpretive community and where Mozart plays
in the subways, we are finding only more and more works of art and more
artists. Yet we still desire something else, maybe to see art more at
work in the world than as a subject in a
curriculum. We feel a lack, perceive a crisis. Why? Is it because we
have indeed metamorphosed into numbers, into abstract entities from a
positivist's daydream? I should think not, as member of a virtual
community, connected through thought and little else (just ones and
zeros). Our commitment and ability to talk about art in every new medium
that comes our way is evidence enough of its
dissemination.

We are as never before, rational beings. But we are only just beginning
to accommodate within our totalitarian designs on reality the sketchy
outlines of the unreal, the unhomely and the infinite. As we expand our
sense of being human, and understand the boundaries of sanity, we are
locating art everywhere yet feel it is most missing. After the purveyors
of crafted commodities and the
exotic are done with their mass production, we recognize Nature as the
next-biggest producer of art. Culture for us has become an ecstatic
propagation of the transient. All is for consumption and consumption is
for all. Yet we talk about art. Is it the art that we learnt in school?
The Art of Living? The art of motorcycle
maintenance? The art of cooking? What is this thing called art, and what
will it become in the future?

What uplifts us, what makes us more human, is changing. As we come to
love, consume and preserve our bodies in new ways, we also do the mind.
Consumption, reflection, maybe even theoria, will occupy us more in the
future, as we are more able to guarantee physical wellbeing. Will art
engage our minds equally well as
it is does today? Or will it tend towards music and dance, and a Cubist
descent down a staircase will be an actual experience, not just a
strange thing for a nude to do and for a painter to paint.


Jagan Shah