[Reader-list] thoughts re: baroda

[Ashok Sukumaran]

now that we have temporarily gotten past the "get your
bloody hands off our bloody artists" phase,  a few
thoughts:  



1.  A statement I have heard more than once in
artist's gatherings in bombay is
"the boom in the art market has given us so much
freedom of expression. " 

This is true at various levels, and is familiar and
recent.  It also marks a path towards various
imaginations of artistic "autonomy" .   It is the
order of things that we have to pay attention to: 
boom...then freedom,  success... then choices, and the
posing as "free" that hopefully someone will see and
say:  this deserves to be free... buy it!!    

For young art students being tapped by gallerists (as
the "internal" student show in baroda was) this is an
aspiration that leaks into academic art's "intentions"
and Kant's  "...although no purpose can be found" - in
ways that are not easy to dismiss.  Is it better to
disclose this confinement or pretend otherwise?



2. The trajectories of free speech and "fearless
listening" in this case (after enjoying Lawrence's
text  in TOI) appear to dance around the question of
language.  How do we (or they) build up a level of
"tolerance", a commitment to listen to that which we
cannot understand? Or rather, whose understanding, 
motivations, etc  are seemingly deliberately kept away
from us?  How do we tolerate, on these terms? 

There is an old debate around contemporary art's
miniscule sphere of influence, and its genuflection to
the same, and there are enough reasons to defend
either side. The thing is that the current gaping
holes in understanding, (which are valuable spaces for
artists to manuever in),  become nevertheless easy
pickings for forces like the right-wing in Gujarat,
who became the only voices heard in baroda when they
proclaimed to the public: "your gods are being painted
with penises around them! and sold in bombay!"  The
arts fraternity (which includes me)  broadly has found
no language to respond to such charges, other than to
say, weakly, "so what, it happens all the time in
ancient indian history",  or a defence via the extreme
abstraction of "free speech".   Either way, from what
I saw, no one in a deeply-divided gujarat is
convinced.  

 In such conditions, the "insanity plea"  doesn't
really help either (outside the courts, that is). In
the local public eye, the right-wing often succeeds in
dismissing student-artists anyway,  as "charsis" and
so on... we could do with subtler, or more directly
threatening, forms of "impostership".  Or, as others
have suggested in the various meetings I have
attended, have the ability to discuss and interpret
the work in public. That is also, the freedom to
change (not just lose) our minds.

Yes,  the protection of present and future freedoms is
a greater challenge than concerns of artistic "value",
as shuddha said here earlier. And maybe the point
isn't to convince the majority in Gujarat, or
elsewhere.  But a lot of these questions go beyond
artistic value, into what art "wants", especially us,
here... what do we want,  and what freedoms, special
or ordinary, are needed to achieve it? 
I will also defend the right to not be transparent, in
our wants.  But some vocabularies beyond a somewhat
avant-gardist evocation of "free speech" need to be
built, even if it means finding something evocative to
sing at protests. Maybe then someone will listen. 

As Sudhir Patwardhan said the other day,  and perhaps
he can expand his thought if he's around, artists who
want to work "socially" (and even those who dont, but
who understand that their work is at the threshold of
a mass media exposure, at the slightest "offence")
have to be prepared to answer some of these
challenges. 


3.  Market-driven exclusivity and notions of artistic
autonomy are only some of the reasons why, as Max
Bruinsma puts it in a recent issue of Open (see his
Revenge of the Symbols in OPEN 10, (in)tolerance)...
"the codes of the making and the reception of art have
evolved in different directions".  

To turn this around, to have something more
significant at stake than the art market,  we have to
consider the receding zones of reception as important.
For this reason I am interested in art  that not only
tries to be read symbolically as/ against, but also
inhabits/ performs other dominant codes:  advertising,
television, interior designs, public decorations,
conferences, literature, science or infrastructure, a
terrain to me more interesting than free speech in a
box.  
(You could claim that Chandra mohan's work was able to
"enter" the codes of religious representation. To what
degree he succeeded, and in what ways this has been
productive, we shall slowly find out.)  

We may not need to bridge these distances of
understanding in a conventional do-gooder sense. The
challenge is cleary to turn this conflict into a
constructive dissensus, (because consensus even
internally is unneccessary and probably a waste of
time). 
This could mean for example a careful curation of the
most poignant  terms of abuse,  or for people with
different styles,  the design of platforms for genuine
dialogue. In either case, such legible "interface
objects" are key, I think, to prevent the
instrumentation of art by external and arbitrary
political agendas.  



further thoughts welcome.. 

ashok

http://0ut.in



       
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