[Reader-list] Ways of Life and Transgressions

[hasina hasan]

wish they'd let us dance all night in Bengaluru. they should dance and let dance. violation of my basic right to dance. (to express through dance?)
i'm not ashamed to say this despite many people elsewhere starving / committing suicide with no money for what's their basic needs. if they were in my shoes, they'd wanna dance too, i bet. 

my first reaction when i saw the ads, before reading the reviews:
vogue - a rich bitch (i say this endearingly. i do like the way they make ugly look so pretty) high fashion brand wants to be associated with India. another one bites the dust. 

behind the scenes, i feel......
vogue
wants to be associated with the hottest hottie around. maybe the creative
team was looking at who to play with besides china. so they picked
india. 
or maybe it refers to where they got the inspiration for the design from. India. 

..........shame.
i cant make a ruckus about people taking pics of my dirty neighbourhood
when i cant keep it clean myself is what i thought after reading the
bit finally. 
the titles of that thread and the article etc are jarring. the ad, not so much. 

i think perhaps the hurt/anger comes from elsewhere. from the poverty/
our ugliness / our dirty neighbourhood having been brought to light?
though they tried to show it in a pretty light (it's what they do), we
see not the pretty but the ugly shining through?

anyway, i wonder how much those folks got paid for the modelling bit. 

would be funny if they got the handbag etc. instead of money.

funnier still if that's what they wanted.

have a nice weekend,
Hasina






--- On Fri, 5/9/08, inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:
From: inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Ways of Life and Transgressions
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Date: Friday, 5 September, 2008, 7:48 AM

Dear  Danny Butt,

Here in India we are made to believe that M.F. Huaain's paintings have
angered Hindus. If so, we are merely gulping down the throat what is
being offered to us.  I believe, people on the List and elsewhere,
need to express their emancipated views while dealing with
subjectivities which are exclusively aesthetic in nature. It quickly
lapses into communsalism and hate.

how  ' this causes this' gets inverted with the passage of time is too
interesting to read.  It could be seen even then , but needs a
'creative eye' .  Picasso is just a example, of knowing how European
colonialism of Africa might have caused, let us say a Gurenica, to
happen much earlier before the world war 2nd which made picasso to see
Civil war in Spain and other such things.  Here, this also will be
interesting to note that Picasso was 'high jacked' by the market, and
the subject 'death' danced a la aesthetic.  Here, it is also note
worthy that Picasso also worked his compositions  from the war
photographs in the press and also from the African masks. Picasso
himself says, that he does not know whether he is a good artist or
not, but he is a good craftsman. I think he was clear to a large
extent, and he had to courage to abandon his successful style at the
stage of a career when very few artists dare to do so.

On the contrary Hussain  had little choice when he began to kiss ' the
modern'  That was OUR  fate, and we continue to reel under the impact
of that 'modern' which was promoted as global as the same time.   So
post colonial, which has its own dynamics, depth and relevance, like
Bollywood is not merely a derivate of Hollywood, Indian modern
paintings  too are not simply Western, but something which we can own,
even in the absence of a coherence. Hussain has indeed worked overtime
to bring that Indian into the form which was seen purely as modern.
That truly is, and nothing more.

Even if we enter a new phase of post-modern / art-now kind of Indian
art scene,  we cannot simply  can not say that Indian modern art,
(painting and sculpture) does not exist.  Because any representation
of India, even with some pretension  of the modern, offends the Hindu
nationalists, The paintings which have caused this anger in some
fanatic hindus can be seen through this perspective. This is also
speaks the darker side of democracy in a post colonial free India.
This anger is part of the process that brought down a 400 year old
mosque   by these hindu fanatics, jut to come to power in the centre.
They managed it, and are not out of race this time again. So defending
Hussain is so urgent for a modern democratic and secular citizen
living in India.

That is that. Your response,  with passage from Lauran Bernat to
Aarti's question on HURT is really profound and demands a sincere
discourse. Please forward  his complete article.

The question of 'hurt' is truly democratic.  This is how Aarti puts it
lucidly  "that it posits a horizon of desire that is unachievable for
the people it uses for the ad" .   Our progress in the modern  has no
space for hurt, perhaps because it posits its being in the machine
exclusively. This modern machine thing has simultaneously given
monopoly over ' the hurt' to  religious believers only.  That is
indeed undemocratic. To expand the definition of 'hurt' we need to
enter  a  word like 'environment'. A tree, a river, a simple identity,
a simple dignity of the individual can be seen as environmental, only
if there is some challenge to the value judgment unleashed by the
capitalists.  How else  "we are to fashion any sort of language to
deal with the violence of the present". I quote Aarti again.

So, Art that is overwhelmingly part of the capitalist investment, and
is bereft of that urge to challenge the horizon of desire that has no
space for the people that it uses it, and no space for the earth that
uses it.  To quote  Tee Bee Di "Hmm.. Who is not an artist? "  I feel
everybody, only if there is a radical thought in place.

The question of 'hurt' is therefore,  political, and can not be seen
only in the so called acts of profanation of the sacred.  It is quite
ironical that how people are so close to the realities of mythologies
which are so distant, and so distant to the realities that is
intimate.

How  has  all this happened?

With love
inder salim





On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net> wrote:
> Kia ora all
>
> I've also been learning a lot from the recent discussion, as I try to
> map these conversations back onto the very different cultural
> histories (though equally fragmented perhaps, if less recently as
> bloody) here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
>
> Having seen a huge retrospective of Picasso's work (and collection)
> close to my hometown recently, I couldn't help but be struck by the
> fact that while it might be true that, as Yousuf says, "Picasso
> probably never had people killing each others angered by his
> paintings", it is nevertheless equally true that his work is
> unthinkable without the death that accompanied the European
> colonisation of Africa and the Pacific. The works in his collection
> acquired from those regions seem to take on additional significance
> when read in light of that history. So perhaps the question of time,
> where we sequence events and consequences to say "this causes
this",
> becomes inverted and displaced in situations where the affect seems to
> precede the event of production. In some respects, when hurt is
> experienced, the potential of that hurt seems to have been structured
> in advance.
>
> This was just one of the thoughts brought to mind by Aarti's very
> productive questions. While I am not really fluent enough in the
> specific issues which prompted this discussion to comment more
> specifically, I would like to share a quote from a writer that I have
> learnt a lot from about the issues Aarti raises, which I think does
> speak to the recent discussions on the list.
>
> "The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not
> generally induce more than mourning on the part of the state and the
> public culture to whose feeling-based opinions the state is said to
> respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is
> dead, no longer living (to you). Mourning is an experience of
> irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living. He is dead, I am
> mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime, experience of emancipation:
> mourning supplies the subject the definitional perfection of a being
> no longer in flux. It takes place over a distance: even if the object
> who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is neither dead nor
> at any great distance from where you are. In other words, mourning can
> also be an act of aggression, of social deathmaking: it can perform
> the evacuation of significance from actually-existing subjects. Even
> when liberals do it, one might say, "others" are ghosted for a
good
> cause. The sorrow songs of scandal that sing of the exploitation that
> is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in this sense
> aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military
> march of capitalist triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard.
> Its lyric, currently crooned by every organ of record in the United
> States, is about necessity. It exhorts citizens to understand that the
> "bottom line" of national life is neither utopia nor freedom but
> survival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry that eats its
> anger, makes no unreasonable claims on resources or control over
> value, and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate spheres
> while scrapping a life together flexibly in response to the market
> world's caprice."
>
> Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and
> Politics", in Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds.) Cultural
> Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law. Ann Arbor: University of
> Michigan Press. 1999.
>
> (In the notes for this paragraph Berlant references Douglas Crimp and
> the politics of AIDS in the US: "Crimp is especially astute on the
> necessary articulation of sentimentality and politics: because
> processes of legitimation cannot do without the production of consent,
> and empathetic misrecognition is one tactic for creating it. The
> question is how, and at what cost, different kinds of subjects and
> contexts of empathy are imagined in the struggle for radical social
> transformation.")
>
> I'd be happy to forward a PDF of Berlant's article to anyone who
is
> interested in these questions of subjectivity, affect, and public
> recognition.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Danny
>
> --
> http://www.dannybutt.net
>
> On 4/09/2008, at 9:09 PM, Aarti Sethi wrote:
>
>> A few thoughts on an interesting discussion.
>>
>> One term I think that has remained unexamined in this discussion is
>> "hurt"
>> or "sentiment". By this I mean not an assessment of whether
that
>> hurt is
>> justified, valid etc, who is to decide whether this offends or not,
>> whether
>> this is offensive or not, the relative self-sufficiency of value
>> systems and
>> speaking across them. But the inherent value of hurt as a positive
>> force in
>> itself. Let me try and explain what I mean.
>>
>> Why is "hurt sentiment" a bad thing in itself? Can having
one's
>> sentiments
>> hurt, sometimes quite badly, not be a positive force? Might it not
>> impell me
>> to re-think, or think, about my sentiments in a manner that is
>> creative?
>> Maybe those sentiments are better discarded. Maybe my outrage alerts
>> me to a
>> violence I have been commiting without realising it. Maybe if more
>> people's
>> sentiments were outraged a little more forcefully, then we would be
>> living
>> in a far more democratic and tolerant world.
>>
>> Further, I do not see why only religious communities have a monopoly
>> on
>> sentiments which can then be hurt. As a feminist, my sentiments are
>> assaulted on a routine and regular basis. As someone who believes in a
>> version of social justice and equality, once articulated by, but not
>> only
>> by, Marx for instance, my feelings are continually trampled over. As
>> someone
>> who believes in a secular vision, the discussions on this list
>> offend me
>> everyday. However i do not see this being taken very seriously. And it
>> needn't, that is the point. It is up to me to alchemize this
>> outrage, hurt,
>> sadness in a manner that enables me to live and act in the world.
>>
>> This is actually how we live our lives generally. My mother, or
>> father, or
>> lover, or friend might say something that hurts me terribly. Not
>> always is
>> this clarified, discussed, put in its right perspective. All our
>> lives are
>> all littered with silent archives of hurts we have never expressed.
>> There is
>> no heroic moment in which resolution is sought for hurts. And no one
>> can do
>> this for anyone...
>>
>> The recent Vogue advertisements doing the rounds, around which there
>> has
>> been some discussion on this list, have hurt the sentiments of many
>> people.
>> A few years ago another set of advertisements for brand equity in
>> which two
>> tribal women are shown discussing the tans they have got in Monte
>> Carlo to
>> an accompanying snide and contemptous copy which said something
>> about how
>> advertisers need to accurately reach their consumers, also outraged
>> many of
>> us. Having thought about this, I realised that though both the Vogue
>> ads and
>> the brand equity ads trouble me, they do so in different ways.
>>
>> The Vogue ads can be read in one of many ways - that it posits a
>> horizon of
>> desire that is unachievable for the people it uses for the ad. In
>> some sense
>> then the frisson of the ad derives from the discrepancy in what is
>> desired
>> and what is possible. Further it assumes that their horizon of
>> desire will
>> follow the trajectory laid out by Vogue. But most interesting to me
>> is that
>> both Vogue and the critics work with a fixed definition of poverty
>> in the
>> first place, and  certain trajectory of the direction a life can take.
>>
>> The second set of ads function on precisely the opposite principle.
>> Rather
>> than positing an eventual horizon of desire, they deem a present
>> life as
>> failed, and urges us to recognise its failure. It presumes and makes
>> me
>> complicit in a social consensus in which we can use languages in a
>> manner as
>> if we are all agreed on the terms in operation.
>>
>> Can you see the difference in both ads? They both trouble me deeply,
>> but
>> they trouble me in different ways. How is this at all useful, or
>> valuable? I
>> think it is. I think to be able to carefully work through how and
>> why and in
>> what ways something arrives to me and what it disturbs is a critical
>> thing,
>> if we are to fashion any sort of language to deal with the violence
>> of the
>> present.
>>
>> with regards
>> Aarti
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:00 PM, inder salim
<indersalim at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> dear yousuf
>>>
>>> thanks for response.
>>>
>>> no i dont agree that people are killing each other because Hussain
>>> painted this or that, People want to kill people and there is
always
>>> an  excuse available. We will always not blame people for that
>>> because
>>> people have ceased to be people with their existential choice to
be '
>>> being-in-itself'. Prime symbols of our society have  perhaps
>>> cultivated bad tastes because of a deep
bourgiouse-captilist-fascist
>>> leanings. We are indeed in a deep mess.  For example, Sudhir
Kakkar
>>> talks about how unresolved sexuality has a deep relationship with
>>> violence.  Now who is the culprit. At least Artists are trying to
>>> heal
>>> themselves. let them, even if people are not healed...
>>>
>>> about what is good to society ? Stalin's USSR did this mistake
and
>>> killed lot of intellectuals poets and artists, Theortically what,
>>> poets are artists were doing at time had little relevance to the
>>> times
>>> ' of bolshivik ' but in the end we can see how wrong was
that policy
>>> of actually believing what is good for society and what is not. 
We
>>> need to provide a space to everything for everybody.
>>>
>>> People like TV reality and  other such heaps of trash....., how
much
>>> we can carry is seriously with us, you know better, at least i
cant
>>> take the popular bullshit of saas Bahu and bootnath serials.
>>>
>>> About market and art  via ' conspiracy of art' we already
know
>>> Hussain
>>> sahib is not in a great spiritual health. But a fanatic has  no
right
>>> to dislodge something which is already dislodged by the Tusnami of
>>> sheer profitalbity of americansim..
>>>
>>>
>>> love
>>> is
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Yousuf <ysaeed7 at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>>>> Dear Salim
>>>> You are right, an artist should never have to explain. But
Picasso
>>> probably never had people killing each others angered by his
>>> paintings. But
>>> (as we have discussed earlier on this theme) if you are doing an
>>> art for
>>> public, would you not be concerned if the public appreciates it?
No
>>> one is
>>> born appreciating high art - we acquire a tastes for everything.
>>> The point
>>> is, whose responsibity is it to inculcate the appreciation of art
in
>>> society? If its a Madhubani painting done on the facade of my
>>> village house
>>> by my mother, its very much there in my genes. But if it is a
horse
>>> by
>>> Hussain kept in a gallery to which I have no access, somebody has
>>> to do a
>>> bit of explaining on why such art is distanced from social reality
>>> (which
>>> actually is not, but the market has made it look so).
>>>>
>>>> Yousuf
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --- On Wed, 9/3/08, inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> From: inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Ways of Life and Transgressions
>>>>> To: reader-list at sarai.net
>>>>> Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 7:14 PM
>>>>> Picasso said, if it is possible to explian, it is futile
to
>>>>> paint.
>>>>>
>>>>> even if i we gnore picasso, who is an old hat in modern
art
>>>>> now, let
>>>>> alone hussain sahib who is immensely supported by
>>>>> investors, and 'post
>>>>> colonialism' as theoritical justificaioin to do
>>>>> whatever he or we
>>>>> sometimes  are doing which can pass as derivate at the
>>>>> best.
>>>>>
>>>>> what is education or what is not , what is offensive or
>>>>> what is not,
>>>>> is difficult to explain, if one chases the text, and its
>>>>> meaning
>>>>> profoundly...
>>>>>
>>>>> what we forget also is the fact that what we see are
>>>>> phtographs of the
>>>>> the original
>>>>>
>>>>> .and is photogaphy representing real, if so then we have
>>>>> truly
>>>>> disappeared from the face of this earth. and it does not
>>>>> matter if
>>>>> there is hussain or not,
>>>>>
>>>>> there is book by Jean Baudilard ' conspiracy of
>>>>> art'
>>>>> which speaks  the contemporary art practices , and that
>>>>> makes us feel
>>>>> that the whole world is in fact a piece of modern art work
>>>>> , and we
>>>>> are not there, simple not part of it.
>>>>>
>>>>> the question of relevance of hussain in our social
>>>>> structures is open
>>>>> to this sort of criticism,
>>>>>
>>>>> but not once it lands as amunition in the hands of
>>>>> fanatics.
>>>>>
>>>>> love
>>>>> is
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>



-- 

http://indersalim.livejournal.com
_________________________________________
reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
Critiques & Collaborations
To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in
the subject header.
To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>


      Bring your gang together. Do your thing. Find your favourite Yahoo! group at http://in.promos.yahoo.com/groups/