[Reader-list] Is painting a currency note which can not be forged unless you act illegally?

[indersalim]

on Fake and Art

>From introduction to The Piracy of Art by Sylvere Lotringer:

"In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege
attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for
illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own
vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of
art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of
insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial
frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole".

With the backdrop of the above thought piece on Art, I believe, we can
seriously enter the debate on Faking, and its age old practice in Art.
I guess we all would like to know different opinions on the subject,
since a couple of days back, S.H Raza a noted Paris based Artist was
invited to inaugurate his own show where he discovered Fakes, not one
but many. As we know, this happened at one of the oldest gallery,
Doomimal Art Gallery in New Delhi. Reports say that he is initiating
legal action against those who are responsible for faking his art.

Tintorrito, a Renaissance Master in Venice was notorious for lifting
other's compositions, and yet J.P. Satre wrote highly about his
genius, and not for nothing we have his paintings hung in Museums next
to those who labelled him unethical once. Even if this does not fall
under the category of faking, we have MonaLisa which was faked many
times during Leonardo's time itself, and there is doubt if the piece
hung in Louvre is the a real one or a fake . You may press the link to
read and see more on it.
http://www.mystudios.com/gallery/forgery/history/index.html.

 Since ancient times, faking art is a practice, so Raza is not the
first one to suffer. We have Bimal Roy fakes , Hussain fakes, Anjoli
Menon fakes, Bawa faks, Arpana fakes  and even Subodh Gupta fakes. The
list is long and I heard there  is some industry like thing near
Bhopal, and ' faking art ' is thriving trade in India. The debate here
is what is Fake in the first place? Is painting a currency note which
can not be forged unless you act illegally?  But is there any
significance of word 'legal/illegal' in art?

The above artists and their like-minded brethren are anguished, but
are they really? Or if yes, then do we need to join their anguish too,
and if yes, what way it benefits society, art and life ? And if it is
just about their market, why then we need to join the protest? Or is
it high time to declare that Art is neither original nor duplicate;
art is art, as long as its space-time is existentially breathing in
'the present'? And the present is all about quantum we signs we are
dealing with on day to day basis. Who cares, if the  Mao Zedong by
Andy Warhol sells for 17 million or whatever, and if its other silk
screen versions don't even sell for a shilling. To disseminate is the
conceptual urgency...

Still, they have a point, and for that reason a senior artists Anjoli
Menon found a way out by marking her paintings with her thumb
impression which can be verified by a forensic expert if need arises.
So why don't other artists imitate her. Ah, these artists, as we know
are too egoistic. They will trace a photograph on their canvas and
fill it with their own colours of fantasy without declaring it
publicly, or lift anything from any forgotten composition or from any
popular form, but they wont lift anything what is well known in the
art domain. In the present case of faking their originals, they feel
helpless. I am personally amused.

Now, imagine, if a painting which depicts Indira Gandhi or Gandhi by
MF Hussain is recommended by Govt. of India to be incorporated into a
Currency Note, and after some time it is discovered that the said work
of art was fake, would that currency be also declared as Fake?
Obviously no,  because the value of the currency note is not measured
by nuances of the line work or some details important in aesthetic
world, but by the signature of the Reserve Bank Governer, who
represents the State. Please note that how artist's signature on the
canvas has often posited as the part of composition in the frame, and
not merely as a sign to verify the rest around it. Here, the moment we
attach a price tag to a painting it functions like a commercial
object. It was perhaps inevitable. One can understand the compulsions,
but what people in general have to say on the subject is quite
important.

I quote : "The  real is not threatened by its double today,  ( Clement
Rosset ), it is threatened by its very idiocy".

If the present is all about 'idiocy', then we need to  grapple the
meaning of it rather than what is happening between Artists and
her/his collector.  Any intensification of the debate on that account
would eventually not rob the concerns of those artists who feel '
threatened by the double'. I am somehow interested by 'the idiocy of
art in life' and its long term effects in society.  Obviously, the
collectors would offset such leanings in any art discourse and the
artists who want to appease the collectors are likely to join the
chorus. And if it becomes so black and white, I have no option but to
be content with whatever 'idiocy' grants me.

I quote Jean Baudrillard, from his book 'The System of Objects' : "
The collector is never an utterly hopeless fanatic, precisely because
he collects objects that in some way always prevent him from
regressing into the ultimate abstraction of a delusional state, but at
the same time the discourse he thus creates  can never for the very
same reason- get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism. Collecting
is always a limited,  a repetitive process, and the very material
objects with which it is concerned are too concrete and too
discontinuous ever to be articulated as a true dialectical structure.
So if no-collectors are indeed ' nothing but morons,' collectors, for
the part, invariably have something impoverished and inhuman about
them".#

Those who have seen the film 'The Moderns' ( 1988 ) know the story of
a failed painter down on his luck in Paris in the 1920's who accepts a
commission to forge a famous impressionist paintings. The film
questions what is real versus what is perceived or subjective. The
plot twists include a millionaire art collector publicly slashing
priceless paintings, thinking it as forged, while the fake paintings
are sent to hang in a New York museum.  By the account, what we see as
best of impressionist works are in fact ' fakes'.

Ah, what a relief.

And for this reason alone, perhaps, we need to see Photography bereft
of those faking fears.

( to be continued … )




--

http://indersalim.livejournal.com