Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

SESSION 6 : SP I RI TUALITY AND RE- INVESTI NG TRADITION Deepak Ananth Profane Illuminations I n titling this paper 'Profane I ll uminations' I wish to suggest that the 'spiritual' is a vexed topic i n contemporary I ndian art, and that if the most interesti ng artists working in I ndia today are chary of dealing directly with this 'subject', this is so because all too often , in the reception of works thus predisposed , the 'spiritual' comes to be identified with a particular religious agenda , and therefore available for ideological recuperation . I n a cultural context where the popular, larger than l ife effigies of fi lm stars and politicians - the former often mutating into the latter - come to be decked out with all the attributes of supra-human agency, it seems natural that the more critically astute artists should shrink from so strenuous an appeal to the supernal . . . But more darkly, the climate of religious fundamentalism - from which I ndia is hardly immune - calls for a particu lar vigilance on the part of artists interested i n recoveri ng something of the au ra once attached to ritual or cult objects that, in the I ndian trad ition , were also works of art. But before going on to talk of the artists inclined to work in this vei n , and as a way of d ramatically illustrating a context in which relig ious fundamentalism masquerading as spiritual fervou r cu lminated in widespread carnage, here is a work by Vivan Sundaram made in the recent aftermath of the destruction of the seventeenth century Babri mosque in Ayodhya (in Northern I ndia) by right-wing Hindu extrem ists, and the ensuing riots in which thousands of Muslims were kil led . The installation made in 1 993 entitled Memorial, triggered by the newspaper photograph of a dead man lying on the street, proposed an experience of what can only be cal led a negative epiphany, a spi ritual numbness in the face of the breaking of a secular covenant. I nterestingly, Sundaram has devised his work of mourning as a tour of the modernist graveyard , littered as his installation is with allusions to modern ist emblemata (from Malevich to minimalism) . A commemoration of an anonymous subject of history via a re-memoration of the lost possibilities of figuration, the passage through what have become the memento mori of the modern re-sited in the shadow of a barbarous political event. It is here that I can broach the second part of the title of this afternoon's session - 'the rei nvesti ng of tradition'. For Sundaram's 'Memorial' is also critically re-visiting what from our present vantage point, already constitutes a certain tradition, modernist in this case. The poi nt is that artists belonging to post-colonial cultures are involved in negotiating both Western modern ism and the I ndigenous traditions of art. The predicament of the modern (Western) artist, that of a sense of belatedness vis a vis h is or her predecessors - as explored , for example, by Harold Bloom in his The Anxiety of Influence, and , after him, by No rman Bryson who transposes anxiety into the more Lacanian motif of Desire in h is study of French painting from David to Delacroix - this predicament of latecoming is, for artists working in a post-colonial context, a bifurcated or forked one - a latecoming both to their own traditions and to the foreign one. I ndeed, the energising source of much creative endeavour is this dialectic of tradition and modernity, and this is as true of artists working toward critically subversive ends, such as Vivan Sundaram, as it is of artists interested in the category of the 'sacred'. Thus, the archetypal forms and mythopoeic condensation of Anish Kapoor's early scul ptures a re grazed by kabbal istic design and the modernist monochrome, by post-minimal objecthood and wayside shrines, not to mention the heaps of coloured dust sold i n Indian bazaars. If the ch iasmatic relation between emptiness and plenitude, absence and presence i n these works, as well as in those that have followed , takes a manifestly erotic form, Kapoor is thereby recovering for his practice an organic link between the sacred and the erotic that is one of the disti nctive traits of traditional I ndian art: the energies of the erotic as the driving force of life, procreation and growth . I ndeed , a potent way of I ndian artists to approach the sacred , or more precisely, the 'numinous', is th rough a vocabulary of primal, sexualised 82