The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

An active desire for the classical traditions has to be recognised. For there is little doubt that the Indian past has a seductive grip on one's psyche which it is our privilege to embrace. More palpably perhaps there is a lesson in classical, Oriental, pre-modern aesthetics: of an intense eroticism, of an intricate subtlety of form and its ornamental magnitude. These forms are still accessible in the vast architectural sites replete with sculpture and painting. They are also splendidly performed to this day and with infinite improvisation.Thus the interface between the classical and the contemporary is actual; it defines the very sovereignty of the great performers, the living musicians and dancers of India, in the moment when they disinterestedly, passionately, peremptorily address their mixed audiences. Given the continued presence of the high (margi) tradition in India there is, among the decidedly modern artists, an inclination to test their creativity through a positive hermeneutics and to give an allegorical account of the tradition thus transformed. Among the best examples of this is perhaps to be found in the cinematic rearticulation of the performing arts by Kumar Shahani (Khayal Gatha 1988, and Bhavantaran, 1991).There is, in addition, the desire to work at the possibility of achieving morphological perfection enfolding ancient aesthetics in a time loop such as we find in the cinema of Mani Kaul (Dhrupad 1982 and Siddheshwari 1989). There are corresponding examples in theatre and dance. There is a temptation in all the arts, including the plastic arts, to indulge in scopic delight and fantasy of plenitude via tradition; to adorn the artefact with decorative excess, formal redundancies, 'decadent' poetics of the art of the past-and why not. It is worth asking why the civilisational frame should have to shrink to the size of the global metropolis– is that the only recognised site for art today? It is also necessary to develop, within the framed mise en scene of the past, a stylistics of being that suits the historically conscious contemporary. Tradition, with all its advantage of gaining the voluptuous contour of ages past can yield, in the moment of transition, illusory models, thin icons. The artist can produce simulacra if she seeks an unmediated and de-historicised resource: ... I've always found very questionable the tendency in certain postmodern works to merely plunder a number of historical styles without suggesting a different reading of history. The historical status of the material from which these styles are extracted is taken for granted. So is the notion of history itself. 11 My second item on the itinerary has to do with the present status of the vast numbers of artist-artisans in the country. A sensitive handling of their living traditions helps maintain the sense of a complex society which informs and sometimes subverts modernisation that the very institution of the nation state inaugurates. If until today the ritual arts and handcrafts are part of the perennial life processes, of daily drudgery, they are now also part of an openly exploitative capitalist economy. In economic terms this phenomena provides a lesson in humility because the terms of survival are so hard. In cultural terms it can be understood through a radically revised ethnography as well as from within the imaginative universe, by using the sympathetic sensors of art language itself. Early in his career, the artist-pedagogue, K. G. Subramanyan, combined a Gandhian ethics with the traditions of Tagore's Santiniketan. 12 After Independence he made his contribution to the enlightened State-run projects for the support of the handloom and handicraft sectors. As an artist, he has conducted something like an ongoing workshop without walls around artisanal practices, evolving modes of interaction with the polyvocal languages of the folk. Subramanyan circumvents the problem of appropriation with his ingenious, de-solemnised, quizzical style of making serious and playful art objects. More importantly, he finds a new syntax for the material vocabulary of artisanal forms in his own practice. He contributes by extending this living tradition into and beyond the closed circuitry of traditions-repetitive craft traditions as well the repetitive tradition of the new in Western modernism. Another kind of relationship with specifically the tribal artist was nurtured by J. Swaminathan, artist– critic and later museum director of contemporary urban and tribal art in Bhopal, on the ground of an existential continuity in the creative act itself. 13 His kind of metaphysical formalism, shared by contemporary artists across the board, leads simultaneously to a pristine aesthetic, to structural readings of the symbolic in tribal communities, to linguistic play in modernist art. It would seem that there is nothing which comes in the way of our direct appreciation and apprehension of what is commonly termed as tribal art ... [Further), If .. .we take recourse to ethnological or anthropological methods, or if we refer to archaeology and history, our aim and intention should never be lost sight of -to emphasise the numinous function of art, neither to replace, nor to subordinate it. 14 The lessons offered by Subramanyan and by Swaminathan are different: yet each implies that modern artists in India must start from degree zero of their existential ambitions as they stand at the threshold of a culturally rich and materially pauperised hinterland. This hinterland holds living traditions with a vast number of differentiated skills and vernaculars which it must somehow be their ambition to know and decipher. This requires not just ethnographically correct answers, but a generosity which can encompass and contain the loss of 'superseded' culture. Western modernism has valorised the near autonomous motive of the hand, of the sign, and of the metaphor in the making of the earliest art works. This in turn has been seen to connect the modernist with the 'primitive' or tribal artist, and vice versa. For a younger generation of artists, it is precisely the displacement of these three elements-hand, sign and metaphor-onto other more problematised levels of materiality and semiotics that is important. It causes a radical disjuncture of meanings– beyond modernist formalism-and marks a new terrain of reflexivity. It is in this metonymic manoeuvre within the conceptually open, half empty, space of modernity that the more fraught social identity of the contemporary (post-modern) artist abides. And it is in the moment of historical mortality, in the death-act of making and destroying the (art) object that the new politics of subjectivity takes hold. The third proposition in this set has to do with the future, and with the kind of voluntarism that an artist from this part of the globe has to muster. For all the transactions with tradition, there is a precipitate sense of historical identity in Third World cultures. In the process of decolonisation, our societies have to deal with accumulated problems of ethnicity, religion, and caste; as with the new formulations on class and gender. These are tested on the ground reality of ancient civilisations; on the undoing of its anthropological/allegorical content into the present; on the basis of something measurable like political representation. I turn now to something so routine as the 1996 general elections in India for a cue to the third 'thing' about ourselves. Drawing on its massive strength of 900 million, the Indian polity has taught the political players, including the intelligentsia of the country, the meaning of sustaining through electoral means the range of ideological choices put in place by the historical process at the time of Independence.The great democratic struggle seems now to be entering another, more unpredictable phase of political polarisation. Indian voters have questioned the euphoria of post– socialist capitalism offered in the name of economic liberalisation, while the fate of a corrupt public sector economy already hangs in the balance. It has mocked the destructive manipulations of fundamentalist parties, and put to test the rhetoric of secularism. It has questioned the ancient privilege of the upper castes while giving qualified support to the dalit parties (representing the underprivileged sections within and outside the Hindu caste hierarchy). But the result of this exercise is not negative. The Indian electorate has voted with such cunning as to put the ruling Congress and its Es sAV s I 23