This is a serialized narrative: the seminar was a brainstormer…it’s a pity it intellectual and conceptual isolation with the seminar held in the context of the seminar held in parallel with Benodebehari Centenary Retrospective, which is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi till February 11, 2007, and is subsequently scheduled to open in NGMA Mumbai. If visualized inter textually, the seminars together give us an in ignorable input on the shaping of early Indian modernism in Bengal, and its influences on art practices. The remaining part of the ‘Field Notes’ will be uploaded on the 20th March upload.
R Sivakumar : Ramkinker and the Dual Commitments of Modernism
- Locating Ramkinker in Santiniketan and Indian Modernism.
Bengal school…historicism
- Historicism vs. Romanticism (early Santiniketan)
- Alternate modernisms
- Parallels to the neo classical romantic debate.
- Does it enter a line versus color dialogue?
- But the Masculine and the Feminine associations (sometimes attributed) to neo classical - romanticism
- Dialogue between history and anti history between the transitory generation between Abanindranath Tagore and. Subramanyan through the agencies of Nandalal, BenodebehariMukherjee, Ramkinker Baij, Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher Gill and others.
- Western Modernism…Oriental antecedents.
- Ramkinker joins Shantiniketan in 1925
- Rabindranath Tagore used to bring in ‘catalouges’ from his visits abroad.
- Photo archives of ‘Western Art’ in Kala Bhavan
- Rabindranath Tagore…Indian internationalism…open to western winds standing on oriental soil.
- The notion of Vishwa Bharati.
Early artistic strategies operational in Santiniketan
- The rising of a post Nandalal generation.
- Western Modernism as a tool through which to articulate the ‘local’.
- Inspiration from ‘Realism’?
- Ramkinker ’s involvement with the aesthetics of ‘Realist Cinema’ at a later period in his life.
- Taking from the ‘local’ and transforming them into icons.
The question of Ramkinker Baij and issues of stylistic coherency vis-à-vis BenodebehariMukherjee and Rabindranath Tagore
- The notion of prodigious talent and what it does to the “normal art historical practice of stylistic bracketing...one can include Michelangelo, Turner, Matisse, Picasso as parallels.
- Is there an art historical need to bracket?
- The artist-genius as leader in interdisciplinary experimentation.
- A legacy carried forward by K.G. Subramanyan
- The notion of the ‘renaissance man’ in early modern Bengal…the notion of the ‘renaissance man’ among the Bengali bhadralok. (A legacy, which Satyajit Ray so painstakingly tried to carry).
Ramkinker ’s stylistic intervention: “Subsuming the oriental under the Western”.
- Seen primarily in his sculptures
- Relationship between his works and anti left humanism.
- Aesthetics of intervention is this a modernist project?
- In our minds is protest is a modernist and post modernist prerogative…intrinsically linked with the notion of the radical.
Probable influences on Ramkinker ’s stylistic affiliations within western modernism
- “Fascist branding of Abstract Art as degenerate”
- Valorizing the proletariat but moving away from social realism.
- Trying to reconcile dual projects of modernism? (Capitalism and its celebration of the artist genius (individual) vs. Marxism and its celebration of the community and a greater sympathy towards the working class.
- However the relationship and liberatian aesthetics and abstraction (vis-à-vis Hitler, Stalin favoring figuration), may be hegemonised in our minds courtesy post world war American propaganda (including and involving the marketing of Jackson Pollock) towards certain liberalism and the celebration of euro American abstraction. This ‘history’ conveniently ignores the nexus between Mussolini and the Futurists well within the war years.
Parul Dave Mukherjee: Cosmopolitan Modernism: Santiniketan from Elsewhere
(The paper looked at the site of Diaspora as a mode of cultural production and pushed back its frame of reference to an earlier moment when a Mauritian artist embarked on a voyage to India in the 1950s, and chose Santiniketan as his destination. In the second section of the paper, the focus shifted to the contemporary website wwwsantansociety.com and how Hariah Johari reinvented Indian culture and mythology for the NRI and western audience. He draws his lineage to Santiniketan)
An academic contestation in the realm of ‘Contemporary Popular art history’
Diaspora as a site for culture production
- Modernism can be scripted in different ways.
- www.sanatansociety.com
- Sanatandharma
- “Shantiniketan as a metaphor of authentic Indian.”
- Bengal School and the foregrounding of the feminine.
Why Does Nagalingam choose Shantiniketan and associate himself with the most ‘non progressive’ of art expressions available there, and after leaving Santiniketan he associates himself with a stale, classicized late-Bengal school language.
- Nagalingam’s rejection of contemporary India.
- Utterly formalist female figures
- Quasi abstract.
How does a Diaspora seek to inscribe into the contemporary, an inter weave of memory and myth, the role religion plays in the definition of a Diaspora.
- The colonial impact on our imaginations and the resultant impact in the colonized being able to imagine their own past.
- The notion of pure culture and historical purity of a culture’s artistic tradition.
- The power of visuality to serve the purpose of ‘hegemony maintenance’ , and the question of Diaspora participating in terms of active consent in the maintenance of certain orthodox non libertarian tendencies as culturally dominant.
- The making of the postmodern right wing.
- Diaspora and the outsourcing of ‘stagnation’
- The making of a diasporic Orientalism.
Amit Mukhopadhyay: Love, Play Labour: fore and after Independence (Ramkinker and Sovan Kumar.
(Discusses the overall historical perspectives on Ramkinker and the post independence Indian art by figuring a young artist Sovan Kumar as a linkage)
Ramkinker ’s articulations about art)
“This does not involve doing harm to others” (Amit Mukhopadhyay quoting Ramkinker )
- A Kantian coming together of morals and aesthetics.
“No profit motif involved in this” (Amit Mukhopadhyay quoting Ramkinker )
- Money as bad had not entered the discourse around kala before the coming of the colonial rule…in fact a gifted shilpin was to except rich rewards.
- Anti capital articulations at a time when the notion of capital is attaining hegemonic status in India.
- Judeo-Christian origin of the notion as money as bad…and the manner in which this strand of thought enters European modernism and informs Marxism (can see hands being raised in protest that Marx was not anti capital.)
“Frees man from utility”
- Utility as bad
- Kantian hierarchy between art and craft.
- The discourse of bourgeois aesthetics becoming dominates in India.
The question of Sovan Kumar.
- “Love, Play Labour” in Sovan Kumar’s works.
- But is the linking to Ramkinker a bit too stretched? Sovan Kumar has a different articulation…works with different artistic strategies…in completely different contexts.
- The only connecting theme is that both engage with “Love, Play Labour” within the domain of High Art…and have affiliations towards the subaltern.
Artist Presentation by the Raqs media group
Did people touch “Do not touch works of art”? Any documentation of how many cards were taken during the display at Nature Morte Delhi.
- Not a personal question but when did the Raqs media group last ride on public transport Delhi bus.
- As a frequent user one can say that the ‘public’ using this mode on commuting does not feel the threat of alienation and one only felt ‘bombarded’ with fear at Nature Morte (at the Raqs show). What the city/state apparatus did not succeed in doing (i.e. causing alienation and fear), was done very successfully by Raqs in a work (allegedly) designed to counter hegemonies against such ‘intrusions’ in contemporary visual/cultural scapes.
- Public Art will always be in dialogue with socio-economic and political hegemonies…
Why do we need a Meta history of gatherings?
- Were we not (allegedly) moving away form tendencies to create Meta histories?
Most Indian based intellegencia continue to look at the Public as passive
Arguing for new age aesthetics?
- No good art versus bad art
- Only boring versus interesting?
- Post modern continuations of the modernist hegemony of knowledge
- If you don’t have an agenda (in terms of a post modern self consciousness) you are out?
Anti copy right discourse
- Art freely copies (appropriates) from within and without its realm even in this age of copyrights.
- Can one have a copy right on style?
The claim that new media makes things more democratic.
- Independent publications in the Kolkata Book Fair have in fact gone down after the advent of the ‘net’ and desktop publishing. The Little magazine tradition in Kolkata is actually dying.
End of Raqs presentation but Field Notes to continue.
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