Waswo X. Waswo's Posting Board

An exhibition that promises to be an interesting one, and of which I am a part...

Opening on Sunday, March 11th

Curatorial Concept by Dr. Kavitha Balakrishnan

pREpellers

This show connects fifteen contemporary artists for their dislocated lives and extremities in a post-globalised world, for their problematic containment of self, body, land and memories. They are brought together regardless of their location, origin and profile decorum in the art world. Using political memories and experiences to stretchable extents these artist-worlds are expressed at the verge of being grotesque, I mean, a state of ‘becoming’ where assorted sacred techniques of artistic transcendence turn absolutely impossible at work. All these artists in their own ways are sensitive to a post-idealist and post-global world wherein wonder-machineries of liberal consumerism, globalism, ‘shining nation’ and secular democracy are suspended for introspective scrutiny; leave alone the wonders of artistic transcendence. In a wider sense, this is apparently a grotesque situation for anyone who lives an artistic citizenry today trying to communicate with shapeless publics and contexts. The situation is caught at the verge of propelling and repelling, hence one can call them pREpellers.

A curated show, I believe, is a statement in collaboration on a particular space and time. ‘pREpellers’ is thereby an attempt to project the dialogue of selves that are both revealed and hidden, underpinning contemporary art’s variegated contexts. This being done in Chennai in 2012, also count a lot as this is one place where ‘the regional’ arguments are quite active. Interestingly, there is no single way art could be understood today in terms of a country, culture, locality, style or theme. More important are the ways in which art can generate new modes of thinking and doing with artistic identities in relation to a particular public. In that sense pREpellers is a part of that ‘artistic citizenry’ which is defined more by dislocations than essential locations. Inherent extremities of artists are here potential facilitators to connect with each other in a certain public domain and context of art.

I do not look for the representational dilemmas of ‘grotesque’ as a theme. Here is the lived experience of artistic identities in relation to ‘the canonical’ and ‘the uncanny’ in life and art. I am also interested in different ways in which artists quit /experiment / eroticize / mock their long standing representational burdens. Discourses of ethnic / gender identities are largely suspended for further genuine reasons. Artists address their distressed selves from variously designed vantage points. All these artists consciously corrupt the ideal edifices of political imagination of identities, both conventional and critical, that prevailed throughout the 20^th century artistic maneuvers. And these artists are not fallen angels / demons from the skies. Here is a chosen group of people sensitive to the traditions and art histories of uncanny art practices, both accounted and unaccounted, in different registers.

In India the canons of modern art had different propositions to generate expressions of rebellious imaginations of ‘progressives’, first ever radical breech from conventional public domains. The call for a modern 'avant-garde’ was also a call for extreme responses. One should also see that it was small circuit of people, many of them belonging to politically dislocated minority communities in post-independent India who actually shared and supported modern art world establishments here, like Emmanuel Schlesinger or the Alkazis and so on. But rebellions of the modernists hardly could directly connect with the post independent Indian life. Its uncanny margins, the regions and the idiosyncratic ‘commoner’s realities remained untapped. Modern Indian art was also a regularized ‘balancing act’ of alienated individuals on the idealistic foundations of a post-independent nation-state. So the later modernist communities rather tried to generate many synthetic forms of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as a perennial continuum.

This synthetic mode by and large happened to characterize India’s artistic modernity in regions and institutional strongholds (like Shantiniketan or Madras School) and in variously erudite endeavors of artist-individuals like J.Swaminathan, K.C.S Panikkar and K.G.Subrahmaniam. So on the surface of great Indian public domain all this while, there had been ideal pictures, political arcades and machineries of secular living and democratic hopes and Indian art has its own role in it. But the volcanic presence of dislocated identities, religious minorities, suffocated sexualities, critical citizenships and the very exodus of cultures within a plural state kept one in prolonged dialogue with the art of survival and subterfuge. The public domain debates initiated by affluent and strategic Indians often ignored the peripheral but large community of artists in India. Nevertheless, a pervasive kitsch of ‘culture / tradition’ was well entertained as it contributed to religious regional and political fundamentalisms of sorts.

It is important now to locate when and where an eventual sedimentation of ‘nether-worldly-ness’ of creative individuals started surfacing. Certain dialogue between ‘the canonical’ and ‘the uncanny’ more clearly emerged in 1990s as artists variously articulated the collapse of art-language-canons in their conceptual and installation projects. The plenitude of unconventional materials that they all used, virtually created the first jolt to the shapeless canons of modern art then in Indian galleries. This generation had posed challenges to the way galleries could anymore function here. ‘Uncanny’ in India at the fag end of 1990s emerged as expressions of political otherness of quite a few significant artists, their political support groups and rarely of some galleries participated in this by nailing their walls and housing ‘unmarketable’ materials, to mark their radical exhibition perspectives. But artists functioning as ‘intellectual others’ in a supposedly ‘naïve public domain’ had not then devised direct means to address troubled identities caught in the flux of sweeping changes in culture and economy. The ‘radical’ painters and sculptor’s group in late 1980s had tried to give a brief and extreme attempt to take art directly to a local Indian ( in this case, malayali - fishermen) public, seemingly an uncanny task at that time, away from the supposedly safe enclaves of galleries and their functional politics. Needless to say, the group was doomed to immediate fragmentation as the time was then not ripe to address the deep rooted extremity of living in India as an artist in cities, regions and locales, caught in critical relation to immediate society.

Useful and inevitable shifts, at once terrible and promising, happen in the contemporary phase. Art's profusion has well started propelling long-suspended desires for artistic-careers while repelling some of its own undesirable or rather disputable outcomes. Art practice today has to test the capabilities of unevenly profiled art-publics to meet, share, express and understand each other. Spot lights and white cubes of the artistic enclaves, those longstanding ‘transcendental’ museum props, are today caught in incessant mutations. Once the sign system of rare and mysterious beings, they are now props designed to engage conditionally and temporarily in a domain in a public, if not in a coherently defined 'public domain'.

Dr. Kavitha Balakrishnan

08-02-12