DISMANTLED NORMS:

APROPOS OTHER
AVANTGARDES

Geeta Kapur

THE NORMS
Indian art reflects the cultural agendas of the past 50 years in its
forms of modernity. At one end there is a sustained attempt to give
regard to indigenous, living traditions and to dovetail the
tradition/modernity aspects of contemporary culture through a
typically postcolonial eclecticism. At the other end, there is a
desire to disengage from the overarching politics of the national by
a reclusive attention to formal choices that seemingly transcend
both cultural and subjective particularities and enter the modernist
frame.1 My intention here is to step outside this by now familiar
paradigm and recognise alternative forms of self-designation by the
artists, as also non-conventional attributes for the art works. At an
empirical level, it means attending to the changing art forms in the
current decade. At a theoretical level, it means that we foreground
disjuncture and try to name the possible avantgardes. But first, a
countdown on the norms as these have characterised the decades
preceding the 1990s.2

46 Art and Social Change

Secular identity
Given the variety of well-appointed actors in the theatre of Indian
art there was, until recently, an aspiration for the artist to become a
central national figure. It was hoped that the artist would articulate
in work and speech a historical position that would clearly
demarcate a hospitable national space. This ideal of an integrated
identity had something to do with the mythic imaginary of lost
communities. It had to do with nationalism, Third World utopias
and postcolonial culturalism.3
Between the 1940s and 1960s, the integrated identity of the
Indian artist was, in an anti-imperialist sense, political. Somnath
Hore was part of the Communist movement, J. Swaminathan was
a Communist–anarchist, and K. G. Subramanyan a Gandhian.
Most contemporary artists, prominently M. F. Husain and Satish
Gujral, were privileged members of the Nehruvian liberal ethos.
Until recently, the identity of the Indian artist was largely modern
and secular. While there might have been conservative artists,
there would hardly be a fundamentalist among them. And if that
identity questioned modernity it did so on the basis of a tradition
that was, despite the invocations of sacred myths and symbols,
‘invented’ during a nationalist resurgence and was therefore
sufficiently secularised.
Or this seemed to be so until we began to interrogate this
past. In doing so we recognised in hindsight a bad faith in some of
the terms of nationalist cultural discourse. In particular that the
sectarian pulls of religion and caste had not been fully considered,
making both the modern and the secular well-meaning but
recalcitrant ideals.
In the post-Independence ethos Maqbool Fida Husain
characterises the ‘function’ of the national artist: he marks the
conjunction between the mythic and the secular and then between
secular and aesthetic space. Husain, along with some of his peers
(F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza and other members and associates of the
Progressive Artists’ Group of 1947), has helped to give modern art
in India an autonomous status — an autonomy that was, however,
already institutionalised in the West a century before. At the same
time, because of a socialist register in the liberal society of post-
Independence India, an artist like Husain has occupied a converse
status — that of peoples’ representative. The two contradictory
modes of formalising the Indian artist’s identity — as autonomous

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 47

 M.F. Husain and as spokesperson of the people — are held together by an
The Last Supper
idealised notion of the artist’s access to subjective and cultural
1991 plenitude. To further facilitate this utopian identity, Husain invokes
Acrylic on canvas
213 x 488 cm
a pantheon of benign gods in a reworked iconography. They are the
Collection: Pundole Art artist’s mascots in the ideological terrain of national culture.
Gallery, Bombay, India Today, Husain is a controversial public figure. He has been
close to State power and to the bourgeoisie. For the people, for the
layperson, the lure of Husain’s bohemian persona and what he
produces — a modernist/populist update on the Indian heritage —
are attractive. By this logic it is not Husain’s intention to provoke on
the basis of class, sex or religion. If any form of subversion can be
attributed to him it comes from the inherent tendency in modern
(expressionist) art to put an autobiographical stamp on the image.
Thus references to myths and epics carry the same libertine style of
representation that the artist’s self may sport, and the authorial
signature enhances the complicit nature of all iconographical
renderings, including the more erotic among these. The artist,
making an expressly personal intervention in epic realms, can appear
to be driven by hubris or, on the other hand, by unjustified intimacy.
The unfolding ‘case of Husain’ in the past few years
proves that whatever was sanctioned in progressive politics of
the post-Independence phase — by a centrist State, the national
bourgeoisie, a secular people — has come to be desanctioned by the
Hindu right wing.4 Precipitated by the charge that Husain is
a Muslim artist playing with Hindu myths and religion, the
controversy is about the right of representation through images and

48 Art and Social Change

whether this right is bound by community (inevitably embedded
in religion). It brings up the necessary role of the Muslim artist/
intellectual in defining the nature of Indian secular culture. It raises
questions about the status of mythology in contemporary life, of the
relation between cultural symbols and secular politics. It also brings
up the fate of modern art in the developing orthodoxies.
From an opposite pole, the more radical exponents of
democratic culture have expressed some discomfort with an artist’s
presumed expertise in slicing through the layers of this stratified
society; with his right to draw imaginative inspiration by touching
simultaneously high-caste, dalit and tribal cultures while leaving
the source compressed within a too-steeply hierarchical structure.
What has also been challenged is the mapping of the artistic
imagination on to a transcendent horizon, for this is the scale at
which the heroic self-designation of the national artist is pitched.
Even as cultural imperialism dressed up in euphemistic
phrases becomes globally more rampant, our redoubled critical task
is situated in the framework of a national culture. But from the other
end, as it were. I would maintain that the norm of a modern, secular
identity is honourable, but that its gestalt has to be rethought. At the
same time, the normative profile that Indian cultural practitioners,
artists among them, have hitherto adopted needs reconsideration.

Living traditions
At an ethical level, the votaries of a nationalist position will
expect to fulfil the responsibility of always contextualising their
artistic choices, situating them within the continuum of a living
tradition. This is felicitous. Sensitive handling of living traditions
helps maintain the sense of a complex society which informs and
sometimes subverts the modernisation that the very institution of
the nation-state inaugurates (and the market promotes).
Ritual arts of the rural communities and everyday artisanal
practices are part of perennial life-processes until today. They are also
part of daily drudgery, as they are now part of an openly exploitative
capitalist economy. In economic terms this phenomenon provides
a lesson in humility because the terms of survival are so hard. It is
a lesson that Meera Mukherjee lived in her life and art, using tribal
metal-casting techniques, using imagery from everyday cultures
including the iconic condensation of folk forms. She referred
especially to the compassionate traditions of Buddhism and to the
itinerant mendicants, the bauls, of her native Bengal. Furthermore,

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 49

she found a personal stylistics, going ‘beyond’ the matrix of
tradition and technique to a contemporary vision of the working
people. In cultural terms this 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.
In continuation with his Santiniketan training K. G.
Subramanyan has conducted something like an ongoing workshop
without walls around artisanal practices. His pedagogical role in the
fine arts faculties in M. S. University, Baroda and Visva-Bharati,
Santiniketan, and his status within the Indian Government’s policy
initiatives on the handloom and craft sectors are well known. As a
practising artist, he has evolved modes of interaction with the
polyvocal languages of the folk, especially the terracotta and pata
traditions; more importantly, he has found a new syntax for the
material vocabulary of artisanal forms. Thus he has contributed to
extending this living tradition into and beyond the closed circuitry
of traditions — and I refer to both repetitive craft traditions as well
as to the repetitive ‘tradition of the new’ in Western modernism.
Another kind of relationship was nurtured by artist–critic J.
Swaminathan with the primordial, the adivasi (in terms of ethnic
designation, the tribal) artist: this was first offered as a speculative
possibility when he formulated the manifesto for Group 1890
in 1963. Later, in 1982, he institutionalised this into policy
on becoming director of Roopankar, the twin museums of contem-
porary urban and tribal art in Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. Swaminathan
claimed existential continuity with the primordial imagination in
the creative act itself. His kind of metaphysical formalism involved
a conversion of cultural symbols and formalised icons into the more
elusive numen; it led 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 emphasize the numinous function
of art, neither to replace, nor to subordinate [it].5

The lessons that Meera Mukherjee, Subramanyan and

Swaminathan offer are decidedly different, yet each of them

50 Art and Social Change

 J. Swaminathan
Untitled

1993
Oil on canvas
117 x 173 cm
Collection:
Glenbarra
Art Museum,
Himeji-City, Japan

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. A hinterland
that holds living traditions with a vast number of differentiated
skills and vernaculars which it must somehow be the ambition
of the modern artist to know and decipher. This requires not
just ethnographically correct answers but a generosity that can
encompass and contain the loss of ‘superseded’ culture.
It needs to be noted, however, that living traditions are now
subject to the ever-revised categories of anthropology. The
tradition-versus-modernity argument was high on the common
agenda until recently; later, structuralist assumptions about
conceptual commonalities between cultures came to the fore. All
these are subject to new critiques. Artistic choices, once globalised,
enter the new (or non) ethics of postmodernism. This celebratory
neo-traditionalism is based not so much on material practice as on
the appearance of simulacra. This has to be taken on board in any
further discussions on the subject.

Eclectic choice
The more polemical aspect of the ethical proposition about living
traditions (or the perennial contemporaneity of all creative
expression) is the ideology of cultural eclecticism. Artist-teachers
in India (going back from Gulammohammed Sheikh to K. G.
Subramanyan and K. C. S. Paniker, and further back to Benodebehari

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 51

Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij and Nandalal Bose) have persuasively
argued that colonial cultures achieve a synchronous complexity by
intricately weaving local, vernacular and ethnic strands around a
‘standard’ heritage.6 By extension, national cultures in their post-
Independence status achieve certain lost parities with other
civilisations.
Further, eclecticism serves to emphasise the democratic
right of politically subordinated cultures to invent new syncretic
traditions of their own and thus to participate in an international
discourse of modernism through such (usually nationalist)
mediations.7 Decolonisation is an especially propitious moment to
open the floodgates of the national/modern imagination, rupturing
its too-conscientious project of identity with heterodox elements
from the rest of the world. It is this dismantled identity that then
enlarges the scope of contemporary art practice.
Within the terms of a colonial–postcolonial transition,
artistic eclecticism corresponds to the polemic around an Indian
identity. There are artists who make free use of tradition by
proffering mythic attributes and invented ancestral origins in their
work — A. Ramachandran, Ganesh Pyne, Laxma Goud are
examples. Thus eclecticism can be a defensive rearguard action. It
helps to balance nostalgia and derivativeness up to the point where
sources are transformed into independent creative expression and
serve to distinguish contemporary cultures.
Conversely, the use of iconography can become an act of
subversion. Sustained at an ironical level by older artists such as
M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, K. C. S. Paniker and K. G. Subramanyan,
iconographical devices continue to be generative among the next
generation of artists. Consider the infusion of the erotic in the
fabled, miniature-inspired narratives of Gulammohammed Sheikh.
Consider Jogen Chowdhury’s attenuated representations, his ever
more provocatively staged encounter with figures from his own
Bengali middle class and their peculiar body language mediated
through the stylistic conventions of the Bengal pata. Consider
the homoerotic tableaux of Bhupen Khakhar, who takes Indian
popular art from the 19th century across the modernist crucible
and, in a painterly sleight of hand, arrives at a kitsch-sublime of his
sexual fantasies. Almost more than any other Indian artist, it is
Khakhar who has helped to dismantle the incumbent norms.
Bhupen Khakhar, Jogen Chowdhury and Gulammohammed
Sheikh were three among six artists (the other three were Vivan
Sundaram, Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan) who presented

52 Art and Social Change

 Bhupen Khakhar
How Many Hands
Do I Need To Declare
My Love To You?

1994
Watercolour on paper.
122 x 122 cm
Collection: Bohdi Art,
Delhi/Singapore

Bhupen Khakhar
An Old Man From
Vasad Who Had Five
Penises Suffered From
a Runny Nose

1995
Watercolour on paper
116 x 116 cm
Collection: The Estate
of Bhupen Khakhar
Image courtesy
The Fine Art Resource,
Mumbai, India

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 53

a seminal exhibition titled Place for People in 1981. They made
urban narratives and representational fantasies into an ideological
choice. Creating a combustion in the heart of Indian modernism,
they set apace many pictorial (auto)biographies along the Baroda,
Bombay, Kerala trajectories.

Modernist ‘integrity’
The terms national, secular, modern are so familiar in Indian
cultural discourse that modernism as such is not always examined.
The formal logic, the stylistic dovetailing and contending
ideologies of modernism are not systematically investigated in
the sometimes fortuitous, sometimes passionate syncretism of
contemporary Indian art. The modernist enterprise is made up
of aesthetic choice, existential temperament, recognisable style
and the auteur’s characteristic signature. But that these modernist
assumptions, when placed in a nationalist paradigm of authenticity,
may present a paradox becomes evident only when the formal
regimes of modernism are foregrounded.
In the context of these developments, it is important to
emphasise that Indian artists do occasionally work with developed
adaptations of expressly modernist canons and, indeed, with a
modernist poetics. There is a short but intense history of Indian
modernism that is perfectly consonant with economic and political
modernisation: it does not require a hermeneutic of tradition, nor
a demonstrable nationalist purpose, nor even the alibi of post-
colonial eclecticism.
The first phase of self-declared modernism in India dates from
the 1940s (triggered, as I mentioned, by the formation of several
‘progressive’ groups). It coincides with the immediate post-
Independence decade. Typical of several mainstream modernists
from this generation is an expressionist aesthetic. Let me take Tyeb
Mehta (a later associate of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group)
as an example to examine the representational procedure of these
artists. Mehta accepts the necessity of art-historical cross-refer-
encing but privileges the analytic mode of structuring references.
He thus makes the sources formally coeval and the image symbolic
in the universal sense of that term. Tyeb Mehta’s inscription of
a figural metaphor for terror on a brilliantly painted ground reads
like a death mask in the context of late 20th century art. This
painterly double-act of mourning and celebration places him with

54 Art and Social Change

internationally situated modernists devoted to existential paradox
and formal mediation. Mehta’s figural ensembles invoke not only
the arcadia of classical modernism (Matisse and Leger) but also
politically pertinent mythology: for example the near-nihilist
celebration of corporeal devourings by goddess Kali, the apotheosis
of the buffalo-demon Mahishasura by goddess Durga. His recent
work is wedged like a historical marker in the project of Indian
modernism; it is subliminally mapped over contemporary tragedies
such as the marginalisation of his own Muslim community within
what is designated as a national–secular space. Mehta works
towards synthesising the image, resolving it into an iconic poise
that engages but also transcends cultural and subjective particu-
larities. He thus offers, in a sense, one ‘solution’ to the paradox that
is Indian modernism.
The iconic has had a central space in modernism since the
beginning of the century. An important category of modernism, it
transposes romanticist impulses to abstraction. After the 1960s,

Tyeb Mehta
Mahishasura

1998
Acrylic on canvas
260 x 175 cm
Collection:
Glenbarra
Art Museum,
Himeji-City, Japan

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 55

one part of the modernist-expressionist enterprise moves
towards contemplative imagery: the works of the trio S. H. Raza,
Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, belong here. There are artists —
J. Swaminathan, Biren De, Prabhakar Barwe — who, in deference
to the modernist principle of condensation, convert lyric images
into spiritual numens. And others who convert numens into airy
grids — V. S. Gaitonde, V. Viswanadhan, Nasreen Mohamedi. We
thus have a body of work that makes virtue of (nature-based)
abstraction to gain metaphysical ends.
There are successive generations of modernists, Jeram Patel,
for example, who work out their subjectivities through a vestigial
expressionism to arrive at a discrete form that yields a graphic trace
and artists’ ecriture. A condensation of form through metaphor
appears also in the work of sculptors like Satish Gujral, Himmat
Shah, Nagji Patel, Mrinalini Mukherjee, who convert objects into
contemporary icons and icons into hermetic form, thereby empha-
sising the significance of material immanence in modernist art.
Modernism has valorised the near-autonomous logic of the
hand, sign and metaphor in the making of art works. This connects
the modernist with the ‘primitive’ or tribal artist by a looped
argument, giving the former the privilege of possessing a visual
language and the latter that of contemporaniety. This universalised
notion of the image can be positioned as the common norm of
modernist formalism, also often standing in for ‘integrity’.
For a younger generation of artists it is precisely the
displacement of these three authorial elements — hand, sign,
metaphor — on to other more problematic levels of materiality
and semiotics that is important. It causes a disjuncture of meanings
and loosens up new chains of meanings. It is in this manoeuvre
within the conceptually open, half-empty space of modernity that
the more fraught social identity of the contemporary Indian 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 art practice takes hold.

AVANTGARDE ALTERNATIVES
In his formulation of the historical avantgarde, the German theorist
Peter Burger identifies some key characteristics, one of which is anti-
institutionalism — including opposition to the institutionalised
autonomy of art. The establishment of autonomous art within

56 Art and Social Change

bourgeois culture is interrogated, a reconnection between art and life
and an integration of high and low cultures is encouraged.8
I will argue that if the avantgarde is a historically condi-
tioned phenomenon and emerges only in a moment of real political
disjuncture, it will appear in various forms in different parts of the
world at different times. To develop this point, I extrapolate from
the American critic Hal Foster’s reflections on the subject.
Although indebted to Burger’s concept of a historical avantgarde,
Foster takes issue with Burger’s sectarian position on the avant-
garde of the 1920s:

[H]is very premise — that one theory can comprehend the

avant-garde, that all its activities can be subsumed under the
project to destroy the false autonomy of bourgeois art — is
problematic. Yet these problems pale next to his dismissal of the
postwar avant-garde as merely neo, as so much repetition in bad
faith that cancels the prewar critique of the institution of art.9

Clearly, a historicism that designates cause and effect on the

presumption that the prior event produces the later one is not
acceptable to Foster, and he goes on to say:

Despite many critiques in different disciplines, historicism still

pervades art history, especially modernist studies, as it has from
its great Hegelian founders to influential curators and critics
like Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg and beyond. Above
all else it is this persistent historicism that condemns
contemporary art as belated, redundant, repetitious.10

Hal Foster takes a position in favour of successive vanguards

precisely to make contemporary practice viable, claiming that it is
as advanced and ambitious in its critical stance as the 1920s’
historical avantgarde. I am suggesting that we extend the argument
by a deliberate deflection: the successive forms of the vanguard are
extended to include hitherto unlogged initiatives. Initiatives taken
outside the West and vetoed out of modernist and avantgarde
histories on the ground that these initiatives are belated and
repetitious. This deflected argument will rebound as a critique of
Foster’s own (Euro)Americanism, of his indifference to non-
Western ideologies of plural modernities/alternative vanguards.
Once we admit history — over and above art history — as
the matrix from which the notion of the avantgarde arises, then

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 57

there are always plural histories in the reckoning. For a long time
now Latin American cultures have followed a radical agenda that
has developed into a cultural dynamic quite independent of their
Euro-American antecedents. Similarly, an African or Asian
avantgarde will come into its own if at least two moves take place
simultaneously. One, a move that dismantles the hegemonic and
conservative features of the national culture itself. Two, a move
that dismantles the burdensome aspect of Western art, including
its programmatic vanguardism. That is to say, such an avantgarde
would have to treat the avantgarde principle itself as an
institutionalised phenomenon, recognising the assimilative
therefore sometimes paralysing capacity of the (Western) museums,
galleries, critical apparatuses, curators and media.

Who’s afraid of the American avantgarde?

Here, a quick retake on the American avantgarde might help since
it so mediates and dominates the art-historical discourse on the
subject. It is worth remembering that, in the American context,
the parameters of the debate on the avantgarde are conditioned by
the Americans’ own telescoping of modernism. The first great
phase of modernist art in the United States emerged as late as the
1940s. By the 1960s, American art critics had already marked the
end of modernist art per se. American modernists, having pushed
an ideology of freedom in the Cold War years on the single ticket
of heroic abstraction, brought it to a quick impasse. With the next
generation of more academic art historians in the lead, American
artists became exemplars of a disciplined vocation. The positioning
of the 1960s avantgarde was fitted out as a recuperative strategy
within an already established teleology of advanced art, indeed
of an overall American advancement.
The avantgarde of the 1960s — pop art and minimalism
(in Europe: fluxus and arte povera), positioned in critical
relationships to the suppressed histories of dada and constructivism
— did respond to the outwardly directed radicalism of the decade.
And the conceptual opposition to the modernist aporias of the
period were based in some part on the intrepid stand of youthful
revolutionary energy intent on upturning, as in the decade of the
1920s across Europe and Russia, the last bastions of bourgeois
modernism. But if the American neo-avantgarde replayed the
1920s’ battle with modernism, we should remember that it was in

58 Art and Social Change

terms of a very reduced notion of this modernism and of modernist
painting: Marcel Duchamp was face to face with Pablo Picasso; A.
M. Rodchenko with, say, Max Beckmann; but Donald Judd faced
only a Kenneth Noland — one formalism against another. A too-
precise battle, too easily won, straitened the discourse of the
neo-avantgarde into retinal epiphanies versus bodily encounter. It
needed the feminist-led extension of the conceptual art movement,
with its emphasis on the political import of phenomenology and
semiotics, to give the avantgarde some bite in the 1970s.
Not only is there no reason whatsoever for the rest of the
world to subscribe to the vocational stringencies of the American
vanguard, there are other larger battles to be taken account
of: alternative avantgardes must emerge in opposition to the
American power structures of art, academia and, above all, politics.
They do in fact emerge — and within the United States as well —
to challenge the biggest monolith of all: the American State and
its capitalist fundamentalism.
Political forms of cinema and magical narratives in literature
from Latin America have knocked peremptorily at the gringo
citadels since the 1960s. Enough has been produced in the visual
culture of the neighbourhood to break any notional monopoly of
the American avantgarde. Other parts of the world find their own
cultural equations and make precise linguistic choices. Clement
Greenberg’s aesthetic, for example, meant very little in Asia; there
was always a greater attraction for eccentric and excessive acts of
art-making and therefore other models served the purpose to make
up alternative modernities. In the post-1960s period, for example,
pop art and the attenuated forms of narrative reflexivity that
R. B. Kitaj and David Hockney developed apropos what came to
be known as the School of London find reverberations among the
narratively inclined Indian painters. The new-image painters of
the 1980s, such as Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke in
Germany, or the more florid Italians such as Francesco Clemente
and Enzo Cucchi, strike a chord in Afro-Asian postmodernisms,
given the expressionist bias of the first-generation modernists in
several of these cultures. On the other hand the contrary, the
mythic–romantic, aspect of the conceptual art practised by Joseph
Beuys and his followers has fascinated artists in many parts of the
world, including younger Asian and Indian artists. Feminists have
learnt from each other across cultures and this brings into the orbit

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 59

of imagination artists as disparate as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse,
Nancy Spero and Cindy Sherman.
An Asian/Indian artist does not aspire to be part of the
monumental trans-avantgarde of Europe; for the same reason, the
American avantgarde is seen as a discrete phenomenon within
mainstream internationalism. Even renegades from the American
canon — from the painterly to the minimalist, from the post-
painterly to the conceptual — gain other meanings in other
contexts. The continuing debates on the avantgarde, invigorating
as they are, cannot — precisely because the avantgarde is not a
moral or academic but historical force — claim a determining
discourse on the avantgarde elsewhere. Once they are unstrung
from the logic of a Euro-American master discourse on advanced
art, Third World vanguards can be seen to be connected with their
own histories and to mark that disjuncture first and foremost.11
It is true that in the (still operative) imperialist phase of
internationalism, plural histories are hierarchised in terms
of effective agency. But this view has been repeatedly challenged
since liberation politics came on the agenda. The discourse of
decolonisation has staked the claim that these cultural alterna-
tives, positioned as they are at the cutting edge of poverty, are as
valid as any criterion that we recount in conventional art history.
Contemporary Euro-American cultural discourse cannot function
without a recognition of the major shake-ups that have taken place
in its hegemonic assumptions: just as Mexico and the Soviet
Union challenged Europe in the prewar era, and Cuba and
Vietnam challenged the United States in the 1960s, Asia may well
be the economic rival and cultural nemesis of Euro-American
power in the coming decades.

Asian art: a poetics of displaced objects

Asian cultures are faced with multiple paradoxes barely covered by
art-historical debates in the Euro-American context.12 It needs to
be emphasised that if a rehistoricisation of modernism has been
undertaken in Western art history via the very distinction made
between modernist and avantgarde ideologies (as, for example, the
issues around the 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition,
Primitivism in 20th Century Art: affinity of the tribal and the modern,
and how these were reversed in the 1989 Centre Pompidou
exhibition Magiciens de la Terre13), then this form of exposition is

60 Art and Social Change

wide open for interventions: the disjuncture of decolonisation
makes a particularly useful vantage point.
We can now speak of the co-production of modernities as
between the colonial and the colonised, and quite certainly of the
co-production of postmodernism on the elaborately theorised
experience of postcolonialism. Indeed, one may now pose a
somewhat parodic question: whether it is time for avantgarde
initiatives in the non-Western world to place qualifiers around
Euro-American art and treat it as ethnographic source material for
their productions.
An anthropological intent that figures alterity is now active in
the Asian arts. The point is to go beyond the well-known
primitivist trope; to open out the sacred, the self-incorporating
secret with which art objects in traditional societies are imbued.
There is an interest in tribal materialism and cosmologies as these
concern indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Australia
and the Americas. The counter-taboo against any interference by
metropolitan artists in the life-world of tribal artists was based on
one kind of ethic. This has been broken to the extent that
interaction between so-called closed and open communities is
inevitable in the present electronic age. Every space has been
invaded or will be shortly. Artists bear witness to the fact that a
new ethics of reciprocity has to be devised that is wary of the
ethnographic sentiment for conservation, of an art-historical desire
for a traditional aesthetic, of national appropriations, of imperialist
robbery. And of artistic masquerades on behalf of the people.
In most Third World countries indigenous and civilisational
values are covered over by more recent manifestations of
nationalism, of national struggles and, in some cases, of the
revolution. Not surprisingly, the Mexican mural movement is the
monumental representational project in this regard. In the
Philippines allegorical painting, somewhat like the Mexican mural
movement, is still strong, ranging in more recent years from, say,
Edgar Fernandez to the surreal mappings by the artist-couple
Reamillo and Juliet, to the collective work of the Sanggawa Group.
While national liberation movements — their triumphs and
their occasional reversals — are a continuing subject of cultural
creativity, the representational projects are now accompanied by
strategies of future survival. The relay of blood and memory in the
history of the nation yields a simultaneous vision of material and

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 61

cultural transformations under way in specific locations. There is
cleverly coded political art in Indonesia with artists like FX
Harsono, Heri Dono and Dadang Christanto making up an
advance guard. They use aspects of the Javanese tradition of
puppetry and pantomime, converting theatric traditions to
conceptual and political ends, staging strange artefacts, macabre
figures, disciplined robots with a precisely calculated charge. These
works mount a cumulative critique: on the hegemonic role of
Western art, on the consequences of coercive globalisation and,
more specifically, they represent as well as act out the tragic affect
of an oppressive State machinery at home.
Many Asian societies have witnessed a dispersal of their
populations through successive waves of migration, and are
therefore subject in their cultural manifestations to mediations of
diasporic, now global, concerns. The immigrant simultaneously
questions imperialism as s/he does the ideology of nationalism, thus
deprivileging the hierarchies set up by local interests. Equally,
however, the deconstruction of capitalist myths is acted out more
and more outside the West; it now takes place in Eastern locations
where transnational corporations resituate themselves for surplus
profit. So the issue of location is once again important, this time
inversely, as a site of global exploitation and of cruel profit through
local collaborators. The work of the Thai artists, Vasan Sitthiket,
Kamol Phaosavasdi and Navin Rawanchaikul finds ways to show
how people’s ecological integrity as well as political sovereignty
is being destroyed daily and precisely in the Third World.
A landscape with debris forms the basis of 20th century political
imagery that is still, in our part of the world, finding new forms of
articulation.
What we are dealing with is transcultural signs. For, if national
allegories and their deconstruction are foregrounded in many of the
Asian countries, the various forms of cultural creativity are based
precisely on a metamorphosis of the inputs I have been speaking
about: anthropological resources, national ambitions, transnational
capital, economic and ecological devastation. It is this conjuncture
that has, in the past two decades, produced a volatile situation and
an avantgarde in Asia.
The Chinese avantgarde bursting forth in the aftermath of
Mao’s Cultural Revolution (and subsequent death), produces
bitterly parodic pop paintings. Zhang Xiaogang, Feng Mengbo,

62 Art and Social Change

Wang Guangyi, and Yu Youhan are examples. More recently,
elaborate and ironical forms of installation and performance art
have multiplied: the work of Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Chen Zhen
are formally as complex as they are flamboyant and provocative.
The installation/performance projects of the Chinese artist, Cai
Guo Qiang, include the spectacle of exploding Chinese fireworks;
the making of a mock-primitive boat armed with arrows after a
wisdom tale from Chinese tradition about the tactics of warfare
with the enemy; and, in his Venice-based project, Bringing to Venice
What Marco Polo Forgot Project (1995), the historical reversal of
the theme of voyage, discovery, trade, whereby he suggests an
ethics of reciprocity in current times.
Along with the articulation of a new cultural cartography
(charged with a geopolitical force), the Asian region is rich terrain
for the formation of new subjectivities, especially female and
feminist subjectivities long held captive by the heavily guarded
patriarchies of the region. It is while interrogating hegemonic
aspects of collective consciousness and national allegory, both
personified by male protagonists, that female artists such as Imelda
Cajipe-Endaya of the Philippines and Arahmaiani from Indonesia
signal solidarities with victims of global capital. In the process
of radical recodings, as in the case of Thai artist Araya
Rasdjarmrearnsook, the transition from the social to the familial to
the subjective takes place through a relay of melancholy metaphors
that can be seen, together with artists such as Suzann Victor from
Singapore, Chen Yan Yin from China and Bul Lee from South
Korea, as a corporeal and immanent language of dissidence. Asian
feminism stakes claims as a contemporary intervention, revealing
culturally rich female self-knowledges where family, self, social
abandonment and the erotics of pain are all put out for scrutiny.
We have to consider the status of the object in relation to
indigenous crafts as in Asian countries objects, sculptures and
installations are produced from materials and skills quite different
from the West. We must remember that in Asia materials are still
connected with live artisanal practices. There are artisans in
transitional stages within the village and urban market economies
who have traditional skills; correspondingly urban artists have
access to vestigial skills. Consider the work of the Indonesian artist
Nindityo Adipurnomo who melds ancient and new eroticism
through the use of exquisite craft, making the act of handcraft itself

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 63

a voluptuous, if also ironical, ‘gift’. And of Soo Ja Kim from South
Korea, using traditional/fake silk and brocade textiles as
ornamental flourish and floating arabesques, as deliberately
devalued stuffings in migrants’ bundles.
There is here a question of skill as paid labour and the
problem of exploitation of indigenist art practices. There is also a
question of authenticity — not an issue of being within a tradition,
but of possessing a language that transcends it while respecting the
material conditions of artisanal practice. It is not enough to
fabricate in order to textually deconstruct an art object for its own
sake. We have to find new ways of speaking about the material
predispositions of Asian artists as well as their neo-conceptual
operations on the notion of a raw indigenism.
The object in the installations of many Asian artists signals
an in-between stage of use and exchange value. In a situation of
incomplete modernisation and uneven market economy, there is a
quasi-commodification at work: older forms of fetishism survive
within new forms of reification in a consumer culture. The object
installed within such a context is neither fully functional nor
sacred nor entirely part of commerce. There is reference to all
three aspects at once, and to a fourth aspect: the making of art with
its own parameters stretched between art-historical context and
formal autonomy, with the paradoxes and ironies this enfolds. This
in-betweenness can give the object in the installations a peculiarly
liminal presence.
We must further remember that the object of art, both by
itself and in the theatrical mise en scène of the installation, is quite
differently conditioned in societies that have an active tradition of
magic, fetish and ritual, including elaborate performances. In the
Philippines, in the small town of Baguio, artists have construed
an indigenous aesthetic with poor materials and shamanistic
performances to ‘appease’ destiny: I am thinking in particular of
the late Roberto Villanueva and Santiago Bose.
Incarnate experience, in the larger phenomenological sense
in which these traditional cultures mobilise the image, should now
include a new poetics of space. I am speaking of the contemplative
aesthetic introduced by Chinese artist Xu Bing with his
monumental scroll A Book from the Sky, and other language-based
works mimicking, invoking, provoking, upturning, civilisational
pedagogies. In the work of the late Thai artist, Montien Boonma,

64 Art and Social Change

the suggested circumambulation and peculiar sensory saturation
resulting in a condensed ‘aura’ produces a form of hypostasis.
His modestly installed temples are designated as precincts of
meditation that give to the act of spectatorship a deliberate
reticence and to all the senses together an indexical charge
of mortality that is both pain and jouissance.
Many sculptural ensembles by contemporary artists from
Asia, such as those of Filipino artist Agnes Arellano, tend to
redefine identity through mythic concreteness — a resurrected
body in the iconic mode, a numinous presence in the dismantled
condition of self. It is no wonder then that the theatric temporality
of the installation form experienced as a secular site for benediction
has been so optimistically pursued in Asia in recent decades.
Because the civilisations of the Asian region hold a
continuing lure for the transcendental, there tend to be revivals
of a scriptural/metaphysical aesthetic. Similarly, there is a subtle
diffusion based on the enshrinement of mystical desire in the heart
of dissenting cultures. A creative relationship between the
classical, the mystical and the everyday secular which demands
what I called living solidarities, is precisely the range of contra-
dictions contemporary Asian artists constantly tackle.
Given that Asian/Indian art has been so dominated by the
metaphorical — the metaphors heavy with civilisational values —
the assembly and installation of objects in foregrounding
metonymic meanings perform a crucial function. The processes
of condensation are eased and the artist is able to introduce both
the poetics and politics of displacement. The installation form,
presenting a phenomenological encounter based precisely on the
act of displacement — of found and sited objects, concrete and
ephemeral ideas — produces propitious results for Asian art. It
raises questions on the notion of the artist’s proper domain; her/his
entry into public spaces and the discourse emanating therefrom.
It reflects on the equation between the citizen–subject, the artist
and art work in the imaginary (evolutionary) public sphere.
I will now take up implications that emerge from the
developing Asian/Indian situation. The first is the recurring status
of the hybrid sign within colonial discourse as it pertains to
contemporary art works. The second is the politics of place in the
global context with specific reference to postcolonial discourse,
and the actual production and exchange of art works.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 65

Heterogeneous/heterodox
By confronting these [historical] issues, perhaps we can
understand more clearly the cultural hybridities that emerge in
moments of transition and transmutation. In the process, the
concept of homogenous national Asian cultures seen through
consensual art traditions can be redefined. Indonesian
installations that represent the violence and burden of
postcolonialism can be contrasted to Korean history painting
of resistance during the colonial period; Philippine mural
painting that makes allegorical reference to the Roman
Catholic faith can be compared to a Buddhist-inspired
medicinal-herb installation from Thailand or a cow dung
painting from India; the native female body is examined as the
focus of sexual desire and physical abuse in works by Indian,
Philippine and Korean artists. This is not the ‘clash of
civilisations’ … it is the chink and clang of the heterogeneities
and hybrids that make contemporary art from Asia so full of
surprises and expectations.14

The pleasure of heterogeneity is also a claim to heterodox

politics, which is what the definition of the avantgarde in Asia
may most closely approximate. I will add a rider here so that the
issues do not get stereotyped on the other side of the divide.
Playing the devil’s advocate, I will suggest that colonial–
postcolonial cultures in Asia have been too ready to capitalise on
eclecticism. I am in favour of the honourable conventions of
eclectic art practice, taking it as a privilege of complex civilisations
that have strongly syncretic aspects. But I take a critical position
at this juncture because, as a multicultural norm (which is itself
constituted in large part through the debates raised by the diverse
cultural processes released in the postcolonial period), it can mask
the sharper contours of an identity forged by the pressures of
modernity, de-colonisation and global capitalism.
A continued insistence on eclecticism and its conversion to
various ideologies of hybridity within the postmodern can serve to
elide the diachronic edge of cultural phenomena and thus ease the
tensions of historical choice. It can lead not only to nostalgia but
also to a kind of temporal recoil. For in societies where traditions
are part of the material life of living peoples and modernity is still
and again besieged — by religions/fundamentalisms of every kind

66 Art and Social Change

— recycling tradition is anything but an unproblematic business. It
can help the right-wing propagandists and suit their tastes. This is
what we have to remember apropos postmodernism itself. Global-
scale eclecticism can lead to the kind of laissez-faire where every
choice and combination is ratified by the participatory spirit of
postcolonial/postmodernism.
To put it in more ideological terms, we must look not for
hybrid solutions to the tradition/modernity dichotomy but for a
dialectic. The heterodox elements from the national culture itself
— which is to say the counterculture within it — must first be put
into the fray: the visual inputs of the popular, the marginalised
cultures of tribal communities, of minorities and dalits, of women.
A space for contestation has to be recognised within the national/
modern paradigm so that there is a real (battle) ground for cultural
difference and so that identities can be posed in a far more acute
manner than postmodern notions of hybridity can accommodate.15
This may be the precise time to reconsider why postcolonial
artists may, in fact, refuse the passport of cultural hybridity into the
postmodern. That is, of the postmodern that promotes simulacra
based on attenuated cultural mediations of the contemporary. It
may also be the time for these artists to treat plurality as a means of
posing a series of alternatives that have some bite left from the
earlier, more dialectical notion of contradiction.16 Modernism has
(a still unrealised) revolutionary history — even if it is at present
in retreat; postmodernism, even if it is ascendant, coincides with
a retreat of all anti-capitalist ideologies. I would like to revert to
a historical dialectic developed in the radical strains of 20th century
avantgarde art and to link modernism and postmodernism by
that means.

Geopolitical tremors
Globalisation and its contingent ideologies make up the kind of
postmodern space that requires new mapping strategies. Multiple
places and plural histories are yanked together as sites of
speculation, as sites of operation for the TNCs (transnational
corporations), and for their sheer exploitability in the labour and
consumer markets.
Moreover, the TNCs force a form of multiple interference
that dislodges the earlier international consolidations and splits it
into the local and the global. It thereby also reinscribes artists into

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 67

an anthropological discourse and gives them a command over
otherness that is, by now, largely emblematic. It is this that is prone
to be trivialised both by postmodern discourse and by the kind of
postcolonialism that reduces itself to ethnic banalities. We have to
make sure that otherness has less to do with the fancy dress of
multiculturalism and more to do with political reflexivity and
cultural action of a kind that opens the possibility of direct,
democratic address.17
Even anthropology — the most located of all disciplines —
makes sense in its excessive forms at the brink: of subjectivity in
extremis. Indeed, if otherness is not to become another kind of an
ecriture you have to position both the self and art practice in a
critical dimension: where linguistic investigation remains distinct
from yet another indigenist style and cultural translation
foregrounds its political agendas.18
The possibilities of redefined location are coming to be
better understood by artists of the Third World as they stake their
position within the terms of a new global culture. In that respect, it
is not surprising that Asian art has come into an avantgarde aspect
at the point of double reckoning with old and new imperialisms
and at a moment when the fruit of the economic miracle begins
to taste bitter at the core. If the Asian avantgarde is based on
a sense of the future, as it must be, this lies in the enlarged theatre
of political contradictions.
The question, then, is not of reinventing discrete national
traditions nor of manufacturing something like an integrated
Asian/global tradition. This politics requires the harnessing of
countercurrents — currents that carry and sublimate civilisational
values crisscrossing those that painfully desublimate them.
Nor is such transgressive energy to be nurtured in the raw;
the aesthetic is elaborately coded in Asia and the recoding requires
adequate formal means. It requires an understanding of the classi-
cising principle; it requires considerations due to surviving artisanal
practices in the commodified context of globalised economies. There
has to be an ethics of identity in Asian societies that requires not only
posthumous retribution on behalf of destroyed cultures but also
devalorisation of the self, of subjective indulgence, in an act of living
solidarities with the cultures that survive. To reiterate an earlier
proposition: acts of radical desublimation that avantgarde art practice
requires are that much more complex in cultures based on a
sublimation of civilisational ideals through centuries.

68 Art and Social Change

 A hermeneutic must be put to work in the art of Asia today;
it is a major excavation of precisely the geopolitics of place that
includes tradition and the TNCs. Marion Pastor Roces dramatises
this to excellent effect:

The vocabulary of geology is especially useful in visualizing the

ground of tradition as active and substantial and subject to
dramatic or imperceptible processes of subduction. Slippage,
fissuring, accordioning, folding in, absorption, collapse;
building up — all irruptions within highly local dynamics —
elude confinement in fixed strata. Specialists need to direct
their attention toward volatile chemistries and traceries of
ancient and current traumas. And if potential for equilibrium
or disaster is calibrated with a healthy respect for the
indeterminate, it may be possible to gain an understanding of
forces that reverberate jaggedly and fracture the binary
formulations so fundamental to Western epistemologies into
capillaries — not just vivid fault lines — of stress.19

The politics of place

I want to introject the notion of an avantgarde into the specific
cultural dialectic in India, or what one might call a politics of
place.20
There are two major opposing forces in India’s social terrain.
The claim of the Hindu right to a hegemonic status mounting in
moments of crisis to a near-fascist use of majoritarian power. And
the equally massive force at work within the nation towards the
realisation of a more radical democracy and the recognition of
economically backward and socially oppressed sections of the
polity: dalits, religious minorities, women. These volatile forces
threaten to pulverise the centrist State and throw up styles of
identity which shake the certitudes of its progressive nationalism.
Stepping back along the tracks of change, it may be worth
mentioning the two prominent approaches deployed to deal with
the stress of change in Indian cultural history. Terms such as
continuity, eclecticism and reinvention all try to work through the
more elastic substances of old civilisations — from tradition to
modernity. The subalternist’s response privileges transgression,
subversion, hybridity, and proposes another style of (or even exit
from) modernity.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 69

 Once norms such as cultural sovereignty, (autonomous)
high art forms and an institutionalised aesthetic devised alongside
the compound canon of the national/modern come to be
dismantled under pressure from globalisation, the transformative
and the transgressional approaches break down. Once the State
and the national bourgeoisie begin to play out the game of
economic liberalisation, the Indian artist is certain to have to shed
‘his’ singular identity, to arrive at a more polyvocal presence. It is
no longer a matter of pitching into an indigenous identity
(frequently hijacked by cultural conservatives), nor of self-
representation through existentially authenticated art forms. Even
the strategies of subversion will need to be worked out into a new
style of making, of placing, of reconstituting the world of objects
and values in the fragmented gestalt of our times.
Is there a substantive aspect to cultural differences within a
changing India? How do production values supersede the demands
of conservative elites and avid consumers — as also conventions of
Third World radicalisms established elsewhere? How do we relate
with the radicalisms immanent in the social terrain at home, how
should we recognise and name an avantgarde in India?
The argument I want to introduce is that the model for an
avantgarde in Indian art could be part of the same dialectic that is
motivating social theory. Consider how Indian historians further
the methodology that breaks down the national narrative, the
cultural paradigm, the object of attention and the very subject of
history; how they seek to replace teleologies (which happens to be
the mode of projecting modernist art) with phenomenological
encounter and discursive analysis (which coincide with the mode
of apprehending the historical avantgarde).
Developing the analogy further: Indian social historians now
frequently work with the idea of the fragment, accepting that it
provides a part-for-whole significance in the moment of loss — the
loss of a humanist utopia, for example, the very evacuation of which
has to be understood within the terms of a (failed?) historical
vision.21 The fragment may be seen as something split off because
of an ideological disengagement from the pressure of a given
hegemonic culture. Or it may be an element that was never
integrated and which further devolves to withstand assimilation.
This could be the point at which the feminine transforms itself into
a feminist position, or at which the dalit consciousness performs an
act of cultural secession in order to create a state of extreme alterity.

70 Art and Social Change

 The cultural dialectic in India requires that analysts and
practitioners — artists among them — foreground positions of
marginality and reveal such contradictions that bring creativity to
the brink. Indeed one may argue that any cultural creativity
requires the deployment of social analysis on the one hand, and a
commitment to avantgarde practice that deals with materiality and
process and facilitates transformation, on the other.
Thresholds have to be crossed once nationalist protectionism
in art (as in economics) is dropped and the vexed category of the
Indian/modern stands exposed. Dating from the middle of the
1980s, changes have occurred in art practice that have now, in the
1990s, acquired an edge. A newly differentiated politics emerges
along with a long overdue art-historical retrospection on sources
and language.22

INDIAN ART IN THE 1990s

Before going on to a more detailed exposition of the work of some
of the key players, I want to map the significant trajectories in the
Indian art scene. Artists still undertake, in a far from exhausted
way, representational subversions. At the same time, they develop
textually complex allegories based on the image. To this has been
added a repertoire of monumentally styled iconography by younger
sculptors. In recent years there is more recourse to masquerade, and
there is the actual staging of art works in a theatric mise en scène.
Art as object, and its status at the level of assembly and installation,
and art works using found material and conceptually coded signs
are beginning to be explored. The domain of reproduction has
been extended within the gallery from the print to the photograph
to the video, thus devalorising the uniqueness of the image/object.
Armed with a battery of new signs, artists have taken the initiative
to enter and designate the public sphere. One might even say
that by undermining the image they seek a fresh mandate on
historical motifs. But there is also, as against these public concerns,
a manoeuvre towards counter-reification through the crafting of
the unique fetish — where coded desire deflects both the alibi
of objective representation and public forms of address.
I present here two versions of the representational project.
Making a deliberate and somewhat provocative binary between
the male/female exponents, I show them to be consciously
attempting ironical counterpoints in current iconography. This is

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 71

followed by another deliberately posed (but not exclusively
gendered) binary: of private fetish and public concerns.

Male representations
The interrogation of identity by Indian artists today coincides with
the loss of a certain equation between history, sovereignty and the
subject. The loss takes on a centrifugal force where the artist pulls
out fragments of otherness and clads the self, but sparsely. Is this,
then, a no-norm artist? Or is it a consciously masquerading subject
who is more often than not a mock-surrealist with astonishing
layers of interiority still immanent?
The legacy for this kind of figuration is most precisely
attributable to Bhupen Khakhar (died 2003) who, as he grew older,
developed a unique form of intransigence through not only the
play of taste but by an intimate and deeply unsettling presentation
of homoerotic and transvestite motifs. Pushing his art to the brink,
he brought, ironically enough, a sustainable understanding about
gendering in the spiritual protocols of Indian culture. He found
a visual language through and beyond indigenism and built an
iconography that privileged marginal lives. This included gender,
caste and class identities but also a quizzing of the male/modernist
representational style in its heroic self-stance.
The lineage of new figuration is carried on by younger
painters and sculptors. Since the 1980s, two ‘generations’ of
painters have worked in and around the narrative/allegorical axis:
among them are Surendran Nair and Atul Dodiya. These two
painters construct pictorial allegories based on recognisable
(ancient and contemporary, private and public) icons. They have
been working in tandem to recast figures in paintings, bringing to
the representational project a precise form of critical annotation.
As Indian artists they make a particular contribution to the
relation between the icon and narration; and as contemporary
artists of a progressive turn they translate the mythic into the
allegorical, allegories into a contemporary secular encounter.
There is an aura of hidden meaning with Surendran Nair;
there is a play of chance encounter with Atul Dodiya. What
happens at the level of a hypostasis with Nair is, in the case of
Dodiya, montaged in the form of contingency. Both, as we can see,
are surrealist devices to enrich the image. They give the high
modern vocabulary of images (from surrealism) a second level of

72 Art and Social Change

irony associated with postmodernism, and yet
remain committed to the meaning of the
picture puzzle.
The Gandhi project taken up by Dodiya
and Nair is a way of coming to terms with the
prime representative phenomenon of 20th
century India. At the end of the century it
involved a revision of a destinal life. In order to
do this, both painters in their own ways, not only
paint Gandhi like a contemporary icon, they
inscribe themselves in the tradition of dedicated
image-makers and, adopting the popular mode,
mediate the passage to the ‘sacred’ and beyond
— where the calendar image may be seen to
serve the purpose as well as a ‘good’ painting in
dispersing the message. There is here a contrary
semiotic charge: the reinstatement of the aura for
the image dismantles the actual sign, exposes its
vulnerability: Nair’s Gandhi stands on what
looks like a weighing machine, his body studded
with little crystals of salt and sand that spangle
his back but also pierce it like nails. He is a martyr. Nair weighs him Surendran Nair
The Unbearable Lightness
with the salt of the earth and finds him floating — like an ascending of Being (Corollary
avatar. Mythologies)
In their courage to re-present Gandhi, Nair and Dodiya’s
1998
ongoing representational project grips the ethical over and beyond Oil on canvas
the merely semiotic game plan offered in postmodern art. The 180 x 120 cm
Collection: Nitin Bhaya,
artists seem to position themselves as exemplary citizen-subjects: in New Delhi.
the choice of their iconography they are both conscientious and
critical, and they evaluate its worth through the twist and turn of
meaning in the still available repertoire of cultural symbols within
the social domain.
Both take up the Vishnu myth. Nair’s recumbent figure,
whose body line is also the horizon, sprouts a whole herbarium
from the navel; flowers, fireworks, a forest of symbols shoot out and
hang like luscious pendants, like instruments of torture in the
night sky. Mimicking the myth of origins, he gains this jouissance
spiralling from the male belly even as he screws down the pristine
body with the unicorn’s horn and, with perverse pleasure, fixes the
godhead like a svelte dummy.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 73

 Surendran Nair,
Auto Da Fe

1995–96
Oil on canvas
244 x 183 cm
Collection: Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum
Image courtesy
Fukuoka Asian
Art Museum

Alongside this recumbent figure Surendran Nair has made a

succession of erect torsos referencing occult iconography. Featured
as the cosmic body, the torso becomes a framing device for secret
signifiers: towering like a silhouetted mansion, the body is cut open
by little windows in the tiered niches of which are placed objects of
ritual, torture, propaganda, provocation. While the protocol of the
icon is maintained (corresponding as it were to the flat picture-
plane/fixed frame, held ‘sacred’ in modernist painting), the icon is
punctured and its numinous body deflated. This kind of profane
iconicity houses, literally, an arsenal of gratuitous devices and

74 Art and Social Change

itemised symbols; it spells out a vocabulary for a counter-narrative
about art and religion alike. This is a kind of hermeneutic where an
abstruse allegory is recoded without it being demonstrably decoded
in the first place.
Atul Dodiya’s Vishnu is surrounded by a zoological
spectacle: the coiled serpent, sheshnaag, lifts its reptilian head and
smiles along with a chorus of devotees, one of whom might be the
redoubtable artist-creator — Brahma/Picasso/Dodiya himself,
blooming at the end of Vishnu’s abdominal gut. The myth of
origins is here returned to the sporting ground of a bunch of benign
denizens; but it is the sly fox in a vignette that gives the picture its
title, Grapes Are Sour. The picture itself is a mockery of mythology
in the spirit of an agnostic who, moreover, puts his origins at stake:
he openly recognises himself to be the grandchild of modern art
and is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the masters to
escape their aura and project his own.
Thus Dodiya pushes on: he takes the postmodern penchant
for pastiche head on and tests the painting conventions of the high
modern vis-a-vis the popular Indian. He inscribes the surface with
lessons of art history — turning on a sharp irony to camouflage the
full force of genuine pedagogy. In his actual practice he argues the
case for painting with whoever will denigrate it as a sentimental
relic of high modernism; it is as if he is ready, single-handed, to
prolong the life of painting. And in India, where there is no fear of
its disappearance anyway, he incorporates the object-nature of
painting, objectivising the painted surface, making of it a tough
support that receives the cryptic sign of disaffection. It softens to
act out existential dilemmas and hardens again to display, as
on a billboard, the political travesties enacted in the every day.
As painted surface and as the provocative iconography of a
motivated self, Dodiya’s work is brilliantly polemical.

Sculptural icons
A host of new avatars descended quite suddenly on the sculptural
ground, and ahead of their painting peers. The decade of the 1990s
saw the rise of a new representational tendency towards the iconic
among young sculptors. These sculptors — mostly from the art
schools of Trivandrum and Baroda — made a dramatic rupture
with modernist conventions and offered a retake on classical
Indian traditions. With amazing figural skills, they began to

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 75

 redefine contemporary sculpture (in clay, plaster
and fibreglass) as a theatric ensemble of modelled,
cast, painted, and frontally posed figures in a
somewhat kitsch and parodic mode.
The first retakes on the sculptural tradition
came from Dhruva Mistry and Ravinder Reddy.
Over the years, Reddy has found a way of further
monumentalising the iconic form in classical
Indian sculpture, making the gilded icon a volup-
tuous object of contemporary delight.
Reddy’s sculpture is about seduction,
ornament, gigantism, iconicity, repetition, fetish.
Fixed with a burning gaze, such a code defines the
erotic nature of nearly all Indian art. This has less
to do with subjective mutualities, more with a
dangerously bold encounter of the human and the
divine that sanctions similarly permissive play by
mortals. Reddy equates the eroticism in the
Atul Dodiya
Gabbar on Gamboge
divine and popular, high and low traditions and thereby puts into
place a kitsch-sublime that goes beyond parody. The yakshi, to
1997 whom Reddy repeatedly refers, is not to be embraced; she touches
Oil, acrylic and marble
dust on canvas what she will make fertile. Traversing tricky ground, she now
214 x 152 cm appears in Reddy’s work as the aboriginal woman, the tribal girl,
Collection: Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum
the studio model from the rural neighbourhood who does not
Image courtesy resort to ruse: he finds in her a sculptural version that mocks false
Japan Foundation and advances. Thus Reddy sets up a generative cycle between life and
Fukuoka Asian Art
Museum myth; the construed pleasure derived from the female icon is at
home in the popular and celebratory experience of the everyday.
It is humorous, performative, readily accessible.
Once the repeatedly fashioned and benignly fetishist
portrait-head and free-standing figures find a place in the vast
resource of live faces/anointed idols, one can see that Reddy
makes his way beyond the cruel reification of the sensuous in
contemporary exchange. Reddy’s great golden heads and life-size
figures are mock subscribers to an anthropological pageant; they
keep to a state of contemporary wakefulness, a little dazed by their
own immortal beauty.
Another, different trail was blazed on the sculptural front in
the 1980s: it was first configured in 1985 in the exhibition Seven
Young Sculptors, and then between 1987 and 1989 it developed

76 Art and Social Change

into The Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’
Association. This Kerala–Baroda group
hammered out a militant agenda, arguing that
Indian art required a radical interrogation of
political and aesthetic issues. K. P. Krishnakumar
adopted a heroic stance in his tragically brief
career. He used the figural gesture, often
profoundly comic, to taunt the viewer and also
to signal faith in the sculptural presence itself.
In an act of Brechtian double-take he hoped
to reinscribe a lost humanism in the local
liberationist politics of his home-state of Kerala,
and thenceforth perhaps in (what he might have
called) the betrayed map of the nation.
It needed a sculptor such as N. N. Rimzon
to mediate the aforesaid stances with the choice
of a reflexive language. Rimzon makes traditional
icons a noble pretext for radical deviation. When
Ravinder Reddy
conceiving the male body in the archaic– classical mode, his Woman Holding
antecedents are quite apparently the heterodox traditions of Her Breasts
Jainism and Buddhism. It is a body chastened by yogic austerities;
1998
it makes possible an apotheosis (as in Inner Voice, 1991, and The Paint and gilt on polyester-
Tools, 1993). But as an atheist Rimzon creates a scriptural elision resin fiberglass, wood
177 x 101 x 106 cm
whereby other texts can appear in the discourse of the body. Collection: The Fukuoka
He directs the image, anthropomorphic/symbolic, toward Asian Art Museum
what one may call a materialised asceticism that reinstates the aura Image courtesy
Fukuoka Asian Art
of the art work but challenges the processes of its reification: Museum
through the suppressed ritual of carnal love, the concealing of the Photograph by
Fujimoto Kempachi
sacred, the violence and purification of art. In a series that
represents complete lovers, ideal labour, upright ascetic — the last,
the ascetic, becomes a portal. If you step back, beyond its
threshold, the ego reverts to the primordial. You can also step
forward, as in Speaking Stones (1998), into the historical. This
classically composed ensemble is of topical relevance. Rimzon
encircles the seated figure with newspaper cuttings on communal
violence in India. The news weighed down by stones is obscured
yet the verdict is assimilated, and the seated man performs a
profound act of mourning and expiation on behalf of the retracting
citizen-subject.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 77

 Formally, Rimzon’s work is a considered retake on phenome-
nological encounter; it is a contribution to the minimalist aesthetic
of appropriate bodily regard in the realm of the material/
metaphysical objecthood. To the extent that it is the chastened body
of sculpture that propels the viewer, this is a controlled encounter;
and it is this level of precision in finding a formal analogue for the
activity of circumambulation, for a meditative ambience, for
spiritual protocol, that contemporary art gains a real iconographic
charge and the aspect of an incarnation in secular space.
Further, the indigenous tradition of dissent and locally
pitched politics takes Rimzon into the area of transgression, as in
his work Far Away from One Hundred and Eight Feet (1995),
referring to dalit discrimination and the punishing rituals of a caste
society. At that juncture, cultural exile from within the surviving/
stagnating communitarian structures is seen to be almost inevitable.
The profane is structurally present in the sacred, and Rimzon’s
obsession with essence implies anxiety that is itself a productive
possibility of the soul — its private precondition of praxis.
While both aspects in Rimzon’s work, the absolute and the
material, retract to a notion of the primordial that is in the process
of shedding metaphorical fuzziness and mythical excess, he is in no
way a primitivist. He is interested in taking the coded body of the
archetype and turning it into a replete object of contemplation —
and contention — in historical consciousness.
We have to find further ways of conceptualising this oddly
symbolic, variously displaced art practice that manifests itself in
the stark gestures of civilisational avatars dismantled. For it is here,
in the structure of a seemingly sacred space, that there is also
signalled the ‘loss’ of a monadic self that is conceptually male.

Women artists/ female bodies

What are the norms that need to be dismantled in Indian art? One
of them is precisely a properly symbolic formation that is by
and large male. And it may be that in a mocking contest with
Duchamp’s bachelors, it is being stripped bare by the brides, even!
We can track three directions taken by Indian women artists
in the past decade. Artists who paint the female body and those
who find other representational modes such as photography and
video to work with the feminine as masquerade. Those who take

78 Art and Social Change

feminist concerns into issues of materials, female labour, ethnog-
raphy and environment. And those that enter the domain of the
fetish.
The oeuvre of the senior painter Arpita Singh holds the
ground in order to sustain and survive socially generated traumas.
During the 1990s, her image of the girl-child, traced through the
successive phases of her life to motherhood, forms the core of an
allegory that contains explicit images of subjective and social
violence. This is often portrayed in the form of a direct combat of
wrestling bodies, or as peremptory death. However, the frame that
surrounds the painting holds this played-out terror in a balletic
balance. The protagonist matures in the end with the naked grace
of a saint and an apotheosis is revealed not least in the painterly
manner itself. Arpita Singh marks the moment of female self-
canonisation in Indian art. The body is represented to act out
mortal pain and erotic self-absorption with an almost identical
gesture of liberation.
Related in her poetics of affection to Arpita Singh, Nilima
Sheikh offers the coded inflection of a carefully crafted visual
language. With their medieval/oriental sensibility, her minia-
turised paintings offer vulnerable representations of the female self
converging on the body that bears and brings forth the child.
Then, in her enormous tent-like hangings (Shamiana, 1996) she
introduces a sweeping orbit, a mock-infinite spatialisation, thus
establishing a mise en scène for the staging of the beloved’s

N.N. Rimzon
Far Away from One
Hundred and Eight Feet
(installation view)
1995

Site-specific installation
with terracotta pots, straw
brooms and rope, at
Buddha Jayanti Park,
New Delhi, India
Approx. 2000 x
700 x 80 cm

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 79

performative body — from Akkamahadevi to Meerabai to Sohni.
This levers her pictorial proposition into a kind of rhetoric: with a
near-transcendent impulse she unfolds a calibrated structure of
gendered feelings that move like lightning from the everyday to
the erotic to the mystical — scattering signs on the exquisitely
painted surface.
If the elliptical space opened by Nilima Sheikh swallows her
ecstatic figures in its radiance, Jaishree Chakravarty, in her
cascading paper scrolls, blanches the field to light up paths for
invisible voyages. If Arpita Singh encodes her psychically notated
good and bad objects in the closet proscenium of the picture,
younger women artists such as Rekha Rodwittiya present frontal
images of the woman engaged in a series of healing vocations
secured with her use-objects. And Anju Dodiya, tipping out of her
space like a giddy acrobat, wields her props in a daily masquerade
and poses quizzical questions by openly doubling her identity. I am
proposing the possibility in contemporary Indian art of the female
self reconfiguring both existential and topographic elements to
gain a situational identity.
As if to break the too-compact notion of female self, to mark
and textualise it in a way that it does not get interpellated into an
ethnographic notion of a situational identity, Nalini Malani goes
against the grain and packs the art work with a disintegrating
subjectivity. Refusing to concede a sane social space in which
meaning can be reconstituted, she suggests that the tattered fabric
of the world unfurling in the wake of the woman’s willful descent
will have to serve as the proverbial mantle of universal shame. She
pitches the art work as a subversive agent that can turn around to
designate the new historical forces at work in actual global space.
In her fudged and shadowy drawing series titled Mutants
(1993–95), Malani demonstrates a devolution of subjectivity to
the point of measured degeneracy. She gestures towards the world
by filling up the vacuum with her own subjectivity, now worked
through the body and soul of a painfully exposed androgynous
figure. The mutant’s body, serialised in drawings and paintings of
changing scale, is evidence of the concealed modes of violent
expropriation; the mutant’s soul, planted with a stigmata, offers
‘the truth of the victim’.
In the decade of the 1990s, Nalini Malani enlarges her
engagement with the identity of the (female) victim into myriad

80 Art and Social Change

 Nilima Sheikh
Songspace

1995
Installation at ‘Africus’,
First Johannesburg
Biennale, South Africa

Nilima Sheikh
Shamiana
(installation view)

1996
6 hanging scrolls
of casien tempera
on canvas, canopy of
synthentic polypaint
on canvas, steel frame,
customwood hexagonal
plinth with ramp
225 x 180 cm each,
canopy 540 x 585 cm
Collection: Queensland
Art Gallery
Purchased 1996
Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Image courtesy
Queensland Art Gallery

phenomena under the somewhat ironical trope of nature. She

invokes psychic horrors worked out in mythological structures and
fuses these with biological and environmental degradation (as in
her installation for the staging of Heiner Mueller’s Medea, in
1993). In Medeaprojekt, Malani works with a new allegory for an
ancient tale, investigating exploitation and violence as political
categories. Through the Greek myth she tests the ground for an

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 81

 argument — what happens when you go ‘against nature’. Further,
she transfers the anguish of female othering into theatric forms of
catharsis and critical reflex (as in her installation/video for a
staging of Brecht’s The Job in 1997). Most recently, she elaborates
this proposition of othering in a video installation about ethnic
violence and full-scale war.
Given that female personae are now up for persistent
masquerade, the possibilities of photography, video, installation
and performance open out. Besides Nalini Malani, these have been
staged by Rummana Hussain and Pushpamala N. Turning to the
medium of photography and performance, the sculptor
Pushpamala has had herself shot (by photographer Meenal
Nalini Malani
Hamletmachine

1999–2000
Installation view
Installation of 4 DVD
projections, salt,
mirror and sound
Collection: the artist
Image courtesy the artist

Pushpamala N.
Phantom Lady or Kismat
(artist photographed
by Meenal Agarwal)

1996–98
Set of black and white
photographs in an edition
of 10, 41 x 51 cm each
Image courtesy the artist

82 Art and Social Change

Agarwal) in a photo-romance titled Phantom Lady or Kismet.
Enacted here by Pushpamala herself — after the image of a 1930s
stunt queen of Bombay films, ‘fearless Nadia’ — the mock-tragic
twinned-heroine of B-grade film noir, plays out clichés of the
desired subject/ discarded object. The narrative sequence of the
separated sisters has a foreclosed quest: one sister is reified in the
image of the dangerously pursued heroine; the other is cast as an
empty enigma, and the feminine is signalled in the ironical
dénouement of the romance as inevitable abandonment, and
death. In her more recent work (cross-referenced to Cindy
Sherman’s photo-project, Film Stills), Pushpamala enters another
kind of melodrama and gets herself photographed as a middle-class
heroine dreaming her existence through banal situations and mass-
produced kitsch. In its give and take of dreams, a commercially
hand-tinted photograph becomes a perfect artefact; it is a symbolic
thing but it is also a simulacrum — the copy of a copy, the original
for which does not exist. In initiating that empty enigma
the person that is the openly masquerading artist refers to a kind
of pristine self, a demonstrably false innocence, whereby she
can conduct, as if from ground zero, a retake on the arts of
representation.

Stripping bare
Besides the working of these symbolic alterities, there are
specifically annotated relationships with materials and labour in
the work of Indian women sculptors such as Meera Mukherjee.
And now, a new phenomenology and function of the object that
reworks a formalist aesthetic towards ethnographic readings.
The work of Navjot Altaf and Sheela Gowda makes the
point of cultural deconstruction through ingenious relays of
material signifiers in transposed contexts. Navjot Altaf’s project is
about elaborating the context of art production from village
community to metropolitan gallery. Sheela Gowda’s work is honed
to a minimalist aesthetic that makes the message spare — like
a life-sustaining parable.
An ethics based on collective creativity informs Navjot
Altaf’s practice as she struggles with the received orthodoxy of
Marxism and its definition of radical art. Having worked earlier
with schoolchildren and women’s groups, she now attempts
a much more ambitious project: of living and working with tribal

Art and Social Change 83

 artisans and ritual image-makers in village communities of the
Bastar region, sharing the experience with an art writer and a video
cameraman who record the nature of the interaction.
Navjot Altaf’s own sculptural style is openly ‘primitivist’.
She amalgamates in the truncated, totemic female figures elements
of innocence and fertility. Other elements in the installation resist
fetishist closure. She packs the nakedness of her sculptures with
the rude resistance of archaic goddesses positioned within invented
traditions of feminism that are notated with contemporary texts.
She encodes little wrapped rolls (tied tight like tampons) of
newspaper cuttings about the affairs of women. These are stacked
and framed in acrylic. Thus her dwarf-marionettes are motivated
by an inner/outer propelling towards contemporary concern.
The recent installation called Modes of Parallel Practice is
more disparate in means, message, image. The first factor in the
work produced in the process is an ‘earthing’ of the image through
the use of materials — notably wood and brick and fabric — that
are basic to tribal economies and cultures. The jointly/discretely
made forms hug the ground and clutter the surface (added to
organic materials are PVC pipes and plastic bags) and shoot up as
totem poles, all the while declaring their material, magical, use-
value. As productive bodies and linguistic signifiers of a material
culture that is still partly based on barter (at any rate not
completely reified by money exchange), they have a rough-and-
ready existence. The artist enacts her belonging/unbelonging in
the theatre of this environmental work.

Navjot Altaf
Modes of Parallel Practice:
Ways of World Making
(installation view)

1997–98
Room size, installation
with wood, paint,
PVC pipes, cloth,
feathers and brick
Collection: Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum

84 Art and Social Change

 This cross between an anthropological experiment and an art
workshop has to be informed today with all the hazards and
calumny that earlier primitivisms and newer, revisionist studies
of interculturalisms have gone through. The premise is shaky, but
what Navjot Altaf seems to suggest is that the primacy of
metropolitan creativity is equally shaky and needs at least to be
played out from different ends of the language network. She seems
to say in this work and the texts wrapped around it in a semi-
confessional mode of contemporary anthropology, that we live
Sheela Gowda
through an astonishing continuum of representational and symbolic And Tell Him of My Pain
attitudes and that it may be an affirming thing to try and inhabit (installation view)
this labyrinthine passage, whatever kind of charade this entails. 1998/2001
Sheela Gowda’s commitment to material existence, environ- 2 sets of ropes 10,500 cm
mental concerns and women’s labour in rural India leads her to each, thread, needles,
glue and pigment.
choosing materials such as cow dung (treated/combined with neem Collection: Walker Art
oil and kumkum). Besides being part of the everyday economy of Center Minneapolis,
United States
the Indian woman who must recycle excreta as house-plaster and Julie and Babe Davis
fuel, this gives her a malleable sculptural material that is replete Acquisition Fund, 2002
with meaning and, indeed, properly signified
in the realm of environmental and cultural
ethics. Even as the woman’s material existence
is signified by the use of this one raw material,
an anti-aesthetic is also benignly signified,
accepting ridicule and recoil as part of the
regenerative process.
The stuff is turned into cow dung pats,
bricks and walls, plumped and strung like
blood pouches or, as she calls them: ‘gallant
hearts’. This transposition of basic raw
material, this reissue of ‘primitivism’ becomes
also a way of anointing female labour. Formal
discreteness references art history and leads to
subtle allusions, even as the object itself
remains deceptively simple.
Recently Sheela Gowda has turned to
another kind of labour-intensive art work:
she makes two sets of 350-foot-long ropes by
passing 700-foot-long ordinary thread and
doubling it through the eye of a needle. Then,
gluing a handful of these threads and adding

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 85

blood-red pigment to the fevicol, she makes them appear like great
coils of disembowelled innards. The rope-end is tasselled with the
clutch of needles that have performed their meticulous task and
now droop and glisten like prickly ornaments, miniaturised objects
of torture. The ropes are looped all across the white cube that can
be up to 20 feet high. They thus dissolve the strict right-angle
format: a little like Pollock’s single-surface, high-tension drips, the
strung-up drawing — deep red on white — seems to flatten out the
wall and floor. In the next moment the dematerialised space refers
(much like Eva Hesse) to the dominantly male aesthetic of
minimalism so as to challenge it.
These ropes that are like umbilical cords and intestines and
blood-trails become the body’s extension/abstraction in longing.
They ‘tell him of her pain’, as the title says, but make of this pain a
strange ritual of self-perpetuation. This is a visceral work, but very
far from being gory. The woman’s body is erotically signified
through its absence and the work involves you in a combined
enticement: of her labour and her narcissism which together turn
into the act of doing, nurturing, being.
When you return to the formal proposition the ropes, laid
out as loosely knotted arabesques in the large white cube,
challenging body-scale. Even as you walk through the festooned
space the body disentangles itself and the linear pattern recedes
into a spatial dimension set for a virtuoso performance that you
prefer to behold rather than reenter. So the particular route which
finally takes Sheela Gowda to her concern with the ethics of
(female) creativity passes through a form of symbolic theatre,
tantalising you by pulling out yards of her wound/womb and the
very arterial system that pumps blood to her heart.
This kind of metonymy that never recoups the body to
which it refers, what sort of a subject does it figure, what sort of an
encounter is this? I would like to present Sheela Gowda’s new work
as a radical deframing of the exhibition space. Even as she feels at
home in the white cube of the gallery she has adopted the logic
of the parergon — the frame that disappears, buries itself, effaces
itself, melts away and leaves just space. And even as she entangles
the spectator’s body in imitation as it were of the artist’s own body,
it is to arrive at the experience of an unfolding structure — the
temporality of what appears to be infinite unravelling yet clutched
and terminated at certain points on a metaphor of pain.

86 Art and Social Change

Fetish
Knotted, moulded, bedecked with full-blown genitals, the
monumental fibre sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee are, on the
other hand, macabre and ornamental at the same time. They are
metaphors for fecundity — nurturing/devouring mother-goddesses
— but they are arrived at by the process of a fetishist suturing of
the shredded body. Crafting a sexually prodigious form, she wrests
male power to expose as it were the phallic nature of totemism. At
the same time, she devises a voluptuous fetish that materialises
the fear of the female grotesque. In a case of inverse affiliation,
Anita Dube’s miniaturised objects — textured and bejewelled —
complete the picture of female craft/newborn fetish. Her assembly
of delicate human bones sheathed in red velvet and trimmed with
beads irradiate desire. The encapsulated ‘skeleton’ becomes a
caressing, dissembling object meant for female possession, for
ecstatic perversion.
A new generation of artists, both men and women, seem to
be taking a sharp turn towards fetishism, incorporating sexual
magic into the commodity nature of the art-object. Inclined to
mock high culture, high art, high purpose, painter-sculptor
Sudarshan Shetty produces images that are glossy, seductive,
cunningly construed simulacra. He fabricates kitsch objects,
mimicking the manipulative aesthetic of the market-place. In the
process he resuscitates the lustful mystique of the object-riddle that
is eminently surrealist and imbues current commodity fetishism
with enigma.
Also in the surreal mode but at the other end of the
spectrum of desire is the recent work of painter Ranbir Kaleka.
Now working with video installation to create a form of meditative
hypnosis, he offers a barely moving image of patient repetition,
insistent attraction, that escapes being commodified by the fugitive
nature of the video image itself, as of the dissolving nature of the
fetish-presence he places before the spectator’s scrutiny.
Claiming this to be their form of social alertness, younger
artists in the cosmopolitan cities (especially Bombay [Mumbai])
work at the edge of the social matrix where they perceive the
entropy created by the spin of industrial, mercantile, electronic
expansion. Jitish Kallat’s large paintings work with a shallow image-
surface gestalt signalling indifference to interiority/exteriority,
preparing a neutral compound of signs for metropolitan self-imaging.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 87

 Sudarshan Shetty The paintings are not riddles but, rather, communicational codes
Home
(installation view) such that media-savvy recipients use to access the flow of messages
on new information highways. Except that Kallat makes the game
1998 of exchange ‘esoteric’: the conceptual gestalt that underlies the
Installation with life-size
cow, paint, wood, visual, and the cleverly programmed codes often reveal a canny
fibreglass, stainless steel portent of urban fear, a political shadow appearing like a ghost on
and nylon rope.
Collection: Fukuoka the wall.
Asian Art Museum Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Sharmila Samant, Shilpa Gupta,
Image courtesy the Japan initiate a form of social demolition and dismemberment that
Foundation and Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum foregrounds greed — in the debris so to speak. The closure of the
fetish, the accessibility of the net: the ideology of current work
both re-tracts and opens out to include interactive and exchange
strategies. In video/computer work the input ranges from the
conceptual to the trivial and indicates precisely a menu that spells
postmodernism. These artists convert the free realm of consumer
culture into quasi-political games, recognising the farce played out
between the masquerading subject and the seductive object.
Subodh Gupta from Bihar/Delhi uses indigenous materials
to reverse the narrative of what I call the masquerading subject/
the seductive object. He introduces an ‘authentic’ self, ‘native’

88 Art and Social Change

experience and a ‘local’ aesthetic and
converts them into objects of curiosity, of
voyeurism and possible parody. Mock-ritual
presentations of ethnographic material that
resemble rustic ‘life’ and use-objects in the
fast-changing rural–urban environment
bring the question of cultural identity
upfront like a badge for difference in global
exchange, thus making the terms of that
exchange open to critique. In contrast,
there are attempts — by other young artists
— at breaking open the fetish in art by a
change of scale and site. Among a series of
environment-oriented projects undertaken
in Bangalore, M. S. Umesh attempts
‘earthworks’ on a monumental scale that
are in a transient mode — traces of rituals,
erased signs in the country–city continuum.

Historical markers
Following the utopian idea of an artists’
collective lived through by the Kerala
Radicals in the 1980s, there is, since the
1990s, a renewal of the idea of group projects,
but in more informal and negotiable terms.
I have already mentioned the unique
project of Navjot Altaf working with local communities in Bastar. Mrinalini Mukherjee
Woman on Peacock
She brings the site-specific, installation mode of environmental
exploration to the threshold of a utopian dream where the arts 1991
form the necessary residuum within a larger resource build-up for Hemp
214 x 130 x 77 cm
social regeneration. Activist formations like SAHMAT engage Collection: Public
artists in a dialogue on political issues through public art Collection, France
interventions. With works surfacing on the cusp between the
environmental and the historical, politically alert artists hope to
build not only interactive languages but possible communities
through a more participatory art practice. Artist-run workshops
like Khoj International in Delhi and Open Circle in Bombay
attempt to stage art activity outside the art market, de-commodi-
tising art by privileging ephemeral manifestations and public
projects.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 89

 M.S. Umesh There is now a transgressive spirit in the contemporary art
Earth-Work
(installation view) scene that includes a welcome polemic on the ‘correct’ application
of the modernist canon. More recently, there is a critical reckoning
1996 of global postmodernism through conceptual manoeuvres: I now
Time and site-specific
installation with pigment, go on to certain installations that set out materials, processes,
charcoal dust, bamboo situations and site in such a way as to embed these in a recog-
shelter, live cows,
lights, on one acre of nisable historical context. I am referring to projects undertaken in
uncultivated land at recent years by Vivan Sundaram, Rummana Hussain, Nalini
Kodigehalli near Malani.
Bangalore, India.
(Work destroyed Vivan Sundaram in his work of the past decade installs the
after the show.) historical motif as a documentary/allegorical account of the
contemporary. This is exemplified in his 1993 Memorial to the
dead man on the street — victim of the carnage against Muslims
in Bombay in 1992–93. His successive installations unpack
art-objects to become metonymically linked signifiers in what may
be read as a disintegrating Indian polity. In his most public
installation, Structures for Memory (1998), the object-world is
conscientiously reassembled to become a formal commemoration,
and critique, of the national journey.

90 Art and Social Change

 A site-specific installation in the
Durbar Hall of the Victoria Memorial in
Calcutta (a white marble monstrosity
built by the British in the early 20th
century), the project Structures for
Memory is a workshop reconstruction of
the modernising process in India. The
installation disembowels the imperium
by its contradictory trajectories from
floor to dome — as for example the 80-
foot narrow-gauge railway track that
cuts through the middle and turns this
ceremonial meeting-place into a railway platform. A great symbol Subodh Gupta
Untitled
of British India’s modernising project, the Indian Railways (lauded (performance view)
by Marx, denounced by Gandhi) multiplies the meaning of the
1999
space: place for transport and transit, temporary home for migrant Performance by the artist
labour and refugees, burial ground for tragic journeys undertaken at at Khoj International
the time of India’s Partition in 1947. A mammoth steel container Workshop, Modi Nagar,
India
on wheels encloses spoken verse from the trauma of the Partition.
In the first perspectival view, the cathedral-like space
becomes a platform or a lumber-yard; then the space becomes
performative, with the sound input settling in on rough-hewn
objects such as the wall of jute bags inscribed with a 100-year
history of (Bengal’s) peasant and labour movements. Then it
becomes a museum within a museum for public pedagogy: 500 box
files with names and photos of eminent Bengalis arranged like a
bibliotheque. Each relayed element is notated and signified
through empirical data, displayed texts, voice-over and video
images. Thus physically montaged in space, the parts become
telling signifiers, and the body navigates through the structures of
memory even as it steps into and across the obstacles scattered
in the project of recuperation.
Placed within a dome that is consecrated with verses by
Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das about the immanent
forms of history, Sundaram’s installation is, by its very nature,
overarching. In a transposed montage of many objects, the imagined
whole is a phenomenological experience that temporarily suspends
historical time. The interesting question is how the domed and
perspectival (baroque) space of the Durbar Hall is also turned into a
map, a flatbed design for receiving information, a crane-view of an
urban ethnography, an archive, a fairground spectacle.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 91

 Vivan Sundaram
Structures of Memory
(installation view)

1998
Site-specific installation
with 1500 cm rail track in
the Durbar Hall at Victoria
Memorial, Calcutta, India
approx. size of hall
2000 x 3000 x 2000 cm
(Work destroyed
after the show)

Vivan Sundaram
Structures of Memory
(installation view)

1998
site-specific installation
with stacked gunny bags
500 cm high, jute coils,
velvet-covered objects in
vitrine, in the Durbar Hall
at Victoria Memorial,
Calcutta, India
approx. size of hall
2000 x 3000 x 2000 cm
(Work destroyed
after the show)

Inserted in the space is a consideration about the fragment:

an installation in so many parts is a lesson about how unfinished
objects in a construed workshop constitute meaning. How, through
recitations of names and dates and events narrativised in time,
they gain cumulative meaning. How, also, these objects reinforce

92 Art and Social Change

the contradictions, undo the need for condensation, refuse any
closure of meaning. It is through hands-on practice, through
insistent proof of making and manufacture, that Sundaram’s more
ambitious installations — exposing methods and relations of
production — demonstrate a way of coming to grips with the
material world, affirming that it is still amenable to praxiological
motives, future utopias.
Through foregrounding material process, lessons from art
history are specifically socialised in Structures of Memory. Formal
devices are taken from minimalism and arte povera, but the lay
viewers, walking here and there in a dispersed itinerary, make the
fragments fall in place as post facto historical design. Though the
installation functions seemingly without authorial presence, as a
new kind of genre, the theatre of repeated encounters construes an
active spectator who tracks the space carrying a belief in the
normative designation of the citizen; a spectator who reconstitutes
himself/herself through participatory presence at the sites of
knowledge production privileged by the ‘hidden’ author. If the
possibility of reconfiguring the world by a conceptual recoding
of the fragmented parts requires utopian belief, a concrete form has
to be devised to set apace, to motivate, the lay citizen to become an
inquiring subject. Dealing in public history, Sundaram creates
a mise en scène for discursive agency, ‘nominates’ himself as citizen-
subject and stages a democratic encounter whereby the author
along with the sometimes recalcitrant spectator reemerges as
a political subject.
Rummana Hussain’s installation Home/Nation (1996) works
through a set of displacements where nothing adds up, neither the
subject nor a place of belonging. But the very unbelonging is
specifically sited — in Ayodhya (later in Lucknow). On offer are
bits of body which make up in their configuration a lived life of
pain, privation, longing and a strong compensatory faith. As for
the nation, it is made implicit through a negative commitment or,
in the romantic sense, a negative capability to build an imaginary
sense of wholeness through loss. Hollows of doorways and mouth
and fruit suggest the more wholesome convex forms that complete
the metaphors for life — full bellies, complete domes, lit halos and
hands cupped in prayer, not want. Rummana Hussain’s work is as
much about material fragments in lieu of historical evidence as
about torn memory that is also emphatically historical.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 93

 Rummana Hussain
Living on the Margins
(performance view)

1995
Performance at Chauraha,
National Centre for
Performing Arts,
Bombay, India
(Video of performance
included in the
1996 installation
Home/Nation at Gallery
Chemould, Bombay, India)

Modes of self-inscription into the historical are worked out by

the artist: she proposes an aspectual engagement with the female
body and devises personae that fit each travail. After December 1992
she chooses an historically indexed masquerade about ‘the Muslim
woman’. In The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal (1997), the overlap of
female body (personally afflicted, always subject to intrusion and
violence), historical site (Ayodhya, Lucknow, Bombay), traditional
fetishes, wish-fulfilling objects that help aestheticise valiant and
pathetic prayer, produce a provocative montage.
This part-for-whole narrative about a Muslim woman’s
identity in India adds up in the installation to a kind of transcen-
dent meaning so that while she speaks of the fear of social rupture
and marginalisation, she confirms the intricate patterns of a
syncretic culture to which she contributes her own body —
suturing the wound with an autobiographical skill that translates
into an act of social reparation. In her performance piece Is It What
You Think? (1998), her own body is presented in a state bordering
on apotheosis. And hereby she not only pitches her identity for
display, she constructs a public occasion to test the viewer’s gaze.
She asks crucial questions, as if from an Islamic crucible, that
return her to an immanent state of doubt about what is too easily
theorised as religious identity, female subjectivity, and feminist
protest. In 1999, just before she died from cancer, she celebrated a
mortal reconciliation between the pain she carried in her body and
in her heart, and consecrated the lost ground of her place in
history, calling her funerary installation A Space for Healing.

94 Art and Social Change

 Rummana Hussain
1952–1999
A Space for Healing

1999
Metal implements, PVC
poles, cloth, plastic
objects, gold paint,
vermillion red paint and
sound component
500 x 500 x 500cm
(approx. installed)
Purchased 2000
Queensland Art
Gallery Foundation
Collection:
Queensland Art Gallery
Image courtesy
Queensland Art Gallery
and Ishaat Hussain

She was equipping herself to signify the public sphere which

the citizen-subject inhabits; she had learnt to polemically position
herself in the democratic space of a liberal society that consecrates
the individual in the fullness of her individuality and then narrows
her political rights. She deframed and then framed herself as icon,
and as evidence, on secular ground.
Nalini Malani, in a recent video installation, transfers the
theme of subjective masochism to systematically perpetrated
ecological evil across the globe. She has tracked down victims of
chemical poisoning who stand as metaphors of old and new
imperialism including the vagaries of a globalised economy. I use
the word telescoping for Malani’s work. It is as though Malani,
focusing and refocusing through a lens, spots the denaturing
processes devolving earthly life into a continuous narrative
of calamities. This worldview has inevitably enveloped the theme
of violence and war: her end-of-the-century contribution to
contemporary art is an elaborate video installation titled
Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998). It features 12 video monitors
relaying scenes of religious terror/ethnic conflict, the undoing of
national boundaries, the migration of refugees across continents,
the explosion of bombs, the retraction into the womb of
traumatised infants. The monitors are placed in tin trunks on the
ground with quilts pulled out like traces of fugitive lives. On three

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 95

 walls there are large video projections: on the largest wall in front a
video montage shows simulated images of the US bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an animation film by Malani where
she draws, animates and bleeds humanoid figures into the terrain of
a guilt-ravaged universe. On the flanking walls two young women
act a charade whereby their iconic bodies unscroll themselves on
the ground, gather themselves and press against the imaginary
surface of the screen. Distorting themselves in the time span of the
bombing sequence, they suck the gaseous diffusion and sublimate,
as if, the lethal onslaught of bombs exploding on screen.
The room with the video installation is bathed in a cold
blue light. The tin-encased monitors on a glassy (mylar-covered)
floor reflect the flickering images. The installation carries the
name Remembering Toba Tek Singh, after the famous story by Sadat
Hasan Manto about the inmate of an obscure village of that name.
Heard at the site of the installation in voice-over, the story is
excerpted to focus on the death of the ‘lunatic’ Bishen Singh who
refuses to make a choice between the new nations of India and
Pakistan in 1947. In the no-man’s land between the barbwired
borders of the two countries, he stands bewildered until he simply
buckles and dies from fatigue. Nalini Malani’s work is a response to
the nuclearisation of India and Pakistan; the bombs make more
Nalini Malani
Remembering
Toba Tek Singh

1998–99
20 minute video
installation comprising
17 VCDs and one CD,
tin trunks, quilts, mylar
flooring. ed. 1/3
900 x 650 x 400 cm
(approx., installed)
Purchased 2000
Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation Grant
Collection: Queensland
Art Gallery
Image courtesy the artist

96 Art and Social Change

belligerent the communal call of ruling right-wing parties. The
story and the installation, which includes archival footage on
India, Pakistan, Palestine, Bosnia, works as an allegory of the war
victims and refugees of the 20th century.

IN CONCLUSION
An avantgarde artist in India has to recognise that if the logic of
modernism is both syncretic and secular, it must also be radical;
that while postmodernism is semiotically diverse it must be pitched
to the substantial message of history.
To that purpose, we have to work out our relationship with
the Western notion of alterity, that is, to a form of absolute
otherness as attributed to aliens, and of a radical singularity in
ethical and political terms as attributed to the self. For this now
produces a cynical, certainly bleak and abject construction of
contemporary subjectivity; and encourages alienation that
dissimulates radical projects. On the other hand, alternatives —
alternative positions in society — are quite visible in the southern
world. I believe that artists from the Third World, from Asia/India
are in a position to still engage with historical options.
In the current conjuncture, then, there must be art at the
cutting edge — of community, nation and market. This art will
differ from Western neo-avantgardes in that it has as its referents
a civil society in huge ferment, a political society whose
constituencies are redefining the meaning of democracy, and a
demographic scale that defies simple theories of hegemony. The
national cannot, then, be so easily replaced by the neat new
equation of the local/global (as in so many ASEAN and other East
Asian countries), nor even perhaps by the exigencies of the
State/market combine.
What we might look forward to, however, is not only
emerging social themes but a renewed engagement with art
language, a radical compound of formalism and history. A calibrated
exposition of subjectivity through motifs from private mythologies,
interstitial images will match the task of grasping the shape of
social energies in their transformative intent. We know that it is in
the moment of disjuncture that an avantgarde names itself. It
recodes acts of utopian intransigence and forces of dissent into the
very vocabulary and structures of art.

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 97

NOTES
The first, considerably shorter, published version of this essay appeared under the
title ‘Dismantling the Norm’, in Contemporary Art in Asia: traditions/tensions, Asia
Society Galleries, New York, 1996. The second, enlarged, version appeared as the
last chapter in Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: contemporary cultural practise in
India, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2000.

1 See Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘Postcolonial in the Postmodern — Or, The

Politics after Modernity’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXX, No. 30,
29 July, 1995.
2 See Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s art-historical exegesis on the national/modern
in her The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: artists, aesthetics, and nationalism in
Bengal, 1850–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. Guha-
Thakurta furthers this work in her essays ‘Visualizing the Nation’, Journal of
Arts & Ideas, Nos. 27–28, March 1995; and ‘Locating Gandhi in Indian Art
History’, in Addressing Gandhi, SAHMAT, Delhi, 1995. The debate on art
and nationalism has been further elaborated in a study by Partha Mitter, Art
and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental orientations,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. For contemporary mappings
of the national/modern in art practice, see Geeta Kapur, ‘A Stake in
Modernity’, originally published in Caroline Turner (ed.), Tradition and
Change: contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland
Press, St Lucia, 1993 and pp. 146ff in this volume. The debate on the artist
inhabiting a national space through an expanded local–regional ethics has
been evaluated through the account of one art institution designed for
pedagogy and practice in postcolonial India: see Gulammohammed Sheikh
(ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda, Tulika, Delhi, 1997.
3 For a critique of this phenomenon, see the selection of essays in Tejaswini
Niranjana et al. (eds), Interrogating Modernity: culture and colonialism in
India, Seagull, Calcutta, 1993; and Journal of Arts & Ideas, special issue:
‘Careers of Modernity’, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, Nos. 25–26,
December 1993.
4 For a recent account, see Michael Brand and Gulammohammed Sheikh,
‘Contemporary Art in India: a multi-focal perspective’, in Beyond the
Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, (Catalogue,
scholarly editors, Caroline Turner, Rhana Devenport and Jen Webb)
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999.
5 J. Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection
of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India, Bharat Bhavan,
Bhopal, 1987.
6 K. G. Subramanyan, one of the most eminent artist-teachers in
contemporary India, has elaborated on the uses of tradition in the making
of art (especially as this was developed in Rabindranath Tagore’s
university at Santiniketan). He extends the idea of a living tradition
through an ever-renewed eclecticism. See the three compilations of his
essays: The Moving Focus: essays on Indian art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi,
1978; The Living Tradition: perspectives on modern Indian art, Seagull,
Calcutta, 1987; and The Creative Circuit, Seagull, Calcutta, 1988. His
teaching methodology has been elaborated in Nilima Sheikh, ‘A Post-
Independence Initiative in Art’, in Contemporary Art in Baroda.

98 Art and Social Change

7 For a political historian’s perspective on the problem of colonial culture
and derivative discourse, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World: a derivative discourse?, Oxford University Press, Delhi,
1988. I am also referring to the kind of mediation conducted by Gayatri
Spivak (In Other Worlds: essays in cultural politics, Methuen, New York,
1987) and then Homi Bhabha (Location of Culture, Routledge, London,
1994) over the past two decades on the question of the postcolonial
consciousness. Reference should also be made to works of fiction from the
diasporic sphere that mediate by finding fictive spaces for the dénouement
of the postcolonial imaginary, as in the inimitable Salman Rushdie.
8 The generative formulation of the problematic comes from Peter Burger,
Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1984. I am also indebted in the following argument to related positions
found in Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, in Readings and Writings:
semiotic counter strategies, Verso, London, 1981; and in Andreas Huyssen,
After the Great Divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1986. See also the Introduction in Jim
Pines and Paul Willemen (eds.), Questions of Third Cinema, BFI, London,
1994. Specific reference to the position of plurality and cultural politics in
the postcolonial era is developed by Paul Willemen in ‘An Avant-Garde
for the 90s’, in Looks and Frictions: essays in cultural studies and film theory,
BFI, London, 1994.
9 Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October, No. 70,
Fall 1994, p. 8.
10 Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, p. 10.
11 It will be instructive to place the American discourse on the avantgarde as
conducted, for example, in the journal October, discussions of DIA
Foundation and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, vis-
a-vis the discourse on the avantgarde in the wake of de-colonisation and
the subsequent postcolonial/Third World cultures in the journal Third
Text published from London.
12 There is growing literature on Asian art. For a comparative understanding
of Asian art, see Caroline Turner (ed.), Tradition and Change. Also John
Clark (ed.), Modernity in Asian Art, The University of Sydney East Asian
Studies, Number 7, Wild Peony, Sydney, 1993; and John Clark, Modern
Asian Art, Craftsman House, G+B Arts International, Sydney, 1998. For
a more popular review of Asian art, see issues of Art AsiaPacific, a
magazine published from Sydney since 1993.
13 There is an extended polemic on these two shows. See, for example, Thomas
McEvilley, ‘Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief’, Artforum, November 1984,
reprinted along with related texts in Russell Ferguson et al (eds), Discourses:
conversations in postmodern art and culture, New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990. On Magiciens de la
Terre, see Cesare Poppi, ‘From the Suburbs to the Global Village:
afterthoughts on “Magiciens de la terre”’, Third Text, No. 14, Spring 1991.
14 Apinan Poshyananda, ‘Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition’,
in Contemporary Art of Asia: traditions/tensions, Asia Society Galleries,
New York, 1996, p. 28.
15 For discussions of popular culture, especially the cinema, see Journal of
Arts & Ideas, Nos. 23–24, January 1993; and Journal of Arts & Ideas, No.
29, January 1996. The discourse on minorities commands a vast body of

Dismantled Norms: Apropos other avantgardes 99

 literature in Indian historiography: for the interlayered question of caste
and gender, see Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Problems for a
Contemporary Theory of Gender’, in Subaltern Studies IX: writings on
South Asian history and society, edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996.
16 For a polemic on the necessity of working with contradiction as part of the
project of anti-colonialism, see Benita Parry, ‘Signs of Our Times: a
discussion of Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture’, Third Text, Nos. 28–29,
Autumn–Winter 1994.
17 For a perspective on the issue of multiculturalism in the visual arts, see
Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: towards a new internationalism in the visual
arts, Kala Press/inIVA, London, 1994.
18 Hal Foster complicates this issue to bring out its dialectic in ‘The Artist as
Ethnographer’, in Fisher (ed.), Global Visions.
19 Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Bodies of Fiction, Bodies of Desire’, in
Contemporary Art of Asia, p. 84.
20 I want to make a notational reference to two texts that can be seen to
frame the question of culture at this historical juncture. See Vivek
Dhareshwar, ‘“Our Time”: History, Sovereignty and Politics’, Economic
and Political Weekly, Vol. XXX, No. 6, 11 February, 1995. For a dialectical
response to the recent tendencies in social theory to supersede the
discourse of the nation, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Beyond the Nation? Or
Within?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 4–11 January, 1997.
21 See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: writing about
Hindu–Muslim riots in India today’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual
number, March 1991. The concept of the fragment finds elaboration in
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: colonial and postcolonial
histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
22 I have developed this argument further in ‘The Centre Periphery Model,
or How Are We Placed? Contemporary Cultural Practice in India’, Third
Text, Nos. 16–17, Autumn–Winter 1991; ‘When Was Modernism in
Indian/Third World Art?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 3,
Summer 1993; and ‘Navigating the Void’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao
Miyoshi (eds), Cultures of Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham,
NC, 1998. (Later versions of these essays are included in this volume.)

100 Art and Social Change