Reporting Via Mumbai

Via Mumbai was an international seminar organized by the now very well known Mohile Parikh Centre for Visual Arts, between 13^th and 15^th of February 2006. The seminar’s subheading read as follows: Multiple Cultures in a globalizing World. This perhaps was one of those rare occasions in India, when you get a significant cross section of artists, critics/ historians and curators together in the same plenary session. The energy levels were very high and the ideas that grew, veritably rich.

Over and above, when you place yourself in the midst of this flurry of very rich ideas and the flow of arguments, there is pragmatics at work. That is the pragmatics of communication, via what was proposed (the overarching theme) and then the proceedings in which we saw those very themes divided into segments and then being problematized.

In many ways the general theme of the seminar was both alluring and predictably contemporary. For, over last one decade the world has been witnessing changes in its orientation, one of the major causes of which is identified as globalization. Thus when any new feature in a culture or society drums up for support today we can see a clear alignment of those effects in those cultural manifestations, especially in their metropolitan versions.

Hence, when you have a sampled variety of theoreticians and practitioners assembling in a forum to discuss how multiple cultures behave in a globalizing period, then the variety of sub themes that emerge are simply dazzling.

Theoreticians who studded the conference were from Homi k. Bhabha to Thierry de Duve to Noel Carol, then Jale Erzen to Ales Erzavec and Geeta Kapur, Neeladri Bhattacharyya, and Kumkum Sangari, Johannes Pijnapple and Amra Ali; artists were also diverse like Shahzia Sikander, Marco Kusumawijaya, Ellen Harvey and Virginia Mckenney. There was an equally balanced Panel of chairpersons: Parul Dave Mukherjee, Manas Ray, Rahul Srivastava, Girish Shahane,  Kavita Singh and Dominic Wilsdon. The outer circle comprised of a cross section of very significant artists, critics and art historians from four major metros of the country and from Vadodara(Baroda) and Santiniketan.

The regular sessions of seminar presentations were followed by a questionnaire session, ending the day with panel discussions. In fact, in many ways that was the liveliest part of the day, a spirit of interactivity prevailed amid the signs of difference that the world of culture and theories are always marked by.

The seminar was so structured as to bring out the aspectual and symptomatic narration of belongings and longings in the current global cultural and theoretical practices. The theme was divided into two levels according to the proposal written by Prashant Parikh, in circulation. These were the themes of peaceful cohabitation and difference, and the placement pattern of these within the dominant world systems (liberal, democratic and capitalist world systems). This proposal was also sensitive to the existence of other parallel and deviant traditions, and finally, how contemporary visual art deals with these themes.

The first of the sessions that was to guide the rest started with the Homi K. Bhabha ‘s Keynote address, ‘Living Together, Growing Apart’. His argument was around how today’s messianic pronouncement compares with the past enunciations of a similar kind. Hence, relating the historical reality of the present (via George Bush and the war in Iraq) through a passage of deep time to T. S. Eliot- whose messianic dream (according to Bhabha) helped him imagine the future in the form of an endless war.

As a contrast to (t)his figuration of power he posits some diasporic and, less empowered artists whose humanistic spirit, multiculturalism and globalization stand out.

Coming down to the contrast of representational scheme- Bhabha suggested that– ‘Pride and Ego down ‘ as an American proclamation during the war is a malapropism, for it contradicts the action which strips the prisoners under examination. He quotes Conrad’s witness, Sontag’s last sentence and Derrida’s last pronouncement about the never-ending aspects of the war.

In contrast to the critical dynamics within which to place these pronouncements,

Eliot would articulate the metaphysics of war without end, figuring some kind of civilizational end, which was, according to Bhabha, Orientalist cosmopolitanism within the spiritual and secular dynamics of the clash of civilization. Eliot, in his representation would support liberty but give more importance to order. Eliot, thus, would look upon the American foreign policy as a low brow messianism of a trans-historical kind, according to Bhabha. The foreign policy of the US is to take preemptive action: e.g. Vietnam, Nicaragua etc., or as David Walcott, Bill Clinton’s advisor would put it, to seduce and abandon. Or, in another vein his advice would be to control the information flow.

Within this dynamics of preachy and authoritarian secular democracy (which Partha Chatterjee called ‘Liberal fundamentalism’) aimed at a greater control over the world on the one hand and messianic pronouncements issued by the White House on the other, Bhabha, in examining the Jehadi’s self-justification, comes to cover the liminal zone wherefrom artistic practices would thus attempt at various self-retrievals.

Bhabha located Eliot’s Shift to the historical in his Four Quartets on which there is a shadow of Irving Babbitt’s humanism. (Babbitt and Paul Elmer initiated a movement, called New Humanism, which advocated a forceful doctrine of moderation and restraint, looking to classical traditions and literature for inspiration.)

Thus Bhabha ‘s argument, cutting across, as he did, the layers of enunciatory moments, charted out the genealogy of a contiguous, though heterogeneous idea; the idea of messianism. His attempt was to an extent that of space clearing; in trying to locate himself and his examples as representing an am-bi-valent zone from which then to respond to the dominant logic, or the logic of dominance.

As a deviation to the past grand narratives of a modernist (Eliot) or an evangelical poser ( Bush/ White House) thus, he found a certain resting place in the art works of the people who address their issues of a homeland, away from the homeland. His main exemplars were Emily Jazir’s work titled Ramallah New York, where the two stills from the video on display shows the contiguities than difference. He then moved via Mona Hatoum’s work called Cafier (a piece of cloth, used traditionally as turbans by males), into which women’s hairs are embroidered. Next came the miniature derived images of women, by Shahzia Sikander where the shadow of the unknown falls on the apparently seductive court women, Shahzia adapts from Mughal miniature.

He thus advocated an interesting but difficult idea of slowness, a slowness that involvement of body invokes and according to him, staves off the lure of a hermeneutic hurry, and provides us with space to think of the questions of cultural translation and cultural transmission.

Later on, going through Shahzia’s slide presentation clarified more issues for some in the audience, not completely familiar with her work earlier. It raised the question of doubleness as at least a slippery and tricky terrain, which demands long discursive engagement and patience than sweeping rhetoric.

However, as Parul Dave Mukherjee justly pointed out in her introduction to Bhabha: he has given that ‘much awaited sensuality that cultural theory needed since long’. We thus stood witness to a highly intelligible and polemical lecture, fine tuned to address the present from his own location related dynamics, of being a part of the United States academia and the discomfort that the said position brings with it.

At the second session that day, Ales Erjavec (from Slovenia) and Neeladri Bhattacharya (New Delhi) talked of world culture today, from two complementary perspectives- theory and history. Ales in his paper titled ‘Culture and Negativity’ dwelt upon the thematics of a dialectical model derived largely from the critical theory school (Adorno, Frankfurt school in general and Martin Jay). He posited the question as to how multiple cultures coexist in today’s world. His approach to culture is largely understood in the sense of culture industry. Or, in other words, how culture in the elite notion is translated in the form of elitist art (e.g. Mathew Arnold and T. S. Eliot). He proposed that the mainstream bourgeois culture gets

replaced by the Avant Garde. And in this sense, the American Avant Garde is a qualitative designation. He traced the continuity of this theme from Adorno to Slavoz Zizek (1960’s to 1990’s) and then to Kristeva and Tel Quel who replaced the aesthetic category of creativity with production and signification.

Ales expanded on the idea of Schusterman that the productive sphere should be broadened to stave off the inadequate or the asymmetric equation between the stock market and art, via Jean Baudrillard and Jean Luc Nancy’s idea of a culture of equilibrium. He asked whether Chinese modernism which showed no signs of knowledge of the globe, could be called an instance of insularity. On the other hand, he put forward the case of Japan, wherein Ichikawa went to Taiwan, incorporated the exotic Taiwanese works in his own, came back and propounded the same- and Ichikawa became a genre. Herein lies a paradox- that of producing an exotic Other out of Taiwan, sitting in Japan. By the force of this example there is a shift in the focus of understanding that modernist appropriations (modernity is an epoch for Ales) should look up to the west as a model. He stated further via Hardt and Negri that capital is so powerful that it produces negative question. Through the positivity of affiliations, this may evoke effects and affects, which has become an affirmative culture today.

Neeladri Bhattacharya laid out five different possible ways of looking at history or historical temporalities in his paper-Empathy, Distance and the Politics of Representation- to point out the possible engagements of the historian of today and the future. His contention was to show how our closeness to or distance from the past might work out as the ruling metaphor for engaging with the historical time. He finally grounded his argument in the current problems that vex the secularist historical project.

At the end of this day’s session there were three artists- Jale Erzen (Turkey), Ellen Harvey(U.S) and Virginia Mackenny( S.A) who presented their works and/ or reflected on their locations. Jale presented a paper- Temporarilities, spatiality: Reconstructing (Art) History (ies). She proposed an organic model of concord such as aesthetic’s capacity to reach out to the world. She said via Ernst Cassirer that deep structures are the basis of cultures and cultural differences, that cultural identities were created but not dispersed, that new technology has changed the entire perception of the world. Interestingly, Jale gave the example of Abysenna, the 15^th century aesthete from Turkey who used separate categories like mind, intellect and ‘akal’, which capacitates an artist. She quoted from Sufi compositions to show how temporalities go forward and then go back, and that most of the arts go back in time. Jale’s plea is for the retainment of cultural difference without the globalizing credo of mimetic homogeneity.

Ellen’s session titled Art and Desire was the most light hearted of all the days; she held the audience, entertained them with her quick humor and presented her serious embargo into the world of public culture in a seamless seeming way.

In fact, this was the point of contention for many in the audience later, when the session was opened for question. For, her project was to reappropriate the appropriated graffiti sites in Bronx, New York, where graffiti spell volumes on the underclass subculture of the New York City suburbia. She used an image of an idyllic landscape derived of the 17^th 18^th Century French and Italian (Poussin, Lorraine) tradition. There were two sides to this, one was the light hearted way in which she broke the civic rule of painting on the public buildings, and the second could be that she, a white western woman reoccupying / whitewashing (?) the occupied spaces by the protesting underdogs of her city. If there was to be a third, it was the humorous turn she gave to the narrative.

She narrated how, while she painted, a Puerto Rican approached her to tell in a voice of reassurance “Finally, there are some images of Puerto Rico on the wall”.

The rest of the papers likewise could draw rapt attention of the erudite public present there. Thierry de Duve is a theoretician born in Belgium but settled in France. His well-known contribution to the theory of the contemporaneity and modernity is global at the very outset, by involving issues such as Avant Garde, recurrence and autonomy or heteronomy. As in his book, Kant After Duchamp, de Duve took on a certain difficult question – or, an observation and a question put together; that is, whether or not after the projects of the great historical Avant Gardes we are going back towards Kant and turning the path breaking innovations into genres. Thus here in the paper he proposed a project of retrieving Kant from the Kantians as well as from misrepresentation.

In a certain way, because Kant’s retrieval is not much talked about today, let alone be fashionable, his talk was imbued with certain freshness. His objections were too many and were multi directional- first was the art education since 1970s, which he critically called an imploded paradigm. He then objected to the Spivakian take on Kant, as in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. He cared to remind us that Sensus Communis was no more than a transcendental idea. In another vein, it was also about a universal feeling, the possibility of sharing feelings universally. de Duve also reminded us, via Kant,  that we ought to attach a value to objects of art. The parallels that Kant draws between the aspects of art and aspects of living were via the feelings and sentiments we may have for those objects around us. Today the discourse of anti aesthetics has run its course for over 30 years, and Kant bashing and Greenberg bashing are two of its favorite ideas. So aesthetics comes in this via back door.

In his thought-provoking talk Duve told that singular universality jumps a couple of steps, it jumps from the local to the global, thus producing glocal, which was according to him, an empirical concept. He thus would rather like to have an empirical pessimism and a transcendental optimism, in a belligerently poised opposition to the current cultural moorings.

Kumkum Sangari, as always, had been very precise and illuminating, combining her skill of discourse analysis with historical readings. She this time, in her paper  titled : The Changing Face of Culture, or, Naming Culture From Different Places, contemporanized the issues of power and difference in the new world order. This she did by referencing wide varieties of labor and differential exchanges across the globe. In the current global scenario, which to her is another name for NGO-isation, wherein there can be national art exhibition without any national representation. This, according to her could produce a blind political subject, as Hardt and Negri argue in their book Empire.

She referred to the global representations as anomalous such as a BBC world service program showing the site of protest while muffling the protesting voice of Arundhati Roy and telling how the old American women who invested in the MNCs, responsible for building Narmada Dam were going to lose out on their money because of the anti–dam movement. Here, the category is clearly ‘they’ vs. ‘us’, American vs. Indian women. She thus found Jameson’s refutation to ontologise modernity as a pointer to the problem of location of ‘modern’ at any given point of time. Today, thus, national space could be a site for trans-national politics.

Geeta Kapur held out with her concerns around the issues of Avant Garde and counter culture in the paper titled: ‘Globalism, Hegemony and Counter Culture’. She proposed this via a riddle: that of how to condense and problematise the relationship between art and culture, and thus the question as to, ‘is culture what artists make?’  For her, the idea of culture comprised of symbolic and mediated meanings, and it is marked by emancipation from the market meanings. Geeta proposed a model which is axial, having two large arms dissecting each other at the center, at whose nodal ends rest two paired opposites (read concepts). Top and bottom has the contrasting pairs like Elite/ High. At the bottom rests Popular/ low, and across the horizontal lies the other two : Genres, vs. Avant Garde. She sees these categories as fixed point with movements of the arms providing the clue to the change of direction that might take place from time to time. She thus proposed Documentary as a new genre, freeing itself from the realism of the yester-years, so as to claim subjectivity on behalf of the maker. Her examples were, Anand Patwardhan (whose claim to a sustained practice could be of 30 years) and Amar Kanwar (for 10 years). To her, the media seems to have produced an interspace between private and public and a deeply produced subject thus can make a form of transcendence on the verge of public sphere. In the performative mode, a residue of the object thus lurks in the material substratum; she thus enumerated those differences via Bill Viola and Bruce Newman as exemplars, where the undeconstructed selves play out their roles. She voiced, very interestingly, her concern over the current engagements over how these practices (which to her were of indexical nature) can feature in the new and broadened out landscape of art theories, or in other words, how you retotalize the fragments?

In the rest of the sessions Noel Carol, Amra Ali, Marco Kusumawijaya, Shahzia Sikander and Johannes Pijnapple presented their concerns over their works or the broader field of theories of practices with which they jostle on a daily basis.

Noel Carol’s presentation titled-‘Beyond Aesthetics: are we Global yet?’ charted the spaces across which the differences are spelt out and melted. His indexes were- food, to explore as to how the Americans are now exposed to multiple food culture; to the dissemination of films- the fact that Jurassic Park was released in Russia before it was released in the U.S.

According to him Mass Communication and media is the only pervasive means to globalization, for him , his data tells him that the traffic of movies are worked out locally, and the fact that the receptivity of the current web related connections work out at variable speeds. Hence globalization exists with variable intensities

He dared to dissent on the fact that the European narrative of art remains parochial, and no non-Western artist was seen as part of that narrative. Noel talked of the privileges that the other art forms hold over the so called Paintings and Sculptures. He located two or more distinctions over Mona Hatoum example- Over what was shown by Bhabha and called these the sense making strategies and further contrasted what Duchamp did earlier in the past century to what he experienced in the recent Kala Ghoda festival in Bombay- that is the perceptual difference over the ready-mades : the overused object ( as in the west ) and a dearth as in any Indian metros. In the end via the philosopher George Dickey he argued out a case for the differential transnational transaction of the global. Many a times though the terms of reference for global did not seem to include the specifics of effects and affects that those who belong there might fell feel, hence it did raise question of another kind of homogeneity by assumption indeed.

Amra’s argument of all of them was the most circular, showed her concern and her bindings within the current location, Pakistan. Though the works she showed during the course of her presentation demonstrated how you could possibly contrast concerns of the people who stayed back in their homes, however backward looking that position may be against some one who chose to migrate to a difficult location like United States, and hence have to handle the identity matters in quite another term.

Marco, likewise, representing Indonesia, voiced his current concerns over the public projects where he and his peers take over billboards in the prominent city squares and pun on the expected advertisements.

Shahzia’s, as we said earlier, was one of those most alluring and gripping presentations, a set of most energetically crafted works within the genre of appropriation. Being segregated, by choice of course, from the Pakistani culture she belonged to, she now earned the legitimacy of using the doubleness of location.

Pijnapple, a Dutchman by origin, but settled for almost a decade in India, as always, least rhetorical and almost always in a documentary mode, presented his concerns over the video art in the south Asia and India in particular. In his presentation he voiced the concern over the new age art activity, the distribution of the patterns of energy and interest into smaller areas of concerns than into one mega event that happens and vanishes, leaving no, or almost no trace behind.

Finally, at the end of the day one went back with the feeling that be it Said’s extrapolations or Bhabha’s attempt at constructing a new self, or Shahzia Sikander’s discovery of a new identity, or even by the concerted self representations of the new mandarins, a new age identity may be constructed. Without euphoria we may thus take this as a limit of this seminar.