Art Futures Kolkata

Exit Through the Gift Shop

2011-08-28T17:57:00.004+05:30

Graffiti deity ... Banksy

This teasing faux documentary about Banksy and his fellow street artists is priceless – and hilarious.

by Peter Bradshaw
from The Guardian

He is Britain's newest national treasure: but he presumably won't be accepting a TV viewers' award from Ant and Dec any time soon, or making libertarian interventions in the smoking debate, or writing an annual Christmas Diary for the London Review of Books or posing alongside his mum with his CBE outside Buckingham Palace in his grey topper and chimp mask. Perhaps his mum would have to wear a chimp mask as well. Street artist, situationist and public-space japester Banksy is famed for his snogging coppers, simpering apes and for debunking Israel's new West Bank barrier with graffiti. Now he takes his career of radical cheek into the cinema with a wacky new "documentary", being shown this week in the director's own pop-up cinema in an underpass in London's Waterloo before moving on to more conventional locations.

Like many of his graffitoed images, it's a kind of cinematic trompe l'oeil. There have been notable hoax-oriented films in the recent past: such as The Blair Witch Project, Borat and the complete works of Lars von Trier. Exit Through the Gift Shop is in this genial tradition. Orson Welles made F for Fake; Banksy has made W for Windup. As a documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop is as about as reliable and structurally sound as that house-front with the strategically placed window that falls on top of Buster Keaton. As entertainment, though, it works very well.

Introducing it at the Berlin film festival last month – he appeared on video with his face in darkness – the artist himself cheerfully declared he hoped that it would do for street art what The Karate Kid did for martial arts. Like karate, street art is more difficult than it looks, particularly the trick of making a living from it, maintaining a combat-ready crew of studio assistants, and all the time persuading an ever-widening circle of professional acquaintance to keep the secret of your anonymity.

What the film does, or purports to do, is take a sideways look at Banksy and the new explosion of street artists, particularly in Los Angeles. The practitioners, at the outset of their careers at least, were unpaid graffiti-outlaws, pulling off daring and often dangerous visual stunts for the sheer hell of it: people like Shepard Fairey, who incessantly replicated his Andre the Giant image on the sides of buildings, a fat staring man over the single word "Obey". Fairey became conventionally celebrated for his Barack Obama Hope poster.

At the centre of the film is the apparent friendship between Banksy and one of his biggest fans, one Thierry Guetta, an LA-based Frenchman with a lucrative retro clothing business and a passion for making videos. Guetta got fascinated in the LA street art scene, followed the artists around and shot miles of unusable video in the hope of making a documentary. Eventually he seems to have made the acquaintance of Banksy himself, filming his "Guantánamo" stunt in the precincts of Disneyland: propping up an orange-jumpsuited life-sized doll near a ride.

With pixelated tongue in blanked-out cheek, Banksy claims that he persuaded Guetta not to make his own film, but to be the star of this one, and then to be an artist himself. In no time, Guetta is somehow producing hundreds of suspiciously accomplished Warhol-Banksy pop art-style knockoffs for a colossal Los Angeles show under his new street-art name "Mr Brainwash". Well, Thierry Guetta may well exist – but at the mention of his Mr Brainwash output, you may feel a strange tugging sensation on your leg. This could be the most startling debutant in the art scene since novelist William Boyd told us all about the neglected genius Nat Tate – but Mr Brainwash's works are available for purchase, which is more than I can say for Nat Tate.

You're under no compunction to take the film seriously: but it does offer an insight, of a teasingly incomplete and semi-fictionalised sort, into Banksy's working life. We see his helpers carry away a London telephone box, take it to pieces in his workshop, replace the wackily twisted result in its original position and film the response from passersby. Nobody scratches their head or strokes their chin and wonders if it is "art" or if its creator might have "sold out". They just laugh their heads off. They enjoy it: it is absolutely hilarious and this, to my perhaps naive and untutored eye, is the most compelling argument in favour of Banksy and in favour of this chaotic film.

The same goes for Banksy's Diana tenners: he shows a cardboard box full of real-looking £10 notes with Princess Diana's face on instead of the Queen's. These things could get him arrested for forgery. Like Mr Brainwash, they are inspired counterfeits. Perhaps the point of Banksy's art is that it inhales the wild spirit of forgery: his work makes free with brand identities and the symbols of authority, it replicates them, debunks and devalues them, it is a form of benign subversion. And he could be an important artist or just a silly fad – either way, in the street and with this film, he's providing pleasure while he lasts.

Art-fair musical chairs

2010-07-03T07:06:00.006+05:30

Field, by Ai Weiwei. Ming Dynasty-
patterned Chinese ceramic structure
in front of Art 41 Basel’s entrance
(courtesy of Art Observed).

From The Economist

Global frameworks

Contemporary art is a futures market in which “derivative” is a bad word. Art Basel, which ended on June 20th, heard a lot of phrases adapted from the financial markets. To be a good bet against near-zero interest rates and unpredictable currency fluctuations, art needs the potential of a global market. Thus, “local artist” has become a synonym for insignificant artist and “national” damns with faint praise. “International” is now a selling point in itself.

Aided by banks and royalty, international art fairs are spreading belief in contemporary art. UBS sponsors Art Basel and its sister fair, Art Basel Miami Beach; Deutsche Bank subsidises London’s Frieze Fair and the Hong Kong International Art Fair. In the Middle East, local rulers are patrons of Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art.

Art fairs accelerate the transnational exposure of artists and Art Basel is the unrivalled leader in this, partly because it has always defined itself as international. This year, its 41st, the fair featured 300 galleries from 37 countries. Careful curation is required for this global mix to be properly diverse. As Lucy Mitchell-Innes of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, a New York gallery, warns: “It’s a problem if four or five booths have the same artist’s work. A good international fair wants Chinese galleries to bring talented Chinese artists, not another Antony Gormley.”

There are many components to the globalisation of art. Marc Spiegler and Annette Schönholzer, co-directors of Art Basel, suggest that private collections internationalise in the process of becoming more serious. “Collectors often start by acquiring art from their own nation, then their own region, then finally internationally,” explains Mr Spiegler.

The hierarchy of fairs is different from the auction market. The top three cities for auctions are New York, London and Hong Kong, in that order. But the hierarchy of fairs is in dispute. Everyone agrees that Basel comes first, but it is unclear which comes next: Miami or London. Or if New York, with the Armory Show and Art Dealers Association of America show, or Paris with FIAC, is third. The situation in the lower tiers is even more volatile. Madrid’s ARCO fair used to be the most important fair for South and Latin American galleries but it has been usurped by Miami. Now ARCO is perceived as an afternoon of cultural exposure for Spanish punters rather than a pressing business occasion.

Two newcomers are shaking things up. The Hong Kong International Art Fair, which took place at the end of May, boasted 155 galleries from 29 countries. Hong Kong is the financial and geographical centre of Asia, a transport hub where people from West and East feel equally at home, and there are no duties on art. Lehmann Maupin, a New York gallery, was one of many delighted with the results. As the primary dealer on a range of Asian artists including Do Ho Suh, a well-known South Korean, Lehmann Maupin’s inventory proved attractive to the pan-Asian audience that had flown into town.

The other fair that is the subject of much discussion is Abu Dhabi Art. Last November it welcomed 50 galleries from 19 countries as a first move towards interesting visitors in a vast museum building project that will see its first openings in 2013. David Zwirner Gallery was convinced to participate in the next edition of the fair by Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum. As Mr Zwirner explained, “The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open soon, so it has to get cracking with its acquisition programme. The fair is therefore a key venue. My business model relies on museums educating the public.”

The globalisation of art is not all about money. A growing number of not-for- profit biennials are being developed alongside the market structures. Massimiliano Gioni, a curator based in Milan and New York, who is overseeing the Gwangju biennial, which opens in South Korea in September, recalls that the avant-garde was “built on a transnational community of kindred spirits,” adding, “sometimes I long for that.” Art has often aspired to universal values. Perhaps it is finally in a position to have them.

Global Art at the Margins of Empire

2010-06-22T18:03:00.003+05:30

by Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay

For an alternative artistic approach between an ephemeral global village and a reactionary appeal to tradition.

The emergence of art as a global institution (backed by a global art market) as one of the consequences of the process of financialisation, is an epochal event of our times that has rarely been commented upon. Commentators on New Capitalism have waxed eloquently about ‘informatization’ and ‘dematerialisation’ and, about the ability of capital to valorise processes and objects which were outside the erstwhile value circuit (affect and art are two prime examples) and to invent new, intangible, objects (e.g., financial derivatives), but what remain unsaid in that account is the fantastic concordance of artistic flows with financial flows leading to a certain Saatchification of contemporary art. In the mid-90s, Thierry de Duve wrote about an epochal transition – from Modernism to Postmodernism – premised upon art’s becoming a wholly self-referential category defined entirely by circulation rather than by some extrinsic criterion (beauty or truth). While the tendency towards dematerialisation has been exacerbated in the subsequent innovation of ‘Conceptual Art’ followed by more ‘ephemeral’ forms of non-representational art, a parallel process in geopolitics culminated in art’s globalisation or biennialisation which would remove the last vestige of art’s anchorage in specific places and times. Despite Clement Greenberg’s expansive claim about art as such (art did not go global until the late twentieth century) around the middle of the last century, think how localised was the context of his pronouncements – determined largely by his own location within the US ‘culture industry’ and the Cold War ideology which shaped it. And when you contrast him with comparable figures of today who can make claims on behalf art as such (rather than this or that – American or Japanese – art) – say, someone like Nicolas Bourriaud or any other curator/theorist of stature who shuttles across the globe with the ease of a business traveller and negotiates with non-western or even ‘tribal’ artists with a flourish, it becomes quite clear that the law of general equivalence (which is not the same thing as homogenisation) has permeated what can be called The Global ArtWorld Inc. Art’s de- and reterritorialisation in recent decades calls for a radical departure from theories (Bloch or Adorno) which valorized artwork’s transcendent qualities.

In our radically delocalized world, upholding the claims of a tradition is bound to sound hypocritical and reactionary. In the context of the ongoing Tate Triennial, Bourriaud (the curator) has rightly asserted that Postmodernism, which was obsessed with the idea of an indentifiable origin and tradition, is no longer relevant for the world we inhabit. The state of the artistic world today is such that one has to, of necessity, start from “a globalized state of culture – [the artists] not anymore working as logotypes of their own culture, or their own tradition. The question is not anymore where you are coming from but where you are going to?”

Yet, no one, except a miniscule and privileged minority of jet-set globetrotters, actually lives in the famed global village – it is counterintuitive. While lived places are pulverised and undercut by centripetal global forces, there can be no denial that groups to benefit from this mobility are usually the privileged ones – it is the powerless underdogs whose fate is to remain localized. In fact, the same forces that engender mobility and movement also create enclaves, ghettoes and camps where the ‘dangerous’ populations are confined, trapped and un-homed. Glocal art does not espouse a certain fetishism of place, instead it destabilizes the very fixity of place by asking: who makes places out of spaces? What are the stakes in this? What is the politics of place today? And it is precisely in these ‘zones of exception’ – refugee camps, borders, ghettoes of illegal immigrants, depraved slums, zones crisscrossed by petty smugglers who cross borders regularly for making a living and other ‘dangerous’ subaltern population groups who are being deprived of their mobility and livelihood and are being steadily localized by the operation of the global surveillance machinery – that the politics of place manifests itself. These places have nothing to do with the sense of sheltering autochthony associated with the erstwhile idea of place.

EmFacing the Defaced: The Art of Portrait in the Era of Displacement

Paradoxically, some of the most prosperous zones of the globe have enclaves teeming with the disenfranchised. Squeaky clean Singapore happens to be one of the wealthiest states of Asia (in terms of per capita income) but its red-light district, Gaylang, has a large population of immigrant, illegal sex-workers from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Malaysia. Many of them are not even professional sex-workers: they are housewives, daughters, young factory workers and college students from the large Asian hinterland where the operations of a globalised, ‘disorganised’ capitalism in recent times have brutalised, ravaged and disoriented traditional life-style and patterns of expectations. They all worship the mighty Singapore Dollar and cross borders to make some fast buck. The heat of poverty and the dust of dispossession have driven them to such extreme alienation that traditional notions of honour, shame, wellbeing – have all been forgotten. Theorists of ‘affective labour’ do not adequately recognise the degree of dispossession and degradation entailed in sex-work in the squalor and brutality of the Asian sex-industry. Joan Marie Kelly, an American painter who teaches drawing and painting at the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), was shocked to find out that painting these sex-workers was not easy. The resistance came from the sex-workers themselves who felt inadequate and were reluctant to be represented: they felt that they are merely part of some anonymous and commoditized ‘flesh’!

In this era of ‘conceptual art’ and ‘performance art’ when painting has almost been relegated to limbo, experimenting with portrait painting would appear to be anachronistic. The end of art-as-we-knew-it is a logical outcome of the exhaustion of the classical (post-Renaissance) problematic of representation whose aim was verisimilitude. The advent of photography and cinema in early twentieth century not only made painting, (qua representation) somewhat superfluous but also gave rise to a certain reflexivity which, instead of thinking of painting as a window to the world, began experimenting with the materiality of the surface of the canvas, with the nature of colour and lines — without any reference to the ‘world’. Around mid-twentieth century, this tendency exhausted itself, culminating in high abstraction, ‘ready-mades’ and minimalism.

The wheel has come in full circle and today artists are asking, once again, with Nicholas Bourriaud, whether, through art, “it [is] still possible to generate relationships with the world” in a way that would circumvent the problematic of ‘representation’. Joan Kelly is a self-conscious practitioner of ‘relational aesthetics’ (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space). She looks at portraiture more as an ethnographic encounter rather than a mimetic activity: the purpose is not simply to paint a face but to generate an encounter between the artist and the social milieu of the subject to be painted. The idea is to use portraiture as a form of ‘conceptual art’ in order to engage with marginal communities in different parts of the world – illegal sex-workers in South and South East Asia, the unemployed and the homeless in the US, the refugees and the immigrants in Europe, factory workers in China who lost their limbs in accidents and were thrown out of their jobs — living on the margins of society. As is well known, the purpose of traditional portrait is to re-present a person’s inner persona. Kelly’s portraits, far from wanting to capture a subject’s expression, seek to valorise the process of interaction itself (between the artist, the model and his/her milieu) and the resultant portraits are the material remains, or witnesses – to this inter-subjective exchange and the resultant establishment/reinforcement of sociality.

The face is what represents the person. To be human is to have a face. To be a person, to be acknowledged as a person, means to be acknowledged through one’s face. It is not possible to contemplate a relationship of love, hatred or friendship with a faceless person. Human beings without faces are not quite humans. And yet, social marginality – professional sex-work and the kind of affective labour it entails – is precisely a way of rendering the sex-worker faceless. To concentrate on the face of a sex-worker is thus to redeem his/her humanity on the face of a ‘reality’ which seeks to reduce him/her to mere flesh. Kelly’s invocation of Levinas’ ideas on ‘the face of the other’ (he wrote about the ‘defenseless nudity’ of the face of the other – the ‘widow, orphan or stranger’) — is significant. According to Levinas, in the human face is found the original ethical code. From a look into the face of the Other we become aware of basic human responsibility and meaning. To emface the faceless through artistic encounter (Kelly attracts crowds of onlookers whenever she paints the sex-workers in public) is thus to restore the human in the dispossessed other.

Lipstick Zihad and the Sex of Things

By now it is widely acknowledged that the commodity is ontologically heterogeneous: it does not mean the same thing everywhere. Mia Jafari is a British-Iranian artiste who has been drawn to Iranian public commodity culture and her artistic work (textiles and photomontages made from staged photographs taken in Iran) on Iranian women’s engagement with mundane, mass-produced western consumer goods deserves critical interrogation as glocal art. Iran is one of those few places in the world where a self-conscious anti-globalization, anti-consumerist agenda permeates the state ideology and public culture. Predictably, most Iranian art (diasporic art included) today is undergirded by a certain artistic angst about the illiberalism of the Islamic regime.

As is well-known, the Islamic regime of Iran is critical of consumerism and for some strange reason consumerism is viewed as ‘western’ (while the crassest of the consumerist dystopias are located in the Middle East and South East Asia). While it would be difficult to brand Jafari’s work either as pro- or anti-consumption, what is clear is that a certain irony about the semiotic status of mass-consumer goods in Iranian feminine imaginary is pervasive in the textiles she makes. The subtle perversity of the façade of a washing-machine made from shiny, shocking-pink rough fabric (with a golden door and instructions written in Persian) arises out of a shrewd play with the politics of gender in contemporary Iran. The transposition from cold, smooth white metal to warm but rough pink not just feminizes this mundane gadget but also seeks to characterise the defiance of young Iranian women whose affiliation with visible markers of westernisation (loud make-up, flashy clothes, shiny trinkets, high heels etc.) shocks the conservative public. It is chic, wry and simultaneously disturbing and attractive.

Jafari’s photomontages depict staged scenarios of semi-veiled young Iranian women in colourful clothes playing with replicas of various mundane gadgets. What gives these scenes a certain dream-like quality is the background: a derelict but rugged and picturesque landscape (rural, sparsely inhabited areas outside of Tehran) reminiscent of absence, emptiness and aporia. It is in this utopic non-place that the romance of young Iranian women with western gadgets unfolds.

Jafari’s Iranian works compels us to rethink not just Islam but also the ontology of commodity. The received binary of use- vs. exchange value is of little use in making sense of Islamic feminine engagement with consumption. The thrust of feminine consumption is on mass-produced mundane gadgets of quotidian use (the regime disapproves of ‘conspicuous consumption’ – western cosmetics, for example) whose semioticity is nearly zero because these are use-values – utilities. Yet, as modest and non-spectacular metonyms of the western commodity imaginary, these do not remain mere passive things. It would not occur to anybody here in England, for example, to ask: what does a washing-machine mean? Our quotidian familiarity with household gadgets has rendered them banal: a washing-machine or a refrigerator does things for us (washing and cooling, respectively) – these have no meaning beyond their functionality. The ontological precariousness of the branded washing-machine in Iranian feminine imaginary arises out of the fact that its semioticity surpasses its functionality. Their artistic re-presentation in Jafari’s art-works becomes doubly enigmatic when she characterises her own work as ‘kitsch’! In sum, her work on commodities in other places makes us rethink not just the problem of alterity but of our engagement with things as such.

Glocal art at the margins of empire is not about the ethnographer or the activist taking over the artist. These artists claim no ‘authenticity’, nor do they have any hang-ups about ‘tradition’. They are plain outsiders in the terrains where they work. But in important ways their engagement with life-worlds embedded in specific places – passages of coming and going, territories deterritorialised by the violence of states and wars – marks a clear departure from a line of thinking that would attribute an unthinking homogeneity to art practices. The global/local binary, conceived under the Enlightenment episteme which opposes universality to autochthony, is no longer adequate for articulating the planetary experience of unhomliness: our world is no longer double, it is many.

This article originally appeared in European Alternatives.

A father of modern photography

2010-04-23T09:29:00.011+05:30

At a transit camp for displaced persons, a woman who had been
an informer for the Gestapo is denounced.

"Of all forms of art expression, photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight. We look for the evanescent, the irreplaceable; this is our constant concern, and therefore one of the characteristics of our craft...In what we see and reveal to others we are witnesses of the world around it."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To photograph is to place in the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

ALL IT takes to be a photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is “one finger, one eye and two legs”. He visualised photography as a way of engaging with the world. He quietly stalked his subjects—Balinese dancers, Mongolian wrestlers, New York bankers—until that “decisive moment” when the right composition filled the frame. It all came so naturally. He rarely used a light meter or checked his aperture setting, and he seldom took more than a few shots of a single subject. With the instinct of a hunter, he knew when to click the shutter: “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living.”

Born in 1908 in Paris, the eldest son of wealthy cotton-thread manufacturers, Cartier-Bresson had a lusty, rebellious hunger for travel. With a head full of Rimbaud and a copy of “Ulysses” under his arm, he set off for west Africa in search of adventure. (He aspired to be a painter, but Gertrude Stein suggested he drop the brushes.) He bought his first Leica in the Côte d’Ivoire when he was 23. Light and quiet, the camera had just come onto the market, and it was a revelation. It fitted into his pocket, along with a few rolls of film. “Nobody took pictures that were better at exploiting the portability of the camera,” says Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century” is on view.

The show, many years in the making, is drawn primarily from the huge archive of work held by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, founded a year before he died in 2004. From the thousands available, Mr Galassi has selected 300 images from 1929 to 1989, a fifth of which have never been seen publicly before.

As cameras grew smaller and picture magazines bigger, Cartier-Bresson became a globe-trotting hired hand. But though he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time—in India at the time of Gandhi’s assassination, in China during the Cultural Revolution—he did not really have a nose for a good scoop. What he excelled at was seeing things in a different way from most other people.

The visitor is greeted by a wall of four photographs: a crowd of flag-waving, bespectacled Nixon-supporters in Texas in 1960 (the illustration above shows a couple of more sedate fans in Indiana); a cluster of Chinese youth gawking at a television in Beijing in 1958; a mass of French mourners in coats holding hands in 1962; and a group of wizened and rather menacing old men in Sardinia, lounging in straw-like grass, also in 1962. The juxtaposition of these images shows not just Cartier-Bresson’s range but also his gift for group portraits. When snapping a spectacle—a coronation, say, or a parade—he trained his camera on the unsuspecting bystanders.

The show is divided into sections, starting with some of Cartier-Bresson’s most arresting surrealist work from the 1930s, such as a sunbather in Trieste, Italy, whose white body echoes a sliver of white in the grass, and his self-assured prostitutes in Mexico City. Then came the war (he was a prisoner in Germany for three years before escaping) followed by his career as photojournalist and portrait photographer.

There is much to marvel at, such as the pictures of China in 1948, which capture the photographer’s powerful sense of formal composition. Some of the curator’s choices seem a bit odd and the written descriptions, which add little, are occasionally heavy-handed. One section, for instance, is introduced as Cartier-Bresson’s criticism of “American vulgarity, greed and racism”. But the visitor is left with a remarkable chronicle of the transformations of the 20th century—the rise of industrialisation, the fall of colonialism, the spread of commercialism and the grand-scale shift in world order—all captured by a lone man and his camera.

From The Economist

View a slide show of some of the exhibition images here.

End of empire

2010-03-05T16:38:00.003+05:30

A Glimpse Of India from Cambridge University on Vimeo.

A collection of almost 300 films which offer a unique glimpse of life in India and other parts of South Asia during the final days of the British Empire has been released online.

The archive, which is owned by Cambridge University's Centre of South Asian Studies, will be available from Thursday (March 4th) from the link here, where users will be able to watch and download the footage for free.

It contains approximately 50 different private collections, all made by people who lived and worked in India and other parts of Asia between 1911 and 1956, just as British rule in the region was coming to a close.

The silent films cover a huge range of topics, including harrowing scenes shot during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, images of labourers working on railways and dams, and pictures of the funeral of Lord Brabourne, a former Governor of Bombay and Bengal, in 1939.

They also open a window both on to some of the lesser-studied facets of Imperial history, such as women's experiences in colonial India; and aspects which otherwise would simply have gone unrecorded.

Alongside stereotypical images of dignitaries attending official events or spending a day at the races, viewers will be able to watch royal weddings, tribal dances, people working on farms and children playing or going to school.

"It's one thing to get an understanding of a place by reading about it or visiting 60 years later; to be able to see people at the time and watch events such as partition actually taking place before your own eyes is quite another," Dr. Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, said.

"The films are the equivalent of modern-day home videos. This makes the collection particularly valuable because it shows some of the things which aren't recorded in documents or books - like the interactions between people, or the way that the British behaved towards their servants. It's a fascinating resource for analysing how these two societies, British and Indian, worked - or perhaps didn't work - together."

The films were shot on 8mm or 16mm reel and have not been extensively available or used until now. In some cases, they had never been viewed until they were digitised.

They were originally gathered by Mary Thatcher, the Centre's first archivist. In the 1960s, she set about compiling an archive of memoirs of the British in India, while many of those who had witnessed the sun's setting on the Empire were still alive.

After one interviewee offered her a collection of old films which he otherwise planned to burn, Thatcher also began asking for old reels, eventually amassing almost 80 hours of unique moving images from the era.

"Amateur films have only recently become an accepted academic research topic, and material from the colonial age has received less attention than other areas of study," Dr. Annamaria Motrescu, an affiliated scholar at the Centre, who oversaw much of the digitisation project, said.

"Nowadays, home movie-making is an accepted part of many people's lives. For school children, watching home movies from the 1930s in India is an opportunity to see images documenting a time in a different manner than other sources, a historic time that in some cases is still shrouded in stereotypical representations."

Some of the most moving clips appear in two collections which deal with partition. The division of Pakistan from India took place in August 1947 and displaced millions of people. Hundreds of thousands died in widespread violence as Muslims and Hindus both raced to cross the borders and settle among a religious majority.

The archive contains clips taken both from the air and the ground showing trains crammed with emigrants trying to reach safety. Scenes from refugee camps bring home the scale of the tragedy, with pictures of the sick and dying, corpses being pecked at by vultures and the digging of mass graves.

Elsewhere, sequences show the immense scale of engineering works that took place under the Empire. The footage shows huge numbers of Indian labourers working on railways, bridges and dams, some of which were completed in remarkably short spaces of time. In one case, an entire collapsed bridge was rebuilt in between two scheduled services.

Much is revealed about the under-studied lives of women, both British and Indian. "By looking at the way in which British women presented themselves to the camera in these films, we start deciphering things about their experiences," Dr. Motrescu said. "It rapidly becomes clear that often they weren't necessarily enjoying spectacular lives of leisure and wealth. In very short scenes they show us signs of anxiety and boredom."

The Centre of South Asian Studies is now seeking funding to link its film collection and its oral history archive, which contains more than 300 recorded interviews and was released online last year. It is hoped that the two will, in time, be available as a single package that can be used in schools, universities, and by anyone with an interest in film or Imperial history.

Not all bad, some worse than bad

2010-02-24T13:21:00.003+05:30

Her Suburban Dream (2009) by Huma Mulji, at the Saatchi Gallery,
London. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features.

by Adrian Searle
The Guardian
2 February 2010

The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.

This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.

A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition (read the review here). There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.

A view from Europe

2010-02-23T17:32:00.000+05:30

Through the peephole: How to approach contemporary art from India as a curator from Europe

A lecture by Dr. Barbara J. Scheuermann, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Tuesday, 2 March, 6.30 pm
CIMA Gallery, Sunny Towers, 43 Ashutosh Chowdhury Avenue
Kolkata 700 019

In this illustrated talk the curator raises questions that sooner or later occur to everyone who deals with transcultural matters in the visual arts: How can one understand culturally defined aspects from a culture one hasn’t grown up in? Is it necessary to gain expertise on a certain world region in order to understand its artists? Or can one just walk over to any country and use the learned criteria and rules to judge art? How much context is necessary to understand an artwork?

The talk will be illustrated with images of the outcome of Barbara J. Scheuerman's ongoing curatorial research trip to centers of contemporary art practice in India.

Barbara J. Scheuermann is a free-lance curator and author based in Berlin, where she also heads a “BABUSCH - Project Space for Art from and about Elsewhere” in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. She has previously worked as a curator at TATE MODERN in London, where she was involve din the John Baldessari-retrospektive “Pure Beauty” as well as “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” (both in 2009). her previous positions where at: HAUS DER KUNST in Munich and K21 KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALEN, Düsseldorf. She completed her doctorate in 2005 on narrativity in contemporary art. She has since also been contributing to various art magazines and publications.

Oxford Launches Eastern Art Online

2010-02-13T15:30:00.005+05:30

Standing Parvati, Tamil Nadu, mid-10th century AD

From Press Trust of India (PTI)

12th February 2010

For the first time, images of rare objects and artefacts from ancient India and other Asian countries have been made available Online by the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.

Called Eastern Art Online: Yousef Jameel Centre of Islamic and Asian Art, the centre will provide global access to the university's Islamic and Asian Art collections held at the Ashmolean.

The collections span the Islamic West Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea, and comprise a wide range of media, including ceramics, textiles, sculpture, metalwork, paintings, and prints.

The centre will initially focus on the objects and themes featured in the Ashmoleans new galleries for the Islamic and Asian Collections, with over 1,400 of the Museums great treasures of Eastern Art accessible online at launch.

This resource will be an invaluable tool for historians and students for research purposes, for craftsmen and designers seeking inspiration, and for an interested and curious public all over the world.

Mr Yousef Jameel, Hon. LHD, is a Fellow of the Ashmolean Museum. In 2005, he made a substantial benefaction to the Ashmolean to establish the Online Centre for Islamic and Asian Art, as well as the Centre for the Study of Eastern Art.

According to Mr Jameel, “Knowledge should be accessible to everyone, everywhere, at any time. The Online Centre for Islamic and Asian Art will be a major step towards achieving this goal. I envisage the Centre as the hub of a future worldwide network exploring how different cultures learnt from each other and enriched peoples’ lives as a result.”

On Graphic Novels

2010-02-13T12:50:00.012+05:30

by Andrew D. Arnold

From Time magazine
14 November 2003

"You mean like pornographic?" queried the startled librarian when I asked for help researching articles about graphic novels. She had never heard the term for book-length comics used before. It's admittedly a not very well-liked phrase. Even among comic-makers the term only gets grudging usage, mostly because any alternative would be even less recognized. But "graphic novels" in name and in form have reached their 25th anniversary in 2003. To mark the occasion TIME.comix has two-part coverage. This week we look into their history, controversy and recent extraordinary growth. Next week will be an "instant library" list of 25 graphic novels that shouldn't be missed.

Will Eisner's "A Contract with God," published in 1978, gets the credit for being the first graphic novel, though it was not actually the first long-form graphic story nor the first use of the phrase. It was, however, the first marriage of the term, which appeared on the cover, and the intent of "serious" comix in book form. "It was intended as a departure from the standard, what we call 'comic book format,'" Will Eisner recently told TIME.comix. "I sat down and tried to do a book that would physically look like a 'legitimate' book and at the same time write about a subject matter that would never have been addressed in comic form, which is man's relationship with God." Though the concept of a "graphic novel" had been brought up among comix fans during the 1960s, Eisner claims to have to come up with it independently, as a form of spontaneous sleight-of-hand marketing. "[The phrase] 'graphic novel' was kind of accidental," Eisner said. While pitching the book to an important trade-book editor in New York, says Eisner, "a little voice inside me said, 'Hey stupid, don't tell him its a comic or he'll hang up on you.' So I said, 'It's a graphic novel.'" Though that particular editor wasn't swayed by the semantics, dismissing the book as "comics," a small publisher eventually took the project and put the phrase "A Graphic Novel" on the cover, thereby permanently cementing the term into the lexicon.

Even then the terminology didn't really fit. "A Contract with God," was actually four short stories and not like a traditional novel at all. Art Spiegelman, author of the comix Holocaust memoir "Maus," recalled when "Contract" first came out. "I liked one of the stories very much but it didn't register with me as having anything to do with what I had already climbed on my isolated tower to try to make, which was a long comic book that would need a bookmark." In the past 25 years the meaning of the phrase has only gotten hazier and less satisfying. Japanese manga, superhero collections, non-fiction, autobiography — all of these are "graphic novels," a term that now applies to any square-bound book with a story told in comics format. "The problem with the word 'graphic novel' is that it is an arguably misguided bid for respectability where graphics are respectable and novels are respectable so you get double respectability," Spiegelman says. Eisner himself dislikes the phrase, calling it a "limited term," and prefers "graphic literature or graphic story."

Either of those terms seems preferable to the striving, mostly-inaccurate "graphic novel." But some would argue against any such terminology. Chip Kidd, book designer and "graphic novel" editor at Pantheon, an imprint of the giant trade publisher Random House, loathes the ghettoizing of such books, starting with their name. "What I don't like is when we have to categorize everything in order to appreciate or understand it," he wrote in an email. "At Pantheon, we do not see these books as part of a 'line,' or a 'program' any more than we would books by Ha Jin or Stanley Crouch. They are simply books we want to publish that happen to use the form of visual narrative."

As a critic, though, I would argue that these types of books are fundamentally different from prose. Blurring the line between them would be charmingly quixotic at best and harmful at worst. That which distinguishes drawn books from prose is what we love about them. The Artistry is different — way beyond mere genre — and must be celebrated. In order to talk about the unique pleasures of drawn books we necessarily distinguish them from their text-only relatives.

But categorizing graphic novels goes beyond artistic semantics to the real bottom line — dollars and cents. Most big bookstores, like Barnes & Noble and Borders, put all the graphic novels together in one place. Trade bookstores have become an increasingly important outlet for comic publishers so the strategy for selling them on the floor has become critical. Should Superman, manga and "Maus," sit side by side? Chip Kidd, among many others, can't stand this. "I truly believe that Spiegelman's 'Maus' should be shelved next to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, not next to the X-Men. Maus is a Holocaust memoir first and a comicbook second." Micha Hershman, the graphic novel buyer for the Borders bookstore chain has no such doubts. "The graphic novel is a format," he says. "We would not segment the category by splitting up the graphic novel section."

According to Hershman, Borders' research shows the "demographics for 'Maus' overlap with the ones for Spider-Man," so that it is theoretically easier to lure the reader of one to the other than it is to lure a reader of Elie Wiesel to "Maus."

Something seems to be working because graphic novels have finally reached a point of critical mass in both popular consciousness and sales. Jim King, VP of Sales and Service at Nielsen Bookscan, a book sales monitoring service, says that, based on preliminary research, sales for graphic novels have increased "exponentially." Micha Hershman at Borders confirms the trend, saying, "over the last four years graphic novels have shown the largest percentage of growth in sales over any other book category." English-translated Japanese comics, or manga, are chiefly responsible for this growth, according to Hershman. More specifically, manga aimed at girls, called shojo, have exploded. "Superheroes are up a little," says Hershman, " Alternative comics are up a little. But 60% of all Border's graphic novel sales are shojo."

Comic specialty shops have felt the up-tick too. Nick Purpura, a manager at Jim Hanley's Universe, a comic store in New York City, also reports an annual increase in graphic novel sales, most particularly in manga. Could graphic novels eventually make the traditional comic book disappear? Frank Miller, author of "The Dark Knight Returns," recently shocked a comics industry crowd at the annual Eisner awards by pronouncing the format to be a goner, declaring, "Our future is not in pamphlets." Nick Purpura disputes this, saying, "the serialized versions pay for the trades. That way publishers get to sell it twice — once to comics fans and again to people who only buy collections." Even so, he says, "books that sold marginally as comics sell better as graphic novels." Additionally, there have been an increasing number of "original graphic novels," as Purpura calls them, which never appeared in serialized form. The most impressive example of these is DC comics' October release of "Sandman: Endless Nights," by Neil Gaiman, which reached number 20 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The future of the graphic novel seems both sunny and dim. As a term for a kind of book, "graphic novel" has become increasingly dissatisfying. "Maybe for a short window it was enough to say 'graphic novel' but soon it won't be," says Art Spiegelman, "because if you talk about [Chris Ware's] 'Jimmy Corrigan' as a graphic novel you'll have to explain that it's not manga or Marvel. Then you are left saying, 'well it's got a seriousness of purpose' that the phrase 'graphic novel' alone won't offer." On the positive side, the public awareness of these books has vastly increased, creating a kind of renaissance era of intense creativity and quality. Says Spiegelman, "Ultimately the future of the graphic novel is dependent on how much great work gets produced against all odds. I'm much more optimistic than I was that there's room for something and I know that right now there's more genuinely interesting comic art than there's been for decades and decades."

Read the author's "A Graphic Literature Library: 25 books from 25 years for smart, sophisticated readers" here.

Read his TIME.comix articles here.

The Lambiek Comiclopedia is accessible here.

The Google Index of comics resources is accessible here.

Where art is a part of life

2010-02-12T13:24:00.007+05:30

Samuel Fosso. Self-Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of
the 70s), 1997

From The Independent

Art of Africa: The 50 greatest cultural figures shaping a continent

In Podor in Senegal, the place where I grew up, everyone is an artist because art in Africa is not a commercial enterprise but is part of life itself.

Let me explain. When I was young, I used to watch the fishermen by the banks of the Senegal river. They were working close to the desert in intense heat, and whenever they stopped working they would start to sing. In Podor, people sing naturally about their experiences, their lives and their relationships. It is not just musicians and singers who perform. Everybody has a part to play - even children are allowed to join in if they have the inspiration. It doesn't matter if your voice is not the finest; everyone is involved.

Musicians are respected, but only in the context that the music itself belongs to the community - not to the person who is playing an instrument or singing a song. Those instruments have been developed over many years, while the songs themselves are inspired by the people as a whole rather than by any individual.

But I do, of course, have my own favourite artists - musicians, painters, fashion designers. Some never had the chance to become famous outside Africa, but their work has made a lasting difference to the people who live there.

Like Kouyaté Sory, the inspiration behind African ballet. He gave birth to a whole movement, bringing together people from Benin and Guinea, from Mali, Senegal and Gambia. He took the music from the smallest villages, brought together women who created the songs and dancing to go with it, and then brought it all to the stage. He is a true pioneer, as this was the first time African music had been organised so people could come and see it outside of its usual environment.

And Kouyaté started doing this during the Fifties, before all these African states became independent. It was a tremendous achievement. And all of those who came to see the ballet took something away from the experience, taking these memories and inspiration back home to their own villages, towns and countries.

Then there is Miriam Makeba. Her life has been so important in the story of African music. She was performing when life was very hard for black people in South Africa, yet she tried to address issues such as apartheid. She fled to Guinea as a refugee in the Seventies, which gave her the opportunity to record with West African musicians. The work that she did at that time gave birth to different styles of music, and even now it is an inspiration to people such as me.

When you talk about culture in West Africa, it is impossible to separate dance from music, instruments from costumes. Everything is linked to the communities themselves. One fashion designer who has developed this is Oumou Sy from Senegal, who travels the world presenting her collections. She uses all the elements of art and culture from West Africa.

Then we have visual arts. Some readers would have been fortunate enough to see the Africa Remix exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2005. You could see from this that we have a lot of African painters and sculptors who are getting more conscientious about the role their painting is playing in changing things on the continent. Take Chéri Samba from Congo. When you look at his paintings you can see the traditional African elements, but at the same time he is talking to a modern world, especially young people. So you will see scenes showing the lives of young people in Kinshasa or Abidjan, illustrating the reality and the politics behind Africa's situation in the world. He shows the balance between what leaves Africa for the rest of the world and what is coming back. This is a vital part of the modern African story.

Computers and digital technology are becoming very important to African artists, just as elsewhere. I see it with the impact of hip-hop across the continent. You can see it beginning to have an impact on the visual arts. This will grow in time. Our communities can use new technologies to show off their identities to the rest of the world. And when Africa is shown on the internet and shared with other people, it's important that people are aware of the need to put something back into the continent.

African leaders need to be more conscious of the role that culture can play, particularly economically. Many Western economies - such as Britain - have benefited hugely from the showbusiness and music sector. It generates huge amounts of money and provides significant opportunities to work. Everyone in Africa - whether a politician, musician or businessman or woman - needs to appreciate the role that culture can play in our development.

And I am confident that the more people see of Africa's art and culture, the more they will find the inspiration and joy in it that I have found ever since I first watched those fishermen on the banks of the Senegal river as a child.

THE PANEL: Our 50 best was chosen by Baaba Maal (who would otherwise head any such list himself); the artist Owusu Ankomah; Ian Birrell, deputy editor of The Independent and expert on African music; Margaret Busby, writer and broadcaster; Augustus Casely-Hayford, director of the Institute of International Visual Arts and programme director for Africa 05; Thelma Holt, theatre producer; Frances Harding, lecturer in African drama at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; Gregory Maqoma, artistic director of the Vuyani Dance Theater, Johannesburg; Keith Shiri, director of Africa at the Pictures

THE 50 BEST AFRICAN ARTISTS

OGA STEVE ABAH, PLAYWRIGHT (Nigeria)

Oga Steve Abah is a tireless, prolific theatre activist whose work focuses on creating dramas based on the everyday lives of ordinary people: poor, powerless, without a channel for learning to cope with the pressures of contemporary life. In his work, he aims for a creative, aesthetic "empowering" theatre practice drawing on masquerade and dance, the existing forms of performance of both peasant society and urban workers. Through this technique, people address the inequalities in their lives and create exquisite dramas in open-air settings all over Africa.

CHINUA ACHEBE, AUTHOR (Nigeria)

The father of the African novel, Achebe made his literary debut in 1958 with the classic Things Fall Apart, which has been translated into 50 languages. It is hard to resist his beguiling style, which infuses standard English with Igbo proverbs and speech patterns. As the founding editor of Heinemann's African writers series, he was instrumental in introducing the world to much new writing from Africa. Also an essayist, writer of short stories and university professor, he continues to inspire and teach, despite having been paralysed in a car accident in 1990. He could be considered literary godparent to several fledgling novelists (including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the writer of Purple Hibiscus). In 2004, he declined to accept Nigeria's second-highest honour in protest at the state of affairs in his country. Many believe a Nobel Prize would be a more appropriate honour.

DAVID ADJAYE, ARCHITECT (Tanzania)

The 40-year-old is the head of Adjaye/ Associates, having received his Masters in architecture in 1993 from the Royal College of Art. Based in London, Adjaye has received commissions all over Europe and the United States. His work strives to create a sense of dialogue between the building and its space. He has given lectures around the world and has worked for the BBC, notably hosting a six-part TV series, Dreamspaces, about modern architecture. His company's designs include the east London projects Elektra House in Whitechapel and Idea Store in Poplar, and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

NEWTON ADUAKA, FILM DIRECTOR (Nigeria)

Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, in 1966, Newton Aduaka moved to Lagos in 1970 and then to England in 1985. After a diploma in video arts and post-production, he studied at the London International Film School, graduating in 1990. He wrote and published short stories while working as a sound mixer on a wide range of productions. In 1997, he set up Granite FilmWorks with Maria Elena L'Abbate to produce cutting-edge, uncompromising films. His debut feature Rage (2000) was released to acclaim, becoming the first independent film by a black film-maker to gain a national release in Britain. It won many festival prizes, including best director at the Pan African Film * * Festival in Los Angeles and the Oumarou Ganda Award at Fespaco, Africa's biggest film festival. Aduaka has directed commercials and several short films. Funeral (2002) was commissioned for the Cannes Film Festival alongside similarly-themed work from directors such as Walter Salles, Arturo Ripstein and Amos Gitai. The short film Aicha (2004) demonstrates his poetic and visual skills in telling a story.

MAHMOUD AHMED, MUSICIAN (Ethiopia)

Little known outside his native country, Mahmoud Ahmed was born in the Mercato district of Addis Ababa and spent his formative years listening to music by the Imperial Body Guard Band and the famous Ethiopian singer Tlahoun Gessesse, before heading into the capital and shining shoes for a living. He found a job at the Arizona club, one of few "semi-legal" clubs permitted by Emperor Haile Selassie, which became a favourite haunt of the Imperial Body Guard Band, whom he eventually joined before recording in his own right. He was rediscovered by the West through the groundbreaking Ethiopiques series released by Buda Musique in the late 1990s.

AMA ATA AIDOO, PLAYWRIGHT (Ghana)

Ama Ata Aidoo is best known for her play Anowa, a complex tale of a husband and wife's relationship set against the background of the iniquities of the slavery and the disapproval of her conservative, resentful mother. Initially strong, Anowa eventually succumbs to madness and death as her husband finds himself disempowered by her strength. Aidoo's work, published in the 1960s, was ahead of its time, pointing to the contradictions and tensions in love and the abuse of power; her husband Kofi employs slave labour in their business, a practice Anowa despises.

AMADOU AND MARIAM, MUSICIANS (Mali)

Success was a long time coming for this talented, award-winning Malian couple who met in 1977 at the Institute for the Blind in Bamako. The guitarist and singer Amadou Bagayoko had served his apprenticeship by playing guitar in legendary band Les Ambassadeurs. After moving to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1986, they recorded a series of cassette-only releases that made them stars in their homeland. These were recently re-released on the French label Because Records (1990-1995: The Best of the African Years). They recorded three successful major-label albums after moving to Paris in the late 1990s before meeting up with Manu Chao, who produced their biggest and (by general agreement) best album so far, Dimanche á Bamako.

AYI KWEI ARMAH, AUTHOR (Ghana)

Born in 1939, and one of only a few Ghanaian novelists who have been published internationally since the 1960s, Ayi Kwei Armah is rather less known but is no less talented than his more widely feted Nigerian contemporaries. Variously based over the years in the United States, Algeria, Paris, Tanzania and Senegal, Armah has gathered a dedicated fan-base who might wish that his output had been somewhat greater than it has been. However, he has also worked as a translator, editor, scriptwriter and teacher. His novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born burst on to the scene in 1968, to be followed by others that display his extraordinary way with prose, at once excoriating and spiritual: Two Thousand Seasons (1973), Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (1995) and The Healers (2000).

LES BALLETS AFRICAINS, DANCERS AND MUSICIANS (Guinea)

The Guinean choreographer Keita Fodeba formed the dance company in Paris in 1952. They successfully toured the world until Guinea's independence in 1958. On returning to their native country, the company became a national treasure; Les Ballets Africains, affectionately known as "roving ambassadors", are credited with enlightening their audiences about Guinean culture. The company strives to foster better understanding of Africa and build relationships with other countries. Their lively music is made by drums, flutes and Guinean castanets; audiences enjoy their elaborate costumes, dance and storytelling.

BIYI BANDELE, AUTHOR (Nigeria)

Born in 1967, Bandele is one of the most versatile and prolific of the UK-based Nigerian writers, having turned his hand to theatre, journalism, television, film and radio, as well as the fiction with which he first made his name. His novels, which include The Man Who Came In From the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (2000), are rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit, as well as political engagement, as is all his writing. As a playwright, his ambition is admirable.

SOKARI DOUGLAS CAMP, ARTIST (Nigeria)

Sokari Douglas Camp is one of the first female African artists to have attracted the attention of the European art market. She left her country at the age of 21 to study in Oakland, California and at the London Royal College of Art. Her expressive man-high steel sculptures show her immediate relationship to her home country. She uses masks and ritual clothing as compositional themes in her work, reflecting the political and cultural relationship between Africa and the Western world.

BOYZIE CEKWANA, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER (South Africa)

The choreographer works mainly in South Africa but also presents a lot of work in Europe, mostly in France. Cekwana has taken contemporary dance to the next level in Africa. He is important because he has changed perceptions about dance, particularly in South Africa. Trained in classical ballet, he has found his own way of blending the heritage of his country with his work. He deals with identity and history, fusing politics with the mainstream of art and finding his South African forms within the classical form.

SOULEYMANE CISSE, FILM DIRECTOR (Mali)

Cissé has crafted a body of films that combine visual elegance with Marxist ideology and allegorical storytelling. His best-known film is Yeelen ("Brightness"), a Jury Prize-winner at Cannes in 1987 and one of the great experiences of world cinema. Born in 1940, Cissé began his career as a projectionist and photographer in Mali. After studying cinema in the Soviet Union for seven years, he returned to Mali, where he made newsreels and documentaries. His first fiction film, Cinq jours d'une vie ("Five Days in a Life", 1972), launched his career and gained attention for the burgeoning African film movement. In 1975, Cissé directed the first feature film in his native language of Bambara, The Girl, only to have the film banned. Drawing on indigenous lifestyles and folklore, Cissé attempts to explore conflicts in Malian society.

LUEEN CONNING, PLAYWRIGHT (South Africa)

In her play A Coloured Place, Conning has produced an exciting piece of writing that explores the contradictions inherent in being "coloured" in post-apartheid South Africa. Using multi-media staging, the play is unrelenting as its barrage of images, perceptions and attitudes spill out on to the stage from bodyless voices.

TSITSI DANGAREMBGA, AUTHOR (Zimbabwe)

When Dangarembga's first book, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction in 1989, Doris Lessing wrote: "Many good novels written by men have come out of Africa, but few but black women. This is the novel we have been waiting for... it will become a classic." It was read by millions, and was among the top 12 titles in the project to identify Africa's 100 best books of the 20th century. The follow-up has been long coming (Dangaremgba turned her attention to film), but The Book of Not, just published by Ayebia Clarke Publishing, was worth the wait; it's a powerful story spanning the period from minority rule to the emergence of independent Zimbabwe.

TOUMANI DIABATE, MUSICIAN (Mali)

Perhaps the best-known kora player in the world, the Malian star Toumani Diabaté has released a string of albums alongside the likes of Ballake Sissoko (New Ancient Strings) and the late, great Ali Farke Touré (In the Heart of the Moon). Refusing to be pigeonholed, he's worked with the blues legend Taj Mahal and Spanish superstars Ketama, and is always willing to mix various styles with his Malian roots. This year saw the release of the critically acclaimed Boulevard de l'Independance with his band Symmetric Orchestra. Recorded at the same time as In the Heart of the Moon, it showcases the diversity of his playing.

DILOMPRIZULIKE, ARTIST (Nigeria)

Dilomprizulike, the self-proclaimed "junk man of Africa", is among the most enigmatic of artists. Dilom creates sculpture and performances tied deeply into traditional African masquerade, yet which are informed by a post-modern awareness. Dilom is the art. He lives in what seems to be a junkyard in a permanent performance, recycling the detritus of Lagos into artwork, clothes, a home and a way of life that questions much of what we take for granted. Yet the work wrought from rubbish is deeply beautiful, intriguing and has a real gravitas; he is a philosophical Gaudi for the 21st century.

CESARIA EVORA, SINGER (Cape Verde)

This Grammy-winning singer hails from the port town of Mindelo, on Sao Vincente. She possesses one of the most powerful and alluring voices in the world, helped by a bitter-sweet style of singing called morna, a descendent of Portuguese fado, sung in Creole-Portuguese. Ostensibly a folk singer (although the style is known as Cape Verdean blues), she's accompanied by guitar, accordion, violin, cavaquinho (a small four-string guitar) and clarinet, and often sings of isolation, love and slavery.

SAMUEL FOSSO, PHOTOGRAPHER (Cameroon)

Samuel Fosso is a prolific and witty photographer, whose colourful and outlandish portraits range from African chiefs to American women. But they all have one thing in common; on close inspection, they can be seen to be self-portraits. His explorations of identity have featured in the Guggenheim in New York and the Photographers' Gallery in London

FLORA GOMES, FILM DIRECTOR (Guinea-Bissau)

Gomes is the only film-maker to emerge from Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. He attended a course in cinematography at the Institute of Cuban Art in Havana under the legendary Santiago Alvarez and qualified as a cameraman and director of photography in 1972. Gomes started working for television with the late Senegalese film-maker Paulin Vieyra. In 1973, he made his first news film about the second congress of PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde). In 1983, he made Mortu Nega, the first full-length film produced in Guinea-Bissau, a remarkable tale of love during the liberation and the struggles of independence.

PIERRE ATEPA GOUDIABY, ARCHITECT (Senegal)

Through the African Scholarship Program, Goudiaby took a degree in architecture from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York in 1973. Born in the village of Baila, his humble beginnings are a thing of the past; he is now among Africa's most respected and successful architects. His company, Atepa Group, is responsible for some of the most innovative and modern buildings in Senegal. His West Africa Central Bank in Dakar is modelled on the baobab tree. Elders in his culture gather round this sacred tree and have discussions. In 2003, the Africa-America Institute awarded Goudiaby the Special Recognition Award for Architecture and Business Enterprise in Africa.

MAHAMAT SALEH HAROUN, FILM DIRECTOR (Chad)

Born in N'Djamena in 1961, Haroun was forced to leave his home country at the start of the 1980s because of civil war, fleeing to Cameroon and later Paris. He studied in France - film, then journalism - and worked for five years as a reporter before directing his first short film in 1994. Among his early shorts are Maral Tanie (1994) and Goi-Goi, le nain (1995). His first documentary, Bord d'Africa (1995), focuses on African musicians living in Bordeaux. The second, Sotgui Kouyaté, un griot modern (1996), tells the story of a griot from Burkina Faso. The film explores the life of the famous griot in the different worlds of Africa and Europe. Haroun provides a new language and aesthetic for African cinema. Bye Bye Africa (1999) was the first film of its kind to be produced entirely in Chad; it's a "documentary fiction", a story about making a documentary in which he himself plays an exiled African film-maker. His latest film is Daratt ("Dry Season").

DELIA JARRETT-MACAULEY, AUTHOR (Sierra Leone)

Drawing on her Sierra Leonian background for an uplifting story about a child soldier, Moses, Citizen & Me (2005), Jarrett-Macauley's confident first novel did not enjoy the sort of hype that greeted, say, Helen Oyayemi. But a measure of her accomplishment in dealing with sensitivity, humour and empathy with disturbing material is that the novel won the George Orwell Prize for political writing. Already the author of The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65, a biography of the first black programme-maker at the BBC, Jarrett-Macauley exemplifies the African diasporic talent that has continued to invigorate mainstream English literature.

SALIF KEITA, MUSICIAN (Mali)

One of the founders of Afro-pop, Keita was born in Mali in 1949 to a noble family. He was born an albino, which led his mother to hide him for fear of reprisals from superstitious neighbours. His decision to become a singer met with hostility from his family because it was seen as an occupation beneath his noble standing. He stuck to his guns and left his village for the capital Bamako aged 18. He later played with the Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs before becoming a solo artist, recording such classics as Soro and the Grammy-nominated Amen.

KHALED, MUSICIAN (Algeria)

Possibly the most famous Algerian rai singer of all time, Khaled is one of the few North African artists to have won wide acclaim, particularly in his adopted home of France, where his singles "Aicha" and "Didi" flew to the top of the charts. Born Khaled Hadj Brahim in Sidi-El-Houri in 1960, he left school at 16 to record his first single. Influenced by Arabic, Spanish and French music, as well as The Beatles and James Brown, his sound soon typified rai's smooth synth-pop output of the Eighties. Moving to France in 1986, he recorded a string of successful albums such as Kenza and Sahra before going back to his roots with his latest, Ya-Rayi.

ABDOULAYE KONATE, ARTIST (Mali)

The contemporary artist, 53, began his career as a graphic designer at the Musée National in Bamako and went on to be appointed director of the Palais de la Culture. In 2002, he received two awards: the Chevalier d'Ordre National du Mali and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. Having started as a painter, his style has evolved into multi-medium and large installation work. His political, social and environmental views are expressed through his art. Recently, his work has depicted the devastating effects of Aids on society and individuals.

KONONO NO 1, MUSICIANS (Congo)

Konono No 1 are a unique musical collective from Kinshasa. They use percussion instruments salvaged from junkyards, and combine electric likembé (a thumb piano) with percussion and voices, filtered though a PA system that consists of a microphone carved out of wood, fitted with a magnet from a car alternator and an oversized horn-shaped amp. The cacophony is unforgettable.

Likembé player Mawangu Mingiedi is the leader of the band. A former truck driver, now in his seventies, he adapts trance-inducing zombo ritual music (from his homeland near the Angolan border), as heard on the band's critically acclaimed album Congotronics.

FEMI KUTI, MUSICIAN (Nigeria)

He'll never quite escape the shadow of his father (the Afro-beat legend Fela Kuti), but Femi Anikulapo Kuti has done a creditable job of emulating his father's work, albeit in a much cleaner (and less risqué) way. Kuti was born in London in 1962, but grew up in Nigeria's former capital, Lagos. He quickly adapted to his new musical and politically active surroundings, learning various instruments as well as singing. He put this education to good use on a series of albums with his band Positive Force. He headlines the African Soul Rebels Tour next year.

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER (Congo)

Born in Ubunvu in north-east Congo, Faustin Linyekula doesn't conform to any form or structure or place. He's inspired by nothing and creates something out of it. Coming from Congo, he's always worked under very difficult circumstances, but for him these circumstances have become a form of inspiration. After eight years in self-imposed exile (1993-2001), Linyekula returned to his homeland with a renewed desire to create art there and established a company, Les Studios Kabako, in Kinshasa. His work can best be described as experimental performance art, using text and theatre to examine the links between art and society and issues of identity.

VINCENT MANTSOE, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER (South Africa)

Vincent Mantsoe grew up dancing in the township of Soweto, and trained at the Moving Into Dance school in Johannesburg. He is the pioneer of Afro-fusion - a blend of African aesthetics and traditions with European forms - bringing it to the world stage. His work draws on traditional African dance, the song and dance rituals of the sangomas (traditional healers) as well as modern, ballet and Asian forms.

ZOLA MASEKO, FILM DIRECTOR (South Africa)

During apartheid, the handful of South Africa's black film-makers were either unable to work in their country or were in exile. The end of apartheid provided opportunities to make films that were in synch with their history and realities. Maseko became the first South African to win the Etalon de Yennega, Africa's leading prize for fiction film, at Fespaco (2005) with his biopic Drum on the life and death of the journalist Henry Nxumalo. Maseko was born in exile in 1967 and educated in Swaziland and Tanzania. He studied at the National Film School at Beaconsfield, England. He also directed an 11-part series for the South African Broadcasting Corporation entitled In Search of Our History. The capturing of popular memory lies at the heart of his work.

SOUAD MASSI, SINGER (Algeria)

This talented singer/songwriter fled her homeland after being hounded out by Islamic fundamentalists who took exception to her promotion of independence for young women. She ended up in Paris, where she started to create her own unique blend of folk, rock, flamenco and shaabi (Arabic street pop), releasing her acclaimed debut album Raoui ("Storyteller") in 2001. She's toured prolifically for the past few years, and won a Planet Award at the 2006 BBC world music awards. She is defiantly outspoken about the problems in Algeria: "Remaining silent would mean that terrorists have won and that all the intellectuals they murdered died for nothing," she says.

YOUSSOU N'DOUR, MUSICIAN (Senegal)

Perhaps the best-known African singer of all, most people remember N'Dour for his hit "7 Seconds" with Neneh Cherry, but there is much more to him. With his band Super Etoile de Dakar, he changed the face * * of Senegalese music with a radical form of energetic, polyrhythmic music called mbalax, which spread across West Africa like wildfire. He's become a figurehead for Africa, campaigning for Aids awareness and speaking against corruption and genocide. His finest albums remain Immigrés and the Grammy-winning Egypt, a devotional album in praise of Islamic sages.

KETTLY NOEL, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER (Haiti/Mali)

Kettly Noël, from Port au Prince, Haiti, began dancing seriously at the age of 17. In 1996, she moved to Benin, where she began giving training in contemporary dance to local youngsters, many of whom went on to become members of the Benin National Ballet. At the end of 1999, Noël relocated to Mali, with the intention of starting a similar project there. She's a female choreographer who deals with women's issues in Africa. Her work deals with identity and the fight for the position of women in the continent. She confronts issues other people are not willing to go near in their work. She likes to go deeply into dark areas in search of light.

IDRISSA OUEDRAOGO, FILM-MAKER (Upper Volta/Burkina Faso)

Born in Banfora in 1954, Ouedraogo's early knowledge of film came from the travelling cinemas that visited villages. He made his mark at the Cannes Film Festival with his 1990 film Tilai, which won the Jury Prize. His 1989 film Yaaba about a 10-year-old boy who befriended an older woman remains an international success. Having studied film in Paris, his style is dubbed "Francophone African cinema". His films are known for their visual charm and the attention he pays to the composition of each scene.

TRACEY ROSE, ARTIST (South Africa)

Tracey Rose makes Tracey Emin look like a Girl Guide. Rose is a mixed-race feminist who uses identity and sexual politics as incendiary devices, waging war on her fellow South Africans' sensibilities with almost narrative-less performances, films and artworks. It is hard to resist the crazy world she weaves, a car crash of popular culture and extreme sociology, so assuredly absurd that it has a kind of convincing intoxication that pulls you in. Even against a backdrop of the extremes of her home town Johannesburg, she is wild, seeming to weave a visual poetry across the polarities of South Africa's political landscape that can make you laugh, yet feel guilty for your collusion.

IBRAHIM EL SALAHI, ARTIST (Sudan)

It is difficult not to fall in love with the deeply serene El Salahi, the godfather of African modernism. He has created great work over five decades, has had as many chapters to his practice as Picasso, and has generated his own personal art-history. There's a story that when he worked as the Sudanese cultural minister in the Seventies he was imprisoned for six months, accused by the military dictator of anti-government activities. In prison, he asked the guard for paper and pencils. The guard laughed: "You're not in New York now!" Salahi managed to beg and steal the means to paint and draw, under threat of being beaten or worse. His work helps one to see why someone might be driven to take such risks.

OUSMANE SEMBENE, FILM-MAKER (Senegal)

Sembène is the "father" of African cinema. Best known for his historical-political works with strong social comment, Sembène was born in Senegal in 1923. He left school at 15 and worked as a plumber, bricklayer and apprentice mechanic. In 1944, he was called up to active duty to liberate France and was subsequently sent to the colony of Niger. After his discharge he took part in the Dakar-Niger railroad strike, which inspired his book Les bouts de bois de Dieu ("God's Bits of Wood") (1960). In 1948, Sembène went back to France, worked in Marseilles docks, became a trade union activist and joined the French Communist Party. In 1956, his first book Le docker noir ("The Black Docker") was published. Sembène began to realise the greater potential of cinema for a largely illiterate mass audience. He went to Moscow to study under Mark Donskoj at the Gorky Studios). His short film Borom Sarret (1963) is the cornerstone on which African cinema has been built.

ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, FILM DIRECTOR (Mauritania/Mali)

Sissako is the most distinguished and inventive film-maker working in Africa today. Born in Kiffa, Mauritania, in 1961 and raised in Mali, his father's homeland, he returned to Mauritania in 1980. The difficulties of adjustment encouraged him to turn to literature and film. A study grant allowed him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow. Le Jeu (1990), first presented as a graduation assignment, won the best short prize at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991. In 1993, Octobre was shown at Locarno and won prizes the world over. Waiting for Happiness was screened at Cannes 2002 and won best film in the Un Certain Regard section. It was shown at the New York Film Festival in 2002 and won the Grand Prize at Fespaco in 2003. His latest film Bamako, in which Western financial institutions are put on trial by African civil society, had its premiere in Cannes in May this year and its UK premiere at the London Film Festival last month.

WOLE SOYINKA, DRAMATIST, NOVELIST, POET (Nigeria)

Soyinka is an iconic figure who, in 1986, became the first black (and first African) Nobel laureate. Outspoken against government oppression in his native Nigeria (like his cousin Fela Kuti), his writing career over 40 years has encompassed prison, exile and a death sentence for treason. He is the best-known playwright from the continent. His plays include Death and the King's Horseman, an exploration of morality, human weakness and pomposity within the performance of sacrificial rituals. Some of his most important writing is as an autobiographer, such as his 1970s prison memoir The Man Died and Aké: A Childhood Memoir. As a novelist he is less accessible.

RACHID TAHA, MUSICIAN (Algeria)

Taha is the perfect foil to the sugary love songs sung by many modern rai artists. His music emulates the guttural, promiscuous and socially satirical rural rai style typified by the late great Cheikha Remitti, and also the shaabi singer Dahmane El Harrachi, whose song "Ya Rayah" he covered for his biggest hit. Taha started out in the French rock band Carte De Séjour, where his politically charged lyrics took shape. A string of solo albums followed, bursting with traditional Algerian rhythms and a healthy punk-rock attitude. His best-loved album Diwan, covering classic Algerian songs, was recently followed up with Diwan 2.

NGUGI WA THIONG'O, AUTHOR (Kenya)

Exiled from Kenya for 22 years because of his highly political work (including the best-selling novel Petals of Blood), one of Africa's greatest and most highly respected writers has just returned to attention with his first novel in 20 years, Wizard of the Crow, a magisterial, acerbic milestone work set in a fictional modern African state.

TINARIWEN, MUSICIANS (Mali)

Formed in 1982 in Muammar Gaddafi's Tuareg rebel camps, this celebrated Tuareg blues band gave up guns for guitars, singing in French and Tamashek and playing a style of music called tishmoumaren ("music of the unemployed"). Their creative heart is the vocalist and guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who can strike a mean Chuck Berry riff. The band's first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions, recorded in 2000, was followed by Amassakoul ("Traveller") in 2004. Their third album Aman Iman: Water Is Life is released in January on Independiente.

ROKIA TRAORE, MUSICIAN (Mali)

One of the most distinctive new voices of Mali, and a tremendous live performer, Rokia Traoré came to UK attention at Womad in 2000. Although not a griot, her family encouraged her to sing at weddings, though her father was a wealthy diplomat and such things were frowned upon. While studying in France she sang with a rap group, and this led her to begin writing songs. She was discovered on the French festival circuit, and in 1997 became a protégé of Ali Farka Touré, who persuaded her to record her first album Mouneissa. A series of critically acclaimed albums have followed.

BINYAVANGA WAINANA, AUTHOR (Kenya)

Born in Kenya, but with an imagination that transcends borders and cultures, Wainana won the Caine Prize for African Writing (the "African Booker") in 2002. His Granta-published essay, "How To Write About Africa", brilliantly satirising the clichés and stereotypes that can ensnare non-African writers, will make any but the guilty laugh out loud. As founder of the journal Kwani? he nurtures new writers, including Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, the 2004 Caine winner.

ZOLA, MUSICIAN (South Africa)

Born in Soweto, Bonginkosi Dlamini, known as Zola, is one of the most famous singers of kwaito (a form of dance music pitched somewhere between house and hip-hop). He performed the score and appeared in the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi. His father abandoned his mother and their three children in one of the roughest and most notorious areas, where unemployment, violence, alcoholism and drugs were rife. This helped him prepare for his role as the gangster Papa Action in Yizo Yizo 2. His music reflects his tough upbringing.

ATHOL FUGARD, PLAYWRIGHT (South Africa)

Fugard has written benchmark plays, statement plays and wonderful pieces that introduced us to the township. He was responsible for making a lot of people focus on South Africa in a theatrical context. The Road to Mecca affected the political thinking of everyone who saw it. The truthfulness of his writing strikes painfully at the heart. What he has to say makes him an international writer but, first and foremost, it convinces us that he is a great and good man.

K'NAAN, RAPPER (Somalia)

A relative newcomer, this Somali rapper made a name in hip hop and world music circles with his inventive 2006 album The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Born in 1978, his spent his formative years trying to avoid Somalia's civil war and listening to hip-hop records sent to him by his father, who was working as a taxi driver in New York. At 13 he moved with his siblings to Harlem, and then on to Rexdale, Ontario, where he became part of a large Somali community and started rapping. A rapid rise ensued, including performing at the 50th anniversary of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2001, and contributing to Youssou N'Dour's album Building Bridges.

OUMOU SY, FASHION DESIGNER (Senegal)

The Senegalese designer is known as "Queen of Couture". Her bold avant-garde and Afrocentric fashions are her signature style, with a touch of Western glamour. The 55-year-old Sy is a Renaissance woman, she founded the Dakar Carnival and International Fashion Week and is also a teacher. Elaborate headdresses, vibrant colours, baskets, and even adorning CDs are her trademarks. She has pride for her culture and designs for the modern African woman, who has a bit of a fun side to her.

A phenomenal success

2010-02-10T17:45:00.001+05:30

From The Economist

JEZ BUTTERWORTH and Mark Rylance are an odd couple. Six years ago Mr Rylance was running Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, where he distinguished himself by playing Cleopatra as well as Hamlet. Mr Butterworth was a promising playwright, the singular quality of his dramatic imagination being evident at Cambridge University, where he had adapted for the stage a cookbook by Katharine Whitehorn.

In 2003 Mr Butterworth sent to Mr Rylance the first draft of a play called “Jerusalem”, about anarchy and authority. It was set in rural Wiltshire, and its hero, Johnny “Rooster” Byron, was a drug taker and dealer, a seducer of adolescent girls, a hard-drinking and hard-swearing romantic fantasist. Rooster lived in a mobile home parked illegally in a glade in the woods where he held wild parties and mocked society and its institutions, especially the Kennet and Avon Council.

Mr Rylance liked what he read so much that he agreed to take on the part when the play was completed. Mr Butterworth took himself off to Somerset, where he breeds pigs on his smallholding and takes his dog for long walks. Having finished a successful directorship of the Globe, Mr Rylance went on to play a variety of roles in the commercial theatre.

“Jerusalem” finally opened at the Royal Court Theatre last July, directed by Ian Rickson, their mutual friend; its reputation spread quickly by word of mouth. It soon sold out, and during the winter playwright and actor swept both major theatre awards. The success of “Jerusalem” has been phenomenal, appealing, as John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter did, also at the Royal Court, in 1956, to the instinctive rebelliousness of the young, though its contempt for “health and safety” extends its appeal to an older generation.

Rooster’s mobile home is parked beneath the leaves of real trees, with a hen coop, and a clutter of broken furniture. Mr Rylance makes an astonishing entry, flinging himself into a handstand on a tank of water and dunking his whole head in. He is an anarchic life force, presiding over a “Bucolic Alcoholic Frolic” attended by alienated young girls and grown-up losers, one of whom delivers a quite original definition of what makes local TV news local: “to make any sense [of it] you’ve got to have at least a chance of shagging the weather girl”.

The action is set on St George’s Day when a fair is held in the village. The play is frenetic, uproarious and foul-mouthed, a lament for an idealised, free and easy rural England, infused with legends of gods and giants, that has succumbed to invasive bureaucracy. Rooster tells of his meeting with a 90-foot giant (“Just off the A14 outside Upavon. About half a mile from the Little Chef”). The giant, who claims, incidentally, to have built Stonehenge, warms to Rooster and gives him a drum; if he ever needs help he should bang it and the giants will come.

At the end of “Jerusalem”, as the Rooster is about to be evicted from his mobile home, Mr Rylance gives a virtuoso performance on that drum. In the final moments, heavy footsteps are audible offstage. Who comes? A giant—or the two dozen policemen who are about to evict him? The state sledgehammer is surely about to crack the nut, and Rooster’s subversiveness takes on a heroic grandeur.

The only problem with this absorbing play is that Mr Rylance’s brilliance may deter other actors. That would be a terrible shame. This “Jerusalem” is a memorable production. Someone should film it.

“Jerusalem” runs at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London until April 24th

Heart-breaking, heart-lifting

2009-12-06T10:07:00.003+05:30

An amazing self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, in words and pictures.

from The Economist

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Thames and Hudson; 2,500 pages; $600 and £325.

The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core. The first letter was written when Vincent, aged 19, was a trainee at The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, a firm of international art dealers. Like most of the letters, it was sent to his brother, Theo, then 15. The two remained close. Theo became an art dealer and Vincent’s main source of financial and emotional support.

Van Gogh is irascible, engaging, intelligent, touchy, high-minded, well read, rebellious and pigheaded. When he started dressing like a tramp he claimed it was, in part, to advertise his refusal to join polite, ie, hypocritical society. (Equally, it may have been because polite society was refusing to accept him.) He was often miserable, occasionally love-struck, almost always fiercely committed to something or other and sometimes mad.

Art and literature were his constant companions. He wrote often about what he was reading and seeing. His concern was never a book’s place in the canon or a painting’s in art history. He judged a work on what it communicated, and how. From Antwerp he wrote that the religious paintings of Rubens are “theatrical…But what he can do is paint a queen, a statesman, well analysed, just as they are.” He wrote beautifully about landscapes and peasants. In time, he gave a vivid, perhaps unequalled, account of an artist making art.

He set off at 16, a seemingly conventional young man, to make his way as a dealer first in The Hague and then, via Paris, in London. There, a prickly instability, characteristic of his childhood, re-emerged, perhaps brought on by a rebuff from his landlady’s daughter. He lost the job he had had for seven years. Other failures followed, as a preacher and a teacher.

His religious fanaticism grew. Indeed, the letters offer a rare look at obsession from the inside. His pursuit of a young widow was so unrelenting he would be called a stalker today. But to him, her repetition of “No, nay, never!” was “a piece of ice that I press to my heart to thaw.”

When he was 26 his fixation became art. By then he was a penniless, eccentric loner. This coincides with a year-long break in the correspondence. He had fallen out with Theo following a “discussion” about his future. When the letters resume, Vincent refers to himself as a prisoner, a caged bird. “I know I could be quite a different man!” he writes. “There’s something within me, so what is it!” Two months later he bent himself to the study of drawing and painting as others would bend to the plough. It was as if he had to labour, and metaphorically sweat, before his genius could, or was allowed to, emerge. Five years later, in the spring of 1885, came “The Potato Eaters”. Movingly, triumphantly, van Gogh had broken through.

After two years in Paris, living with Theo (only nine letters; no images), Vincent moved to Arles in 1888. Colour now floods the pages. This was the beginning of the legendary period of prodigious, radiant creativity. Yes, he cut off his ear. He also painted nearly 200 pictures, among them “The Night Café” and “The Yellow House”.

In 1889, after a series of crack-ups (in reaction to Theo’s marriage or perhaps just too much absinthe?), he spent a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The work continued to pour out (about 150 paintings). Sunflowers and irises but also “Starry Night”, in which viewer and artist are pulled up over the rooftops, and tumble round and round across the dark sky.

The very last letter reproduced, addressed to Theo but unfinished, was written on July 23rd 1890. He was staying in Auvers-sur-Oise, not far from Paris where Theo lived with his wife and child. The note was found in Vincent’s pocket after he shot himself. He died, aged 37, on July 27th.

Fifteen years were devoted to this publication. The Dutch, English and French editions are the joint project of the Huygens Institute and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Letters and illustrations fill five books; the sixth has commentaries, maps and indexes. It is all accessible, free, at www.vangoghletters.org (the site provides a valuable concordance). There is also a free iPod app, “Yours, Vincent”.

This is not the first attempt to publish the complete letters but it is the best. There were editions in 1914; an expanded version appeared in English in 1958; 20 newly discovered letters were added for the 1990 Dutch centenary edition. Now the letters have been retranslated, comprehensively annotated and there are 20 new items.

But what really sets this edition apart from, and above, all others are the illustrations. Sketches are embedded in many of van Gogh’s letters; the drawings and “scratches” he sometimes tucked into envelopes before posting are reproduced. So are thumbnail illustrations of every work the artist mentions (whether by himself or by others) plus larger reproductions of paintings based on these letter sketches.

The Van Gogh Museum is marking the publication of the letters by rehanging its permanent collection and displaying 100 letters. (“Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” closes on January 3rd.) On January 23rd a different exhibition opens at London’s Royal Academy: “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters”. More than 60 paintings and 35 drawings will come from across the world, closely related to the 40 letters that will be shown.

The publication of the six volumes is cause for celebration. To have all the artist’s words together with all those images is like being given a pair of super-special 3D spectacles. The resulting self-portrait has a depth that would not exist were this a collection only of images or only of words. This could be the best autobiography of an artist yet to appear anywhere.

Beauty and beast in the drawing room

2009-10-04T22:10:00.006+05:30

From The Economist

His monumental public sculptures have been seen by tens of millions of people from Chicago to Tel Aviv. In London alone, the 4m or so who visited Tate Modern in 2002 could not have missed his dark red, 500-foot-long (152-metre) PVC-covered “Marsyas” which soared across the Turbine Hall. That piece worked so well, the space might have been created especially for it, rather than the other way around. “I like the idea a lot that you go somewhere to see something that has a particular relevance to a particular place,” said Anish Kapoor. But he quickly added: “A good work of art should be able to stand on its own.”

In the exhibition that has just opened at London’s Royal Academy, and runs until December 11th, about half the works, many of them huge, were created with its gracefully proportioned rooms in mind. Are they, in the event, relevant to their setting? Not often. But some, such as the fine mirror sculptures, are certainly enhanced by it: seeing the gallery’s gilding and skylight reflected upside-down in these pieces adds to their enjoyment. Others are splendidly positioned—and one of them, “Hive”, is so powerful that it would be worth the price of admission even if the rest of the gallery were bare.

The first sculpture on view, “Tall Tree and the Eye”, stands in the academy’s courtyard. As our picture shows, this tower, made of 76 highly polished, stainless-steel balls, each a metre across, is like a cloud of silver bubbles racing towards bubble heaven. Walking inside the sculpture at its base, the viewer looks up to see an endless multiplication of reflections—of himself, the handsome buildings framing the courtyard, the bubble-balls and the sky. This fine work of art, or giant-sized perceptual toy, lights up, and lightens up, its venerable surroundings. One small quibble: bigger would have been even better. In December it may be mistaken for an artsy Christmas tree. Of course, the sculptor might not mind.

The glass doors of the academy’s entrance hall allow a sneak preview of “Hive”, a huge rusted-steel sculpture on public view for the first time and actually the last work in the exhibition. Looking through the doors, one sees two colossal shapes like open thighs exposing a dark oval. Even innocents will see a vagina. Approached from the interior, however, “Hive” looks more like a magical tuber. The sculpture, taller than every entrance to the room, elicits the anxious feeling that it will grow even bigger, pushing through walls and ceiling. It is exciting and beautiful. The show couldn’t end on a higher note.

“Snail”, another exhibit, has a fat, coiling fibreglass body which opens out into a lusciously vermilion mouth. It is terrific.

But other installations were considerably less appealing to this reviewer. A cannon blasts gobs of lurid red wax-plus-Vaseline; a wagon-sized contraption made up of similar stuff deposits bits of itself on floors and doors as it slowly trundles through four rooms. Both these works seem unfortunate departures from Mr Kapoor’s admired elegance and refinement (though with talk of “ejaculation”, “war” and “penetration”, appreciation of these sculptures may divide along gender lines).

This is not a retrospective. Most of the sculpture is recent. However, the first room displays work from 1979, six years after Mr Kapoor, who was born in India, arrived in London. These pieces include “1000 Names”, a series of small objects of various shapes—geometric, flowerlike, imaginary—coated with intensely coloured pigments. Whether perceived as religious or as evocations of spice markets, their freshness appealed even to people allergic to conceptual art, and his reputation was launched. Honours followed, including representing Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Now 55, Mr Kapoor is the first living artist to be offered the entire main floor of the Royal Academy, another landmark in an ever more successful career.

His record price at auction is $3.8m; some private sales are rumoured to be far higher. He employs more than 20 skilled staff and can afford to create immense, costly works just for the adventure of it. One of these, “Grayman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked”, is on view. This single work, made up of 53 low-lying pieces, was fashioned by a computer-directed machine extruding coils of cement. Its earlier working title, “Shit and Architecture”, gives an idea of the overall effect. It is one of the pieces in this uneven but enthralling exhibition that seems out of place with its elegant surroundings.

Anish Kapoor talks about his show in this online audio slide show,

Photo: Getty Images

Come and see

2009-05-16T13:11:00.007+05:30

Thina Lucy Manebaneba with her son Samuel Mabolabola and
brother Enos Manebaneba

Through the links to the work of various artists and photographers, as well as to museums, organisations, galleries, journals and blogs, we have tried to share the awesome resources the internet offers. We visualise artistic people spending hours exploring these links, and being delighted and uplifted thereby!

The photograph shown above is by photographer Pieter Hugo, whose name features on our list of links. His work can be seen here.

A menacing edge to a rarefied elegance

2009-05-16T11:31:00.000+05:30

by Somak Ghoshal
The Telegraph

Around this time last year, the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre had organized an exhibition of Somnath Hore’s prints, which brought together some of his earliest studies from the 1940s and ’50s along with his later pen-and-ink drawings. While that show chronicled the evolution of the young poster-painter for the Communist Party into a sublime genius, this year, Seagull has selected a handful of bronzes, drawings and watercolours that bear the unmistakable mark of the master’s middle-to-late style. Showing till May 20, this beautifully put together exhibition looks beyond the popular perception of Hore as the archivist of hunger and pain. Instead it revives a somewhat less evident aspect of his versatile brilliance: his lifelong absorption in the little dramas of everyday existence.

Since the drawings and watercolours have been chosen from a set of Hore’s sketchbooks of the 1990s, they often look like pages from a visual diary of someone who is probably confined indoors, but soaks his eyes in the fleeting beauty of daily life. From the feel of the twilight air to the chromatic rhythms of each season, nothing escapes his ever-alert senses and eternally curious mind. We invariably think of Amal in Tagore’s Daakghar, looking out all day on the life that unfolds just outside his window, ever within his reach but forever unreachable. The men, women and animals that fill up Hore’s sketchbooks are similarly touched by a graceful innocence. It is evident that these figures have been brought to life by hands which once keenly felt the ripples of each unremarkable day, and that aching memory of a deeply sensual past remains still alive in every line that these hands have traced on paper.

From being just another daily record, the sketchbooks start looking like a journal of the mind, a history of inwardness, an internalized document of the vestiges of time. The limpid reds and blues become chaotically interspersed with black and brown, the brushwork becomes frenetic, and the luminous stillness of the mother-and-child series is broken. Hore’s obsession with the twinned oneness of the mother and her child is remarkable. In a series of delicate drawings, he depicts a mother holding her child, each inseparable from the other, fused to resemble an all new creature of love (picture: below, left). Pale shades of orange liven up their faces, while a waning grey hovers like the harbinger of imminent decay.

This paradoxical co-existence of burgeoning life-force and ebbing vitality is most eloquently captured in the bronzes. Hore’s sculptures have shed the trappings of flesh as they stand erect in their rarefied, bony elegance. These hollow men, women and children — drinking thirstily (picture: below, right), lying at ease, seated pensively, at play with one another, or standing shockingly lean in their visceral emptiness — bring to mind Giacometti’s stick people. Yet, if the Italian master’s greatness comes from making what is abstract intensely expressive, Hore’s characters remain unforgettable for the shimmering clarity of their structures. In Hore’s aesthetics, Giacometti’s mystery meets Brancusi’s lucidity to create a mystically ambivalent form.

At times, one feels baffled, even disturbed, by the utterly unpredictable effects of Hore’s art. The charged figures in metal sway the viewer from one emotion to the other, often merging different layers of feelings. Looking at the powerful scene of Shakuni disrobing Draupadi, one is initially startled by the literalism of the composition in which a vulture tears away a haggard woman’s sari (picture: above). Yet even as we take in the ruthless hunger of this carrion-eater, the wasted contours of the woman’s body, and the signs of affliction written all over her face, we also gaze on her parted lips and closed eyes, and are reminded, momentarily, of Bernini’s St Teresa.

As violence gets riddled by eroticism and physical decline becomes intertwined with sensuous longing, moments of pain and pleasure are darkly conflated. The figures, sleeping their troubled sleep, or caught in the throes of a wet dream, take on a menacing edge. Sleep suddenly begins to look like death’s brother.

Kandinsky: A Bright Future, Once

2009-05-14T13:33:00.006+05:30

TRUE COLORS: Works such as Blue Mountain (1908-09) show
the influence of folk art. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

by Lucy Fisher
Time

Wassily Kandinsky could have ended up a law professor. Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky studied law and at the age of 30 was offered a professorship at what is now Tartu University in Estonia. Luckily for us, he had been inspired by an exhibition of French Impressionists the year before. He turned down the university job and moved to Germany to study painting full time. "Kandinsky," a major retrospective at Paris' Pompidou Center until Aug. 10 and then at the Guggenheim in New York City from Sept. 18, tracks his journey over the ensuing decades, both geographically and stylistically. Drawn to centers of the avant-garde and occasionally swept off course by the grim events of the early 1900s, we see Kandinsky progress from traditional naturalistic scenes to the stunning abstract canvases that made him one of the great pioneers of 20th century art.

Much of Kandinsky's early work drew on the folk art he encountered in Germany and in Russia. The works depict an ideal premodern Russia full of riders, onion domes and walled towns. But even in these first paintings, bright colors were used for effect, not naturalism — trees could be red, hills and horses blue. Pure color would become the central focus of his best works, a focus he pondered in his 1911 manifesto of abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Art, he wrote in the book, comes from within, from "inner necessity," and colors and shapes speak to people just as musical sounds do: "Color is a power which directly influences the soul." Contemporary Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky had preached that a new, spiritual age was about to dawn, and Kandinsky was convinced. He saw the artist at the apex of a triangle moving into the future, the base representing the mass of humanity who are slower to see the light. The paintings he produced at the time are full of joy and liberation, made with rapid, free gestures. In Improvisation 20 (Two Horses) (1911), animals are sketched with a few black lines, like a half-obliterated prehistoric cave drawing. Elsewhere mountains and buildings are indicated by sooty lines driving through patches of pure rainbow shades. (See pictures from a Cézanne exhibition.)

Kandinsky didn't paint much during the war years, but in 1921 he was asked to join the staff of the forward-looking Bauhaus art school in Germany, and the chance to teach turned his creative light up full again. His theories about pure form and color became student exercises; this was when he started painting his signature hard-edged abstracts: bright, lighthearted, with their own internal logic. Black lines, now severely clear-cut, are a skeleton for vividly colored shapes on a pale background. New motifs appear: jagged saw teeth, rainbows, triangles, circles. Though none of these canvases have subjects, pictograms float through them — sometimes recognizable boats, creating structure with their masts and spars.

After the Bauhaus school closed in 1933, Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, went to France, settling in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Instead of being surrounded by like-minded colleagues, he was now somewhat isolated. He had been experimenting in new directions before he left the Bauhaus, but his isolation, and freedom from the need to be didactic, may explain the playfulness that breaks out in his work. He carefully mixed colors — sage, sky blue, maroon — and experimented with texture, using controlled paint splatter for a sandy effect. Nothing is still: in Colorful Ensemble (1938) the splatters are a background of dots on which swim strange biomorphs; in Sky Blue (1940) stripy plankton flutter multiple legs while Reciprocal Accord (1942) fizzes and explodes.

By this time, Kandinsky was on his own, artistically. The train of followers that he predicted in his book failed to materialise. And that new age he had been so sure of never did dawn. But after his death in 1944, his spirit lived on in the postwar design explosion that sprayed color onto a grey and battered world. And today, his work perfectly illustrates progress toward an ideal — a rarity in a world consumed with art for art's sake.

Salima Hashmi

2009-05-14T11:29:00.002+05:30

Poem for Zainab, 1994, Salima Hashmi

by Laila Kazmi

Jazbah Magazine: Women of Pakistan

“The objective of art is to give life a shape and though artists cannot change the world they can, through their work, give flight to imagination; they can give you the direction”

Salima Hashmi

Pakistan has been blessed with her fair share of talented artists in many different fields including the art of painting. The works of painters like the legendary A. R. Chugtai and Sadequain are among the most respected and recognized around the world. However, historically, as has been the case in the West, there are few women painters who have acquired high acclaim. In the 1996 edition of his book, Painting in Pakistan, Ijaz-ul-Hassan beautifully presents the history of painting in Pakistan starting from the Mughal era and introduces the works of close to 100 painters from the region. Of the 59 artists whose works are discussed in detail dating pre-1980s, only seven are women. In contrast, among the 38 artists each of whom are introduced briefly in the last chapter as emerging artists of the late 70s-80s, there are 12 women. One of these women is Salima Hashmi whom, in the late 80s, Hassan considered a new-comer to the world of serious art.

Today, some fifteen years after Ijaz-ul-Hassan first wrote about her, Salima Hashmi is one of the most well-known artists of Pakistan. Besides being an accomplished painter, she taught at Pakistan's prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) for about thirty years and served as the Principle of NCA for four years. In 1999, Salima Hashmi received Pakistan's Pride of Performance award. Today she is the Dean of School of Visual Arts at the newly established Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and she also runs her own art gallery featuring works of young artists.

Salima Hashmi comes from a socially and politically active family. Her father was the legendary Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and her mother, the British-born Alys Faiz was a respected journalist and peace activist in Pakistan. One of two daughters, Salima was always active in the arts, performing in plays before taking on painting professionally.

Salima was about eight years old when Faiz Ahmed Faiz was imprisoned for his political views. She remembers visiting him in jail. Later, during the repressive years of General Zia-ul-Haq rule, Salima's father had to go into self-exile as a result of the harassment he faced by Zia's government. Therefore, Salima grew up in a politically charged atmosphere. Painting became her outlet.

The Zia period is considered one of Pakistan's most repressive era especially for women, implications of which are still prevalent in society today. Salima's work focuses on the suffering of women in a highly patriarchal society especially under Zia-ul-Haq's. Her paintings usually include abstract figures of women depicting their struggles. They are a reflection of Salima's thoughts and feelings regarding the political and social uncertainties under which people of Pakistan have lived.

Salima deplored the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998. In an interview with Humsafar magazine she talked about her series People Wept at Dawn which she says is in response to the nuclear tests. Salima expressed her frustration at the India and Pakistan nuclear test by saying, "It would be so much more fruitful if these energies could be used in producing food to eat, providing shelter, freedom from disease and education for all."

In 2007, Salima Hashmi published a book titled Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. The book examines the lives and works of about 50 of Pakistan's women painters since independence. As Murataza Rizvi wrote in his review of Salima's book in Dawn, 09/2202, "She took to writing (the book) only because our writers had failed to document the history of Pakistan's women artists." Salima Hashmi spent a number of years doing research for the book and interviewing women artists.

Salima Hashmi has also been active in the human rights movement since the early 80s when she was one of the founding members Women's Action Forum, an organization dedicated to promoting women's rights though it has been criticized for being limited to the elite class of Pakistan.

These days Salima Hashmi is focused on mentoring and promoting the works of younger artists. She has curated art exhibitions showcasing works of Pakistani artists both in Pakistan and abroad. She has also been traveling internationally to promote the new art school Beaconhouse National University which has already attracted students from abroad.

This article is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

Read Salima Hashmi's essay on the contribution of women artists to modern art in Pakistan here.

School of art & aesthetics

2009-04-30T12:14:00.015+05:30

One of the gates of Frognerparken, Oslo.

In 1997, while working on an environmental planning project for Calcutta, a post-graduate student who was working as an assistant suddenly took off when I was talking about something, and had referred to art.. She said that was just pseudo-intellectual hogwash, modern art is not art at all. Just like Jung's moment of synchronicity with a scarab, right there next to me were envelopes of photos, taken by project assistants, and some by a visiting professional photographer from UK. I kept taking out one of each and compared them for the benefit of the group around me. The latter, while not being of great merit were nonetheless consistently tellingly different in each case, bringing out for instance the eye for light and shade. So I said, now you see, there is something called art, and it is different. She was shamed to silence, and later apologised to me for her imprudence and arrogance.. This blog is also a response to this hateful anti-intellectual and anti-art tendency in many "educated" people.

During that same planning project, I had shown a senior colleague, a govt engineer, a photo-essay in a journal, with pictures by documentary photographer Achinto and accompanying text selected by me. He looked at it. He pointed to a picture and asked how that image illustatrated the accompanying text. I looked blankly at him, in inner disbelief, and then tried to tell him smilingly and patiently that there was no one-is-to-one, uni-directional correspondence between image and text; image was something, text was something else, the image rich and pregnant in so many resonances, the text too possessing deep meaning; and for me there was a kind of link between the two and hence that composition. This artifice was an invitation to engage in that immersion and personal resonance. There may be completely other inferences and associations in the minds of other readers, or none. But this also gave me a direct, insight into the make-up of the person, and of wider social attitudes. All very dismaying and enervating.

Later that year, I developed a photo-text-speech-song presentation, "The Child in the City". This was an hour and a half long meditation on cities and childhood, drawing upon diverse references. There too, the link between image and narrative was only an imagined one. But it worked, with audiences across India and also abroad. Recently, while reading about the exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of phtographer Robert Frank's The Americans at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, I learnt: "...also ground-breaking was the way he tightly sequenced his photographs in The Americans, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically to present a haunting picture of mid-century America." That was similar to what I had done, purely intuitively, in "The Child in the City". I savoured a sense of gladness about some merit in my madness.

Some five years ago, I had gone to see a painting exhibition. Just before that I had picked up a younger associate, a factory engineer, who was visiting Calcutta, to go for dinner with a common friend. We had met in front of the art gallery and I asked him to excuse me and give me a few minutes to quickly take a look at the exhibition. Before he went and waited outside the display area, he too did a quick tour of the exhibition. He looked at a particular painting, stood there a while and stared at it, and then came to me and asked me how that painting was its title. I can't recall what I said to him, I think I said something to the effect that art appreciation was about a personal relationship with the art-work, where one talks to the other, where both respond to one another.

I call this un-comprehending, assumed mechanical notion of art the "this is an ass" school of art and aesthetics. Meaning - people will look at a painting and the title and ask how does this mean that? Or ask, what does this painting mean, or say? I say, why ask me, you figure it out, if you want. It is assumed art means that there should be a picture of a gaping ass, and a title saying "this is an ass", and that will keep teveryone happy and the world going round and round.

But it is also quite insidious. A couple of months ago, at a public event in Bangalore, a minister in the state of Karnataka in the course of his speech said, “modern art has become a medium for pseudo intellectuals to insult ancient Indian culture.” Thankfully a group of artists from Karnataka raised their voices in protest against the comment. “Mr Gowda, you have no right to speak about modern art, you know nothing about it. We object to your remarks,” said M S Murthy, an artist and director of ‘Bhoomi - the centre for artists’ in Bangalore. He was joined by other local artists. When the group of artists continued to object to the remarks, the minister asked the police to throw them out. The artists were then forced out and some sections of the crowd too left the venue, saying, “we are with the artists, there is no need to be fascists.”

You can see, hear and feel all kinds of things and resonances in a painting, if you are are sensitive and discerning and imaginative, like a child. You can make yourself open to a state where you are immersed in the image, nothing else matters, it becomes a powerful means of awareness and consciousness.

Something like that happened to me during an exhibition in December 1997, part of the Calcutta Metropolitan Festival of Art organised by artists from the state of West Bengal to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. I had been involved in conceptualising and organising that festival, at a time when an outpouring of sensitivity, to music, song, mythology, poetry, fine art, performative art and culture was taking place inside me. The "Bengal school of art" and subsequent Modern painters were brought to the public, meticulously and lovingly curated by a senior painter. Perhaps the first time when I was stunningly stirred by art was at the New York Met, where, sadly, I had something like 30 minutes or less to have a quick look during a short visit to that amazing city. But I think the exhibitions at the art festival were when for the first time in my life, images caught hold of me, shook me and a powerful relationship was made with a painting, and meanings, profound wisdom were sensed and a rich train of thought-feeling-imagination flowed. You are a transformed person after that, and see art and artists in a completely different light. The reality, however, is that the domain of art, and the much of the community of "artists" may themselves be very far away from that "different light" in which art and artists were seen following the inner experience of art and aesthetics, value and meaning.

In the spring of 2002, I happened to be in Oslo. My host suggested I visit the Vigeland sculpture park (Frognerparken), and so I went there one morning, taking a bus. I did not know anything about what was there, and before and after entry, I saw a whole collection of statues and sculpture. It can feel quite overwhelming, but I was in no hurry, I had as much time as I wanted. I began looking at and taking in each item, beginning at the beginning and working my way through the arrangement. Something started happening to me, I became immersed in another world where the display was telling an ancient, grave tale... A coach brought in a large group of visitors, from India as it turned out. Must be one of those ten-cities in ten-days tours of Europe offered by tour operators, I thought. I observed a couple, they spoke Bengali. Cameras were out, click click all around. They were gone in 15 minutes. Astonishment! Here was I, exulting in timeless immersion, and there they were, coming from the same place, India, Calcutta, that supposedly artistic land, and how different our individual experiences were in the Vigeland park. I spent almost half a day there, finally I was all alone in the place. It had been an awesome personal trip. I had felt that the sculpture park had been waiting for my arrival, I was a key, which unlocked the secret of the display put together by Vigeland! I sat and soaked myself in that mood and feeling. A lovely gentle breeze played, a tree rained tiny red leaves. I wept, in joy, incredulity and humility. How privileged the people of Oslo were, to have this treasure in their city. I did learn from talking to people there that the park was seen as a witness to the life of the city, and its various seasons, in each of which the park assumed a different appearance. Oslo's gift is also a gift to the whole of humanity, and Oslo is its custodian.

Over the years, just like I have been seized and shaken by specific compositions of music, or songs by particular singers, or dance performances and choreography, or films, so have I had intensive personal experiences, around particular art-works or exhibitions or sites or places. Artists, like Abanindranath Tagore, Gagendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, Murillo, Arthur Tress, Rodin, Henry Moore, Kandinsky... Places, like Tawang, Panihati, Belur, Elephanta, Golcunda, Sarnath, Calcutta's Victoria Memorial, Thodupuzha, Nizamuddin, Gomteswara, Guruvayur, Sanchi ... Neighbourhoods in Calcutta, like in Chetla, Wellington, Alimuddin Street, Bow Barracks, north Calcutta... Cities, like Jerusalem and Nablus... Topographies, like the course of the Adi Ganga in Calcutta, the Sundarbans, the path of the river Ganga, Palestine... Countries, like Japan...

One is made larger, enriched and uplifted by art, which is the key to life. It is therefore the supreme duty of governments to ensure that its people have access to the best of art and works and feats of human imagination and highness. Art education, through schooling, is a must. That is nourishment. It is vital for cities to have public museums of art. Thus will refined citizens be made.

Sarbari Roy Choudhury

2009-04-26T11:30:00.002+05:30

Self Portrait, Sarbari Roy Choudhury, 10" X 9.5", plaster
of Paris.

Sensibility Objectified - The Sculptures of Sarbari Roy Choudhury

A retrospective show of sculpture by Sarbari Roy Choudhury, at Akar Prakar, Calcutta. From 28 April 2009, through May.

Six Story Sculpture

2009-04-26T11:17:00.003+05:30

Reece Terris, Ought Apartment [under construction],
2008-09. Photo: H Robideau, Vancouver Art Gallery

The work of Vancouver-based Reece Terris focuses on the relationship between constructed architectural spaces and our common experiences and encounters within them. Through amplifications or shifts in the function of an initial design, Terris’ work reconsiders utility in both object and place to create environments that highlight the larger cultural contexts implicit in our built environment.

Commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ought Apartment will consist of a tower that rises from the main floor to the full height of the central rotunda, in which sections from six apartments are stacked one on top of another. Each apartment will be furnished with discarded items from the 1950s (on the lowest level) up to the present decade (at the top). Through this process of “making strange,” Terris invites viewers to consider their relationship to the consumption and construction of domestic space and the role this space plays in locating a public as social subjects.

Reece Terris: Ought Apartment, May 6 to September 20, 2009

North Looks South

2009-04-26T10:41:00.005+05:30

Gyula Kosice, Argentinean, born 1924. La Ciudad Hidroespacial, 1946-1972.
Acrylic, plexiglas, paint and light, variable dimensions. Museum purchase
with funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund.

from Art Daily

HOUSTON, TX.- North Looks South: Building the Latin American Art Collection, opening June 7 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), celebrates the museum’s major Latin American art acquisitions since 2001, with more than 80 works in every medium, ranging in date from the 1920s to the present. North Looks South is organized around unexpected juxtapositions between artists and works from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, the United States, and Venezuela.

Rather than a traditional, chronological timeline, North Looks South is instead organized around the Latin American art movements that have come to define the collection, advancing dialogue between varied works from different periods: Constructivism, Kinetic and Op art, Surrealism, Latin Pop, installation art, and contemporary video. The arc of the exhibition moves from ethereal works that play with light and space, to darker works that wrestle with social issues.

Featured artists include Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Roberto Obregón (Venezuela); Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Alfredo Volpi, Franz Weissman, Waldemar Cordeiro and Luis Sacilotto (Brazil); Xul Solar, Antonio Berni, Marta Boto, Carmelo Sobrino, Miguel Angel Ríos and Juan Carlos Distéfano (Argentina); Roberto Matta and Alfredo Jaar (Chile); David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel de la Mora and Teresa Margolles (Mexico); Julio Alpuy, José Gurvich and Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay); and Beatriz González and Oscar Muñoz (Colombia). The exhibition will be on view through September 28, 2009, in the Upper Brown Pavilion of the Caroline Wiess Law Building.

"This exhibition is an extraordinary opportunity for the MFAH to envision how its Latin American collections could be installed in a future, permanent space," commented Dr. Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "As this exhibition has come together, the works that so far comprise this collection have revealed unusual and even unexpected relationships and counterpoints among artists, movements and objects."

Mari Carmen Ramírez, the MFAH’s Wortham Curator of Latin American Art, has built one of the most important Latin American art collections in the United States. For the first time since the critically acclaimed, groundbreaking 2004 exhibition Inverted Utopias Ramírez, along with Gilbert Vicario, Assistant Curator for Latin American Art, will again pull together artwork from a wide array of Latin American countries, this time by exclusively mining the museum’s diverse Latin American art collection (which does not currently have permanent display space at the museum). In North Looks South, Ramírez and Vicario will present a provocative view of the Latin American modern and contemporary art tradition—one that has been shaped as much by technical innovation and utopian concerns as it has by cultural and sociopolitical realities.

"In just eight short years since the Latin American art department was established at the MFAH, we have pursued a collecting mission aimed at identifying, researching and collecting renowned masters of Latin American modern art, as well as those artists who challenge preconceived notions about the region," said Ramírez. "In this exhibition, we will showcase some of the museum’s major acquisitions, including outstanding recent gifts, along with long-term loans and works that the museum hopes to acquire. These acquisitions are a testimony to the MFAH’s and the community’s commitment to Latin American art. The majority of the works acquired since 2001 were purchased with funds from the biannual Latin American Experience Gala and the Latin Maecenas, the department’s extremely dynamic Latin American art collectors support group."

Also featured in the exhibition are masterpieces on long-term loan to the MFAH from the Latin American Art Department’s Partners-in-Art Program. Participants in this program include the Fundación Gego, the Cruz Diez Foundation, Houston, and the Tanya Brillembourg Art Collection.

In addition, the MFAH will showcase a major new acquisition, La Ciudad Hidroespacial, 1946-72 (The Hydrospatial City), by Argentinean artist Gyula Kosice. An ambitious undertaking first begun in 1946, Kosice worked on the project for over 25 years. While components of this artist’s signature piece have been exhibited, the MFAH will be the first museum to display this immense work in its entirety. The installation, to be presented in a 200-square-foot room, demonstrates Kosice’s vision for the future: space architecture for a new, utopian civilization. The centerpiece of the work is 9-by-9-foot installation filled with a galaxy of clear plastic mobiles ― each a unique habitat — that dangles from the ceiling. The installation also includes a manifesto and fifteen drawings.

Ian Fairweather

2009-04-26T09:15:00.001+05:30

Carousel, by Ian Fairweather

Fairweather, by Murray Bail, Murdoch Books.

from The Economist

A STRANGE shy man with a cultured voice but almost penniless stepped ashore in Melbourne in 1934 and unrolled some drawings tied up in a singlet. “I was absolutely staggered,” remembered the first person to view them. “I was dumbfounded at the beauty of those things.”

Ian Fairweather was an artist of exceptional force and originality who, until his death in 1974, produced paintings that merged the diverse influences of cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. An art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that “the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty” of Fairweather’s finest pieces, such as “Epiphany”, surpassed all other Australian paintings.

In this handsome book of biography and colour reproductions (first published in 1981 but now greatly expanded and altered) Murray Bail goes a step further: “There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art—or anywhere else.” Yet who was this pathologically reclusive artist?

Mr Bail, a prize-winning novelist who wrote “Eucalyptus”, is a critic parsimonious with his enthusiasms, but he has devoted many years to beating Fairweather out of the bush that was the artist’s preferred habitat. A self-appointed vagrant who was “much travelled but unworldly”, Fairweather was born in Scotland, the youngest of nine children of a surgeon-general in the Indian army, and spent his first ten years in the care of Scottish aunts. After an adolescence in Jersey, he joined the army but was captured in France at the start of the first world war, passing some of his happiest years as a prisoner-of-war. He then studied at the Slade school of art in London, a favourite pupil of Henry Tonks, an artist who found him “profoundly melancholy”. From then on, “he avoided the art world like a plague”.

Few artists, Mr Bail demonstrates, can have enjoyed such poverty in such inhospitable surroundings. Fairweather worked as a farmhand in Canada, a road-inspector in Shanghai and a bush-cutter in Australia, living variously in a concrete-mixer and an abandoned patrol boat (Darwin), a converted cinema (Brisbane), an empty goat dairy (Cairns) and a tent (Bribie Island).

Patrick White, an Australian writer who once visited him, drew on him for the painter in his novel The Vivisector, but in his dogged modesty and solitariness Fairweather more closely resembled White’s desert explorer in Voss. Whenever he saw anyone approach, he rushed into the bush and hid. “Hell for Fairweather was other people,” writes Mr Bail.

A perfectionist who painted at night by the light of a hurricane lamp, Fairweather destroyed much of his art. The 500 or so paintings and drawings that remain are intensely felt, unsettling and resonate with “a searching necessity”. The act of painting was the thing: “It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.” He didn’t much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of sometimes disowning it, or even not recognising it.

Into the Sunset

2009-04-26T09:10:00.002+05:30

Timothy O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840-1882), Ancient Ruins in the
Canyon de Chelle. 1873. Albumen silver print, 10 13/16 x 7 15/16” (27.5 x 20.2 cm),
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West, opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

See images from the MoMA exhibition here.

Eid Milad Laila

2009-04-26T09:06:00.004+05:30

From Eid Milad Laila (Laila’s Birthday). 2008. Palestine / Tunisia / Netherlands.
Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi. Pictured: Nour Zoubi as Laila and Mohamed Bakri as Abu Laila. Image courtesy of Kino International.

From Art Daily

NEW YORK, NY.- Laila’s Birthday (2008), the latest feature by director Rashid Masharawi (b.1962, Gaza Strip), will have a weeklong run in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from May 27 through June 1, 2009.

Laila’s Birthday is set in the filmmaker’s chaotic hometown of Ramallah. The film follows a Palestinian judge turned taxi driver who is trying to arrange a birthday cake and gift for his young daughter’s birthday. It turns out to be an epic task as he navigates the corruption, hassles, constantly changing political winds, and Israeli checkpoints around the city, all in the space of one single day. Masharawi provides a lively and revealing portrait of both a city and decent man at the breaking point.

Masharawi’s feature debut, Ticket to Jerusalem (2003), was featured in MoMA’s 2003 New Directors/New Films. It followed his 2002 documentary Live from Palestine, which chronicled the editorial and production process of journalists working for the famed Voice of Palestine radio station. Masharawi founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Center, a film initiative that promotes local productions and organizes a mobile film-screening program aimed at bringing high-quality cinema to Palestinian refugee camps.

Laila’s Birthday will open theatrically in select US markets this summer and fall, and will be released on DVD before the end of 2009.

MoMA Presents: Laila’s Birthday is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Eid Milad Laila (Laila’s Birthday). 2008. Palestine/Tunisia/ Netherlands. Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi. With Mohammed Bakri, Areen Omari, Nour Zoubi. In Arabic; English subtitles. Print courtesy of Kino International, New York. 71 min.

The Lost Skyline

2009-04-26T08:20:00.000+05:30

56 Leonard Street, Herzog & de Meuron for the Alexico Group. ANNOUNCED: September 2008. PLAN: A 56-story residential tower comprising 145 luxury residences, with occupancy originally expected in late 2010. STATUS: Louise Sunshine, a real-estate consultant working with Alexico, says the project “is awaiting the completion of its financing.” Meanwhile, construction is stalled and the developer admits the timeline has been changed. Photo: Connie Zhou for New York Magazine

by Daniel B. Smith
New York Real Estate

An entire counterfactual history of New York could be written simply from the stories of buildings that never got built. Even in flush times, ambitious projects are hard to incubate; they struggle to maturity against a tide of red tape, cost overruns, warring egos, and community sensitivities. In difficult times, when the market goes suddenly from strong to weak, the survival rate drops with the Dow. Plans are left out in the cold.

Only nine months ago, each of the buildings on the following pages stood a fighting chance of making the jump from architect’s drawings to glass, steel, concrete, and brick. Today, all are on indefinite, very costly hold. That doesn’t necessarily mean death; developers, with all they’ve invested monetarily and emotionally, routinely maintain that construction is poised to continue as soon as financing gets back on track. But as often as not, time passes them by, and the lots sit unchanged, waiting for new architects and developers to reimagine their future for a different, more modest world. In the meantime, we are left not with towers or spires or bold cantilevers, but snapshots, renderings. A portrait of a city that never was.

See a slide-show of "Ghost Buildings" here.

Diane Arbus exhibition

2009-04-26T08:16:00.004+05:30

Diane Arbus, Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. 1970 1970.
© 1971 The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC.

from Art Daily

CARDIFF.- One of the main art exhibitions in 2009 at the National Museum, Wales, in Cardiff will reveal the work of legendary New York photographer Diane Arbus (1923 -1971), who transformed the art of photography.

Diane Arbus, which comprises 69 black and white photographs including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: "Box of Ten, 1971", is one of the best collections of Arbus's work in existence and will be on display at the Museum from 9 May until 31 August 2009.

Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 "Artist Rooms" from the collection created by the dealer and collector Anthony d'Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. Diane Arbus will be one of the first exhibitions on a tour of this collection.

Anthony d'Offay's guiding principle for the creation of "Artist Rooms" was the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists, Diane Arbus being one of them.

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle ,
N.J. 1967. © 1971 The Estate of Diane
Arbus, LLC.

Capturing 1950s and 1960s America, Arbus is renowned for portraits of people who were then classed on the outskirts of society nudists, transvestites, circus performers and zealots. In one of her most famous works, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ of 1967, the twins are photographed as if joined at the shoulder and hip with only three arms between them.

Her powerful, sometimes controversial, images often frame the familiar as strange and the strange or exotic as familiar. This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.

It is a privilege to be part of the Artist Rooms Tour an initiative that brings together high quality art with top establishments across the country, said Nicholas Thornton, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art at Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales.

The name Diane Arbus might not be familiar to everyone, but her portraits will be! As Arbus's pioneering approach to the art has greatly influenced photographers across the world, we hope this exceptional exhibition of her work will have a positive impact on new and existing visitors to the Museum.

Improving art displays, creating new galleries and radical changes to the way in which works are shown all form a part of Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Waless current drive to enhance the presentation of Wales's art collection. Within this project, the Museum is developing new spaces for modern and contemporary art in order to create new opportunities for the display of its important and growing collection of post-1950 art and temporary exhibitions such as Diane Arbus.

This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.

"Artist Rooms on Tour with The Art Fund" has been devised to take those displays beyond the collections owners, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.

"Artist Rooms" is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation. It has materially strengthened Tate's ability to represent some of the most important art of the latter half of the twentieth century, and helps establish Scotland as a world-class destination for contemporary art.

The Art Fund is giving £250,000 per year to "Artist Rooms on Tour" with The Art Fund. The Scottish Government are giving £175,000 over three years.

Pioneers of Contemporary Glass

2009-04-26T07:00:00.000+05:30

Marvin Lipofsky, American, born 1938,
Kentucky Series #8, 2000-2001, blown
glass, © Marvin Lipofsky, Barbara and
Dennis DuBois Collection, Photo: M. Lee
Fatherree

This exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, explores the origins of the studio glass movement through works by its innovators, including Harvey Littleton, known as the "father of studio glass" because of his role in moving the production of glass from a factory to a studio environment, and Dale Chihuly, one of the early champions of art glass through his foundation of the Pilchuck Glass School, and his success as an artist. Other major figures represented in the exhibition include husband and wife team Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova, credited with introducing conceptual ideas into the movement by working with shape, thickness and depth to create art that utilizes "the light inside" and delivers an experience rich with emotion; Erwin Eisch, whose early and radical rejection of traditional glass vessels in favor of an expressive, sculptural form allowed for political or narrative content within glass; and Toots Zynsky, whose delicate creations are singular in their thread-like construction, prompting her to name the technique that she developed "filet-de-verre", or "fused and thermo formed glass threads."

Featuring works by artists from the United States, the Czech Republic, Germany, Australia, Italy, Finland, and Sweden, the exhibition will be concentrated in the Alice Pratt Brown Gallery of the MFAH, and will reinforce the idea of international artistic collaboration and community, as well as educate viewers about the diversity that is possible with this unconventional medium. In addition, select pieces from the DuBois collection will be displayed in other areas of the museum alongside various examples from the MFAH´s permanent collection, underscoring the relationship between glass and other media and guiding visitors toward an appreciation of the works as part of a larger tradition of world art.

Visual arts opera

2009-04-26T06:56:00.000+05:30

Olafur Eliasson, "Echo House", "Il Tempo del Postino",
Manchester Theater Festival in 2007. Photo Joel Fildes.

from Art Daily

BASEL.- One of the most spectacular events at this year’s Art Basel will be the presentation of “Il Tempo del Postino” at Theater Basel. The Independent called this unique show “The world's first visual arts opera” after its first and only presentation at the Manchester International Festival in 2007. A group of the world’s leading visual artists created a major experimental presentation.

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno as a group exhibition that would occupy time rather than space, “Il Tempo del Postino” (Postman time) is presenting a sequential display of time based art on the theatre stage. Each of the over fifteen artists is creating an act of different length. In Basel “Il Tempo del Postino” will be directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

In addition to the artists who participated in Manchester in 2007, Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Il Tempo del Postino” in Basel will include a new contribution by Thomas Demand. The graphic design for Manchester was created by Peter Saville, for Basel it was created by Ludovic Balland.

By focusing on time-based work, this unique group show aims to redefine how the visual arts can be experienced. Set in a classic theater architecture, it transforms the established exhibition model into an exhilarating, shared audience experience. “Il Tempo del Postino” is organized by Art Basel, Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel and was originally co-commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris for the World Premiere in Manchester in July 2007.

After its first celebrated presentation, Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph wrote: “At the end of ‘Il Tempo del Postino’ I felt I’d been present at a historic occasion when the ambitions of the curators were perfectly matched by the quality of the art.” This elaborate and ambitious exhibition is now touring to Basel.

The question that was originally posed by the curators was: “What happens if having an exhibition is not a way to occupy space, but a way to occupy time?” For “Il Tempo del Postino” each artist creates their own piece, including the presentation of installations, and inviting performing artists, singers, actors, dancers and a full orchestra playing specially commissioned music. “Il Tempo del Postino” is delivered to the audience in its own presentation time, rather than the audience walking through it in their own time; the final production was created collaboratively with all participating artists feeding into the overall structure, assisted by a creative team of experienced theatre practitioners and technicians.

There will be three presentations of “Il Tempo del Postino”, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, June 10 – 12, 2009 at 8.30 pm at Theater Basel.

Democratic Design

2009-04-26T06:55:00.002+05:30

Tumblers "Kalas“, 2000. Designer: Monika Mulder.

Democratic Design: IKEA opens at the International Design Museum in Munich.

See images from the Munnich exhibition here.

Remembering a collector

2009-04-26T06:52:00.000+05:30

Amy Blakemore, American, born 1958, Girl & Game,
1990, Gift of Will Michels in memory of John Cleary
and his lifelong love of photographs

"To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else´s collection rather than one´s own," wrote Susan Sontag. Cleary was a rescuer. He rescued things for himself and for others. Many collectors of photographs owe a debt of gratitude for Cleary´s aid in starting, expanding, or enhancing their collections.

Cleary was a dedicated supporter of the museum´s photography collections. He made images from both his personal collection and the gallery inventory available for various exhibition projects, helped the museum find and acquire significant images to add to the permanent collection, and donated numerous photographs to the museum.

Cleary´s legacy has prompted both photographers and photography dealers to make generous donations to the museum in his memory, selections from which are shown in this exhibition.

Remembering John Cleary is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sunday, May 3, 2009.

Florescence

2009-04-26T06:33:00.001+05:30

Florescence 1

Florescence, one of the largest competitive national flower shows sanctioned by the Garden Club of America in the United States, is presented by The Garden Club of Houston, River Oaks Garden Club, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During this biennial event, fabulous floral arrangements complement the artworks in the museum´s galleries.

Art, school and community

2009-04-26T06:01:00.000+05:30

Daniel Jordan, The Great Community of The Third
Ward, Gelatin silver print

Eye on Third Ward, an annual exhibition of photographs by students from Jack Yates High School, is designed to express the distinctive identity of Houston´s Third Ward. A historically black community, the Third Ward is home to many important political, cultural, and educational organizations as well as strong religious and community groups.

The education department of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and the Magnet School of Communication at Jack Yates High School founded the Eye on Third Ward photography project in 1995 to encourage students to hone their technological skills and powers of observation by documenting the neighborhood and its residents. Yates photography teacher Ray C. Carrington challenges his classes to make photographs that capture the personality of the area and the people who live there. About 60 high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors, ages 15 to 17, participate in the project, and a number of the works created during the year-long class are selected for the annual exhibition.

World's Largest Art Prize

2009-04-25T22:47:00.000+05:30

From Art Daily.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI.- ArtPrize invites artists of all kinds from around the world to participate in an unprecedented competition that will award nearly one-half million dollars to prize winners, including $250,000 to the artist who receives the most public votes.

Details of ArtPrize, which will run from Sept. 23 through Oct. 10, were announced today from the competition’s host city of Grand Rapids, Mich. ArtPrize will have no formal jury, curator or judge. The public will decide who wins the prizes by voting, using mobile devices and the web.

“It’s time to reboot the conversation between artists and the public. ArtPrize will be a celebration of art, design, and innovation that will bring artists and the public together like never before,” said ArtPrize creator Rick DeVos.

The city of Grand Rapids will become art gallery. ArtPrize art works and performances, professional and amateur, will be exhibited at hundreds of venues, all within a three-square mile area in Grand Rapids’ downtown riverfront district. The city has offered up parks and bridges for outdoor venue displays. Scores of businesses will convert lobbies and public space for displays.

“Our family sees ArtPrize as a new and innovative way to engage and support the arts for the future,” said Betsy DeVos. The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation is underwriting ArtPrize. “Dick and I share our son’s vision for encouraging everyone to explore the arts in a truly democratic way.”

Grand Rapids, a city of about 200,000 amidst a metropolis of more than a million people, has an impressive cultural urban core and a rich history of supporting public art. It is home to Alexander Calder’s “La Grand Vitesse,” the first community sculpture project funded through the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as major works by Mark di Suvero, Robert Morris and Maya Lin.

“It is increasingly important to find new ways to engage people, especially young people, in the arts,” said Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. “ArtPrize is a dynamic and creative way to use technology to engage people of all ages.”

ArtPrize is expected to draw thousands of entries, and art enthusiasts from across the globe are expected to attend. The ArtPrize team directly communicated with about 10,000 artists, design schools, art schools, museums and galleries worldwide as part of today’s launch. “This is a bit of an art revolution,” said Jeff Speck, former director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts and author of Suburban Nation. “It will be exciting to see a city use its downtown area as an art gallery to share with the world.”

“I’m astounded by the potential for social networking, community involvement, and the expanded view of the role of art,” said Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell. “ArtPrize will excite the world, and the world will look at our city differently because of it.”

Grand Rapids is internationally recognized as home of Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, which showcases one of the world’s foremost collections of modern and contemporary sculptures, including pieces from well-known artists such as Moore, Oldenberg, Goldsworthy, Plensa and many more. In 2006, the city hosted a large-scale exhibit by Tom Otterness, considered one of the premier public artists attracted more than 750,000 visitors. The city recently built and opened the world’s first LEED gold certified art museum.

Art museums a thing of past

2009-04-25T16:30:00.001+05:30

from China Daily / AFP

LAS VEGAS: Museums dedicated to neon, entertainer Liberace and pinball machines remain, but high-brow culture in Las Vegas has achieved a new nadir with the closure of its public art museum.

The 59-year-old Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) went broke and shut down, the latest in a string of bad news for the arts in the largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Last year saw the closure of a Guggenheim outpost in the Venetian Hotel-Casino and the decision in 2007 by Steve Wynn to convert a gallery at his Wynn Las Vegas resort into a Rolex shop.

"This is a community of 2 million people and it doesn't have a museum," said Libby Lumpkin, the LVAM's last executive director, who quit in January hoping to save the institution money. "That's not a good thing. It's just really disappointing."

The LVAM had its problems. It rented its space from a branch of a public library about 15 km west of the Strip, too far for all but the most determined to spend the $85 round-trip cab fare to reach it.

And in this economy, when Nevada faces the nation's highest home foreclosure rate, donors stopped giving. "Our donations just stopped, like somebody just turned off a faucet," said Lumpkin, who in the 1990s worked as chief of acquisitions for Wynn as the hotel magnate became enthusiastic about collecting fine art.

Yet attendance was meager at just 12,000 visitors a year, reflective of a general disinterest in art by both the local populace as well as the 40 million tourists traveling to the city each year.

Wynn, who for a time showed his private collection of Monets and Picassos in a gallery at his resort, boasted last year that the Rolex shop he replaced it with grossed $16 million in sales the first year.

The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian is now a restaurant.

Still, it was the LVAM's closure last month that demoralized many, including Lumpkin's husband, the Vanity Fair art critic Dave Hickey.

The couple moved to Las Vegas in the 1990s because they sensed the city was on the verge of a cultural renaissance; Lumpkin says she hoped the city could become a Miami-like art-tourism destination.

"We were just wrong," Hickey said. "I thought there would be more support from the middle class and there wasn't. And nobody at the university or in city government is particularly interested in cosmopolitan culture."

Others see more hopeful signs.

MGM Mirage spent $40 million on public art at its five-skyscraper, $8.6 billion development which includes commissioned works by Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer and others, said Michele C. Quinn, the art consultant in charge of MGM Mirage's acquisitions.

Another major resort, the Fontainebleau, is also expected to open later this year with a public art program, she said.

Also, the 10-year-old Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art has drawn 7,000 paying visitors in the first two months of its latest show featuring works by Lichtenstein and Warhol; and First Friday, a festival in which several downtown small galleries and antique shops stay open late, draws thousands each month.

"Yes, it sounds like we're going down with the ship here, but we're not in a tailspin," Quinn said.

"To say everything is in a demise is misleading. In 10 months, when CityCenter and Fontainebleau open, it will seem like a lot is happening. All of this is going to be open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Less is more...

2009-04-22T13:31:00.002+05:30

Rorschach-blot-like images.
Credit: JILA

"I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation. Lazier readers hate when I do this but fortunately they seem to be in the minority."

Grant Morrison

"Indian Highway"

2009-04-22T09:45:00.002+05:30

Bharti Kher's The Nemesis of Nations at the Serpentine.

by Charles Darwent
The Independent, December 2008

This Westernised view of the subcontinent's contemporary work does a disservice to artists and visitors alike

You might think that squeezing a show which purports to represent the art of a nation of 1.2 billion people into a single gallery would be a difficult thing to do, the more so when that gallery is the Serpentine and thus on the small side.

And you would be right. The curators of Indian Highway (Serpentine Galley, December 2008 - February 2009) point out that India is not just a big place but a complex one, and that the art being made there reflects these truths in addressing "environmentalism, sectarianism, globalisation, gender, post-colonialism, sexuality and class". So how do you shoehorn all of that into half a dozen not very big London rooms?

The answer, if you are wise, is that you don't. Indian Highway makes a link between the subcontinent's road system and its recent harnessing of the information superhighway, although I'm not sure the point of this is really understood. What that link suggests – and this suggestion is the subject of much of the work in the show – is that India, since time immemorial, has had systems of order imposed upon it: Moghul roads, Raj railways, Athenian democracy, the virtual protocols of global computing. And through all this, India has remained heroically chaotic, a place whose essence defies logic, whose philosophy and daily life subsist on a different truth.

To edit the entirety of India's contemporary art down to 20 or so practitioners is to fall into the trap of imposing order on a thing that will just not have order imposed upon it. The result is that we come away from the Serpentine with the idea that Indian art is a pallid form of Western art, albeit with a mild curry flavour – a view so exquisitely patronising as to make you wince. If, after 61 years of independence, India's artists are still preoccupied with colonial attitudes, then Indian Highway explains why.

Maybe it's a market thing. Unless you are a specialist, it is unlikely you will have heard of many of the artists in this show. This makes the labels attached to their work something of a surprise: Subodh Gupta is represented by Hauser & Wirth, Dayanita Singh by the Frith Street Gallery and Amar Kanwar by Marian Goodman in Paris. Hauser & Wirth also represents Martin Creed and Louise Bourgeois, of whom you certainly will have heard; the gallery is known for just such high-end, ideas-driven art as theirs. So where does an artist like Gupta fit in?

Date by date (detail), 2008, Installation,
Dimensions variable, 'Indian Highway',
Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008. Photo:
Hugo Glendinning

His work typically homes in on the creaking join between East and West as instanced by Ambassador taxis and airport carousels laden with cardboard luggage. Gupta's piece for this show, called Date by Date, re-creates the kind of bureaucrat's office you can find anywhere in India, furnished with battered deal desks and manual typewriters and awash with manila files. The installation's centrepiece is a breakfront cabinet so crammed with these last that it has had to be bound in a tight steel cage. It all looks quite logical until you realise it isn't.

As with the work of many young British or German or American artists, there is a whiff in the air of Beuys, the constructing of an order whose sole perverse point is its orderliness. What makes Date by Date different from these other works is its national specificity: this is Indian art because its subject and materials are Indian. Likewise, Bose Krishnamachari's Ghost/Transmemoir differs from all the other screen-of-talking-monitor installations you'll have seen, in that its screens are held in used tiffin tins, hang from hemp rope and speak Hindi.

Ghost / Transmemoir, Bose Krishnamachari. mixed media
installation, 'Indian Highway', Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008.
Photo: Andrew Jaffe

So what is my problem with all this? It is that much of the work in this show isn't very good, but has been included anyway because it looks Indian – or, rather, Indian enough. The one artist who really impressed me was Bharti Kher, whose cut-paper wall piece, The Nemesis of Nations, has no obvious national identity at all. What it is, though, is a highly original and visually compelling work – a bit of formalist madness, as though Jim Lambie had gone in for spot-painting.

For the rest, you get the sense of this show's curators sitting down to decide what "Indian" was most likely to mean to a Western audience and tailoring their choices accordingly. The result is that Indian Highway feels condescending, both to that Western audience and to the artists in the show. I'm sure there is a great deal of good art being made in India today, and equally sure that it is not to be seen here.

Obama, listen up!

2009-04-22T06:49:00.000+05:30

As the Taliban silence music in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan, musician Salman Ahmad, founder of Pakistani rock group Junoon, denounces the Pakistani peace accord with the Taliban.

from Freemuse

American president Barack Obama has promised to listen to the Muslim world. He can start by listening to Pakistani artists who embody peace, modernity and pluralism, suggests Freemuse Ambassador Salman Ahmad in an article in the US newspaper Washinton Post.

Salman Ahmad, the founder of Pakistani rock group Junoon, says that artists in Pakistan take their inspiration from Sufism, the tolerant and inclusive strain of Islam that is the antithesis of the beliefs of the Taliban.

Commenting on the Pakistani government ´‘peace agreement’ with Taliban troops and acceptance of Sharia law in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, Ahmad says:

“The killing off of arts and culture in Swat is an ominous sign. It is the first step in the potential Talibanization of more of the country. If you give the Taliban an inch – as Zardari has done – they will take a mile.”

Alien form of Islam

In the article Salman Ahmad writes that in its 60-plus turbulent years as an independent country, Pakistan has been held together by its music, poetry, films, literature and sports. Pakistan is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, but culture – not religion – is the glue that binds people in this critical US-allied country.

Ahmad adds: “But now the Taliban are grafting an alien form of Islam onto Pakistan, with dire consequences for Pakistanis, the region and possibly the world. Earlier this month the Pakistani government and army made a deal with the Taliban and gave them control of the Swat valley. The government ceded this region near the Afghan border after countless pitched battles with the militants. Many military and civilian lives have been lost to an enemy that loves death more than life."

Ahmad and his band Junoon suffered political censorship in Pakistan during the rule of Benazir Bhutto, partly due to a song denouncing political corruption. Bhutto’s husband is now president of Pakistan and Salman Ahmad suggests that:

“President Asif Ali Zardari’s ill-conceived appeasement will only embolden the Taliban and may squelch more of Pakistan’s voices of peace just when Pakistanis and the world need to hear them most.”

Eerie silence in Swat

In Swat and elsewhere in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan’s cultural soul is under attack. Swat – 100 miles from Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad – used to be a haven for arts, music and tourism. There is now eerie silence.

“The Taliban have shut down girls’ schools, imposed an extreme interpretation of sharia law and destroyed music shops. Cinemas are being locked down. The fanatics’ idea is simple: to asphyxiate Pakistan’s rich and vibrant culture and replace it with their own ‘distorted interpretation’ of Islam,” says Salman Ahmad.

In 2004 in the BBC4 programme ‘The Rock Star and the Mullah’, Salman Ahmad confronted mullahs in the North-West Frontier Province on their ban on music.

Eastern Promises

2009-04-22T06:07:00.003+05:30

by Eric Chang
International Director, Asian Contemporary Art and Chinese 20th Century Art
Christie's
March 2009

The development of animation has been intimately connected with contemporary art in Japan, exerting great influence in recent years. Hisashi Tenmyouya’s RX-78-2 Kabuki-mono 2005 Version was among the top Japanese Contemporary works offered in Christie’s Spring 2008 Evening Sale and melds traditional Japanese painting forms with images from animated cartoons. In Tenymouya’s work the traditional culture of Japan has been absorbed and projected with a new, contemporary face. This major work was among the best representations of the artist’s work to date to appear at auction. In 2007 it was one of the very few works by contemporary artists chosen for inclusion in Japan’s travelling Gundam exhibition. It more than doubled its pre-sale estimate to sell for HK $ 4,807,500.

Contemporary Japanese Art

Contemporary Japanese art reaches far beyond the often incorrectly stereotyped works of wide-eyed prepubescent girls rendered in intoxicating colors; in fact contemporary Japanese art’s roots are embedded in the post World War II era when, as a deeply dispirited nation, artists and civilians alike sought guidance and hope from the well-developed foreign avant-garde art movements.

Before long, rumbling underground, beneath the formal art movements of the 1970s and 1980s such as the prevalent Gutai and Mono-ha (developed in the 1960s), were the now prevalent sub-cultures of anime and manga. Only in the 1980s when the worlds of otaku, anime and manga were acknowledged as true expressions of contemporary Japanese culture itself, were these subjects accepted as high art. Thrust at piercing speed into the 1990s, Japan’s economy rapidly developed, endured and, arguably, remains in a steadfast hi-tech revolution. The centuries-old traditions instilled in the Japanese were suddenly swept aside by modern technology, distorting the daily lives and creative inspirations known to date.

The sizeable impact of this rapid industrial and economic advancement cannot be underestimated; some artists were repelled by the country’s abrupt desire to build a utopian society while others wholly embraced it. Conflicted between the new age and custom, contemporary Japanese artists articulate probing sentiments regarding Japan’s ever-transforming society. Critical of society yet introspective, contemporary Japanese artists have presented an extensive array of works and styles, often being averse to the formal domestic or foreign movements that previously inspired them. Now, much of Japanese contemporary art is an extension of the artist’s struggle to find a comfortable place within and outside him or herself, sifting through those childhood experiences that often demarcate moments of self revelation.

Japanese contemporary art embraces subcultures such as manga, anime, fantasy and technology of the post-war period as high art. Displaying an obsession with fantasy, these contemporary works address the fine balance between mass production, eroticism, science fiction, heritage and the identity of Japan as a nation. The market for Japanese Contemporary Art has seen an incredible explosion in interest as of late, growing threefold from a total of HK $ 12,522,000 in the Spring 2007 sale of Asian Contemporary Art to HK $ 36,165,000 just one season later in Christie’s Fall 2007 sale.

Contemporary Korean Art

Among the top lots in Christie’s May 2008 sale of Asian Contemporary Art was Hong Kyung Tack’s Library II , a dizzying work of flamboyant colors that upon closer inspection reveals the artist’s contemplation on religion and pop culture. His technical proficiency and shrewd dexterity in painting enables him to create an almost synthetic surface to the work. Religious icons, including an image of the Crucifixion of Jesus, white doves, and countless colorful books, amass to create a shrine that toes the line between kitschy arrangement and religions devotion. This work sold for HK $ 4,567,500 against a pre-sale estimate of HK $ 2,000,000 - 4,000,000.

Since 1957, when various art groups began to form to advocate their intuitive response in expressive rebellion against authority and institutional conservatism, Korean art has advanced rapidly. Heavily inspired by abstract art, these pioneers soon paved the way for creative liberation by forming the first post-war generation that rejected structured tradition and instead embraced the gestural freedom of brush strokes and experimentalism generally.

This Art Informel movement allowed limitless exploration, particularly seen in young artists today, who have overturned the significance of material from its conventional value into a vital element of conceptual connotation. Although this liberalisation has drastically accelerated a greater expansion in creativity, it has also left individuals perplexed by their identity. Korean artists still strive to retain the passive beauty of the traditional Korean aesthetic. Their tendency to balance conventional artistic execution with modern critique is what makes Korean contemporary artists unique. They have an ability to mirror their society’s psyche; striving to preserve their valuable past from the speed of cultural hybridity and yet driven to be a part of modernisation.

Artists from Korea are known for their exceptional technical abilities, a skill most clearly expressed in hyper-realism, and for their innovative experimentation with materials. Korea possesses a rich cultural history that has resulted in a unique approach to art that embraces revolutionary and contemporary practices while retaining a connection to traditional heritage. This market too as been experiencing growing interest from collectors throughout Asia and beyond, and each season Christie’s offers a series of the most cutting-edge works from the region.

Contemporary Indian Art

Christie’s sold Subodh Gupta’s Saat Samundar Paar (10) (‘Across the Seven Seas’) for HK $ 9,280,000 – far exceeding its presale estimate of HK $ 1-2million, and setting a record price for the artist at auction at the time. This work is part of a series of works undertaken by the artist on the theme of migration and the return home. Luggage, luggage carts and airport conveyor belts become overarching metaphors for the hopes and dreams invested in these journeys, as well as the psychological baggage borne by the immigrant/migrant worker vacillating between homesickness, alienation, and assimilation.

Recent art from the Indian subcontinent is part of an unbroken tradition that goes back centuries but, as with contemporary art across Asia, much of it also bears influences from the merging of cultures and styles emanating from both East and West. The effects of colonisation, Partition, rapid industrialization, globalization, technological advances, homegrown politics, religion and caste/class warfare as well as the heady pace of modern life tend to find root in the concerns of many 20th- and 21st-century practicing artists. The geopolitics of war and terrorism, a new set of identity politics that have arisen from the racial profiling of South Asians post 2001 also had an impact.

The early 20th century was dominated by the British Academic painting school in the works of Raja Ravi Varma and his followers, who first used oil as a medium and created realistic but fanciful tableaux often taking mythological figures out of the context of the miniature painting and into a much larger scale while experimenting with perspective, light, and shading.

In Bengal, a new movement in Indian art and the founding of Modernism began concurrently at the Santiniketan school under the tutelage of the Tagore family. Eschewing overt Western styles and influences, the Tagores and their followers looked both inward and Eastward and combined the styles of calligraphy, Japanese printmaking, and Art Deco into a uniquely Indian mode of expression. This can best be found in Bengali artist Jamini Roy who reclaimed the folk art style of the Kalighat painting as his own after training in the West in Impressionist painting.

The year that India gained its Independence from Britain, 1947, saw the founding of the momentous Progressive Artists Group who in their manifesto adopted international Modernism from Kandinsky to Klee and Picasso and from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism as a visual language. Artists such as Francis Newton Souza, Syed Haider Raza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, and Tyeb Mehta became the predominant masters of Indian art in the 20th century by rejecting the sentimental and bucolic themes that prevailed in their day and by implicitly claiming independence from the British Academy.

However, the economic boom in India propelled by reforms and privatisation in 1994 certainly caused ripples in the art scene over the last 15 years. Today’s contemporary artists have benefited greatly from their Progressive predecessors who have laid the groundwork for the attention and success of Indian art on the global stage. As they travel farther and gain wider exposure from their inclusion in the international art scene, they break barriers without having to leave their home countries. Key exhibitions in 2005 such as Indian Summer at the École de Beaux Arts in Paris showed more avant-garde artists such as Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, N.S. Harsha, Bharti Kher, Shilpa Gupta, amongst many others, and highlighted a new generation of very individualistic artists. There is not an overall defining movement to describe the 21st-century artists as there was with the Progressives in the 1950s. Some work in traditional media while others use technology and adapt techniques from Photorealist or Surrealist motifs. It is however, the elevation and exposition of popular culture or ‘Pop’ perhaps serving as the most unifying theme to describe the worldview of many artists working today.

Contemporary Indian art is at once autobiographical and at times phantasmagorical, yet an overriding theme to their distinctive style is the addressing of national and philosophical concerns: social reality, traditional gender roles, empowerment and relationships. The Indian modern and contemporary art category has also grown exponentially. Increasing global demand is seen in every one of Christie’s sales in New York, London and Hong Kong. Since launching Modern and Contemporary Indian Art sales in New York 2000, worldwide sales in this category at Christie’s have grown from US $ 656,000 to US $ 45million in 2008.

Helen Levitt

2009-04-21T10:52:00.000+05:30

Estate of Helen Levitt/Laurence Miller Gallery, NY

from The Economist

Helen Levitt, photographer of New York, died on March 29th, aged 95

OVER the course of her long life, many people wanted to ask Helen Levitt about her photographs. She always refused, at least as far as public pronouncements were concerned. “I’m inarticulate,” she would say. “I express myself with images.” Or, “If I could say that, I wouldn’t have to take pictures.”

The result was that few people knew her, outside professional photographers and her poker circle. And that was fine with her. She lived defiantly alone except for Binky, her tabby cat. The only photograph released of her after her death showed a not-unpretty face, crop-haired and heavily lipsticked, about to scowl. She was in her 50s then, and looked as though the camera had outraged her.

More determined interviewers tracked her to the fourth floor of the walk-up brownstone on East 13th Street where she lived for most of her life. The stairs didn’t deter her, despite her sciatica and a strange, lifelong inner-ear disorder that made her feel “wobbly” all the time. But in her last decade she found her old Leica was getting too heavy to carry about, and switched to a Contax automatic. It was a poignant moment. She had been inspired to use a 35mm Leica by Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, after trailing him one day in 1935 as he took photographs round the wharves of Brooklyn. He became a great admirer of her work. She thought any comparison of herself with him was ridiculous.

Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.

The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.

Here and there

Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.

A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing—a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building—would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.

Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.

In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multicoloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.

She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.

Man's Inhumanity to Man

2009-04-20T17:16:00.003+05:30

Ruth Weisberg, Keep The Gates Open, We Are Not The Last

The art exhibition "Man's Inhumanity to Man: Journey out of Darkness" which opened on April 4th, at the Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 West Mountain Street in Glendale, will run through May 8. This is part of the City of Glendale's Annual Commemorative Events.

The exhibit at the Brand Library is organized by the City of Glendale and co-curated by Ramela Grigorian Abbamontian PhD in association with the Brand Library Art Galleries. "Art is a powerful agent in society with the ability to awaken our consciousness, transform our minds, and ignite a desire to bring about change," says Abbamontian. "This exhibition aims to do all of these things."

Organized into three sections, the exhibition includes over 40 artists and includes over 70 works in a diverse range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Accompanying the exhibition will be a fully illustrated, color catalogue and essays by Dr. Abbamontian and UCLA Professor Paul Von Blum which describes the exhibitions themes and purpose.

The goal with Journey out of Darkness is to educate the viewer about the various inhumane events that have taken place yesterday and today, with the hope of avoiding and preventing them tomorrow. It is an exhibition of contemporary reflections of these events by artists originating from throughout the world and now residing in Southern California.

The exhibition will include an innovative educational wall wherein visitors are invited to post their responses to several question prompts, including:

What must it have felt like to have been a victim of the inhumanities portrayed?

What can you do to prevent similar acts in the future?

What is the power of art in the endeavor to prevent inhumanity?

Despite the inhumanity you have just witnessed, is there hope?

Where is there hope?

The intent of this interactive component is to provoke thought and initiate a dialogue amongst the visitors to the exhibition.

The Art of Architecture: 10 Incredible Installations

2009-04-20T15:40:00.012+05:30

from Web Urbanist

Where is the line between art and design? If “function” is the word that comes to mind then there are many works which fall somewhere in the gray area between extremes. Perhaps the most engaging works to exist on both sides are architectural and interior art installations - those works that are interactive and spatially complex but are still more about aesthetics and experience than a strict singular function.

The Dollhouse was once a modest two-story farmhouse, abandoned decades ago to the elements but left remarkably intact with furniture, furnishings and fixtures on the inside. One artist, however, envisioned a new function for this abandoned building - a hyperbolic showcase of interior space frozen in time.

What does one do to transform a bland space into something engaging for employees who toil in their offices day in and day out? One way to enliven a space is through art. This staged architectural explosion literally lights up the central courtyard of this office building but also provides something of visual interest from every possible angle.

There is no reason to let a soon-to-be-demolished building go to waste - at least that was the viewpoint of the artistic talent behind this exploding house art installation. More than merely something for spectators to gawk at, this design invites participation by allowing visitors to move through the vortex to the other side.

While some architectural installations address buildings as a whole or simply from the outside in, others rework with existing spaces to create interior experiences. One group of artists took buildings abandoned after Hurricane Katrina and breathed new life inside of the deserted structures.

Readers may recognize the work of one Robbie Rowlands, an installation artist with a different way of looking at the world of architecture and urban design. His works literally (and otherwise) break down conventional aspects of buildings, pealing, bending, and twisting them in unique ways.

Walls are what hold a building together, define its spaces and are reliably located in conventional places throughout - particularly in traditional old buildings, right? This artist comes into existing architectural interiors and adds offbeat elements that turn conventional spaces into paradoxical interior designs.

As the previous example demonstrates, the starkness of contract between new elements an old spaces can have a profound aesthetic impact on the person experiencing a hybrid interior. These glowing arrows draw visitors into an old mansion and through it in ways that defy the traditional layout of the building interior.

This rain art installation project goes against two basic associations we have with rain: that it falls only on the outside of buildings and that it is always in motion and difficult to see while moving. By contrast, people can walk through this controlled space and see, feel and push each individual drop of rain.

The building envelope is what defines the difference between interior and exterior, public and private. This moving building wall project contorts and distorts that strict boundary, literally spinning a section of wall visible to pedestrians passing by on the street below.

Over 1600 chairs went into making this incredible urban art installation project. The chairs are aged, each with its own history that contributes a piece of the story of the overall installation. The sheer volume and time associated with placing these chair-by-chair in place is impressive enough, regardless of intention.

"There is an alternative"

2009-04-20T15:30:00.002+05:30

by Tom Shapiro
The Art Newspaper

Museums and the recession: there is an alternative to closure or selling off the collections — sharing

The near-death experiences of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other, more recent, tales of woe provide graphic evidence of the financial stresses bearing down on museums. These events highlight the need for solutions that are healthier than closing down, selling a collection, or being subsumed by a larger enterprise. Fortunately, better options exist. All that is required is embracing that quintessential childhood behaviour: sharing. It is time for museums to make the most of their investments by sharing operating structures across two or more institutions. Well-crafted, cross-institutional partnerships can bring increased efficiency and capacity—without risking the loss of integrity.

By consolidating duplicated operational efforts, museums can become more efficient and proficient. The concept echoes the shared-services model that many for-profit industries use to control cost. Importantly, sharing can help reduce the reliance on revenue-generating activities that may conflict with mission-strengthening activities—a persistent hazard when museums pursue many business strategies.

There are at least three profound benefits to a collaborative model. Put simply, in terms of cost control and purchasing power, running one department for two users is cheaper than running two departments for two users. In addition, grouping purchases ranging from paperclips and shopping bags to software, shipping, storage, and insurance—should lower costs.

Second, by expanding the range and depth of a department’s activities, it’s likely that it will become better at what it does. For example, registrars who track collections at two or more museums might develop enhanced database tools for recording and cross-referencing those specific collections.

Third, collaborations may enable one partner to bring certain activities in-house, for which it had previously paid inflated prices on a contract basis. The conservation department, which tends to require a significant investment in space and equipment, comes to mind. Other areas might include graphic design, website management, and technology management.

You can almost hear—as I have in the past—the resistance to partnering as soon as the idea is raised: “We can’t partner with them because: they don’t get what we do; our art is so much different from theirs; they just want a free ride on our superior capabilities; our intellectual property and confidentiality will be at risk; we compete for funding from the same supporters.” And concerns about logistics can be just as strident: “How will we allocate expenses? Who gets priority when we both need the same resource? Our internal departments work cross-functionally—how can we extract particular aspects and still be effective?”

These are all great questions. But in light of the foreseeable economy and future of non-profit funding, a bigger question trumps them all: “How can any of us survive in the long run with an old, inefficient, and expensive operational model?” An incremental approach to partnering is one way to alleviate some of these valid concerns. For instance, it might be best to ease into partnerships with less contentious functions (for instance, purchasing and technology management) and, once successful, move to a deeper engagement.

Of course, there can be negative consequences from developing a shared-services model. Depending on how you design your shared resources, department consolidation could result in layoffs. That can create stress among employees, and territorial tension across museums. In addition, competition for consolidated resources will come up frequently, especially when there is concurrent demand because of overlaps in scheduling. There will also be conflicts because every organisation has its own way of doing things—from the trivial (for instance, assigning purchase-order numbers) to the strategic (for instance, healthcare benefits). Obliging, and then empowering, departments to come to their own joint resolutions will need to be an important part of the working agreement.

However, the potential positive consequences outweigh the negative. Bringing together the best thinking from multiple organisations should result in better processes and practices. Also, as employees talk across organisations, they may develop synergies that have nothing to do with shared resources. For example, an art museum and a natural history museum might start lending works or exhibits to each other; museums might begin to coordinate their exhibition schedules and openings, and there may be opportunities for region-wide collaboration. Shared resources apply most readily to museums in the same geographical area. Regardless of location, however, museums that have a similar focus or budget might also have opportunities—for instance, new ways of sharing exhibitions, collection management, or conservation. In creating world-class centres of excellence, museums might become outsource providers to other non-partner museums. Becoming a regional resource can lead to continued improvement in process and capabilities.

Sharing resources runs on a continuum from collegial dialogue at one extreme, to near-merger at the other. So, where to start? First, make sure you know what you do well and what could be improved. By knowing what you need, you are in a better position to pick a partner; by recognising your strengths, you know how appealing you might be to a potential partner. Next, work out how much you can save. Ensure that the scale of benefit warrants the investment of time, resources, and management focus. Finally, it is vital to pick the right partner or partners. Beforehand, consider the following questions. Do you have a history of collaboration or competition with that partner? Is the partner financially stable? Would the combined effort be adequate to service you both? Can you accept relinquishing some control? Are you of reasonably matched size?

In any case, don’t allow the details of these investigations to get too much in the way. In a discussion with potential partners, you might discover new opportunities and consider options you had not previously imagined. Only when your organisation is open to flexibly approaching its operations can it take advantage of these benefits. Put another way, remaining stuck in your current operating rut could be a recipe for financial disaster.

The writer is a partner of Cultural Strategy Partners.

Chinese Contemporary Art

2009-04-19T15:00:00.001+05:30

by Eric Chang
International Director, Asian Contemporary Art and Chinese 20th Century Art
Christie's
February 2009

As China, Korea, Japan and India have have evolved into global epicenters, contemporary Asian artists are changing previous perceptions of Asian art.

Asian artists use the political and social turmoil, and successes of their own countries, whether consciously or subconsciously, as artistic influences. This reflects the vast changes to their society. Information floods the countries via the internet and Western ideas merge with Eastern cultures. Artists take these external influences and reject, accept or contrast them with their own culture.

It is this fine balance of Eastern aesthetics, philosophy and perspectives that intrinsically distinguishes Asian contemporary artists from their Western counterparts, creating new visual commentaries on a powerful contextual revolution through their art, and thus engaging in a global dialogue between the traditional and the contemporary. Christie’s is a committed advocate of these artists because of the unique perspective they offer international collectors.

In following the Asian Contemporary Art market, the art world will not only further educate itself in current Asian contemporary art trends, but become conscious of the future artistic prospects these countries are establishing in the global art market.

Tracing the beginnings of modern Chinese art leads us back to the period of the mid-1920s. At that time, the first group of painters was returning to China from Europe following participation in the government-sponsored work-study program. This spurred a highly influential wave of artistic reform, led by such great figures as Lin Fengmian, Wu Guanzhong, Xu Beihong, Zao Wouki, Chu Teh Chun and Sanyu.

Modern Chinese art, however, was not yet in vogue and neither was the movement a large-scale one; it could not provide anything like the independent salon system of Paris to counter the academic school, critique new work, or systematically foster young talent. Neither the government nor private concerns established authoritative museums or galleries to provide direction, so that exhibitions promoting the trend toward modern painting were held only under the aegis of private art schools or supportive civic groups.

As the 20th century began to unfold, the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures began to impact upon the 5,000-year tradition of Chinese ink wash painting and calligraphy. Thus, a question much discussed among Chinese artists was how to create a new presentation of that tradition while at the same time infusing it with new life.

The increasing clamor for artistic change brought about notable success, while continuing the evolution based on Chinese artistic tradition and the merging of fundamental Chinese and Western artistic influences. The resulting rich new seam of creativity wrote a crucial chapter in the history of China’s art. The 1928 founding of the Hangzhou National Academy of the Arts by artists including Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu represented an important step forward in its cultivation of the outstanding artists who were to follow.

The dynamism with which post-communist China has propelled itself into the 21st century is a parallel theme adopted by many Chinese artists of the contemporary generation. These are artists who realize their respective creative identities in the context of a rapidly changing society. The development of contemporary art in China began during its period of political reform towards the end of the 1970s, when revolutionary and native realism were the predominant styles.

By the mid-1980s, the rise of modernist thought was evident in what is known as the '85 Art Movement (or the '85 Art Current), which brought new maturity and diversity to China's contemporary scene. The distinctive cultural and historical changes of the 1980s – flourishing under the ideals of communism – significantly effected a burgeoning avant-garde art movement using multimedia and other means of engagement.

The movement further succeeded in instigating theoretical and philosophical debates at the deepest level, focusing on all aspects of Chinese ideology, its relevance and its effects in the contemporary context. During this period, Chinese contemporary art also embodied a distinctive saturation of Western thought and culture that flooded in as the country slowly began to open its doors to the world.

Yet by the mid-1990s – just one decade later and one that saw such dramatic change – it is possible to see that the manifest forms and styles of expression that appeared in China’s new art remain deeply and intricately bound to the traditions of Chinese life; Western materials and approaches are only a part of a greater body of expression that emphasizes a strong adherence to Chinese tradition and philosophy.

The development of Chinese art into the 21st century began with cautious, clandestine explorations, leading towards a diverse critical and dialectical tryst within the larger global structures shaping China’s own transformations.

On Public Art

2009-04-18T19:25:00.010+05:30

"Landscape is an environment in which people act and to which they react."

Barrie B. Greenbie

The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs' Public Art Program installed the public artwork by Lawrence Argent entitled I See What You Mean, a 40-foot tall, blue bear, at the Colorado Convention Center.

The artist has described I See What You Mean as a stylized representation of native fauna. As the bear peeks inside the enormous facility at the conventioneers, displacement and wonder pique curiosity and question a greater relationship of art, technology and whimsy.

"My public artworks are part of a larger whole," stated Lawrence Argent. "I am an artist that utilizes assorted mediums and venues to engage the viewer in questioning the assumed and provide a vehicle by which stimulus opens a plethora of responses that defy verbal articulation."

"What gives art it’s vitality is simply and ineffably the capacity of individuals to interpret and transform the language to express new ideas or restate old ones in a compelling way."

Robert A.M. Stern

An example of environmentally-minded public art, in Arlington County in Virginia. In this stunning public-art installation in 2007, five-hundred twenty-two solar-powered LEDs on rods, each topped with a reused plastic bottle, light up the Rosslyn traffic island between North Lynn Street and Ft. Myer Drive in Arlington County - looking a bit like luminescent reeds. This temporary environmental public artwork, aptly named CO2LEDby artists Jack Sanders, Robert Gay and Butch Anthony, was designed with Arlington's environmental initiative FreshAIRE (Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions) in mind.

"This temporary project promotes sustainability, hails the availability of alternative energy sources and technologies and demonstrates the ease of recycling," says Jack Sanders. "We will reuse all the materials used in the project-everything."

The installation was on display to coincide with the opening of the second annual Planet Arlington World Music Festival.

"‘Art’ and ‘the public’ do not belong to different categories or stand for entirely different phenomena. Art is public by definition. Works of art are the result of actions aimed at the public. Metaphorically, the arena of art is a public space. People do not create art without a desire to communicate. All else is a private matter, a hobby, self-fulfillment."

Ludger Gerdes

The Symes Avenue redevelopment scheme in Bristol sought to provide for an integrated programme of public art.

At an early stage the Symes Avenue Steering Group agreed that consultation and integrative thinking regarding public art was needed prior to the submission of Morrisons' detailed planning application. Bristol's Architecture Centre was therefore commissioned to devise and manage a consultation process that would enable local people to consider the ways in which artists could enhance the redevelopment.

A report produced by the Architecture Centre, entitled 'Symespace' identified a number of opportunities for artists that local people wanted to see progressed. It also suggested that the Symespace Project Implementation Group (SPIG) be set up, and that a Project Manager be appointed to work with the group on sourcing and managing the involvement of artists.

Les Baker from Reckless Orchard (Project Manager) and Cleo Broda (artist) progressed the findings of the Symespace report and produced a Public Art Plan for the development which was approved by the city council. Working with SPIG, discussions took place on a proposed public art programme that would have two key elements:

a) Events/projects celebrating Symes Avenue's past/future (the creative backdrop to the development); and

b) Design and integration of artworks within the architecture and its surroundings.

"Public art contributes to the process of place making."

David Sucher

Downtown Stuttgart.

"Symbolism makes a good city as much as bricks and mortar, glass and steel, and shade trees. We are probably all instinctual ancestor worshipers, and we worship the idealization of the past, not its reality, which is mostly lost to us anyway."

Barrie B. Greenbie

Chelmsford is home to a number of notable public art works and Chelmsford Borough Council has an active public art steering group that pursues an ongoing programme of public art creation.

"Traditionally the purpose of public art was one of commemorating important personalities and/or events - literally, the narrating of history in the streets. It was believed that through exposure to art and the inculcation of national and local pride the masses would become more cultured and civic-minded."

Daniel Piercey

This house in Anyang Public Art Park, Korea, was designed by Finnish architect and artist, Sami Rintala and Landscape Architects, Eedo Space Architectural Design, of Seoul, Korea. Located in a Korean context, in a suburban town with 700,000 inhabitants, Anyang is a small satellite city in the Seoul metropolis. The city had decided to invite several international architects and artists to participate in the design of a new park. Element house, Anyang Public Art Park, relates to the concept of art and architecture parks in Japan, the largest of which is Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial area in Niigata.

"The park is situated in a river valley. The building itself is standing on top of a small forest hill, along an outdoor route leading to the mountains in the far end of the park. Main space is a larger steel cube. Four smaller wooden rooms are connected to this space in different floors. In each of these small rooms there is the presence of one nature element; in cellar, water, on courtyard, soil, in first floor, fire and in the attic, air.

On a practical level, the idea of the work is to offer a simple shelter where the hikers may rest, enjoy their lunch, have a view over the mountains or light a stick of incense. For this purpose Norwegian artist John Roger Holte has crafted a platform and storage for the incenses out of coloured concrete. This habit relates to the history of the valley as an important Buddhist retreat. There used to be many temples situated on the mountain area, only few of which are left today. However, I was told that there are even older shamanistic rituals left, and services available if needed.

Main building materials are steel and wood. Concrete has been used to cellar and foundation. Openings are covered with safety glass, floors with jade and marble gravel, different stone type and colour in each space.

Seoul is an immense urban area the fast growing of which is visible in the condition of the surroundings. Constant noise, packed motorways, endless rows of cloned blocks of flats and ever prevailing grey smog create a tough place for living things. I hope this small building in the edge of the city and the forest would offer some contrasting atmosphere. If someone ever, walking by in an everyday hurry, decides to stop and sit down and allows silence to take over, lets thoughts wander, this work has reached its goal."

Credits: Quotes taken from this web-page.

Festival of Lively Architecture

2009-04-18T19:11:00.003+05:30

From 18 - 21 June, 2009 Montpellier will host a free architecture festival to give access to hidden and forgotten parts of the city and showcase new talent.

The Festival des Architecture Vives 2009 will allow access to hidden and forgotten parts of the city via a public walk that will link up the usually private courtyards of the mansions in the city centre. During the festival these courtyards will become sites for teams of young architects from across the world to create 11 contemporary site-specific interventions that relate to their historic settings.

This year’s theme for festival is Short-lived Curiosities. The spaces in these private courtyards, normally hidden behind doors and objects of curiosity, will be revealed to the public for four days.

Address: Various locations, city centre, Montpellier, France
Opening hours: 9am to 7pm, 18 - 21 June 2009
Access: Free public event
Tel: 0033 467 925 117
Web: 4th Festival of Lively Architecture

Still waiting...

2009-04-18T18:59:00.003+05:30

We had written about the paucity and poverty of images and narratives from and about Pakistan. That sad saga continues...

The New York Times features the work of photographer Zackary Canepari, in a slideshow titled The Heart of Punjab.

The picture above bears the caption:

"Students at a seminary school in Dera Ghazi Khan, a gateway both to Taliban controlled areas and the heart of Punjab, police and local residents say. As cooperation between insurgent groups intensifies, places like Dera Ghazi Khan are particularly vulnerable."

Is that all Zackary Canepari saw? Why did he go to Punjab? How would a Punjabi express herself in photo?

Photo: © Zackary Canepari / The New York Times

"Dutch Invertuals"

2009-04-18T09:49:00.006+05:30

Grow on You by Lucy and Bart

Work of Dutch artist Bart Hess will be shown as a part of the 'Dutch Invertuals' exhibition during the Milan Design Week 09. In the exhibition, a group of independent designers from Eindhoven, united by their common vision in design, present their latest work.

The exhibition has been made possible in collaboration with the Italian label Verger. The former design academy students explore familiar materials and show them out of their usual context.

Location: Via Varese 1, Moscova Subway Station.

Some of Bart Hess' previous work in collaboration with Lucy McRae can be viewed here and here.

From street to museum

2009-04-17T21:42:00.000+05:30

Shepard Fairey, Guns and Roses, 2007.
Courtesy of the artist.

From humble beginnings as a defiant, skateboard-obsessed art student pasting homemade stickers, Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.

Fairey's multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red. Recently, his portrait of Barack Obama, a ubiquitous sight on the campaign trail, drew a new level of attention to the artist's work and was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for its collection.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand now exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and running until 16 August, traces the development of the artist's career, from the earliest Obey imagery through his latest efforts, and includes screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal, and canvas. The artist is also creating a new mural for the ICA and public art works at sites around Boston.

See a slide-show of Shepard Fairey's art-works here.

Behind photographs

2009-04-17T21:05:00.000+05:30

From the NPR blog

A photographer's job is to document life -- both the big moments and the small. Tim Mantoani has taken it a step further: He's photographing photographers with their photographs! His series, "Behind Photographs," is currently on exhibit at the ongoing Month of Photography Los Angeles event.

Although the photos are recognizable, the people hiding behind the lens usually aren't. Mantoani wanted to pay homage to the creators of some of the most iconic, timeless images. It was a mammoth endeavor, not only because of his subjects -- all photographic giants -- but also because of his equipment choice. There are only six of these 235-pound, five-foot-tall, 20-by-24 Polaroid cameras in the world, and Mantoani used one of them to take his portraits. It's an homage, then, to the photographers, to their photographs, and also to a dwindling photographic medium.

Check out the Month of Photography Los Angeles Web site to learn more about the event, which runs until the end of April. The month-long celebration of photography is definitely worth exploring.

Soul expansion

2009-04-17T19:43:00.000+05:30

"When I admire the wonder of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in worship of the Creator"

Mahatma Gandhi

Image: © Project neXus by Thomas Solberg

Contemporary Vietnamese Art

2009-04-17T15:53:00.000+05:30

by Ashok Soman

New Asia Gallery in Singapore showcased four award-winning Vietnamese contemporary artists in January and February 2009 – Trinh Tuan, Nguyen Trung, Nguyen Thi Chau Giang and Tran Luu Hau.

Vietnamese contemporary art is gaining some traction in the art scene, although it still lags behind work from Indonesia and Thailand. The artists at the New Asia Gallery have moved on from images of women in ao dai, conical hats and traditional landscape visuals.

According to the gallery, the worked showcased explores intense emotions, socio-cultural changes in Vietnam and an exploration of identity.

Trinh Tuan is one of Vietnam’s top artists working with lacquer, Nguyen Trung is the acknowledged leader of the abstract movement, Nguyen Thi Chau Giang is a leading female artist and Tran Luu Hau is known as a master of oil paintings. The exhibition ran from 1 January to 28 February 2009 at the New Asia Gallery.

Art of Money

2009-04-17T12:48:00.000+05:30

Artist J.S.G. Boggs, holds $20 bill he painted, along
with actual $20 bill

Boggs: A Comedy of Values
Lawrence Weschler
Chicago University Press, 2000

Review by Stephen Bayley
The Observer

Lawrence Weschler takes a sardonic look at money and reality, evaluating the banknote drawings of JSG Boggs

There's nothing new about copying things. The Apollo Belvedere, which Winckelmann thought the 'highest ideal of art', is actually a Roman copy in marble of an old Greek bronze. In the seventeenth century, the French Academy in Rome taught its students to copy 'everything beautiful', a process which resulted in French government buildings from Djibouti to Calais being full of good, bad and mediocre knock-offs of something else. In the nineteenth century the Academie des Beaux-Arts insisted copying was the second most important artistic discipline after life-drawing. In those days 'creativity' was not valued as much as technique.

Reproduction technologies question the special status of 'art'. Walter Benjamin's famous 1936 essay, 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalten seine Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (' The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'), established an argument that photography made art 'ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free', as John Berger put it.

Photography encouraged fakes, too. Joe Rosenthal's memorable picture of the 28th Marines of the 5th Division taking Mount Suribachi was staged. Rosenthal found the original, spontaneous planting of the stars and bars on a bit of bent pipe by a scruffy bunch of squaddies a little unimpressive, so ordered up a more photogenic team of marines with a proper flag. In architecture, the architect Philip Johnson said the great thing about minimalism is that it's easy to copy.

And so to Boggs. To this rich tradition of classical academic values, Frankfurt School sociology and post modern muddle, JSG Boggs brings a welcome wry hucksterism. Boggs is the American artist who draws money. No tradesman in Antibes ever bothered cashing a cheque with Picasso's signature because, almost irrespective of its face value, the autograph was worth more. Boggs has developed this concept with hilarious energy and flair.

A night out with Boggs ends with him offering as payment a very well copied hundred dollar bill. Boggs will say something like: 'I'm an artist, I drew this, it took me many hours to do it, and it's certainly worth something. I'm assigning it an arbitrary price that just happens to coincide with its face value. This means, if you do decide to accept it as full payment for our meal, you're going to have give me change.' This delightful conceit has put Boggs at odds not only with restaurateurs across the United States and Europe, but with the 1981 Forgery and Counterfeiting Act when in London (where he has been based since 1980).

In this intelligent, amusing and diverting study Lawrence Weschler explains that Boggs has mischievously put our perceptions of worth and value into free fall. Boggs has won credibility in the art world and shaken the Secret Service. It is one thing to settle the cost of dinner with a painstakingly drawn hundred-dollar bill, it is another entirely to plan to reproduce a million dollars worth of drawings with the help of a colour laser printer. For this, Pittsburgh police busted him.

But Boggs is not a simple fraudster. His work reminds Weschler of that paradox of Zeno, where the race cannot be finished because first the runner has to do half the distance, then half the remainder and so on to infinity. Boggs is the same with counterfeiting. He never quite gets there: art and humour prevent closure. His drawings are also rather charming.

Boggs: A Comedy of Values is a brilliant little book whose sardonic scholarship (check out: Fernand Braudel, Milton Friedman, Jacques Derrida, naturellement, and Gertrude Stein's Selected Notes on Money) is a perfect match for its subject.

Very amusingly, and with great sympathy, Weschler tests our beliefs about money, art and reality. It is a miniature of great depth. Boggs himself explains that genuine paper money is itself a form of mystification (and that early US notes carried illustrations of 'real' silver dollars to assure the public of their worth). After all, the concept of credit is etymologically related to 'belief'. Boggs's money might not be beautiful, but ask yourself whether you believe in it and you're right into the debate about value that characterises aesthetics today.

But is Boggs art? Not really. He's too funny.

Rhythms of India

2009-04-17T09:42:00.000+05:30

Sati, Nandalal Bose

The Philadelphia Museum of Art had put up the exhibition "Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose" during June - September 2008. Here is a review article on the exhibition.

Indian Modernism via an Eclectic and Elusive Artist

by Holland Cotter
New York Times

Word is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show called “Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helps us to do.

Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.

In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.

Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. Ernest Binfield Havell, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present.

This mission really took fire, however, in a social circle gathered around the Tagore family in Calcutta. One of its members, the artist Abanindranath Tagore, taught at the Government School and developed a type of painting based on Indian rather than Western models. His uncle, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, opened an experimental university at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Devoted to the study, preservation and regeneration of native culture, it would be a modernist seedbed.

Into this venturesome environment came a young painter named Nandalal Bose, first as one of Abanindranath’s prize students, later as a teacher and director of art at Rabindranath’s school. From the start Bose understood the concepts behind the school: the idea that an aesthetic was also an ethos, that art’s role was more than life-enhancing, it was world-shaping.

And he knew that shaping was hard work, the result of accumulating, examining and sorting a wide spectrum of data. He observed and closely emulated Abanindranath’s style, which was based on Mughal and Rajput miniatures, and made a success of it. Bose’s watercolor and tempura Sati (1907), an image of a goddess who set herself on fire to prove her devotion to her husband, Shiva, was quickly adopted as an emblem of a resurgent, self-sacrificial Indian nationalism. (The original version of the painting was lost during World War II; a 1943 copy by Bose is in the show.)

In 1909 he spent months copying fifth-century Buddhist murals in the Buddhist caves at Ajanta . Everywhere he traveled he paid close attention to popular forms, urban and rural, Hindu and Muslim, from woodblock prints to palm-leaf manuscripts, to ephemeral patterns drawn in rice powder directly on the ground. He went to China and Japan to study ink-and-brush painting, and he kept an assimilative eye on trends in the West.

Steadily and quietly, from all of this he forged an art that was both cosmopolitan and distinctively Indian. It was also a body of work that conscientiously refused to settle on a recognizable style, which is why Bose continues to be an elusive presence in the history books and in the rare museum surveys of Indian modernism.

The Philadelphia show, organized by Sonya Rhie Quintanilla of the San Diego Museum of Art, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, retains the eclectic texture of Bose’s career while laying it out within something like a time-line format.

Annapurna, 1943, Nandalal Bose

The first gallery includes early work influenced by Abanindranath’s moody, spiritualized miniaturism and by the monumental Ajanta figure type. Later Bose would cook up a highly ornamental version of the Ajanta style in murals done for a private mausoleum called the Kirti Mandir in Baroda. These paintings of scenes from “The Mahabharata” now survive primarily in Bose’s full-scale tempera-on-paper studies, which are in the show.

In 1930 he designed a series of linocut illustrations for Rabindranath Tagore’s children’s book teaching Bengali, and he made a print to commemorate Gandhi’s march to the sea that year protesting the British taxation on salt. The print, a portrait of Gandhi, was an instant hit. Cheap to reproduce, it became the most widely circulated image of the leader of the Indian freedom movement.

The two men, who had met at Santiniketan, became friends, political collaborators and spiritual allies, with Bose creating hand-colored posters of Indian village life for three of the Indian National Congress’s annual sessions that led up to independence in 1947.

After Gandhi’s death Bose continued to teach at Santiniketan; Indira Gandhi and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray were two of his many pupils. In 1951 he retired but kept producing art, mostly Japanese-inspired, ink nature studies that moved toward abstraction, and postcard-size sketches — of friends and students, street scenes and coastal fishing communities, farm animals and flowers — of a kind he had been turning out by the thousands throughout his life.

He spoke of the sketches as a form of seeing. His long-nurtured habit of carrying paper and pens wherever he went suggests a form of yoga. With their formal deftness and avidity of detail, the drawings are his most engaging and personal body of work.

While the almost self-effacing scope of Bose’s art can make his career hard to grasp, its effect on 20th-century Indian art has been important, as demonstrated in a small satellite show called “Multiple Modernities: India, 1905-2005,” organized by the art historian Michael W. Meister and the museum’s curator of Indian art, Darielle Mason, to accompany the Bose survey.

It ranges from drawings by Rabindranath Tagore, through work by Bose’s fellow modernists in Calcutta and Bombay, to pieces by contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya. Mr. Dodiya, who has recently set auction records for new Indian art, is represented here by prints of scenes from the epic “Ramayana” inspired by Bose.

If Bose was ahead of his day, he was also very much of it. Some of his work is now dated. His image of the self-immolating Sati as an ideal of Indian womanhood obviously doesn’t work today. Arpita Singh’s politically ambiguous 1993 oil painting of a pistol-wielding goddess Durga, or Bhupen Khakhar ’s watercolor “goddesses” of uncertain gender are more like it.

But as an example of a polymath artist and teacher who through consistent and diligent generosity put his talent to the service of the life of his time, he is worthy of prolonged and intensive notice. The Philadelphia show, which will travel to India, immerses us, wonderfully, in both that life and that time. And it reminds us that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.

Horn Please

2009-04-16T18:20:00.000+05:30

Unlike Western modernisms of the 20th century that rejected the narrative in favour of the self-reflective artwork, India has had a strong tradition of figurative, narrative painting that goes back several decades. The exhibition Horn Please - Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, shown at the Kunstmuseum Bern during September 2007 - January 2008, attempted to follow the journey of the narrative over three decades, from the 1980s to the present, by tracing certain ‘critical’ moments in Indian art – moments of both assimilation and intervention – through which a particular kind of narrative was constructed.

By representing scenes from everyday life, fictive happenings, mythology and satire as well as autobiographical, societal and historical material, the contributing artists will reflect an India that has changed economically, politically and socially over the last three decades.

Bhupen Khakhar, Fishermen in Goa

The points of departure are the exhibitions Place for People (1982) and Question and Dialogue (1987) of the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Both these moments serve as reference points only to try to capture what followed until today, across time shifts and media, breaks and continuities.

The Place for People exhibition in 1982 was put together by a group of artists Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malini, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulam Mohammed Sheik and Vivan Sundaram, based in Baroda mainly, but with their links in Bombay, Delhi and Shantiniketan. This was, at that moment in time, a significant exhibition because it brought into focus new ideologies of narration (formulated almost as a manifesto by Geeta Kapur) and narrative paintings that appropriated the vernacular and the global, drew as much from traditional styles as it did from the West and told everyday stories without resorting to the monumental or the iconic.

Gulamohammed Sheikh, Looking for Layla, from
"The Mappmundi Suite, 2006-2007. Digital Collage
for videoprojection. Courtesy of the artist

This move was in turn rejected by the Question and Dialogue (1987) exhibition constituted by what came to be known as the Kerala Radical group. This short-lived collective was formed on the lines of left-wing political activism through what they saw as alternate art practices. Narratives were condensed into gestures that emphasized the political, the humanitarian and the social. Everything international, commercial and Western was rejected by the artists in this group who included Krishna Kumar, Alex Mathew, C K Rajan and Anita Dube, who was also the "chronicler" of the movement.

Horn Please revisits some works and writings from these seminal exhibitions, juxtaposing them with current works made by the same artists, and place them alongside the works of much younger artists, for many of whom the exhibitions referred to might be of no significance whatsoever. By representing scenes from everyday life, fictive happenings, mythology and satire as well as autobiographical, societal and historical material, the contributing artists will in turn reflect an India that has changed economically, politically and socially over the last three decades.

Nilima Sheikh, Firdaus V

Horn Please tries in its own way to bring together the multiplicity and diversity of art practice around the well-defined, the ambiguous and sometimes fragmentary narratives told through painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage, video, animation and installation work. The exhibition also shows how people who do not come from a primarily artistic background bring in new types and styles of narratives and how a number of women artists began using the narrative in different ways in new media work.

Horn Please was curated by Bernhard Fibicher, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and Suman Gopinath, independent curator and partner/director of Colab Art & Architecture, Bangalore, India. A catalogue in German and English was published and distributed worldwide.

Read Patti Marxsen's review of the exhibition here.

Multiple Modernities

2009-04-16T09:10:00.000+05:30

Atul Dodiya, Sabari with Her Birds (2005).
Lithograph and chiri-bark paper collage on
paper, 50 x 40 in. Courtesy Philadelphia
Museum of Art

During June - December 2008, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted the exhibition, "Multiple Modernities: India, 1905-2005". The artists represented included Jamini Roy, A. R. Chughtai, F. N. Souza, Bhupen Khakhar, Nasreen Mohamedi, M. F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Gaitonde, and Atul Dodiya.

Here is Stamatina Gregory's review of the exhibition, published in Modern Painters.

Disaffection with academicism, an embrace of simplified, abstracted forms, and a search for the spiritual in art—the overarching trajectory of Indian modernism may seem, at first glance, to resemble a shopworn Western narrative. Each of these 30 drawings, prints, and watercolors, however, offers highly personal windows onto a politically charged century that straddled decolonization, partition, secular movements, and the assertion of a national identity—in other words, a specifically Indian experience.

At the forefront was the Nobel Laureate Rabinandrath Tagore, represented by several drawings of birds and stark, abstracted faces (all 1928–30). Tagore’s experimental university at Santiniketan in rural Bengal became a hotbed of innovation, where artists rediscovered and combined the techniques of traditional manuscript illustration and East Asian painting. Several works directly attest to the university’s legacy. Bhupen Khakar’s wispy watercolor Untitled (Puja on a Visit to Santiniketan) (ca. 1990s) depicts a devotee paying homage to the school, and Tyeb Mehta’s angular charcoal of a bird was created during a 1984 residency there.

After independence, abstraction became a way to reconcile India’s figurative tradition with pure form. V. S. Gaitonde’s 1957 drawings, formal exercises in rhythm and line, are sensitively matched with Nasreen Mohamedi’s elegant Untitled (Rectangles in Space) from the 1980s. Mohamedi is the only woman represented here, despite India’s vibrant, integrated contemporary art scene, and depictions of goddesses from Hindu epics are left to artists like Atul Dodiya, whose admittedly striking Sabari with Her Birds (2005) reimagines its main figure as a youthful yogini. The history of Indian modernism has been laid—let its revisions begin.

Double Consciousness

2009-04-15T11:03:00.000+05:30

Food for thought: Untitled, by Sarika Goulatia,
consists of chili powder and bronze mushrooms.
Photo courtesy of the Mattress Factory.

by Savannah Guz
Pittsburgh City Paper

Within the past decade, South Asian contemporary art has received some long-overdue attention. In 1997, New York's Asia Society organized an exhibition titled Traditions/Tensions, which featured artists from South and Southeast Asia. It was the first major U.S. exhibition to highlight the work of living artists from the region. A year later, the Queens Museum, in New York, mounted Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora. The show included the work of artists from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the nations that emerged after Britain relinquished power in 1947.

Now, The Mattress Factory, in Pittsburgh, takes a look at aesthetic and conceptual developments in Indian art since those landmark New York shows. With Double Consciousness (June 2007), one of two South Asian exhibitions currently on display, Mattress Factory reveals the perspectives of Indian émigrés who have settled in the U.S. or Canada, and who are continuously reassessing their personal identities in response to the West's cultural hegemony.

Guest curator Vicky A. Clark has gathered the work of eight Indian émigrés on two floors of the museum's main building. While the show's title refers to the two identities each émigré lives with, it also alludes to the sometimes confusing duality of perception and truth: Appearances in these artworks can be deceiving. For example, Allan deSouza's aluminum-mounted C-prints, like "Shadows Cross Madinat al-Salam, 2003" and a piece with the spaghetti-Western-inspired title "Everything West of Here Is Indian Country, 2003," may initially look like arid landscapes and South Asian cityscapes. However, the vistas reveal themselves to be constructions of plastic and Styrofoam. This visual duality suggests that we be vigilant for similar cultural biases and misconceptions.

Exhibition contributors hail from two of the three artistic generations that are said to have developed following India's independence. Saira Wasim, born in 1975, represents the third of these phases. Her meticulously painted tableaux of gouache and ink on paper have the stylistic intricacy of sutra illustrations, but offer a cleverly disquieting mix of secular, religious and multinational iconography. In "Round Table, 2005," Wasim depicts major Middle Eastern heads of state, including Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All are seated around a table that is watched (and perhaps later served) by four inquisitive Ronald McDonalds.

Another "third-phaser," Sarika Goulatia, has produced two sensuously textured installations, both untitled. The first, resembling the powdery swelling of anthills, is comprised of bronze and ground mirchi (Hindi for "chili"). Fourteen of these deep-orange mounds extend, like miniature colonies, over part of the fourth-floor gallery. Inside each is a dense gathering of bronze mushrooms -- alluding, possibly (if somewhat unexpectedly), to one of India's agricultural exports.

Goulatia has constructed a similar work in the museum's basement. Made of aluminum and neel, a inorganic blue pigment, it is arranged much like its mirchi counterpart. However, with its visually arresting cobalt powder and gleaming silver centers, it is that other work's color-wheel opposite, and plays in cool contrast to the mirchi's decidedly warmer hue. Perhaps the visual and material duality refers to India's two sides: the country's supposed earthy, almost Bronze Age status and its rapid expansion into the engineered, postindustrial economy.

In Double Consciousness, each of Clark's eight chosen artists deals with the multivalent issues of identity, perception and their inevitable connection to international politics, while also exploring innovative media and aesthetics. These distinctly individual vantage points (and their articulate visual expression) can facilitate serious cultural debate and reflection. Meanwhile, by highlighting contemporary Indian art a decade after its first appearance in an American museum, The Mattress Factory offers a vital forum for the creative voices of the South Asian diaspora.

"Enjoy art for art’s sake"

2009-04-15T10:17:00.006+05:30

Art market bubbles...

by Merryn Somerset Webb
Financial Times, 10 April 2009

This time last year, a large part of the investment community was still convinced that the art market – and particularly the high end of the contemporary art market – would remain utterly unaffected by the global meltdown.

We were told that the super-rich would keep on spending, no matter what happened to the global economy; that the diversified nature of the new art buyers (not just the Russians, but the Chinese and half the world’s hedge fund managers too) would somehow protect prices; that art prices were uncorrelated with the returns from other asset classes; and that the collapse in other asset prices would soon see investors shifting even more cash into art.

For a while last year, the bulls seemed to be winning. In the first half of 2008, prices held up fantastically and, even by the end of a year that had savaged pretty much every other asset out there, the Mei Moses index – which tracks auction prices – had fallen a mere 4.5 per cent.

There is, I gather, a very simple explanation for this. In most art market bubbles, the holders of the most expensive pieces are rarely just art collectors. Instead, they are often tycoons who are heavily leveraged to other businesses and who, in many cases, have secured various borrowings against their Picassos and Hirsts. This means that, in troubled times, they have a very strong incentive to keep art prices both high and rising – something they do by overbidding for other art works at auction.

Say you have five works of art by the same artist valued at £2m each, and borrowings against them of something like £8m, and you need more money to bail out a failure elsewhere. The best way to get it might be to bid up another similar painting by the same artist to £3m – in a stroke making your existing collection suddenly “worth” not £10m but £15m, and allowing you to borrow the extra £5m.

In tough times, it is also in your interest to bid for the similar painting just to keep the established auction price at £2m, rather than letting it fall – and taking the value of all your collateral with it.

In fact, the idea that dealers and collectors are in cahoots to maintain prices was much discussed last year when, in the wake of the huge Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s – it turned out that his dealer had bid on more than 40 per cent of the lots.

However, no market can be bid up indefinitely. The Mei Moses index fell 35 per cent in the first quarter of 2009.

So, the great contemporary art boom was just another bubble. There was never a shortage of supply and demand was more speculative than rational – as perhaps all art investment always is.

The truth is that the art market has pretty much everything you don’t want in an investment.

It is very illiquid: when you want to sell, you have either to find the right private buyer for the artwork or find the right auction, persuade the auction house to take it and then wait for the auction to take place.

It is utterly untransparent: we might be able to see auction prices but who knows what price speculators in a hurry are getting for their works from dealers? It doesn’t pay an income of any kind. It is very fashion-dependent. It is also a poor performer. Unless you happen to get your hands on something by a dead artist (ie in genuinely limited supply) that has been recognised as good for some decades by everyone, it is pretty much a guaranteed money loser.

Sure, the indices that track auction prices suggest that art has moved more or less in line with the S&P 500 for decades, but most art never gains enough value to get a place at the kind of auction that index compilers track. There’s no index tracking that sweet painting of fishing boats that you paid £500 for in a little gallery in St Ives a decade ago – and no index tracking what happens to the prices of paintings by the average “emerging artist” over a career.

If there were, I suspect we’d find that “art” as a whole has always underperformed every other possible investment there is.

With these thoughts in mind, I have just bought a painting by Emily Gregory-Smith. I can’t imagine I would be able to sell it for what I paid for it (most original paintings are, in this sense, a bit like new cars) and, over time, its value will be entirely dependent on the extent to which other people might agree with me that Gregory-Smith is a fine painter.

If not many people agree, my painting will have no intrinsic value beyond the energy it will create if I burn it. I paid £2,000 for my painting. I don’t expect to make any more money on it than I will from the hard-boiled egg my little girl has just spent hours painting. Luckily, I still rather like owning both of them.

Merryn Somerset Webb is editor-in-chief of Money Week and previously worked as a stockbroker. The views expressed are personal.

Photo Mandalas

2009-04-15T08:00:00.000+05:30

Mandala 464, negative 2007;
print 2008, Bill Armstrong,
Chromogenic print, from the series
"Infinity", courtesy of ClampArt

An aid to focus and meditation long used in Buddhist and Hindu religious practices, a mandala (literally "circle") is a schematic depiction of the divine palace or realm of a deity. More broadly, it is a visualization of the entire cosmos. While many historic mandalas are painted or drawn, a mandala can also be represented in sculpture, architecture, textile art, or even, in the case of this exhibition, as a photograph.

Sudan, negative 2001; print 2008
Milan Fano Blatný, Gelatin silver
print, from the series "Photo-Mandala"
courtesy of the artist

Photo Mandalas, a visually bold exhibition of more than thirty photographs curated by Katherine Ware at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (September 2008 - January 2009), brought together two contemporary artists whose work has been inspired by the ancient form of the mandala. These photographic mandalas, made in color by Bill Armstrong (American, b. 1952) and in black-and-white by Milan Fano Blatný (Czech, b. 1972), are not meant specifically for sacred use, but are meant to inspire contemplation.

“The more you look at the image, the more you see,” Blatný writes about his dense, constructed images. “New worlds, new levels come up from the center of the picture and you can go deeper and deeper inside the image.”

Armstrong, by contrast, uses rings of saturated color to interpret the form: “The mandalas are meant to be meditative pieces – glimpses into a space of pure color, beyond our focus, beyond our ken. Their essential purpose is to create a sense of transcendence, of radiance, of pure joy!”

A cosmic vision

2009-04-12T11:50:00.001+05:30

Vishwarupa. Pahari painting from a Guler
workshop; last quarter of 18th century
collection: National Museum, New Delhi

by B. N. Goswamy

On attempts by artists to give form to the elusive Vishwarupa of Krishna-Vishnu

‘I am Time grown Old’

Bhagavadgita, Ch. 11

For countless generations, the air has been ringing with Krishna’s utterances in the Bhagavadgita — such as the one above: hoary of age, steeped in mystery and wisdom — but each time one returns to them, one gets the sense, as Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau did more than a century and a half ago, as if "an empire were speaking to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent`85." The great text starts as if it were a narrative, the bard Sanjaya being asked by the blind king, Dhritarashtra, to describe to him all that was transpiring on the field of the great battle which was about to begin. Quickly, however, it takes on a different aspect, as we know: that of a prolonged philosophical discourse in which the most profound of questions are asked and a range of answers given.

But then sensing, in the midst of it, the Pandava prince, Arjuna’s continuing inability to comprehend ‘the deepest mystery’ of it all, Krishna reveals to him his true self, a concrete vision of the creator and the destroyer, and of time’s deadly destructiveness: ‘a fearsome explosion of countless eyes, bellies, mouths, ornaments, and weapons, gleaming like the fiery sun that illumines the world’. Understandably, Arjuna is terrified, for who, which mere mortal, can take in the sight of "the 12 Adityas, the eight Vasus, the 11 forms of Shiva, the twin Ashvins, and the 49 Maruts", all revealed in one form? Or to be able to bear the "effulgence of a thousand suns blazing forth in the firmament all at the same time"? Before him are suddenly limitless wonders never seen before.

That magnificent form, the Vishwarupa of Krishna-Vishnu, is, however, not for everyone to see. When Arjuna sees it, it is only with the divine eye granted to him for that moment. And when the vision ends, Krishna reminds him that ‘this form that you have seen/is rarely revealed’. For, he adds, ‘Not through sacred lore, /penances, charity, or sacrificial rites/ can I be seen in the form/ that you saw me.’ And yet, generation after generation, and in region after region of India, artists have been attempting to capture that very form in their work. It is a daunting task, for the vision is at once grand and terrifying and wondrous. The brilliance of the words of the eleventh chapter is not easy to match, and to compress everything into one soaring image almost impossible. For how does one bring in nearly all that there is: the ‘fiery rays of crown and mace and discus’, ‘brushing the clouds with flames of countless colours’; ‘roiling river waters, streaming headlong toward the sea’ like ‘moths in the frenzy of destruction flying into a blazing mouth’; the ‘many mouths and eyes and thighs and feet and bellies and fangs seeing which the worlds tremble’; the ‘throngs of gods entering the great form — howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods, and gods of ritual, gods of the universe, twin gods of dawn, wind gods, vapour-drinking ghosts, crowds of celestial musicians, demigods, demons and saints’; a form that has ‘no beginning, or middle, or end’? The descriptions are remarkably dense, and when all the space, as the text says, is filled with this form alone, all space ‘between heaven and earth and all the directions’, is there any room left, even a little sliver of it, for the visual artist to enter it, one wonders?

With great courage and imagination, however, gamely as it were, hosts of painters in India took up the challenging task over the years and have turned out some remarkable images. And in a recently published book — Vishvarupa: Paintings on the Cosmic Form of Krishna-Vasudeva — by Neena Ranjan, so many of them — some occurring in illustrated manuscripts, others as independent, stand-alone folios — are brought together. Clearly, each artist brought his own resolve to the task, and his own understanding.

In one breathtaking image from Rajasthan, conceived as being with just one head and four arm — as different from so many others with multiple heads and arms and legs — nothing is what it initially appears to be: what seem like normal eyes of the Lord have the sun and the moon embedded in them; what looks like a golden crown from a distance is an image of the vaikuntha-loka; where there are nostrils, winged angels come rushing out of them. The image teems with forms and figures and symbols, all parts of the body densely packed with them. There are here other works of great ambition and complexity mingling with works that are touchingly simple. Some stay close to the text, and others depart from it. There are additions to the descriptions and eliminations from them, word-bound renderings and leaps into the unknown. But one thing is certain: in the rendering of the great theme, each artist must have discovered something of himself, gained some glimpse of the mysterium magnum that life is and the universe consists of.

The effort of bringing so many works on the theme together, and of interpreting them, must have been enormous, for they are taken from a large range of styles: Mughal, Rajasthani, Pahari, Kashmiri, Maratha, South Indian etc. Even modern ‘calendar images’— ‘photos of the gods’ as they have started being called – are drawn upon. But even as one would like to thank Neena Ranjan for this, one is tempted to wonder if engaging with a theme as moving and as layered as this, did not turn out for her personally to be a voyage of self-discovery. Or changed her, brushing as she must constantly have been against words and images that do not ordinarily even enter one’s ken?

For someone — was it Plato? — said it quite beautifully: "We choose our destinies when we choose our gods."

Reading...

2009-04-12T11:08:00.000+05:30

"When the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."

Virginia Woolf

Painting: Roger Fry

The quest for empathy

2009-04-07T14:11:00.000+05:30

Naseeruddin Shah and Raghu-
vir Yadav in Firaaq

Nandita Das talks about Firaaq, her maiden directorial venture

"Firaaq" is an Urdu word which means both separation and quest. I chose to call my film on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots that, because it reminds us that we have a choice over how we want to see what is around us — a world rife with separation and division, or a quest for peace and justice.

In fact, the one choice we can make is to choose our own response to violence. And I intended Firaaq to be a small mirror that shows us not only who we are, but also who we can be.

Now that I look back on my directorial debut feature, I realise that making the film was only half the journey. Taking it to audiences is the second half that requires not just promotional skills but also the perseverance to peel away the layers of misunderstanding and resistance towards the ‘other,’ and questioning anything under the surface of our ‘civilised’ lives. While I have enjoyed taking Firaaq to festivals abroad, what I was really waiting for was its release in India. I felt that it was here that people would relate most to the context and understand its nuances.

Cinema, unlike poetry or painting, is not a personal art. You make it to share it with people and engage with them. As an actor, I resolved the dilemma of wanting to be part of stories that need to be told even if not many people actually wanted to hear them, by choosing to do those roles. But as a director, I also wanted to reach out to as many people as I could, of course with the story I so wanted to tell.

For those who have not seen Firaaq, it is set a month after the Gujarat carnage of 2002 and deals with five different relationships and the impact of violence on their lives. Firaaq is about how fear, prejudice, guilt and violence linger on much after their obvious manifestation is over. In fact, there is hardly any violence in my film and yet the fear and tension are palpable. The story traces the emotional journeys of ordinary people — some who are victims, some perpetrators and some who choose to watch silently.

It was not my desire to direct that led me to these stories. Instead, the stories that were festering inside me compelled me to direct. It had to do with waking up to newspapers full of violence, getting into conversations about religion and identity that would turn into polarised debates on “them versus us”, meeting victims of violence at the relief camps, interacting with young college students who were finding their faith and idealism fading away, and many such life experiences that I needed to express. For me, making Firaaq was cathartic.

The film has been made against all odds but the responses I have been getting have more than compensated for all the challenges I have faced since its inception. The film has no overt message that it hammers or prescribes. Its intent is best captured by one of the reviewers who titled his piece “Firaaq holds a mirror to national healing”. With sectarian divisions on the rise, what we need is not just protest but also healing and that takes time. One of the viewers from Bangalore emailed me, “Not often does one come across a story that so subtly drifts inside you and raises questions you have been afraid to ask.” That is all I have attempted to do. Or as somebody said, “you gave a voice to so much that remained silent”.

There are emails, calls and SMSs from people I have known and not known and none of them stops with a congratulatory note. What has overwhelmed me is their need to engage with their observations, share their stories, go into the depths of their feelings, question their own prejudices, surface their own fears, so much so that people wanted to reconnect days after they had seen it, to express the complex emotions that the film evoked in them.

Of course, the film has also evoked other sorts of reactions. There are some who feel that it is a “one-sided story,” that it is “pro-Muslim” or that it is “not balanced”.

It clearly states at the beginning of the film that Firaaq is a work of fiction based on a thousand true stories. And I did want it to be true to the context of Gujarat, which sadly, was a carnage and not a riot. So if the reality itself is skewed, it would not be correct to balance it artificially. The blame belongs not to artists who represent that reality but to those who created that imbalance in the first place.

In any case, Firaaq is not about pointing fingers. It looks at the tragedy from the only perspective that is morally valid — the victims — and doesn’t revel in the heinous crimes of the perpetrators, even though they did occur. Above all, I wanted to evoke empathy, an emotion that we are fast forgetting.

I have also been asked the predictable question “why Gujarat and why not Kashmir?” As a storyteller, I wanted to respond to the world around me. The Gujarat carnage happened and affected me at a stage in my creative life where I could respond to it directly. Had I been at the same stage, say, when the Sikh genocide happened in Delhi or when the exodus of Pandits from the Kashmir Valley was forced through terrorist acts, I probably would have made films concerning them.

But there is a more fundamental issue at stake here: Muslims in Gujarat, Sikhs in Delhi and the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits are not competing tragedies over which sympathies must be traded. Worse still are those who try to use the suffering of one set of victims to justify or rationalise the suffering of others. Two wrongs don’t ever make a right.

A feature film needs a context, a setting, but it doesn’t mean that it cannot go beyond the context. In fact, the reason why people have been able to connect with Firaaq in different parts of the world is that it has resonated with their contexts. I met a Sri Lankan Tamil who said this was a film about the Tamils and the Sinhalas.

A woman from Cyprus that I met in Greece said it was about the people of Turkey and Cyprus and a man in Korea could see it in his context and shared his grandfather’s stories of the Japanese and the Koreans.

Human emotions and predicaments are universal, and it is not just a lest-we-forget film, but there is no shying away from the fact that it deals with a deep-rooted divide that is surfacing more than ever.

Firaaq is a means to an end, a journey that began seven years ago. Making sure it reaches its end is for all of us to decide.

Image versus reality

2009-04-06T08:00:00.000+05:30

Pakistan is today perhaps the country with the most negative image in the world. The print and electronic media seem to be intoxicated with projecting Pakistan as terrorist hub, haven of Islamic fundamentalism, hotbed of violence, zone of lawlessness...

But for millions of people living in Pakistan, daily life - is like daily life for people anywhere else in the world: work and leisure, energy and fatigue, young and old, home and workplace, joys and sorrows, hope and frustration, laughter and tears... Amidst the blitzkrieg of negative portrayal of Pakistan, the basic humanity of the people of Pakistan seems to have been completely ejected! And that must be saddening and enervating for the people of Pakistan. As much was expressed by Begum Nawazish Ali, the host of a very popular tv programmes in Pakistan, in the television programme on Discovery, Don't Tell My Mother, in its recent feature on Pakistan.

Hence one looks, like Diogenes, for the intrepid journalists, writers and photographers, who venture off the beaten track, and bring us stories, images and portraits that convey and affirm the essential humanity of the people of Pakistan.

But that is something The Big Picture, with its collection of 40 images from Pakistan taken from AP, AFP and Reuters clearly fails to do. The introduction, the images, and most of all, the captions are all hell-bent on ramming the stereotype down our tired throats. Sad, considering the potential for an empathic, humane portrayal shown in pictures like those below from that collection. (The captions are reproduced.)

Muslim devotees light oil lamps at the shrine
of Muslim saint Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore, February
14, 2009. Thousands of devotees from all over the
country were expected to attend the three-day festival
to mark the anniversary of the death of the saint.
(REUTERS/Mohsin Raza)

A Pakistani vendor waits for customers as he holds
heart-shaped balloons on a street in Islamabad on
February 14, 2009. Valentine's Day has gained
popularity in Muslim-dominated Pakistan recently.
(Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Images)

Afghan refugee children play in the Kochi
refugee camp on the outskirts of Karachi February 12,
2009. (REUTERS/Athar Hussain)

A Pakistani barber cuts the hair of a boy in a barber
shop on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday,
Jan. 31, 2009. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

That the ordinary, everyday life of ordinary people, in places considered to be outside the zone of normalcy, can be conveyed by photography (and caption), and thus bring people together rather than distance them - is well proven by Behrouz Mehri, in this picture reproduced in No Caption Needed.

An Iranian man skewers chicken for grilling as he
picnics with his family

From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib

2009-04-06T00:20:00.000+05:30

Photo: Eddie Adams, 1968

"... I called Peter Galassi, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, to ask him if the Abu Ghraib photographs were in MoMA's photography collection. I asked because MoMA's collection includes many pictures that were not intended as art but that are nationally important, including landmark photographs of the moon, Eddie Adams' 'execution picture' from Vietnam, civil rights-era photos and more. ..."

Thus begins Tyler Green in his outstanding blog on modern and contemporary art, Modern Art Notes.

Photo: Nick Ut, 1972

Green says Abu Ghraib was a particular landmark in the Bush years. They are what the Eddie Adams 'execution' photo was to the Vietnam War: the revelation of a grossly unpleasant truth, pictures that forced Americans to consider the horrors encouraged by their leaders in the name of our country. Recognising the role the Adams photograph plays in American national consciousness and its import to American visual culture, the picture is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. "Photographically, in terms of impact on national consciousness and our shared visual culture, the Abu Ghraib pictures - there may be as many as 2,000 of them - stand in for the whole of the torture committed by our government during the Bush years."

Read Tyler Green's post here.

Chen Chieh-jen: Condensation

2009-04-06T00:05:00.000+05:30

Chen Chieh-jen: Bade Area, 2005, video

"Condensation: Five Video Works by Chen Chieh-jen" was the first major solo exhibition of leading Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen in the United States. Born in 1960 and based in Taipei, Chen has gained both local and international acclaim for his important works in photography, installation, performance and video art, his medium of choice since 2002.

"Condensation introduces museum audiences to the depth of Chen's video works which are compelling in their sense of urgency towards issues of politics, humanism, and social welfare," said Melissa Chiu, Museum Director, Asia Society.

Read more here.

Robert Frank: "The Americans" at 50

2009-04-06T00:00:00.000+05:30

Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955.

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of photographer Robert Frank's The Americans. Through 83 photographs taken during 1955-56, the book looked beneath the surface of American life. The Americans changed the course of twentieth century photography and redefined the icons of America. Frank's style was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter.

Some of Frank's photographs from The Americans can be viewed here.

The exhibition presents all the photographs from The Americans.

Robert Frank (b. 1924) was present at the NGA recently, for a discussion in conjunction with the exhibition, together with exhibition curator Sarah Greenough. Read blogger Tyler Green's report on the discussion here.

From the Land of the Taj Mahal

2009-04-05T23:30:00.000+05:30

Shah Jahan

"From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for India's Mughal Emperors in the Chester Beatty Library" runs from March 21, 2009— June 14, 2009 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

The Mughal Empire was an Islamic dynasty descended from the Mongols that ruled most of India from 1526 to 1857. Leaders such as Shah Jahan, who is best known for building the Taj Mahal, commissioned vibrant illustrations and calligraphies from the greatest artists of the time.

The imagery and techniques used by Mughal artists demonstrate the interaction between Persian and Indian painting traditions, Christian imagery, and European ideas about depth and perspective–developments that were revolutionary in their time. Highly detailed and richly colored portraits of emperors, holy men, important historical events and hunting scenes provide a window into this important period of Indian history and culture.

We know a lot about the Mughals because they wrote memoirs and chronicled their reigns. They presided over a rich empire and a luxurious court.

This website is organized into four sections that allow you to dig deeper into the history and a few important aspects of the Mughal emperor’s lives including religion, opulence, legacy and art.

A tapestry of exile and loss

2009-04-02T14:41:00.000+05:30

Tahar Ben Jelloun

The Economist

In his latest work to be translated into English, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Morocco’s best-known novelist, examines how much people are willing to sacrifice to start a new life in Europe, and the consequences of taking flight. Mr Ben Jelloun is no stranger to these issues, having left Morocco himself in 1971 to study in Paris. He has won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt in 1987, an award he now judges.

In Leaving Tangier, the author draws on his research as a social psychiatrist that also inspired an earlier novel, Solitaire, as a way of exploring psychological and sexual dysfunctions that arise as a result of migration. Azel, an educated, heterosexual young man from Tangier, is unable to find work and becomes obsessed with his desire to escape from Morocco. He spends every evening at the Café Haha, gazing longingly at the lights twinkling on the Spanish coastline just 20 miles (32km) away. When he meets Miguel Lopez, a rich Spanish homosexual, Azel seizes the opportunity and leaves his family and his country behind to become Miguel’s lover in Barcelona. However, he underestimates the extent to which this decision will destroy both his sexuality and his sense of self.

In 40 short chapters Mr Ben Jelloun weaves together a tapestry of exile and loss as he follows his characters through the dream and reality of leaving Tangier. Al Afia, “the fire”, smuggles boatloads of illegal emigrants across the strait, unashamedly profiting from an enterprise that often ends in arrest or drowning. Azel’s sister, Kenza, enters into a marriage of convenience with Miguel and obtains a job and a resident’s permit in Spain, but her dream of finding “love, true love” is snatched away. Back in Tangier, the most touching figure is Malika, an imaginative young girl who dies before any of her dreams can be realised.

The invisible, omnipresent character in the text is Morocco itself, as Mr Ben Jelloun demonstrates the difficulty of ever really “leaving” your country. Although most of the plot takes place in Spain, the characters’ thoughts continually turn back to Morocco, a country that remains the “dearest and greatest” of their anxieties. Leaving Tangier is a brave, unflinching look at the issues underlying economic migration from North Africa — and the hard choices people make between roots and wings.

Walking between worlds

2009-04-02T12:57:00.000+05:30

Photo: Ibarionex Pirello

"My writing describes my experiences living in different countries, and my experiences of war, but beyond this, I think that people are interested in reading about how one person might attempt to cross a cultural divide. We live in an era in which community is, increasingly, something that we need to create for ourselves rather than something into which we are born. As a result I think there is a great hunger to discover how others have walked between worlds. In a way, the specifics of those worlds become less important than the way in which the traveler has attempted to bridge them. And with the growing number of people who are migrants (the United Nations estimates than one in five people on the planet have been displaced), the experience of migration itself - rather than the details of the home country or culture - becomes something that defines a person's identity."

Poet, playwright, and neuroscientist Pireeni Sundaralingam considers how migration defines a person's identity and art's ability to build bridges and break down the fears that lead to demonising others. Read Michelle Johnson's interview with Pireeni Sundaralingam in the March 2009 issue of World Literature Today here.

Postmodernism: Recent Developments in Art in Pakistan and Bangladesh

2009-04-01T21:06:00.001+05:30

by Atteqa Ali
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 2000

The first years of the twenty-first century have been a critical time for Bangladesh and Pakistan. Although the arts are thriving, the political climate is unstable. Bangladesh has yet to get on its feet. After Pakistan's fiftieth anniversary in 1997, many questions still loom. Are the principles upon which it was founded justified? Will there ever be full peace and stability in the region? Pakistan continues its struggle with India, now with the added threat of nuclear war. Through their sometimes political artwork, Bangladeshi and Pakistani artists contribute unique perspectives to the complex debates surrounding their countries.

Art schools are the centers of artistic activity in these young nations today. In Bangladesh, Shilpakala Academy and the Institute of Fine Arts at Dhaka University are the main schools where students can enroll in classes ranging from painting to theater. The National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi are the two major institutions in Pakistan that challenge ideas about what can be considered contemporary art, and particularly the position of postcolonial artists within this debate. New generations of artists in Bangladesh and Pakistan think critically about their society and its artistic heritage. They use a range of local methods and materials, from the jewel-like technique of miniature painting to elements of the vibrant mass culture. Yet these artists also embrace global modes, including abstract painting and video art.

In Lahore, Zahoor ul-Akhlaq brought postmodern ideas to the forefront in the 1970s and '80s. At NCA, he insisted on miniature painting's relevance and viability as a source for contemporary artists. His own paintings took elements from the miniature tradition and combined them with an abstract painterly style.
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The Three Younger Sons Of Shah Jahan
Zahoor ul-Akhlaq (Pakistani, 1941–1999)
Estate of Zahoor ul-Akhlaq
Image © the artist's estate

Akhlaq studied at the National College of Arts under Shakir cAli and began teaching at the school immediately after he graduated. He also attended the Royal Academy in London, where his interest in miniature painting began. On a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum, he was struck by a Mughal painting of Emperor Shah Jahan and his sons on horseback. He also saw the miniature painting collection at the British Museum. Akhlaq took images from and elements of miniatures and brought them to an abstract painterly realm, including a gridlike format developed by the American artist Jasper Johns.
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But some artists from the next generation have reversed this practice and use miniature painting as a foundation for their contemporary images. One such artist is Shahzia Sikander. Her work is in dialogue with the tradition of miniature painting; she expands it by adding contemporary elements such as new artistic techniques or images dealing with current events. Bashir Ahmed taught her and others, including Ambreen Butt and Imran Qureshi, in the late 1980s and early '90s through a rigorous training in the craft of miniature painting.
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Installation at Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, 1998
Shahzia Sikander (Pakistani, born 1969)
Overall size: 12 x 45 ft.
Image courtesy of the artist and Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis

Sikander left Pakistan to attend graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1993. She remained in the United States and now lives in New York. Before she left Pakistan, she received her undergraduate degree at the National College of Arts, where she studied miniature painting. Like her predecessors in this long tradition, Sikander updates the centuries-old art form with the latest developments in art as well as current trends in fashion and jewelry.
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Sikander and Butt are two of a number of Pakistani women at the forefront of artistic innovation; others include Alia Hasan-Khan, Naiza Khan, Huma Mulji, and Asma Mundrawala. Salima Hashmi, principal of NCA in the 1990s and currently a professor at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, has been very influential in the work of these and other younger women. In the 1980s, she continued to make artwork that dealt with political and feminist themes at a time when the military dictatorship curbed artistic expression.
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Poem for Zainab, 1994
Salima Hashmi (Pakistani, born 1942)
Oil and collage on canvas, 20 x 30 in.
Image courtesy of Salima Hashmi

Hashmi is a renaissance woman involved in many different aspects of Pakistani society, from teaching to political activism. She has championed the work of younger artists and advocated for the rights of women. She has been a television actress, a professor and principal at the National College of Arts, a curator, an author of books, a gallery director, and a vocal political activist. Her social awareness came early as the daughter of one of Pakistan's greatest poets, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who was an outspoken leftist. Hashmi's works are collages that explore a number of social and cultural issues in addition to current events.
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In Bangladesh, Runa Islam explores postmodern ideas in her art. Living and working in England, Islam develops cutting-edge videos on subjects ranging from the films of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to the mechanics of vision.
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Stare Out (Blink), 1998
Runa Islam (Bangladeshi, born 1970)
16mm film installation
White Cube Gallery, London
Image courtesy of the artist and White Cube Gallery
© Runa Islam

Before turning to the practice of art, Islam first studied it. She was an art history major researching the work of contemporary artists who use film as their medium. She now primarily makes films in which she considers presumably simple acts, yet intently observes and analyzes them. The young woman in Stare Out (Blink) does just that. In this film, Islam plays with the act of looking at artworks by reversing the direction of the gaze, which usually goes from the viewer to the image.
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Shishir Bhattacharjee is known for his scathing political cartoons. More recently, he has made paintings in the style of Bengali film posters.
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The Picture, 2004
Shishir Bhattacharjee (Bangladeshi, born 1960)
Mixed media on canvas; 135 X 135 cm
Image courtesy of the artist

Bhattacharjee's works of art were first seen in the 1980s, when he made paintings that were critical of the political establishment, but always in a satirical fashion. He continued this line of imagery, but changed the material and the mode of circulation. His political cartoons have appeared in daily newspapers in Bangladesh. During the past couple of years, he has produced paintings that appropriate images from Bengali film posters, but he alters these to serve his social and political messages.

Click here and here for more on contemporary art in Pakistan.

Click here and here for more on contemporary art in Bangladesh.

Read Naeem Mohaiemen's essay on Bangla artists here.

Postmodernism: Recent Developments in Art in India

2009-04-01T20:30:00.000+05:30

by Atteqa Ali
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 2000

The political climate in India has been volatile in recent years. The hard-line Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in government during 1998-2004. Ongoing tensions with Pakistan escalated to the brink of nuclear war in 2002. At the same time, India is a growing democracy with a population reaching a billion. Indian mass culture has also expanded, as its commercial film industry, known as "Bollywood," becomes the most productive in the world. Some artists take inspiration from or appropriate actual elements of local mass culture; some also address current events in their works.

A few artists and art critics in India have begun to conceptualize their unique position in international contemporary art. They question Western modernist ideas such as formalism from the standpoint of working in a post-colonial society that has recently emerged from beneath the shadow of a Western power. In fact, India is at the forefront of postcolonial critique, with theorists such as Arjun Appadurai, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak emerging from its shores. With the blossoming of art and theory in the South Asian country, artists and writers increasingly find an international audience and, indeed, many of them settle outside of India.

Among them is Anish Kapoor, an Indian by birth who lives and works in England. He creates sensual and spiritual works that are best described as sublime, evoking both pleasure and discomfort. The intense colors he uses recall the radiant hues one encounters in Indian mass culture and Hindu festivals.
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Untitled: From 15 etchings portfolio, 1996
Anish Kapoor (British, born India, 1954)
Etching; Sheet: 20 1/8 x 23 in. (51.1 x 58.4 cm); plate: 11 3/8 x 14 3/4 in. (28.9 x 37.5 cm)

Kapoor is known for sculptural installations that create an environment in which the viewer's body and mind are transformed by the subtle power of color, shape, and light. His portfolio 15 etchings, which contains the work illustrated here, provides a similar sensorial experience, with its sensual surfaces and rainbow of deep hues. Kapoor works with a minimalist vocabulary of clean lines and forms, even though the resulting installations are generally massive in size. Born in Bombay, Kapoor has lived in London since the 1970s. In 1991, he won the prestigious Turner Prize, the top award in England given to visual artists.
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Like Kapoor, several artists have adopted the installation format. Rummana Hussain's installations are contemplative spaces in which the viewer is soothed into reflecting on turbulent topics like religious strife, illness, and feminism.
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A Space for Healing, 1999
Rummana Hussain (Indian, 1952–1999)
Installation comprising metal implements, PVC poles, cloth, plastic objects, gold paint, vermillion red paint, and sound; dimensions variable
Estate of Rummana Hussain
Image courtesy of the artist's estate

This was Hussain's last work before her death due to cancer. Appropriately, in this installation she brought together the shrine and the hospital. A Space for Healing was a soothing, contemplative environment meant for both spiritual and physical healing. Yet it also included disturbing elements—domestic metallic items like forks and scissors made menacing by the rust growing on them. Referring to her own struggle with illness, the installation also raised the issue of her minority positions as a Muslim and woman in India. In the 1990s, Muslim-Hindu tension reached an unforeseen height that resulted in a mass persecution of minority communities.
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Although they are also concerned with social and political themes, Nalini Malani's installations are almost the opposite of Hussain's sensual spaces. Malani confronts the viewer with an overload of images and sounds about such issues as nuclear war and Hindu-Muslim tensions.
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Remembering Toba Tek Singh (Installation view Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. 2002), 1998
Nalini Malani (Indian, born 1946)
Installation with video projection on walls, 12 monitors with video clips, tin trucks, quilts, and Mylar flooring
© Nalini Malani, Bombay

"Toba Tek Singh" refers to a story by one of South Asia's greatest writers, Sacadat Hasan Manto. Taking place a few years after the partition of India and Pakistan, an insane patient keeps asking where his hometown of Toba Tek Singh is located. He wonders whether it is in India or Pakistan. He never receives a satisfactory reply. When he is sent from India to Pakistan in an exchange of mental patients, he collapses in the no man's land between the border of the two countries in search of his home. The story is a poignant expression of the sense of loss and uprootedness experienced by thousands of migrants who were forced to leave their homes for a new nation.
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Nilima Sheikh uses miniature painting—perhaps the only contemporary artist in India to adopt this format—to examine ideas about craft and tradition. Her tent-like installations take her paintings out of the context of a small, intimate setting. Like Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram first practiced painting; more recently he has worked on large-scale installations. He uses layered historical references to discuss contemporary conditions such as war and sectarian violence.

Ravinder Reddy, in his sculptures, also invokes history, in particular ancient sculptures of yakshi or fertility figures. Reddy's voluptuous statues, however, exist in the contemporary moment because of their vibrant hues made from car paint atop a fiberglass base. But more so, the wide-eyed women are reminiscent of popular Hindu festival sculptures used today.
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Appayamma, 2001
G. Ravinder Reddy (Indian, born 1956)
Image courtesy of the artist and Walsh Gallery, Chicago

Reddy's sculptures of full-bodied women or mammoth heads usually have an otherworldly gaze. Their unblinking eyes stare blankly out into the space inhabited by the viewer. Framed by elaborate hairstyles, the eyes are outlined with a thick, black line in the characteristic way of ordinary Indian women. Ravinder's works can be read as both religious icon and the everyday Indian woman.

Raghubir Singh's colorful photographs of everyday life in Indian metropolises are also enmeshed in the contemporary moment. However, photography has a long history in India; it was introduced to the Indian subcontinent only a few years after its invention in France in the 1840s. Singh's color photographs invoke India's history while capturing the country's present.
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Taxi Driver and Pedestrian Argue, Chitpur Road, Calcutta, 1987, printed 1991
Raghubir Singh (Indian, 1942–1999)
Chromogenic print; 10 x 14 3/4 in. (25.4 x 37.4 cm)
© Raghubir Singh

Born into an aristocratic family in Jaipur, Singh lived and worked in Paris, London, and New York, but his lifelong subject as a photographer was the vibrant culture and landscape of modern India. With its emphasis on visual surprise and spontaneity, Singh's work belongs to the tradition of small-format street photography pioneered by such artists as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Unlike many of his European counterparts, however, Singh worked exclusively in color, often composing his images with a graphic complexity akin to that of Mughal miniatures. Singh's prolific career was cut short when he died in 1999 at the age of fifty-eight.

Worshipper and Smallpox Goddess, 1988
Raghubir Singh (Indian, 1942–1999)
Chromogenic print; 9 15/16 x 14 3/4 in. (25.3 x 37.5 cm)

In this work, Singh captures the popular votive figures used by Hindus today in festivals, ceremonies, and homes. The photograph provides an interesting comparison with the work of Ravinder Reddy, whose sculptures are influenced by votive figures of this type.

Bazaar through Glass Door, Bombay, 1989
Raghubir Singh (Indian, 1942–1999)
Chromogenic print; 9 15/16 x 14 7/8 in. (25.3 x 37.8 cm)
© Raghubir Singh

In this view of a busy intersection through a plate-glass window, Singh vividly captures the surging energy and functional mayhem of Bombay, India's "Mayanagri", or City of Wealth.