Recent MARG Issues

(All images courtesy the MARG Foundation and used here only for representational purpose.)

 

What makes a work of art, or a piece of writing on the arts, relevant in/to/for contemporary India? That is certainly many-questions-in-one, and I pose it well knowing that attempting to address it, one indeed runs the risk of encountering its inherent contraindications. One is rightly warned against possible long-winded obscurity or comic simplification. One could even end up witnessing one’s earnest intent turn into a tragicomic act of sorts. Yet, that question is one which no modern Indian mind can escape; we need to encounter it lest we lost our direction not only as individuals with creative and critical faculties but also as a people imagining, forming as well as responding to our times. Hence, notwithstanding the perils involved, I endeavour to discuss it here in a threefold manner:

• What could be appreciated as relevant art making in contemporary India?
• What are the ‘pasts’ that the arts in India might invoke today and what are the ‘futures’ that they might offer intimations of?
• How can writing as a unique utilization of human language capture the complex interplay of past-present-future demonstrated in the creative continuum of art located in the Indian contemporary?

1. What is Relevant for the Arts to Do in Contemporary India?

MARG Vol 5 No 1, Jul 1951

There is no denying that the nomenclature ‘India’ has been invested, in varying degrees though, with the weight of the West’s rather linear aesthetic, religious and scientific aspirations since Herodotus first alluded to this land in the 4^th Century BCE. Marking a materially different cultural immersion, the old Avestan articulation and extensions of ‘Hind’ have been resonant of a still growing body of non-linear socio-economic transactions and politico-spiritual connections in a geography that spreads from Pasaru Raman’s Kerala to the Kashmir of Bahand Pather, Dalal Street to the Jarawa land, Sabarmati to the eight sisters of the North East, Naxalbari to Chandni Chowk’s Paranthewali Galli. Indeed, ‘contemporary’ as well as ‘relevance’ cannot but be problematic usages in the Republic of India today, especially in the pluricontext of its many-limbed arts that ceaselessly make and remake our nation into a site of creativity and violence at once.

Evidently when various cultures flow into one another to make unexpected mergers and divergences on a country’s mindscape, ‘contemporary’ inevitably becomes a transtemporal space of co-existence, and ‘relevance’ turns into a synonym of relativity. Now let us rephrase the question with which we began our deliberation: What makes art relevant in the contemporary—progressive concepts and urban activism or living practices and issues concerning art making itself? What makes writing on the arts a relevant endeavour in the contemporary—urging the artist-hero to take on the world and bring a change, or drawing the artist’s attention and craft to the patient ways of history?

The answers are not obvious or easily accessible, but the panorama of time that spans from Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” on the night of independence till the nationalist demands made on Indian citizens today seems to offer a double-edged tragicomic idiom to explore relevant art creation and appreciation in contemporary India.  It compels us to think at once deeply and broadly about the roles of the arts and the functions of the artist in a modern nation.

There is obviously a creative imaginary at work in constructing and reconstructing a nation through various historical times. And, it is certainly in the interest of the nation to uphold the most marketable aspects of its cultural heritage as well as conserve its sources of creativity. Given its constant need for creativity to feed its nation-building agenda, the state must consider the creative artist its greatest ally. But, in reality, the state’s projection of the individual artist very often veers towards the anarchic. And, the popular portrayals of the artist almost always represent her as perennially critical of the nation. How and why does a nation’s political and cultural imagination become different from that of its artists’? What makes the state wary of the artist and feel insecure about her thoughts, connections, movements and doings?

Attempting to address these questions might lead us to investigate what makes the nations of the world fear their artists, impose censorship on them, and even banish and execute them. As we progress with that inquiry, we may begin to see the pungent irony embedded in Plato’s alleged banishment of the artist from the Republic, the ideal state, which has provoked two millennia of interpretations by different thinkers from Aristotle to Iris Murdoch to Kancha Illiah Shepherd.

Responsive and responsible artworks, irrespective of their genres, converse and engage with their time, even as they take it upon themselves to reflect on the past and intimate the world of its future. Art treads a fictional course as Plato observed, but it becomes relevant when it arrives at and reveals a truth that is greater than what appears real. Art that makes such a difference to the world’s apprehension of truth willingly inherits complex conceptual and aesthetic foundations and constructs a layered practice that transcends its own appearance at a given point in time.

In 2004, performance photographer Pushpamala N made an experimental short film (11 min. English, B&W, Mini DV with sound) called Rashtriy Kheer and Desiy Salad (National Pudding and Indigenous Salad). An ironic look at the ideal of a modern Indian family as it was getting embedded in the post-Independence public imagination, the film presents its father character as a young Lt. Col in the army, his heavily pregnant wife as focussed on various recipes and domestic concerns, and their son as a studious schoolboy. As the action takes place in a classroom setting, the nation-building lessons expected to be imbibed and demonstrated by each character unfold.

The film that begins and ends with the National Anthem, was made at a point of radical change in India’s contemporary political history. Pushpamala’s retrospective reflection on an India which saw a few wars and a national emergency in nearly six decades after independence is in all appearance a comic projection of the aspirations of our neo-natal nation in the 1950s. But it assumes an altogether prophetic, even ominous, aspect in 2019 as we stand up in a movie hall in attention to the National Anthem being played.

If such a time-travelling awareness of the human condition embedded in an artistic work is what determines its contemporary relevance and distinguishes it from other expressions whose implications are exhausted within a given context, doesn’t ‘contemporary’ imply more than a reference to the current time? If so, how could an artist or an art writer begin to understand, theorize and negotiate ‘the contemporary’ towards engaging in an active conversation that helps her remember, work, and exist in a ‘relevant’ manner?

2. The ‘Pasts’ to Invoke and ‘Futures’ to Herald
 

MARG Vol 21 No 1, Dec 1967

To understand the implications of the term ‘contemporary’ in India today I recall here a recent reflection on Gandhi by artist Atul Dodiya (who has done more than 200 paintings featuring Gandhi) in the Sunday Express: “As an artist, whenever I looked at Gandhi’s photographs, I felt that he was approachable and understood the feelings of common people. As I reflected on him, I began to feel he was India’s first conceptual artist, who used various ways to convey his message and reach out to people — look at the sheer act of picking salt at Dandi. Aesthetically, he began to encourage me.”

Dodiya’s 2019 reference to Gandhi as his artistic inspiration takes me back to a memorial article where Gandhi alludes to Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi who was killed in the Hindu-Muslim riot at Kanpur in 1931 as his inspiration:

"I do not know if the sacrifice of Mr. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi has gone in vain. His spirit always inspired me. I envy his sacrifice. Is it not shocking that this country has not produced another Ganesh Shankar? None after him came to fill the gap. Ganesh Shankar's Ahimsa was perfect Ahimsa. My Ahimsa will also be perfect if I could die similarly peacefully with axe blows on my head. I have always been dreaming of such a death, and I wish to treasure this dream. How noble that death will be,—a dagger attack on me from one side; an axe blow from another; a lathi wound administered from yet another direction and kicks and abuses from all sides and if in the midst of these I could rise to the occasion and remain non-violent and peaceful and could ask others to act and behave likewise, and finally I could die with cheer on my face and smile on my lips, then and then alone my Ahimsa will be perfect and true. I am hankering after such an opportunity and also wish Congressmen to remain in search of such an opportunity."

In 1948, Gandhi’s ‘dream death’ apparently came true.  But, was he peaceful when Nathuram’s fatal shot arrived to take his life? Was he happy about a fellow human being turning an assassin as he attained martyrdom? While wondering about what had truly inspired Gandhi’s proclaimed ‘envy’ for Vidyarthi, one is reminded of Eliot’s ruthless insight in Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

While institutions of all kinds are competing with one another to be a part of the national celebration of Gandhi’s 150^th birth anniversary this year, the unsolved puzzle of words and motives that the above complex of inspirations and remembrances foregrounds might inspire more unpredictable expressions of human desire elsewhere. Hence does it lead me back to explore the contemporaneity as well as relevance of the genre of art that Atul Dodiya projects as the intuitive field of Gandhi’s political play, which by the logic of associative inspiration, as illustrated above, must have been Vidyarthi’s playfield, too: Conceptualism.

Conceptual Art, as it began as a trend in the Western world in the 60s, involves art making using just about anything--from the artist's own body and its performance to found objects. While the idea/concept that the artist wishes to communicate is arguably fully formed before its public display, the finished work of art gains lesser import--it could look like just about anything as long as the idea matters. Sol LeWitt’s 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” published in Artforum, Vol 5, No. 10 was the first piece of writing to use the term ‘Conceptual Art’ to reference a distinct movement in the arts that he described thus: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” In 1973 came out American critic Lucy Lippard’s pioneering record of the early years of the movement in her book, Six Years which had the following not-so-short subtitle:  The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.

It is curious that Lippard presented the terms ‘conceptual’, ‘information’ and ‘idea’ as though they all mean the same, and till today not only that this has not been challenged by either artists or art critics anywhere in the world, but more variety has been added to the pool of terms that are now used rather synonymously to speak of art that privileges concept over form. Hence do we have installation art, performance art, live art and so on—all veering towards an art making process that privileges the concept, thus blurring the boundaries of artistic genres and disciplines.

Western conceptual art may trace its inspirations to early modernism, especially Marcel Duchamp’s prototypically conceptual works. His 1917 Fountain featured a standard urinal-basin signed by the artist with the pseudonym "R.Mutt", and was submitted for inclusion in the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which of course rejected it.  However, half a century later artists seemed to have woken up to Duchamp’s insight as articulated by Joseph Kosuth in his 1969 essay Art after Philosophy: “All art is conceptual because art only exists conceptually.”

The idea that art can only be conceptualised and never fully realised directs us to the German polymath Leibniz whose notion of infinitesimals informs us that, the extreme quantities of both smallness and bigness cannot exist except conceptually. That is the theoretical/scientific foundation from where conceptual art makes its political statements. Ironically, in the sixties when abstract painting was at its zenith on the one hand, and the market for pop art was booming on the other, the emergence of conceptual art was a reaction to the commercial gallery system rather than a fully formed independent idea. In the wake of the tragedy of Vietnam, radical artists started making “dematerialised” works that inspired thought in the viewers, but were not desirable by rich collectors who, as far as the artists were concerned, were a part of the Capitalist machinery that had to be resisted politically.

When an artist claims to practice ‘conceptual art’ in India today, outside the continuity of the above art historical and political contexts available to her Western contemporary, what could make her work ‘relevantly conceptual’? What is the critical local relationship that an Indian artist’s presence must forge with her own past as well as the future that awaits her? If traditional artistic skills to paint or sculpt and an attempt to fully express a concept are not the artist’s priorities, as artist Mel Bochner protested, won’t ‘concept’ run the risk of being reduced to or confused with mere ‘intention’?  Won’t it also lead to an obliteration of many a rich artistic tradition in a country like India?

Besides the above concerns, the discourses of conceptualism often tend to undermine the idea of 'beauty', sometimes unthinkingly and sometimes deliberately, thus exposing the field to the danger of simplistic ideas  getting built into gigantic installations or silly performances. It is true that many installation artworks and performance art sequences in major exhibitions today disappoint and repel mindful viewers with their inane concepts, ramshackle architectures, and indifference to truth and beauty alike. Many a time, in the name of challenging the 'conventional' ideas and frames of beauty and reality, one tends to lose all grip on the lived experience and possible manifestations of beauty and truth. Many contemporary works betray their conceptualisers’ division between their theoretical propositions and their existence as sensory, sensual beings.

The above concerns and deliberations on the politics and aesthetics of conceptual art draw us back to Atul Dodiya’s reference to Gandhi’s conceptualism, as well as to Gandhi’s own allegiance to Vidyarthi’s practice of ahimsa as willing reception of violence.

Here, let us turn our attention to Inder Salim, the performance artist who chopped off the little finger of his left hand and threw it into the dead river called Yamuna. “They call me crazy. But I call it art,” he says.

On a hot April morning in the year of the Gujarat riots, feeling a void within owing to the disconnect that he felt with his environment, he decided “to create a bridge, a small metaphysical bridge”, to connect his being with the river, and went to the Yamuna with some of his friends, “like an engineer going to make a bridge”.  He had with him “a surgical knife, a bottle of Betadine, some bandage, cotton, a drawing board, video and still cameras”. He described his act and experience that followed in an article written a few years later in OPEN magazine: “I amputated the little finger of my left hand and threw it into the Yamuna, building a bridge between myself and the dead river. I titled the performance Dialogue with Power Plant, Shrill Across A Dead River. The pain was extreme, blinding out memory. I escaped some of it with local anesthesia. When I returned home, there was an ugly stump on my left hand. But my heart was full of something beautiful. It took a few weeks of treatment before the hand healed. But the heart was whole, almost whole. How alone I was, grappling with the truth of my own body, my being. I have no language to put it in words. No memory really remains, not even of the bodily pain. Only that stump of a finger stands witness to that April morning by the dead river. And, there are some images—some photographs and video footage. I think I managed to construct a small metaphysical bridge for transporting that part of my being which couldn’t cross the bridge in a bus or auto-rickshaw. In the process, I mixed pain with pain, dead with the dead. I guess I gave birth to a personal relationship with the dead river. I saw how the stinking dead murky water of a river is, in fact, an extension of our own pulse.”

I read Inder Salim’s narration alongside Gandhi’s quoted above. Both presuppose interested audiences for the presentation/description of their conceptualism. In both, there is an intense ritualization of action and even a romantic suggestion that violence is a necessary aspect of one’s rite of passage, and that it is in the endurance that the artistic/political hero is born.

Gandhi carefully ritualised his everyday even as he broke every redundant rule—in everything from his dress to the act of cleaning a toilet or attending to a sick goat in the middle of a political meeting of national importance, there was drama and a presupposition of witnesses. But does that really taint the achievement of redemption afterwards, as Eliot seems to suggest?

Perhaps, here and now we may begin to see what marks a relevant concept that through its expression, however sensational, showy or unfulfilled it is, reveals its difference from its hollow counterparts—sustainability. And, what else is sustainability but the continued and spirited endeavour of an actor or agent to realise an idea for life, well knowing the endlessness of that road? Only through such a sustainable endeavour can the relevance of a concept become manifest and apparent. This capacity to sustain one’s quest at once locates an artist within a live history of ideas even as it urges her to lead the world into a hitherto unknown dimension of experience. As she makes live art, she cuts a road between the unattainable infinitesimals—a greater common ground, a relevant middle path, which bridges the remembrances and dreams of humanity and shows the world a way to go.  Art, whenever and wherever it displays such resilience, remains forever contemporary and relevant.

As we have seen, ours is an age that challenges the material limits of practising art. A characteristic feature of our times that radically challenges the arts is its unprecedented technological ingenuity that has democratised and made accessible to all a new borderless experience of time and space. Earlier, the responsibility of rendering timebound and localised moralities redundant and inconsequential belonged solely to the arts, and ordinary people had to look up to the artist’s freedom of spirit and imagination for daily inspiration. Today, technology offers handy ways of freeing oneself, albeit temporarily. Hence, it is imperative for the arts at this time to rethink their purpose and modalities. It has thus become a contemporary necessity for the arts to find interdisciplinary perspectives and technological conduits that may facilitate radical transformations of human consciousness, thought and experience in the least possible time, using minimal resources. In this search for relevance, it is a waste of time to judge any idea, form or practice as good or bad. What matters is the faculty of the arts to reveal such possibilities of the past that can transcend a single individual’s or nation’s archiving and implementing capacities; its spirit must align itself with such futures that no technology may ever discover independent of compassion.

3. Now, What Shall We Write on the Arts?

MARG Vol 7 No 1, Dec 1953

If relevant art refers to the past and speaks of the future even as it performs in the present, contemporary writing on the arts calls for an engagement that is perhaps harder than making art—of preparing the world to receive as an everyday requirement, the complex matrices of such art making. It must take on the responsibility of studying the layered relationship between the artist and the many nations of the world even as it shapes a responsible public imagination about it. Its engagement must be interdisciplinary and international. It must be capable of dealing with aesthetics as well as history; ideas, practices and movements; institutional governance and the socio-politicality of culture; economic layers, labour and exploitation behind the scenes, legal battles, technology, media. 

One of the major changes that conceptualism in art brought in was the blurring of the boundary between art making and the art of writing. This was because language came to become a central concern of art during the first wave of conceptualism in an unprecedented manner. Many conceptual artists produced art solely by linguistic means. That trend continues to be, though conceptual art has now ramified into installation art, performance art, digital art, internet art, etc., all of which seem to be ruling the world today. It is also important here to note that many 20^th and 21^st century artists have also been pioneering art writers. Roy Ascott’s 1964 essay on the application of cybernetics to art and art pedagogy, "The Construction of Change" was quoted on the dedication page of Six Years where Lippard dedicates her book to artist Sol LeWitt. Ascott's art allies itself with technology and also makes unexpected forays into language to explore its verbal as well as visual realisations. In India, one would remember J Swaminathan’s efforts to conceptualise the artist as critic/ideologue, thus making a case for art writing to move from criticism to self-criticism. He wanted to explore the idea of the contemporary in multiple ways and wished to build an institution around it.

At this juncture, as contemporary art still privileges thought over craft and individual skill, it might help researchers if we made a taxonomical distinction between art writing from art making. What could form the specific concerns of art, has been a perennial question haunting the world of art. The other side of that question is about the kind and extent of engagement that may make art writing ‘relevant’. These concerns have provoked curiously splintered responses at different junctures in the history of the arts in ‘contemporary’ India, too. For instance, in the context of the 1971 artists’ protest against the Lalit Kala Akademi’s functioning, artists Bhupen Khakhar, Jeram Patel, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh et al who were involved in it held a markedly different opinion about the responsibility of the artists from that of KG Subramanyan who thought the protest had ‘nothing to do with art’. Issue No. 4-5 of Vrishchik magazine (February/March 1971) edited by Khakhar and Sheikh and published by Sheikh featured a set of contemporaries whose views on what brought relevance to an artist’s life in the seventies were quite divergent. But what were published in Vrishchik as well as in other art magazines and journals like Marg, Lalit Kala Contemporary, Journal of Arts & Ideas, Contra ’66 etc.,  during the last few decades of the 20^th century, are worthy references for contemporary art writing, if one were to see  locating the artist’s concerns within the discourses, debates and movements alive at particular times as one of the main purposes of critical writing on the arts. To a great extent, such a critical climate was made possible by the artists themselves with their interest and collective engagement in matters beyond their individual art making. Many members of the short-lived but intense Group 1890 including Gulammohammed Sheikh and Jagdish Swaminathan were not only artists, but also ideologues of the movement. Since independence till today, many Indian artists, art historians, pedagogues and critics like D P Roy Chowdhury, Richard Bartholomew, Bhupen Khakhar, K G Subramanyan, Rudy Von Leyden, Mulk Raj Anand, L P Sihare, Geeta Kapur, Gieve Patel, Gayatri Sinha, R Sivakumar, Ranjit Hoskote, Nancy Adajania, Deepak Anand, Vidya Shivadas, Natasha Ginwala, et al have contributed towards developing a public understanding of what makes relevant art writing.

All these do not mean that all has always been well with critical writing on the arts. Since the publication of James Elkin’s 2003 text, What Happened to Art Criticism? there has been an intense international debate about why the exponential growth of publications and platforms has not enhanced the quality of art criticism. In India this complaint was registered as early as 1952  when sculptor and the Principal of the Madras College of Arts and Crafts, D P Roy Chowdhury in his essay ‘The Artist and the Critic’ spoke of how the self-appointed art critics often lack knowledge about the processes and techniques of art making which are “crucial to analysis”.  Marg’s founder editor Mulk Raj Anand’s constant grief was concerning the critic who lacked historical sense but would still offer “half-baked opinions which are likely to mislead.” K G Subramanyan’s Moving Focus too condemned the “non-specialists” who populated the scene of art criticism in the country and produced writings that were “bland, colourless, uninformed, embarrassingly pretentious and prescriptive”.

There has always been a felt need among Indian artists for an energetic field of art criticism that would match the intense contemporaneity of art making in the country. It has become a greater challenge today to nurture and develop deep and yet lucid art writing  because on the one hand, the globalised art market constantly  demands custom-made writings to suit its commercial purposes, and on the other the academia, limited by the compliance requirements of centralised bodies like the UGC, chooses not to stray beyond the tight disciplinary boundaries of art history, contemporary art appreciation, art education, art journalism, theatre studies, film studies etc. Not only has this affected the quality of thought in art criticism and made it quite derivative, but it has also given a feeling to many artists that if art writing needs to be developed as a reliable genre aiding the fast-paced and yet discursive contemporary art scene, they have to do it themselves.

It is against the above disconcerting background that we see the curious character of contemporary arts curator emerge on the Indian arts scene. She often wears many hats from that of an arts manager to that of an art writer. Some of them do not develop their writings beyond what is required for the serious-sounding exhibition notes and catalogue introductions, while others go on to publish professional essays, commissioned artist monographs and even book-length research on favourite topics. In a world where artists’ practices of conceptualism as well as the dynamics of art-and-technology are exploding the conventional art historical categories, can art writing lag so far behind art making?

The artistic and critical issues and events that the Indian contemporary presents to an art writer to deal with are manifold. In a world where art-and-technology is making quantum leaps as it creates newer forms of visuality and performances to respond to the changes in and around the artist, art writing demands to be profound, vigilant and yet playfully lucid in order to communicate. If art writing today cannot sensitise, inspire and guide the tech-savvy millennial, whose material culture is infused with an urge to embrace speed, towards savouring time’s myriad paces, the future of art will be very lonely and self-referential.

Mixed media artist Rajyashri Goody’s installation work uses found objects—thread, cloth and even people’s personal belongings—to create an assemblage that serves as a stark commentary on untouchability that is still used as an instrument to consolidate power structures in many parts of India. Her installation ‘Skyscape’ alludes to the Manusmriti that relegates some sections of the society to the lowest level, comparing their location with that of the feet on the human body. A viewer who enters the room finds a ceiling that is heaving with old footwear almost falling on her head. The general feeling that the installation generates is again mixed, like the media itself—suffocation, darkness, dread about the sky of dirty chappals tumbling down on one’s head, along with a humdrum fear of getting dirty. Goody makes her unsuspecting urban art viewer partake in the lived experiences of some of our population in the remotest corners of this country. By doing that, she actively works to make her installation a piece of ‘information art’, spreading awareness on how oppressive systems may be undone by inviting community responses to her work.

When contemporary art is engaged in such thought and subtle activism, what must art writing be doing? Should not it take upon itself the role of showing the distinction between committed art and what is passed around as committed art? That question leads us back to the old masters of art writing in modern India—WG Archer, Richard Bartholomew, Mulk Raj Anand et al—who placed a deep engagement with the histories, processes, material and techniques of art as an essential qualifier for an art writer.

Ironically, conceptualism which started out by rejecting the primacy of material and skill over idea, has now given rise to a generation of artists for whom their chosen material is of paramount importance. Subodh Gupta’s gigantic sculptural works using steel kitchen utensils and Shilo Shiv Suleman’s 50-feet-wide spread of lotus flowers standing tall with pulse sensors on the stems that make each of them pulse in sync with the heartbeat of the person touching it, are both arresting due to their curious visualities. They belong to two different generations but seem to share a capacity to express their concepts with abandon. But, knowing that Gupta is facing #MeToo allegations and Suleman is running the Fearless Collective, would not an art writer be intrigued enough to look more closely at their works and study each for its potential to hold humane content? That initiative could also develop either into an insightful subaltern study of the material  and resources used to create the mammoth works of many contemporary conceptual artists, or as a critique of the art industry that is largely indifferent to the divides that separate the artist’s work, her life and her pronounced ideological location.

Likewise, a comparative study of Inder Salim’s performances, in a pair of trousers with the back cut open, that starkly bring our attention to the fact that ‘women are vulnerable from the front, men are vulnerable from the back,’ and Maya Krishna Rao’s performative Walk would reveal the blurring of generic boundaries of the arts. Salim and Rao come from entirely different backgrounds and training regimes, but their bold expressions before their audiences connect in a manner that needs to be thought and written about.

Should not the sensational trial of art dealer Subhash Kapoor for allegedly running an international idol smuggling racket and the concurrent forensic study of the antique works that he had ‘sold’ to many renowned museums across the world move an art writer to explore the intersection of art and law as well as that of art history and science? Should not she thus lead studies on art into an organically interdisciplinary future? Karnatic musician and activist TM Krishna weaving his music with that of the Jogappas, the transgender musicians; the fundamentalist attacks, state bans and sedition charges faced by artists for being a force of resistance; the comparable movements of inherently conceptual forms of art like cinema and architecture that seem to be leaving a volley of imported theoretical positions and experimental practices behind them to now adopt an open minimalism that privileges space even as they focus on the distinctiveness of locality, character, complexion and direction; Raghu Dixit’s interpretation of Kannada folk music juxtaposed with the soul-crushing hip-hop of Kashmiri rapper Ahmer Javed; the possibility of the archaeological excavations at Phanigiri, the early Buddhist site in Telangana, offering unexpected warnings against religious and ideological conflicts jeopardizing democratic ideals in our times; a workshop to reinterpret texts like Chitrasutra and Natyashastra towards understanding the contemporaneity of Chandralekha’s revolutionary choreographic works that also draw from those ancient texts; exploring the reasons of Dashrath Patel’s collaboration with Chandralekha and  her own reasons for drawing alike from the physical resources of Bharatanatyam, Chhau, Kalaripayattu etc, and  the visual ethos of artists like Mondrian; the futuristic significance of Rahul Mehrotra’s study of the architecture of an impermanent megacity that springs up for the Kumbh Mela festival; the lessons in endurance that our ancient temples, Mughal structures, Kerala ettukettu residences, Kath-Kunni heritage of Himachal Pradesh and other apparently diverse architectures in different parts of this land can cumulatively offer our current thinking on smart cities—these and many more of such subjects need to be explored, and hence artistic and critical platforms appropriate for such explorations also need to be created, nurtured and sustained in India.

Art writing today must address some other seminal questions, too: Why are our cultural institutions set up in accordance with visionary manifestoes (such as the India Report prepared by Charles and Eames Ray which served as a guiding document for setting up the National Institute of Design) reducing themselves to mere bureaucratic functioning? In this age of communication revolution and information surfeit, does documentation-oriented research and writing have any chance of survival in the public domain? How are we planning to relate with the vernaculars and channel their critical cultures towards subverting the hegemonic systems that still suffocate us? In a world that is largely guided by the vividness of the digital media, and habituated to their competitive speeds of delivery, what is the future of writing and designing for print? What are the specific advantages a bigger bracket of time may offer an art writer in an age allegedly characterised by attention deficit? What transformation must documentation and archiving as institutional processes undergo in a world of advanced search engines and opens sources? Is there an organic link between the thousands of dying native art spaces and contemporary conceptualism which could be discovered and nurtured to bring about a democracy of the arts in the country? How do we facilitate an ecosystem of the arts wherein national institutions, commercial galleries and theatres, auction houses and box offices, museums and art schools, gharanas and non-profits, collectors and indigenous spaces, market and academia may collaborate to create an energetic creative environment for our children? What does internationalism mean for the arts in the times of internet?

These are exactly the concerns and questions that animate our discussions and reflections at Marg, India’s oldest magazine of the arts, as it prepared to enter its 75^th year in Oct 2020. Time and again Marg’s editorials have posed these questions. And, true to that explorative spirit of its founders and in keeping with the demands of the times as understood above, a new discursive format of Marg is scheduled to be launched to mark the legendary magazine’s Platinum Jubilee year. In dreaming and planning for its renewed avatar, Marg is presently trying to recover the critical voice that the art scene in India seems to have lost somewhere along the way, and which it badly needs as a cohesive force in our fast-fragmenting times. And, this is indeed an attempt to understand and practice what may be termed relevant and contemporary in art writing.

To conclude this largely theoretical outlining of what may make relevant art making and art writing in our times, I revisit a conversation wherein a 30-year-old Naseeruddin Shah narrated one of his theatre experiences to Chitra Subramanian: “We did Waiting for Godot. I know it is not fair to stage a play like that and expect a full house, but you'd be surprised that we did get a full house. But the tragedy was that the people found it a funny play and they sat and laughed through it. What do you do?”

Naseer’s poignant 1980 question, ‘What do you do?’ is our cue to find an answer to our own puzzle about the responsibility of art writing today. The crucial role, which informed and insightful art writing must play to bridge the gaps between the inspired artist and the uninitiated lay person, art history and contemporary art journalism, various genres of art and epistemic advancements in other fields and disciplines, is what is foregrounded here. However, the larger responsibility of art writing is perhaps to ensure that the individual artist’s critical faculty for resistance remains counterintuitive to the manipulative games of the powerful and the insensitive.

An example of such futuristic art making may be found in the heart of Vienna in the form of a Memorial for the deserters and other victims of Nazi military justice, created by artist Olaf Nicolai. Its concrete base in the shape of a three-layered X has on it the repeated inscription, “all alone”, borrowed from a poem by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. This memorial tells us of the predicament of individuals in the face of societal structures of order and power. Though they were threatened with the fate of being obliterated as  an »X« in a file, the artist understands the position of the  deserters as one which brings a  great lesson for humanity, because they were the ones who dared to make their own decisions and stand up to pressure. Nicolai created only a pedestal as Memorial so that whoever steps onto it became part of the memorial, symbolizing the autonomous individual.

Nicolai’s 2014 work in Vienna in many ways illustrates Milan Kundera’s incisive articulation of the integral connection between resistance and memory: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” It is such moving reminders that contemporary art making must tirelessly offer our present when it tends to turn mindless and repeat its past violences. And it is of the possible futures of sensitivity that it must intimate the world. With such art making as its subject of study and field of engagement, relevant art writing must discover hitherto unheard stories of connection, so that hope may prevail on earth and peace is conserved for our children.