Timeless consolation or shock device?

RANJIT HOSKOTE focusses on a variety of art that imparts motive power to its practitioners. It addresses itself not to the aesthete, but to the viewers on the street. Starting a new column.

IT has long been regarded as a sacred truth that painters and sculptors create images that endure and whose power transcends the historical context of their origin and even the stylistic parameters within which they arose. On this account, the finest and most compelling art-works produced by the human imagination are those whose meaning can never be exhausted by interpretation: there they stand, proudly autonomous of ambient reality, preserving their intriguing ambiguity and their mystery. Wherever they may go, they take their own weather and temperature with them, so that an Egyptian pharaoh or a Gangetic earth mother continue to exercise their spell even in a New York museum, and a Rodin sculpture or a Picasso etching retain their vivid gravity and disturbing power even when they are on display in Mumbai or Delhi. In other words, the greatness of great art is seen to reside in its ability to provoke wonderment in a way that is universal and transcendent.

Such a vision of art stems from a view of the artist as a sort of priest of higher energies. Creativity, in this version, is seen to flow from the gift, enjoyed by a few sensitive spirits, of communicating revelations from another plane of consciousness. These revelations are transmitted by the artist-as-priest, in turn, to the faithful, who are distinguished from the philistine rabble by their aesthetic competence, their cultivation of refinement. Over the last few decades, however, many artists have become preoccupied with a very different understanding of what goals art can achieve and how it can achieve them, not at a universal and transcendent plane, but in that theatre of more urgent and possibly more visceral questions of life which we address under the aspect of social and political being.

This kind of art expresses the determined anti-aesthetic impulse which imparts motive power to many contemporary practitioners of art: it addresses itself to the circuits of language, communication and meaning through which we construct our lives, our ideas, our self-images, our world pictures and our relationships. This art practice does not limit itself to the painted frame or the object hallowed by a pedestal; nor does it confine itself to the gallery space. It blurs the lines separating the Fine Arts from other sectors of human activity. It finds expression in mailing procedures, in the dissemination of photocopied images, in the assembling of eccentric manuals of instruction, in the re-wiring of interpersonal exchanges and ritualised situations of encounter. It often takes the form of elaborate games that unmask art as a contract of interpretation between the artist and the viewer, rather than treating it as a sacred revelation conveyed by the artist to the viewer.

In a word, we are speaking of those beguiling, sometimes deceptive, often edgy varieties of art broadly gathered under the rubric of Conceptualism. And though their detractors believe that the Conceptualists have democratised art to the point of anarchy, Conceptualism can also produce art-works that are compelling and semantically inexhaustible, precisely because of their local and situational emphasis. Conceptualism does not address itself to the aesthete prepared for the holy communion of art, but rather, goes out to find its viewers in the street. And when it finds them there, trudging the pavements of ordinary experience, it opens the trapdoors of insight below their feet without warning.

The genesis of Conceptualism lies in its fundamental opposition to High Art: as such, it deliberately annihilates the status of its creations as art by deploying unorthodox or found objects in bizarre or mutable arrangements, or by offering coarse and sensational stimuli to the viewer, in a spirit of flamboyant affront. Whether it is Marcel Duchamps urinal (a readymade object re-located ironically in the gallery) or Joseph Kosuths chair (not a physical presence but an idea evoked through photographs and dictionary entries), Conceptual Art has obliged us to review, literally re-view, our role as consumers of art, and to re- sensitise ourselves towards art-works as forms of life rather than as commodities.

This is the emancipatory impulse that propels the witty charades and bewildering constructions of Conceptualism, which tend to be dismissed as obscure, somehow irritating and even juvenile antitheses to the dignified Work of Art properly enshrined in the antiseptic white box of the gallery. The danger with Conceptualism is that although it is too protean an approach to be replicable, it can degenerate into a mail-order style along the passage from West to East, as so many idioms of art have done before it. In the process, it would lose its real charge as a sophisticated, multi-style approach to artistic intervention in specific political and cultural contexts.

This is a danger that aspiring Conceptualists in India ought to think about, because real Conceptualists do not turn out feeble, simple-minded imitations of Sol LeWitt, Vito Acconci, Barbara Kruger or Rebecca Horn rather, they cultivate a panther-like alertness to the environment, reaching out for whatever language of ideas and images seems best to serve the confrontation of the moment.

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