Indian art in New York

Unlike the earlier great westward rush, the brightest Indian artists are choosing to live at home. But it is private interest that will present their work in the international arena, says GAYATRI SINHA.

A FEW months ago an edit piece in The Dawn, Pakistan, pointed out that Indian art galleries were proliferating in New York. Despite the success of Pakistani artists abroad, the writer complained, no galleries had been initiated by Pakistani entrepreneurs. In the intervening period, the number of Indian galleries in New York has more than doubled. And suddenly the distance between Mandi House and Chelsea seems to have shrunk.

In Chelsea, in which former warehouses have been converted into the hub of the New York art world, the Indian presence has a lively aggressive edge. Between 24th and 26th Street, there is Ebrahim Alkazi's "Sepia", probably the largest photo gallery in New York which houses Alkazi's extraordinary collection of 19th and 20th Century photographs. There is also Arani and Mita Bose's "Pacia", a sprawling 11th floor space that has so far fielded individual artists but has in the last two seasons invited shows curated by Peter Nagy of Indian and diaspora artists. Cristina and Mahesh Naithani formerly of "Dialectica" have renamed their gallery "Culture" while Sundaram Tagore has opened a spanking new space in the heart of Soho with an exhibition of abstract works by Natwar Bhavsar.

A more recent player in the field is Rajiv Chaudhuri's "India Center of Art and Culture" (ICAC) which opened in March this year with "Home and the World", a mixed media show on diaspora and identity. Presently it is exhibiting "Woman/Goddess" with its focus on contemporary Indian photography. Another proactive gallerist is Sushil Puria of "Admit One" who has shown Anjolie Ela Menon's religio-kitsch paintings in the past, Pakistani artists Ayesha Khaled and Imran Qureshi and is currently showing the works of London based Indian photographer Sushil Gupta.

The Chelsea galleries are so close to one another that your Bangladeshi cab driver may just advise you to walk. What is also critical to the attention that they attract for Indian art is their proximity to other leading galleries in New York. Both Bose's "Pacia" and the "ICAC" are located in buildings almost completely dominated by galleries. Within a stone's throw is Barbara Gladstone, the gallery which has orchestrated an extraordinarily successful showing of Shirin Neshat's powerful audio visual trilogy - "Pulse", "Passage" and "Possessed". Virtually next door is the Charles Cowles Gallery - a recently inaugurated space that is showing Richard Hamilton's prints and photographs from 1968 to 1998.

Hamilton, probably Britain's first pop artist, reveals his commitment to experimentation and his independence in the face of numerous schools, much like James Joyce who did not allow a single influence to dominate his writing. Several of the prints on view illustrate Joyce's Ulysses, although there is also Hamilton's famous "Swinging London" in which the artist creates a near iconic picture from a newspaper shot of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser after their arrest on account of drug possession. It is an image of 1970s consumerism that Hamilton presents with an ironic aloof detachment.

However, of the nearly 600 galleries in New York with artists of every hue, it is the success of Pakistani artist Shazia Sikander or the Iranian Shirin Neshat that holds some interesting lessons for a burgeoning Indian art. Neshat (43), was born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957. She went to America as a 17-year-old in 1974, and returned sporadically to the homeland after the Iranian revolution.

There is an apocryphal story that Neshat quotes of her student years in America. One day she wore a full Iranian burkha to class and was surprised, even intimidated by the response. Many of the students saw her as a figure of fear - a stereotypical Islamic entity, even one who may be concealing a gun under her burkha. Neshat's reaction was to work in a concerted way, over the last decade on issues of Muslim identity especially that of women in post-revolutionary Iran.

The works "Pulse", "Passage", "Possessed" are three single channel films of astonishing power, which develop not through narrative but through visual suggestion in which the viewer inscribes her own story. "Passage" builds up a terrible tension in alternating shots of black-clad women in a circle, digging on stony desert land with their hands while a group of men in black proceed solemnly to that spot, carrying a body on their shoulders. The suggestion of the division of male and female spheres of activity, of death and renewal, are heightened through Philip Glass' climatic musical score.

In "Possessed", a seemingly mad woman in an Islamic village evokes questions of social acceptability. Finally in "Pulse", Neshat creates sexual suggestion with very deliberate skill to define the limitations of female space and desire walled in by a traditional conservatism. An Iranian woman sings of her desire in response to a male voice on the radio, even as her isolation is emphasised through her confined physical space.

Neshat's sponsor "The Barbara Gladstone Gallery" has not only been transformed into three mini theatres but also sells each print as coveted collector's items.

Neshat, Shazia Sikander of Pakistan and Navin Rawanchaikul of Thailand are among non-western artists to succeed in the razor sharp competitive art world of New York.

Sikander, who did a series of provocative images on the veil and its sense of a shroud barrier, almost duplicated Neshat's experience. She says, "I actually wore a veil to elicit people's reactions. I wore it to the grocery store, to the bar, to a classroom and discovered that people would get confused and intimidated." Sikander has used the miniature format, as privileged on the subcontinent not only to rehearse contentious issues around Islamic womanhood, but also to integrate Hindu mythology with its ability to encourage the multiple, idiosyncratic making of icons, with the more "abstract" nuances of Islamic art.

As a Pakistani trained in miniature at the National College of Art, Lahore, she found that her interest in Kangra painting and Hindu mythology became a means of transcending boundaries. There is irony and a cross pollination of cultural identities in her work that thrusts it firmly into the sphere of the post modern. Interestingly, Shazia Sikander and Nilima Sheikh, both inheritors of parallel traditions of the miniature in the subcontinent are due to show together in the Asia Society in fall this year.

Sikander and Neshat are both stars in the American art firmament. Perhaps expectedly, subcontinental diaspora artists express reserve at their success which builds on the transgressive images of Islamic women within the American context. Neshat, for instance, left Iran in 1974, shoots her films in Morocco and arguably works outside the rejuvenated Iranian film and audio- visual industry. More to the point however in a specific context is the fact that no Indian artist has so far attained this kind of global attention. At one level it is disturbing that Indian visual art invested in the contemporary culture, politics and history of the subcontinent is still making only a tentative progress towards the epicentre of recognition.

Perhaps the reasons lie closer to banal logistics rather than a genuine lack of excellence. At the risk of sounding like a license raj left over, it is nevertheless a moot point that wherever government could make a difference, it has failed abysmally. At this year's Venice biennale, for instance, 65 countries with hundreds of artists were represented in palazzi, warehouses, etc including several small and large Indian nations. India did not have a pavilion, and it has never striven to appear at this prestigious venue. Even relatively tiny centres like Taipei's unusually vigorous cultural centre funded the "Cities on the Move" exhibition at PSI, in 1998 in New York, possibly one of the most multicultural exhibition sites in the world.

A run down of the CV's of the post independence artists, be it M. F. Husain, Krishen Khanna or even Ram Kumar reveals that leading Indian artists in the 1950s and 1960s represented India much more vigorously at world art fora than say younger contemporaries like an Atul Dodiya or a Jitish Kallat.

Thus the more full bodied Indian representation at the biennales of Tokyo, Paris or Sao Paolo of the 1950s and 1960s have receded almost in proportion to the devaluation of our own triennale.

Almost through a process of elimination, the initiative of presenting Indian artists and contextualising Indian art through curated shows now belongs to private galleries. The position they are faced with is actually a piquant one.

Unlike the great westward rush five decades ago, when two generations of artists from Krishna Reddy to Viswanadhan embraced the western alternative, the brightest Indian artists are choosing to live at home. Ironically it is through the mediation of private interest that their work will be presented in an international setting.

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