Post-colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, contemporary art and the market in the age of neoliberal capital
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01436597.2012.657422
ISSN1360-2241
Autores Tópico(s)Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
ResumoAbstract Arjun Appadurai has argued that 'the materiality of objects in India is not yet completely penetrated by the logic of the market'.Footnote1 However, the entry and the visibility of modern and contemporary Indian art into the circuits of the global art world increasingly challenge this argument. The story of modern and contemporary Indian art is one of the inscription of local objects and their 'Indianness' into the above circuits, with market value being created inthe process. If the globalisation of the art world provides a conceptual and material arena where objects are circulated, displayed and bought and sold through auction houses, exhibitions, biennales and art fairs, this article analyses an event that epitomises some of the forces at play in this arena: the contemporary art exhibition 'The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today' held in 2010 at the Saatchi Gallery, London. An artistic cum business instantiation of 'India in Europe'—and one that challenges the visual and aesthetic canons 'traditionally' associated with India—this article examines this exhibition as anentry point into the analysis of how neoliberal capital produces 'culture', and into the tension between the commodity form and the infinite possibilities, and unintended consequences, opened up by this very status. Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this article were presented at the workshop 'Asian countries as exhibited at World Expositions: revisited in a global historical perspective' at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, 2July 2010; at the panel 'Governing difference' at the conference 'Asian diversity in a global context', University of Copenhagen, 12–13 November 2010; at the SERIS seminar on 25 October 2011 and at the 'Visual culture in contemporary India' workshop, 8–9 December 2011, both held at Aarhus University. I wish to thank YoungSoo Yook and Ravinder Kaur and the audiences at the above events for they all provided invaluable comments and suggestions. Moreover, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change for the award of a Framing the Global Fellowship (2011–2014) for the project entitled 'Modern and contemporary Indian art and the global: culture, capital, and the development of post-colonial taste': research for this project will allow me to take further the questions developed in this article. Notes 1 A Appadurai, 'The thing itself', Public Culture, 18(1), 2006, p 18. 2 A Ahmad, 'Cultures in conflict', Frontline, 14(16), 1997, at http://hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1416/14160760.htm, accessed 18 September 2010. 3 I am not implying that Ahmad endorses this argument. 4 This article focuses on an exhibition of contemporary Indian art. However, as discussed later in the text, its entry into the global art world is linked to the rise in visibility and market value of modern Indian art. Moreover, as a specialist in modern and contemporary Indian and Southeast Asian art at Sotheby's, Priyanka Mathew has stated: 'The distinction between modern and contemporary South Asian art is not a formal one, but rather a qualification created by galleries to catalogue artists who worked in different time periods' (P Mathew, 'State of the art', India Today, 25 March 2011, at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/state-of-the-art/1/133354.html, accessed 8 August 2011). 5 IndiaArtConnect, Vol. 1, June 2009, at http://www.karmayog.org/info/upload/24709/India%20Art%20Connect-Newsletter-June%202009.pdf, accessed 14 June 2010. 6 R G Shah, 'India's online auction pioneers', 2010, at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/arts/08iht-rartsaffron.html?_r=1, accessed 7 September 2010. 7 M Collett-White, 'China overtakes Britain in art market: report', 2011, at http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/14/us-market-china-idUSTRE72D5EW20110314, accessed 10 December 2011. 8 Ibid. 9 I analyse the presence of the India pavilion at the Venice Biennale in a separate article. 10 See J Boloten 'The state of the global art market 2011', public lecture at the London School of Economics, 23 February 2011, http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=898, podcast accessed on 24 February 2011. 11 One of first private art museums in India, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (knma), opened in New Delhi in January 2011 (http://www.knma.in/about.asp). It hosts an impressive collection of modern and contemporary art. Concerning public museums of contemporary art, there has been a delayed response to the new artistic wave in India. 12 Between 29 January 2010 and 8 May 2010, the exhibition recorded 407,796 visitors (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/, accessed 3 December 2011). 13 M Hardt & A Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000. 14 J Burbank & F Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010. 15 Ahmad, 'Cultures in conflict'. 16 R G Shah, 'Not just modern art, but Indian', 2011, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/arts/04iht-rartindia04.html?pagewanted=all, accessed 20 March 2011. 17 M L Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York/London, Routledge, 2008 [1992]. 18 B Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983. 19 B Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2001, p 7. 20 If this form of investment is relatively new in India, elsewhere it has been a standard practice, see DHarvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London, Profile Books, 2010, p 21, on post-1980s investments in asset values including art. 21 J Ganesan, 'Let your mouse take you on an artistic journey', 2011, at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main51.asp?filename=Ws231111Art.asp, accessed 27 November 2011. 22 A Sawhney, 'Mall-titude of artworks', 2010, at http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/637898.aspx, accessed 27 November 2011. 23 C Howorth, 'The Sotheby's of India', 2010, at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-06/indias-online-auction-house/, accessed 7 November 2010. 24 N Susan, 'Another cultural revolution?', 2008, at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=hub081108another_cultural.asp, accessed 19 May 2010. 25 K Crow, 'The China factor', 2011, at http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203476804576613050373696270-lMyQjAxMTAxMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email, accessed 20 October 2011. 26 Ibid. 27 G Adam, 'Starting local, going global', The Art Newspaper, 2011, at http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Starting%20local,%20going%20global/23996, accessed 4 November 2011. 28 Ibid., accessed 9 November 2011. 29 H Suroor, 'Indian art goes global', 2010, at http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Hasan_Suroor/article405538.ece, accessed 23 April 2010. 30 Ibid. 31 D Hicks & C M Beaudry, 'Introduction. Material culture studies: a reactionary view', in D Hicks & M C Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp 1–21, at http://weweremodern.blogspot.com/2010/05/material-culture-studies-introduction.html, accessed 20 May 2011. 32 C Breckenridge, 'The world on exhibition. The aesthetics and politics of colonial collecting: India at World Fairs', Comparative Study in Society and History, 31(2), 1989, p 214. 33 U Hannerz, 'Notes on the global ecumene', Public Culture, 1(2), 1989, pp 66–75. 34 Appadurai, 'The thing itself', 18. 35 Ibid. 36 M Khaire & R D Wadhwani, 'Changing landscapes: the construction of meaning and value in a new market category—modern Indian art', Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 2010, p 1289. 37 Ibid., p 1282. 38 Ibid. 39 For a study of the performance in online auctions of both Indian artists classified as established (born in the first quarter of the twentieth century) and emerging ones (born after 1955), see S K Reddy & MDass, 'Modeling on-line art auction dynamics using functional data analysis', Statistical Science, 21(2), 2006, pp 179–193. 40 In China, the houses Poly Auction and China Guardian Auctions were created. 41 Shah, 'India's online auction pioneers'. 42 This appropriation needs to be analysed vis-à-vis the broader cultural economic context of the art trade in Indian history, of the status of art as a commodity, its relations to capital, princely patronage and the colonial era. 43 D Graeber, 'Consumption', Current Anthropology, 52(4), 2011, p 502. 44 C Brosius, India's Middle Class. New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity, New Delhi/London, Routledge, 2010. 45 P Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R Nice), New York, Routledge, 2003 [1984], p 7. 46 Ibid., p 282. 47 Breckenridge, 'The world on exhibition', 212. 48 See C Gleadell, 'Indian art: a taste for Saatchi's hot favourites', 2010, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/7078106/Indian-art-A-taste-for-Saatchis-hot-favourites.html, accessed 25 May 2010. 49 For a market analysis of the artwork acquired by Saatchi and later exhibited at 'The Empire Strikes Back', see Ibid. 50 Email communication from the Saatchi Gallery, London Press Officer, 23 July 2010. 51 Z Jumabhoy, 'Introduction', in The Empire Strikes Back. Indian Art Today, London, Jonathan Cape Random House, 2010, p 56. 52 Ibid., p 64. 53 Ibid., p 74. 54 Ibid., p 64. 55 P Pinglay, 'First Anish Kapoor exhibition is staged in India', 2010, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11868762, accessed 2 December 2010. 56 M Hudson, 'It's modern India, but it's not all Indian', 2010, at http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/current/india_reviews/Empire-SundayMail-7Feb2010.jpg, accessed 20 May 2010. 57 K Weir, 'The Empire Strikes Back at the Saatchi gallery', Indian Art News, 2 February 2010, at http://www.indianartnews.com/2010/02/empire-strikes-back-at-saatchi-gallery.html, accessed 20 April 2010. 58 M Collett-White, 'Indian art show tackles Gandhi, war and poverty', 2010, at http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/01/29/exhibition-india-saatchi-idINLDE60R2F620100129, accessed 30 May 2010. 59 A M Di Brina, 'Visions of India', 2010, at http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/02/india-art-saatchi-women, accessed 30 June 2010. 60 http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/huma_bhabha_orientalist3.htm, accessed 25 June 2010. 61 J Pitman, 'Caste in the bleakest of lights', 2010, at http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/current/india_reviews/Empire-Times-29Jan2010.jpg, accessed 20 June 2010. 62 Press Association, 'UK gallery holds Indian art expo', at http://www.pressassociation.com/component/pafeeds/2010/01/29/uk_gallery_holds_indian_art_expo?camefrom=india, accessed 30 June 2010. 63 S Mathur, India by Design. Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007. 64 Ahmad, 'Cultures in conflict'. 65 Judging by the preliminary data released from Census 2011, these trends continue unabated.
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