The 11th Triennale sees a decline in the number of participating countries and an increase in the influence of American art with its stress on techniques and gimmickry rather than skills and depth.
THE 11th Triennale showcasing global contemporary art, which was held in New Delhi from January 15 to February 10, reminded one of earlier Triennales. The first one, in 1968, was the brainchild of the writer Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, whose connections in the art and literary fraternity of the world went back to his participation in the International Brigade in Spain. And then, being representative of a non-aligned India which was being wooed assiduously by both imperialist and socialist camps, the Triennale attracted the best art from all parts of the world.
That phase is over now. So we had far fewer countries participating in this Triennale. Also, while we are living in a unipolar world, the unipolar power, the United States, which submitted the work of the artist Jackson Pollock for an earlier Triennale, was missing this time. Despite this, the organisers feel honoured to have a New York-born curator, John T. Spike, at the head of the international jury. Spike, who has concentrated on European art of the pre-industrial period, would hardly be seen to be the best judge of global contemporary art; but as director of the Venice Biennale, he plays the new role the U.S. has assigned itself - above participation and on top of the list of judges.
Given this overall perspective, it is not surprising that the pernicious influence of U.S. art, with its stress on techniques rather than skills and gimmickry rather than depth, seems to have erupted in many corners of the world. That India, which had managed a remarkable resilience to these trends thanks to its national movement, should succumb to them is a matter of concern. After all, the Bauhaus headed by Walter Gropius and Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan both started in 1919. The Germans could only keep theirs going until 1933. Until Hitler put an end to it, while in India Santiniketan developed into a university that is a leading centre of art training today. Similarly, while neither France nor Switzerland gave Le Corbusier a commission worth the name, India offered him a city to make. So, both as the creators of art and as patrons, not only is India second to none, but its art has made a niche for itself in the global art market today. The organisers of the Triennale seem well set to destroy this niche.
This is evident from the awards. One of them went to Australia's Callum Morton, who is totally unaware of the Indian reality and presents it in the worlds of the Australian curator, Stuart Koop, who sees "a global tendency in art and architecture, and aesthetics generally, towards and international style, originally emanating from Europe and North America, influencing a wide variety of regional practices (from Brazil to Australia, to Mexico, to India, and elsewhere)". And from this distorted perspective, Le Corbusier's scheme of organic community living becomes nothing more than yet another Disneyland and his plans are reduced to "examples of fantastic theme park aesthetics that simulate the high points in Western culture."
This perspective is totally out of keeping with the reality of an alternative global cultural paradigm that has emerged all over the world where time-tested cultures challenge Western aesthetics and make their own way forward. It is no accident that Japan reflects this trend most sharply. Indeed, it is Japan that has a much closer appreciation of the posturing of the West, having been the testing ground for its weapons of mass destruction at the end of the Second World War. But the Japanese had been warned a good 40 years earlier by that friend and collaborator of Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Tenshin, who said that too much talk of the `Yellow Peril' might one day awaken Asians to the reality of the `White Disaster'.
Indeed, it was refreshing to see that the Japanese entries not only concentrated on painterly qualities, notably on the highly developed brush-working skill of Chinese and Japanese art, but the best of them was a minimalist installation by Gyoko Yoshida, a young woman painter, who, in the words of the Japanese curator Nakai Yasuyuki, "has carried on the discipline of Japanese-style painting with a critical attitude and used it with great boldness as her means of expression". Her concept of space too is actualised nothingness' or `meaningful emptiness' (ma in Japanese), rather like the space within the ancient Indian symbol of the zero (shunya), unlike the Western concept of three-dimensional space. In her work one can see the contemporary use of Okakura's concept of a pan-Asian aesthetic as distinct from the West developing in the framework of a multipolar world. Another Japanese artist, Tokuzo Yabitsu, takes you along a different path of this alternative aesthetic. In the words of Nakai Yasuyuki, he "makes his dynamic art by painting on the surface of a carved wooden block. He awakens faded memories of art history for the Japanese who can be said to be suffering from amnesia." His theme: `Mac Arthur, Minakatella Longfila', with its ironic botanical categorisation, focusses on the thought of the Japanese artist Minakata Kumagusu, who, in the words of the curator, "applied highly original ideas opposed to the modernisation of Japan modelled on the West". In fact, all four of the Japanese entries reflected the clear emergence of an alternative aesthetic that calls for a break from that which borrows its imagery from digital technology and comics that had virtually taken over post-War Japanese art.
Su Xinping and Li Fan from China too reflect the use of specialised brush-work in two different traditions. Su reflects the powerful imagery of the revolutionary print-makers inspired by Lu Hsun, while Li follows a patter U.S. pop-artists borrowed from Japan and China: the `lexicon of a series of signs'. Not surprisingly, Li Fan was given an award, not Su Xinping.
The Indian section, too, challenged the standardised U.S. view of an international aesthetic based on the Euro-American tradition. The commissioners, Amitabh Banerjee, Vinod Shah, Surya Prakash, Prem Singh and Hanuman Kambli, note that "understanding the vastness and cultural diversity [of India], we have unanimously selected Indian artists who are expressing in varied mediums, which in our opinion not only represent the complete cultural scenario of India but also a wide spectrum of different art trends prevailing in the country". This terse and modest statement was amply reflected in their selection.
The most outstanding among these trends is that of India's contemporary `eclectic' art, with Yusuf Arakkal's `The Crucified', which shows interspersed images of a child and crucified human beings, using only red, white and various tones of brown, being the best work. It reflects one of the most successful ways of carrying forward India's folk-modernist trend to the level of a highly economical narrative whose seriousness and political message are not lost to anyone. This brings to the fore the second great truth about art that Okakura enunciated and no doubt, Rabindranath Tagore, with his commitment to making India independent of British rule, endorsed: that art as an activity that explains itself cannot be anything but political. So it is with judging and curating.
So, we saw the award going to Shibu Natesan's work that could be a distortion of a National Geographic photograph of a deep-sea diver. The fact that the works of Shyamal Dutta Ray, Sidharth, T.V. Vaikuntham, Paresh Maity, Moinul Haq, Barbuiyan, Rayana Giridhar Gowd, Babu Xavier and Alok Bhattarcharya are far more painterly in the same category made no difference to the jury, which appeared to have bowed before its U.S. mentor.
Not that political dissent is not to be allowed. It is, but in a North American style using techniques that benefit the Information Technology corporates. This is evident from the award given to the Argentinian installation by Monica Espinssa, which is explained by the artist in this way:
"We are faced with the virtual image of food projected onto a single plate. Dozens of spoons ready to take something that is not there to the mouth. We have the spoons, we can use them, it does not matter what they are made of because they can serve their purpose. But the paradox is that there is nothing to put on the plate, its content is only virtual, and so the spoons are reduced to useless devices. However, hope and faith, undying signs are not lost. That is when ritual appears." Clearly, the work reflects the helplessness of post-modernist art. And though the content reflects disillusionment with the virtual reality of the dreams of profiting from the prescriptions of globalisation, still it fails to project an alternative to North American post-modernism. So it merited an award.
The same can be said of Andreas Siekmann's laser drawings, the German entry. They are "dedicated to issues such as unemployment, urban policy, corporate management and their mediated presence in urban space". His works are a powerful indictment of the economic authoritarianism of monopoly capitalism dominated by a handful of multinationals. But it is interesting how even this work from a country of the European Union Challenges the Unitarian view put forward by the Australian curator. The German curator, Jurgen Bock, was at great pains to point out that "the presentation of laser prints and the stylistic allusions to the painters of the Cologne Progressive Movement of the 1920s refer to underlying serious art-historical and theoretical concerns" that differentiated his expression from its American pop counterpart. So even the awards could not maintain consistency, which is not surprising as the global art as visualised by U.S. eyes is a spurious concept that has no ground to stand on.
The British entry was a clever film sequence of young recruits of the Scottish Infantry Division and the Madras Regiment, shot by Roderick Buchannan. The regiments share the Assaye colours (figuring an elephant) as they fought along side each other under Arthur Wellesly in the Battle of Assaye in 1803. This reflects another virtual reality of imperialist globalisation that of the global village. The world is presented as being one happy family. Actually, even those who fight side by side under the same colours may appear the same, but savage immigration laws still operate against the cannon fodder of the multinationals to keep them divided. Buchannan shows only one side of the picture, the continuity. He fails to uncover the discontinuity behind it. This is not surprising from a country that is the staunchest ally of U.S. imperial wars today. But even so, the inconsistency is obvious.
Many other entries exhibited at the Triennale are critical of the hypocrisy of the U.S. A country that preaches freedom to the world while crushing it under its feet in Iraq, whose record of torture and plunder and wanton destruction of ancient archaeological sites reminds one of the Nazis in the Second World War, is hardly expected to inspire art and culture. So in a way it was poetic justice that the U.S. did not participate in the Triennale. With its record in Asia, its absence was not regretted, but its presence in the jury (even by proxy) was less than welcome; and its interference in the awards was even less so. The present office-bearers of the Akademi should be warned of the danger of what they are going to burden our future cultural development with. Our contemporary art was built up by a force spirit of independence and self-reliance. To abandon that, as the Akademi seems to be doing from this Triennale, could do enormous damage to our presence on the global art scene. It should not be allowed to be repeated.
