Whose body, Whose City?

Proposed as a grand interdisciplinary project, body.city: new perspectives from India, mounted this autumn at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, was a constellation of exhibitions, conferences, performances and screenings, one of numerous cultural programmes held in the German capital to celebrate India, which was the theme country for the Asia Pacific Weeks, 2003. As I walked into the HKW, which is still very much a 1950s convention centre despite the spatial alterations made to accommodate the unpredictability of art, I experienced a strange kind of divide. The display space for the Indian exhibition had been clearly demarcated into two sectors: to the west, in a cavernous space, was situated an exhibition of contemporary visual art practices curated by the independent critic and curator Geeta Kapur; to the east, boxed into a grid, was an exhibition classified under the rubric of »Indian Popular Culture«, curated by the art historian Jyotindra Jain.

This sector-wise demarcation was strange, because the prevailing rhetoric of the HKW project is that of visual culture: that catch-all term which embraces everything while explaining nothing. The actual situation tells another story, that of the segregationism of the avant-garde; apparently, it is only the academy-trained, invariably metropolitan inhabitant of the art world who can qualify as the bearer of value in art. Those below the line of visibility, the rural artisans and the urban producers of billboards and mass-circulation prints, lacking membership of the art world, are corralled under the abstraction of »popular culture«.

Thus, while body.city’s western sector reiterates the Romantic avant-garde image of the artist-as-genius, always leading the way with innovations and subversions (the artworks here range from paintings and sculptures to video-installations and inter-media projects), its eastern sector is structured as a compendium of semi-anonymous and generic found artefacts, spanning a gamut from oleographs and calendars, to theatre backdrops, cinema stills and posters, all museumised for the viewer’s delectation.

The invisible yet palpable wall that separates the two sectors is further cemented by the preface to the book, body.city: siting contemporary culture in India, by the director, Hans-Georg Knopp and the project manager, Peter C Seel, who proclaim: »While the 1992 Indische Festspiele centred on the classical arts, the aim here is to present contemporary forms and to place them within the context of global-level debates on political, cultural and aesthetic issues.« Interesting as this local institutional history may be, it commits the HKW show to an exhausted debate between the merits of the »contemporary« and the claims of the »classical«. Theorists, curators and artists concerned with Indian art have long ago abandoned these simplistic terms: the classical and the contemporary are now recognised as interrelated and contested energies, not static and immutable entities. The crucial objective, in an exhibition of such ambitious scope, should have been to look at the different claims made on the space of the contemporary.

In trying to escape one binary, the HKW has fallen headlong into another. The flawed display strategy of this double show perpetuates a politically loaded distinction between contemporary Indian art and Indian popular culture: Kapur and Jain’s shows are like two estranged siblings who have always known each other, but refuse to acknowledge one another’s presence. This separation is disastrous: it robs Berlin viewers of the opportunity to »read« the politics of the contemporary in Indian art from the viewpoint of a politically sophisticated and constructive counter-history of art. Inaugurated in the 1980s by J Swaminathan, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Jain himself, it has critiqued the crafts/arts binary and the pernicious myth that craftspersons work by rote in an ahistorical mode.

In »body.city«, the divorce between privileged artist and neglected artisan is replayed yet again. The very category of »popular culture« paralyses Jain’s exhibition, burdening the images with the anonymity of the collective. The irony deepens when we note that the expository essay for the contemporary art show is titled subTerrain: artists dig the contemporary. While this show announces the artist as free agent and excavator, Jain’s show showcases an inventory of excavated objects. While the metropolitan artists demonstrate the insouciance to quote or appropriate from the evolving, never-still corpus of »Indian popular culture«, the artisans in Jain’s exhibition are clamped in a neo-ethnographic definition by the politics of display.

Jain, of course, emancipates his exhibition from these constraints by examining »the role played by popular Indian imagery of the 19th and 20th centuries in the construction of cultural, social and national identities.« Subtitling his show, »The Conquest of the World as Picture«, Jain employs the metaphor of collage to indicate how a radical new visuality served as the ground for the manufacture of the great colonial-period debates of identity and resistance. This churning of images was sustained by the intellectual and expressive agency of many cultural actors: individual practitioners, studios and circles, each responding to a vibrant heterogeneity of stimuli – political events, regional aspirations, cultic inheritances and, above all, the confrontation between British imperialism and Indian nationalism.

Indeed, the general result of this segregationism was that many observers in Berlin felt that the contemporary art component was merely »derivative«, while the popular culture section was »spiritual«. These observations, which echo default positions, would have been greatly modified, had the two shows been integrated into a persuasive and dialogic relay of meaning, instead of the tragedy of two sectors separated by the Mauer of disciplinary entrenchment. I am arguing, not for the primacy of either sector over the other, but rather, for a mutual understanding on equal terms. Instead of dynamising – in concept and display structure – the interplay between metropolitan artists operating within the art world and the so-called popular artists whose practices fall beneath what I have called the art world's line of visibility, this double show replicated the mutual suspicion and apartheid that has paralysed visual studies in India. It failed to share a new universe of meaning with the Berlin audience.