Signatures of Dissent Geeta Kapur places two avant-garde art magazines, Contra' 66 and Vrishchik, as also the scholarly Journal of Arts and Ideas in their art historical and sociological contexts.

CONTRA'" =:,;~..!:..";,,=::,,,:,!':;,,;';' . ;,:,:,, •• -:::,.,,;::'H_~_"' ___ '_~""H "'_

Top: Contra'66. June 1967. Editor: J. Swaminathan.

Courtesy Printer and Publisher Hem Chandra. Above: Etching by Gulammohammed Sheikh

from Contra'66. June 1967.

J. Swaminathan.

78 THE ART NEWS MAGAZINE OF INDIA VOL. VI ISSUE II

The lineage of critical writing in Indian art still requires to be firmed up­the more so because the trajectories are fragile, even perhaps weak compared to art production. But not after all so different when we examine

the spirit and ideology of both these activities-of art and artwriting-in their simultaneous development during the past 50 years or so . My brief here is to replay the voice of two 'little' magazines both run by artist-writers-the short­lived Contra'66 (usually referred to as only Contra) edited by J. Swaminathan in the year 1966-67 from Delhi, and Vrishchik, edited by Gulammohammed Sheikh along with Bhupen Khakhar during the years 1969-1973 from Baroda. And to then write about the Journal of Arts & Ideas started in 1982.

Contra was not only oppositional but like Swaminathan himself: contrary. By 1966 Swaminathan, activist, critic, artist, was strategically positioned within the Indian art world. He was ready to dislodge the Progressives and clear space for himself and for his 'generation' of artists or, rather, his comrades from the Group 1890. The Group had not survived beyond the 1963 exhibition but had sparked off an 'attitude'-to use a current word-that might well have become a movement. The barely 16-page magazine on the cheapest paper achieved something like an avant-garde gesture. Swaminathan was always flamboyant-in his life, in his words, though not in his painting bound as he was by a relatively reticent aesthetic: from Klee to Malevich, from Pahari miniatures to what he never spoke about, American colour-field painting favoured by Clement Greenberg. I will make an amusing digression here. Contra of June 1967 carried a review by Gieve Patel of the big 'Two Decades of American Painting' show held in Delhi that same year. Selected by Waldo Rasmussen (from the Museum Of Modern Art, New York), it was accompanied by none other than the great Greenberg. The review by Patel made an intelligent gloss on the show and then remarked that in the course of the event Swaminathan nearly sabotaged the seminar insisting "that participants converse in 'poetry' not in cliche."

The review continued: "The later sessions veered under his [Swaminathan's] groping metaphysics .... all the same [he] gave the

only performance distantly matching Mr.Greenberg's" . Recently returned from New York, I was a well-informed cub-critic at that event. I remember how Swaminathan, drinking through the day, gave a shrewd go-by to American painting as he did to most 'western' art, and then put the seminar to rout. Being himself the proverbial untutored artist, he targeted any form of art-historical discourse lest it rob him of his performative ingenuity in the developing mise en scene of contemporary Indian art. In his space-clearing gesture he managed to place Greenberg, the personification of the Imperialist American Critic, face to face with himself, and dramatised a third-worldist CONTRA-diction between the two. Patel remarked further, "when condemned at the conclusion by Messrs Greenberg and Rasmussen for attempting to draw attention to himself, he offered to these gentlemen a final, desperate area of amity." It can't be pure accident that he repeated the double gesture of hostility/complicity twenty odd years later in the presence of Harold Rosenberg (invited to the 1978 Triennale India by the commissioners, Krishen Khanna, Richard Bartholomew and Swaminathan ). This time he clearly charmed the generous Rosenberg and also, no doubt, the

~=============================::::========= T URN I N GPO I N T legendary second-generation surrealist, Matta (also invited to the Triennale), who did a real performance by coming to the seminar stage riding a bicycle and whistling like an elderly loafer.

Most of the articles in Contra were written by Swaminathan under various names, others were placed there for a polemical jousting with established fellow artists-including the vulnerable (already venerable) Ram Kumar, but mostly against the critics, a favourite past-time with the artist community. Texts were quoted from major writers like Andre Breton or Octavio Paz but they were meant less for textual pursuit more to signal a stance-to confirm that he, Swaminathan, was a foster-child of the surrealist-anarchist tradition. Destabilising the given situation and preparing the ground for free-wheeling creativity, Swami was Contra and Contra was an extension of Swami's desire for masquerade. He never failed to score a point about his style of radicalism. And to hell with 'good art'. Although of course the artists featured in Contra were good precisely in that they were breaking new ground: Jeram Patel, for example.

Vrishchik, which means scorpion, spoke in the many voices of those artists, critics, poets, who featured in its inexpensively produced 24-odd pages (always supplemented by a free original modest artwork- a linocut, woodcut, lithograph­to be slipped out and tacked/ framed by the subscriber). There was a subversive contribution in Vrishchik from the just emerging Khakhar-lampooning even ~ .. N.15189/69

the subversive Swaminathan!- and echoes of the beat generation in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's modernist-mystical poetry. On the other hand there was social criticism posited on behalf of an ethically constructed 'good citizen' speaking through Sheikh's editorials . This aspect developed two further trajectories. One was a call for a political understanding of art, something that Sheikh encouraged by including writings of Adil Jussawalla, Pranabranjan Ray and myself . Beginning in 1971, Vrishchik serialised my (master's) thesis recently completed in London. Titled: "In Quest of Identity:

Drawing by Nagji Patel from Vrishchik, Year 2, Nos. 10-11 .

August-September 1971 .

Vrishchik, Year 3, Nos . 6-7.April-May 1972. Art and Indigenism in a post -colonial culture with special reference to Indian painting", it introduced, quite early in the day, terms like identity, indigenism,

All Vrishchik issues were edited by Gulammohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar. Cover image: lithograph by Bhupen Khakhar. Images courtesy publisher Gulammohammed Sheikh .

postcolonial culture- terms that have been in the forefront of ideological contestation in later years. In 1972 Vrishchik published Adil Jussawalla's provocative lecture called "View of a volcano with various members of the artistic profession warming their arses on it" where, in his ironical mode, Jussawalla

. made a direct socialist injunction about the responsibilities of artistic production. The second trajectory pitched Sheikh himself into acts of public intervention.

From its very inception Vrishchik, became a platform to critique the Indian art establishment. It literally spearheaded the famous Artists' Protest against the Lalit Kala Akademi through its editorials, letters and signature campaign. More immediately it asked for a boycott of the 1971 Second Triennale India based on a critique that spelt out the Akademi's constitution, membership, misplaced priorities, bureaucratic ignorance, vested interests. In 1971, the all-India Artists' Protest initiated by Vrishchik joined up with a Delhi initiative galvanised by Swaminathan and an organised front came into existence: the Ad Hoc Committee of Protesting Artists. Vivan Sundaram acted as secretary. The Artists ' Protest forced an initial set of reforms . These were undertaken under the aegis of the Committee Appointed to Review the National Akademis and the ICCR under the chairmanship of Justice G.D.Khosla (in 1970-72). A period of emancipation

Bhupen Khakhar.

THE ART NEWS MAGAZI NE OF INDIA VOL VI ISSUE II 79

TUR NING POINT

Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 14-15. July-December 1987. Editor:

G.P. Deshpande. Courtesy Tulika Print Communication Services.

Covel' image: col/age. All Journal of Arts and Ideas

covers designed by Vivan Sundaram.

Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 27-28. March 1995. Executive

Editors: Geeta Kapur et al . Cover image: superimposition of

paintings by J. Swaminathan. Courtesy Tulika Print

Communication Services.

80 THE ART NEWS MAGAZINE OF INDIA VOL. VI ISSUE II

was followed by another long eclipse ... . Meanwhile, like all 'little' magazines that have a short run but a long life, Vrishchik folded up in 1973. Sheikh continued however to give his time to institutional reform, most importantly when he was invited to serve as a member of the High-Powered Committee Appointed to Review the Performance of the National Akademis and the NSD under the chairmanship of P.N Haksar (in 1988-90) .

Today the Akademi, 'reformed' through some bureaucratic mis-interpretation of the principles laid out by the High-Powered Committee, devolving because of an all round apathy towards national institutions, remains as backward as ever. But though the story of failure on the State front looms larger than any success, the chronicle of the Artists' Protest-where artists fought for professionalism, autonomy, and a creative vision in the State-funded bodies that offered at the time the main patronage for modern art, where strategies to define and empower the artist community were debated-becomes a part of the ideological formation of the Indian art world.

The Journal of Arts and Ideas, of which I am a founder-member and part of the editorial collective since its inception in 1982, has survived 18 years. Started as a quarterly, it finally averaged two 80-page issues a year, and is now planning a selected compilation in the form of a Journal of Arts & Ideas Reader. I borrow some part of this synopsis from Ashish Rajadhyaksha. Closely associated with the Journal, he has a framework for viewing its changing content that could well form the introduction to the proposed Reader.

If the virtually hand-written, hand-crafted 'little' magazines like Contra and Vrishchik offered the dissenting voice of the artist as an editorial signature, the Journal signalled a shift to a sustained historical discourse on the conditions of art practice in the third world and, by sympathetic extension, in the second (socialist) world. One beginning for the Journal can be traced to a seminar titled 'Marxism and Aesthetics' organised at Kasauli in 1979 by the journal Social Scientist. The issues raised in the seminar pertained to realism and modernism (after the famous Lukacs-Brecht debate on the subject, a paradigm for twentieth century arts memorialised by Fredric Jameson in his edited book, Aesthetics and Politics) The participants included marxist veterans like the chronicler of IPTA documents, Sudhi Pradhan; it included the young star economist Prabhat Patnaik, the choreographer Chandralekha exploring a palpable materialist aesthetics, Saeed Mirza embarking with the new wave on realist filmmaking practice. Another beginning for the journal comes in the early 1980s from ac tive politics. The proposal, triggered by the theatre-activist Prasanna, and taken up by a relay of comrades like P. Govinda Pillai and Rajan Prasad, was then 'blessed' by E. M. S Namboodripad at a CPI (M) cultural conference in Kerala where he told a group of leftwing intellectuals and artists that the Party would gain on the cultural front precisely if such a journal remained creatively independent.

A more focused meeting hosted by Kasauli Art Centre in 1982, launched the Journal with G P Deshpande, scholar-playwright, as editor and an edi torial collective with, among others, Prasanna, Malini Bhattacharya, Anil Bhatti, Romi Khosla, Kumar Shahani, Vivan Sundaram, and myself, representing thea tre, literature, architecture, film, visual arts . The editorial has undergone inevitable changes in these two decades, so has its functioning- from something like a marxist collective to a small working-group with a succession of guest editors (with Indira Chandrashekhar of Tulika publishing remaining the constant factor). One only needs to scan the masthead and the consolidated author li~t to see the intellectual energy that the Journal has commanded in the area of art, culture and politics.

One can suggest that the need for such a journal was located in the historical conjuncture during the second half of the 1970s. Very briefly: the Emergency had forced an unprecedented political formation through coalition politics (the Janata Party, supported by the CPI (M) from outside). Indeed the Emergency had re­defined and also degraded the role of the nation-state and, in the process, set up mixed agendas for a national culture. The return of Indira Gandhi, and the entry of Rajiv Gandhi into politics, further changed the terms by inducting India into

the first stages of globalisation. The leftwing parties saw themselves adopting a new, and protective, role towards the disintegrating nation. On the cultural front, critics of the kind represented in the Journal tried to place the national in relation to the modern and arrived at the hyphenated term national-modern to keep the cultural question sufficiently dialectical.

In the early phase of the Journal, there was an attempt to directly relate ideology to art practice. When, in the process, the question of art-language was raised by practitioners and critics, two directions opened up . We find one set of authors re-inscribing the issue of tradition within contemporary creativity as a material and expressly mutable phenomenon . The other set update the critique of cultural assumptions that go with the conservative ideologies of tradition. To tie in both these sets of inquiry, we can recall a proposition that has been, for the past two decades or so, popular among sociologists: that in the process of decolonisation there is something like an 'invention of tradition' legitimated by larger national(ist) agendas . To which one can add that in the hands of artists and artwriters, this proposition becomes a means to recognise a form of deconstruction, a metonymic relay, whereby invented traditions may appear at the end of the line to spark an avant-garde.

Many of the newer authors writing in the Journal of Arts and Ideas during the late 1980s and 90s approached the question of culture as a dialogue between the more orthodox marxist texts and the Cramscian point of view as interpreted by subaltern studies historians / cultural theorists. Such a dialogue surfaced in a seminar organised by the Kasauli Art Centre in 1988 where feminists like Susie Tharu and Kumkum Sangari, art-practitioners like Kumar Shahani, Culam Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Arun Khopkar, Anuradha Kapur, political scientists like Sudipta Kaviraj and Sanjay Baru, critics like Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Madan Copal Singh and myself were present. The exchange, which developed confron ta tional points, was transcribed, edited, and published in numbers 19, and 20-21 of the Journal of Arts and Ideas.

TURNING POINT

It is a fact of some importance that in more recent years the very category of culture mediates, replaces or glosses the area of artistic practice, and the voice of the critic turns into that of the theorist. In the later

Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 23-24. January 1993. ExeC/itive editors: Geeta Kapur et al. Cover: collage of film stills.

1990s, the Journal suggests terms of discourse with emphasis on new art history, film studies, and popular culture and, through these recently reformatted, gender­mediated, disciplines, a harder critique of the Indian nation. If this resembles in turn the curricula of postcolonial! culture studies, there is some irony here. All this makes the Journal more desirable as an academic resource but more distanced from the potentialities of actual art practice. What one is perhaps looking for is unexpected areas of inte'rsection between theory and practice, radical disruptions in the paradigm of cultural studies that prevent it from congealing into a ruling discourse. I: "A

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