 |
New Breed / hybrid Medium: Oil and acrylic on canvas Size: 3ft x 4ft each |
|---|
Karma Chameleons The way, in which International capitalism exploits and reshapes for its own purposes the cultural expression of various tribal groups makes it necessary for artists working outside the self-anointed centers of artistic authority in Europe and North America to distinguish between modernization and westernization. Individual artists can choose to either mask or foreground certain stylistic characteristics that the dominant global culture might see as formal indicators of otherness. They do this by quoting directly or obliquely from an approved body of sanctioned imagery and processes in the cultural equivalent of lightening the skin, straightening the hair or changing the shape of ones eyes. Some artists however celebrate their brownness, queerness or blackness and are becoming active in an area of art making based largely on local identity, popular visual culture and a diverse history of established regional practices. Overt Indianess is a possible strategy for escaping the gravitational pull of the few ubiquitous stylistic models available at any given time in the small universe of modernism with its auto-reflexive theories of what matters. Willful ethnicity, as a structure where the Indian self purposefully encounters its mimetic double in the mirror of traditional art is available not only to artists living within the republic’s boarders but also to members of the extensive Diaspora communities. Chintan Upadhyay lives and works in Mumbai, thecities contain substantial residual ornament from the wardrobe of 19th century Empire alongside more recent deposits of 20th century achievement. In 2003 these two artists have exhibited cohesive bodies of work that privileges the role of customary imagery in mediating identity and he has developed sophisticated practices where established positions in popular visual culture are contemporaised by the methodologies and processes of new media. In an important way Upadhyay use the interface between tradition and innovation in his work to challenge rather than reaffirm the pivotal authority of the few dominant formal positions authorized by the International art market. He does this by reaestheticizing the existing formal language of some popular and accessible motifs originating within the traditional art practices of the Indian sub-continent Chintan Upadhyay’s "New Breed/Hybrid" paintings and the more recent "Designer Babies" series strongly incriminates digital imagery in authoring on-going modifications to traditional art and the slick, polished surface of these paintings with almost no visible evidence of a brush stroke restate to us that the printed image has to a large degree displaced the painted one as the default setting for both high and low art. Using special software Upadhyay generates a humanoid profile that resembles the Yaksha and Yakshi, the nature sprits of early Indian Art. Into these pungent ciphers for the fertility and abundance of India Shining are imported highly eroticized fragments of Rajasthani miniatures, which are rendered in the Jiapur style. Much like a D.J., Upadhyay is sampling, he is lifting from the accumulated repository of traditional and popular visual imagery imprints of its salient characteristics. These images, some from existing works of art and others generated by the artist are then montaged rather like the scenes in a Top 10 Pop video coming from any of the Bollywood studios. The origins of much of the emblematica of popular visual culture in Upadhyay’s part of the world lie in the conjunction of music and dancing in religious ritual and he realizes that the natural space for this in our time is the 3-minute pop video. Just as the Gandhara style developed as a consequence of contact with the late Hellenistic culture, Upadhyay’s New Breed/Hybrid paintings have composited themselves along the interface between technology and convention. Miniature painting does not necessarily mean small in format, its etymology is to be found in the Latin for the medium once used miniar, or the layer of evenly applied red paint used as a primary ground. In all Upadhyay’s recent paintings the figures float within a field of plain colour or nuanced miniar that works to parenthesize these images within specific quotations from the mass production techniques of popular art. In Upadhyay’s paintings the elimination of background detail in favor of flat colours allows the attention of the viewer to be focused on the containing silhouette of the figure, a process that highlights a further conflation between these beautiful images and the regions popular art, which has long history of generalized images. The figures populating the "New Breed/Hybrid" and "Designer Babies" paintings with their generic attributes and lack of explicit individualized identity both fit within while at the same time extends this tradition. Until very recent times, painting in Indian culture was expressed largely in the form of frescoes or of miniatures done for books and albums. The "Designer Babies" series are large paintings (6feet x 6feet) and in this sense they are willfully positioned within not only the existing examples provided by temple frescoes but also more importantly the secular world of the movie poster and the advertising billboard. Like the richly printed shirts available in Mumbai’s Lokhand Wala market Upadhyay’s quotations from miniature painting and other popular genres are about an outer skin of traditional motifs that is capable of being worn as an immediately identifying cultural garment and they remind us that ethnicity remains the industry standard for encoding the complex relationship between linguistic, racial and religious signifiers. All over the world the relationship between art and life is being replaced by the relationship of art to its own history. The engagement between high art and popular culture is one way of mitigating the requirement for auto-reflexivity that reinforces the authority of a few urbanized models originating in North America or Europe. Much has been written in the Indian press about the sexed up Kaanta Laga and Chadhti Jawani remixes available on VCD’s for Rs. 101/- and what Chintan Upadhyay does in his comparable remixes of idiomatic cultural forms is revalidate the essential linkage between the work of art and its place and time of making. In his images, as in the highly controversial pop videos coming from production houses like Gulshan Kumar there is a marked shift in the way in which the Indian body is depicted, and this change underscores the displacement of the signs of reproductively and fertility in popular visual culture by those of pleasure and gratification. This reminds us that identity, whether individual or collective is an elaborate fabric sewn over a framework of ethnicity, class and sexuality and that if we remember Ghandi’s lesson, the most radicalizing and empowering cloth is still woven at home, by hand. Gary Carsley. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |