Along the Indian Highway

An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition

Cathrine Bublatzky

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000186390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition Indian Highway that presented Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a significant period for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art exhibition as a mobile "object" and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities, sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the field of global art. It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism.

Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of modern and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and transcultural studies.

1
Along the Indian Highway

An introduction

The international travelling exhibition Indian Highway was the second exhibition conceived and organised by the Serpentine Gallery (London) in collaboration with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo). Between 2006 and 2015, the cooperating institutes focused, in a kind of geo-aesthetic mapping, on the contemporary art of five major cultural regions: America, China, India, and subsequent to this, Brazil and Europe. The exhibition Indian Highway (2008–2012) featured a “timely presentation of the pioneering work being made in India today, embracing art, architecture, fi lm, literature and dance” (Peyton-Jones, Obrist, and Kvaran 2008, 7). The participation of internationally celebrated curators, distinguished artists from India, and well-known museums, paired with exciting site events, promised to make this exhibition an outstanding platform for discourse about Indian contemporary art outside its national borders and thus a travelling transcultural contact zone. Moreover, Indian Highway marked an important moment in the history of the internationalisation of Indian art, as it turned out to be one of the last regional survey shows of its kind. It allowed artists, curators, and audiences to encounter the phenomenon of globalised Indian contemporary art at various art institutions in London, Oslo, Herning, Lyon, Rome, and Beijing, and, as this book will demonstrate, the exhibition itself became an identifier for a critical transcultural discourse with and about the “self” and the “other” in the international art world that can be described as a “scene of translations” (Maharaj 1994, 28). Growing and reshaping itself along the different venues and creating translocal and transcultural intersections between the global and the local, the exhibition came at a moment of – and even acted as a facilitator for – the global marketing and consumption of Indian art as a postcolonial renaissance of Indianness in the age of neoliberal capital (Ciotti 2012).

Mobile spaces of encounter

Outlining the moment when Indianness as a selling point in the art markets incited critical debates in India and beyond about a re-empowerment of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) in the field of art, this exhibition became a meaningful, mobile space of knowledge production in which the dynamics of cultural critique, of dialogical relations with an “other”, and thus the relation between space and cultural difference (Gupta and Ferguson 2002, 13) operated. Exploring Indian Highway as a European invention that generated various intersections between different cultural and spatial settings, this book provides an ethnographic case study along the Indian Highway and examines its symbolic dimension of mobility and the geopolitics of knowledge (Rodríguez 2007, 4). But the question of what sort of knowledge is actually produced when the field of visual art appears as a field of knowledge production remains (Maharaj 2009). Borrowing from profound anthropological debates and their more “sophisticated understanding of processes of objectivation and the construction of other-ness in anthropological writing” (Gupta and Ferguson 2002, 13) from the 1990s, anthropology has much to offer those attempting to critically engage with recent forms of contemporary art exhibition. Forging ahead with the discussion on decolonisation and how to empty authoritarian spaces of representation, such as museums (Mirzoeff 2017), the study comprises insights into the internationalised and cosmopolitanised Indian contemporary art world. In doing so, it tracks and traces the art exhibition in different venues in Europe and Asia as an “organically” changing and growing travelling contact zone (Clifford 1997a), one that has been established through successive interventions and engagements by an array of urban and institutional sites, curators, artists, and audiences. In this sense, the exhibition opened a window onto particular European strategies of presenting art from India and the corresponding resonances in parts of the local Indian art scene that were closely intertwined with Indian Highway and Delhi-based international art events.

This book examines the intersections of different positions as a fundamental contribution to the dynamic nature of the global art field that unfolded alongside the powerful emergence of hyped individual figures such as star curators and artists, institutional networks, and “must-have” works of Indian contemporary art for established and emerging creative cities on the global art map (Florida 2003; Carta 2007; Andersson, Andersson, and Mellander 2011; O’Connor and Shaw 2014; Gerhard, Hoelscher, and Wilson 2017). The at times dizzying internationalism of the twenty-first-century global art world presents a phenomenon par excellence, according to Arjun Appadurai’s visionary discussion of the cultural dimensions of globalisation (1996), especially when observing probably one of the last survey exhibitions on contemporary Indian art in Europe. Globalism appears, according to the cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania, at “an enabling rather than an alienating distance from the logic of regional and national narratives” (Adajania 2010). The adoption of a globalist position allows us then to see that the destinies of certain societies and regions “are shaped through the mediation of intricate webs of exchange, conflict, diffusion and mutuality, which may sometimes extend across oceans and continents” (ibid.). Such intricate webs are established along the route of the Indian Highway exhibition and through various moments of dissonance and asymmetric knowledge production inscribed into the field of art as it interconnects Europe and Asia (represented by India and one exceptional venue in China). By taking travelling cultures and representation politics (Clifford 1997b) in the field of art and exhibition-making as one starting point, this study conceives international mobility in the art world and its covering of large distances, with a regular back-and-forth between particular sites over a limited time frame, as moments of displacement. These are strung together by artists and curators who create complex infrastructures of knowledge production (Maharaj 2009), cultural entanglement (Maharaj 2009; Adajania and Hoskote 2010), and symbolic dimension (Rodríguez 2007) for art of postproduction (Bourriaud 2007). In the context of accelerating mobility, the promotion of Indianness as a marketing category in European exhibition projects is only the tip of the iceberg in what I shall discuss as the actual sites of transcultural encounter: that is, the sites where the translation and transformation of cultural products evolve to contest and negotiate contemporary art. In order to understand how exhibitions can generate spaces for mutual identification, I will explore how they are put together, what they show, how they are displayed, and how the exhibits are talked about. This intense anthropological investigation will provide crucial insight into the quality and influence of global flows of people, objects, and ideologies in this sector and how this leads to the creation of cultural differences and commonalities, as well as creative, urban hot-spots. Enhancing the methodology of a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 2009), this study’s most notable endeavour will be to explore an exhibition project that is distinctive in its mobility across different cultural and institutional destinations and in its potential to create and interconnect old and new creative hubs. This book, therefore, offers a rare anthropological engagement with the contemporary art world, which is built on contested politics of representation and struggles with a space that Nicolas Mirzoeff describes in reference to Hanna Arendt and Jacques Rancière as unequal, exclusive, and “where hierarchy and substitution enables authority and dominance” (Mirzoeff 2017, 7–8). Similar to defining globalism as a conceptual tool that allows us “to break free of several restrictions, some that are external, others that arise from within” (Adajania 2010), the term “art world”, as it is used here, partly breaks with Arthur Danto’s philosophy of an art-historical system that defines an object as art (Danto 1964). Instead, it redefines Bourdieu’s definition of the “field of production” in which different agents, according to their relationships with each other as well as with the art objects, produce the value of the artist and the art object (Bourdieu 2003, 261). For an updated critical reflection on this field and its formation, questions such as who has the right to appear, where, and when must be raised (Mirzoeff 2017, 7). Generally, I will use both “global” and “international” to refer to the “contemporary art world”, to specify art practices in India that were seen from the late twentieth century onwards, and to decipher in which sense contemporary art “is a fully formed cultural project with certain defined parameters, complete with logics of inclusion and exclusion not so different from those of the modernist project” (Aranda, Kuan Wood, and Vidokle 2009). In view of Indian art, it may be that the contemporary art market followed the meaning and value production of Indian modern art by employing “Indian” as its central category for comparison and valuation (Khaire and Wadhwani 2010, 1281). In order to move beyond the marketing value of Indianness, however, it is worth turning to the discussion “What Is Contemporary Art?” (Smith 2001).¹ With the presumed failure of recent universalisms, such as globalisation or fundamentalism, the idea of the “contemporary”, according to Terry Smith, “has become – in its forms and its contents, its meaning and its usages – thoroughly questioning in nature, extremely wide-ranging in its modes of asking and in the scope of its inquiries” (2001, 2). More intriguing is its second quality, that of “contemporaneousness” – being “contemporary with oneself, with others, with everything in the world and with all time” (3) – which leads to the third and deepest dimension, that of the “cotemporal”: namely, “the coexistence of distinct temporalities, of different ways of being in relation to time, experienced in the midst of a growing sense that many kinds of time are running out” (2001, 3–4). In view of contemporary art in India and its internationalisation, it is worth questioning the function of European initiatives such as the Indian Highway project: Do the exhibition and its branches at the institutional sites in Europe and China reveal productive dynamics of meaning and knowledge production and circulation produced by distinct temporalities and pluralistic perceptions? How do its resonances in the various Indian art scenes contribute to the constitution of the contemporary? It may be intriguing to position Indian Highway as a space of cultural complexity in which the coexistence of distinct temporalities is created, generating a form of contemporaneousness; however, the complexity of temporalities arises, it seems, from the critical negotiations and entanglements within and between a macro level, with its specific historical and modernist approaches in the field of postcolonial debates and art history. With and within a micro level, it unfolds with particular individual viewpoints and practices that see the contemporary art world as encompassing those different dimensions on the one hand, but struggling, on the other, with qualitative and cultural differences. In this sense, this book seeks to underscore the “multiplicity of relationships between being and time” (Smith 2001, 4) and the “contemporaneity” that shapes art “most profoundly” (2001, 6) as,

the most evident attribute of the current world picture, encompassing its most distinctive qualities, from the interactions between humans and the geosphere, through the multeity [sic] of cultures and the ideoscape of global politics to the interiority of individual being.

(2001, 5)

The research on Indian Highway helps identify the inscribed complexity of cultural entanglements and nuances as they contribute to shaping the field of Indian contemporary art. In other words, one can argue that Indian Highway unfolded a present world picture with its particular struggles of decolonisation (Tuck and Yang 2012; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). With its focus on exhibitionary and artistic practices in close interrelation with network politics and institutional strategies of creating “arty” and creative hubs in urban contexts, this ethnography draws attention to these practices, which go far beyond the construction of Indianness as a cultural value. Along with the notion of postproduction and how art reprogrammes the world (Bourriaud 2007), the transformation of artistic techniques and materials as they circulate on the cultural market make it necessary to rethink any idea of “cultural origin” (2007, 13). However, alongside the complexity of contemporaneity as it generates interactions between humans in various localities, connecting different cultures and ideoscapes, art has seemingly preserved its relationality and effective power (Bourriaud 2002; Bishop 2004). The strategies used to exhibit art from India in a way that underlines “cultural difference” and its originality while simultaneously trying to avoid a homogenised picture of it have turned out to be a truly conflictual and deeply transcultural endeavour. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a promising entry point with which to study the turbulent dissonances of mutual repulsion and attraction and the processes of translation and interpretation inscribed in the global establishment of relations between the “self” and the “other” and to look beyond hegemonic Western universal curatorial tropes (Perkins 2013, xv). The resulting perspectives on contemporary art from India as they are inscribed into the different exhibition versions of Indian Highway would necessarily form more than one possible outcome of those interactions. In addition, exhibitions and “art as a way of acting in the world cannot be separated from its overall cultural context and translation, inasmuch as that is a synonym for cross-cultural and cross-temporary communication and is an essential component in art history” (Perkins 2013, xvi). With their specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts, curators, exhibitions, as well as artists and their work function as cultural translators of a certain knowledge or as “long-distance cultural specialists” (Harris 2006, 699). As creators of defi nite and often distanced fields of cultural production, they link up with diverse histories of travel and displacement, of institutional and cultural knowledge that, despite all their expertise and professionalism, are limited in their potential as cultur...