Comment

It is as bad as it gets. The reviewer from the British paper, The Independent, didn’t mince any words while giving an emphatic thumbs down to Indian Highway, an exhibition on Indian contemporary visual arts featuring over 25 Indian artists that opened recently at the Serpentine gallery in London.

The much-hyped show does, as many survey-like shows do, feature the grand daddy of contemporary art, MF Husain. But it also includes our current stars and hotties and auction-faves like Subodh Gupta, Jitesh Kallat, Bharati Kher, Dayanita Singh, Shilpa Gupta and others.

Tom Lubbock, the reviewer, was neither nice nor deferential about Husain, whose recent works he described as “crudely cartoony pictures”. However, while he attributes his cold response to the nonagenarian painter to a cultural gap, he encounters no such “gap” with most of the others. They speak his language and yet…

As he puts it, quite baldly: “The artists may seem fluent in contemporary art, but this language is clearly a Western invention. They have adopted it in an efficient but derivative way, as a badge of contemporaneity. They lack the confidence to take it over and reshape it.”

I saw red when I first read the review: how dare this foreigner write such a dismissive review. And that, too, when he jauntily professes at the outset that he is ignorant about Indian art. So, why then, did he bother? But then, once, my temper has calmed down a bit and nationalist instincts been tempered — in the light of cold reason and all that — I realise that some of his criticism was spot on about the younger bloods.

Think about it: what is really missing in much of our contemporary art, notwithstanding the hype of the spin doctors of the art world? Certainly, our superstars speak the global language of contemporary art: they have rapidly acquired its vocabulary and mastered its grammar. They have the globe at their fingertips — literally, with the internet, not to speak of globe-trotting to art fairs and group shows.

But have our artists, especially those dealing with conceptual art, given it an original twist, made it their own? It’s almost like learning by rote and then regurgitating it all, with a few embellishments and desi touches here and there. In this age of cut-and-paste (physical, digital or metaphoric), the artists, both here and internationally, move dexterously from one form to another, from one medium to another, from one idea to another.

They rarely press the pause button. Some of the artists whose work we see in our galleries today remind me of quick-change performers. Ironically, the faster they change or move from one idea or style to the other, the more they end up being alike. Much of the art world is people by doppelgangers.

All these thoughts were going through my mind when I came across the venerable painter A Ramachandran at an exhibition in Delhi. So, I popped the question of what he thought of the contemporary artscape and its youngest luminaries.

These days conversation revolves round the downturn of the art mart at gatherings of the arterati. But Ramachandran, known for his acerbic wit, was not lamenting the wilting art market. He was more worried about the state of the art and the concerns of the artists. What worries him the most is that hardly anybody now talks about the image: talk about prices and trends and techniques dominate.

He has more time for artists who follow their individual paths without being swayed by trends and fashion, and heedless of their wallflower status in the current world of art. His words, and I paraphrase, “We (he means the older generation) also learned from masters and from our teachers but then we added something of our own and then moved on.” Strangely, thousands of miles and temperament apart his words echo those of the British critic.