Workshop, Conference
Global Art and the Museum – The Global Turn and Art in Contemporary India
2008-10-10 - 2008-10-11
Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi
3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg
New Delhi 110 001
Tel: +91 11 23329506
Fax +91 11 2372 2573
For further information on the workshop please call
+91 011 23329506 ext. 110
→ go to http://www.goethe.de/INS/in/ned/acv/bku/2008/en3643305v.htm
In 2006 Hans Belting and Peter Weibel initiated the project Global Art and the Museum (GAM) at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The project links two topics that usually are discussed separately: the global production of art and the global expansion of art museums.
The global turn in the last 20 years has produced not just a new history but a new geography of art. The art market, the prominence in the contemporary art world of artists, curators and collectors from outside the west, and the tremendous proliferation of museums, especially in the Asia Pacific region and the Gulf, are all phenomena that have not yet received widespread attention. The post-colonial debate rarely addresses the global turn in art practice, nor does it study the new era in art museums. This study therefore aims to explore the impact of art’s globalization on art institutions, art history, and art practice in the last 20 years. The project GAM proposes to distinguish global art, as a new phenomenon in the contemporary art scene, from world art, in the sense of world art heritage, though the two areas of practice and musealization may be linked in several ways.
The post-colonial era opens up new perspectives on what has been a divided world (Western modernism as opposed to ethnic art). The legendary Paris exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre”, curated by Jean Hubert Martin in 1989, left many open questions as regards the discourse about art practice in a post-ethnic and at the same time post-historic (in the sense of Western art history) way. In the face of post-modern and global developments, the political function or the nationalization of indigenous currents may gain a new significance. Among other activities this project will organize four international workshops in four selected areas of the world whose different situation promises to offer new insights into the globalization process. The first workshop took place in São Paulo in August 2008.
It is a major concern of the project GAM to explore the specific situation in India today, including Indian audiences and Indian collectors, to learn about the relations between modern narratives of art history and alternative traditions in viewing Indian culture. The workshop aims to bring together different voices of the contemporary Indian art scene, including art critics, art historians, anthropologists, art curators, artists and collectors and address the new configuration of the art world taking shape currently in India. Similar workshops will be held in other parts of the world so that the present situation can be analyzed in different environments.
Program
Friday, October 10, 2008
10.30 a.m. – 1 p.m.Session I: The GAM Project
Following a description of the overall goals of the project GAM by Hans Belting [biography] and Andrea Buddensieg [biography], the Indian workshop participants will be invited to contribute their views on the key issues raised by the project.
Discussants: Kavita Singh [biography)
Discussion with the audience
Session II: How Global Is Art History Today?
In the past twenty years, an earlier phase of multiculturalist protocol has been worked over by a more systematic postcolonial critique. In its turn, capitalist globalization produces an incremental gain in information technology, which now mediates widely different cultures. Are these developments worked into the discourse of art history?
We can begin with placing two kinds of art historiographical projects in the recent decades. Some Western art historians (David Summers, James Elkins) attempt a regurgitation of universal art history after Hegel. In his concept note, Hans Belting [biography] puts aside this refurbished picture of world art/world art heritage and attributes a sharper edge to the global phenomenon. In India, we may further distinguish at least two, and now more, positions emerging from post-colonial critiques of art history: a position that unravels the obvious eurocentrism within the discipline; and another that attempts to calibrate the modernist project itself, and elicit counter narratives that may, on occasion, assume the role of an avantgarde with a situational, site-responsive, logic.
More recently, strategies of cultural disaggregation have gained ground, producing a picture of radical divergences in materials and categories of art history. This panel hopes to create a space for a dialogue between these parallel trajectories.
Panel: Parul Dave Mukherji [biography] (moderator and speaker), Jagath Weerasinghe [biography], Marian Pastor Roces [biography]
Discussion with the audience
Saturday, October 11, 2008
10 a.m. – 1 p.m.Session III: Questioning the Post Ethnic
In this panel we intend to explore the value and resonance of the term ‘post-ethnic’ and its cognate – ‘post-historic’ – in India. Hans Belting [biography] put forward the term ‘post-ethnic’ to describe the ossibilities that open when indigenous traditions are “exhausted and interrupted.” But in India, local cultures still flourish in what an outsider might see as “authentic contexts.” At the same time, and sometimes by the same agents, this ethnicity (or post-ethnicity) is also something to be performed on regional, national and international platforms.
The term post-historic, which suggests that we might, in this age, be free of history, is another of the mirages of globalization discourse. Increasingly, the world reveals itself as an unflattened realm; and increasingly, we understand that our attempts to be “post-” are shaped by our histories.
Different propositions about location – historic and ethnic – circulate, interact or grate against each other in India’s many art worlds. This panel would like to open discussion on new forms of circulation, new aspirations, new actors and agents (such as designers, collectors, curators and impresarios), institutions (new and old, private and governmental), new technologies; new power structures and new representations of those that present themselves or are presented as, the traditional, the ethnic and the marginalized of India’s worlds of art.
Panel: Jyotindra Jain [biography] (moderator and speaker), Rustom Bharucha [biography], Olympia Bhatt [biography], Kavita Singh [biography],
Discussion with the audience
Session IV: Art in the Global Contemporay
The concept of global art derives from, and valorizes, the contemporary, thereby encouraging retroactive readings of the modern, as indeed of the pre-modern. Art historical concepts are telescoped and the past comes to be read anachronistically. Further, the contemporary holds such premium that the diachronic paradigm (now characterized as an overdetermined discourse creating a teleology that promotes western hegemony), is superseded by a euphoric synchrony. A detemporalized globality that subsumes an earlier, more dialectical, internationalism and its (utopian) avantgarde — is itself a vexed phenomenon. Global capital produces its own standardized institutions: the new millennium prefers collector-driven museums coeval with an investors’ art market and the spectacle of art fairs. Hans Belting quotes Thomas McEvilley: “The problem is no longer that art works will end up as commodities, but that they will start out as such.”
It is however important to consider when and where global art exchange in the contemporary assumes simultaneity of concerns as it does parity in technologies of production. There is a new democracy in exhibitory processes within contemporary museums; and curatorial practice in the cycle of worldwide biennales favors de-territorialization at the same time as it calibrates the politics of region, nation, and place, so that artists can devise new and contested means for mediating social conflict and political choice.
Panel: Geeta Kapur [biography] (moderator and speaker), Sheba Chhachhi[biography], Anshuman Das Gupta [biography], Shukla Sawant [biography], Ashok Sukumaran [biography]
Discussion with the audience
