By the early 1980s the Department of Fine Arts and Aesthetics at the Maharaja
Sayajirao University in Baroda stood as the key institution for contemporary art in
India. Its reputation had been carefully cultivated over the last fifteen years by both K.
G. Subramanyan and Geeta Kapur. Under their careful artistic and theoretical tutelage,
the Facuhy of Fine Arts turned to narrative-figuration as a self-proclaimed polemical
stance against the materialist/determinist thrust of history. The narrative turn moved
beyond the regional locality of Baroda in 1981 with the exhibition Place for People.
Held in the cosmopolitan art centres of Delhi and Bombay the show included the work
of six artists variously affiliated with the school in Baroda: Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan
Sundaram, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Jogen Chowdhury, and Sudhir
Patwardhan.
The arrival of Place for People in the 1980s must be situated within the larger
frames of contemporary art in the post-colonial moment. In attending to the variegated
terrain spanning both theory and practice, my project has as its underlying concern the
interface between discursive formations, institutional structures, and sites of artistic
intervention. More specifically, I am interested the representational strategies that
emerged in the period between 1960 and 1990. In looking to the gaps in the discourse,
alongside the points of conflict or conciliation, I raise larger questions about the politics
of representation, and the productive or prohibitive possibilities of artistic intervention.
At the core of my argument is the rise of painterly narrative-figuration exemplified by Place for People and the challenge leveled against it by the Indian Radical Painters and
Sculptors Association. Both laid claim to radicalism as a polemical gesture; however,
the battle was waged across the historically contingent fields of artistic subjectivity,
regional difference and the capacity of art to function as an agent of social change.
Pivotal to my study is how certain approaches to both the theory and practice of
contemporary art in India have emerged as paradigmatic while others have gathered the
dust of disregard.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU./2833 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Wyma, Kathleen Lynne |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | 10254468 bytes, application/pdf |
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