{"id":9918,"date":"2018-05-11T13:39:33","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T13:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=9918"},"modified":"2020-07-27T21:00:47","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T21:00:47","slug":"exchange-geeta-kapur-saloni-mathur-and-rachel-weiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=9918","title":{"rendered":"Exchange: Geeta Kapur, Saloni Mathur, and Rachel Weiss"},"content":{"rendered":"

This exchange from <\/em>Art Journal 77, no. 1 (Spring 2018) contains a text by Geeta Kapur, with responses by Saloni Mathur and Rachel Weiss.<\/em><\/p>\n

Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South
\nGeeta Kapur<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Contemporary and the Avant-Garde<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. The contemporary is now often theorized beyond the frame of history; seen as both irrepressibly transitive and<\/em> uniquely itself, the concept runs the risk of losing its diachronic edge. The contemporary as fetishized space privileges, paradoxically, a transcendent temporality.<\/p>\n

2. Even when qualifying the practice of art and acting as concept and event rather than a sequence in history, the contemporary is always of course imbricated in the historical process. I am interested in bringing to bear upon this process exigency of the punctual<\/em> moment but also its opposite: the \u201cart\u201d of deploying anachronisms<\/em>\u2014in slow time and recursive regard. This paradoxical pairing will induce hermeneutic understanding of the contemporary.<\/p>\n

3. It still seems useful to continue with the term avant-garde\u2014not with the historicist pressure exercised by the early vanguards but with dense and diverse (cultural) annotation that gives valence and purpose to the key avant-garde dialectic of \u201cart and life\u201d\u2014tested now on the widest political scale across the world.<\/p>\n

The South-South Axis<\/strong><\/p>\n

4. To start with an \u201coriginary\u201d moment: the Soviet Union in its revolutionary phase defined the role of the political vanguard and opened a space for utopian art thinking. Despite ideological vicissitudes, Soviet art of the 1920s remains the historical avant-garde of the twentieth century. The argument here takes off from another plane: the unraveling of the modern world with successive waves of decolonization peaking around the mid-twentieth century. Artists\/activists engaged in anticolonial struggles claimed the privilege of radical consciousness and took on advanced roles as citizens of new national states. Hereon, the avant-garde principle, as defined by twentieth-century Western art, was substantially, tendentially<\/em>, altered: recall Frantz Fanon\u2019s ontological rendering of black consciousness; the poetics of N\u00e9gritude; the cumulative effect of the left-aligned IPTA (Indian People\u2019s Theatre Association) movement; revolutionary resistance to dictatorships by Third Cinema from Latin America; and much more. Questions follow: Do cumulative movements of cultural and political dissent still produce precipitous forms of alterity? Is the global South still a valid category to counterbalance the hegemony of the North? Is this the reason for a recently renewed interest in the Bandung movement (1950s); do the Tri-Continental Conference (1960s) and the formation of a powerful Third World aesthetic ask for historical reinscription? Do \u201cmemories of underdevelopment\u201d acquire anachronistic significance in judging the model of the developmental State? Does postcolonial theory in its vastly influential role continue to exercise its \u201cdeconstructive\u201d leverage?<\/p>\n

5. Drawing on this deeply mined terrain, my argument (with reference to Rasheed Araeen, Gerardo Mosquera, Okwui Enwezor, and my Indian colleague Ashish Rajadhyaksha) reinforces the postcolonial with an avant-garde discourse<\/em>. Even as the hegemony of a modernist aesthetic is dismantled; the teleology of the vanguard questioned; and the formalism of the neo-avant-garde (in its North American variant) upturned, a fresh dynamic and new interventionist strategies\u2014all the way from Brazil to China\u2014come into play.<\/p>\n

6. During anticolonial struggles, the relationship between colonizing regimes and subjugated populations was marked by a frank antagonism<\/em>. In more \u201csettled\u201d postcolonial conditions, creative acts are premised not so much on confrontational as on transactional skills whereby citizens navigate what have been called agonistic relationships between members of a democratic polity. Contradictions within civil society and contending political regimes are to be worked through by constitutional means and hard diplomacy\u2014but this is no more than a claim. Violence within nation-states is evidence enough, as are brutal wars across the globe.<\/p>\n

7. Here is a mere index of ground realities in India: To account for battles on the gender front\u2014inadequately framed within civil society norms and subverted by atrocities still practiced on the female population in traditional and modern India. To reckon with Dalit consciousness as it confronts similar and worse crimes by the upper castes, challenges the very premise of Indian modernity, and pushes democracy to the limits of its constitutional promise. To acknowledge how India\u2019s \u201ctribal\u201d populations, whose land rights (along with basic ecological norms) are systematically violated by the State and the corporates, develop \u201cMaoist\u201d strategies of resistance. And to understand the ideology of India\u2019s sub-nationalities fighting the coercive mandate of the Indian State through (often underground) insurgencies.<\/p>\n

8. The situation is further fraught when art comes to be positioned within the expanding domain of global capital; it commands collusion and expects independent countries to homogenize: to adopt neoliberal, free market ideologies by declaring policies for economic (\/structural) \u201creforms.\u201d Indeed, the very status of democracy is offered and attested to by the Corporate Gulag. To confront such hostile conditions in a grossly unequal world through the model of agonism\u2014transactions as between \u201cfriendly enemies\u201d\u2014seems difficult. The terms of reference have to be vastly complicated.<\/p>\n

9. As the global is constituted by capital, it is disrupted by grass-roots struggles, massive migrations, civil society conflicts, and political upheavals. These reveal disparate time-lines, lost trails of discourse and \u201cminor\u201d (now crucial) community histories that can be seen to disaggregate a seemingly homogenized world. Such ruptures on the ground of one country, then another and another, make the political geography of the globe not homogeneous as much as a seismic terrain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

10. While the history of the avant-garde gives us a template<\/em> for radical disruptions, it is important to keep alive questions of material practice: It follows that situational politics\u2014the very site for avant-garde initiatives\u2014should be rescued from subsumption in the global imaginary. There is need to focus on location (as an archeologist would) and simultaneously shift paradigms (as a philosopher would): a concept like heterotopia<\/em> speaks of \u201cother spaces\u201d\u2014spaces with several places of difference, real and metaphoric otherness, and rerouted allusions to \u201cutopias.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aesthetic Hypotheses<\/strong><\/p>\n

11. There is, finally, the task, on a micro level, of calibrating the semiotic substructure of aesthetics itself; one which offers new ways of reconfiguring sign-systems within generic forms of communication and global modes of sociality. Wider distribution connotes a democratizing impulse; it also implies that hitherto occluded signifiers be brought into focus\u2014not just to highlight cultural difference but to continually disturb established parameters of aesthetics itself.<\/p>\n

12. The discursive claims made above produce many possibilities within art practice: (i) a foregrounding of processes with corresponding possibilities of live production and indeterminate itineraries such as multifocal installation; (ii) a reassertion of linguistic and formal concerns that subsist at the core of avant-garde strategies (including futurist projections); (iii) an incremental gain in site imaginaries, and an insistence on situational (and participative) sociality that enacts public forms of praxis; (iv) a rescripting of politicality in the growing ambit of artworks: performative and documentary forms; moving-image narratives; electronic signals, messaging systems, and social media networks; (v) a reworking of the avant-garde dictum\u2014of imbricating art and life\u2014to include dematerialized and \u201cvirtually realized\u201d connectivities; (vi) a reckoning of this distributive model of communication, collaboration, and collectivities\u2014on the ground and across cyberspace\u2014so as to be able to shape a precipitate role for an avant-garde.<\/p>\n

13. As new norms of subjectivity and masquerade (and other such affective strategies for the self) are sought and, contrarily, as alienated citizens in the expanding grid of global cities become talking heads in some everlasting documentary footage, a poetics as much as a politics needs to be invoked. A developed subjectivity has radical if anarchic potency; we know this from the upheavals produced by the Surrealist movement through the twentieth century (and until today). As with
\nthe Surrealists, a desiring subject may go so far as to (allegorically) invert the historical into the oneiric; deploy mock mimesis to conflate cosmological entropy with ontological ennui, hoping to arrive, through the paradox, at productive contradictions. A contemporary poetics will track such invisible paths where signs of dissent stray and regather into metonymic relays\u2014and thereby perhaps to elide what is now seen as vanguardist hubris. My argument is that the very frisson between poetics and politics will convert combustive energies, internal and external, into an avant-garde position. Far from hubris, this is a case to sustain the singularity of the human voice within an amply articulated plurality; it is also a case to foreground a conjunctural politics\u2014where the contemporary is defetishized and becomes a critical category, making it logical to ask: with what conceptual strategy and in what dissident form shall the avant-garde perform today?<\/p>\n

\n


\nA Response to Kapur’s “Proposition Avant-Garde”
\nSaloni Mathur<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cProposition Avant-Garde\u201d by Geeta Kapur, the preeminent theorist, critic, and curator of contemporary art in the Indian subcontinent, takes the form of thirteen core claims related to the conditions and urgent challenges of the aesthetic field in India. The proposition is pitched from a specific axis, the geopolitical South, and through a decisive set of historical energies\u2014from Bandung to Fanon to N\u00e9gritude\u2014that reshape the dominant story of radicalism in twentieth-century art. Here, Kapur has enumerated all manner of temporal, social, and geopolitical contingencies that constitute the \u201cseismic terrain\u201d of our world today, and put forth the perennial problem of art\u2019s possibilities for existence within it. At the heart of the proposition is Kapur\u2019s call to \u201ccontinue with the term avant-garde,\u201d to imbue it with \u201cdense and diverse (cultural) annotation,\u201d and to give \u201cvalence and purpose to the key avant-garde dialectic,\u201d namely, the imbrication between art and life across the widest possible political scale.<\/p>\n

Kapur\u2019s investment in the idea of the avant-garde should by now come as little surprise. The concept is a recurrent one in her theoretical writing about art practice in the Indian subcontinent since the 1990s, appearing in several of the essays collected in her influential book When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India<\/em> (2000). In the book\u2019s final chapter, for example, titled \u201cDismantled Norms: Apropos an Indian\/Asian Avant-garde,\u201d first published in 1996, Kapur argued that the notion of the avant-garde needed to be \u201cunstrung from the logic of a Euro-American master discourse,\u201d and connected to the \u201chitherto unlogged initiatives\u201d that belonged to specific national or regional histories like those of India and\/or Asia.1<\/a><\/sup> Kapur\u2019s response in that essay to the American theorist Hal Foster has been described as \u201cone of the first serious attempts to converse directly\u201d with the long history of intense discussions about the avant-garde in Euro-American theory.2<\/a><\/sup> In enacting what she called a \u201cdeliberate deflection\u201d of Foster\u2019s argument, Kapur drew attention to the narrow geopolitical frames and continued indifference to the non-Western world that shaped existing debates on the avant-garde. She thus made visible what Paul Mann has referred to as avant-garde theory\u2019s \u201cdiscursive economy,\u201d namely, its own vested interests in institutions of thought.3<\/a><\/sup> In later essays, she appeared to harness the concept more firmly to the locus of the city, in particular, to the disruptive possibilities contained in the volatile cityscapes of Mumbai in the 1990s, and the fraught urban expansion of New Delhi in the first decade of the twenty-first century.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The current proposition by Kapur to \u201ccontinue with the term\u201d by reinforcing \u201cthe postcolonial with an avant-garde discourse\u201d therefore recalls and reactivates these earlier efforts, and raises several questions at the outset. Why, it seems reasonable to ask, does Kapur remain attached to the concept of the avant-garde in relation to contemporary art practice in India, when this concept has been increasingly disparaged as outdated, exhausted, or overexposed? How should we understand the centrality and organizing role of the avant-garde in Kapur\u2019s art criticism and theoretical imagination over time? What is to be gained from continuing with this concept, or at least taking her proposal to do so seriously? And how might such questions themselves alert us to the changing role and identity of theory itself within the unfolding trajectories of art in the subcontinent?<\/p>\n

The idea of the avant-garde is a truly ubiquitous one today, often synonymous with any experimental art or a rejection of the status quo in general. Kapur\u2019s usage, by contrast, is highly particular, and might be seen as an act of vigilance against<\/em> the problem of the concept\u2019s increasingly nonspecific character. To begin to understand her intervention is to grasp its intellectual origins in a tradition of Marxist aesthetic theory that evolved from debates surrounding the German literary critic Peter B\u00fcrger\u2019s influential text Theory of the Avant-Garde<\/em> (1974), and the Italian theorist Renato Poggioli\u2019s 1971 text of the same name. Ever since B\u00fcrger\u2019s diagnosis that the avant-garde had failed\u2014it failed to resist the forces it opposed, like the market and the institutions of art\u2014the question of the \u201cdeath\u201d of the avant-garde has been at the center of these debates. In what Mann has called this \u201cseemingly inexhaustible discourse of exhaustion,\u201d there is a dizzying lack of consensus around the questions of where, when, how, and under what conditions an avant-garde project becomes absorbed or obsolete, or inevitably co-opted by the systems it opposes. The death of the avant-garde thus represents not its termination, according to Mann, but its \u201cmost productive, voluble, self-conscious and lucrative stage.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> While some might view the avant-garde as a historical project that has been superseded (with what, however, is not at all clear), Kapur is among those critical theorists who recognize it as a productive discourse of aesthetics driven by its own self-conscious contradictions and the tension of its unrealizability. From this position, the avant-garde is an anti-teleological category that \u201cfar from being dead, remains vitally alive\u201d through its internal contradictions and ongoing rearticulation in new and different social and political circumstances.6<\/a><\/sup> It provides, as Kapur states, a \u201ctemplate for radical disruption,\u201d an open-ended placeholder with \u201cdeconstructive leverage,\u201d rather than a concrete course of action or a doctrine with a fixed design. In other words, it is precisely the lack of an endgame that imbues the avant-garde with its greatest possibilities. This is what John Roberts has called the \u201csuspensive function\u201d of the avant-garde, namely, the indefinite open-endedness of the discourse itself, its constructive paradoxes and contradictions, and the supple way in which this theoretical framework returns us to the most penetrating aesthetic questions in the end, namely, What is an artist? What is an artwork? What constitutes value in art? What are the progressive possibilities and limitations of art\u2019s relationship to the world?, and so on.7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The curious prose format of Kapur\u2019s present argument, distinctly unlike her conventional expository writing, is also significant in this regard. Remarkably, this text is itself a manifesto, or rather a playful performance of a manifesto, a kind of ironic retake of a high modernist genre. As several scholars have argued, the manifesto, famously formulated as an instrument of revolution by Marx and Engels in 1848, became the exemplary discursive form of avant-garde movements throughout the twentieth century, from Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, to feminism, anticolonialism, and civil rights in the late 1960s.8<\/a><\/sup> For such groups, the manifesto was both a no-nonsense format of plain speech, \u201ca genre that shoots from the hip,\u201d and a self-conscious rhetorical form in which the complexities of political subjectivity, and the questions of voice and representation, were theatrically negotiated.9<\/a><\/sup> \u201cTo proclaim a manifesto,\u201d Tristan Tzara wrote famously in the Dada manifesto of 1918, \u201cyou have to want: A.B.C., thunder against 1, 2, 3, lose your patience and sharpen your wings to conquer and spread a, b, c\u2019s little and big.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> Here, Kapur appears to be mimicking the manifesto\u2019s formal features\u2014its spirited sense of urgency, its forceful enumeration of grievances, its polemical flourishes, and epigrammatic style\u2014with the wry ironic take of Tzara\u2019s Dadaist text.11<\/a><\/sup> If the manifesto represents a narrative structure born from the need to challenge the universalizing narratives of progress and individualism throughout the previous century, then we might ask: what are the narratives that Kapur\u2019s manifesto seeks to challenge today in the late 2010s? These are, to my mind, the unfolding universalisms\u2014transnationalism, neoliberalism, and globalization\u2014that produce, in her words, the fraught \u201ctranscendent temporality of the contemporary.\u201d Significantly, her challenge does not emerge from a (non-) place of elevated abstractions, but, in the venerable tradition of the manifesto itself, from the rigorously grounded reality of its writer. Kapur\u2019s experimentation with this historically symbolic form thus stands as a playful and highly inventive component of her larger argument to renew the vocabulary of the avant-garde.<\/p>\n

It would be a mistake, I suggest, to view Kapur\u2019s \u201cProposition Avant-Garde\u201d as a symptom of what Rosalyn Deutsche has called \u201cleft melancholy,\u201d the attachment on the part of Marxist theorists to past political ideals like unified social movements or a politics defined exclusively by class.12<\/a><\/sup> For this would imply an adherence to traditionalism, a sense of orthodoxy and inflexibility, and a foundationalist worldview that cannot be accurately attributed to Kapur. On the contrary, her account of a \u201cdisaggregated\u201d society, defined in and through the struggles of India\u2019s marginal constituencies along gender, caste, and tribal inequalities, presents a disparate political geography that does not presume such a social totality. Nor does Kapur call for an old-style oppositional avant-garde; she speaks rather of a \u201cconjunctural politics,\u201d and modes of resistance that are tethered to situational and locational criteria. For her, the term must be qualified with \u201cdense and diverse (cultural) annotation,\u201d in order to give it new purpose and life. Else-where in the text, Kapur insists on self-revision: her earlier model of \u201cagonistic reckonings,\u201d she states, \u201cseems difficult\u201d within a neoliberal era, and the terms of reference \u201chave to be vastly complicated,\u201d yet again. In other words, Kapur\u2019s proposition is a revitalizing endeavor; a project of continuous creative renewal; an ongoing, flexible, and dynamic procedure, rather than a static or nostalgic return to the past. It is a proposition that favors instability and indeterminacy, while drawing attention, through its stylistic play, to the forms available for political speech in the present. \u201cFar from hubris,\u201d Kapur reminds us, \u201cthis is a case to sustain the singularity of the human voice within an amply articulated plurality.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her recent mapping of the historical field of art criticism in post-Independence India, the young Delhi-based writer and curator Vidya Shivadas identifies Kapur as an independent and \u201cinterventionist\u201d critical voice who, more than any other art world figure, has brought theoretical understanding to the discourses of contemporary art in the subcontinent. \u201cSteering clear of the nomenclature of art historian even as she has used the tools of the discipline,\u201d Shivadas writes, Kapur\u2019s critical practice \u201cis one that intervened theoretically, ideologically, and in actual interaction with practice.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> Shivadas further reflects on the implications of an underdeveloped discourse about art for her generation working in India within the new \u201chigh speed demands\u201d of the post-1990s, \u201cwhere critics are pushed into the role of professionals operating within the art market.\u201d \u201cOur feeling of being in a post-historical moment, of navigating through a void, is tied,\u201d she contends, to the compressed time and pressure generated by the \u201cdazzling ascendency\u201d of India\u2019s art market conditions.14<\/a><\/sup> Her own study of five seminal figures in English-language art discourse since Independence, supported by the Hong Kong\u2013based Asia Art Archive, was an attempt to gain critical distance and reflection, and to \u201cmove away from these discourses of lack, even as we acknowledge them.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

It is interesting to contrast Shivadas\u2019s concerns about the sense of directionless-ness of art discourse in India today with the very different conditions of crises around discourse that drove B\u00fcrger to formulate his Theory of the Avant-Garde<\/em> almost half a century ago. B\u00fcrger\u2019s theory was written in the aftermath of May 1968, and the failure of the student movements in cities across Europe and North America, which helps to explain the impassioned tone and enduring rhetorical force of his text. \u201cIn this situation,\u201d B\u00fcrger later reflected, \u201cI transferred, without being conscious of it, utopian aspirations from a society in which they could clearly not be realized to theory. Theory now seemed to be the key that could keep open the door to the future that I imagined, along with Breton, as a finally livable world (\u201cun monde enfin habitable<\/em>\u201d).\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> Regrettably, the vision of theory in B\u00fcrger\u2019s account\u2014its high-stakes relationship to epochal upheaval, and the seriousness of its role in transforming the world\u2014seems increasingly distant to us today in an art world relentlessly oriented to professionalization and market concerns. What appears to have been lost in the rejection of the audacity of this heroic vision was a certain historical and intellectual rigor, a theoretical sophistication, drawn from the essential conviction that discourse or ideas can \u201ckeep open the door to the future.\u201d Kapur, for her part, has also recently pointed to the dialectics of hope and failure that drove the intellectual imaginary of the 1960s and imbued it with philosophical and discursive force, describing her formation as \u201cvagabonding,\u201d embracing the bohemian spirit of studios, exhibitions, travel, and protests in places like Delhi, London, and New York.17<\/a><\/sup> This \u201cis precisely the ground,\u201d she has stated, \u201con which I resurrect, with help of third-worldist Havana, the term and concept of the avant-garde in its other, more diverse and polyphonic registers.\u201d18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Kapur\u2019s \u201cProposition Avant-Garde\u201d is therefore an act of resurrection, one that is neither nostalgic nor melancholic, but directed toward diversification and regeneration. It is a revivalist effort on multiple fronts because, increasingly, pronouncements about the death of the avant-garde seem to be accompanied by fatal declarations about theory itself. Kapur\u2019s manifesto speaks, at least implicitly, to the widespread consensus that art theory or criticism in the register of B\u00fcrger\u2019s historical text has become obsolete, displaced by a proliferation of instrumentalist writing within the dramatic expressions of globalization that characterize contemporary art. Indeed, scholarly rigor or theoretical understanding appears to be of little consequence to the new networks of dealers, gallerists, and auction-house writers in the expanded Indian art world that Shivadas has described. This perennial condition of aftermath, what Foster has described as our current \u201cparadigm-of-no-paradigm,\u201d is even more confusing because it is distinguished, on one side, by the vague claim to \u201ccriticality\u201d by almost everyone at once, and on the other, by the renunciation of difficulty or indifference to intellectual discussion altogether.19<\/a><\/sup> No wonder, then, that Kapur, the consummate essayist, would seize the form of the manifesto at this specific moment, in a manner reminiscent of her vocal intervention over thirty-five years ago in the introductory text of the Place for People<\/em> exhibition (1981).20<\/a><\/sup> That project proved to have long-term consequences for Indian art, in part\u2014as Kapur has noted\u2014because it asserted the primacy of discourse (by seeking to retheorize traditions of narrative painting), and forged a dialogical relationship between the critic and six artists included in the show.21<\/a><\/sup> It stands, in other words, as an exemplary instance of how the manifesto, the \u201cpoetic shout\u201d of the twentieth century, has already been seized and re-scripted for India by Kapur, and the malleability of her successive engagements with the form.22<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In the end, Kapur\u2019s proposition is a philosophical one that rejects the morbid discourses of death that foreclose a historicized concept of the avant-garde and, indeed, on the role and practice of theory itself. It is an invitation to rethink one of the key theoretical terms in the realm of aesthetics in the past half century, to review and recalibrate its usage and scope, and to dislodge it from its previous scripts. It is a call to rework our existing vocabulary in ever more democratic directions, and to understand art\u2019s discursive economy in a historically informed way. It argues for an avant-garde consciousness, as well as a consciousness of the avant-garde debate<\/em>. My colleague, the critic and art historian George Baker, drawing on Edward Said\u2019s (and Theodor Adorno\u2019s) account of \u201clate style,\u201d has recently identified what he calls \u201clate criticism.\u201d For Baker, late criticism represents a form of possibility, a \u201csplinter of redemption\u201d in the new era of irrelevance for art criticism. Late criticism is, according to Baker, a criticism of \u201cwillfully anachronistic criteria\u201d \u2014not a nostalgic relationship to the past, but a means of exacerbation and intervention.23<\/a><\/sup> The point, Baker argues, \u201cis not to consider criticism as dead, but instead as confronting<\/em> its death, and making of this confrontation a project.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> Here, then, is a final way to understand Kapur\u2019s bid to resurrect the (exhausted) concept of the avant-garde in the (outdated) polemical form of the manifesto. This is no weary program of Marxist didactics, but an assiduously self-conscious undertaking that involves creative reckoning and renewal. It is dedicated to the project of passionate criticism, and to activating the \u201cfrisson between poetics and politics.\u201d It bears the same antisynchronic spirit and elusive temporality that defined the radical historiography of When Was Modernism<\/em>. It is therefore a signature text by Kapur, and a proposition I believe we should step up to receive.<\/p>\n

\n


\nSome Thoughts after Kapur and Mather
\nRachel Weiss<\/strong><\/p>\n

As it happens, it was in Havana that the term \u201cavant-garde\u201d entered Geeta Kapur\u2019s active vocabulary. She\u2019d been invited to speak at a conference organized as part of the Third Havana Bienal, in 1989, and the experience turned out to be pivotal for her\u2014especially in the context we\u2019re considering here. Twenty years later, I interviewed her as part of the research for a book about that exhibition, and a substantial part of our conversation concerned her encounter with the term and idea of an avant-garde, as deployed in the Latin American context. When Art Journal<\/em> approached me about this project, I was reminded of that dialogue with Geeta, and so I went back and listened to it again.<\/p>\n

Geeta Kapur<\/strong> [reflecting on the aversion in India to the use of the term \u201cavant-garde,\u201d due to its tight association with dominating Western discourses]: Going to Havana meant the possibility of using the term \u201cavant-garde\u201d outside of the hegemony of the West . . . that there was a Latin American discourse which could be internationalist, indigenist, and at the same time speak about avant-garde practice which engaged with, and was critical in relation to, and which was in many ways challenging of the Western canon. So, it was in that context that I think my entire vocabulary almost turned around and changed, and I felt able to relate to internationalism in a certain way, and particularly the avant-garde in a certain way . . . the live encounter with intellectuals, with artists, with the ambience, with this self-confidence, and the affirmative and celebratory nature of that whole society and of the Latin American intelligentsia [was crucially important].<\/p>\n

Rachel Weiss<\/strong> [noting that the Bienal had specifically accepted Western contemporary art as a lingua franca among Third World artists\u2014a position which had been criticized by some as self-colonizing, because they accepted contemporary art as a universal language]: So, it\u2019s a tricky line. I think what I\u2019m hearing you say is that the negotiation with that kind of problematic internationalism happens very specifically from different locations . . .<\/p>\n

Kapur<\/strong> [critiquing the Bienal curators\u2019 selection of objects with ritual or tribal or folkloric nature]: Claiming an avant-garde status for them, in the face of or in challenge to the Western canon [was problematic]. That was how I saw it, but you\u2019re seeing it from the Latin American side, where that was actually seen as being democratic. [She notes that the Indian perspective would have been critical of merging that kind of object into the category of contemporary or modern art, a boundary broken in India only around 1991 or 1992, with installation, performance, and so on.] I was, in 1989, still very aligned with socially engaged figurative or narrative painting, and very clearly socially engaged . . . with emphatic reference to the local, not for folkloric reasons, but for political reasons.<\/p>\n

Weiss<\/strong> It\u2019s an interesting contradiction that you\u2019re describing, I think, in terms of which tradition the work was coming out of. The theme that year was called \u201cTradition and Contemporaneity,\u201d and part of the way that was being read, it seemed to me, was that tradition was understood as local, while contemporaneity was cast as a sort of subsequent modernism, namely a false universality. But it sounds to me like what you\u2019re saying is that the struggle over tradition had to do with the tradition of modernity, of universalist modernity, and how to pick that up in a kind of resistant way.<\/p>\n

Kapur<\/strong> Yes, I think that Indian artists, unlike probably the African artists or even some of the other Asian artists, would have seen themselves as very legitimate heirs of modernity, that they would lay claims on modernity . . . at the intellectual, cultural, and political level. . . . We have engaged with modernity in its universal form, its imperial colonial form through the British, and in the way it has been internalized and rearticulated for our own cultural and political purposes throughout the twentieth century. So the claim to modernity is already well celebrated and mediated within the Indian imagination. So there would be no embarrassment with making alliances with modernism, and making choices within it . . . conscious alliances. So modernity was not seen as something which ipso facto was an imperialist or universalist compulsion, but one that allowed us to make choices.
\n. . .
\nKapur<\/strong> [about the impact on her, in the years since, of having been in Havana in 1989]: I could use, subsequently, in my discourse, the term \u201cavant-garde\u201d . . . and I am virtually, in India, the only one who uses it. At that time, the reasons were that we shouldn\u2019t have to follow that kind of march . . . that we shouldn\u2019t have to use the word in the manner of the West. And now, the argument is, like in much of the rest of the world, that this military term is already pass\u00e9 . . . that there is other terminology to express similar forward movements, and that in any case that whole metanarrative of modernism\u2019s progressivism is over and done with, and it gets more or less identified with [Clement] Greenberg, so there\u2019s every good reason in postmodernism to reject that term. And younger critics . . . reject it for another set of reasons, as against the ones we used in the \u201970s and \u201980s in India, by people like myself, actually, to critique notions of a globalized avant-garde. So, in one sense, I have used it as a deliberate provocation in discourse, because its absence is a problem in all the discourse on modernism; its conspic\u00aduous absence tells a great deal about the passive aspects of our modernism. The second reason I have continued to use it is that it\u2019s been picked up, as it were, from Latin America. I mean, if Latin America was using it with this kind of originality and panache, then the Chinese started using it for the \u201980s, with another kind of provocation. And they\u2019ve adopted the term, almost as against modernism; they say we have not had a modernism of any substantial nature; but we have an avant-garde\u2014we have a contemporaneity and we have an avant-garde. And India seems to be able to take it neither historically nor in terms of contemporaneity; so I insist on it, and I think it is the gift, if it is a gift, that I got from Cuba. People find it, maybe, as an anachronism or as a provocation, one of the two. But I find it necessary for my discursive frame.25<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

. . .
\nTitled \u201cTradition and Contemporaneity,\u201d the conference at the 1989 Havana Bienal was formed around the problematic of how to relocate the Bienal in a complicated and conflictive internationality. Perhaps the first point to make is that both \u201ctradition\u201d and \u201ccontemporaneity\u201d were fraught terms, though for different reasons. Tradition, as it pertained outside the Western world, had all too often been viewed from the Western centers as either exotic or primitive. Such ideas linked the traditional to an authenticity that was stuck somewhere in the past. James Clifford had elsewhere highlighted the logic, in order to challenge it: \u201cThe various non-Western \u2018ethnographic presents\u2019 are actually pasts. . . . What\u2019s different about peoples seen to be moving out of \u2018tradition\u2019 into \u2018the modern world\u2019 remains tied to inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce<\/em> it.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup> At the same time, \u201ctradition\u201d had been a fundamental tool of authoritarian and antimodern aspects of some nation-building projects, as in Zaire, while also an element of more leftist nation-building exercises, as in Mexico and India.<\/p>\n

An internationally prevalent idea of \u201ccontemporaneity,\u201d meanwhile, assumed it to be the obverse of the Third World\u2019s supposed backwardness and underdevelopment, its nonparticipation in both economic and cultural advancement. Moreover, the meaning of both terms had migrated frequently in the postwar period. As the Argentinean art historian Andrea Giunta has noted of her country\u2019s history,<\/p>\n

whereas in 1956 internationalization meant, above all, breaking out of isolation, in 1958 it implied joining an international artistic front; in 1960 it meant elevating Argentine art to a level of quality that would enable it to challenge international art spaces; in 1962 attracting European and North American artists to Argentine competitions; in 1964 it brought the \u201cnew Argentine art\u201d to international centers; in 1965 it brandished the \u201cworldwide\u201d success of Argentine artists before the local public; and, finally, in 1966, internationalism became increasingly synonymous with \u201cimperialism\u201d and \u201cdependence,\u201d upsetting the previous positivity.27<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The instability of all these terms\u2014internationalism, modernity, tradition, contemporaneity\u2014both across time and from one context to another, meant that the conference was dealing with a moving target.<\/p>\n

Even beyond the problems inherent in each of these terms, the ideological frameworks that seemed to hold them together as a coherent binary were also troubled. As the Peruvian critic Mirko Lauer pointed out, \u201cOur thinking about the relation between tradition and modernity has followed the evolution of our thinking about what the \u2018Third World\u2019 signifies as a social space. . . . It is not surprising that today, when Third Worldism has problems as an instrument of analysis and tool for action, both within and beyond art, the antinomy of tradition\/modernity is also in crisis.\u201d28<\/a><\/sup> Since \u201ctradition\u201d had played a specific ideological role in the decolonizing process, it had therefore been the subject of some of the most influential theorizing about culture in the self-defined Third World. Tradition had been argued for in opposition to modernity, and put forward as a key weapon in the ever-present struggle against neocolonial and imperialist incursions into local cultural development. Summarizing those earlier arguments, Lauer spoke of a \u201cmodernized\u201d art that was associated with \u201cdominant,\u201d \u201cdevelopmentalist\u201d sectors, in conflict with the \u201coppressed sectors\u201d that played only a marginal role in capitalism with their artisanry and \u201cprimitive\u201d forms. The modern was irreversibly alienated from the local\/traditional by virtue of what the Mexican writer Marta Traba had called the \u201cterrorism of the vanguards\u201d: the \u201caltar of modernity\u201d represents the destructive dominion of central markets over the traditional.29<\/a><\/sup> As antidote, Traba and others had proposed an \u201cart of resistance\u201d in the vein of nationalist Mexican muralism\u2014in effect, proposing a regime of liberatory reason as a Third World move against the \u201cinstrumental\u201d reason presumed to lie at the heart of Western modernity.<\/p>\n

It is important to note that arguments such as these were congruent with a broader turn away from a developmental strategy of \u201cmodernization\u201d (i.e., international integration) and toward one that was national or regional in direction.30<\/a><\/sup> These rehabilitations of tradition as a legitimate and contemporary cultural force were, then, a political project. They opposed the stigmatization of tradition within the avant-garde credo of vigorous departure from the past and, more recently, the precarious status of traditions as taken up in postmodern appropriationism. They rejected the complex of ideas in which adherence to tradition was tantamount to stagnation, and in which \u201ctraditional\u201d societies were seen as inherently nonmodern and marginal because they operated outside the abiding dialectic between tradition and innovation held to move \u201chistorical\u201d societies forward.<\/p>\n

By 1989, however, such thinking was proving outdated, especially for its prioritization of identity construction as the principal cultural dynamic. This point was made repeatedly at the conference in Havana. And while anticolonialism was acknowledged as having played an important role in asserting local identities against the force of Eurocentrism, questions were raised concerning what it could offer for negotiating the present.31<\/a><\/sup> The opposition between tradition and contemporaneity that these arguments demanded fit poorly in a reality in which popular expressions of tradition were suffused with, and responsive to, the present day. Furthermore, an essentialist identity politics could not easily be mapped onto the dispersed and diasporic nature of contemporaneous societies, with their ever-accelerating movement of capital, culture, and people. The idea of identities and of communities of interest defined by nationality was incapable of answering to a situation fundamentally defined by the inseparability of cultures\u2014which is, after all, the basic condition in the wake of colonialism. In his remarks at the Bienal conference, the Sudanese artist Rashid Diab took a step in the direction of a more inclusively theorized cultural landscape, retaining the valorization of tradition as legitimately local expression (in this case, in what he identified as the African context), but arguing that the \u201ccontemporary\u201d offered a set of tools or materials that could be usefully taken up in the production of meaning, which was normally the work of traditional culture.32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In her paper presented at the 1989 conference, Kapur had insisted on the authoritarian potential of tradition, which in many cases had been propping up the nationalist project of a populist right wing. A doctrinal idea of tradition, she warned, perpetuates the idea of a nativist, ahistorical, and essential subject; in this sense, traditional production is inherently susceptible to conversion into an institutional bulwark, a process through which it loses the adaptability to a living context that was its initial source of value. Even apart from that historical critique, she warned of the burdens that patrimony can impose on cultures struggling to renew themselves.<\/p>\n

Her comments seem, in retrospect, to have been at broad variance with the ideas of the Latin Americans, who generally drew much looser boundaries around those two central thematics: this was reflective of the debates about syncretism, hybridity, creolization, and the like, which were pervasive in the region at the time. There was no bright line bifurcating cultural production, in either the tradition-modernity or the local-international binary. The emphasis that emerged in the conference debates was on both the continuities and discontinuities among First and Third Worlds (to use the language of the day), and the broadly diachronic approach to contemporaneity obviated the need to choose sides on that score. In the Bienal itself, and in the formulations that surfaced during those debates, traditional and contemporary cultures, and vernacular and \u201ccultured\u201d art were presented as, in many ways, continuous with one another, rather than staked out across an ideological divide. Meanwhile, analyses of cultural appropriation and resignification in the Latin American context generally pointed to a dynamic framework that was globalist rather than parochial in its principles. It\u2019s also noteworthy, I think, that Kapur made so much of the \u201cself-assuredness and panache\u201d with which her interlocutors in Havana deployed \u201cthose tricky concepts of modernity, internationalism, and avant-garde . . . in the service of a critical project\u201d\u2014a point that calls to mind her attribution of a certain \u201cpassivity\u201d to Indian modernism in her recent text. What her comments suggest, it seems to me, is that Kapur heard in those debates the germ of precisely the audacious and mobilized avant-garde that she now calls for so urgently.<\/p>\n

Speculating a bit, I also wonder whether she didn\u2019t perhaps also hear, in the arguments for a temporality at once traditional and contemporary, a potential way to conceive of the past as something other than simply past\u2014a contention that she puts at the center of her call for an avant-garde of today. In place of an either\/or formulation, those discussions had tried to be accountable to the realities of a situation in which both tradition and contemporaneity existed simultaneously, in a productively complex and fraught relation. Tradition was conceived in broadly transcultural and contemporary terms, and linked to an idea of popular creativity. Traditions, in this sense, were residual rather than archaic, and in fact often closely related to emergent artistic or cultural forms. Traditions, in other words, were a living force that could be articulated in a contemporary (international) idiom, and they were important because they made manifest the complicated history of cultural encounters within the colonial and postcolonial processes. This approach facilitated and legitimated a Third World claim to contemporaneity while recognizing its capacity to originate its own contemporary forms. All these arguments sync well with Kapur\u2019s current insistence that it is the ambition of the avant-garde\u2014that anachronistic presence\u2014 rather than the historical form of it, that remains available to us now as a potent node of possibility.<\/p>\n

In her musings on the \u201cSouth-South axis,\u201d the most elaborated of the text\u2019s three sections, Kapur recalls earlier manifestations of the \u201cavant-garde principle\u201d across the global South and asks a lot of questions\u2014questions that probably didn\u2019t feel so daunting in 1989, questions about the basic building blocks of change: Do movements (still) have a cumulative character? In what sense, and in what geographic formation (if any) is solidarity still a meaningful concept? Why do we still care about those older radical formations? She insists that we reckon honestly with the pretenses at \u201cuniversal\u201d truth that underlie the appeals, for instance, to the ameliorative forms of agonism and other softening claims about the realities of power\u2014broad claims meant to have universal applicability, but which she cuts down to the much smaller realm in which those principles can be taken seriously as political discourse. Kapur is writing from a place that puts extreme pressure on the idea of political hope: Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India in May 2014, right around the time of Kapur\u2019s manifesto. (For that matter, I too write from such a place; Saloni Mathur and Art Journal<\/em> approached me about this project at another seismic moment, the Trump one.) Kapur is working to frame an avant-garde zone of possibility that doesn\u2019t renege on the political promise of being a meaningful force\u2014an audacious move, given the present circumstances. Hence her eloquent call, now, for a usurpation of the very terminology, the right to name a practice, an avant-garde enmeshed in equal commitments to politics and to aesthetics, considering them inextricable in its overall project.<\/p>\n

Kapur is placing a tremendous amount of weight on a single word, one that she knows will rankle. She was very clear, in 2009, about the intended provocation. All these terms\u2014power, culture, politics, avant-garde\u2014are highly contested. Kapur provokes us to reconsider these concepts in order to reenergize them. But she still\u2014and this might be the anachronistic aspect of her polemic \u2014assumes that, even in their reimagining, those terms will retain some stable basis of meaning. This is probably the aspect of her polemic that is most likely to raise objections. But if we take it as a strategic use of language, rather than as a definitional exercise, we can find the constructive potential that Saloni Mathur insists on in her response. Kapur\u2019s call is radical in scope: she demands that we \u201ccontinually disturb established parameters of aesthetics itself;\u201d that we \u201crescript politicality\u201d\u2014what she\u2019s after is a \u201cprecipitate role\u201d for the avant-garde. \u201cPrecipitate\u201d is an interesting word choice\u2014the avant-garde she speaks of is not form, but formative.<\/p>\n

The anachronism is deliberate, but not in the nostalgic sense that we might assume. Kapur insists, in the muscular elegance of her manifesto, that we (once again) aspire on a scale now considered immodest and irrelevant. In emphasizing the always incomplete results of decolonization and of the process of democratic emancipation, in emphasizing the baselines of violence, inequality, mass migration, and the pervasive tendencies to wish them away into the past, her call for a renewed engagement with the avant-garde is a call also for a more purposeful engagement with the failures of social movements to arrive at their goals, and a reframing of those as loam rather than grave.<\/p>\n

The catalytic effect of Kapur\u2019s Havana encounter is proof enough that concepts take on new life as they are moved into new circumstances, which ought to cancel out any complaints that Kapur is beating a dead horse. In 2009 she spoke of the \u201cgift\u201d that she received in Havana\u2014which still drives her commitments decades later. If that encounter was with a discourse that was intent on moving beyond the creation of a usable past to a critical analysis of culture in the contemporary sphere; if it was, in broad terms, a move away from the literalism, or realism, of identity politics and nationalist\/regionalist legitimation, to a postrealist, postnativist, transnational solidarity and debate; if it became a kind of critical reflection reprising, or interrupting, the institution of the avant-garde and reworking it toward a different end, a project of transforming the terms of the inquiry\u2014then all of that remains an animating force, echoing forcefully in her current call.<\/p>\n

The situation in India that Kapur describes has broad similarities to that of Havana. In India, too, the global commoditization of art could potentially lead to a relative alientation of theory and critical discourse. It will likely not be that different in many other places as well. To call now for an avant-garde is an act of intransigence, and of commitment to an art that supersedes our mostly low expectations in a time in which the vaunted dream of art-into-life has been largely reduced to a funding category. It seems that the best we can do with regard to any vaguely utopian desire is to shelve it delicately into the category of Not Yet. Kapur has no compunctions about violating that gentlemen\u2019s agreement. Mathur refers to our \u201cperennial condition of aftermath,\u201d and that seems a painfully apt diagnosis. Kapur challenges us to do something about that. She deliberately adopts the posture of contrarian, in order to push us to sharpen our thinking. She calls for an ambitious art\u2014art as an activity that, however provisional its achievements, could still stand as a space of thinking otherwise, of proposing otherwise, of doing otherwise. If we take up the idea of an avant-garde on Kapur\u2019s terms, as an arena of thought and action that can push the question and call the question, then we could find in her provocation her recirculation of that gift back to us.<\/p>\n

\n

Geeta Kapur<\/strong> is a Delhi-based critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists <\/em>(1978), When Was Modernism <\/em>(2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice <\/em>(forthcoming). She is a founder-editor of Journal of Arts and Ideas, <\/em>a former advisory member of Third Text<\/em>, and a trustee and advisory editor of Marg.<\/em> Among her curatorial projects have been Dispossession,<\/em> Johannesburg Biennale (cocurator, 1995); Bombay\/Mumbai<\/em>, for Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis<\/em>, Tate Modern, London (cocurator, 2001); subTerrain<\/em>, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); and Aesthetic Bind <\/em>(five exhibitions), Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2013\u201314).<\/p>\n

Saloni Mathur<\/strong> is a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art<\/em>, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Rachel Weiss<\/strong> is a writer, educator, and lapsed curator, currently professor of arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Major publications include Making Art Global: The Third Havana Biennial<\/em> (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press), Por Am\u00e9rica: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso<\/em> (Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico, Instituto de Investigaciones Est\u00e9ticas: coauthor and editor) and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias<\/em> by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism 1950s\u20131980s: Points of Origin<\/em> (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: codirector with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver) and Ante Am\u00e9rica<\/em> (Biblioteca Luis \u00c1ngel Arango, Bogot\u00e1, and traveled in South, North, and Central America: cocurator, with Gerardo Mosquera and Carolina Ponce de Le\u00f3n). Her current book project is titled Now What?: The Quandaries of the Radical Past.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
    \n
  1. Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India<\/em> (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000): 374\u201376. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Elizabeth Harney, “Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London,” in “What Is an Avant-Garde?” special issue, New Literary History <\/em>41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 740. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 6\u20137. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay\/Mumbai 1992\u20132001” in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, <\/em>ed. Iwona Blazwick, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 16\u201341; and Geeta Kapur, “Delhi,” in Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes<\/em>. exh. cat. (London: Phaidon, 2013), 89\u2013112. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Mann, 3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. John Roberts, “Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde,” in “What Is an Avant-Garde?” special issue, New Literary History<\/em> 41. no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 717. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Ibid., 720. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. See Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern<\/em> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race, and Manifestos<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Lyon, 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918), in Manifesto: A Century of Isms<\/em>, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 297. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. See Lyon, 3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  12. See Rosalyn Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  13. Vidya Shivadas, “Mapping the Field of Indian Art Criticism: Post-Independence” (report to Asia Art Archive, 2009), 41, at https:\/\/aaa.org.hk\/en\/resources\/papers-presentations\/mapping-the-field-of-indian-art-criticism-post-independence<\/a>, as of February 2, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  14. Ibid., 2\u20136. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  15. Ibid., 5. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  16. Peter B\u00fcrger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde<\/em>,” in “What Is an Avant-Garde?” special issue, New Literary History <\/em>41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 698. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  17. See Sabih Ahmed, “Landing Imaginaries: An Interview with Geeta Kapur,” Sarai Reader 09: Projections<\/em> (Delhi: Sarai Programme, CSDS, 2013), 248\u201356. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  18. Geeta Kapur, “Vagabondage: Art and Life in the Sixties” (paper presented at “Revisiting the Global 1960’s: An Interdisciplinary International Conference,” School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, March 4\u20135, 2011), 13. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  19. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes)<\/em> (London: Verso, 2012), 128\u201329. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  20. Geeta Kapur, “Partisan Views about the Human Figure,” rep. in Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art<\/em>, ed. Bernhard Fibicher and Suman Gopinath, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 33\u201340. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  21. See Natasha Ginwala, “Geeta Kapur: On the Curatorial in India, Part 2” (interview), Afterall Online, 2011, at www.afterall.org\/online\/geeta-kapur-on-the-curatorial-in-india-part2#.UoxmfF4zzwg<\/a>, as of February 2, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  22. Mary Ann Caws, “The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms<\/em>, xxi. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  23. George Baker, “Late Criticism,” in Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets, <\/em>ed. Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw (New York and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 31. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  24. Ibid., 35. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  25. Phone conversation with Geeta Kapur, December 9, 2009. On the use of the term “avant-garde” in Chinese discourse, see, for example, Minglu Gao, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  26. James Clifford, “The Others: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in “Magiciens de la Terre,” special issue, Third Text <\/em>3, no. 6 (1989): 73\u201374, emphasis in orig. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  27. Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, <\/em>trans. Peter Kahn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 9. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  28. Mirko Lauer, “Notas sobre pl\u00e1stica, identidad y pobreza en el Tercer Mundo,” conf. paper, distributed in transcript after “Tradition and Contemporaneity” (Havana, 1989), 20. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  29. Marta Traba quoted in Lauer, 21, my translation. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  30. The debate in culture had important connections to broader theories about development. Modernization theory, mostly expounded in Europe and the United States, considered underdevelopment the result of internal conditions, and held that development in poor countries should follow the pattern that had been established by already developed countries, and with their help and leadership. Dependency theory, on the other hand, was developed largely by Latin American and\/or Marxist writers and became increasingly influential in the 1960s and 1970s as an alternative way to understand the chronic syndromes of underdevelopment in the Third World. It argued that development and underdevelopment were relational and structural, with the core of wealthy nations dominating a periphery of poor ones that were exploited as the source of cheap labor and raw materials. Dependency theory, then, suggested that in order for underdeveloped nations to develop, they would have to break the cycle of their dependency on developed nations and pursue internal growth. This led to, among other policy tendencies, the idea of industrialization based on import substitution. See, for example, Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  31. Jos\u00e9 Rabasa has provided a helpful definition of this term: Eurocentrism is not only “a tradition that places Europe as a universal cultural ideal embodied in what is called the West,” but also “a pervasive condition of thought.” Rabasa quoted in Santiago Col\u00e1s, “Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies,” PMLA<\/em> 110, no. 3 (May 1995): 392. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  32. Rashid Diab, “Hacia una contribuci\u00f3n peculiar del arte africano contempor\u00e1neo a la historia universal del arte y a una comprensi\u00f3n nuestra de la est\u00e9tica,” conf. paper, in Debate Abierto Tradici\u00f3n y Contemporaneidad en la Pl\u00e1stica del Tercer Mundo<\/em> (Havana: Centro Wilfredo Lam, 1989), 14\u201318. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Geeta Kapur puts forth a thirteen-part text, “Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South,” with critical responses by Saloni Mathur and Rachel Weiss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversations","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}