The Possibility of Being
Post digital* directions in contemporary image making.
The Possibility of Being is a curatorial
engagement with five artist immersed in image making with a constant dialogue
with Painting and Drawing both in terms of medium and
practice. The curation is dedicated to (re) exploring linkages
between the image, the socio-political and painterly practices as we come to the end of an era
which was (is being) called Contemporary.
Among the many developments that marks the term contemporary has
been the dominating focus on content that prioritize socially and
politically charged subject matters over stylistic experimentation and
investigations over Form and Language. It is also marked by its affiliations to
the idea of digital progress. As the digital (r)evolution settles
down, we are in a position to understand that Digital is not just a
technological shift, it is also an aesthetic trend. In an age where we are
surrounded by digital technology, this splitting of the Digital allows us to
explore beyond the aesthetic measures of purity, pristine images, perfect
copies and powerful (spectacular) illusions.
Since the 1990’s postmodern culture and contemporary art was principally
associated with photography, film, installation and text-based interventions.
Painting lost its culturally privileged status and judged as an intrinsically
conservative or reactionary aesthetic form. Post the onslaught of the
digital (r)evolution, we reached a point where ‘Painting’ was declared dead as
political and cultural agency; and it was only as a commodity that the
relevancy of ‘Painting’ was acknowledged. This seeming fissure in history
allows (forces) us to split Paintings in terms of medium and practice. At
the height of the digital age (As the neo liberal was defined and celebrated as
the era of new media and the ‘futuristic’), we witnessed artists producing
paintings that looked like digital prints (hyper realistic, no trace of
artistic labour, smooth finished cosmopolitian flat surfaces).
However, as we peaked inside the contemporary trend, silently inside
artist studios we see a reassertion of analogue aesthetics. This return
to analogue in a digital age has led to both painting and drawing
have changing in terms of medium, concept, viewership and practice.
In a sense this curation becomes a project in cultural archaeology or
ritual nostalgia. Slowly there is a growing recognition that painting practices
continue to hold important contributing agency in shaping new cultural
directions. These new directions in taste and cultural archaeological position
disturb the meaning of ‘new media’ by opening doors for old media to stand as
an vanguard act. That is why the Possibility of Being.For a
post-1950s generation, such a ‘reconstruction’ of analogue aesthetics has lead
recognition that painting practices today are contributing to new cultural
directions.
Through the heights of the dominance of digital aesthetics in global
taste, there have been artists who have worked within zones that transgress
labour, concept and skill. Thus Painting (not as a medium but as practice) has
emerged as an important platform for post-digital, post-conceptual art.
The 'durability' of post-conceptual art through the old media suggests
that its practitioners have been re-fashioning and re-defining the medium with
some of its earlier histories and aspirations in mind. Today, embedded in the
practices of drawing and/or painting, we will find modernist understandings of
medium, style, form and surface being re visited, but through the layers of
post-modern theory and criticism.
Two concerns that is integral to the curatorial thought.
- Contemporary
art’s investment in labour, analogue and old media assumes various
forms and it is symptomatic of changes in the economy and taste rather
than expressive of a broader left consciousness in the arts. In other
words, the rise of labour as a sign-reference in recent art does not (necessarily)amount
to a political project, even if it indicates a departure from the staples
of postmodernism and, in some quarters, the desire to provide an
alternative to capitalist economic relations.
- Within
the conventional Contemporary Indian Art production, the emphasis on
manual/physical labour comes up as a kind of noise, a disturbance which
takes away from the digital/conceptual art itself. This type of art which
has come to dictate the art market for a long time emerged simultaneously
with the global capitalism which swept the world two decades ago. Labour
was sought to be omitted from the art and a clean, sterile, sophisticated,
digitised practice which only projected the concept was developed. It is
to the extent that the old media art practices refer to and embody forms
of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the
concept of abstract labour of new media.
The curatorial strands will be manifest in a show The
Possibility of Being, bringing together Ashim
Purokayasta, Jaganath Panda, Muktinath Mandal, Nataraj Sharma and Rekha Rodwittiya
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*Post-digital is a term which has recently come
into use in the discourse of digital
artistic practice. This term points significantly to our rapidly
changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It
points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being
digital. If one examines the textual paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a
choice: either the "post-digital" society has intrinsic meaning, or
it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a
totality. Either way, Roy Ascott has clearly demonstrated that the
distinction between the digital and the "post-digital" is part of the
economy of reality.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postdigital
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