The artist works on multiple levels. On the one hand, artists communicate a distillation of human experience, of inner emotional life, through their art. On the other hand it is an artist’s job to engage with her times, to respond to the reality around her as she sees it, to imagine alternative realities and futures as she or he imagines them. But in this, how is an artist’s job different from that of, say, a journalist, cartoonist or photographer?
More specifically, if we narrow the ‘artist’ down to ‘visual artist’, as opposed to say, a musician or theatre-wala (who one would call artistes with an ‘e’), and exclude creative people working exclusively with prose and poetry (those who identify themselves only and strictly as writers and/ or poets), then the questions become even trickier: what are the parameters for judging whether an artist has made politically engaged work? Is there a minimum level of directness or readability required for a work or a practice to be deemed engaged? Is there a minimum number of people it has to reach before it’s given the licence of ‘a work of political protest’?
I read an opinion somewhere that claimed that in the current period, writers and poets have been far clearer, far more courageous in protesting against the political dispensation in India, while Indian visual artists will be remembered as having hidden behind the moats of form and aesthetics. There are several problems with this notion.
First, there is the pesky issue of access. In a country that’s largely illiterate, how many readers do text journalists actually reach? The number is minuscule. Then, how many people read fiction writers and poets? If we were to squeeze this further, what is the readership of those writing in English? With each filter, the numbers get tinier and tinier. Next, on a scale that ranges from mass media at one end to art on the other, in any society, no matter how advanced or backward, the ones closer to the art end of the scale are bound to be addressing a much smaller number of people. So, a TV anchor or reporter will have a wider audience than a print/ text journalist; the print journalist’s readership will be bigger than a novelist’s; and the novelist will usually beat the poet in sales and readers.
Likewise, someone producing public billboards will score far more eyeballs than a painter whose work is confined to a gallery. The question is: does the poet or painter have to make their work coarser or louder or larger in order to protest or show courage?
To add to this, today, the label ‘visual art’ reeks a bit of obsolescence. Anyone with the slightest interest in the arts would know that the old watertight distinctions are no longer possible, with text, film, music, performance, and even smell being as much a part of contemporary art space as painting and sculpture. The area once known as visual art is now a big tent under which comes video, audio-visual, purely aural, public art, a lot of textual work, and performance art, which overlaps with theatre and music.
All of these means and mediums make up what one calls art and yet, all of them put together find only a small audience in India. Some exceptional dissemination efforts aside, only a sliver of the population is exposed to these practices in the bubble of the exclusionary art world, and that too mostly in the big metros.
With the times
So when people in the future look back at this time, perhaps seeing it as a fairly dark period in our history, how will they judge, or assess, the political engagement of the various branches of creative endeavour — art, literature, performance and film? I think one test will be: did the individual or group speak out in their chosen language of art? For instance, if a writer at this time were to be writing a novel set in a historical period, the test would not be whether it reflected the current times and brutalities accurately but whether it threw some light on human nature and societal forces operating today, and on the historical route our society took to reach where it did in 2018. Were that novel to be weighed against other novels published currently, books that some people might accuse of being mere compilations of headlines and news reports garnished with flecks of fiction, it may not fare badly. So, no, it would not matter which books found more readers, (or how close they got to the sales of Chetan Bhagat’s novels or packets of paan masala ) or which got closer to getting international awards, none of it.
Now, if we were to apply the same criteria to those working in the arts (visual, plastic, call them what you will), there is no dearth of people who’ve engaged politically and socially while staying far way from the production of outright agit-prop. To mention just a very few off the top of one’s head: Nilima Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Sheba Chhachhi, Ravi Agarwal, Anita Dube, Amar Kanwar, Zuleikha Chaudhari, and Shilpa Gupta. Their work ranges from installations and performance art to old-fashioned painting, and when people look back at artists working and interfering with circuits of power at this juncture of history, these names and others will sit quite happily next to the most outspoken writer-critics.
Political ravages
If you open up the definitions a little more, the list grows. For example, the work of photographers Sudharak Olwe and Ishan Tankha can be placed under the label of photo-journalism, yet many of the photo-series both men have made can easily sit in dialogue with the strongest of what is called ‘art photography’. Then, of course, you have the work of Sahmat, a group that has spoken out against bigotry, oppression and inequality for a quarter century, sparing neither Congress regimes nor the BJP-RSS ones. These are just a few names and they and others have hardly been quietist, hardly played safe when faced with the political ravages of our times.
Perhaps the questions need to be different. Does the poet or painter have to make their work for the largest common denominator in order to be politically relevant? Or do the spaces that these art practices circulate in need to expand beyond the commercial axis? Or should we expand our own understanding of what art is, and what art does, in addressing the political?
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
