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Import/Export Tracking the Indian Diaspora A recent exhibition at the Queens Museum focused on contemporary South Asian art, much of it installation work created by émigré artists. By Thomas McEvilley When the art market was booming in the yen-drunk 1980s it seemed to have an appetite big enough for everything - even things that it couldn't quite identify. The moment for multiculturalism had apparently dawned. But in less than a decade the yen has fallen, the market has dried up, and the multicultural tendency appears to be petering out. After the Pompidou Center's pivotal 1989 exhibition "Magiciens de la terre," Cheri Samba's paintings were briefly everywhere; do you recall seeing one lately? Once the market crashed, the brief burst of "Magiciens"-inspired tokenism abated. Western markets returned to protecting their own. Still, the fact remains that many of the most interesting developments in contemporary art are happening outside of western Europe and the United States, in what would be regarded by traditional modernist criteria as off the beaten track. In Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, complex and subtle installation art characterizes energetic and spirited art scenes. On the periphery of western Europe, in Estonia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia and other nations once part of the socialist East, neoconceptual sculpture and photography, video installation and performance art are thriving. In Senegal, Zaire, the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, contemporary modes of painting and sculpture vigorously engage both the esthetic and the social. Cuba, Columbia and Venezuela have lately emerged at the forefront of Latin American art. In these and other artistic centers in the previously colonized world influence from the West is felt but not slavishly pursued; art works involve bidirectionality, addressing the cultural roots of the artist and his or her audience at home, while simultaneously engaging the international community through global issues. In New York, unfortunately, evidence of this global ferment in the visual arts too rarely passes our way, and almost never in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. So far, it's mostly been left to smaller museums to fill in the gaps. Last year, for instance, the Asia Society presented "Traditions/Tensions," an important exhibition of contemporary art from five Asian nations curated by Apinian Poshyananda (see A.i.A., Feb. '97). Another, more recent, such exhibition was the Queens Museum's "Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora." Curated by the museum's director of exhibitions, Jane Farver, it brought together work by 26 artists of South Asian origin. The show included artists who live in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (the nations created in the wake of Indian independence) as well as others who live and work abroad. Interestingly, even the emigrant artists make work which comes largely from India culturally - theirs is a diaspora community which still acutely feels cultural ties with the Motherland. [[image]] Ravinder G. Reddy: Krishna Veni, 1997, polyester-resin fiberglass, gilt and paint, 76 by 75 by 74 inches. Photo © Sylvie Ball. "Out of India" was a truly exciting and beautiful exhibition which any New York art-lover would have felt honored to see. While one must congratulate the Queens Museum for mounting the show, it's also necessary to ask why, 15 years after "Primitivism" and its discontents and 20 years after Edward Said's critique of "orientalist" attitudes, New York's bigger and better-known museums remain so hesitant to open their doors to contemporary art of non-Western nations. It's not enough to mount shows of historic, traditional art, as the Guggenheim has recently done with its China blockbuster. If we don't more fully engage with the contemporary art of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we risk waking up one of these days to find that the art history of our time was happening elsewhere and we failed to notice. Indian art since 1947 (the year of independence from England) seems to fall into three stages. The generation of the Progressives, painters such as Syed Haider Raza and Maqbool Fida Husain, who were emerging and maturing in the 1940s, has now become classical and was not represented in "Out of India," which focused on contemporary art. From the next great generation, mostly born in the 1940s and until very recently dominating Western shows of current Indian art, only two artists were included, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram. Instead, the exhibition concentrated on the third phase, a younger generation of artists who have recently become prominent, most of them born in the 1950s and '60s. As in "Traditions/Tensions," much of the work in "Out of India" is installation art, a genre which, in the last decade, has become an intercultural visual language of historical importance. Installation art is suited to this role because it does not unambiguously proclaim any particular cultural hegemony. A generation or two ago, gestural abstraction (primarily Abstract Expressionism) and its successor, Color Field painting, were globally available styles disseminated chiefly from New York. Their claim to global relevance was based on the metaphysical universals that were held to inform and support the paintings. As numerous scholars have pointed out, these styles were actively advanced during the Cold War period through a series of overseas exhibitions that were initiated by the United States government agencies.1 While this policy was primarily aimed at Europe, it was secondarily directed toward Asia. In India it left an imprint on the work of the Progressives.2 Somewhat later, a certain influence of Color Field painting was felt in Neo-Tantric painting, the Indian abstract style named for its relationship to Hindu Tantric art of the 18th century. The practice of gestural abstraction seems to have been one useful cultural instrument among others in newly independent India's drive to develop a sense of an expressive individual selfhood not based on religious tradition. However, in India and elsewhere it subsequently became clear that Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting were irrevocably associated with the formalism of Western hegemonists to whose advantage, ultimately, a claim for universalism worked. These were genres whose expressions of abstract order and depersonalized feeling fitted comfortably into the lobbies and offices of corporate headquarters. The style spread around the world in a manner that felt disconcertingly like the spread of multinational capitalism. Installation art comes differently contextualized. Much of it is rooted in the ritual environments of cultures outside the industrialized West. Although installation art has sometimes involved Western artists adopting or appropriating cultural forms from the Third World, its cultural signature is often non-Western and nonmodern. It is natural for it to allude to the universal or the timeless not through emblems of abstract order but through invocations of a quasi-neolithic substratum of peasant village culture that is still visible in much of the Third World. It's no surprise, then, that installation as a medium has been more congenial to counter-hegemonic outsider statements than to demonstrations of Western hegemony. In addition, the fact that installation art involves real objects from the artist's environment is of crucial importance. Each artist tends to incorporate into his or her installations October/1998 Art in America 75
