Essay on "Radical Art From India Contested Terrain"

Essay 4 pages (1254 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Indian Art

For centuries, philosophers have puzzled the human condition. Questions abound about why humans act the way they do, why they form groups, what role cultural and social norms have for learning, how societies form, the nature of society, social change, and the way integration and alienation fit in with modern societies. . In particular, the changes in urbanization and technology, and access to other cultures, spurred even more study of what it means to be human. Together, these paradigms form a notion of human history in which theories have tried to explain different aspects of human behavior and interaction. One way of looking at a particular issue on the human condition is through art. We ask ourselves, then, what is it we can learn from art that may enhance or become more experiential than literature. In the most basic sense, we learn to benefit from the insight of others and to open our minds to new ways of thinking, of the ambiguities of meaning, and of different interpretations that come into our own tool box of life. Art is a part of the extreme and most availably knowledge about humanity. Even simple sketches contain our overall beliefs about ourselves and the universe, our assumptions about the world, and how we found ways to understand and live to the next generation. Art forces us to pause a bit and think about what we see and feel; we can visualize it on the surface, or we can look for deeper meaning and ask, "what is the artist telling us?" Of course, we know that life is not simple and cannot always be expressed in simple terms.

This is a powerful way to introduce some of the material from post-colonial India. K.S. Kulkarni, (1916-1994), for instance, lived during a time of turbulence and change for India. He was born while the Raj still controlled almost every aspect of Indian life, during the transfer of power and the initial conflict between Hinduism and Islam, the assassination of Gandhi and the formation of a new democracy, and even into the post-Cold War India in which the tenets of globalism began to drastically change Indian Society. Krishna Kulkarni studied art in Bombay and had his first one-man show in 1945 when he was almost 30. In 1948 he founded the Triveni Kala Sangam and served as the director of the Art Department for the next 20 years. In the mid-1950s, he began to travel throughout Central and South America, and was heavily influenced by both the Mayan and Incan artistic expression (Kulkarni -- Profile, 2012).

Kulkarni focused primarily on the form of art -- and thought that art could hold meaning and emotion in a way that literature could not. In his artwork, this comes through in the manner in which his images have no real cultural context -- they can be peasants in India, Mexico, or Guatemala; and the dwellings and views of the micro can be almost anyplace and anytime. It seemed, in fact, that Kulkarni wanted to dialog with his audience, to experiment with form in a way that would challenge the traditional Indian, but also take a theme a mutate it through both the imperialistic and post-colonial world. Sometimes his critics found that because Kulkarni's art was so multi-cultural and chronological vague, that it had no real redeeming features for modern India. Kulkarni wrote a defense of this statement by noting, "If art was an effective means of solving our problems -- and how I wish it were so -- wars would have ceased as a terrible human activity after Goya, Rouault and Picasso. To our horror it is still there and more terrible than ever before. I cannot see that we can assign a larger role… READ MORE

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