This Pomp At The Pompidou

01 July, 2011

THE EXHIBITIONParis-Delhi-Bombay, which opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 25 May and runs through 19 September before traveling to India, exposes an elegantly muted yet palpably French anxiety about irrelevance: Indian contemporary artists have been taking the global art world by storm for several years now, but France's national museum dedicated to contemporary art only just took notice. The introductory texts by the museum's president, Alain Seban, the director of the National Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Pacquement, and curators Sophie Duplaix and Fabrice Bousteau self-consciously admit that the Centre Pompidou is playing catch-up.

In the annex to the exhibition catalogue, a chronology of major exhibitions worldwide of contemporary Indian art, dating back to the First Triennale in Delhi in 1968, amply illustrates that what was for decades a mere trickle has become, in the 21st century, a raging torrent. Listed in the chronology are the major museum exhibitions, biennials and triennials across North America, Europe and Asia, as well as big private exhibitions in India. It is hard to miss that even in France, the Centre Pompidou is late to the India party. In 2005, L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts hosted Indian Summer, an exhibition that featured some of the very artists currently showcased at the Centre Pompidou. In 2006, the city of Lille hosted Bombay: Maximum City, an exhibition that showcased several of the same artists. In 2009, the Indian Contemporary Art exhibition, curated by Supriya Banerjee and Ranjit Hoskote, was held at Fécamp. And partly concurrent with the Centre Pompidou show is Indian Highway IV at the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring, again, some of the same artists.

So what can France's national museum of modern and contemporary art do at this late date to distinguish itself on a crowded playing field? The Centre Pompidou's answer: initiate a dialogue between India and France by asking Indian artists to react to France and—and here's the big innovation, or so the museum brags—French artists to react to India, in works commissioned for the show.

Despite some 400 years of commercial and cultural exchange, India appears to be, outside a small circle of specialists, a land of utter mystery and marginal importance to the French. France's leading museums have precious few Indian works in their collections. Moreover, France's biggest artists, judging from those selected for this exhibition, have neither set foot in India nor cared to include it among their artistic concerns until assigned to do so by the Centre Pompidou. Through Paris-Delhi-Bombay, the Centre Pompidou aims, therefore, to inform the French about India in general, while at the same time enriching its collection with works by leading contemporary Indian artists. To achieve these goals, the museum has taken a decidedly French—ah, that Cartesian legacy—approach. Before assigning work to the artists, the museum commissioned a report on the political, social and cultural dimensions of contemporary India, drafted by a team of India experts led by the internationally known scholar Christophe Jaffrelot. According to Jaffrelot, the report was originally intended to provide the French artists with basic knowledge about India before they travelled there, many for the first time, so that they would have some inkling about what they were going to encounter. However, as France's museum-going public was felt to be at least as ignorant about India as its leading contemporary artists, the text of the report was incorporated into the catalogue, albeit as a separate section, printed on orange paper and titled 'Indian Contemporary Society: Analyses and Points of View'.

The composition of experts neatly echoes the theme of the cultural dialogue, with 22 chapters evenly split between Indian and French experts. Among the Indians, Urvashi Butalia writes on women in India; Sudhir Kakar on a "portrait of a people"; Rita Kothari on the Partition; Vaiju Naravane, Paris-based Europe correspondent of The Hindu, on the press; Dipankar Gupta on the agricultural crisis; and Nandita Palchoudhuri on craftsmanship. This knowledge—or, as social scientists now say, "knowledges"—about India were also integrated into the exhibition, with explanatory texts on 'Politics', 'Urban Development', 'Environment', 'Religion', 'Home', 'Identity' and 'Craft' in two facing concentric rings around Ravinder Reddy's giant gilded sculpture of a female head, Tara.

The basic idea is to spread the word that Indian contemporary art is actively engaging with, and is a product of, the political, social and cultural reality of a rapidly changing 21st-century nation-state informed by an ancient civilisation. Indian contemporary art, therefore, cannot be viewed intelligibly without some background on India and its current growing pains—basic knowledge that most French people lack. While this is all quite reasonable, it raises questions that occupy the heart of debate on what contemporary art is and should be—a debate that has raged across decades, even centuries, as artists continually redefine art, how it is created, the artist's relationship to her work, the nature of the aesthetic experience and art's relationship, extant and ideal, with society and politics. In fact, one could argue that what makes contemporary art contemporary is its dynamic calling into question the answers that all preceding art has provided.

Many of the artists in Paris-Delhi-Bombay took their assigned task seriously and endeavoured to produce work that somehow reflected a France-India dialogue. Among the Indian artists, Pushpamala N's movie-style photographic self-portraits shot at Studio Harcourt in Paris are staged as citations of iconic female figures in French art: a bare-breasted 'Liberty Leading the People' à la Delacroix; an Indira Gandhi-fied (that streak of white hair) Virginia Oldoini, the Countess of Castiglione, a mistress of Emperor Napoleon III; both a blonde harem girl and a dark attendant in a very Mughal-esque setting, based on Ingres' Orientalist painting, Odalisque with a Slave, which is ironised to a dizzying mise en abîme. Sunil Gupta's narrative series depicts himself as the subject of scenes from the life of an Indian male homosexual about town by day and in a gay Paris club by night. Krishnaraj Chonat's installation of castaway computer parts turned into a wall of keyboards and dangling mouses is both visually arresting and a commentary on consumption, waste and pollution in the context of the information technology sector, now so associated with India.

Among the French works that stand out are Camille Henrot's gripping film on a contradictory fascination with and fear of serpents, and what they symbolise about our most primal compulsions and phobias; the artistic duo Pierre et Gilles' über-kitschy, fluorescent images of Indian divinities and other icons, and Leandro Erlich's recreation of a Parisian bourgeois drawing room, one window of which opens out, through the glass expanse of the museum, on a real but utterly silent Paris cityscape, and the other "window", a video projection with sound, reveals a street in an Indian city.

There are also works by Indian artists on loan to the exhibition. While these works—borrowed from Atul Dodiya, Sunil Gawde, Vivan Sundaram, Hema Upadhyay, Dayanita Singh, Tejal Shah and Sheila Gowda—don't explicitly engage in a French-Indian dialogue, they are powerful and interesting in their own right.

In his avant-propos to the exhibition catalogue, Alain Seban defines the forward-looking dual mission of the Centre Pompidou as 1) to become in the 21st century what it considers itself as having been in the latter part of the 20th century—one of a handful of major museums in the world that are truly "universal" in their pertinence; and 2) to be the go-to "institution of reference" for the French art scene. Seban argues that these two missions cannot be separated. Since India is increasingly present in the contemporary art world, making India better known in France is part of a strategy by the Centre Pompidou to establish itself as a privileged repository of knowledge about India and, hence, about the changing global art scene.

Yet one can't help feeling that there is something forced about this strategy. The Centre Pompidou has already been overtaken by forces of cross-cultural exchange beyond its power to shape. Its determination to impose itself therein as a privileged arbiter seems, at this point, both artificial and over-ardent. Geeta Mehra, director of the Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, which represents three artists in the Paris exhibition, observed when I met her at the inaugural party on 21 May: "Europe is just not the centre of the art world anymore. In addition to Bombay, we now have a gallery in Taipei. Asia is so much more dynamic at this point." That, of course, is precisely why the Centre Pompidou wants to associate itself with India, in particular, and Asia, in general; but, for all its keenness, the effervescent, dramatic Indian art scene seems beyond the ken of an institution tasked with a lofty and serious national mission.

In part, this is because the contemporary Indian art scene is happening elsewhere, including in the city's private galleries. Running more or less concurrently with Paris-Delhi-Bombay is a show by Bharti Kher, a much sought after super-star artist, at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in the historic Marais quarter. Another artist at the Centre Pompidou, Sudarshan Shetty, has a show up at Galerie Daniel Templon, as does Anita Dube at Galerie Dominique Fiat. Both galleries are new generation exhibition spaces. Artists who are not featured in the Centre Pompidou show but are exhibiting privately in Paris include Chandramohan Sreelamantula and Shantamani at Galerie Albert Benamou, and Zarina Hashmi at Galerie Jaeger Bucher.

Meanwhile, London-based Indian-origin artist Anish Kapoor's works are being exhibited at no less than four venues in Paris: His largest sculpture to date, Leviathan, a cavernous cathedral-like space of inflatable PVC, was in place from the first week of May to the last week of June for the Monumenta 2011 exhibition at the Grand Palais; he has an installation of stacked-cement proto-architectural sculptures in the chapel of L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Galerie Kamel Mennour is exhibiting some of his smaller pieces; and in June he was a part of a group show at Galerie Alain Le Gaillard along with Sheba Chhachhi, Hema Upadhyay and Riyas Komu.

Kapoor is candid about the business aspect of his art, telling ArtNet in an interview that art and money have always gone together, that successful artists have nearly always had money, and that he sees no reason to apologise for that.

One senses while viewing Paris-Delhi-Bombay and studying the catalogue that there is a particularly cosy relationship between the Centre Pompidou and certain galleries in Paris. Someone highly-connected in the local contemporary art scene, who prefers to remain anonymous because "it's just very tiny and everyone knows everyone," told me that the Centre Pompidou is no different from other major art centres. "Contemporary art is a business," this individual flatly stated. "It's a big business. That's what no one wants to say. An artist's work goes up when a museum acquires a piece for its collection, or when it is exhibited as part of a museum show. A museum shows it is part of what's happening by exhibiting work by the most 'successful' artists, which means those whose works sell for the most money. That's just the way it works. It works that way in New York. It works that way everywhere."

Anish Kapoor, by far the biggest international art star of any of the Indian artists currently exhibiting in Paris, is not included in Paris-Delhi-Bombay. Neither is Zarina Hashmi, showing at a private gallery in Paris and included in the first India Pavilion ever at this year's Venice Biennale, which opened the week after the Pompidou show. But artists such as Kapoor and Hashmi can't be included in the show, given the strait-jacketed, bilateral relationship the Centre Pompidou imagines in its goal for the exhibition—a relationship between the nation-states of France and India, with their respective artists contained within each country's national borders, even as both countries are, asymmetrically, caught up in what the exhibition catalogue repeatedly calls "globalisation".

They are older than most of the artists in the Pompidou show, which emphasises it is not about "earlier generations", and they are members of the Indian diaspora—Kapoor has lived in London for nearly 40 years and Hashmi for at least as long in New York City.

Ironically, it is hybridised, cross-border, supra-national artists such as Kapoor and Hashmi who may be more representative, or at least as representative, of current global realities, including that of a globalising India, than those artists chosen to represent "India" within the carefully researched and reasoned categories of Indian politics, society and culture laid out by the Centre Pompidou.

India's approach to the global contemporary art scene, which was noticed and noted during its Venice Biennale debut early last month, could not be more radically different from the Centre Pompidou's. Provocatively titled 'Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode', the India Pavilion exhibition, which will run for four months until the end of November, showcases an eclectic group of artists, including Zarina Hashmi, who was included precisely because she belongs to the Indian diaspora. The India Pavilion web page on the official website of the Biennial Foundation paraphrases curator Ranjit Hoskote's vision of India representing itself as a global artistic force, and of the Biennale providing "an opportunity to stretch the idea of India":

This pavilion will approach that idea through the tropes of transcultural practice, migration and cross-pollination. Indeed, this pavilion is intended to serve as a laboratory in which we will test out certain key propositions concerning the contemporary Indian art scene. Through it, we could view India as a conceptual entity that is not only territorially based, but is also extensive in a global space of the imagination.

This statement, made possible by the government of India and its national Lalit Kala Akademi, demonstrates a capacity to think beyond and through national borders. The Centre Pompidou clearly is not ready to think of India, or of France for that matter, as India thinks of itself, at least at the Venice Biennale, as "a global space of the imagination". Indian expert on France Balveer Arora put it this way when I chatted with him in Paris: "While a lot of knowledge on India is being produced in France, it's not read in France. Whereas in India, less knowledge is produced on France but the awareness is far greater." However, how that awareness will mirror the display of knowledge mustered by France's considerable expertise on Indian politics, society and culture when the exhibition travels to India is difficult to imagine given the paucity of Indian experts on France.

Actually, I think I might beg to differ with Hoskote on the tense of his title for the India Pavilion exhibition: It isn't about to explode. It has already exploded. Or, at least, it is exploding. And India is the detonator.