Taking aim at Postcolonialism’s obsession with identity construction and the cult of victimhood privileged by some contemporary artists, Girish Shahane analyses the key problems involved in compulsively privileging political themes in art.

Between Aesthetics and Politics

1. Reproducibility

MY CONTENTION IN THIS ARTICLE IS THAT THE DOMINANCE OF politics in art interpretation is misguided, and has given rise to a critical discourse that’s not only impervious to fact and reason, but dismissive of them.

Walter Benjamin

I begin my argument with an analysis of one of the foundational texts of modern criticism, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In the opening section of his seminal essay,Benjamin wrote: “Theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production... brush aside a number of
outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” In other words, ideas like creativity should be eliminated from discussions about art, and replaced with more politically useful terms.

Benjamin held that Fascist aesthetics allowed the masses an expressive outlet while denying them their true right, which was a change in property laws. He argued, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.” A counter-example immediately springs to mind, of Mahatma Gandhi, who led a mass movement on the largest scale, respected the traditional property system, and aestheticised the politics of India’s independence movement through a propagation of khadi and charkha, while simultaneously guiding the struggle away from the path of violent confrontation. Atul Dodiya foregrounded the aestheticising aspect of Gandhi’s politics in his 1999 show An Artist of Non-violence, which cast Bapu as a kind of performance artist. Benjamin had Gandhi’s example before him as he wrote in the 1930s, but ignored it, concentrating instead on the Fascist sympathies of Italian Futurism. His perception of the Futurists’ impact, however, was grossly inaccurate. The historical record reveals that the writings of Filippo Marinetti and his
colleagues had a negligible influence on the aesthetic concerns of Benito Mussolini’s regime, which glorified a classical culture the Futurists repudiated.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction concludes with the famous lines, “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.” The statement overestimates, in contradiction to all available evidence, the
impact of art in the public sphere. Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Benjamin is right about the consequences of aestheticising politics, how can politicising art constitute an adequate response? It is the equivalent of saying, “Vandals desire to knife our paintings. We respond by painting their knives.” Benjamin’s disciples, despite 75 further years of proof that visual art causes no social change, continue implicitly or explicitly to promote the idea that such influence exists and ought to be taken into account while estimating a work’s worth. Since empirical examination is beneath the dignity of theorists and curators, they credit instead a sort of ideal effect that is based, ultimately, on a vulgar valorisation of subject matter.

The most influential term emerging from Benjamin’s essay was that of ‘aura’. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”, he wrote,elaborating, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic
negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” Mechanical reproduction doesn’t merely introduce the possibility of creating art independent of this atavistic ‘aura’, but destroys the very conditions in which aura flourished: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.” The innumerable reproductions of the Mona Lisa are separate from the actual work, and yet, in Benjamin’s view, have the effect of diminishing the aura of Leonardo’s most wellknown portrait. One does not have to have stood in the crush of tourists before the bullet-proof sheet guarding La Giaconda in the Louvre to comprehend how false the passage of time has proven notions of the aura’s depreciation. There was no need to wait for history’s judgment at all; evidence of Benjamin’s folly was to be found, decades before his essay was published, in the prints of gods and goddesses that were worshipped in a million Indian homes, technologically reproduced images that were imbued not merely with the parasitical aura characteristic of secular art, but the authentic aura of cultic objects.

Atul Dodiya. The Post-dated Cheque.Watercolour 45" x 70". 1998. IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST.

Arguments based on invalid premises invariably end up in erroneous conclusions. Using as their foundation Benjamin’s misguided ideas about aura, and about politicising art as an instrument to tackle Fascism, critics constructed a theory that denigrated mark-making, craftsmanship, and anything that smacked of individualism. In its place, they set up an alternate normative structure which judged the value of an art work not on the basis of its intrinsic qualities, but on the circumstances of its creation, the materials it employed, and its subject.

Benjamin’s thesis has been cited thousands of times since its publication without being exposed for what it is: a mixture of misunderstood history and flawed logic. The most sophisticated theorists, who, when so inclined, parse every sentence in texts to tease out potential contradictions, have given the German Marxist philosopher a free ride. When his
ideas are questioned at all, the debate takes the form of what one might call ‘academic differance’, a process in which differing from an author becomes simultaneously an act of deferring to him or her. I know the method well, having employed it myself in the past.

Raja Ravi Varma.Sitavanavasam. Oleograph used for devotional purposes from a private collection. IMAGE COURTESY STUDIO NAPEAN.

2. Social Constructionism and Postcolonialism

Walter Benjamin wrote at a time when Fascists and Nazis, whose repugnant ideology attempted to explain human nature on the basis of ethnicity, were at the peak of their power. Following the experience of those years, the Left in Europe came to reject the idea of essential natural traits. With feminists protesting the secondary status accorded to women, and activists from the Third World fighting against the stereotyping of non-White peoples and cultures, a theory of identity developed in opposition to all forms of essentialism. It came to be called social constructionism, and holds that human faculties, desires, behaviour and relationships are not innate, but determined by social forces. The theory counters any proposition about permanent value by attempting to historicize it. For proponents of the theory, race is a construct, beauty is a construct, romantic love is a construct, genius is
a construct, and so on. After all these years, one might expect the ‘x is a construct’ mantra to have worn thin, but in fact social constructionist dogma has grown so dominant within the humanities that it is vanishingly rare to find an alternative viewpoint being expressed in any
conference or academic publication connected with the arts.

At a certain level, the social constructionist approach makes sense. Women, colonized subjects and other groups once deemed incapable of undertaking complicated responsibilities have demonstrated they can handle such tasks with ease. However, the anti-essentialist reaction against imperialism, Fascism and patriarchy has created a rigid opposition to any notion of universality, and a valorization of variety for its own sake that ultimately undercuts the principles of social constructionists themselves. (Activists now use the word ‘democracy’ to describe these positive ideals, since ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ have fallen out of favour. ‘Democracy’ has the advantage of being malleable enough to mean pretty much what you want it to mean.)

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