Strategies of Survival in the Age of Surrender

Geeta Kapur dwells on some of the key tactics employed by artists to enable political
interventions as she examines Tushar Joag’s multi-registerial projects, performances and
drawings.

Tushar Joag

WITH NO PREFATORY DEFENSE FOR RELATING AESTHETICS with politics, I propose in shorthand three categories for consideration:Viewed historically, the generic mode for political art has been representational involving a self-conscious development of mimesis into realism.¹The aesthetic of representation is directly matched with representational politics, meaning democratic advocacy, wherein material rights of the citizenry are to be accompanied with the realization of ‘potential consciousness’² by each individual in the desired social order.

Representational art and its generic form, realism, are at the same time challenged in its pre-eminence by more interventionist forms of enquiry, critique and resistance by artists in the 20^th century. This is the vanguard mode as conceived within the revolutionary politics of Soviet Union in the 1920s. Consider the conceptual-collectivist styles of address invented by the Constructivists and by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. These remain the bedrock of all subsequent discussions on vanguardism – it is the historical avant-garde – though the term has greater flexibility now. Consider, further, the redoubtable Brecht and
the legacy of his theory of alienation; and consider at the other end of the avantgarde spectrum, Duchamp and his subversion of the very institution of art. And consider, then, how these legacies, re-worked in the radical 1960s and diversified to leap beyond the modernist avantgarde binary, stake new claims for art-as-praxis.

The third, more recent category of what might be called political art is based on a participatory ethics, jointly shaped by artists, collaborators, audiences. Rather than the dialectically spelt antagonism of avantgarde art, participatory art practices take an anthropological turn, privileging a communitarian basis for aesthetics and introducing another kind of contextual discourse in art.

Modern Indian artists seeking political articulation have usually adopted the realist (/expressionist) language. Since the 1990s, different styles of intervention and, recently, more participatory modes have come to be practised. Available art-historical options, directed to praxiological ambitions, define an artist’s unique purpose: the consequent politics may be anticipatory – forecasting change; it may be rhetorical – escalating the message to a persuasive pitch; and it may be serviceable in that the artwork expressly serves a chosen cause.

For a moment, imagine Tushar Joag placed between the ‘last’ of our realist painters, Sudhir Patwardhan, whose representational ethics and compassionate rendering of the working class is duly honoured; and the ‘first’ of our vanguard documentary filmmakers, Anand Patwardhan who, driven to subaltern causes and activist movements, develops a film-form premised on praxis. This curious placement for Tushar serves something of a tendentious purpose. When Tushar comes into the Indian art scene, Sudhir Patwardhan’s work endures admirably, but the realist genre is over. Tushar, for his part, offers a surface-transfer of narrative interests – a comic-book storyboard that plays the representational idioms with popular, parodic, messages of a Crash! Bang! Win! Lose! variety.³ His drawings are rudimentary, caricatural: assuming the voice of a mocking alien, he offers pennyprint allegories on the state of public affairs, and even smuggles in private (sado-masochistic) forms of fetishisms to ‘cure’ the diseased body-politic – about which more later. As for the vanguardist praxis after Anand Patwardhan, the younger artist must envy such unflinching conviction, but given contemporary circumstance he, Tushar, adopts an altogether different stance. He is a chimerical player, symbolically subverting the game-plan of a (political) mafia; and he enacts this role in swift relays of entry and exit – tactics borrowed from guerrilla-style activism, citizens forced into fugitive roles, artists operating in the margins of high art. So, if I propose this odd inbetween-ness, it is to accommodate a hybrid style of political art – one that will fall short of the canonical definitions senior artists (modernists/realists, on the one hand, and avantgarde practitioners, on the other) can claim. And, yet: hybridity, a sign of our times, opens up the relationship between art and politics to some new possibilities.

Tushar Joag. Justice League at Andheri.Drawing. Glass marking pencil on paper. 2004.