Plumbing Political Potential

Can radical art embody radical politics? Latika Gupta finds that this is just one of the many
questions raised at a seminar on The Kerala Radicals.

QUESTIONS & DIALOGUES: A RADICAL Manifesto, a one-day seminar on the 16^th of January, 2010, at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, Delhi, took its name from the catalogue of the landmark exhibition in 1987 of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Conceived by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, the seminar was one of a series of research initiatives, publications and exhibitions organized by the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway, Oslo, in collaboration with CoLab Art & Architecture, Bangalore. It was part of a larger project, entitled, Reflections on Indian Modernisms and as such, it focused on the artistic practice and political ideology of KP Krishnakumar and the collective of artists formed in the mid-1980s.

The seminar’s brief stated that, “the analysis of the Kerala Radical Group and its legacy will provide the basis for a wider reassessment and critical reappraisal of particular moments and movements in recent art history. Further, the seminar will look at contemporary artists’ practices and use case studies to understand the role of aesthetic strategies in addressing the political.”

In her introduction, Gopinath stressed the need to excavate the forgotten histories of artists such as KP Krishnakumar – of whose work no proper exhibition has been held thus far. Yet, the seminar was not a celebratory forum, but an analytical one: it gained from having 20-odd years to think about the impact of the art of the 1980s.

The 1987 exhibition held at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda brought together the works of KP Krishnakumar, Jyothi Basu, K Hareendran, C Pradeep, CK Rajan, Alex Mathew, M Madhusudhan, Pushkin EH, K Reghunadhan, KR Karunakaran and Anita Dube. This was accompanied by a manifesto entrenched in leftist ideology. The manifesto openly denounced the commodification of art (most notably characterized by Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai that was supported by The Times of India. They also challenged the privileged position that the ‘middle class urban intelligentsia’ occupied in art-making that allowed them to create a bourgeoiscentred art history.

Art, argued the Radicals, belonged to and emerged from people, especially, the working classes. Their choice of materials veered away from bronze and other traditional media hitherto used for sculptures – KP Krishnakumar worked with ephemeral rough unusual material to create his pieces. In this lay the political gesture – a challenge to established norms of not just figuration but also material usage.

Today, when much avant-garde art claims to function at the cusp of politics and social intervention, the seminar threw up relevant questions about the relationship between art practice and political engagement. How important is the political gesture in art?