Ranbir Kaleka. Boy Without Reflection. Oil on canvas. 305 cms x 152 cms. 2004.

ART IN THE TIME OF TERROR

Gayatri Sinha looks at how contemporary artists in India have responded to acts of terrorism and to the rise of violence in public life.

     IN SEPTEMBER 2002, DAMIEN HIRST TOLD THE BBC THAT THE 9/11 ATTACKS WERE "visually stunning" art works and that the perpetrators "need congratulating". "You're got to hand it to them on some level, because they've achieved something which nobody would have thought possible". If Hirst appeared to be the most vocal proponent of the Al Qaeda (he apologized later for his remarks), he was only echoing what Karlheinz Stockhausen, the famous German composer, had said a few days after the blasting of the Twin Towers, endorsing it as "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos". (See The Art of Terror by Charles Paul Freund in the San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 2002).

     Already with this event and its endorsement by a world famous artist and a world famous composer, we are in the middle of a philosophic dilemma. Terror and violence are potentially subjects in art with uncertain, even destabilizing consequences; equally, the artists' response to terror constitutes a vital social and moral alternative. Given the precedent of Nazi Germany, Walter Benjamin had commented that fascism "aestheticised its violent politics" through the celebration of martial strength in art. On the same plane, will the aestheticization of Hiroshima, Phnom Penh, Godhra, Afghanistan, and Iraq change the way we perceive terror itself?

     The shock and scandal that surrounded Stockhausen's and Hirst's endorsement of 9/11 as a work of art has led to an urgent question - Does art feed off terror with a morbid but compulsive interest? Is there a mutual attraction between acts of transgression and the spectacle, irrespective of their contexts? This question was posed by writers Lentricchia and McAuliffe in their post-9/11 work, Crimes of Art and Terror (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which explores the disturbing overlap between creativity and violence and even political terror. In another study, writer and critic, Simon Caterson, draws a parallel between the "shock and awe" invoked by George Bush's bombings of Iraq and the "shock of the new" in art practice. The act of terror is looked at as an apotheosis of the spectacle. Suicide bombing, for instance, has a grimly performative aspect, in which the violent extinction of the self is also the culmination of the (performative) act. In a broader sense, the typologies of terror - 'domestic', 'international', or 'state-sponsored', driven by needs that are 'political', 'non-political', or 'ideological', ironically mimic the typologies of art. Further, the link between acts of terror, the media, and art, is increasingly obvious and has to be more fully explored. At the 2004 conference of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, forensic psychologist Andrew Silke emphasized that terrorists are increasingly motivated by violence that they have seen first hand or on television. In turn, the artist interprets the media image to more fully realize terror in our midst. Thus, the act of terror, its snapshot, or its extended relay in the media, and then, the artistic work, appear in a palimpsest of free floating images; we move significantly away from the initial moral outrage to an appreciation or even a celebration of the image.

A Case for India

     "We need a more robust legal framework to deal with terror threats not envisioned when our legal architecture was set up" - ESL Narasimhan, IB chief, quoted in The Times of India, November 24, 2006.

     Retroactively, the presence of terror in art can now be classified, with the Indian example assuming a particular presence. In India, the focus on 'beautiful atrocities' in the last six decades, marks a decisive turn in art production, one which foregrounds the artist in the fractious discourse around social polity, one in which the geopolitics of the region appears to guide artists' concerns. Terror as news, on television, and in the print media; terror as entertainment in Bollywood movies; and terror as the subject of art - all create different contestations that draw upon the idea of the nation and its sovereignty, identity politics, and issues of humanism.

     The period of the 1940s, as a distinct period of social trauma, of peasant uprising, British oppression, famine, and the violent massacres that accompanied Partition, produced a particular typology. In most cases, it was the imperial ruler who was seen as perpetuating mass terror and suffering, which found its apogee either in resistance or fatalism. Excellent examples here are the drawings of Somnath Hore and Chittoprosad's Hungry Bengal works on the Bengal famine - in which the drawings are themselves an act of resistance, unprecedented in Indian art, although the prevailing emotional response of the poor peasantry that they depict is broadly one of intense fatalism. Since the 1940s, depictions in art of acts of terror have challenged the overarching power of the state and marked an area of active protest. In the contemporary period, from approximately the period of the Emergency, the political crises of the '80s and the demand for Khalistan, the Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, spilling further into Kashmir upto the present, the idea of terror has undergone a full-blown, dramatic change. Terror and its perpetrator - the terrorist - attract interpretive energy - leading to the dual reading of the terrorist/liberator as perpetrator/victim or man of arms/man of God. The state and its estates have become implicated in contested and inconclusive arguments on the moral issues surrounding acts of violence. In this brief essay, I would look at a few essentially contemporary contexts and the multiple strategies artists invoke to deal with terror.