zugvogelblog

On not being a tree was published in The Telegraph (Calcutta) Oct. 26th 2010, and is a generous contribution to Zugvogelblog by its author.

ON NOT BEING A TREE, by Aveek Sen

Art, place and the tyrany of context

“I fall into a place and I become of that place,” replied Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak when asked, during a public conversation in Calcutta, whether she would describe herself as cosmopolitan. “I feel sometimes, when someone asks me the question, that I have roots in air. You know? I am at home everywhere and I am not at home anywhere. It seems to me when one is at home, the place where one is at home has no name.” My music teacher had put it to me, once, more pithily: “I don’t need roots. I’m not a tree.”

     These two pictures were made by the Mexican photographer, Graciela Itúrbide. Both are hanging now in Delhi’s Instituto Cervantes as part of a show called — with a baffling and, one hopes, unintended vengefulness — An Eye for an Eye. Alongside Itúrbide’s work, made in the Seventies and Nineties in India, Mexico and the United States of America, we also see Raghu Rai’s Mexican photographs of the Nineties, so that the Mexican and the Indian exchange places, as it were, in the show. The eye passes over Rai’s work, stopping to catch the pictorial cleverness of each image with a silent “OK, got it” to move on to the next. With Itúrbide, time lengthens and becomes reflective, as she draws the viewer closer and deeper into the heart of the place, person, moment or feeling that she essays in each picture.

     The eye passes over Rai’s work, stopping to catch the pictorial cleverness of each image with a silent “OK, got it” to move on to the next. With Itúrbide, time lengthens and becomes reflective, as she draws the viewer closer and deeper into the heart of the place, person, moment or feeling that she essays in each picture. With Rai, we are optically and manually agile tourists in Mexico playing with light and shade, angles and effects. With Graciela, we are on an inward journey that makes us continually look into ourselves, at the fluid and complicated relations between where we are inside our heads and where we happen to be physically at a particular moment. As she compels us to grasp the meaning of each image, and of the relationships among them as a sequence, something else begins to happen. The sense of an identified location becomes irrelevant and eventually dissolves altogether. We begin to ignore the captions. Place is overcome, absorbed and transfigured. Like the aerial flocks of birds that she photographs repeatedly, identities disperse into experience, movement, memory, encounter, performance and connection. The picture on the left is called “Khajuraho, India, 1998”; next to it is “Highway 61: From Memphis, Tennessee to Clarkesdale, Mississippi, 1997-1998”. But do the labels — Indian, American, Mexican — matter at all with these mysterious, metaphysical images? Is Graciela a Mexican woman photographer? Or is she simply an artist? What do we lose, and gain, with each of these definitions of who she is as a maker of images?

Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, México (Mujer Ángel), 1979. Graciela Iturbide / Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

*   *   *

     Under what circumstances is national or cultural context important to understanding a photograph? Depends on who is doing the understanding, why, and for whom. There is a way of looking at, archiving, understanding and writing about photography that is entirely historical, sociological, anthropological. And here context is all-important. Usually, this kind of writing is academic and specialized; aesthetic criteria are irrelevant or subordinated to the more levelling gaze of the social sciences. The hierarchical distinctions between art and not-art, or among documentary, popular, commercial, journalistic or art photography, do not apply in such readings. So, if we are, say, studying representations of women, or immigrants, or dwarfs, then we should be looking at every kind of photography from advertisements, police shots and ethnographic records to photo-essays in Granta and the work of Arbus, Salgado or Iturbide, without getting into disputes over whether what we are looking at is art or not, or if it is art, then whether we are looking at good art or bad art. We are more interested in content rather than form, and we are producing critical knowledge using photographs as primary documents. We might have chosen to look at folksongs or newspapers or films, and done the same sort of work with these, without bothering very much about aesthetics (although the aesthetic or formal aspects of these documents could have enhanced our interpretation and made it more nuanced).

     But the moment we get into questions of a different kind of meaning or affect (that is, once we take photography into art galleries, auctions and art publishing houses), the moment we get into questions of beauty and form, or of aesthetic, emotional and intellectual impact, then the role of context, especially national context, becomes more ambivalent and complicated. A different set of priorities and criteria, together with a different kind of politics, takes over.

     Someone should write about the international politics of contextualization, and how a great deal of serious academic work is structured by that politics. Why is it, for instance, that Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, the Bechers or Jeff Wall is simply photography, whereas Graciela Iturbide is Mexican photography or Nobuyoshi Araki Japanese photography? I suspect that the answer to this is not only political, but also geopolitical, going back to the ancient geographical divides in post-Enlightenment European epistemology: Who is looking at whom? Who is studying whom? Who is writing about whom? Who is the subject, and who the object, of knowledge and of interpretation? What do we need to know in order to understand a Western artist? And what do we need to know in order to understand a non-Western artist? Who are ‘we’ here?

     In the first case, not very much context is required because Western art is supposed to be universal, transcending national or geographic differences. It is Art. But Asian art is not Art, but ‘Asian art’, and therefore an informed understanding of the various contexts in which it is produced is essential for doing it full justice. It is always tied to its time and place. So, an Indian photographer cannot depict loss, absence or fear, but must always represent poverty-stricken or fundamentalist Bharat, or liberalized and industrializing India. We hardly ever have books, photobook introductions or catalogue essays explaining what is Belgian, French, Canadian or American about Belgian, French, Canadian or American photography, because we can respond to Belgian, French, Canadian or American photographs as we respond to the Venus de Milo or Mona Lisa, without having to know about Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy.

     But not so for Asian photography. An entirely different approach to knowing, understanding and looking has to be constructed, mastered, disseminated and repeatedly invoked in order to bring such a category into the global field of vision. And this applies to not only those who are looking at it, showing it, collecting it and writing about it, but also to those who are making it. That is, Asian photographers themselves often end up internalizing this way of seeing and start producing work for it, and from within it, presenting their work, in books and in shows, according to its requirements. They readily accept the contexts in which their work is invariably read, and then start perpetuating those readings of their work, together with the assumptions that inform these readings.

     They end up producing work that could be written about, shown and taught within what has turned into readymade frames and perspectives. Non-Asia looks at Asia in a certain way, and therefore Asia also looks at, and projects, itself in that way. In the earlier centuries, this was called Colonialism or Imperialism; Edward Said had called it Orientalism. Now it is called Context, and the right-minded, well-intentioned, academically respectable sound of the word obscures the structures of commerce, knowledge and power that constitute this primacy of Context.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1101026/jsp/opinion/story_13094834.jsp