34756 results in Art
Art, Knowledge, and Papal Politics in Medieval Rome
- Interpreting the Aula Gotica Fresco Cycle at Santi Quattro Coronati
- Marius B. Hauknes
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- November 2024
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- 30 November 2024
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Discovered in 1995, the remarkable thirteenth-century frescoes in the great hall, or Aula Gotica, of Rome's Santi Quattro Coronati complex are among the most important vestiges of medieval Italian painting. In this volume, Marius Hauknes offers a thorough investigation of the fresco cycle, which includes allegorical representations of the liberal arts, the virtues and vices, the seasons, the signs of the zodiac, and the months of the year. Hauknes relates these subjects to the papacy's growing interest in fields of worldly knowledge, such as music, time, astrology, and medicine. He argues that the Santi Quattro Coronati frescoes function as a large-scale, interactive encyclopedia that not only represented secular knowledge but also produced philosophical speculation, stimulating beholders to draw connections between pictorial motifs across architectural space. Integrating medieval intellectual history with close attention to multi-sensory and architectural conditions of fresco Hauknes' study offers new insights into religion, art, science, and spectatorship in medieval Italy.
Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts
- 6th edition
- John Henry Merryman, Stephen K. Urice, Simon J. Frankel
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- October 2024
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- 30 September 2024
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Since its first publication in 1979, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts has become a foundational text in the field of art law. This thoroughly reorganized and updated sixth edition takes a fresh look at primary materials and commentary from previous editions and extends the book's analysis with significant changes in format and content to reflect changes in the field. The book provides students and scholars with an accessible set of materials that describe and explain the most important legal and ethical issues confronting artists, collectors, and dealers in today's complex, international art markets. Chapters cover key international treaties, federal and state statutes, judicial opinions, and excerpts from scholarly and other media publications at the intersections of art and law.
The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime
- Edited by Jaqueline Berndt
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- September 2024
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- 30 September 2024
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In recent years, manga and anime have attracted increasing scholarly interest beyond the realm of Japanese studies. This Companion takes a unique approach, committed to exploring both the similarities and differences between these two distinct but interrelated media forms. Firmly based in Japanese sources, this volume offers a lively and accessible introduction, exploring the local contexts of manga and anime production, distribution, and reception in Japan, as well as the global influence and impact of these versatile media. Chapters explore common characteristics such as visuals, voice, serial narrative and characters, whilst also highlighting distinct challenges and histories. The volume provides both a basis for further research in this burgeoning field and a source of inspiration for those new to the topic.
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
- Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation
- Elizabeth J. Petcu
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- September 2024
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- 30 September 2024
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The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation explores how architectural media came to propel scientific discourse between the eras of Dürer and of Rubens. It is also the first English-language book to feature the polymathic, eccentric, and long-misunderstood artist Wendel Dietterlin (c. 1550–99). Here, Elizabeth Petcu reveals how architectural paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints became hotbeds of early modern empiricism, the idea that knowledge derives from sensory experience. She demonstrates how Dietterlin's empirical imagery of architecture came into dialogue with the image-making practices of early modern scientists, a rapport that foreshadowed the intimate relationships between architecture and science today. Petcu's astute insights offer historians of art, science, and architecture a new framework for understanding the role of architectural images in the foundations of modern science. She also provides a coherent narrative regarding the interplay between early modern art, architecture, and science as a catalyst for modern empirical philosophy.
Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History
- Laura Rademaker, Sally K. May, Gabriel Maralngurra, Joakim Goldhahn
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- August 2024
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- 31 August 2024
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The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as the archives and libraries of Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.
The Mirror of Art
- Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture
- Genevieve Warwick
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- July 2024
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- 31 July 2024
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One of the key pictorial developments of Renaissance art was a conceptualisation of painting as a mirror reflection of the visible world. The idea of painting as specular was argued in Renaissance art theory, demonstrated in art practice, and represented in painting itself. Both within the artist's workshop and within pictorial representation, the mirror-image became the instrument, the emblem, and the conceptual definition of what a painting was. In this volume, Genevieve Warwick brings a dual focus to the topic through an exploration of the early modern elision of the picture plane with the mirror – image. She considers the specular configuration of Renaissance painting from various thematic points of view to offer a fully interdisciplinary analysis of the mirror analogy that pervaded not only art theory and art-making, but also the larger cultural spheres of philosophy, letters, and scientific observation. Warwick's volume recasts our understanding of the inter-visual relationships between disciplines, and their consequences for a specular definition of Renaissance painting.
Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
- Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking
- Sarah Bassett
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- July 2024
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- 31 July 2024
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How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.
5 - Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 125-156
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Summary
Does decapitation become the emblem of social and historical division? Or rather the brutal admission of our internal fractures, of that intimate instability that prompts movements, but also crises?
—Julia Kristeva, The Severed HeadDisplacements
They say Sarmad was an Armenian Jew who travelled to India in the seventeenth century and became a mystic. That he came as an ordinary trader and by the banks of the Indus he fell in love with Abhay Chand, that he abandoned himself to nature and roamed the streets naked, that the great prince and philosopher Dara Shikoh invited him to the Mughal court at Delhi, and that Aurangzeb—in rivalry with his brother, or in abhorrence of the abandonment—had him beheaded for heresy.
He was ordered to recite the Kalima—‘there is no god but one God’—and yet only the words there is no god, there is no god came forth. And yet such were his mystical powers that when he was beheaded, he seized his own decapitated head and ascended the steps of the Jama Masjid, his head in his hands, and as he did so, behind him the river Jamna rose in wrath.
For the ecstatic and prolific painter-calligrapher-poet Sadequain, displaced from a small town in north India to West Pakistan in 1947, an intense identification with mystic-martyrs like Sarmad in this image of the beheaded artist painting himself (Image 5.1a)—an image that appears in various guises over and over again in his work—raises some of the aporias of modernity and writing about ‘art’ from the south: Has he been beheaded or has he beheaded himself? Do we grieve the violence of the beheading or is this violence the very condition of possibility, of his playfulness, of his sight? Are these passions or inventions of inheritance by which Sufi abandonment and transgression can enable an articulation of a ‘modern artist’? How does ‘secular’ function as guard and guardian of a domain called art, and as such organize the very terms by which we think of belief, dissent, and the sacred?
A Spiritual Crisis
The ‘crisis’ of Indian secularism and the acuteness with which it has been experienced in the domain of art have been put to considerable political and historical deliberation.
4 - In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History
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- By Kajri Jain
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 31 May 2024, pp 91-122
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Summary
If this volume poses the question ‘How secular is art?’ in relation to South Asia, I want to insist that its stakes go well beyond art history in or for South Asia. For this question is an invitation to examine how art and art history are being reimagined from South Asia: how art history is becoming otherwise, albeit in ways that perhaps are not that other after all but were actually there all along. The unfinished business between ‘art’ and ‘religion’ is at the heart of this necessary reformulation. It pervades modern and contemporary art’s engagements with religious ‘living tradition(s)’ as it does secular institutions like museums. But it also surfaces in the peculiar habitations and uninhabitations of modern and contemporary art history by an ever-expanding domain of images varyingly contaminated by religiosity, spilling out from temples and shrines into homes and shops and onto streets and screens, embedded in the fabric of everyday life. These include the spectacular but temporary public deities of annual festivals such as Ganapati Utsav and Durga Puja; painted bazaar icons like those of Kalighat in Kolkata; the printed ones known as calendar art (Image 4.1); mythological television serials; the propitious adornment of vehicles of transportation (Images 4.2 and 4.3); monumental concrete icons delivering unsolicited darshan along highways (Image 4.4); and animated gifs showering blessings from WhatsApp. I am coming at art’s secularity and art history’s art via the affects and efficacies of these modern religious images, which may or may not, or sometimes do and sometimes don’t, also count as art.
In South Asia, innovative religious or mythological forms have been proliferating in response to new image technologies from the nineteenth century onwards, as described by a number of scholars including myself. Our accounts range across media from woodblocks, reverse glass painting, and history painting in oils to photography; chromolithography; offset printing; proscenium theatre; sculpture in clay, plaster, and other materials; cinema; television; various types of vehicle decoration (paint, hammered metal, carved wood, reflective tape); and reinforced cement concrete. The images described here either appear as central to the emergence of modernist art and cinema in South Asia, or as key to understanding religion, politics, public culture, or aesthetics in the region, or some combination of these.
Part 1 - Secularity and Its Art
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 31 May 2024, pp 31-32
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6 - Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 157-188
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Summary
Looking from East Pakistan
Questions of art and secularism raised in this volume are seeking a South Asian scale, possibly with resonant histories or historiographical possibilities across the subcontinent’s unstable twentieth-century borders. Invited to write on Bangladesh—a critical yet often-marginal perspective in such conversations—my quandaries were two: Are such questions around art and the secular posed to or drawn from the particular histories of the subcontinent’s (relatively young) nation-states? And along that drift, what analytical, even unsettling work, can such particular histories do, in the imagination of such questions aiming subcontinental scales?
My concerns in this essay are historiographical. Not in the sense of re/configuring multiple positions on questions of art and the secular in Bangladesh, but looking from the region and its particularity, as a methodology of perceiving the secular in its plural form(ation)s, as we attempt to generate truly subcontinental art histories. Such looking from location, I am hoping, can release Bangladesh—former East Pakistan, 1947–1971—from being merely an indexical marker for representing South Asia (beyond the hegemonic centre that Indian art/histories have held in the region), and become rather an analytical vantage point to re/generate subcontinental questions. The locational, I will argue, is neither a (simply) spatial nor a rhetorical marker; it is both temporal and epistemological; and as such an agent of the historical itself. While the locational tends to be subsumed within the nation (particularly so in conversations on postcolonial modernities and artistic modernisms), it sustains a critical traffic with transnational and transregional currents (or the often-used scale of the ‘global’), which needs more critical attention in South Asian art/historiography.
As a vantage point, Bangladesh is both a young nation-state of fifty years and the vestige of the long decolonization in South Asia. In this essay, I am positioning myself in East Pakistan: that brief political entity between two climactic partitions in the subcontinent—India’s in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s in 1971 with the liberation of Bangladesh. East Pakistan was formed from the partition of the Bengal province of British India in 1947, on grounds of religion, as a new Muslim-majority Pakistan emerged alongside independent India with the eclipse of British Empire in the subcontinent.
Index
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 31 May 2024, pp 415-429
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11 - Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India’s Past
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 333-352
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Summary
In the fall of 2017, the Taj Mahal (Image 11.1) made international news once again. This time it was not due to pollution, or its sectarian registration as a Muslim cemetery, or tourism development schemes, but because the state government of Uttar Pradesh, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, commonly known as the BJP), removed it from its tourism brochure. This removal was the final incident in a series of public actions, and the one that gained global media attention. Earlier in the year, the newly elected Hindu nationalist chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed in a speech that the Taj did not represent Indian culture. This statement was followed by the BJP legislator Sangeet Som’s public claim that the Taj Mahal was a ‘blot’ on India’s culture and built by traitors, which then led BJP leader Vinay Katiyar to resuscitate the theory that the tomb was once a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. These actions were by no means the first challenge to the Taj Mahal’s existence as a monument of Mughal achievement. The first case of disrespect was reported in 1830 when the first governor general of India Lord Bentinck wanted to dismantle the tomb and sell its marble at the going market rate. The story was never corroborated by eyewitnesses or written evidence but with every retelling it signalled the colonial approach to land management and the East India Company’s desire to turn its territories, along with their monuments, into profitable holding. Fanny Parks, the wife of an East India Company clerk, who sympathized with the Mughals, wrote in her travel diaries against the wanton destruction of their monuments in the name of profit. After she cites the article about Bentinck’s scheme in the Calcutta newspaper John Bull, she asks: ‘If this be true, is it not shameful? … By what authority does the Governor-general offer the taj for sale? Has he any right to molest the dead? To sell the tomb raised over an empress, which from its extraordinary beauty is the wonder of the world?’ When Parks’s diaries were published in 1850 in London her writings represented an early challenge to the East India Company’s valuing of India’s Mughal monuments for no more than their raw material.
2 - Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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Summary
A Distinction and a Definition
I will begin very briefly with a ground-clearing distinction and an attempt at definition before taking up the larger theme of this volume—the bearing of the crisis of Indian secularism in recent decades on modern Indian art. The distinction is elementary and should be familiar, but it bears repeating—between ‘secularism’ and ‘secularization’.
Secularization, a topic first fully explored by Max Weber, unlike secularism, is not a doctrine so much as a name for a process of transformation in society. It has, in the sociological and historical literature, been described by two quite different rhetorics: ‘the death of God’ and the ‘decline of magic’ and ritual, thus addressing religion as both belief and cultural practice. Loss of belief in God or in the myths of creation, on the one hand, and the decrease in church-going (liturgical rituals) or habits of pious dress and dietary restrictions, on the other, were two distinct symptoms of the process of secularization in the European modern, speaking respectively to secularization of religious doctrine and practice.
The concept of secularism, by contrast, is concerned less with general historical processes of ideational and cultural transformation and more concerned instead, with describing specific institutions and laws that form a polity, and that must be kept distant from the direct influence of religion. This is a manifestly distinct thing, a distinctness that has its proof in the fact that the same person can be highly non-secularized (because she is a devout believer and practitioner of a religion) while being perfectly secularist, and also in the fact that the same place can be secularist and yet not much secularized (such as, for instance, the United States, especially in its heartland).
It is, of course, often possible to try and undermine this distinction by dragging cultural matters, say, for instance, habits of dress, into the realm of policy and polity. Thus, France erected some of its cultural prejudices about the hijab in the realm of the polity by actually passing policies and laws about dress in public places. But that does not mean we should give up the distinction.
Part 2 - Boundaries of Secular Nationalism
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 123-124
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7 - Making Place for People?: Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and ‘Indian’ Art
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 189-224
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Summary
Categorical Imperatives
Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001 (Image 7.1): The diptych depicts two ageing, white-haired men, one pointing a gun at the other. They are locked in mortal combat. Both figures reveal their internal organs: the one on the left displays a red heart; the one on the right exposes crimson intestines. And yet, does the pistol resemble an oversized phallus? Does it denote tough love or violent aversion? As viewers zoom in on the protagonists, we realize: they are both the same person, self-portraits of their maker—Bhupen Khakhar.
Bullet was painted by Khakhar towards the end of his life, as he battled with cancer (to which he finally succumbed in 2003). Its playful poignance, mingling homoeroticism with anguish, is typical of the dying Khakhar’s last works, where doppelgangers struggle with their conflicted corporeality. Significantly, it was included in Geeta Kapur’s Subject of Death exhibition, one of five group shows she curated as part of Aesthetic Bind (2013) at Bombay’s Chemould—the first Indian gallery to champion the art of the new nation, and the one which played the largest role in Khakhar’s career. Kapur’s attention-grabbing pairing of Khakhar’s demise with the fiftieth anniversary of Chemould’s birth was a deliberate provocation; a demand for the Indian art world to take stock of itself.
Today it seems vital to take up the gauntlet. Such an investigation could not be more urgent: the nation—as much as its art—is in dire need of soul-searching. The country has witnessed the steady rise of the Hindu Right, which achieved political success with the election of its front-man Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014 and, again, in 2019. Since his second election, Modi has cracked down on India-controlled Kashmir, initiated a series of anti-Muslim citizenship laws (in the form of 2019’s Citizenship Amendment Act), and stirred up border disputes with Pakistan and Bangladesh. If the borderlands face a crisis of identity, the ‘idea of India’ itself is under re-vision, thanks to the governing party’s strategic re-writing of history in which the Mughals are reconfigured as Islamic ‘invaders’. As an ideology, Hindutva instigates sectarian strife; as a political entity it has sparked off Hindu–Muslim rioting in Bombay (1992–1993), Gujarat (2002), and Delhi (2020).
8 - Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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A portrait of Shivaji Bhonsle, crowned Chhatrapati Maharaj of the Maratha territories in western India in 1674, is currently being modelled by the sculptor Ram Sutar for a statue over 200 metres (circa 695 feet) high, projected to rise off the shore of Mumbai. Though the work has stalled due to legal suits—including a plea on the part of local fishermen to retain the use of the waters for their livelihood—the massive bronze cast of Shivaji rearing a horse is emblematic of the symbolic power of this seventeenth-century king today. Yet the likeness that Sutar sculpts has a history; it is rooted in a chromolithograph made by the artist Raja Ravi Varma in the late nineteenth century to centre a growing nationalist movement in western India.
This essay traces Shivaji’s portrait from a range of images made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to those that Ravi Varma and other artists developed in the late nineteenth century. In this period, western Indian nationalists sought a hero-icon for their movement, and the absence of a definitive portrait of Shivaji from his own court became the subject of a fraught debate. The multiple portraits collected at this time reveal their negotiation with a range of deeply rooted traditions of representation in western India—including those of men and of gods—and with those of colonial portraiture and the classification of people.
This aesthetic flexibility was a decisive factor in the transformation of Shivaji’s portrait into a medium of anticolonial resistance. Yet, the multivalence of the image not only stood as a beacon for independence but also as a potent icon for a Hindu polity, which continues to this day. This is a charged image and I treat it with respect as I do Shivaji Maharaj, though the essay is not engaged with him as a historical figure. My purpose here is rather to trace a genealogy of Shivaji’s portrait to historicize and complicate a picture that has become infused with communal politics, and to question the framework of the secular for an image that refuses to be defined as either hero or icon.
1 - Introduction
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent
It was an extraordinary winter of protest in India, as the year 2019 rolled to its end. The background was set by a series of undemocratic bills that became acts in parliament without debate and consensus, culminating in the most explosive and divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December that year, leading to a surge of civil demonstrations, rallies, and protests across the country on a scale that had not been seen before. Directly triggered by the state crackdown on a student protest within the Jamia Millia Islamia University in the heart of New Delhi, made worse by arrests and vandalization of the campus, a group of Muslim women of all ages—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters—came out to occupy the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood flanking the university. With that began a historic day and night, peaceful, immovable sit-in by the Muslim women of this locality against a conglomeration of laws that they feared threatened their citizenship, and the guarantees of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution (Image 1.1).
During the ensuing weeks of the defiant sit-in, artists, along with activists and students, transformed the by-lanes of the neighbourhood with murals, pavement paintings, and installations that guided visitors to the scene of protest. A month into the event, scaffoldings, ephemera, and improvisations became part of ‘the art of resistance’, transforming Shaheen Bagh into ‘an open-air art gallery’. As one student visiting the venue wrote, ‘Even before reaching Shaheen Bagh, where the women sat with their daughters and grand-daughters in silent, powerful defiance … one is introduced to Shaheen Bagh through the numerous murals. The street art guides you….’ Opening up a space for daily congregations of activists and citizens, for singing and poetry reading, for speeches and book discussions, for the setting up of a library, as well as for a profusion of murals, drawings, posters, and installations, Shaheen Bagh was both a site of contestation and experiments in democratic practice (Images 1.2 and 1.3). Particularly significant was the way art and artists became constitutive of the site of protest, alongside community elders and student activists, to together conjure visions that had to be created to be fought for.
3 - Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 63-90
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Summary
Secular behaviours, secular habits of mind, secular institutions, and so on, once described with that adjective, are understood to illustrate of a conceptual domain that is, at the very least, divorced from the realm of the sacred. When compared with its supposed opposite, the secular is a relatively imprecise conceptual domain, with a loose set of phenomena forming its boundaries. It is best understood as realm of practice, made up of forms of self-fashioning or of meaning-making that are common or shared across religious communities and/or relatively independent of religion. Secular practices not only have precise and detailed genealogies but also robust lives in the present. They are intelligible and significant: when one acts in a secular way, that action is understood as such.
Historically, art—both in and outside of India—was transformed into a secular practice, when and as ideas of creation became anthropocentric. A feature of colonial modernity, art emerged as a secular site that is thick (like culture) rather than thin, active (like discourse) rather than passive. The secularity of art’s practices is grounded in its peculiar understanding of subjectivity: an idea of artistic expression in which the interiority of the self is both reflected and produced within an art object that is then interpreted by viewers long after the moment it is made. At the same time, art’s meanings are never just individual, and they often strike allegiances with more general cultural forms, including religion and myth.
In his anthropology of secularism, Talal Asad explores how Adonis, the Arabic poet, at once claims secular habits of mind as crucial to his practice and contemplates within his poetry a category of myth that emerges as the ‘plural, even anarchic’, mark of ‘unconscious truth’. This balance of secular and sacred is common among modern visual artists as well, whose habits of mind and bodily art practices are determinedly worldly, valuing the act of making as the most important part of being an artist. With very few exceptions, when forms of the sacred enter into art, they do so as source material, free for the artist’s taking.
12 - Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple
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- By Tamara Sears
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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Summary
Between 19 January 1984 and 23 January 1988, a remarkable new temple was established in Gwalior (Image 12.1). According to a placard positioned at its entrance, the monument was commissioned by Basant Kumar (B. K.) Birla at the request of his famous philanthropist-industrialist father, Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla, who had passed away on 11 June 1983, just seven months before the laying of the temple’s first foundation stone. That G. D. Birla would have been an inspiration for the monument is not surprising as it was he who had initiated a longer tradition of building monumental complexes popularly known today as ‘Birla temples’. Frequently located in cities and towns associated with the family business interests, these temples represent revivalist efforts to bring together architectural traditions rooted in ancient and medieval India with new visions concerning the role of religion within modern industrial society. Whereas the monuments themselves represented abstracted appropriations of traditional Nagara temple forms, the vast landscaped grounds provided respite for the increasingly crowded conditions of urban life by creating inviting spaces for burgeoning middle-class leisure.
At first glance, the temple at Gwalior follows the typical Birla temple pattern. It was built to serve the community that had grown around the city’s long-standing textile mills, and its design hearkens back to India’s architectural past. However, whereas the revivalist impulse in earlier Birla temples had been realized by combining references to multiple histories and regional styles in order to project a totalizing new vision, the temple at Gwalior was intended to recreate a specific monument, the famed Sun Temple at Konarak, originally built in the thirteenth century along the coast of eastern India (Image 12.2). The choice to model the Gwalior temple on Konarak is curious. Not only are the two removed by over 1,400 kilometres (or nearly 900 miles), but the two places also share very little in terms of their local or regional history. Built on a grand scale by King Narasimha Deva of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, the original temple at Konarak had been largely destroyed over the centuries. Very little remains of the main sanctum, and all that exists is its preceding mandapa (pillared hall) and a large dancing hall.