Tracing the history of a political query

Report on the OCA seminar 2009 on K.P. Krishnakumar and The Kerala Radical Group

Twenty years later the tragic death of K.P.Krishnakumar, sculptor and founder of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, both his practice and the significance of the ‘Radical Group,’ become the subject for an international seminar. Art writer Agastya Thapa reports the seminar that opened up a discourse about the politics of aesthetics.

‘Questions and Dialogues: A Radical Manifesto,’ a seminar around the practice of K.P.Krishnakumar and the Kerala Radical Group, was held on a chilly but understandably pleasant Saturday morning of January.

The seminar was organised by the Office of Contemporary Art (OCA) Norway, and CoLab Art and Architecture, Bangalore, in cooperation with the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The main spread of the day was divided between four speakers – Anita Dube, Gavin Jantjes, Amar Kanwar and Will Bradley, although not in the same order. The morning business was ordered around presentations by Will Bradley and Anita Dube, in the said order followed by Amar Kanwar and Gavin Jantjes in the afternoon session.

This was the second day-long seminar organised by the Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) Norway, Oslo in co-operation with CoLab Art and Architecture, Bangalore as a research initiative into the intensely redoubtable tradition of Indian Modernism taking as they saw fit, the figure of K.P. Krishnakumar, his practice and the ‘Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association,’ which he helped found in the late 1980s, as a point of departure from ‘it’ i.e. Indian Modernism. K.P. Krishnakumar, as a persona in the modernist Indian framework, was one whose practices involved both artistic as well as political persuasions. It is at this combustible point of art and politics that this seminar unfolded with indefatigable questions on art, politics, positionalities, agency, change and transformation being bounced around. However, the rather tragic instance of Krishnakumar’s life had the discussion rolling into other contingent fields of redemption, closure and consequences.

Now, any well-informed compendium on the moment of Modernism in Indian art or Indian Modernism informs one of the founding of the ‘Radical Group’ in the late 1980s as a collective with K.P. Krishnakumar and Alex Mathews at the helm. Art has always existed as a rather trenchant aporia dressed up in many desires and aspirations. However, the keenest of such desires is often impressed in the belief that art carries a deeper value that translates into bringing about societal change and transformation. Correspondingly, the year 1985 is seen as a watershed in one of such step towards this vision when the ‘Seven Young Sculptors,’ exhibition mutated in between 1987 and 1989 into the ‘Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association,’ working within what has been variously described as an “extreme leftist,” “militant” framework(1).

The Kerala Radical Group, in the spirit of political and artistic enquiry, brought out its manifesto ‘Questions and Dialogues,’ (1987) to mark out its claim on what they saw as elitist and mainly bourgeois art world. Coming from working-class ethos, the group sought to politicise aesthetics and believed in a “commitment towards a political pedagogy in art” invested with the intent of unveiling and bringing to light a new national ontology from an investigation into what they called a “return to our real past, understand history outside the will of the dominators.”(2) The radicalisation that they set forth to achieve in the field of cultural production was consciously realised within the modernist aesthetic idiom playing with the politics and logic of subversion. Such a craven dispensation for the ultimate utopia came to a tragic end with the death of K.P. Krishnakumar in 1989 when the group was disbanded.

Hence, a seminar at this juncture would hopefully supply the scope to analyse and recount critically this disgorged fragment from the modernism project in Indian art. The figure of Ktishnakumar as intimately tied to the activities of the Kerala Radicals as carrying forth the programme of an engaged art practice, or rather a praxis in art lends an alternative avenue of dissecting the modernist moment in Indian art which in turn could have wider critical repercussions on understanding the location of politics in the aesthetic and on the art historical discourse itself.

The American Minimalist artist Carl Andre made a synoptic assessment with his statement, “life is the link between politics and art.” This statement offers a sound entry point into the discussions that ensued at the seminar. The main categories of politics and art were to be discussed with the attendant interference of the category ‘life,’ something the artist had opted to end himself.

The first session was inaugurated by Will Bradley, an art critic-curator based in Oslo and a serious participant in the art-social responsibility/change debate. Attempting an aesthetic reading of the Kerala Radicals he underlined the premise of this debate with a presentation of some ‘politically-motivated’ artworks. His emphasis was on culling out the significance of political gestures in the social field, whether the possibility of a serious transformation could be imagined in the event of such gestures being affected in the realm of art within a sovereign cultural realm. The idea of action and its limit in the vector of political agency was drawn out by him as he fleshed out his assertion that the social position of the Kerala Radicals had a determining effect on the kind political gesture they produced which was incidentally artistic since art can never be voided of ideology.

According to Bradley, the working of this ideology in the formation of art reception was contingent on the temporal, spatial context therefore underlining the basic fact that art is produced in real relationships. Thus, the resistant mode of art-production as engendered by the Kerala Radicals became a theme that had to be investigated in the location of the artwork in the capitalist mode of exchange and commodification with the complicit ‘democratisation’ of image and the important questions that crop up with regard to modern art and the canon. Bradley charted out the different modalities of the language of protest, resistance and subversion as worked out by artists’ collectives in the last century. However, he asserted that political action and active political gestures could only have tragic endings as art would always reaffirm its status of privilege. Thereby it would negate any possibility of transacting active political gestures, as the power of the existing institutional framework undermines any calibrated effort to counteract it. This happens as the boundaries of dissent itself are set up by the framework carefully worked out in the assimilative strategies.

Bringing in the Benjaminian debate on authorship, certain recuperation was worked out by Bradley with ‘technique’ as a counter-agency force to deflect assimilation. An attempt at arriving at a working solution, though elusive, seemed to be provisionally resolved with the strategy of what he calls ‘radicalisation of texts’ which includes the complication of the issue of ‘technique’ as an attempt to restructure the distribution of political agency. In a token gesture to the contemporary moment, his analysis left the field open for further interrogations, resisting any tendency towards easy solutions as he ended his presentation with the evocation of a ‘gap’ or ‘lack’ in the way art conceived politics.

If the idea of a collective vis-à-vis political action was investigated by Bradley, the idea of the political artist was brought forth by the artist-art critic/historian Anita Dube who was one of the members of the Kerala Radical Group. As author of the manifesto ‘Questions and Dialogues,’ (1987) she has the insider’s take on what passed with that trajectory of Indian Modernism. In her paper titled ‘Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy of a Lone Revolutionary,’ she went about charting the life and times of the artist. Citing a rich gamut of artworks and quotations, she started out on the difficult task of assembling the temporal fragments and memories into something of a valid account. Building up from the trope of the caricature, she started out with the narration of the personality of the tragic hero. Krishnakumar was one of the founding members of the group and was an important thought-bank, steering the motivation of the group.

Dealing with the task of accounting and talking for the dead, of the dead whose brush with death was tragic, Dube brought to the fore many interesting facets to the persona of the artist and the workings of the group. The inception of the group happened in the 1980s as a forum and agency resisting the mal-distribution of political agency, questioning the existent vortexes of hegemony, preferring to speak from the margins as the margin in the class struggle for affirmation and making space for a dialogue between the north and the south. The consciousness of the group was rooted in what was according to her the “narration of the people.” The group not only had a stand on the broader issues at hand but they were also concerned with the hegemonic contestations in the discursive space of modernist contemporary art in the 1980s as asserted by Dube.

In a clean bifurcation of ideology and spatial identification, the north was seen as a bastion of bourgeois ideology and art. As a statement against such stances, Krishnakumar positioned himself as a “lone revolutionary” in what he identified as a war that had to be fought. Invoking the Foucauldian premise of power, he saw that class struggles had to be undertaken in the form of political action with a political union. This vision of his gave way to the eruption of the Kerala Radicals as a politicised unity.

Marking out Krishnakumar as an astute and extremely well-read person, Dube reiterated that Krishnakumar was not a leader. The telos of the tragic hero towards nihilism came about as it became hard for him to reconcile his identification with the “lone revolutionary” persona with that of having responsibilities towards the group. Dube recounted how frustration and entrapment had engulfed the artist as he saw the edifices crumbling around him. Grappling with the corpus of works left by Krishnakumar who recognised himself as ‘Picasso at 16,’ Dube finds in them immediacy and physicality, a fusion of what she calls “fusion of history and art history.”

Dube traces in the body of work he has produced Bhabha’s reiteration on postcoloniality and contra-modernity in the certain cultural hybridity that follows. According to her, the translation of the modern/modernity drawing from literature and myths found space in his works as reiteration of “gaps” in the act of translation between modernity and banal existence. Talking about the presence of gesture in his works, some works of his like ‘Boy Listening,’ ‘Vasco da Gama,’ ‘Mid-Night Dream’ and especially ‘The Thief’ (1985) were discussed at length. The disillusion of the artist in the later years with his class struggle was thematised in ‘The Rhinoceros’ and ‘The Thief,’ where he saw the figure of the proletariat as corrupted, thereby the revival of anarchic sensibility in his last works. His martyrdom at the altar of revolutionary ideals was something of a significant loss.

However, the arena of politics and art always invites interaction and interrogation as was demonstrated by Gavin Janjtes, who is presently working on ‘Visual Century,’ a multimedia project that aims at a critical reappraisal of South African Art History. His presentation on this issue had much currency in the present discussion, as the legacy of political-artistic interventions was opened up by him in the contemporary context. The fetid history of colonial occupation, apartheid and consequent decolonialisation in the South African context has resonance for the postcolonial condition that awaits any Third World dispensation. Hence, the interjection of political considerations and motivations in the realm of art as action and its viability in contesting the said hegemonies spread out the discussion further. It was Amar Kanwar who went about the task of dissecting the different personas of an activist, a revolutionary. He was wary about the sincerity and commitment to the abject political positions undertaken in the aesthetic realm and the viability and duration of such a project.

Whether there should be a politics in aesthetics or only aesthetics for itself, is still a vexed issue. However it still feels reassuring that Krishnakumar was working on a monumental work before his death, thereby stubbornly damning any attempts at drawing closure.

Footnotes
1. Geeta Kapur, ‘Dismantled Norms: Apropos Other Avant-Gardists,’ in ‘When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India,’ Tulika Press, New Delhi, 2000, pg 394.
2. Anita Dube, ‘Questions and Dialogue,’ exhibition catalogue, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, March, 1987.
Photographs by Mohammed Ahmad Sabih. Images Courstsey Asian Art Archive.
(Agastya Thapa is an art writer based in New Delhi. She is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Visual Studies from School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Email: mail2agastaya@gmail.com .)