<
p>In a NYT review of a new Mughal art exhibit at the Met in Manhattan, Holland Cotter pens these lines:
 |
|
Musharraf as Cupid? |
India is the real subject here; you can hear it and taste it in this painting, as spicy as a vindaloo…That’s what confident cooks and ambitious artists do to the recipes they inherit… A vegetable curry or a peach cobbler can take many inventive forms and still be intensely curryish or delectably peachy…
… there is a picture… of an episode from the fifth and last section of “Khamsa.” And it is pure, melting-on-the-tongue confection. [Link]
I dunno, does a vindaloo make you gag? What clichéd hell is this? Cotter writes with all the insight of Apache Indian. This reads like a kindergarten newsletter hot off the dot matrix printer, clip art carelessly pasted into a Print Shop template. Using a spice metaphor for Indian culture is like complimenting Rosario Dawson on her breasts. Y’know, work a little harder.
As for the art, Mughal miniatures are absolutely gorgeous, but the exhibit in Connecticut sounds far more innovative, an art version of the game of telephone:
One artist would create an image on a sheet of paper, then mail the sheet to someone else, who would add to it before sending it on to the next artist. Part improvisation, part calculation, each finished painting both is and is not the sum of its parts…
<
p>
The NYT: ‘As spicy as a vindaloo…’
I dunno, does a vindaloo make you gag?They include Mughal dress patterns; New York subway maps; phallic missiles; amorous couples; Western politicians as clowns; Islamic clerics as satyrs; outtakes from colonial photographs; many images of nature (birds, flowers, trees); of home (scissors, hearts); and of violence (daggers, bullets, guns), interspersed with calligraphy, scribbles and surface-piercing pieces of blood-red thread…Karkhana is an Urdu word meaning workshop or laboratory. And the six members of the group – Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore and Saira Wasim – studied together at the National College of Arts in Lahore, the only school anywhere that teaches traditional miniature painting. (Shahzia Sikander, who pioneered the kind of work the Karkhana artists are making, studied there, too…) [Link]
Ick and very surprising. Cotter reviews everything (remotely) South Asian for the paper and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Must go check Nexis…
The exhibits, however, look very cool.
I actually gasped and moaned aloud reading that godawful tripe. Yeech.
How can Ridgefield Connecticut have a cooler exhibit than New York?! I hope someone rectifies this, I want to see those collaborative modern minatures.
For the same reason that Fatal Love was at the Queens Art Museum and not at MoMA: there are no big, second gen names in desi modern art yet.
Modern art is crap anyway. What does it matter that it’s shown at the bloody MoMa or some exhibit in Conneticut. And what makes it worse is the publicity for this just because they’re Asian (exotic for those fools in New York). This crap must stop.
Do you only listen to classical music?
…there are no big, second gen names in desi modern art yet.
There’s also very little “modern” art that is identifiably South Asian (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.-generation) or rather, no modern South Asian movement or moment that has proved to be as important to the artistic world as the “classics” of South Asian art (painting, sculpture, architecture). Even this Karkhana exhibit draws much of its strength from its manipulation of the miniature, a “classic” form…
All this to say that from a curatorial standpoint, exhibits like Karkhana are not so appealing to the MoMA, as they neither have a well-known modern context nor do they express a profoundly new aesthetic influence (the form of collaboration the Karkhana artists are engaging in is interesting, but not necessarily new).
That said, what is important is that Karkhana breaks the classic form of miniatures and that in and of itself is important, primarily to South Asian art. It is a movement away from the history and traditions that loom (and almost glower) over all South Asian art, and that’s worth noting. Again, however, to record that moment and put it in the MoMA is difficult, primarily because American, Latin American and European art has already gone through such processes [and in order to showcase South Asian art going through a similar process, well, MoMA would need more “modern” South Asian art, which returns the argument back to my first point…]
“Fatal Love” was pretty interesting, in part because it documented a moment in art, politics and history, and had it’s scope been just a bit bigger and not so specifically refracted through the events of 9/11, I think it could of and would of made it to the MoMA.
IÂ’m not sure why this exhibit is at the modern art museum rather than the Met.
It is at the Met.
There’s Raza and his contemporaries in the 0th gen. The 2nd gen is young yet.
You are correct, sir. I misread.
As you can see my name is Journie just like this websites name