This panel after lunch is
going to be chaired by Foad
Torshizi, who is my colleague.
And at RISD, he's an
assistant professor
of art of Islamic world.
And he actually comes
from a background
in comparative literature
in society and Middle East
and Asian languages
and cultures.
But with a interest
in photography
and contemporary
art, particularly
the global contemporary art
from Iran and the Middle East--
thinking with
post-colonial theory,
and ethics of
readership, theories
of globalization
and cosmopolitanism,
politics of translation
and interpretation.
He's been working on
a manuscript called
The Clarity of Meaning:
Contemporary Iranian Art
and Cosmopolitan Ethics
of Reading in Art History
and a very important
interlocutor this semester
for our Art History from the
South Project as a whole.
The discussant will
be Leora Maltz-Leca,
who is the chair
of the history--
well, now retitled.
Many, many new different
titles for the History
of Art Department at RISD.
Yes, I'm going to
just skip over,
but having worked or been an
important colleague in thinking
with the post-colonial
and global south
in reshaping late modernism
by refusing its most
cherished assumptions.
And so a direct
connection with, I hope,
I think, at least, the
work of the [INAUDIBLE]
and [INAUDIBLE] on this panel.
She is the author of a book
on William Kentridge, Process
As Metaphor and Other Doubtful
Enterprises, published in 2018.
That's her most
recent publication.
And another that she's
working on Material Politics:
Matter and Meaning In and
Out of the Post-Colonies--
of many curatorial
and public projects
that she has done in addition
funded by and supported by--
across both our campuses.
I'm really delighted
that she can be here
with us this afternoon.
So Foad, I'm going to
hand it over to you.
And, yeah--
SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 1: Oh, yes.
FOAD TORSHIZI: Oh,
it's over here.
Thank you and welcome
back, everyone.
I would like to also echo
all the speakers in thanking
[INAUDIBLE] and
[INAUDIBLE] for organizing
this conference and
also the Cogut Institute
for making it possible.
And I have had-- been
very lucky and fortunate
this past few weeks from the
beginning of the semester
to be sitting in their class
and learning a lot from them.
So we are opening the
second panel of the day--
Sacred and Mundane: Locating
the Contemporary in Art History.
And unfortunately, as we
have heard, [INAUDIBLE]
could not be with us today.
But we will have the pleasure
of listening to Kajri Jain
and [INAUDIBLE] presentations,
and a response by Leora
Maltz-Leca, and of
course, also seeing--
because I'm very
much looking forward
to seeing the zombies
in that presentation.
So our first
presenter Kajri Jain
is associate professor of Indian
and South Asian Visual Culture
and Contemporary Art at
the University of Toronto.
Her research on the printed
images known as calendar art
or bizarre art icons that
appear on mass produced pictures
and advertisements has
appeared in her book Gods
in the Bazaar--
the economies of Indian calendar
art an important contribution
to an array of disciplines
and discussions,
including anthropology religion,
political science, art history,
and visual culture.
Gods in the Bazaar
was published in 2007
by Duke University Press.
Her writing has appeared
in many edited volumes,
including in Sumathi Ramaswamy's
edited volume on M.F. Husain,
Barefoot Across the Nation,
also in the Cambridge Companion
to Modern Indian Culture,
and in New Cultural
Histories of India,
which was co-edited by
[? Partha Chattergy. ?]
And Jain's essays have also been
featured in numerous journals,
including Identities, Current
Anthropology, and Third Text.
She is currently working
on a second book--
Gods in the Time of Democracy,
a sequel to Gods in the Bazaar--
forthcoming with Duke
University Press,
which deals with the
emergence of monumental statue
in post-liberalization India
in tandem with economic reforms
and Hindu nationalist and
Dalit political assertions.
A project that is supported
by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
So please join me in welcoming
Kajri Jain for in which
contemporary Indian
icon of [? praxis ?]
devours some sacred
cows of art history.
KAJRI JAIN: Thanks, Foad.
And thank you, [INAUDIBLE]
and [INAUDIBLE],,
for your kind invitation,
and of course,
[INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] for
doing all the behind the scenes
work.
I think I'm going to actually--
this is very well scheduled,
because I do take up
some of those
questions that arose
at the end of the last session
about religion, affect,
and, especially, the
relationship of the spiritual
and the aesthetic.
I can do this, right?
Because I need to be able to--
SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE]
KAJRI JAIN: OK, very good.
SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE]
KAJRI JAIN: Can you
still see anything?
SPEAKER 4: Yeah, that's fine.
KAJRI JAIN: So that
should be OK, no?
So I want to come at
art's secularity and art
history's art via
images in modern Indian
popular or public culture,
and their habitations,
and uninhabitations
of contemporary--
modern and contemporary
art history.
Often these images are
produced by artists
trained at art schools.
But even if they're
not, they're usually
described by artists and
their patrons as art.
So if there's a sense of
unbelonging here it's most--
it's because they
mostly inhabit,
not galleries or museums, but an
ever-expanding domain 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.
This unbelonging indexes
the normative secularity
of modern art according to
art history and the tendency
towards a binary opposition
between what [INAUDIBLE] called
cult value and
exhibition value or what
Richard Davis calls the
"temple effect" and the "museum
effect."
Although both these authors are
interested in the oscillation
between these two forms
of value and efficacy,
these frames are often
implicitly situated
along a linear timeline where
religion belongs in the past.
So a question I get
sometimes about my work
on recent monumental
iconic statues in India--
mostly built in concrete along
highways or in religious theme
parks, often for social
commercial or political
leverage--
is whether this is a
kind of secularization,
despite their clearly
being figures of deities.
Similar problem to
[? Tamara's ?] [INAUDIBLE]
temples--
as though any modern innovation
must be secular or anything
to do with business or politics
isn't properly religious.
At stake for me in the
question "how secular
is art" is how art history is
being reconceived from South
Asia, not just in
or for South Asia,
as a discipline capacious
enough for such images--
how it is becoming
otherwise, perhaps,
in ways that aren't
that other after all,
but were actually
there all along.
For purposes of brevity
and open-endedness,
I'll make six points in
the manner of theses--
flagging our route some of
the points of illuminating
epistemic friction that modern
South Asian icons scrape up
against that might
help us specify
some of the ways in which they
make art history exceed itself.
Here are my zombies.
In one sense to call art history
a zombie is a North American
way of saying, as Georges
Didi-Huberman does
in Confronting Images--
that what he calls our
beautiful discipline
is haunted or possessed
like the figure
of Leah in the central European
Jewish fable of the dybbuk.
Here Didi-Huberman pits the
Panofskian knowledge of images
against Warburgian
understanding--
where Warburg is the dybbuk that
possesses Leah, and Panofsky,
the exorcist, who fails
to fully de-possess her.
Against Panofsky's scientific,
humanist schematistic reduction
of the image to an intelligible
symbol or representation,
Didi-Huberman argues for
Warburg's unreason, his sense
of the inner exhaustability
of the image,
it's over-determination
as a symptom, a trace
of intensities, an incarnation.
This goes back to some of
the questions of enchantment
we were talking about.
So in sympathy with
Didi-Huberman's
imminent critique of
European art history,
I want to contextualize
this and extend it
to another kind of
haunting invoked
by the figure of the
zombie with its connections
to slavery that is to one
extreme of the gray zone
between human subjecthood,
and objecthood,
or brute animality spawned
by colonialism's ranging
of peoples along hierarchical
scales of civilization
and humanness.
This is the haunting
of the aesthetic
by its doppelganger, the evil
twin born at the same moment
in 1750s Europe--
the fetish, aka the
idol, aka the icon.
William [? Petes ?]
brilliantly traces
how the Enlightenment
vilification of the fetish
constituted human subjects via
the constitution of objects as
devoid of agency, except via--
can you see my mouse on there--
AUDIENCE: No.
KAJRI JAIN: No, OK, nevermind--
except via the market
or the invisible hand, which
you see on the top right.
Here fetishism or what some
might now call material
religion is a delusion--
as [? Petes ?] puts it,
quote, "the primary process
of un-enlightenment"--
that in [? Hegel ?] becomes
an early stage in the progress
of spirit or geist towards
more and more adequate vehicles
of self-expression--
that is increasingly
de-materialized, abstract,
or indeed spiritual forms
culminating in thought itself--
i.e. philosophy.
That's why our art
history conference
was started by a philosopher--
kicked off by a
philosopher I should say.
This is prefigured
in Kant's distinction
between the beautiful
and the sublime,
which occasions a
taxonomy of peoples
according to their aesthetic
capacities in his 1764
observations on the feeling of
the beautiful and the sublime.
Note, not long after
Linnaeus' Systema Naturae.
So for both Kant and
Hegel, religious images
are tainted, for Kant by
purposiveness, and for Hegel,
by concreteness.
David Morgan describes how
around the same time with
romanticism in art
religion is both literally
and metaphorically sublimated
by the sublime into landscape,
and then thoroughly
spiritualized,
resurfaces in modernist
abstraction with Malevich,
or Rothko, or later we might
add the installations of James
Tyrrell, or [? Ola ?]
[? Foreliasson, ?] whose very
stuff is light.
In short, the modern
notion of the aesthetic
that undergirded art
history and its objects
both precluded and denigrated
material efficacies, religious
and otherwise from the get go.
Attempting to depossess
objects of their efficacy
and purposeiveness,
only to bring them back
to an enslaved
zombie life as art
by infusing them with
spirit, the artistic idea,
the spirit of a people or
nation, the spirit of an age
or period, spatial
temporal capsules
within which art
history's curriculum
and its restless spirit
is still contained.
Anthropocentric
human spirit then
is art history's sacred cow.
What's left for worship once
the golden calf is dispossessed,
repossessed, sanitized,
and taxidermized?
All this stems from
art history's origins
in encounters with
non-European others
and the role of
enlightenment, humanism
in the politics of religion
and state within Europe,
which we heard about last night.
So if religion,
core religion now
features in Western, modern,
and contemporary art,
it is only, as
James Elkins argues,
as spirituality,
kitsch, or camp.
And while art's
haunting by the fetish
resurfaces in the
drive of the collector
or in the culture industry's
blockbuster shows,
the efficacies of
religion, now retooled
in the time of
democracy, resurface
in the frictions of iconoclasm
via what Michael [INAUDIBLE]
calls the labor of the negative.
Here, images oscillating
between art and religion
are harnessed to the taking and
making of religious offense.
We saw that with
[? Gonaric ?] this morning.
As with M.F. Husain,
the [? Bomian Butars, ?]
the Danish cartoons, Andre
Serrano's Piss Christ,
or Chris Ofili's The
Holy Virgin Mary.
So this is all quite
familiar to us.
But I wanted to sketch
it as a genealogy
of certain sticky habits that
dog art histories attempts
to think the modernity
and contemporaity
of religious images to speak
to [? Ashih's ?] concern
that he brought up.
So while ideas of
modernity as necessarily
secular, or of religion
as a thing of the past
have been soundly
critiqued, and disproved
every day on the news,
the conceptual habits
of a polarized and
temporally linear schema
still pervade our everyday
understandings of religiosity
and the undeniable force
of those understandings
in the world.
So number two.
One of these habits has to do
with a certain essentialism
and universalism in the
category of religion.
So in this scholarship on
South Asian public imagery,
the pioneering work
of Chris [? Pini ?]
and [? Suma Tiramas ?]
has demonstrated how
the nationalism that popular
prints index and produce is
shot through with religiosity.
Both use these prints as
an image-based refutation
of Benedict Anderson's much
critiqued account of secular
nationalism stressing the
mythic and deified nature
of the nation's space and themes
of sacrifice and martyrdom
in nationalist affect.
So far, so good.
But here, Pini runs with
Andersen's opposition
between [? Benjamin's ?] idea
of homogeneous empty time
as the modern nation's
putatively secular temporality
and a messianic time
that monolithically
stands in for all kinds
of religious time.
Indian bazaar
prints thus partake
of messianic temporality.
Now, there may well be a case to
be made for this on the grounds
that [? Benjamin's ?]
dialectical notion
of the messianic is deployed
within, but in excess
of a secular horizon.
But this is not the move here.
Pini's messianic time, like
Anderson's, is just a catch-all
religious category--
religious category--
that does not engage
[? Benjamin's ?] singular
retake on a specifically Judaic
formulation.
Now, my point here is not
so much to plead for justice
to Benjamin of to Judaism,
although that would be nice,
it's more about how our
clunky notion of religion
lends itself to such moves.
For Anderson, religion
and secularism
are mutually exclusive and
ranged in linear succession.
Penny demonstrates that
religion never went away.
But he doesn't ask whether
what apparently persists
is the same as what
existed before.
So religion becomes
a historical.
Thus, for instance, his emphasis
on corepathetic or embodied
devotional engagements implies
a continuum between temple icons
and new ones in domestic
or public settings.
Again, while this may
be valid in some ways,
it forecloses an examination of
what is new or otherwise here,
of what kinds of
other things religion
turns into in its publicness,
or its articulation
with nationalism through
new genres and media,
as a site not just of
native subalternative,
vis-a-vis colonialism,
but also of Hindu
hegemonic reterritorialization.
And we could say
that coming back
to the discussion of
[? Kumaraswamy. ?] Maybe
there's a bit of that
going on there too.
So religion figures
somewhat romantically here
as a pre-modern
leftover rather than
taking on its own
modalities of modernity.
Perhaps one reason for the
stickiness of these habits
is that there is
indeed a distinction
to be made between those forms
of religiosity that were not
shaped in relation to a secular
horizon and those that are.
The confusion arises when these
two forms are lumped together
under the singular
rubric of religion,
and is compounded by
the fact that while we
may no longer inhabit a secular,
a pre-secular horizon, Some
of its material forms and
modality of value, modalities
of value and
authority, are still
with us, both in circuitry with
and distinct from secular ones.
And I think this goes to
what Leila was pointing out
earlier, vis-a-vis that map.
So, in part, this has to do with
the cyclical nature of ritual
temporality, which keeps
traditions alive by continually
adapting them to the present.
It also has to do with
the modern weight accorded
to the origins and the
putatively primordial authority
of canonical ideas or practices.
So religion is neither
simply that which
is rendered obsolete, nor is
it simply that which persists
in some kind of authentic,
universal, essential, or
singular form.
But in practice, it ends
up being treated as both,
even as it is constantly
being remade to become
a prolific site of emergence.
Public iconopraxis and
the discourses around it
provide a good site to get at
these kinds of complexities.
And here, I'm running with
Michael Meisters addition
of iconopraxis to
iconology and iconography
as part of our art
historical toolkit.
So that is what images do
and what we do with them.
And, of course, the specters
of purposiveness and fetishism
loom large here as soon as you
go to questions of practice.
Ongoing temple renovation and
construction, bazaar prints,
and the new public mega
deities demonstrate
that in India,
religious patronage
remains a powerful way
to maintain or achieve
social status and mobility far
more so than artistic taste,
as the Bourgeois
modality of distinction,
that, say, [? Boudieur ?]
described for 1970s France.
In the ethos of Indian
vernacular capitalism,
or the bazaar, as I've
argued, religion and commerce,
the material and the
spiritual, the otherworldly
and the mundane are not
opposed in quite the ways
that they are for
the protestant ethic
with its emphasis on the Word.
Thus, a common way
for Hindus and Jains
to mark economic success is
to build temples, as with
the extensive innovative
temple building
program of the [INAUDIBLE]
from the 1930s.
And I'm very happy
Tamara is investigating
in greater detail.
They also created, actually,
religious theme parks
in the late 1980s
and early '90s.
So in the
pre-liberalization economy,
bazaar prints in the form of
calendars gifted to customers
and business associates
were a common means
of annually renewing commercial,
comsocial, comreligious
networks that maintained the
moral reputation of the donor.
Now, monumental icons
also consolidate
the moral and social
status as well as
the technological or
infrastructural prowess
of post liberalization
players, old and new.
So if the [INAUDIBLE] are
an example of the old,
a controversial new player was
the audio baron, Gulshan Kumar,
who famously started out as a
roadside fruit juice vendor,
and then consolidated an
audio cassette, CD, video,
and then film
production empire, only
to be assassinated
while exiting a temple,
likely by the Bombay underworld.
The case has not
yet been closed.
Media scholars have focused on
Gulshan Kumar's use of piracy
to gain economic mobility.
But in keeping with the habitual
assumption that religion
belongs to the past and
media to the present,
totally ignore the
key role of religion
in his social mobility.
The CDs and videos of devotional
pageants, and pilgrimages,
actually videos of pilgrimages
where Kumar's image features
prominently, or the giant Shiva
statue at his studio in Noida
are characteristically
pirated from the [INAUDIBLE]..
And his patronage of--
and this one is an exact copy
of the one near the airport
in the [INAUDIBLE].
And then his patronage of a
temple and a big Shiva near
[INAUDIBLE],, one of the
[NON-ENGLISH] for important
Hindu pilgrimage centers,
centered on powerful monks
or ancient monasteries.
So note the circuit here
between canonical authority
and spectacular new forms.
It's hardly surprising that
Kumar sought an association
with the institutional
power of [NON-ENGLISH]..
But this is a circuit
because it works both ways.
The authority of
powerful ancient temples
is reinforced, not diminished,
by featuring in devotional CDs
and pilgrimage videos.
A similar circuit is at work
in the political adoption
of the monumental statue
form to garner favor
with local vote banks.
Here, however, politicians tend
to maintain an arm's length
from religion, per se.
So these projects often unfold
under the secular rubrics
of tourism development,
cultural heritage,
philanthropy, even
environmentalism.
For monumental statue
[? impresario ?] [INAUDIBLE],,
Chief Minister of the Himalayan
state of Sikkim since 1994--
that's over two decades now--
this boundary work
enables him to cater
to two major religious
blocks, Hindus and Buddhists,
via two colossal statues
on hilltops flanking
his constituency [INAUDIBLE].
Even as he himself belongs
to the indigenous [INAUDIBLE]
community, these
gestures of recognition
do double duty as
economic initiatives
to develop tourism in
South Sikkim, which
is drier and less
naturally attractive
than other parts of the state.
So the statues in question are
135 foot guru [NON-ENGLISH]
or [NON-ENGLISH] completed in
2004 with a garden inaugurated
on World Environment Day--
that is, so trading
on secular value--
and 108-foot Shiva at
the 2011 [INAUDIBLE]
Pilgrimage [INAUDIBLE]
Cultural Center.
Note this formulation
that conjoins pilgrimage
to culture while also
maintaining them as distinct.
This complex also features
scaled-down replicas--
[INAUDIBLE], you'll like this--
of the four temples
at the [NON-ENGLISH],,
each manned by a priest
and large enough to enter
and worship in.
The ritual authenticity of
these replicated temples was
established via the
site's inauguration
by the [NON-ENGLISH],, or head
guru of the [NON-ENGLISH],,
one of the [NON-ENGLISH].
Similarly, the Dalai Lama led
the [INAUDIBLE] foundation
stone, as well as inaugurating
a 95-foot seated [NON-ENGLISH]
at [INAUDIBLE],, also in
South Sikkim, in 2013.
And this was the initiative
of a local big man
in [INAUDIBLE]
cabinet, who ended up
as the minister for power,
or something really important
like that.
But the sites of the
[INAUDIBLE] project team
were set not so much on
domestic tourist pilgrims
as on the international
Buddhist circuit, and on,
quote, what they called,
"both the pilgrim
and the [INAUDIBLE].
Another both/and formulation
that nonetheless also maintains
a distinction between
religious icon and secular art,
but projected onto a
single object or image.
In some then,
following [INAUDIBLE]
anthropological
approach to secularism,
or Stanley [? Kavel's ?]
ordinary language approach
to religion, rather than working
with essentialist categories
of religious and sacred,
religious and secular, sacred
and profane, to do
art history would
be to attend to the
ongoing boundary
work between these categories
in discourse and in practice.
This is what I see several
of us working from South Asia
as trying to do.
For us, art history
is the battleground
between the exorcist
and the [INAUDIBLE]..
I see [INAUDIBLE] is nod--
you'll see this later that
[INAUDIBLE] is totally
in that terrain.
OK, but this also means
that one can't simply
wish away the force
of linear temporality
and the progress narrative.
Art historians trying to
address the uneven co-presence
of artistic practices
find that they
must contend with
heterogeneities
in the very apprehension
of temporality.
Keith Moxie, for instance, in
his book Visual Time argues
for, quote, "an awareness
of heterochrony,
the sense that
different cultures have
distinct notions of time,
and that these are not
easily related to one another."
Here, Moxie fails to register
that cultural difference was,
in fact, produced in
relation, cooked up
by European imperialism,
kept on the boil
by subsequent
relations of asymmetry,
and served up as
needed to legitimize
the exceptionalities of colonial
and then other forms of rule,
including Hindu absolutism.
Highlighting this
relational production
of cultural difference
makes culture
primordial or essential,
enabling cultural list
explanations to
substitute for a narration
of capitalist movements in
search of its spatial fix,
as David Harvey calls it.
In other words, this invocation
of cultural difference ignores
the force of Western
ideas in the world,
which have material effects,
even if not always in the forms
that these ideas
anticipate or recognize,
forms like giant concrete
statues of Indian deities
as performances of technological
[NON-ENGLISH] and lures
for capital investment.
In its universalism, the linear
developmentalist narrative
makes promises to,
and is therefore
taken up by all who those
who desire progress,
including-- indeed, especially
those who aren't yet
enjoying its fruits.
The giant deities demonstrate
how distinct notions of time,
in this case, those of virtual
progress and of ritual cycles,
are inhabited and remixed
by the same subjects
and in the same objects, such
that even if we can speak
of different cultures,
these aren't easily mapped
onto particular subjects,
objects, or locations.
The lesson then is not to
peg heterochrony to culture,
but to develop complex accounts
of the multiple temporalities
at work in a situation,
where new configurations
are layered on to make
linkages with, reactivate,
and remediate existing ones.
So, for instance, the
new, gigantic statues
don't replace the smaller icons,
either sequestered in temples
or appearing by the roadside.
Even as the emergence
of the big statues
might affect, say,
statues and temples
in ways that produce
further assemblages,
like temple-come-theme parks.
Such accounts would
bring to religious images
media archeology's insight
that image technologies don't
necessarily replace one another
in evolutionary succession
while still acknowledging
the pervasiveness, force,
and efficacy of modernities
progress narrative.
The holy bath water that
cleansed objects and turned art
into a matter of
spirit was thrown out
along with the babies
of material efficacy
and the value of labor.
But that's a little convoluted.
Sorry.
But over the past decade
or so, zombie art history,
duly exercised, has been
undergoing a material term.
Isn't it faintly ridiculous
that art history,
whose method entails close
attention to objects, spaces,
and sense experience should
be part of a bleating
herd following political
philosophers, and historians,
or sociologists of science,
whose disciplines were wedded
to Cartesian or liberal
Bourgeois subjects,
but then suddenly woke up
to the liveliness of things?
[LAUGHTER]
If we bleat in this way, this
is because art history too
exorcized agency and
purpose from objects
in the 18th Century.
But there have always been those
for whom the exorcism never
worked, like Wargurg, for whom
the image continued to exercise
efficacies and affects beyond
its proper time and place,
like [INAUDIBLE]
and [? Kuble, ?]
for whom form itself
was an engine of form,
unfolding over time,
or like Didi-Huberman,
confronting the image in
a present that is just
a movement in the
layers of matter
and meaning contained in the
encounters between the object,
and the senses,
memories, and other
embodied psychic
processes of those
before it, like [INAUDIBLE].
These art historians, like
many of the South Asianists
here, have been alive to the
work of objects, artists,
and [INAUDIBLE],, both in
and beyond enlightenment
subjectivity, and
to medialities not
limited to secular
communication between humans,
but also between mortals,
gods, and living matter.
Art history is and
always has been otherwise
because our objects
will always exceed
what we have to say about them.
In other words, art and
art history may be secular,
but art history's
objects need not be.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
