New Perspectives in Art

About 20,000 years ago, some of mankind’s first artists made remarkable paintings of animals in certain dark and narrow caves of Southern Europe. These paintings had such an astonishing level of sensitivity and skill that when they came to light, in the middle of the nineteenth century, most people found it hard to accept their genuineness or antiquity. Archaeologists, however, proved this beyond doubt in the following years; various discoveries in Europe and elsewhere indisputably confirmed early man’s artistic sensibilities and mimetic skills in painting, engraving, carving and relief. And most of their discovered works had a sense of vitality and life- content as earned them a high place on the ladder of artistic achievement.

All the same, those excellent artists with sensibilities comparable to ours did not have the same kind of outlook on art as we have today. They painted on the rugged walls and ceilings of low and dimly-lit caves which were quite the antithesis of modern picture galleries; worse still, they painted in their most remote and inaccessible recesses. They scrawled their images at random, often laying one on top of another in a manner that most modern art practitioners will hardly ever countenance to do. Obviously, cavemen artists did not make these paintings for other cavemen to see and admire as we do today nor thought of their paintings on the same lines as we do.

According to specialists, their intentions were magical, not aesthetic; by painting these pictures of the animals of their surroundings – the bison, horse, mammoth and deer – in their lifelike images, they were trying to wield control over them in one way or another; for hunters as they who tackled their chase more with their ingenuity than elaborate weaponry, this was a necessary recourse. These, therefore, were not meant to be pictures in the sense we understand them but to be ‘pads’ of power.

Whatever the details may be, one point is clear: the most important feature of today’s art practice – making things for others to respond to – was of no great importance to cavemen artists nor the notion that we now cherish of the picture space. For them, painting was probably part of a secret ritual and its aesthetic qualities, which we now admire, came to be there either by accident or for reasons of magical efficacy. So their perspectives on art were indubitably different from ours.

We may as well ask ourselves here: what do we mean by perspective? In the simplest terms, perspective is an ordered outlook on things. For human beings, destined to live more by their wits than their genetic codes, an ordered outlook on their human physical environment is necessary at each point in time; in other words, they have to be armed at each point with a perspective to chart out their horizons. And since then, from the time of the first man and woman until now – when we are four billion people, scattered over five continents, speaking diverse languages, sporting various notions and beliefs, conforming to different patterns of life and behaviour and holding together or falling apart, as the case may be – there have been many changes in the human and physical environment and, consequently, in perspectives. The various cultural facts that we live with are the fall-out of these changes and, between the human and the physical, they form a third environment partaking of the nature of both. We exploit all the three or come to terms with them as we can. But, made as we are, we are not content to make passive adjustments with our circumstances but want to go beyond, even if it involves husbanding the circumstances a little. So a perspective also implies a lunge forward.

Any new perspective in a culturally developed society has, therefore, at least two sides to it: one, that leads forward to new horizons and the other, that looks back and interprets the old in a new light. One comes with the other, although which precedes which may depend on the circumstances of a time. Often, new intuitions predate any clear re-evaluations of their antecedents. Often, analyses of the existing circumstances precedes a forward vision. But a new perspective is complete and fructuous only when one comes with the other.

So, before we outline and discuss what our new perspectives are, it will help us if we make a cursory trail over the historical terrain. We have already mentioned that the animal images by the cavemen artists have a remarkable vitality and life-content. We find in them, in today’s terminology, a formal articulation of a high order; mimetic representations though they are, they deviated from the seen image ever so subtly to accentuate this vitality (even in a passive subject like a crouching or dead bison). Which makes us ponder: if their purpose was magical, why did they need to have this quality of dynamic verisimilitude, in image after image, in cave after cave? We find this especially intriguing as the visual accoutrements of latter-day magic rarely have this quality; they are either diagrammatic and abstract (like in the Tantric mandalas) or arreal and expressionistic (like in the fetish figures of India, Africa or Oceania). We can only presume that at this (probably pre-linguistic) time, twice-removed or quasi-linguistic symbols (as the latter) did not have for them the same authenticity as mimetic correspondence. In any case, the art of the paleolithic cavemen, brilliant though it may be, was small in range; compared to today’s art, it has a small variety of art objects and certainly, small variations in image.

The range increased over the next stage of cultural evolution in an explosive way. Between the end of the paleolithic stage and the rise of the early civilizations – the neolithic and post-neolithic agrarian revolution – man’s horizons changed conclusively, adding to them phenomenal breadth and depth. From food-hunters and gatherers, men became food-producers, from nomads they turned to settlers. Their knowledge of their environment increased by leaps and bounds and led to technological innovations of lasting value; their observations of Nature, of land and sky, laid the foundations of empirical enquiry and speculative thought. Their need to store, trade and keep account of their product-reserves (or wealth) led to the devising of graphic codes and through this, to writing, and their more intimate and charged responses to their own kind and their environment to clan chronicles and mythology, ritual and religious practices. And the whole network of these built up the corpus of human culture as we understand today.

The arts of this time increased in both technical and dimensional diversity in a large way or, at least, that is the picture we get from the studies of the remains of those days in the surviving pockets of such cultures in certain parts of today’s world. Post-neolithic arts comprised painting and sculpture (of which little remains), a large variety of functional artefacts like pots, baskets, tools, mats, weaponry or visual accessories of life and ritual like costumes, jewellery, masks, drums, rattles and musical instruments, leave alone houses and settlements and places of worship. In fact, our present- day art scene is hardly more diverse than that. As for their dimensional range, there were various strands of activity with various shades to each; for instance, the images of pots, baskets and tools based initially on their function and fabricational method moved beyond these into extra-functional profiles; architecture grew from simple structures into symbolic configurations in staged metamorphoses. Religion and ritual gave rise to a large spectrum of activities ranging from private observances to public extravaganzas, each having a prominent visual content. Whether in the design of a fetish or the planning of the look, movement and paraphernalia of processions, pageants and fairs, their features varied from simple decorations to speaking symbols. Their emotional timbre varied too; some were gay and open and euphoric, others, ridden with feelings of guilt and fear. Their action content varied from the rehearsed and the deliberate to the eruptive and the psychosomatic.

These art forms were no longer confined to simple mimetic units but ranged from single structures to descriptive configurations, whether the descriptions were realized through mimetic or signatory components or intermediate forms. The programmed use of these led to greater communicative resilience and reach; single or in combinations, they led from object to event, from event to narrative, from objects of specific reference to objects of unspecific or plural references.

The arts of the agricultural communities laid the foundations of the concept of a visual language, especially where the communities were hierarchically simple and the various modalities lay close to each other and to the streams of knowledge and technology and conceptual lore and, above all, to the physical facts of the environment. Such a proximity led to interactions and their output to ‘traditions’ as traditions are made up of image or activity models as emerge from a purpose-function-skill-sensibility-object-object correlative chain, though the links may not always be in that order. In the early stages of these arts, however, professionalism is rare; almost everyone in the community participated in the simpler creative activities (except those under taboo) and the specially endowed in the more exacting ones. The growth of the professional comes at a later stage.

The growth of the professional corresponds to a certain extent to the progressive division of labour and skill specialization on the one hand and the growth of a centralized power structure on the other. The people in the seats of power, be they kings or lords, chieftains or clan-leaders, sought to move away from the people and besiege themselves within an aura of exclusiveness, made up of singularities in their dress and manners, their houses and artefacts, their wealth, their instruments of authority and a cultivated interest in the higher reaches of life; they wanted these to be qualitatively superior to those of others whether in skill or refinement or complexity. So a whole tribe of professionals, call them fabricators or creative men, came into their service and worked under their patronage.

The rise of professionalism and patronage effected a major change in perspective. It made the artist self-conscious and forced him to identify the achievement norms of his field of work and cultivate his skills and sensibilities towards them; he wanted his work to be displayed and seen and admired. He also tried to give an individual image to his work, marking it out from the rest of its kind, although his marking out was not always meant to lead towards personal identification but the identification of the family, guild or workshop group. This gave rise to ‘styles’, styles being different from traditions in so far as their factor break-up is more specific than the latter’s. Styles tend to be exclusive and restrictive in essence while traditions tend to be inclusive and expansive.

Whatever this may be, the professional artist appeared at some stage in our cultural evolution. He boosted and refined the activity and made a perch for himself at a level from where he could demonstrate the width of his sensibilities and virtuosity. Although professional sectors developed in each small speciality in the total art hierarchy (even in functional arts and crafts), the sector that served the citadels of the elite, religious or secular, gained in prominence; its skill-content fanned out, its theme-content diversified and its environmental correlates deepened. Art now attained ‘major’ status. Only the exceptionally endowed could enter this sector and they too needed tutelage and apprenticeship. And only a genius could lead. Aesthetics was born and it was given various names and guises. The panorama of a composite tradition divided up into ‘little’ or ‘big’, ‘provincial’ or ‘courtly’ sectors of practice. True, in many pre-industrial corporate societies these sectors overlapped and enriched each other, especially in the major centres of civilization whether that be India or China or Babylonia or Egypt or Greece or Rome; for all their various differences, they shared certain common features in this regard.

The art patronage of the ruling and court elite pushed the image of man into the centre of the field, though it is mostly the image of the privileged, not the common man. At its simplest, art recorded his world and lifestyle, his loves and fears, his gains and frustrations. Then, it presented the extrahuman in the human image, gods in the guise of royalty, abstract entities in anthropomorphic form. The bizarre sub-human imagery (that featured animals, birds, insects or their composites) of the previous stage began to be edged out. Although due to this the repertoire lost a little in colour and diversity, it gained in empathy, human response being deeper and more direct to human subjects and kings or commoners, when shorn of their special trappings, are vulnerable to the onslaught of the same basic emotions. So, in certain parts of the world, we see the development of aesthetic systems centred around human emotions and their filigreed offshoots. Art, thus, came to possess psychological complexities in both theme and tenor that needed a trained connoisseur to unravel and explain.

Histories of art of the various parts of the world present this phase elaborately, partly because its remains are better preserved and recorded, partly because it is more readily legible. From about 3,000 BC to 1,500 AD, arts in the various centres of civilization had these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree; on top were the ‘major’ arts of palace and church, temple and monument, largely man-centred, and below, a substratum of ‘minor’ and ‘decorative’ arts with great variations in iconography and skill content.

But over the last 300 years, there has been a major change in circumstances and, naturally, in perspectives. In Europe, the change started a little earlier, in the fifteenth century, with the rise of the cities and affluent trader communities and a philosophy of humanist materialism during the Renaissance which moved the patronage of the arts, if one may say so, from a top elite to a middle one. This new elite placed art at a distance, regarding it as a symbol of status and privilege. They considered art practice as an autonomous and privileged activity open to only specially-endowed individuals. Its purpose was hedonistic in either a mundane or transcendental sense; it regaled man with the beauty of things or opened his eyes to Nature’s depth and mystery. The mythological and religious themes that still persisted were mostly supports for this exercise, carrying their hedonistic purposes on a truss of respectability. The main change in perspective was, however, in the concept of the artists as individual creators with a special vision, comparable in status to writers, philosophers and the like. Their inspiration and support were the visual facts around them, even as the experience of life was the support and source-book for writers; this experience itself was their main incitement and reward. An artist worked on an inner compulsion and even if he worked at the behest of a patron, a patron had to take cognizance of this fact.

Perhaps this sounds like a kind of emancipation for the artist, setting him free to fashion the form and choose the content of his work as he wishes and embody in it his individual perceptions and feelings without reserve. But this was true only to some extent. The new society that gave him this freedom also cut itself free from any commitment for this support in the normal scheme of things; it let art be one of the commodities, perhaps a privileged commodity, in its market of free choices, open to the consumer or patron to accept or reject. And since the concerns of the new (bourgeois) consumer were mainly the decoration of his household, documentation of his possessions, titillation of his senses or the enhancement of his status, the horizons of a lot of artists were limited by these. Only a few highly self-assured and non-conformist individuals dared to overstep their bounds.

The Renaissance in Europe saw the birth of scientific thought but its social structure was still pre-industrial. Two centuries later, Europe saw the Industrial Revolution which initiated various changes in the economic, social and political institutions of its peoples and their value systems. Directly affecting the arts by wiping out the minor art spectrum and replacing the manual artisan with the machine, it depersonalized the commodity and narrowed the concept of its utility.

The specification of the utilities of each commodity or service and the standardization of the means of production is at the base of an industrial system. A comprehensive value system comes with this. Within it, everything is designed for a specifi c use; to exceed this use is wasteful or uneconomic or injurious to production-consumption balances. So no commodity or service tends to go beyond the needs of use into marginal refinements except where this is related to market attraction or saleability. If any refinements are accommodated in this value system, they are so done as utilities of a special kind, which makes art and culture a special sphere of activity—a source of entertainment and relaxation or psychological arousal and grooming to the consumer, of creative work-out to the producer. This makes their production more exclusively professional and the public response to them more abjectly passive; people seek to enjoy art as they enjoy good weather as a fortuitous gift and, since it is outside the pale of their daily concerns, take no general responsibility for its support. So art depends on the institutional support of state or private agencies or the rare private collectors. Support of the former kind, whether it accrues from state institutions or political barons or captains of industry is, more often than not, coloured by extraneous considerations, their main intentions being cosmetic, seeking to cover their usually banal interests with a visage of respectability. This certainly cannot be categorized as responsive support. The latter kind varies in quality and volume from country to country, depending on its economic and other circumstances.

Whatever this may be, the art and craft scene in an industrial society or an industrializing society, prone to the same forces of change, have these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree; the manual artisan is eased out of the functional art scene which is now taken charge of by mechanical production systems; the artist works outside the normal behests of society as a freelancer, without a specific patron or audience and, so, a decided communication nexus. Personalized functional objects with refinements in image and fabricational detail disappear from use and are replaced by impersonal and tawdry substitutes produced by the mechanized systems. This impoverishes the general living environment, since the taste and refinements of the generality of people in pre-industrialized societies were nurtured by the use and presence of personalized artefacts in their daily lives and their close relationship with the skilled artisans who made them, which introduced a number of them to the practice of various skills or, at least, to the appreciation of their niceties. The uprooting of the artisans and their absorption in large numbers into the new production systems as impersonal participants makes it worse; it robs them of their heritage of traditional skills and transforms them into unfeeling jobbers in the new set-up. Only when one notices how large a presence of these artisans’ skills there is in a pre-industrial society and how, in graded ascent, they connect up with the sophisticated professional arts, can one realize the enormity of this change. In short, within an industrial society, art gets pushed out of the field of functional production and this weakens, even wipes out, the aesthetic sensibilities of the generality of people. (A comparison of the wealth of creative sensibilities as seen amongst people of certain pre-industrial pockets in our own society with the near absence of these amongst those from urban industrial environments will bear this out.) Art is pushed into a small enclosure, to be cultivated by people outside this sphere. So, on the one side lies a barren land deficient in skills and sensibility and on the other, a diminutive hothouse that nurtures these with fanfare and publicity.

Some of the special characteristics of the present-day art scene stem from this bifurcation of our activity spheres into functional and creative sectors. In one, the participants are, so to speak, anaesthetized in the interest of efficiency while in the other, their aesthetic susceptibilities are specially roused and nurtured. This makes it difficult for them to take part in both, and they are blown cold and hot by turns. If some individuals do so, they do so under strain. Generally, they opt for one or the other, the majority opting for the former and working as ‘slaves’ of the production machine in conditions that keep their creativity-counts low and their art responses weak; only a very small number of them engaged in the designing of commodities or their production systems find any challenge or creative outlet in their work. Others manage at most to respond to art forms and, that too, to such art forms as amuse or entertain or, rarely, thrill or shock; they find it hard to negotiate forms as call for more refined sensibilities or informed participation. This basic insufficiency frustrates all serious efforts (as are made in certain affluent countries today) to reach out to them in a large way with the more exacting forms.

So these forms remain with a small minority who cultivate them and have the talent and urge to do so and an equally small minority as are sensitive enough to respond to them. As these artists no more serve a definite social demand or patronage or draw their themes and devices from a commonly shared lore, their creativity has to find alternative premises. They have now to fix the terms, or frames of reference, of their works, find their theme, choose their visual devices and draw each of these from their store of personal experiences to gain strength and authenticity. This, naturally, brings a new set of implications today to the notions of who an artist or what a work of art is or what its content and language, operation and impact are. Today an artist is thought of as a specially endowed person who embodies his responses to what is in or around him, compulsively, in images or objects that move and heighten the experience of responsive onlookers. So he is ‘individual’ in his talent, susceptibilities and choices and, certainly, his mode of expression. This brings him a kind of special (near-shamanistic) status; his eyes are credited with visionary powers, his hands with a special magic, his heart with a divine (or daemonic) spark that turns him on. The works of a number of artists justify this notion to a greater or lesser degree, revealing surprising turns of vision and statement that open new prospects to the onlooker. But notions often settle down to be norms. This individuality that starts as a characteristic of modern art activity gets steered slowly into being considered its main objective and this, in turn, pushes certain artists into absurd novelties of posture. Not only do they want to leave a personal impress on their works, they even want to supercede its image with theirs, the work being only a peep-hole or a coded image through which one sees or reads their presence. The modern art critics too subscribe to this notion in a big way; many of them go to enormous lengths to seat the picaresque image of an artist on the lap of his work, even to the extent of obscuring its own features.

There are comparable changes in notions about a work of art, its form, content and language. In former times, when art had a purpose outside itself, be it to lay a spell on animals or crops or clouds or entrap and embody a deity or power or cleanse, cure or communicate visions, dreams and myths, the artist strove to do this (to whatever level of actual or imagined success) by marshalling all his perceptions and sensibilities to give them life, although he rarely talked about these latter to any except perhaps his novices. But in this disenchanted world of ours, where the aforesaid intentions are considered naive or pedestrian, the artist’s perceptions and sensibilities and, behind them, his dreams, visions or manias and their various configurations, move into the spotlight. These are now the basic staple of works of art, their content and carrier, their theme and language. So today’s artists, art critics and aestheticians are concerned with the various forms of these – varieties of visual experience, their image structure, their range, their communicative potential and the like. Multiplied by the individualities of artists, their forms are countless. So a work of art can today be a unitary image or a constellation of images, a receptive and legible configuration or a resistant and obscure one, a planned logical construct or a spontaneous automatic expression, an enduring object or an ephemeral act, a bunch of harmonies or a medley of fighting contrasts, just to list a few pairs of contradistinct possibilities. Its component units may be readable visual symbols (ranging from mirror image to pictograms) or non-descriptive sensory stimuli. Its total character may, too, be as different – illusionistic or conceptual, formalist or expressionistic, realistic or abstract, figurative or non-figurative, literary or non-literary, with the various connotations these terms have come to gain in modern artistic parlance, each one, in turn, having a whole range of sub-categories.

This proliferation of categories in today’s creative arts has many other reasons besides this. The talents and skills that thrived upon the basal sensibilities related to object-making, object-presentation and the like in the erstwhile functional art field find no place in the new functional context; the only foothold they can find is in the ‘creative’ enclosure. In the preindustrial panorama, they were accommodated in various hierarchical niches and (linked though they were) their operational premises were clear within these. But the creative enclosure of today honours no hierarchy; here, each activity mode is considered equal to the other. So the art scene (at least in certain parts of the world) has now a bewildering variety, lining up art objects and activities of various grades of depth and complexity. It is in a sense a veritable Kumbha Mela; like the Kumbha Melas present a chaotic revue of religious and pseudo-religious characters in a continuous procession – philosophers, pundits, mystics, psychotics, contortionists, transvestites, even runaway adolescents – the modern art scene also presents painters and sculptors of various denominations – realists, hyper-realists, surrealists, neo-realists, systemists, programmists, diverse categories of extrovert and introvert practitioners ranging from designers and performers to narcissists and body-artists, producing works ranging from painting and sculpture of the traditional kind to kinetic mobiles, earthworks, environments and happenings. This is even more so because a greater rationalization of the religious scene in today’s world has made the art scene the last resort for emotional workouts. This variety baffles the art critic and taxes his powers of judgement; he either rejects this levelling up or marshals all his powers of sophistry to justify it. But, for all the confusion this raises, it has certain positive features too; it identifies with greater clarity the various sensibility levels of the art language and their response spectra. If there is still a lot of confusion in the comparative estimates of various art forms, this is partly related to an absence of clear enough models of the experiences these elicit, or emerge from and partly, to the compulsions of the present-day art trade which hires critics to package diverse art forms with the same kind of esoteric verbiage.

Another important reason for this is the ambivalent position modern artists take, or are obliged to take, in the face of history; as individual artists, they are now more concerned with their personal responses and perceptions than with historical imperatives while as a part of today’s civilized society, floating around with the cultural facts of the whole world, they are face to face with a larger and more varied body of historical and cultural stimuli. This confrontation works on them both as an irritant and incentive; it drives some of them into little cabins of seclusion where they play around with the rudiments of art language, or out into the open where they give chase to its various forms and manifestations. This gives rise to a plethora of mutant forms – one has only to recall how the discovery of certain areas of Western art affected Japanese printmakers or Indian painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of Japanese prints the Impressionists, of African sculpture the early Cubists, of Theosophy the Constructivists and Abstractionists, of Sumie painting the Action painters, of various forms of primitive art and ritual various forms of modern art and theatre. So, regardless of the fact that non-conformism is given a special value in today’s art world (especially in the West), out-ofturn conformities to (or inspiration from) historical stimuli continue as also (imposed) conformities of certain artists to their established type-images under the compulsions of art trade (which forces a successful artist to hold on to certain of his mannerisms if he wants to continue his success).

To understand this, we need to know a little about the character of today’s art trade. Creative arts are, as everyone knows, presented to the public today through gallery shows, being personal in language and private in theme and not directly related to any established social demand. The interested elite come to see them, the collectors to buy them. These galleries have their own ways of presentation or promotion and merchandizing and not all of these are elegant and altruistic. Artists know this but they have to depend on the galleries if they do not want to become salesmen themselves. These galleries sell the work to private or public collectors or museums; they are particularly interested in the latter. A museum purchase works as an accreditation for a work of art and establishes the status of the artist, whatever be the intrinsic worth of his work; it is not unusual to see in today’s art market a faddish novelty gain more attention and earn a better price than works of enduring sensibility. So the commodity value of a work does not always correspond to its essential worth. Such a discrepancy may have been there in older times too, when a patron favoured an inferior talent against a superior one, but today it is larger in magnitude. This is especially so as a lot of gallery-men and collectors are not dependable connoisseurs themselves and rely on middle-men appraisers and, in a scene seething with novelties of image and outlook, stable judgements are not easy. These middle-men appraisers and art critics play a sizeable role in the art trade today; they wield power through their reviews in journals and other print media. Richly illustrated reviews reach out an artist’s work to more people than art exhibitions do, regardless of whether they are favourable or unfavourable; an artist often prefers a patently unfavourable notice to neglect and indifference. And the appraisers, on their side, size up an artist and his work through various image-stereotypes, forcing vulnerable artists into various straitjackets of their choice.

The art scene of today is, therefore, riddled with complexities. Contemporary art activity needs sensitive responses for sustenance but our environment is deficient in such responses. In a world teeming with faceless mechanized products, art is, as someone has said, a maximized hand- product; this contrast imbues it with an unduly magical aura and wraps the artist in a shamanistic robe. In a highly professional and planned world, art gets deprofessionalized to a greater or lesser degree, giving unplanned and naive expression an edge over the contrived and crafted. Similarly, in a world where a large communication network reaches almost everything to everyone, art becomes personal, esoteric and remote in the same measure as it hungers for response and participation. To a certain extent, the art perspectives of today are coloured by these contradictions as much as they are concerned with their resolution. Has the functional commodity to be faceless? Has the production system to be inhuman? Have the communication media to be banal? Have the functional and creative spectra to be isolated? Have form and content to push each other out in the art object? Do all art-forms elicit the same category of responses? What is the essential function of art? Are the art and design spectra of today the same as that of the previous ages? Is organized art trade a favourable circumstance? These are certain questions that serious artists ask themselves today.

That today’s art spectrum is different in various ways from the preceding ones has already been elaborated to some extent. The design spectrum too has changed drastically in the last few decades, and for the better; its objectives and technical horizons have undergone a fundamental change. Apart from this, an expanding sector of communication arts has emerged within it. These diverse sectors have been thrown up by the needs of the new circumstances and, by and large, support them. But they have also the capacity to cut loose and work against them.

Let us, for instance, take the case of design. In the early days, design served the narrow behests of bulk production. Thereon, it went to answer market preferences. Today its perspectives are larger and, with great improvements in technological and functional analysis, its methods more refined. Although the crudities and infelicities of early industrial products still persist, the concepts have broadened. Purely economic considerations may still be a major interest but no serious designer would fail to pay attention today to human considerations as well if only from the conviction that, like honesty is the best policy, human welfare can be good business in the long run. Besides, an increasing awareness of the limitations in the availability of resources in a progressively industrializing world has widened a designer’s perspectives further; so have problems of wastage disposal. Design, which was at one time concerned with commodity fabrication, then with commodity image, then commodity function, has now extended its concerns; it strives to plan all these within a balanced system of production and consumption. Ideally speaking, this should help in some measure to bridge the alienation of the producer and the consumer that comes with the industrial system. But unless it remodels the system itself, this may be hard to achieve. So a creative designer today seeks to be creative not only in making an aesthetic or functional object but also in devising conceptual changes. A number of young designers are concerned with basic human problems and whether or not they will be able to tackle them in their professional lives. In an age of giganticism, some of them subscribe to the idea of ‘small is beautiful’ and give a lot of time to devise graded technologies. Others give serious attention to ecological problems that result from an unthinking race towards economic progress in certain parts of the world and advise a more careful and circumspect planning of their rate of development.

The next major sector in the new spectrum is that of communication arts. Arts were used as a means of communication from their early days, whether they were the mimes and spectacles of the agricultural societies or the murals, scrolls and illuminations on religious and secular themes of the later eras. Impressive as some of these modes of communication were, the massive deployment of designed communication is a recent phenomenon and, even if some of it may be found wanting in subtlety and refinement, its variety and resourcefulness are also striking. This has grown by leaps and bounds in the last two centuries and its purposes range from simple visual attraction to elaborate brainwashing, and its devices from the grossly vulgar to the remarkably inventive. With the wide use of printed media and diverse audiovisual genres, its techniques are now larger and, with considerable research in the communicative efficacy of graphic presentation (whether to arrest one’s attention or convey a message), its methods are more calculated. Efforts have been made to gauge the emotional susceptibilities of people, their colour preferences, their ways of seeing, their vulnerabilities to visual stimuli – be it the luscious ‘cheese-cake’ or the well-fed animal or a mug of frothy beer or a droll caricature or gooey comic strip – and the drama created by combinations of image and copy calls for enormous ingenuity and talent. Although advertising arts are looked down upon, and with justification as a large sector of it serves gross commercial interests in none-too-elevating ways, their techniques are open to creative use in the service of sounder objectives. Similarly, inventive graphics can add power and attraction to serious books and educational literature.

Equally prominent in today’s communication arts are film and television. The communicative efficacy of the motion picture is well known; it commands one’s pointed attention, the lighted image gaining in the darkness a quality of possession. On one side, it presents a mirror-image of reality investing it with moving authenticity and on another, a real event with more drama by doctoring the depth, range, proximity and clarity of the images and editing their rhythm and sequence. It also has the capacity to romanticize, even distort, reality with more persuasiveness than other media. And, on top of all this, it has a larger reach. So it is no matter for wonder that governments want to control these media and that they are much sought after by the political leader and the commercial magnate alike for reaching, informing or bamboozling the public. Many creative minds too have woken up to its challenges. And for solid reasons – these media, which can be utilized for misinforming or miseducating a public and undermining their sense of values, can also be used for informing and educating them, refining their sensibilities and strengthening their judgements. They can buttress the vested interests but they can also play an ethical and interventionist role. Filmmaking and designing for film has therefore become an important part of the artist’s perspectives today.

The perspectives of the ‘creative’ artist are coloured by the various questions the new circumstances have given rise to. Some of their characteristics are global. The concept of the ‘individual’ artist, who makes a personal statement based on a personal experience, is ubiquitous. As also, the notion that an artist works compulsively urged by an irrepressible desire for expression or that art is a lifelong commitment to the artist, engrossing him in his waking and sleeping hours. So, when an artist is referred to as a professional today, he is so referred, in the light of this, as a full-time practitioner and not as a person who serves an external demand or purpose. For this reason, artists can be heard to speak of their desire to divest themselves of the bondage of skills and predispositions (as illustrated by the famous and oft-quoted statement of Picasso, that while at 15 he could draw like Raphael, at 50 he wanted to draw like a child); they want to steer clear of such skills as impair direct and unimpeded statement.

Another characteristic that is ubiquitous is the loss of stress on optical resemblance or verisimilitude in a work, except as one of the valid alternatives. That such a stress was there a century ago, and that even in times when close verisimilitude was not a necessary feature of prevalent art practice, the vitality of the image was explained in its terms, are well-known facts. For instance, Appelles’ bunch of grapes were supposed to have deceived a bird. Wu Tao Tsu’s Buddha was supposed to have walked away and left a hole in the wall. Manasara referred to the virtuosity of the medieval artists (of western India) by saying that they could paint a peacock feather in an eye-deceiving way. We know full well that such deception or trompe l’oeil was not a characteristic of the art modes of those times. In any case, optical realism is not talked too much of today. A recent book on the physiology of the senses says while discussing human vision, ‘Experiments have acquainted us with a paradoxical fact: man can see “correctly” only because of his imagination. The human eye, optically speaking, is a peace of bad workmanship.’ Though there are still many unknowns in our knowledge of the sense of vision, we know enough to say that we see reality through the collaboration of the eye and the imagination and what we see is a variable equivalent. While this knocks down the cocksureness of the academic realist, it also explains the presence of a whole range of such equivalents on the world art scene, as have only remote references to the normally seen image but still have what one may call the life-content. Since the Oriental artist was never taken up greatly with the realistic image, this does not make much difference to him. But it does to the Western artist, steeped in the realist concept for over four centuries; so he assiduously tests its authenticity and uses the new freedom with a sort of recklessness, which should explain to some extent the great somersaults in his post-realist explorations.

Another important if not ubiquitous feature is the questioning of the existing art situation. Is it healthy to divide functional arts from the arts of expression and drive one into the marketplace and the other up the ivory tower? Does not this bifurcation lead to a weakening of either and a distortion of values? As early as 1910, a group of artists and designers (of the Bauhaus) in Germany tried to bring art and design together ‘into one house’. Although it did not quite succeed in the way they wanted it to and broke up due to various reasons, its experiments made a great difference to both the scenes. This effort is made over and over. Artists are today learning craft expertise and, in various parts of the world, there is a new tribe of artist-craftsmen working outside the mainstream of the art trade. Some artists have been campaigning against the constrictions of the art trade, taking recourse to demonstrations to highlight the question and criticize the sponsored elitism of the art supported by the museums and galleries. These again are larger problems on the Western scene. In a country like ours, where there is a large sector of pre-industrial arts and crafts (and an artist can, if he wants to, learn from and collaborate with it), the circumstances are slightly different. Also, the art trade is in its infancy in our country. So these questions do not seem so acute and the postures are less dramatic. But it is also true that a large number of our modern practitioners are not even alive to these questions, though in Santiniketan, Nandalal Bose and his associates were, at one time, and did try their best to relate the divided spectra to the extent they could.

A second part of this question is whether it is healthy to cultivate art in a purely aesthetic preserve, whether it should not step down from its exclusiveness. Various efforts to conciliate extreme positions relating to form and content, personal expression and social commitment have been afoot but solutions on a wide scale are not easy in a society with fragmented activity sectors. Things will be easier only if one can effect a change in the circumstances themselves. It is no wonder therefore that our new perspectives in art sometimes lead us to horizons a little outside its pale.

Prof. K.G. Subramanyan

A Study Circle lecture, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, 1981.