Curator: Shubhankar Chakraborty
Group: Shramona Maiti and Shriraj Sagara
Topic: Materiality -its framework and practice.
Idea: Taking Baroda as a case study and about interest in conceptual art.Tracing about the pedagogy; Artist who was aware where the material is not just a medium; brought to the contemporary artist.Talked about an artist like Valsan Kolleri, Vivan Sundaram, and Anita Dubey; also searched artist from Exhibition like Matter Vision and Maya.
Process:
At the Initial stage of research, they looked into the definitions of 'Conceptual art ', which led to the discussion of two contrasting opinions posted by a pair of celebrated 20th-century conceptual artists, Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth. While the former maintained that artworks should engage the mind of the viewers and not just their eye, the latter expressed his concerns about the necessity of authorship on a work of art as 'the public is not interested anyway' in engaging conceptually with works of art. Thus, in the latter case, metaphors inherent in works of art is purely at the artist's behest.
As they were looking into the semiotics of material, they decided to take this juncture into their area of the query, to further problematize the understanding the significance of the material.
Alternatively, they looked into neo-Kantian theoretical positions and after a lot of discussions, they found themselves questioning the ethics, or its lack, in the art world.
They chose a particular case, that of Anita Dube's 'Bloody Wedding' where the fact that the show was made to travel internationally gave rise to an issue- if the bones that the artist presented in her work were bearers of meaning, does the artwork remain the same if they were to be simulated in a convenient medium due to obvious constraints of international shipping?
They have been taking interviews of various artists.
The stage of interviews
When the aspect of ethics was called into play, they saw it fit to conduct a survey among our peers and professors to get a wide-ranging idea on this subject so as to not be short-sighted by observing the opinions of just the two of them.
A set of questions were established which would help extract the opinions of our interviewees on this subjective area of ethics. To sum up, they centered upon
- the extent of material as a metaphor
- the persistence authorial intent
- and, if ethical judgments were to be impaired on the nature of art today.
Mind-Mapping:
Based on the response they received, they decided to map them down to see how the various opinions they collected branched out.
The final stage of Mapping:
In the previous stages, they had their research concerned with simplifying the various opinions they had gathered during their interviews, with ardent expectations of them falling in place with the theoretical frameworks, as informed by their parallel mapping of academic theories.
However, upon frequenting the same alleys leading to their resultant structure, or the lack of, for it did not take any semblance of their expected model, their realization was two-fold: at some point, they ha fallen prey to the folly of interchanging these sourced opinions as fundamental dictums; and, as a consequence of the former, they had completely, and utterly, sidelined the importance of a practical temperament that would have otherwise balanced what had come to be an overarching theoretical fervour.
Thus, narrowing down to pivotal arguments, they branched out successive concerns and juxtaposed them with a Marxist model, taking into a consideration for the first time the factors involved in the modes of production.
Things such as the choice of material, whether simulated or not, came to be better understood in presence of the artist's economic background, or could even be stretched to one's education profile, since the access to knowledge is as guarded a commodity as the access to those granted by wealth, or any other privileged front.
Further, the issue of taste seemed to find linkage very directly,
or in a passive manner, with almost every branching area. Although this criterion could be thought of as a given, it sheds light to what extent factors such as the patron, sourced labor, conceptions of material, much like the rest of the map are linked to each other.
They also have made rough mind maps for the following:
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