When Does Infrastructure “Qualify for [Artistic] Attention”? The “ABCs” of Contemporary Art in Post-Liberalization India

Abstract

The period between “liberalization,” or the 1991 opening of India's economy to foreign direct investment, and the 2008 onset of the Great Recession was one of unprecedented change in the forms of Indian art and the infrastructures that supported its understanding, presentation, and circulation. This period of efflorescence—of multiplying growth in and transformation of a set of interlocking artistic and social forms—poses methodological challenges similar to those identified by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers in their 1995 volume, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Marcus and Myers’ call to focus on appropriation, boundary-making, and circulation, though meant to submit the Western art world to critique, coincides quite clearly with three particularly salient changes seen in Indian contemporary art in the period: the turn to unconventional material as artistic media (appropriation); the deliberate integration of artistic work with the materialities of everyday life (boundary); and the development of entirely new curatorial infrastructures and frameworks (circulation). The present essay examines these changes through Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf's post-1996, ongoing collaborative work with adivasi (indigenous) artists in the Central Indian region of Bastar. Eventually registered as the NGO Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), the collective's activities have ranged from parallel exhibitions of “art” and “craft” to site-specific, cross-disciplinary engagements with play structures (Pilla Gudi) and water taps (Nalpar) built upon collective practices meant to bridge the considerable social distance between urban upper-class and adivasi artists. DIAA's work with water, like other artistic engagements with infrastructure, highlights the social, aesthetic, material, and political aspects of the built networks that sustain everyday life. Their critique leveraged Marcus and Myers’ ABCs, incorporating critical acts of appropriation, the active violation of social and geographical boundaries, and, above all, demonstration of a concern with circulation.