Many insightful reflections from history and philosophy of art could be stitched together to engender an anxious train of thinking not only about art as a process and cultural product but also about its relevance in reading society and politics. Among numerous articulations on the commonsense of art, we often hear that there cannot be a formulaic vantage point to judge art, that art is essentially about a mode of experiential expression or an expression of blissful imagination and therefore is embedded in a field of subjectivism. Within this popular commonsense, a sociologist might deem these relationships and conditions too messy to decipher in a way that would make sociological sense. Such a pronounced absence of art in sociology and anthropology and anxieties about artâs reliability in reading society and its politics are the foundation of this book.
At times, oscillating between the sublime and the ridiculous, the bones of dead and living ideologies and utopias begin to fall from studio cupboards; regimes of exhibitionism and commerce of culture too join in the list, and the tales of art and art practices, become more telling than one can anticipate. And in this wake, it becomes self-evident how some social science disciplines have successfully and adamantly remained distant from intellectually engaging with art in general and contemporary art in particular. Sociology, social anthropology, political science, international relations, and history stand testimony to this situation globally, barring a handful of exceptions. In this scheme of things, monopolizing disciplinary interest in contemporary art has become the preserve of art history and curatorial practices. As a result of this discursive void, art, and the politics, it generates stand in the gulf between class and mass, art and craft, studio and gallery, street and art fare. And in that gulf, what art can say and what art becomes in social and political terms beyond their aesthetics have become inaudible. It is in this kind of void that the anxious but simple questions posed on art and politics by Das provide an initial signpost towards what direction we should travel in our own thoughts. He wonders, âwhen we wedge ourselves between politics and aesthetics, bravely imaging that we have an enabling concept in such an art, what indeed do we want art to achieve?â (Das 2010: 11). Indeed, does art end with a sense of aesthetic and satisfaction and commercial success? Or, should it travel to the realms of cultural production and discursive practices such as sociology? Or, as Das further wonders, âif politics is about constraining the choices of others, what is art?â (Ibid.: 11). Indeed, art can be stifling too. But it is also enabling in reading society if one is adequately perceptive to work out how and when to situate contemporary art in reading the politics of contemporary social processes. It is in such a context of engagement with art and politics that Turner and Webb have attempted to make a case for artâs implication in discourses of human rights (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). Their argument is, whether artists opt to directly engage with evolving political crises or maintain a distance from such turmoil, they remain a part of a cultural system, âand in presenting a particular set of images and attitudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived worldâ in which they are a part (Turner and Webb 2016: 15).
Contemporary art of the kind we focus on in this book needs to be understood as fundamentally a secular discourse (Zitzewitz 2014: 15). But within discourse, the complexity of artistsâ practice acquires different meanings in their dealings with various artistic, religious, and political subjectivities which in turn are also linked to their individual social identities as well as historical experiences (Zitzewitz 2014: 15).
Seen in this sense, art can open up discursive possibilities beyond the delimiting aesthetics and commerce of art, which are of interest to us. Paradoxically, it is in the art world that a perpetual mutuality of class and mass unfolds in spite of curatorial politics of inclusion and exclusion. Then, why most dominant practices of social sciences shy away from the abundance of clues, data, narratives, hypotheses, and research questions that surface in the art world. This stands tall as an intriguing question worth dealing with. It is perhaps of the perceived ââimpurityâ of artâ or due to the âexcessesâ and or the possible âfalse movementâ of images that undervalue their truth and capacity to enhance experienceâ (Das 2010: 11). When we attempt to address this absence, we would mostly do so within our own disciplinary domains of sociology and social anthropology.
It is a somewhat baffling question why the extended domain of contemporary painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation has not become an area of consistent interest for those who formally practice social anthropology and sociology. This is particularly the case in South Asia even though the situation beyond the region is only marginally different.1 One may wonder whether the reason for this absence is due to methodological or theoretical limitations that are inherent in the dominant approaches of anthropology and sociology.2 But a self-reflective exploration would suggest that any methodological limitation is the result of the self-induced fear of the visual rather than any inherent limitations as such in either sociology or social anthropology.3 With anthropology, the problem historically has been its evolution into what Margaret Mead has called a âdisciplineâ or âscience of wordsâ (Mead 1995: 3, 5). Even though her ideas were mostly articulated in the context of film, what she outlines in her essay, âVisual Anthropology in a Discipline of Wordsâ (1995) resonates with the broader context of visualityâs location in anthropology as well. Her critique had to do with what she perceived as the disciplineâs resistance to visual approaches because it clung âto verbal descriptions when so many better ways of recording aspects of culture have become availableâ (Mead 1995: 5). The obvious limitation in Meadâs argument is that she saw visuality, and in her case photography and film, merely in a simple utilitarian manner as technical devices for data gathering, instead of seeing visuality as a possible central focus of research or a broader kind of discourse. Banks notes, though âsocial researchers encounter images constantlyâ, it is not an exaggeration that in social sciences in general and sociology and anthropology in particular, âthere is no room for pictures, except as supporting charactersâ (Banks 2001: 1â2). In other words, images have become mere decorative icons or at best supportive secondary signs to what the written text alludes to. This emanates from the reality that visuality, as a matter of method, research, or discourse, has not been contemplated seriously enough in sociology and anthropology.
What Mead and Banks have noted with regard to anthropologyâs dealings with visuality reflects similarly upon sociology as well though sociologyâs encounter with visuality is far more marginal. Anthropology at least had a longer encounter with imagery from the colonial period onwards, particularly with regard to film and photography and the disciplineâs interest in âprimitiveâ forms of art in the larger scheme of ethnography. This kind of affinity with imagery or art is much less pronounced when it comes to sociology. Schnettler, writing with particular reference to sociologyâs encounter with photography, notes that the discipline did not clearly âdevelop an intimate relationship with photographyâ (Schnettler 2013: 42). In the same sense, sociologyâs relationship with other forms of visuality more generally is also less pronounced compared to earlier phases of social anthropology. It is in this kind of context that any interests in the visual in both sociology and social anthropology have been expelled to the sub-disciplinary domains of visual anthropology and visual sociology. In effect, this expulsion and voluntary exile on the part of those interested in visuality within the two disciplines have kept the mainstreams of both sociology and anthropology âcleansedâ of possible pollutants from the âsubjectivitiesâ visuality might have engendered in the course of research.
It is in this kind of context, we learn from informal accounts of sociologists and anthropologists in the region about the dismissive gatekeepers ridiculing research proposals on thematic issues on art, cultural politics, performance, folklore, literature, and so on based on the somewhat liminal, reductionist, and unimaginative argument that these are not adequately âsociologicalâ or âanthropologicalâ. Particularly in the conventional academic landscape in South Asia, how many young sociologists and social anthropologists are encouraged to undertake research on cultural expressions, art practices, regimes of visuals, and visuality? In general experience, in the biographies of scholars, there comes a moment of realization of a clear existence of a not-so-discrete hierarchy of research areas and interests and resultant modes of scholarship in the mainstream of anthropology and sociology. Political sociology and studies on social stratification, issues of caste, class, ethnicity, violence, and gender, or for that matter other thematic areas popularized by national-international funding agencies that vary from conflict resolution to conflict transformation, ride roughshod over other areas such as culture in general and visual arts in particular despite a longstanding argument in social sciences on the integral relation of culture and politics.
This predetermined and ill-debated understanding of what sociology and social anthropology ought to be has negatively impacted numerous possibilities for intellectual development in these disciplines in South Asia.4 That is, this inherent intellectual conservatism of the disciplines has stunted many potentially creative avenues of research. It is in this context we can understand why a more robust and a theoretically nuanced sociology of contemporary art and visual culture has not yet emerged in any degree of seriousness within contemporary sociology. And this state of affairs supports the seeming fear of the visual, coupled with a methodological uncertaintyâon how to deal with the uncertainty or seeming instability of the visual and visuality in the relatively certainty-obsessed sociology and social anthropology. This is unfortunate since there has also been a realization through heated debates that sociology as well as anthropology entails poetics, particularly in the ways ethnography is crafted. In fact, as the âwriting cultureâ debate in the 1980s and its aftermath ha...