Tracking the Indian diaspora - various artists of South Asian origin, Queens Museum, New York, New York

A novel exhibition at the Queens Museum focused upon contemporary South Asian art, abundant of it installation work created through emigre artists.

When the art market was booming in the yen-drunk 1980 it have the appearanceed to have an appetite big enough for everything--even things that it couldn't quite identify. The jiffy for multiculturalism had apparently dawned. on the contrary in less than a decade the yen has fallen, the market has dried up and the multicultural drift appears to be petering on the outside After the Pompidou Center's pivotal 1989 exhibition "Magiciens de la terre" Cheri Samba's paintings were briefly everywhere; do you recall seeing individual lately? Once the market crashed, the brief crack of "Magiciens"-inspired tokenism abated. Western markets go [i]or[/i] come backed to protecting their own.

Still, the fact remains that many of the greatest in quantity interesting developments in contemporary art are happening outside of western Europe and the United States, in what would be regarded through traditional modernist criteria as not upon the beaten track. In Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, composed of several elements and subtle installation art characterizes energetic and spirited art displays On the periphery of western Europe in Estonia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia and other nations one time part of the socialist East, neoconceptual plastic art and photography, video installation and performance art are thriving. In Senegal, Zaire, the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, contemporary styles of painting and sculpture vigorously engage the couple the esthetic and the social. Cuba, Colombia and Venezuela have lately emerg at the forefront of Latin American art. In these and other artistic center in the previously colonized world influence from the West is felt on the other hand not slavishly pursued; art works involve bidirectionality, addressing the cultural foundations of the artist and his or her audience at domicile while simultaneously engaging the international community end global issues.

In novel York, unfortunately, evidence of this global leaven in the visual arts too rarely passes our way, and almost not at any time in major institutions such as the Museum of recent Art and the Guggenheim. in the way that far, it's mostly been left to smaller museums to fill in the gaps. Last year, for instance, the Asia Society not awayed "Traditions/Tensions," an important exhibition of contemporary art from five Asian nations curated through Apinian Poshyananda [see A.i.A., Feb '97] Another, more new such exhibition was the Queen Museum's "Out of India: Contemporary Art of the southerly Asian Diaspora." Curated by the museum's director of exhibitions, Jane Farver, it brought together work through 26 artists of South Asian origin. The present to view included artists who live in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (the nations created in the wake of Indian independence) as well as others who live and work abroad. Interestingly, level the emigrant artists make work which tend hitherwards largely from India culturally--theirs is a diaspora community which still acutely perceive s cultural ties with the motherland.

"Out of India" was a in fact exciting and beautiful exhibition which any fresh York art-lover would have felt honored to diocese While one must congratulate the Queen Museum for mounting the present to view it's also necessary to ask wherefore 15 years after "`Primitivism'" and its discontents and 20 years after Edward Said's critique of "orientalist" attitudes, novel York's bigger and better-known museums remain with equal reason hesitant to open their doors to contemporary art of non-Western nations. It's not enough to high hill shows of historic, traditional art, as the Guggenheim has lately done with its China blockbuster. If we don't more full engage the contemporary art of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we risk waking up individual of these days to find that the art history of our time was happening elsewhere and we failed to notice.

Indian art since 1947 (the year of independence from England) have the appearances to fall into three stages. The generation of the Progressives, painters of that kind as Syed Haider Raza and Maqbool Fida Husain, who were emerging and maturing in the 1940 has now become classical and was not showed in "Out of India," which focused upon contemporary art. From the nearest great generation, mostly born in the 1940 and until true recently dominating Western shows of generally received Indian art, only two artists were included, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram. Instead, the exhibition concentrated upon the third phase, a younger generation of artists who have not long ago become prominent, most of them born in the 1950 and '60s

As in "Traditions/Tensions," a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the work in "Out of India" is installation art, a genre which, in the last decade, has become an intercultural visual language of historic importance. Installation art is suited to this part because it does not unambiguously proclaim any particular cultural hegemony. A generation or sum of two units ago, gestural abstraction (primarily Abstract Expressionism) and its successor, Color Field painting, were globally available manner of writings disseminated chiefly from New York. Their claim to global relevance was based upon the metaphysical universals that were held to inform and support the paintings. As numerous scholars have pointed without these styles were actively advanced during the cooled War period through a series of overseas exhibitions that were initiated through United States government agencies.(1) While this policy was primarily aimed at Europe it was secondarily directed toward Asia. In India it left an imprint upon the work of the Progressives.(2) Somewhat later, a certain influence of Color Field painting was felt in Neo-Tantric painting, the Indian abstract manner of writing named for its relationship to Hindu Tantric art of the 18th century(3)