It may have gone unnoticed and unremarked within politics and policy circles, but Pakistan is out again, renewed and replenished in odd ways that speak to a disjointed narrative about contemporary art and literature. Consider the new edition of Granta out in newsstands and haute stores that peddle in that version of mature sensibilities that you and I might want others to perceive of us. It is a piece, that announces–without needing to–a new generation of creative and searching artists, full-on with excellent writing, reportage and artworks, specifically about the land of the pure and her environs. (Look for my review of Granta in under a week’s time.)
Meanwhile, Ali Sethi’s recent op-ed in the New York Times has helped redirect public energy away from a facile narrative about government incompetence toward active collusion between land-owners and the government to destroy selected assets and property against other, more privileged titles of ownership.
Shahzia Sikander, the Pakistani born American artist gets written up in all the top art journalism and art-criticism rags. Originally a proponent and propagator of miniature paintings, its history and its idioms in post-historical vernacular she has turned toward narrative art that explores the conflicted and authoritarian rituals of the body and of the sexes in South Asia. Newsweek recently wrote up a compelling piece about female artists in Pakistan. Among other young artists like Aisha Khalid, Sikander,a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grantee got pride of place as a leading voice in Pakistani contemporary arts.
This new awakening of non-Western sensibilities in contemporary art is a welcome detour away from New York City and London. This raises two related questions however: Firstly what is the point of the move when many “southern’ artists are more likely to show in New York and London than in Karachi, Ahmedabad, Dhaka and on and on. Secondly, (and more importantly) how can one disassociate the hunger for Western intellectuals to move away from the short, curt, immediate stories of well-known life toward a more expansive (cotton, rag) canvas from the implicit discourse of noble savagery that now seems to have replicated just those idioms that enabled Parisian artists to break out of their own war-riddled, ennui settled mold. Consider the English author, David Mitchell’s recent reflective fable of Meiji Japan. Consider the wild response in New York to the collection of works by the Chilean born perpetual outsider Roberto Bolano. Consider, the more insidious stories we could tell of the reception and criticism of the British painter of Nigerian descent, Chris Ofili, stood pat against the work of his younger American contemporary Kehinde Wiley.
These are important issues that do not have institutionally derived political answers. Nor are they necessarily socially given–as answers, or for that matter, questions. They are, of course, constructs of criticism and explication; but they hinge on the contemporary experience of men and women the world over. In that sense, they are political (and in some later period, historical) questions, through and through. Now, more than ever they deserve the notice and the response of young, American, British, Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi artists. In short, these questions deserve the time and the space to be answered by anyone interested in the contemporary world.
