January 21, 2008

DC: Subcontinental Drift 2008- January 28

Straight Outta Compton my inbox, an invitation to the first Subcontinental Drift of 2008. This event/collective is one of my favorite things about living in DC. Come find out why for yourself:

2007 sure brought some of the district’s talents out of the basement and into the spotlight. It was nothing less than inspiring to witness the expressive potential of our collective South Asian community.

Subcontinental Drift is excited to be back with the first open mic night of 2008 on Monday, January 28th at 7pm. Come bless us in this new year with your art, your thoughts, your ideas, your presence. The mic will be open from 7-9 pm (to sign up for a spot, shoot an email with your name and performance genre to subdriftdc@gmail.com). And stay for the after party with some chill beats and groovin’.

Where?

Bohemian Caverns, at the corner of 11th and U. We’ll be upstairs. www.bohemiancaverns.com

When?

Doors open at 6:30pm.

More info?

myspace.com/subcontinentaldrift or email subdriftdc@gmail.com

I never go out on Mondays or Tuesdays because those are my most challenging (read: no lunch) days at work, but I’m about to do some serious juggling in order to attend this— THAT’S how amazing Subcontinental Drift is. It is worth the stress and exhaustion. ;) If you are in DC, please come out so that you, too, can babble beatifically about all the awesomeness. And if you are not in DC, remember that it is a new year; resolve to start something similar where you are. Abhi did it fabulously in Houston, so can you. Everyone deserves to drift.

anna at 03:53 PM in Art, Arts and Entertainment, Events, Identity, Music, Theater · 11 comment(s) · Direct link

January 14, 2008

Portraying Monkeys Is Paramount in Preserving Our Culture?

Greetings Mutineers! I am Nayagan and I am guest-blogging here to fight the good fight for pittu, sodhi and the thosai which embraces us all in it’s fermented glory.

Listen up desi parents: Bina Menon, a classical dance teacher from West Orange NY, has the magical cure to all your ‘heritage preserving’ needs. Indeed, according to the New York Times, a turn in one of her stage productions (portraying an animal of the forest) will do wonders for lifting the Vestern pop-culture cloud which descended over your child’s eyes as soon as he/she exited the womb.

Yes, I know, the reporter attributed the sentiment to Menon’s students, but what exactly could these young ‘uns have known about a heritage which was supposedly out of their grasp? Could this deep knowledge be imparted by scratching one’s arm-pit repeatedly? Or perhaps by miming the grooming ritual so fancied by wild-life photographers? Whatever the standard, this reporter unwittingly added fuel to the “All Things Come From India” fire by attributing an honorific desis know all too well

dancing with Bina-Auntie

to the Hindi crowd:

employing a Hindi term of endearment all her fellow dancers used for Ms. Menon

Okay, to be charitable to the reporter, and without sounding the Lemurian call to arms, perhaps this was really all about the dance. The one student who went on record, seems to confirm this:

“My parents brought me into dance when I was 5, and at first I wasn’t that into it,” said Teena Ammakuzhiyil, a lithe 20-year-old from Union who will play the wise monkey in “Ramayanam,” a production that 25 senior-level dancers from Ms. Menon’s Kalashri School will present on Jan. 27 at the Mayo Center for the Performing Arts in Morristown. “But it brought me back to my roots, dancing with Bina-Auntie,”

But the ‘roots’ return and the question bears asking, now that she has ‘found’ her roots, what’s left? Branching out into choreography? Founding her very own dance school? Perhaps she had better think twice:

The Kalashri School employs no other teachers because, as Ms. Menon says: “I haven’t seen anyone who can teach as well as I can. And I really want my students to be good at what they’re doing.

A display of bravado (apparently all the other teachers toiling away at instructing recalcitrant students better hang ‘em up) tempered by weak equivocation—sounds like the ‘heritage’ is being taught by example. Turning aside from the arrogance, I wondered:

1. What exactly constitutes ‘respect’ for your heritage?

2. Can a clumsy portrayal of a monkey mean that you’re disrespectful of said heritage (given that your chosen medium of ‘respecting’ is dance)?

3. Why do we entrust such an apparently important task, this cultural education, to strangers?

4. Bharatanatyam is suffused with Hindu mythology and the pieces are often set to Hindu songs and bhajans—what is it like for non-Hindu desis to be told that Muruga and Hanuman constitute your ‘heritage’ and that the creatures portrayed in the Ramayana will show your child all that you wish to impart about this ‘heritage’ that any honest teacher could not easily define?

The article continues with a few references to platitudes we’re familiar with, “fosters community,” “it’s so much more than dance,” and “Indian Dance feels more comfortable than…” These are the buzz-words, the talking points that classical dance instructors often use to describe and justify what is usually just another extracurricular activity for application-filling, college-going, high-school students. What does it mean to you?

Nayagan at 06:25 PM in Art, Dance, Identity, Religion · 176 comment(s) · Direct link

June 28, 2007

Set Adrift on "SubcontineNtal Drift" in DC Tomorrow

I recently emailed five questions to Sophie, who is part of the force behind D.C.’s Subcontinental Drift.

Several Mutineers discussed SD’s last event at the most recent D.C. meetup— in fact, a few of you even performed at it! I get the feeling the rest of you would be VERY interested in what Sophie and her dynamic crew are trying to do— so I thought I’d post a wee reminder that your next chance to marinate in creative splendor is tomorrow night, June 29. But first, some essential information:

Subcontinental Drift is __?

…an effort to bring out the “basement talents of the District’s desis.” Basically, we’re trying to provide a creative space for people who are artistically-inclined (that’s a broad term and encompasses pretty much anyone from professional artists to people who like to watch other people read poetry) to connect with each other and share each other’s work.

What inspired it?

A few of us “D.C. desis” felt like there was a void in the South Asian community —in a place like D.C. where there are soooo many talented people, there wasn’t a cohesive group or space that was encouraging or nurturing that talent. The need was something that was floating around in the air, and we just grabbed it. Specifically though, the catalyst for me was when I was with Munish and Vikash at Bossa lounge in Adams Morgan and we watched Vishal Kanwar play tablas there. We’re like, wow, this is cool..let’s do more cool stuff. Something like that.

What’s the best thing about it?

The best thing is watching new artists get up in front of nearly 100 desis, and coming more and more into themselves. When you see people willing to get up there, be vulnerable, share a sacred part of themselves, and the audience is so warm and appreciative—it is the most beautiful thing.

What if someone wanted to get involved with it?

They should email us at subdriftdc@gmail.com .

What if a mutineer who isn’t lucky enough to live in D.C. wanted to emulate such awesomeness— any advice for them?

Get a few like-minded people together who are committed to the same thing you are, pick a venue, and go to the ends of the earth to SPREAD THE WORD about it. If your community doesn’t have a creative space for people, chances are people are hungry for it. As long as word spreads, people will come. And especially in the beginning, keep the vibe pretty informal and verryyy welcoming—human connection is the key!

I went to the last Subcontinental Drift and I’ll be at tomorrow’s, as well. The atmosphere that Sophie, Munish, Nina, Mona, Nabeel, Vishal and Surabhi create is extraordinary; upon being dragged to last month’s event, a friend of mine from out of town was actually envious of us DCists, because he thought the open mic/dance performances/live music/stand-up comedy/ridiculously good sangria made for one fantastic night. I agreed and immediately grew mindful of how lucky I was to live here, where creativity manifests like this. I’m telling you, the very air in that room pictured above felt charged, different, exhilarating. You should go, and see for yourself. :)

Subcontinental Drift

An open mic for and by South Asian Americans.

-experiments in words, sound or art
-music
-comedy
-spoken word

Friday, June 29, 2007
7:30pm-10pm
Cost: FREE and we have drinks and snacks!

La Casa Community Center
3166 Mt. Pleasant Street NW
3 blocks from the Columbia Heights metro stop.
(Green or Yellow Line)

anna at 05:30 PM in Art, Dance, Events, Identity, Music, Profiles, Theater · 14 comment(s) · Direct link

June 27, 2007

PostSecret isn't always tragic.

Ever vigilant mutineer and desi in NJ Shlok alerted us to a second browning of Post Secret:

The first postcard SM covered was passionately discussed here.

anna at 05:50 PM in Art, Short · 4 comment(s) · Direct link

May 30, 2007

It wasn't me

Paranoia or Art? Bangladeshi American Hasan Elahi has decided to pre-emptively prove to the FBI (or any other shady wire-tapping federal agencies) that he is not, cannot possibly be, has never been, a terrorist. In order to do so he is doing the FBI’s job for them (quite convincingly):

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. [Link]

Ok, I’ll be honest. The first thing I thought of was whether or not this project is helping Elahi’s love life. I mean, I could just imagine some girl coming up to him and saying, “Wow, isn’t it funny how we just keep running in to each other like this? Must be fate!” (Abhi curses himself for not thinking of this first). Elahi’s logic for starting the project is flawless:

The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho… [Link]

In somewhat related news, Google Maps today unveiled a new feature called “Street View:”

This morning Google gave their 2D maps an incredible realworld addition. Its a street-view, that in certain cities, will let you get a street side view of the area you are currently in. This is not just a static, A9-style image. It will also let you move along the street in a smooth manner and even more amazing it will let you change your angle and continue moving that way. This will be formally launched at Where 2.0 later today. [Link]

I’ve been playing with it all day to see if I can figure out what that one cute chick is doing (and to make sure she isn’t a terrorist). However, I guess some oversensitive people are a bit, ummm, perturbed by the feature:

The new Google Maps zoom feature zooms all the way into my living room window. See cat on cat perch.

I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I’m going to look into whether it’s possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. [Link]

I’ve been telling Ennis for a while now that we need to get curtains for our North Dakota blogging headquarters. I wonder if India is going to flip over this too?

abhi at 10:49 PM in Art, News, Photos · 15 comment(s) · Direct link

May 08, 2007

Small hands are cute

It has been a while since we’ve received any Badmash in our inboxes. That’s because the Badmash crew has gone on a semi-permanent hiatus (as each of them moves on to other endeavours). Two Sundays ago anyone watching King of the Hill may have noticed that the lead writing credit for the episode went to former Badmash-er Sanjay Shah. The plot involved Hank Hill as the protagonist hooligan in a Grand Theft Auto-style shoot-em-up game called Pro Pain. Only fans of the show (living in Texas this is required viewing) will get why the title of the video game is so funny.

Badmash, however, isn’t the only example of a periodic desi comic strip. Readers of India Currents might also be familiar with a strip titled Small Hands, inked by Bay Area artist Nidhi Chanani. Here is an example of her cute strip:

Nidhi also has some artwork on her website in the same style as the strip. I wonder if the women from Kahani grab her up soon for help on their publication? Seems like she’d be a perfect fit.

Check out her stuff and let me know if there are other emerging comic strips we should be keeping an eye on.

abhi at 11:06 PM in Art, Comics, TV · 14 comment(s) · Direct link

May 05, 2007

Taking "Looting" to A Whole New Level: Vaman Ghiya

There’s the makings of a nice suspense novel in a recent New Yorker piece on one of India’s greatest — and most evil — contemporary antiquities smugglers, Vaman Narayan Ghiya. Ghiya operated a transnational smuggling network out of Jaipur, which included three Swiss shell companies that bought and sold smuggled vast quantities of Indian antiquities, ultimately so the priceless works could be acquired by London auction houses — and “legally” sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Ghiya, who was extremely cautious in his business operations, was brought down by a dedicated police officer, Anand Shrivastava, who essentially dedicated years to learning about the workings of the international antiquities market in order to better understand the criminal side of it. Almost miraculously, Ghiya wasn’t able to bribe his way out of prison, nor was bail allowed in his case — and his case is currently in process. Just to give you a sense of scale, here’s what the police found when they raided Ghiya’s house and his various warehouses:

Then Superintendent Shrivastava and his men searched the house, spending hours rummaging through the elegant rooms. Behind the wood panelling of Ghiya’s private study, the officers discovered a set of secret cupboards, which held hundreds of photographs of ancient Indian sculptures: graceful stone figures of the deities Vishnu, Shiva, and Parvati and Parvati’s elephant-headed son, Ganesha; Jain Tirthankaras and Chola bronzes; dancing goddesses with many arms and melon breasts, festooned with delicately rendered ornaments. The photographs were color snapshots, and the objects pictured sat outdoors, in patches of grass or mud. Many evidently had been roughly pried away from temple walls and were missing limbs or heads. The police also discovered sixty-eight glossy auction catalogues from Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London and New York.

This stash seemed to confirm Shrivastava’s suspicion that Vaman Ghiya operated one of the most extensive and sophisticated clandestine antiquities rings in history, and that he had grown rich in the past three decades by smuggling thousands of Indian antiques to auction houses and private collectors in the West. The police found no sculptures in Ghiya’s home. But, in the days that followed, Shrivastava’s men raided half a dozen properties that Ghiya owned around Jaipur, his farm outside the city, and various godowns, or storage facilities, in Mathura and Delhi. They discovered antique paintings, swords and shields, marble panels, stone pillars, three hundred and forty-eight pieces of sculpture, and a dismantled Mogul pavilion the size of a small house. (link)

Ghiya was able to operate for so long partly because he had a legitimate crafts shop as a front in Jaipur. Ghiya was also helped by India’s notoriously “flexible” customs system:

Ghiya’s handicrafts business had many hallmarks of a front. India’s Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, passed in 1972, is a particularly stringent measure, which requires that any privately owned work of art that is more than a hundred years old be registered with the government. Since it is generally illegal to export such objects, to be an antique dealer in India with an international clientele is also arguably to be a criminal. But Indian customs officers are required to check only ten per cent of any large shipment of exports, and smugglers frequently bury a single priceless statue in a giant case of bric-a-brac. (link)

Alongside Customs, Ghiya’s business was facilitated by India’s underfunded Archeological agency, the Archeological Survey of India — which has never even fully indexed all of India’s major archeological treasures, much less employed staff to protect and maintain them. Ghiya also had an ingenious system, where he would commission the production of fakes of particularly important works he stole, and have the ASI officially certify that the fakes were in fact fake. He would then attach the “This is not an original” slip to the original he had stolen, so there wouldn’t be a problem at Customs.

Of course, part of why Ghiya’s crimes are particularly troubling is the fact that many of the stolen religious sculptures were in fact still being actively worshipped:

For religious Hindus, images of the gods are not merely representational; they can be inhabited by the deity they depict. The faithful anoint the statues with oils, camphor, and sandalwood, garland them with flowers, and make offerings of food, incense, and music. (The word “idol,” though largely abandoned by Western academics because of its perceived pejorative connotation, remains in use in India to describe these objects.) When, in 1986, the Indian government sued for the return of a twelfth-century bronze Shiva that had been looted from a village in Pathur, it did so on behalf of the offended god himself: Shiva was named as a plaintiff in the case. “In the south, people still don’t tell lies in Shiva’s temple,” Ashok Shekhar, a former state arts and culture official in Rajasthan, told me. “These are very hotheaded deities.”

This aspect of Hinduism seems not to have bothered Ghiya, who was more concerned about how much his western buyers were willing to pay than whether his actions constituted desecration on an extaordinary scale.

Of course, Ghiya is not the first to pillage India’s treasures — this goes back to the British Raj (and perhaps before; but let’s not get into Vijayanagar again…). But this is fresh pillaging, and in some ways worse: what’s striking is that western buyers, which includes museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British Museum, as well as smaller museums (the Cleveland Museum) continued to buy “newly discovered” antiquities from India even after it was made perfectly clear that the export of such antiquities was forbidden by modern Indian law. Are any of these museums planning to return the stolen antiquities now that Ghiya has been arrested and his network exposed?

Sotheby’s London at least has been deeply affected by Ghiya’s arrest. Ghiya’s contact at Sotheby’s was a dealer named Peter Watson, who was forced to resign once it became clear that he had been extensively engaged in acquiring smuggled goods from Ghiya. Eventually, it spread: Sotheby’s entire antiquities wing in London was forced to shut down.

The law itself might be part of the problem. Japan, which has also had its share of looting and pillaging, has what might be a better system:

The antiquities law has many critics. “The law as it stands doesn’t benefit anybody,” said the scholar and curator Pratapaditya Pal, who came to the United States in the mid-nineteen-sixties and built several renowned collections, including Norton Simon’s. The law is self-defeating, Pal believes, because it makes no distinction between a masterpiece and any generic antique. The result is a black market that the government lacks the resources to control. Pal prefers the model adopted by Japan, which identifies art works of national significance and keeps them in the country, while allowing everything else to be sold on the open market.

Yes — taxes could be extracted on the sale of works deemed not of national significance, and those taxes could be directly channeled to the ASI, which would then be better able to protect and maintain the artifacts that are of national significance.

And there are many other issues raised by this article, which I unfortunately don’t have time to get into at present. I would strongly recommend readers to check out Patrick Radden Keefe’s whole article — journalism like this pretty much justifies my New Yorker subscription.

amardeep at 10:42 AM in Art · 20 comment(s) · Direct link

April 05, 2007

Interpreting Indian restaurant art

Earlier today Boing Boing blogger David Pescovitz wondered out loud about this picture he saw hanging on the wall of an Indian restaurant:

My friend Mike Love and I saw this print hanging on the wall of an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto. The composition makes it look like that woman is about to smash the guy’s head with a sledgehammer. [Link]

I thought SM readers could have a little fun with this. The person who provides the best back-story or conversation interpreting this picture wins!

abhi at 12:15 AM in Art, Humor · 97 comment(s) · Direct link

March 20, 2007

Bring Me the Head of Nina the Infidel!

So, towards the end of my essay on acceptance, a commenter thoughtfully asked me to clarify what I meant by mentioning the fact that Nina Paley had lived in Kerala more recently than I had even visited it. Here’s what I said, which prompted her inquiry:

Nina has been to Kerala far more recently than I have; my last visit was back in the dark ages of 1989. In fact, she lived there, which is something I’ll probably never be able to claim. Who the hell am I or anyone else for that matter, to pull rank over that?

Did Nina’s stay in my parents’ home state give her carte blanche? No, of course it doesn’t. When I said that I wasn’t going to “pull rank”, I meant that I was going to acknowledge that others, even white others, might be more familiar with what everyone expects me to be an expert on, and because of that, I especially loathe the idea of playing the race card, i.e. I am desi, therefore I know more about (and/or get to restrict the unbrown from) my culture. If you read my post, you’ll know that I have a very intimate and poignant reason for why the part I italicized resonates with me.

I appreciate that Nagasai and Amitabh both opened a respectful dialogue about how they feel about Nina’s art but I also am known to be a fan of keeping threads on-topic, so I thought I’d spin this discussion off in to its own separate post, because the issues at play here are fascinating and significant.

What does Nina’s artwork mean to you?

What role does race play in all of this— how many of us would have the same issues we do if her name were Nina Patel vs. Nina Paley?

And how far do these “rules” go? Do some of you have a problem with the fact that I’m writing this post (i.e. that I’m a Christian, commenting on the appropriateness of Hindu imagery in art)? Inquiring and potentially bored mutineers want to know!

Before we get started, there are two things I would like to disclose:

It seems that many of you know each other and Nina in real life, and the natural instinct is to be emotional and defensive of your friends

1) I do know Nina in real life. She has near-perfect attendance at NYC meetups and I have been able to befriend her because of it. Having typed that, I am not writing from a place where I am emotional and defensive about my friend; rather, I am supportive of a mutinous community member whom I have met and whom I would vouch for in terms of intention and integrity. This isn’t seventh grade and I’m not a mean girl circling the wagons ‘round my BFF. This is a very special place and I think the fact that many of us have stretched online relationships formed here offline is a huge part of why that’s the case.

{Incidentally, this is also why I think meetups are more than mere frivolity; when you look someone in the eye, learn their “real” name and hear them laugh while trying some luscious ma ki dal with them, all of that contributes to a fuller, richer sense of whom that person is. This isn’t sorority rush either— I have never met a commenter I didn’t like. I’m always awed and touched when people make the effort to come hang out with us. So please do so, in the future. Not just because it adds to your “Mut-cred” in terms of how future comments from you will be interpreted, but because it’s always fun. :)}

2) Because so many of us are at work, I painted a very shabby halter bikini top on Nina’s cartoon, to de-NSFW it. That rack was driving me to distraction. ;) Forgive me, Miss Paley? The unmolested version of the image is here, for your consideration:

The comment thread on Nina’s own blog where people (mutineers included) initially discussed this image is here.

What I found most interesting was how though the symbolism in her drawing definitely evoked Kali, she never explicitly stated that she was depicting this very beloved Goddess. This reminds me of how all art is open to interpretation, and how the truth we see in it is often our own. I also think the fact that the severed head in one of “Desire’s” left hands is Nina’s own softened any potential offense I might have taken.

I’m not trying to say that how I feel about this image is what’s right or real, nor am I ignorant of the fact that if this were a depiction of my deity or one of his Saints, I’d be particularly sensitive to potential disrespect, much in the same way I am here when some of you (regulars included) have made throw-away comments which aren’t kind to Christianity. I don’t know how I would feel if I saw a cartoon of Jesus holding hands with a blow-up doll, but I also don’t think that example is analogous; I don’t associate Jesus with porntastic accessories. I do, however, associate Kali with raw energy, sexuality and power and if I am wrong to do so, I look forward to being corrected.

If anything struck me, I think I was more shocked about the placement of the “eye” than the castrated bit o’ man which the figure is shown holding. In fact, that last aspect of this cartoon almost delighted my inner warrior princess. Well, it definitely made her giggle. ;)

When I asked one of my closest friends if HIS TamBrahm sensibilities were offended, this is what ensued:

ANNA: I have a bloggy question which I feel funny asking you, since you’re hardly uber-religious ;)…but does this offend you?

SK: It shows ignorance on the part of the artist. It shows patience and understanding (about how these guys are ignorant) on the part of the Hindus. And it shows how advanced a religion we are as compared to others.

It does offend me, but not to a point where I would make a big deal out of it…hold on isn’t this … Nina from SM?

ANNA: Yes it’s Nina and I don’t think her depiction is inaccurate. Kali is fearsome, with severed heads et al…and I for one dig the imagery of her castrating someone and flaunting it. :D

If I were a blood-drunken goddess who just ripped someone’s d!@% off, I’d wave it around, too

SK: :)

ANNA: ah, wait…already did that in college ;)

SK: WHAT

ANNA: So, why are you offended? What’s so wrong? The severed penis?

SK: no no no…

ANNA: the fact that she’s naked? b/c I was always taught that Kali IS. She only wears maya. Is it the eyes? She’s drunk on blood.

Come on, out with it. You’re slow this morning. Kappi kudicho?

SK: no… no kappi and I am doing like three things at one. It’s about her being naked. As a figure that someone else prays to…I think there should have been a little more thought. I never said it was not funny, but just that it could hurt the sentiments of certain people. And you always have to careful of who you hurt. Does that make sense?

ANNA: SK. she IS naked. Nina’s depiction of her as nanga is accurate, AFAIK.

SK: ooh I had no clue… like you mean normally she is naked?

ANNA: Oh for heaven’s sake. SHE IS CLOTHED IN NOTHING BUT MAYA. does maya cover anything when YOU wear it??

I love how people get pissed about something they don’t even know thoroughly. ;)

SK: nope and I was not pissed

ANNA: From wiki— “She is often depicted naked with Maya as her only covering and is shown as very dark, as she has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.”

SK: Hmmm. Interesting.

::

All right, mutineers. I know I’m possibly going to regret even commencing this thread, but my inner optimist thinks that we can all behave and be civil to one another, even as we discuss such inflammatory concepts as religion, appropriateness, respect and place.

I have no qualms about shutting the thread down if we’re not learning anything, i.e. if it decays in to funda-spew, if it’s off-topic or if it’s just ad-hominem attacks on Nina. Please use Nagasai and Amitabh as examples of how one can fully disagree with or disapprove of the image in question without being all Massengill about it. Thank you, don’t flame through. :)

anna at 09:37 AM in Art, Comics, Humor, Issues, Religion · 240 comment(s) · Direct link

February 08, 2007

Sharlene Khan: "It Started Off as Them and Ended Up as Me"

[This will be my last post of Indo-African material, and I wanted to end on a note of cultural solidarity. Thanks again for accompanying me on my trip to Kenya.]

A few weeks ago, Amardeep wrote a nice report from a conference about Indo-African writers:

Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community — especially artists, playwrights, and poets — who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with their black African neighbors.

On that note, I thought I would share the work of my friend Sharlene Khan, a South African artist I met in 2004. She was born in Durban to Muslim and Christian parents (she is Christian) and lives now in Johannesburg, having collected two masters degrees in art, despite her deep antipathy toward all things institutional and official, and done residencies in Cairo and the south of France — like any good artist, trying to avoid joining the work force.

Indian painting has become very popular (and lucrative) in the global art market these days, with post-modern, post-cubist, semi-abstract renderings of Hindu deities and Indian village scenes being all the rage — the proteges and imitators of MF Husain. But Sharlene’s work is none of that.

Her themes are African, her sensibility humanist. One of her series concerns the plight of laborers and street musicians in Durban. She also did an installation based on the little tents that itinerant barbers, often immigrants from other parts of Africa, set up on the sidewalks of South African cities. She has painted murals like Diego Rivera and designed clothing for a fashion show, painting the fabric and inscribing it with text.

A good phrase to describe her stance is the title of the painting above: “It Started Off as Them and Ended Up as Me.”

She once emailed me about her disdain for the term “diaspora,” since the notion behind it (a people outside their homeland) has been a political issue in South Africa: “”It chiefly recognises similarities at the expense of equally important localised differences. I don’t really consider myself as part of such a diaspora, I am a South African Indian who is very located in this specific country at this specific juncture in time. And while I realise that the sense of ‘Indianness’ is probably a valid one among many migrant communities, in South Africa it was promoted by the apartheid government to ensure that Indians in this country were made to feel like outsiders. Indians have been in SAfrica since the 1820’s.””

Her work takes up themes of alienation and longing, the degradation of unemployment, and the simple human joys of family. Her realism is deeply sympathetic, which is a rare trait (it’s also the hallmark of the very best photojournalism, which is one reason I admire it).

So here is an African artist of Indian descent, painting African themes that touch on universal human experiences. But don’t call it diasporic.

Photograph of Sharlene Khan by Preston Merchant
Paintings by Sharlene Khan

Sharlene Khan

Madonna and Pokemon Child (2002)

A Friend Loves at All Times, but a Brother is Born in Adversity (2002)

Dotcoza (2001)

Gokarting (2001)

Ikhaya, The Long Walk (2000)

Man Down (2000)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes (2002)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes, detail 1 (2002)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes, detail 2 (2002)

preston at 03:55 PM in Art · 28 comment(s) · Direct link

November 30, 2006

InstaReview: SAWCC's "In a State of Emergency?" Exhibition

Earlier this evening I checked out the opening of “In a State of Emergency? Women, War & the Politics of Urban Survival,” an exhibition presented by the South Asian Women’s Creative Collaborative here in New York. The show is up at the Alwan Center for the Arts in Lower Manhattan through December 9th. It features photography, video, multimedia and installation pieces by nine desi sisters: Salma Arastu, Meherunnisa Asad, Kiran Chandra, Mona Kamal, Bindu Mehra, Carol Pereira, Maryum Saifee, Tahera Seher Shah, and Vandana Sood.

I’ll go straight to the insta-review, dangerous as that is since I only just got back and the air-kissing, red-wine-in-plastic-cups opening atmosphere perhaps wasn’t the most conducive to critical contemplation (though I did stay away from the wine). So I hope other folks will chime in with their own impressions. Visually, I most enjoyed Shah’s “Jihad Pop” series of digital prints, with their stencils of desi and Islamic iconography set amid fields of sheer black and white. The most thought-provoking to me was Saifee’s series of “Postcards from the Middle East,” which she bills as self-portraits stemming from her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan: as she explains in the catalog, “my skin color made my authenticity as an American up for debate. On the street, I would either be mistaken as a Sri Lankan maid or as a Bollywood film star.” And I found Arastu’s “New York and I” series frustrating: visually fabulous in their superimpositions of New York street and subway scenes with armies of unhinged, chattering silhouettes, but marred by the poems written into each piece, which struck me as trite and superfluous.

The show is a project of SAWCC, the estimable organization that is now in its tenth year and that sponsors, among other events, the annual literary conference that a number of Mutineering types attended last year. SAWCC (pronounced, delightfully, “saucy”) continues to do the Lord’s work for culturally minded macacas, and they deserve all our support.

A show like this one, however, also suffers from self-imposed boundaries. It is imbued with a very 1990s, hyper-theoretical approach to the politics of representation that makes the inherent whimsy and improvisation of artistic creation — and, importantly, artistic consumption — feel secondary. The catalog essay, and the shorter version handed out on flyers, are nearly illegible, and I’ve got Ivy degrees and a reasonably honed appreciation for theory. It frustrates me no end — and this is not a knock on this exhibition specifically; far from it, it’s a common problem — when art is “explained” by its sponsors and presenters using language like this:

These increasingly paranoid urban spaces harbour fears of the irrational violence equated with terrorism, inducing a society of control in which surveillance, intimidation, and the erosion of personal liberty forces forms of resistance that employ the strategies of the absurd. Increasingly aware of the machine that governs and questioning the methods and motives of the state, the artists in this exhibition rely on the absurd, irrational, and uncanny to produce counter hegemonic narratives to ideological, religious, cultural, and social modes of control.

Like the artists of Dada, these contemporary practitioners respond to the presence of war, excess, and other degenerate transgressions of contemporary urban life. Like the women of Dada, they also respond to issues of identity altered by male repression and subjugation, aware of a world in which urban social orders are based on the governance of space, each system of control based on meta-structuring agents, making each space, city, and response, culturally specific. Such disciplinary systems of control exude masculinity, often necessitating a physical, emotional, and psychological domination of women, placing them in a “state of emergency.”

Got that? Read it again: It’s not gibberish, it just feels like it is. There is plenty of meaning, and indeed, a viable argument or several in those hyper-extended, comma-laden sentences. The problem is, those arguments are being beaten into us with the implicit presumption that, ultimately, there is a right way and a wrong way to apprehend this art. And that, plainly, is bullshit. For one thing, taken as theory alone, the argument above merits unpacking; it cobbles together numerous assumptions and interpolations about the world about us with verbs like “induce,” “force,” and “necessitate,” that are dead giveaways of a lack of interest in, or openness to, the serendipitous and the unexpected. Rigidity and art make poor companions, as previous uses of the word “degenerate” in the context of art criticism have made abundantly clear; and I think it’s a disservice to a whole class of potentially interested viewers, as well as to the artists themselves, to fence a potentially interesting exhibition behind such a grim gateway.

siddhartha at 10:28 PM in Art, Identity, Politics, Reviews · 45 comment(s) · Direct link

October 02, 2006

Dearest Pecola, I Want to Weep.

I don’t monitor it regularly, but when I do, PostSecret inevitably offers at least one confession which gives me chills; on September 30, a few of you shivered, too.

anna at 11:44 AM in Art, Identity, Issues, Photos · 223 comment(s) · Direct link

September 18, 2006

Sikh Art @ the Rubin Museum

I’ve been getting lots of tips today about the early Sikh art exhibit opening today at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. There is a surprisingly effusive review of the exhibit by Holland Cotter up at the New York Times:

But what about Sikhism itself? Few Westerners have even basic information.

How many people are aware that it was conceived as a universalist, open-door religion?

Or that its view of society was radically egalitarian? Or that its holy book, the Adi Granth, far from being a catalog of sectarian dos and don’ts, is a bouquet of poetic songs, blending the fragrances of Hindu ragas, Muslim hymns and Punjabi folk tunes into a music of spiritual astonishment?

This is precisely the information delivered by the small and absolutely beautiful show titled “I See No Stranger: Early Sikh Art and Devotion” at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea.(link)

All very admirable and correct. The only thing I find a little odd is that the review is less an evaluation of the art in the exhibit than it is a summary of the basic points about Sikhism covered. For Cotter, the art is more a vehicle for acquiring knowledge than beautiful in its own right. Not a great tragedy, perhaps; in fact, even this short article is pretty informative. But still, it might have been interesting to hear more about how or whether this art fits into the broader picture of religious art in the Indian subcontinent during this historical period. (Call me an academic geek, but the question crossed my mind.)

The other slightly odd moment is this:

The painting is paired in the show with the workshop drawing, produced by a master artist, that served as its model. The contrast is striking. In the drawing the prince, far from being restrained, practically levitates from his saddle with ardor and leans toward Nanak as if drawn to a magnet. Mardana plays and sings with fervor of a contemporary bhangra star. It is in the drawing, rather than in the painting, that the Nanak Effect, so evident in poems and songs, comes through. (link)

Bhangra, huh? Not quite, Cotter-saab. Bhangra is secular, festive, and pro-intoxication. Nothing at all to do with Bhai Mardana. This is a forgivable slip; Holland Cotter is a dedicated art critic, and as far as I can tell this is the first time he’s ever written on Sikh-related art.

Incidentally, the Rubin Museum is doing an extensive array of programs to coincide with this show, including Sikh-related film screenings (organized through the Spinning Wheel Film Festival folks) as well as lectures.

amardeep at 04:43 PM in Art, Religion · 23 comment(s) · Direct link

September 09, 2006

An Exhibit at the Asia Society

There’s an ambitious exhibit of Asian American art at the Asia Society in New York, called “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now.” The New York Times has a detailed review. Among the 21 artists whose works are being exhibited, at least two are desi, Saira Wasim and Chitra Ganesh.

Saira Wasim, who is from Lahore, trained in painting classical Mughal miniatures before moving to the U.S. recently. She was part of the “Karkhana” group that had its own show in New York not too long ago (see Manish’s post from last year). She does these great collage-like miniatures that often parody either political figures or scenes of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

Among the images of Wasim’s I’ve come across on the internet, my favorite so far is “Buzkashi” (Goat-grabbing), pictured above (click on the image to see the full picture). Here is how Wasim characterizes the painting on her website:

So this painting depicts ‘One Man’s show’ of Military Dictator of Pakistan, Perverz Musharaff sitting on a presidency throne and his imperialism is shown with four arms like Hindu god Shiv.

The basic constitutional structure of the country evolving around his regime; army generals are celebrating ‘martial law’ by dancing and wearing Hawaiian sandals.

The world’s seventh nuclear state in spite of her national debt over forty billion dollars and spending on defense budget over 3.5 billion dollars a year. Here goat is symbolized as innocent public. (link)

Wow. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an outcry about her work yet (maybe there has been one, and I missed it).

Chitra Ganesh’s installation art sounds harder to visualize:

Installation art is pushed in different directions by several artists. In mural-size ink drawings, Chitra Ganesh subjects the female body to mutations, exaggerations and struggles worthy of Hindu deities and enlivened with beads, glitter and colored plastic. But routine female obsessions with hair, nails and eyelashes are also evoked. (link)

Again, I’m having trouble visualizing this in the abstract. An earlier exhibit by Chitra Ganesh at another gallery explored the Ramayana from a feminist point of view; it looks pretty interesting.

If anyone goes to this exhibit, I would be curious to hear your reviews. From the review in the Times, the non-desi Asian American art sounds quite interesting. Sadly, I won’t be heading to New York anytime soon, so I may miss it.

amardeep at 02:52 PM in Art · 37 comment(s) · Direct link

August 20, 2006

Anish Kapoor @ Rockefeller Center

The Indian born artist Anish Kapoor has a major sculpture going up at Rockefeller Center in New York next month, and there’s a detailed profile of him in the New York Times (thanks, Tamasha).

The sculpture is called “Sky Mirror,” and it’s essentially a large, convex piece of highly polished stainless steel, roughly in the shape of a contact lens. From the image at the Times (which is computer generated) as well as images of the same sculpture at other sites, I have a feeling this piece is going to be a bit of a tourist sensation.

This high-profile placing of one of Kapoor’s sculptures is a coup for the artist, but hardly the first time he’s been given pride of place in the western art world. Major pieces of his are on display in the MOMA and the Tate Modern in London, the most famous of which might be Marsyas, a massive construction that filled the Tate’s vast Turbine Hall four years ago. Kapoor is one of the most important and influential practitioners of a movement in abstract sculpture called either minimalism or post-minimalism, depending on how exact we’re being.

It’s a long way to come for a Doon School boy.

Let’s get into the art a bit more. Here is the Times:

Both works are extensions of Mr. Kapoor’s almost career-long interest in sculptural incorporeality. Borrowing ideas from Minimalist and post-Minimalist predecessors like Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse but using deep matte colors, reflectiveness and other illusions, he makes boundaries seem to disappear with an effect that is often overtly sensual and spiritual. Mr. Kapoor, who first rose to prominence in the mid-1980’s and won the Turner Prize in Britain in 1991, calls them nonobjects. (link)

Minimalism came of age in the 1960s, and was displaced somewhat by postmodernism and conceptual art, though it never really went away. For the most part I tend to prefer more congenial, conversational art, but a number of Kapoor’s pieces do something for me that Donald Judd’s roomfuls of black cubes don’t really do. Kapoor’s best works clearly are social objects, even if they operate in the same general mode as minimalism does.

A bit more from the same article:

Though his public work is unabashedly crowd-pleasing, Mr. Kapoor’s intentions are often deeply philosophical. His mirrored piece might be thought of as a sculptural twist on the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Fichte, who wrote about self-consciousness being possible only through the resistance an individual encounters from external objects; in other words, something defined by what it is not. (link)

What I like about the “Sky Mirror” piece and a related piece now installed at Millenium Park in Chicago called “Cloud Gate” is the way they present a kind of prism through which to view the world. They are solid, stainless steel, and point at the monumental architecture around themselves — and in that sense they are completely of a piece with the modern American city. But in that they have the general look of liquids, they resist the sense of fixity of massive public sculptures, which are sometimes more in the vein of decorative buildings than art objects that inspire contemplation. As the Times notes, in the convex mirror of “Sky Mirror,” the towering buildings facing the sculpture are vertically inverted — another kind of anomaly.

Incidentally, many of Kapoor’s early works made oblique references to Indian religious rituals — some of his minimalist forms from the 1980s, for instance, were coated in bright red powder in the manner of Hindu religious shrines (see this piece, for instance). The tie back to India seems to be less evident in Kapoor’s recent ‘big’ works, though many art critics draw on Buddhist concepts of space and being (or non-being) in attempting to analyze Kapoor’s work. So it might still be there.

amardeep at 07:19 PM in Art · 21 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

May 30, 2006

ARTWALLAH is back- Los Angeles, June 24th

ArtWallah ‘06 is now less than a month away in Los Angeles. SM readers have heard me sing the praises of this organization and its annual festival before. I appreciate what they do and what they are about so much that I have been wallahnteering to help run the festival for the past three years. This year I decided to retire and actually cool out to all the artists and just enjoy myself…or so I thought. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I’m the new “CashWallah.” I will leave it to your imaginations what that job entails.

Last year I decided to entice SM readers to come out to the festival with a little multimedia tour which made it pretty obvious why anyone within a hundred miles of L.A. (at least) should show up. I hyperlinked to some new musicians, artists, dancers etc. This year the ArtWallah Press Team has saved me the trouble and made a detailed program FULL of interesting hyperlinks to artists many of you have never heard of. It took me an hour to click through them all and appreciate what I saw. It was an hour well spent.

…this year’s ArtWallah festival [at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center] will present the works of over 40 artists through dance, film, literature, music, spoken word, theater, and visual arts - showcasing the personal, political, and cultural celebrations and struggles of the South Asian diaspora (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).

Click on “Continued” below for a quick lick.

Click on any picture above to discover a new artist. Come to ArtWallah to experience them in person.

abhi at 01:10 AM in Art, Dance, Events, Film, Literature, Music, Theater · 30 comment(s) · Direct link

May 23, 2006

Indian Painting in San Francisco: Anjolie Ela Menon

A solo exhibit by Indian Painter Anjolie Ela Menon is up at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Artdaily reports. Menon is a Delhi-based painter of mixed American and Indian heritage. She was born in 1940 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris as well as at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay (which she did not like!). Menon has had an active and successful career, winning many awards, including India’s prestigious Padma Shri.

In the exhibit are ten major paintings as well as a large a triptych called “Yatra,” which you can see in small form here. See if you can rectify the painting itself with the explanation offered in Artdaily:

This triptych depicts various figures that can be identified as participants in a particularly well-known north Indian Hindu pilgrimage, or yatra. Menon’s interest in these pilgrims stems from both a sense of admiration and from her view of their devotional act as an unbroken bridge linking India’s ancient past with its rapidly modernizing present. (link)

(Incidentally, the image on the right is a portrait of Menon I found on the Flickr site of a brilliant photographer calling herself “50mm.” Check out the rest of 50mm’s amazing photos here.)

In this interview, Menon acknowledges the influence of both M.F. Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s two best known post-Independence painters. Husain is constantly in trouble with either conservative Hindus or conservative Muslims, while Menon seems to have avoided controversy. It’s interesting, because many of Menon’s recent paintings and sculptures do employ religious themes. There is a beautiful glass sculpture of Ganesha here, and sculptures of baby Krishna here. To me, the fact that these radical interpretations of Hindu religious icons are inoffensive, while Husain’s “Bharat Mata” is censored just exposes the confusion about what constitutes an offensive image in India.

In a recent defense of Husain, Uma Nair describes the symbolism of the nude body in Husain’s paintings, and makes an important point about censorship:

We Indians are a queer lot - while advertisers and media become ever more daring, or desperate, for attention-grabbing images, art has been reduced to deciphering its references for diatribes. The nude for Husain is a collective celebration of the human form, its life force triumphant over its very evident mortality.

Art is about differentiating between true art and tawdry eroticism. (link)

This kind of basic differentiation of genres is exactly what the anti-Husain legions are unable to do. Fortunately, Anjolie Ela Menon has escaped all this, and I only hope she continues to get international recognition without the usual attendant headaches.

---

You can see more of Anjolie Ela Menon’s paintings here. (Indeed, there are hundreds of her paintings on the internet; you only have to look.)

amardeep at 04:30 PM in Art · 8 comment(s) · Direct link

May 19, 2006

In Which The Head Meets the Body

Thanks to an anonymous tipster, I read this article in the Independent about a strange happening at the Musée Guimet in Paris involving a statue of one of Shiva’s wives (whose name is unspecified). The headless statue, which had been recovered from the Bakong temple in Cambodia in 1935, was reunited with its head after nearly six hundred years.

The temple was built in 881, during the Khmer dynasty, and is one of many ancient Hindu temples scattered around Southeast Asia (today, the vast majority of Cambodians are Buddhists). The statue was decapitated in 1431, though exactly why or who did it I do not know. The body of the statue came to Paris in 1935, and the head remained in the museum affixed to the nearby Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s most famous tourist attraction.

The reunification of head and body happened completely by accident. John Gunther Dean, an ambassador to Cambodia in the 1970s, known for protecting Cambodian art from the Khmer Rouge, decided to give the museum a present from his personal collection:

To thank the museum, Mr Dean, now 80, offered a gift from his own collection of ancient Khmer artefacts. Last month, the gift arrived, the sculpted head of a woman found at the Bakong temple site in 1939.

“I asked him for a Khmer head because we only had headless statues but I didn’t think for a moment about a possible match,” said Pierre Baptiste, the museum’s curator for south-east Asian art.

“I brought the head into our [Cambodian] hall looking for a place that it could be exhibited,” said M. Baptiste. “I had a sudden notion the two pieces resembled each other but then thought, ‘no, things never happen that way’.

“I put the head on the statue’s shoulders. It shifted a few millimetres. I heard the little click that you get when two stones fit together and the head fell perfectly into place. It was as if it had put itself together. I still get goose-bumps thinking about it.” (link)

It’s a great story, but it gives me goosebumps for a slightly different reason from the one curator Pierre Baptist experienced, as it reminds me that so many priceless ancient artifacts from from Asia are in westen museums. Indeed, the most likely place where the head of this statue could re-find its body is in one of the big ‘Oriental’ museums in Paris, London, or New York — not Cambodia itself.

My own local Philadelphia Museum of Art has an entire Hindu temple (ca. 1550) from Tamil Nadu installed in a permanent exhibition (see here). It’s a beautiful exhibit with amazing stone sculptures, and I’m not at all sure it would be preserved as nicely in India itself — but it’s still a little sad to visit it in this context, right next to the similarly-dislocated authentic 19th century Japanese tea-house.

Despite the absence of some major components, these temples are of course still major tourist attractions in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is world-famous, as is, more recently, Ta Prohm (where portions of Tomb Raider were filmed a few years ago). But imagine what they would be like if all the statues and friezes that are currently sitting in western museums were returned to their source!

Of course, this is hopelessly idealistic. The majority of the artifacts in the big European and American museums were acquired legally at the time they entered these museums’ collections. And it’s hardly likely those museums would agree to give back artifacts worth countless millions merely out of the goodness of their hearts.

Since restoration of the stolen relocated artifacts is impossible, I might propose a conceptual art project to draw attention to the incongruity. Careful replicas of statues like the recently fixed Bakong wife of Shiva should be made, and installed at the sites where they were found. Then a sign should be placed out front that reads as follows: “Welcome to Bakong. You are now entering a replica of the Hindu temple at Bakong. Everything of value from this site has been relocated to Paris, London, and New York. Enjoy your visit!”

amardeep at 11:19 AM in Art · 39 comment(s) · Direct link

May 14, 2006

Plogging

Ever since Steven Colbert invented the word “Truthiness” I have been desperately searching for a word of my own to invent so that I too can become a pop culture reference and get a shot out on VH-1’s Best Week Ever. I would humbly like to submit to you all the word “Plogging” (which is the verb form of the word “Plog”). It means blogging your paintings or other works of art. We already have the word “Flog” for Foto-weblog, a place where one can display their photography. Instead of Paint-Blog (the origin of “Plog”) I thought of Art-Blog (Alog) but the second one reminded me of something dirty. In any case here are two examples of fine Plogs. The first one belongs to my friend Adnan Hussain. The guy is crazy prolific and seems to be putting up new stuff almost every day, whereas most bloggers struggle to write just one post every day. Hopefully he will forgive me for snagging two (1,2) of his works as examples (click on thumbnails for larger pictures):

Be sure to leave him comments if you like his stuff, it’s pretty addictive.

The second example of a Plog that I will share with you is the one that belongs to Gautam Rao.

I’m an artist living in Indianapolis, Indiana. In this blog, I’ll be posting new paintings regularly. My goal is to challenge myself, and to seek the extraordinary in everyday life.

All paintings are oil on masonite. [Link]

Here is an example of one of his works. My own interpretation of it is that many of us are beginning to see ourselves as viewed through the window of a computer. Nah, I’m just kidding…just trying to sound smart.

If you guys know of any other South Asian “plogs” then please leave them in the comments. Also, keep your fingers crossed that I get on to Best Week Ever.

abhi at 04:37 PM in Art · 18 comment(s) · Direct link

May 12, 2006

What’s the samachar, yo?

My buddy Chiraag of Pardon My Hindi has just posted a kick-ass second issue of Samachar, a superpremium, arty site which is the Häagen-Dasz of 2nd gen desi mags:

• A scandalous, side-by-side audio comparison of ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart,’ a Black Eyed Peas Grammy winner, with the song it plagiarized, ‘Ae Nau Jawan Sab Kuchh Yahan’ from Apradh. The catchy melody is a shameless copy. Listen for yourself.
  
  It’s not a sample, it’s the entire melodic backbone of the song, almost entirely unchanged. Royalties? Nope. Americans really are learning from Bollywood.
  
  
• A video clip of NYU dosa man Thiru Kumar composing his mirch-e-frisbees while wearing a jacket with a big, LTTE-esque airbrushed tiger on the back

  Out-of-Office Tiger

  . Yes, he listens to M.I.A.
  
  
• A stylish trailer for call center documentary John and Jane:

  The most startling character is the re-named Naomi, a Gujurati girl who bleaches her skin and hair and speaks with an American accent even outside working hours. [Link]

• A self-promotional photo essay of PMH stickers pasted throughout San Francisco by friends of the artist

I really love this site’s aesthetic. The photos are ginormous and animated in a flipbook format. Raag loves his fabric textures and Billyburg blue-on-brown palette. The Meena Kumari (?) sticker still looks like she’s post-orgasmic. He’s got some new shirts big-upping ’70s Bollycomposer duo Anand-Kalyan (licensing issues?), who composed the song the Peas lifted.

IMO this biz plan is brilliant. By pairing Anand-Kalyan audio clips with related tees, Raag educates Bollyhip clotheshorses in a much more engaging way than the tiny back story on a Ben & Jerry’s.

Here are a few unsolicited suggestions:

• It’s crying out for a comments feature
• The concept, design and story ideas are great, but the writing needs more of an edge
• More, please! The site looks like a labor of love with eons invested. What Raag needs is some people to help with the gorgeousness (hint, hint).

Related posts: Everyone recycles, Tiffinwalla in New York, The peacock, The tao of Manschot

manish at 07:36 AM in Art, Literature · 22 comment(s) · Direct link

March 15, 2006

Incredibly off-k!lter

Last night I saw an odd Indian tourism billboard in Times Square. It read, ‘Get to know yoga from its mother,’ and the visual style reminded me of old-skool ‘An Ideal Boy’ posters.

The blurb in an advertising publication says the ads aim for kitsch, but IMO they fall into the chasm between kitsch and cheese. The colors say ‘An Ideal Boy,’ the visual style is fun. But the elements don’t work together. The slogan is lame, its font evokes Dances With Wolves, and the tagline in ultra-serious Bodoni strip it of wit. Indian tourism needs to hire whoever’s penning the witty Citi ‘Live richly’ campaign. I hear Rushdie’s available.

Even the campaign description is off:

Prathap Suthan, national creative director, Grey Worldwide, explains why this campaign stands out: “The difference lies in the expression which, according to me, is very Indian. Where one normally uses photography for billboards, which is a Western expression, the style used to communicate in this ad is the kitsch look… Opting for the kitsch look is based on everyday observations from all over India. These images have been drawn from village folk art and common imagery seen across India, images that bring to mind the colours, uniqueness and diversity of India.” [Link]

Kitsch, like cool, shrivels in sunlight. Trying to explain it kills it. Reading about it in dorky ad pubs kills it. Nonchalant, off-radar irony is the point. Calling it ‘the kitsch look’ voids any street cred. It’s painful even to read. I’ve lost all my Williamsburg karma by writing this paragraph.

Chantal, book me for a fauxhawk. The three hundred dollar kind. Tell them I want highlights, I’m feeling verklempt.

There are three other ads in the series, and each has the same problem, nice art with lame slogans that just don’t translate well. It’s like ads and manuals for Japanese autos in the ’70s before they started using American copywriters:

… there are four billboards at Times Square… the Mecca for global outdoor, and gigantic hoardings and display wraps at Cromwell Road in London and at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The other outdoor initiatives were through display panels on city buses in London and a huge LED display panel at Montparnasse Square in Paris. The entire media spend on the outdoor is estimated to be in the vicinity of Rs 5 crore across the three cities. Later, the campaigns were also taken to Zurich and Davos for a week during the World Economic Forum (WEF). [Link]

The visual style reminds me of:

Related post: Incredible advert!sing

manish at 01:04 PM in Art, Business · 28 comment(s) · Direct link

February 28, 2006

Update/Art Advisory: "Disappeared"

A note on the tipline from desi academic extraordinaire Amitava Kumar reminds us of Disappeared in America, an ongoing multimedia project that began by documenting the round-up of immigrants in the post-9/11 hysteria and has now expanded into a web of collaborations among America- and Europe-based artists. Together they are tackling the rise of suspicion and xenophobia in all these countries, the climate of secrecy and fear, the intended and unintended consequences of actions by governments and their foes. (Manish mentioned the project last February here.)

… While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe & the Middle East, in recognition that anti-migrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon.

The collaborative has several new “interventions” in the next couple of months in New York, Houston and San Francisco that Mutineers in those cities might find interesting.

This is also an opportunity to point folks to tipster Amitava’s work. Now a professor at Vassar College, he’s one of those desi polymaths who covers politics, art, culture, discourse, sociology with even analytical poise and great literary verve. He’s also perhaps the most prominent and interesting discussant of matters Bihari on the web. Indeed, if there’s a thematic connection here, it’s that he is actively engaged in un-disappearing Bihar from the collective consciousness, a Sisyphean task that he handles with aplomb.

Recent posts on Amitava’s blog include one featuring photos from the arrival in Bihar of the avian flu; a mock letter from Lalu Yadav, Bihar’s “supremo” (as an Indian newspaper might say) to George Bush; and a joyful announcement of the upcoming U.S. edition of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s comic classic English, August, 18 years after its original publication.

siddhartha at 10:40 AM in Art · 10 comment(s) · Direct link

January 24, 2006

“Superstition must be utilized”

This painting comes to us via SM tipster Omar Khan:

“An Execution in British India”- Painting by Vassili Verestchagin

As part of his article accompanying the wood engraving of the painting when it was published in Harper’s Weekly on November 17, 1888, [Harper’s Weekly art critic Clarence Cook] wrote:

“So with the other picture, the shooting of the Sepoys, Verestchagin does not say that this particular scene is an incident of the great mutiny. Shooting from guns is the only way, he says, that 60,000 soldiers in a strong country can keep in awe 250,000,000 natives. Superstition must be utilized. The natives do not fear to die, but they fear to die in any way that destroys the identity of the body. They cannot enter heaven blown limb from limb. Therefore this is the way to touch their souls with dreadful awe, and the English, says our artist, have always blown from guns, blow from guns today, and will blow from guns as long as India is held. [Link]

In the painting you presumably see Sepoy soliders in Delhi, captured during the 1857 Mutiny, fixed to the front ends of cannons, and about to be obliterated (although check the comments for a more likely explanation of what is being depicted here). I’m not sure that it is clear if this scene was actually witnessed by Verestchagin, but I like the description of the painting.

Verestchagin’s notoriety came from showing some of the most talked about events of the era. This scene was a standard British way to settle scores, and continued long after the war of independence in 1857. It was hotly debated in British and Indian papers between liberals and conservatives. To the former it was an excess of colonialism, to the latter an essential ingredient. As a Russian, Verestshagin was on opposite sides of the British as far as India was concerned. His American audience was also more critical of colonialism. [Link]

abhi at 04:14 PM in Art · 46 comment(s) · Direct link

January 18, 2006

NYCB's Amar Ramasar: I Saw Him First

A fabulously helpful anonymous tipster sent me my newest and sweetest crush: a boy who can DANCE! Said my anon-penned GMail:

Hey gang, I was reading a NY times article about ballet and it mentioned an Amar Ramasar, an Indian-American male ballet dancer with the NYC Ballet. How cool is that?!

…I hope you write about him! Bonus points if you include lots of Billy Eliot/Center Stage references. :-P

More about this gorgeous man, whom the Voice deems “extremely promising, both forceful and softly muscular” (hell yes!)

Amar Ramasar was born in the Bronx, New York. He began his studies at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of New York City Ballet, in 1992. In addition, he studied at the American Ballet Theatre Summer Program and The Rock School of Pennsylvania Ballet. In July 2000, Mr. Ramasar was invited to become an apprentice with New York City Ballet, and in July 2001 he joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet.[nycb]

I think I’m feeling faint. A brown face in the New York City Ballet? You can’t hear my eeeevil cackle, but I’m gloating over the fact that our DesiDancer is married, else I’d have to whip off my bamboo earrings (at least two pair), smear vaseline on my face and get DIRTY. I keed, I keed…I’m all about the “sistas before mistas” principle (ahem. until someone else comes up with a feminized “bros before hos”, we’re stuck with that).

Amar said the following about his unique situation:

I actually looked at my race as an advantage because there was no one who looked like me. In New York City Ballet especially, I felt my casting has always been great. The biggest one for me was Fancy Free because, if you think of the history of that ballet, it’s not necessarily the case that in the 1940s an Indian guy was one of the sailors fighting for America. But they let me do that here, and I thought, “I’m breaking boundaries that people automatically put up for a stereotypical white ballet.” [link]

So hot.

P.S. Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage Billy Eliot/Center Stage… ;)

anna at 02:36 AM in Art, Dance, Humor · 40 comment(s) · Direct link

January 12, 2006

Rick-rock

Check out this gallery of Bangladeshi rickshaw art (thanks, Gujjubhai). I especially like this tiger-borne palki:

Most worrying is the growing popularity of the prodigal son / criminal as a theme around town:

Perhaps it’s fitting that people park their derrières on bin Laden’s face.

Related posts: Pimp my ride, Rickshaw revival, Top Down, Chrome Spinnin’, Pulling more than your own weight, The next generation rickshaw

manish at 01:21 PM in Art · 13 comment(s) · Direct link

January 03, 2006

Intersections

Yesterday in Sevilla, I saw Christopher ColumbusŽ purported tomb and learned that locally, ‘las Indias’ means the Indies, i.e. the Americas. Only ‘la India’ qualifies as the name of the country. ‘Indio’ means Native American, while ‘Hindú’ is the word for desi, even if you aren’t. That man was confused, confused, confused.

(I also learned that the cityŽs Plaza de España was used in Star Wars Episode 2, but that will excite only a few of you. A scary few to be sure ;) )

Today I checked out La Alhambra, the Moorish fort built by Berbers from Morocco when they ruled Andalucía. It is a totally wild mashup of Spanish colonial and Islamic styles. Think Spanish tile roofs, square, unadorned towers and boring crenelations on the outside, arches, Arabic carvings and geometric patterns on the inside. Think Spanish coats of arms surrounded by verses praising Allah. Think Dehli’s Lal Qila meets Taco Bell. If I didnŽt know it was done that way on purpose, I’d think the Arabic brush strokes were steganography snuck in by marbleworkers held hostage.

Most major innovation happens at intersections. The 2nd gen process that some deride as ‘confusion’ is actually tremendous cultural innovation. And itŽs preciously short-lived, too— as the wheel of assimilation inexorably grinds away, this Cambrian Explosion too shall pass.

and,

Nothing is entirely original. The aesthetic I instinctively recognize as Indian is Mughal, i.e. Islamic by way of Turkish and Irani influence on Mongols from what is now Uzbekistan. The traditions saffronists claim are ‘native’ to India— those, too, came from some intersection, some borrowing, some adaptation somewhere.

P.S. Nobody looks at a brown man in Spain and guesses American— not even fellow Americans. I had the funniest conversation just now with a white woman who spoke fluent Spanish, and then all over again in Amrikan English. So the converse is true too, sometimes.

Related post: O Henry

manish at 12:36 PM in Art, Travel · 59 comment(s) · Direct link

December 19, 2005

The Dutch East Indies

Here’s a Dutch photo project posing members of subcultures (rockers, surfers, ‘ecofreaks’ and so on) in similar clothes:

“By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity…” [Link]

The project includes desi women in Rotterdam:

When desis finally get their own high school clique name, it’ll be in some flick called Pretty in Pink, Orange, Red, Purple and Blue, and the name won’t be as lame as the ‘Massalas.’

On the other hand, the dike-desi look is similar to the British Asian bird uniform of London circa 2001: hip-huggers and three-quarters length fitted jacket with frock collar. Black.

See the entire photo project here.

manish at 01:03 AM in Art, Fashion, Photos · 2 comment(s) · Direct link

December 10, 2005

Tufteing the subcontinent

Map of the world with each country scaled by population size

Above is a map of world populations: “the larger the country, the bigger its population. Each grid square represents a million people.” [Link]

When you eyeball the map, a few things leap out at you in a way that they don’t when presented with a table of numbers:

• India has 1 billion people, or roughly 1/6th of the world’s population
• Pakistan and Bangladesh together have slightly more people