Postmodern Blacklash: Guerrilla Posturing and the Fragmented Innocence

Speaker: Johny ML

August 30, 2006 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Johny ML is an eminent art critic and curator, based in Delhi. He received postgraduate degrees in English Language and Literature (Kerala University) and Art History & Criticism (M.S. University, Baroda). A Charles Wallace scholar, he studied Creative Curating at the Goldsmiths College, University of London. Johny ML has curated several shows in India and abroad and was the art columnist for various magazines and prominent national dailies during the second half of the nineties. Currently, he is the editor of www.mattersofart.com, India’s first ezine on art and works as a freelance curator for the prominent galleries in Delhi and Kerala.

Postmodernism in Indian art heralded the arrival of an art practice that was informed by the socio-political critique. Painting and sculpting became a redundant practice for some time. Art needed a context other than the existential positioning of the artist within the society. The omnipresent and the omniscient individual artist took the backseat for a while and conceptual art practices accommodated subaltern voices in a renewed context of politicized aesthetics. Institutional encroachments were consciously kept at bay both by the artists and other cultural practitioners. Then the backlash art facilitated by the institutions and market came like a storm and took everything on its way including the artists. The innocent dreams for an aesthetic revolution collapsed into pieces. But those pieces were too beautiful to ignore. They contained not only the undying spirit of the guerrillas but it had the innocence too. Original, enthralling and up to date, what we have in the name of post-modern art in India is a backlash art, confirming and rebelling at the same time.