Frameworks for Art: Theory and Practice

Conveners: Avani Parikh and Prashant Parikh
Speakers: Adrian Piper, B.N. Goswamy, Catherine David, Curtis Carter, Daya Krishna, Geeta Kapur, Hal Foster, Marion Pastor Roces, Michael Krauz, Mukund Lath, Noel Carroll, Norman Bryson, Richard Wollheim, Rob Storr, and Rustom Bharucha

January 14 to 16, 1998 | 10.00 am to 6.00 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Concept Note: Avani Parikh

This conference tries to bring together three important strands of contemporary thought: analytic thought, continental thought, and Indian philosophical thought.  We want to apply these frameworks to the problems of understanding art, art practice, and curating and exhibiting art.

Our aims are twofold: first, simply to make the assumptions, commitments, organizing principles underpinning the frameworks we have identified clear and transparent to our audience, which is made up of artists, critics, and primarily the Bombay art world; second, to create a dialogue between and among these paradigms, of a kind and quality that might occur anywhere in the world, not just in India.  Of these two levels, only the first is intended to be bound to India and Indian practices in art and criticism.  The second level indicates why we have as many foreign participants as we do.  We wanted a fully international conference not constrained by geography.  We hope thereby that our audience will benefit from the full range of thought available today.  Indeed, the writings of many of our speakers are already familiar to many in India.  In addition, we would like to think that such a conference may not occur in the West, and that we will have played an important role in bringing such opposing frameworks and ideas together.  We hope our speakers will take this to be an event of significance for their practice as well, providing as it does an opportunity to engage with the art world here, and also to consider the problems raised by contemporary Indian art.

It is perhaps possible to see such a program in the context of current globalization, and indeed such an idea may not be inapplicable.  However, it is worth pointing out that discussion in India has always been quite internationalized.

Our first task was to identify the broad frameworks, or indeed meta-frameworks, operative today.  Our choice was analytic, continental, and Indian thought.  To be sure, there are other frameworks in existence, but these seemed to be of special significance for art theory and practice.  The next problem was what to call them.  “Model,” “framework,” and “paradigm” were considered, “meta-model” and “meta-framework” being found too unwieldy, and we settled upon “framework” as the most neutral of the three choices.

We turn first to the problem of distinguishing between analytic and continental thought.  As is well known, both concepts are vague, are increasingly less tied to geography, and overlap and crisscross in complex ways.  However, it is still possible to make a pragmatic distinction between them for our purposes.  Indeed, we are using the distinction as most people use it, out of convenience, to broadly identify and tag methodologies.  It should not be mistaken for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive partition of contemporary Western thought.  It should also perhaps be pointed out that, while some blurring of the distinction between the two has occurred of late, this by no means implies that the distinction has collapsed.  On the contrary, making a distinction in the context of this increasing blurring may help to clarify the various components that go into contemporary aesthetic discourse.

We have further divided continental thought into three strands that are also neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive.  Many speakers fall into more than one category, but we hope they will be predominantly one rather than the other, or at least assume such a position for the conference.  Culturalism, in particular, is itself not as easily identifiable as psychoanalytic or poststructuralist thought, comprising as it does the mix of orientations found in “Cultural Studies” departments, including perhaps, especially the critique of difference.

It should be pointed out that the various strands in continental thought can be accommodated, more or less, within analytic thought as well (poststructuralism or marxism, for example).  Indeed, this is perhaps part of the blurring that has occurred.  The differences that then arise, between, say, analytic marxism and continental marxism, might make the differences between analytic and continental frameworks more transparent.

Indian thought can be assumed for our purposes to be more or less independent of these developments, though even here there are overlaps with Western thought.  “Indian philosophical thought” is being used to stand for the various philosophical systems that originated in India in ancient times and continue to be developed in present times.  Indian aesthetics was a part of this development, and speakers will draw upon these sources in their presentations.

This brings us to the second triad in the conference, the three days of the program.  This division is more or less self-explanatory, or so we think.  We were especially keen to connect the frameworks to curatorship, at the risk of force-fitting some presentations.  It has also enabled us to keep a simple and uniform format for all three days.

There will be chairpersons from India who will chair the six morning and afternoon sessions and roundtables of the conference.  They will represent contemporary cultural discourse from the point of view of the different arts in India.  Their presence will help to relate some of the discussion, especially in the roundtables, to art in India.

In any case, the program is not intended to be taken literally.  The eighteen slots in the program are better thought of as sites for exploration and dialogue.

It is possible to pragmatically demarcate two levels in the program within each of the three frameworks.  The first level is the subject matter (the end of art, late capitalism, interpretation, curatorship etc.), and the second is the various frameworks (analytic thought, continental thought, Indian philosophical thought, each with their subcategories).

This distinction gives us a slightly more detailed way to state the goals of the conference.  The first goal is to focus on the second level, on the relevant framework, and then to develop arguments involving the first level, the subject matter, in terms of the underlying framework.  We hope speakers will make their frameworks clear, and the relation between framework and argument clear.  Secondly, we look forward to a dialogue at both levels, framework and subject matter.  This, we hope, will generate some reflection upon the foundations of theory, at a time when theory is being examined critically in the arts.

Perhaps we can start the dialogue by identifying what is common to all three orientations.  Our suggestion is a more or less muted rationalism, although each framework works with substantively different notions of logic, reason, and rationality.  By “rationalism” we mean a kind of apriorism.  Ultimately, our guess is that this is where the stakes lie, with different conceptions of reason and argument.

We have not meant to exclude empiricism, but have assimilated it to the three frameworks.  Pure empiricism is most likely to find expression on the third curatorial day, if at all, and we hope our speakers will not find this overly inconvenient.