Turning to the Goddess: Anachronism, Secularity, and the Late Style of Tyeb Mehta and K. G. Subramanyan

ARTMargins ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Karin Zitzewitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Art History ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Late Style ◽  
Religious Image ◽  
Indian Art

At nearly the same late-1980s moment, two of the most important artists of India's twentieth century, Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009) and K. G. Subramanyan (b. 1924), turned to the goddess as a subject for painting. Although Mehta and Subramanyan represented different strands of Indian modernism, they had both hitherto largely limited themselves to secular subject matter. This essay accounts for the significance of their goddess turn by discussing it as an example of late style, as theorized by Edward Said. It finds in these paintings the intransigence, anachronism, and negative intervention championed by Said, but also a critique of the secularism that he argued was the root of late style. Mehta and Subramanyan's intervention came at a crucial moment in Indian art history, as modernism began to be undermined by a rising group of narrative painters supported by the critic Geeta Kapur. The older artists’ embrace of the religious image sits uneasily in Kapur's influential narration of post-colonial Indian art history.

scholarly journals BETWEEN ‘CELESTIAL MAIDEN’ AND ‘SACRED PROSTITUTE’: THE MYTH OF THE DEVAͲDS5 IN THE IMAGINARY OF THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN CLASSICAL DANCE PRACTITIONERS

SYNERGY ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinescu Angelica ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Indian Classical Dance ◽  
Medieval India ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Indian Art

One of the most controversial discussions in the contemporary Indian arts environment remains the connection of the post-colonial classical dance practice with the DevadƗsƯ or the MaharƯ, the temple dancing girls. Born in the Early Medieval India, amidst and in close connection to the Bhakti and the Tantric movements, abiding in the temple institution, the so-called ‘DevadƗsƯ temple system’ remains a mystery, between awe and fascination to the nowadays practitioner and connaisseur of Indian arts. While tracing back the socio-religious contexts that brought the temple dancers on the foremost place of the stage of Indian art history, the author looks for the understanding of this myth in the imaginary and the reality of contemporary practitioners, from the perspective of a foreigner researcher-cum-practitioner of an Indian art form. The paper is based on consulting the existing literary sources concerning the DevadƗsƯ system, and the research is focusing on the nowadays classical dance practitioners’ imaginary (re)construction(s) of this system. Till today, here she stands, the woman-as-dance practitioner, either Indian or from any other part of the world, at the cross-road of all myths, imaginarily rooted in the past, but living all the aspirations of the nowadays social, cultural, religious, political dynamics, neither celestial maiden, nor sacred prostitute.

“For the Greater Glory of Indian Art”: The Life of an Endangered Art Treasure in Modern India

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tapati Guha–Thakurta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
The One ◽  
Indian Art

The essay narrates the biography of a single art object—acclaimed in recent history as a “masterpiece” of ancient Indian sculpture—to invoke the larger spectrum of practices and discourses that came to constitute the field of art history in modern India. It explores the shifting locations and aesthetic trajectories that marked the transformation of this artifact from a curious archaeological “antiquity” into a national “art-treasure” and icon of Indian femininity, and later even into “a travelling emissary of ancient Indian art and culture.” On the one hand, the spectrum of travels of this object provides an ideal instance for mapping over the twentieth century the changing colonial, national and international stature of Indian art. On the other hand, its career also pointedly reveals the clash of contending claims and the politics of “return” and “restitution” that have attended the nationalization and artistic consecration of many such objects.

The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
East Asian ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Global Understanding

Writing from a wide range of historical perspectives, contributors to the anthology shed new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial and postcolonial times in South and South-East Asia. In doing so, this anthology addresses an important gap in the global understanding of documentary discourses, practices, uses and styles. Based upon in-depth essays written by international authorities in the field and cutting-edge doctoral projects, this anthology is the first to encompass different periods, national contexts, subject matter and style in order to address important and also relatively little-known issues in colonial documentary film in the South and South-East Asian regions. This anthology is divided into three main thematic sections, each of which crosses national or geographical boundaries. The first section addresses issues of colonialism, late colonialism and independence. The second section looks at the use of the documentary film by missionaries and Christian evangelists, whilst the third explores the relation between documentary film, nationalism and representation.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

Subordinate-Deity Models of Ultimate Reality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Metaphysical Problem ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.

scholarly journals Edgar Wind on Experiment and Metaphysics

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Falkenburg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Philosophy Of Physics ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Theory Formation ◽  
Internal Realism ◽  
Detailed Interpretation ◽  
Holistic Theory ◽  
Central Claim

Abstract The paper presents a detailed interpretation of Edgar Wind’s Experiment and Metaphysics (1934), a unique work on the philosophy of physics which broke with the Neo-Kantian tradition under the influence of American pragmatism. Taking up Cassirer’s interpretation of physics, Wind develops a holistic theory of the experiment and a constructivist account of empirical facts. Based on the concept of embodiment which plays a key role in Wind’s later writings on art history, he argues, however, that the outcomes of measurements are contingent. He then proposes an anti-Kantian conception of a metaphysics of nature. For him, nature is an unknown totality which manifests itself in discrepancies between theories and experiment, and hence the theory formation of physics can increasingly approximate the structure of nature. It is shown that this view is ambiguous between a transcendental, metaphysical realism in Kant’s sense and an internal realism in Putnam’s sense. Wind’s central claim is that twentieth century physics offers new options for resolving Kant’s cosmological antinomies. In particular, he connected quantum indeterminism with the possibility of human freedom, a connection that Cassirer sharply opposed.

A Polanyian rationale for a liberal arts core curriculum

2021 ◽  
pp. 147787852199623
Author(s):  
Jon Fennell ◽  
Timothy L. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Core Curriculum ◽  
Moral Imagination ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Michael Polanyi ◽  
Character Formation ◽  
Selection Of

What would we have the school teach? To what end? In the name of democracy, and building on the pioneering epistemology of Michael Polanyi, Harry S. Broudy, a leading voice in philosophy of education during the twentieth century, calls for a liberal arts core curriculum for all. The envisioned product of such schooling is a certain sort of person. Anticipating the predictable relativistic challenge so much on display in our own time, Broudy justifies the selection of subject matter (and thus the envisioned character formation and cultivation of moral imagination) by reference to the authority of experts in the disciplines. This response fails to fully repel the assault, thereby revealing the need for a dimension of Polanyi’s thought whose significance exceeds even that of the epistemology that Broudy so effectively invokes.

Jainism in Danger? Temple entry and the rhetoric of religion and reform in post-colonial India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Open The Doors ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.

Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Emison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Visual Composition ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
And Gender

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas---not least the idea of the power of visual art---across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, 1920s-mid-60s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, narrative and visual composition shifted in both cases toward acknowledging the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates and preoccupations are part of the story told here.

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