Talk by BINA SARKAR editor/publisher of Gallerie magazine 

Contemporary New Language Within Indian Art 

I come from India, a country where most of its over 900 million population, couldn't care whether the impressionists have been revived or post-modernism is to be debated. For 90% of our people, survival is really the concern - how to combat each day of deprivation and injustice while the government squanders millions of rupees in nuclear proliferation and defense budgets. It is also a nation of extreme elitism, and a very large middleclass that is lulled by the print and electronic media into a consumerist stupor. 

The visual arts, in such a climate can only flounder. Interestingly, it doesn't. In fact, in the last two decades we have had an upsurge of Art coming into being, in the national and increasingly, the international market. A situation where the artist, especially if young, no longer needs to wait after years of struggle and despair before his or her work is recognized. Today's young artist is organized, savvy and in touch with the worldly world. 

And today, the struggle is of another kind. Singular. Individualistic. To be or not to be. To be famous, or not to be; to be rich, or not to be; to be cerebral, or not to be; to be damned, or not to be. These are the dynamics of 20th century post-modern India. 

Today, there are no tidal waves sweeping groups of artists into idealistic isms, there is no cafe culture or passionate movements. Most of our artists are insular, working alone, sometimes glancing over the shoulder to ensure one is not left behind in the race to be on the collector's list, the media list, prestigious exhibitions, art camps or auctions. Most artists today are their own agent and PR person and if there is an ism, they are the wunderkinds of consumerism. 

Art worldwide has moved ahead to be not just another product for marketing but a very prestigious one that takes you to dizzying heights of cultural and social elitism. As in Europe and America, the art circle in India is increasingly an arena where the artist performs while the buyer flexes his financial muscles. 

In the last two decades particularly, the 80's and early 90's, the art situation has been more electric than eclectic. A passion to be seen and heard and discoursed about, more than a raw passion for the work in progress. Critics, qualified or otherwise, have reveled in their columns, pontificating, theorising, dismissing or creating star artists, anointing them with the ubiquitous media oil. Increasingly, art dealers and collectors are not just art aficionados but shrewd traders, wise people of commerce who can smell a good investment leap years away. 

Notwithstanding, what has emerged through this frenetic activity is a trove of some good work, as vibrant and varied as the topography and culture of our land and its people. The canvas is larger, the artist more agile. The wise one is he who surfs the waves of media whim, yet remains untouched by it. The urban Indian artist today is a global animal quite firmly, arrived. 

In all of this, to make coherence of the frenetic activity in the visual arts, I have tried to go beyond its aesthetics and exclusiveness to seek a validation. How do we create a significant art engagement in the print media-is a question I have asked many times. How do we make it relevant to our complex society? And cross territorial boundaries to make sense in a global context… 

How do we bring it into a space where it goes beyond the art enthusiast to communicate with and be coherent to a larger audience, outside the art community? This has been my concern - to reach a wide cross section of people not necessarily connected with the arts. To reaffirm the fact that life flows into art and art into life. 

More than ever before, the image today is a compelling engagement in our lives-astonishing breakthroughs in technology have ensured that the image will be more sophisticated, more seductive and more confrontational in its discourse with its viewers. In this day and age, image anarchy has taken over. 

How do we harness the power of a printed image to speak the language of the people? The image is not only evidence of an artist's work, but a connection with the artist's sensibility. Meaning must be discovered in this connection, and the artwork made more tangible in the viewers eye, to be stored away in memory or forgotten in ambiguity. To provide the option to do so becomes incumbent upon the editor, the art director and the publisher. 

The plastic arts for centuries have been a lone journey. The artist and medium locked in a one-to-one dialogue. I cite three examples of the power of an image: 

An artist paints an emotion, as Munch did, in 'The Scream'. The tension of the long wavy lines still reverberates after a hundred years. 

Or he makes an ordinary moment extraordinary. Vermeer's 'Maid with a Milk Jug' captivates us after three hundred and forty years-a face softly lit by an open window, the yellow ochre and indigo blue of her dress etched forever. 

In 'Guernica', Picasso's single most powerful painting, you do not see acts of violence, but you feel the pain. Nowhere do we witness the Spanish civil war, but the woman's cry, the gaping eyes, the contorted bodies of horse and men are a silent scream that no one hears. These images are as powerful today as those of falling bodies from the towers of Babel in New York, two of them, as searing as the pain of the wounded in Kandahar, in Kashmir, in Chechnya, in Columbia, in Belfast, in Bihar… 

How do we record these moments? How do we do justice to a work that has been a felt experience? How do we convey the pale sky of an Abanindranath Tagore landscape or communicate the meditative lines in a Gaitonde abstract. How do we convey the power of installation art, and works on video? How do we engage the viewer in recognising a work of art as a process of knowledge? That it speaks of a moment in time, in context to a situation. 

These are questions we must raise in the print media. How to present art aesthetics and ideas. And how to balance the two. Today particularly, an honest critique is difficult to come by. Much of the visual arts have slumped into a comfortable complacency-Most artists are painting to sell, critics writing to keep deadlines. The serious art critic in our country is rare and over-worked. 

Art must be a palpable experience. It must inspire and energize. And like any good thing that deserves to be shared, art must be shared. It must go beyond the art community to include and make aware a wider viewer-ship. It must be a democratic, inclusive process, a dialogue between individuals and nations. 

And so we come to Gallerie, the arts and ideas journal. Four years ago I began an exciting journey with a small group of people. A formidably uphill, but exciting and rewarding journey. A journey of ideas called Gallerie. 

The validation I was seeking evolved through Gallerie. To make art go beyond the visual image and sensory perception and into areas of discourse. To appropriate information, cultural influences and experiences and juxtapose them with the work of an artist-so they work in tandem-a single thread of energy weaving through artworks and ideas to reflect the awesome universality of human sensibility no matter where in the world it surfaces. 

This is not to say that a painting should not give visual pleasure alone. A beautiful still life or landscape, a sensuous figure or miniature may please the senses in a singular function. But when the viewer-spectator is drawn into its context, when the image becomes a polyglot, as it were, then its dynamics provide a wonderful tool for communication. 

To harness images into ideas or the other way around thus became an Alice in Wonderland adventure. A door opened into a tunnel, into a room, into a courtyard, into a garden into fields, into the cosmos. Not to be waylaid and have your head chopped off by an arrogant and silly Queen became the challenge. In terrestrial life, the Queen appears in multiple avatars-the elusive advertiser, the indifferent book distributor, or the mother of all deities, the sponsor. It can be an uninformed market, frivolous media or a dangerously careless production service. 

To navigate and survive all of this is in itself a perilous adventure. Especially when you are committed to your work, believe in excellence and running on a shoestring budget. The litmus test is in not compromising on production values even when you are way out of resources.

Above all, Gallerie is a small effort to dialogue with the world, to foster global understanding and respect for diversity through the visual and performing arts, and through essays and poetry. It's been a huge learning process for us at Gallerie to achieve some of this. There's a long road ahead. 

Bina Sarkar