Taking Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote as a starting point, The Politics of Paper addresses a renewed interest by contemporary artists in the medium of paper as integral to their practices and as a point of departure. By doing so, the proposed exhibition firmly situates itself within the larger movement of re-evaluating long-established forms of cultural production in the context of contemporary interpretative strategies. In a world more and more geared towards the digital, where ‘going paperless’ is becoming a clarion call, the paper has by no means lost its value and mark making still retains its intrinsic nature as a vital gestural behaviour.
However, this re-engagement with a particular medium (in this instance, paper) aims to emphasise ‘medium specificity’ as distinct from the Clement Greenbergian idea of ‘artistic media’, which upheld certain ideas of purity based on essential material traits, for instance - flatness in painting, thereby propagating formalism. Instead, this proposal emphasises artistic medium as a cultural/historical enquiry rather than an ontological one. By reconciling material specificity with the formal diversity of artworks, the ‘medium’ can constitute the topic of artistic practice or research and establish itself as an art form in its own right. To quote Rosalind Krauss: In order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly ‘specific’ to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity.”
Interestingly the ecosystem of Indian art has its independent logic, and the use of paper has followed a distinct trajectory of its own. With its introduction to India in the 12th century, paper, replacing the earlier palm leaf tradition, has brought about fundamental changes to the material histories of cultural production and imagination, from painting to printing and photography. In artistic practices, the paper has long been established as a medium, form, material, and concept, and the show examines art as a stigmergic, collaborative negotiation. Artists try to broaden existing frameworks by redefining what they have received from the past. The exhibition becomes a pedagogical site connecting diverse approaches – a network of flexible, a-centred, heterogeneous collaborations with multiple entries and exit ways.
- Ushmita Sahu
