Political art and market's social responsibility

At the recent Sotheby's sale titled 'Modern and Contemporary Day Auction' on 30 June in London, a screenprint on paper work by British artist Banksy, titled 'Napalm', sold for £37,800 (approx. Rs 36 lakh). It went above its pre-auction estimate of £18,000 - £22,000.

What is so fantastic about this screenprint? Those in the know are aware of the weight the name of the artist Banksy - that's a pseudonym for an artist whose identity is not known completely yet - carries in today's world. By pioneering a unique variety of sensationalism around his art, Banksy, who is rumoured to be about 48 years old, has created a buzz around his works, that, of course, are unique too, as 'Napalm' suggests. Banksy is a street artist, political activist, and a film director, whose works are pithy and often make an incisive comment on current socio-political affairs. He is most famous for his 'shredded painting' — when his work, 'Girl With Balloon' was finally sealed at a price at a 2018 auction, it shredded/ destructed itself as soon as the auctioneer's gavel went down on the winning bid, before anybody at the auction could react.

So, when an artist of Banksy's renown creates a work such as 'Napalm' and it is bought at an auction, art makes a vital inroad into contemporary socio-political discourse, which cannot be divorced from historical events that were monumental enough to change the course of the entire world's history and its understanding of what constitutes humanity.

Banksy's artwork 'Napalm', as is obvious, is a sharp comment on American catastrophic misadventure in Vietnam, particularly referring to the dropping of the deadly napalm bomb on a village of unarmed civilians by South Vietnamese troops backed by the US. An iconic photo from the day, 8 June 1972, showing screaming children running away from the scene of the bomb explosion, won its photographer Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize, while its central figure, then nine-year-old girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running naked with her back burnt severely by the bomb, became a legendary survivor (and is now a Canadian citizen). It is this picture that Banksy used to create his print, with two globally well-known icons of American capitalist imperialism, Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot of the burger giant, armed with their fake smiles and holding hands of the screaming girl. It is as trenchant as art can get to express a million emotions in one picture.

Selling art that has an opinion

The purpose of art is to provoke people into thinking - it's a well-worn quote in the world of fine arts, so widely used that it no longer needs an attribution. Artists through centuries have made art that has pushed people into thinking about the rights and wrongs in a society, even at a time when pretty landscape pictures and nude female figures ruled popular taste. However, it has never been easy for an artist to take a righteous stand and pay one's monthly bills as well with comfort. That, perhaps, remains the biggest reason why art born out of a thinking heart is far less in quantity than other varieties.

That's where a market can play an important role. If it puts its weight behind a work that raises questions and helps in bringing out a paradigm change in the way society judges its own actions, then art will be able to do its duty much more responsibly. One of the biggest examples of art raising its voice to a decibel high enough to frighten the government of the day, in India, was Chittaprosad's Hungry Bengal.

Chittaprosad (1915-78), one of India's most important modernists, is best remembered for his searing black-and-white drawings of starving people in Bengal as a result of the man-made famine of 1943. It killed an estimated 2 to 4 million people and is mockingly referred to as The Great Bengal Famine. Chittaprosad toured the Bengal countryside, documenting the plight of the starving citizens through writings and drawings for the Communist newspaper, People's War. His collection of these drawings was published as a book, titled Hungry Bengal — it was such a scathing comment on the man-made catastrophe that its copies were seized by the British government and burned. His junior, Somnath Hore (1921-2006) to embarked on chronicling this horrific event (as also the Tebhaga Uprising of 1946-47), creating an impressive body of work that launched a direct attack on the government's apathy and its policies that led to the famine in the first place. Quite a bit of this work was recently on view at New Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, as part of its consummate retrospective on the artist, titled 'Somnath Hore: Birth of a White Rose'.

Ever since, Indian artists through decades have picked up their paints and brushes to comment on the burning issues of the day, issues that have not let them have their peace till they had expressed their anger on the canvas. However, the market has hardly ever responded with concomitant enthusiasm.

Both Chittaprosad and Hore are considered among the very cream of India's early modernists, yet their art is definitely not hot property on the market as that of a few other Indian modernists such as MF Husain, SH Raza, Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and others.

Works that voice an opinion, unfortunately, by their very nature, are dark and sombre, and not 'aesthetic' as is generally believed of artworks. Hence, a collecting population like India's, which has recently come into heavy-duty art buying at auctions, doesn't have much space for despondent art in its collections yet. That's symptomatic of young markets like India, where big budget art buying is a recent phenomenon, initiated in the aftermath of the economic liberalization in 1990. We are in the early stages of reclaiming our heritage and adorning our houses with it. We are still reveling in our new found modern, global glory and therefore, not yet comfortable accepting the dark chapters of our past. We are still celebrating, and in some measure rightly so, the courage Indians in all walks of life showed to break free of colonial yoke, fine arts included. That is why the Progressive Artists' Group, which was the most aggressive in rejecting all things colonial in art and charted a new course to create a truly Indian modern idiom, continues to be the most successful block of artists on the auction circuit.

But there is hope for the Indian market to eventually mature and put its weight, as much if not more, behind works that are not strictly celebratory, that have a strong disturbing opinion, and that vociferously chronicled the ugly truths of our collective history lest they be forgotten by a population chasing utopia. That, in turn, will inspire artists to get bolder with their comments, much more than they already are. And then, perhaps, the oxymoron, of a market's social responsibility, would actually become its likeable trait.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist, editor and arts consultant. She blogs at www.archanakhareghose.com)