January 24, 2009

The highlight of the first decade of the second millennium has been a bullish art market and its embrace of Pakistani Modern and Contemporary Art and the lowlight is the persisting apathy in academic circles regarding the development of intellectual resources like Pakistan’s art history and integration of indigenous cultural theories in the curricula.

Contrary to popular belief among young artists, history does not chain us to the past but prepares us to challenge establish norms with informed vigour. This understanding has much to do with the way Pakistani art history is taught as a mere footnote to Western art history which has further marginalised the Pakistani voice and minimised the opportunity to understand its contribution to contemporary art practice.

An acknowledgment of the past, through a well-documented history can counter the misconception that this generation has inherited a moribund tradition.

The cultural/intellectual movements in the region which are linked to the development of ideas can inform artists how writers like Ismat Chughtai broke the silence surrounding the lives of women to provide a breakthrough for local feminism shaped by our values and priorities. It was this consciousness of a generation of women that made the resistance to the Zia era by women poets and artists possible and is the genesis of the debate on women issues in contemporary art.

Reconstruction of religious thought in Islam by Allama Mohammed Iqbal, which has disappeared from the national discourse, needs to be revisited to understand the space it created for the discussion on modernity and religion in the personal and public sphere. Progressive Writers Movement that ran parallel to early Modernism in Pakistan offers many parallels in the assimilation of egalitarian and secular ideas that filtered through writings into society and art practice.

No art history can be complete without a study of the evolution of form and content.

Even a cursory glace at the art history of the last 500 years informs us of crucial transformations in the field. Five centuries would take us to the reign of the great Mughal ruler Akbar who stands among the greatest patrons of arts the world has known. His long rule, from 1556 to 1603 AD, made it possible to established ateliers with extraordinary talent.

The worldview of Emperor Akbar can be seen through the prism of the visual narratives he commissioned. His religious curiosity and tolerance led to illustrated versions of the Bible (Ramznama) and Ramayana and Mahabharata in Persian, a bold step, unimaginable in the orthodox courts of Europe at that time. His eye for talent, technique and content created opportunity for the mingling of the aesthetics of Hindu painters under Persian masters and the gradual exploration of European perspective all leading to a dynamic experimental era.

As a subtext to the achievement of Mughal Miniature painting is the constant questioning of the figurative representation driven by religious concerns that haunted the Mughal emperors. Emperor Aurangzeb succumbed to religious pressures during his period and all but disbanded the grand Mughal ateliers. This cyclic rise and fall of orthodoxy can be seen in other Islamic empires as well. Shah Tahmasp, the Safavid ruler, shrunk his studios for similar reasons, which benefited Humayun. These Safavid ustads were instrumental in establishing the Mughal Miniature Painting School.

Zahoorul Akhlaq who had extensively studied Mughal Miniature during his stay in Europe and United States, engaged with the complexity of this art form in his art and as the head of the Fine Arts Department at NCA, encouraged his students to investigate it through contemporary experience. Among the earlier artists to collapse the purist boundaries of miniature traditions was Shazia Sikander.

Just a history of medium can make fascinating reading. The vast colour palette of South Asia, the most vibrant and diverse compared to other art around the world at that time is indicative of the sophistication of the local art practice. The range of vegetal, mineral and organic material used to create this palette is a study in itself. Its use on vasli and fresco has left behind much evidence. The introduction of English watercolour and ink-based lithography etc produced by machines forms yet another chapter of this history.

The advent of oil paints via the regal portraits and its ascendancy through the curricula of art schools established its dominance till the artists of the New Bengal School challenged it though the Japanese inspired watercolour wash painting and woodcut prints. Watercolour, as it entered the vocabulary of Bengali artists, was introduced at Karachi School of Art by Mansur Rahi, a student of Ziaul Abedin, which led to the birth of a Watercolour Movement in the 1980s.

Its interesting to note how the boundaries between media are disappearing as purist practices are replaced by seamless connections; one such is the extension of miniature tradition through digital animations and digital manipulation.

What runs though the last 500 years like a common thread is the use of visual expression to project the ideology of the state. The culturally sophisticated Mughals set high standards of architecture, craft and painting to reinforce imperial authority. The British, after the Rebellion of 1857, developed an agenda to systematically undermine the cultural fibre through intervention in the education and cultural systems to create the Brown Sahib counterculture, a social force field controlled by access to power and privileges.

Continuing with the same repressive tools, post 1947 Pakistan saw culture as a way to further Islamic ideology, contrary to the progressive ideals of the artists. Among the first generation to resist the control of the cultural establishment, was strong and committed artists like Anna Molka Ahmed, Zianul Abedin and Zubeida Agha. The former with their role in education and the later as the director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Rawalpindi were instrumental in giving Modern art space to evolve.

The study of history allows multiple identities to converge with greater confidence enabling the artist to locate him/herself intellectually and artistically in the centre of the syncretic culture of Pakistan where they can discover that multiculturalism and hybridism is not a transient Western philosophy but a way of life.