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The term, gennext, a shortened compound of 'generation next' first got its currency in Britain in 2006. That year the BBC World Service and BBC Television simultaneously ran a weeklong broadcast titled gennext. The aim was stated to be an understanding and exploring the world-view of those under eighteen. Earlier in 2004 a group of wrestlers consisting of four members, no doubt very young in age but physical heavyweights had called themselves Generation Next whether or not they wrestled against an old world view in order to forge a new one.
In India too, probably following the BBC broadcasts, gennext, both the signifier and its still imprecisely fluid signified, has been getting highlighted in diverse cultural arenas of art, sports and entertainment industry. Even new apartment houses are being designed and built with gennext interior decor and outdoor setting. New faces in the gallery circuit are being branded as gennext artists. They are young painters and sculptors definitely not under eighteen who have been showcasing images since around the turn of the century, or from a little earlier, which in many instances may seem to have engaging freshness of content and construction.
India's gennext art scenario (sounds a little flamboyant, no doubt!), appears to have been largely dominated by a generation of artists, on an average under/around thirty, led by their immediate seniors, mostly those based in Bombay and often trained in Baroda. But in this article I prefer to keep in view generally those very young artists who have featured in the Gennext or Young Contemporaries shows very recently mounted by Aakriti and the new faces seen in other Calcutta galleries.
Do the gennext artists swell the ranks of those crowding the contemporary art scene or, are they the artists of upcoming generation on the threshold of tomorrow's contemporary? Are they tomorrow's news today?
Let me pause here before I go on detailing my perceptions of this new event in India's current art scenario. I know that, call it by any name, a rose is a rose. But a name is nevertheless very important for me in my system of discourse. A name serves as an anchor point to which I keep returning so that my sorties and sallies do not go beyond a reasonable limit. Recently I wrote a catalogue intro for a large group show mounted for the inaugural of a new gallery. The show included a wide range of signature works by artists from all the generations since the 40s of the last century. The title I gave to the show was Modern to Contemporary. The stylistic and conceptual identity of artworks branded modern has ceased to be blurred in outlines, nor does it refer any more to a specific historical time frame, though a temporal context is not altogether excluded. Whereas contemporary has a temporal specificity but leaves stylistic branding fairly open-ended.
The term contemporary began to qualify art after 1950 in the West probably because western artworks of the post war decades, especially those showcased in the five yearly Documenta in Kassel, Germany, spawned such bewildering diversity in terms of style and genre that marking them contemporary was the most appropriate way out of the state of resultant confusion. A contemporary artwork sports a certain uncertainty about how it is to be allotted a stylistic category. Sometimes a work registers the presence of the absence to apply a Derridiean jargon of something of that has gone before and of something yet to come. Lodged in a neither-nor framework (another deconstructionist jargon! The next generation artists have neither arrived, nor not-arrived !), it is better to be given an omnibus tag, contemporary, rather than late-modern, post modern etc.
But though GenNext artists here, not necessarily only those hosted by Aakriti in the three shows including the current one, occupy only a segment of the contemporary art scene, they employ strategies of image-making which have been familiar to western art-watchers since the sixties onward. In the last two Aakriti shows the exhibits clearly belonged to two categories two dimensional and three dimensionalin plainer terms, painting and sculpture. The current show of course includes works such as video art, which like all other techno-based art forms has already earned the credit for upstaging modernism.
In these shows of the next/new generation artists one is struck by the abundance of figurative art. Ranging from realistic imagery of digital sharpness to those comprising free form figures, figurative art seems to have bounced back with a violence after a spell of abstraction practiced with ardour by the senior artists since the generation of the sixties. Bengal came late to it. Only by the end of the seventies did abstraction make an impactful appearance in the works of artists like Chitravanu Majumder and Bandhan Das, though Bengal art never strayed from its century old figurative mooring. The artists of the sixties, though not all of them, indulged occasionally or over a period in abstraction but soon reverted to the figurative. All India art scene, however, is still today dominated by towering personalities of abstractionist art. The new crop of figurative imagery seen in the works of these young artists, whether neo-realist or neo-expressionist, might recall the Stuckists but they do not practice figurative art in revolt against Conceptual art. This figuratism nevertheless comes from the West (think of pop figurative or figurative narrative of the sixties in the West) even though via Baroda.
Certainly works such as those bytaken at random Barun Chowdhury, Birendra Pani, Debashis Barui, Fashad Hussain, Avijit Gupta, Anasuya Chakraborty, Supam Adhikary, Muktinath Mandal, Tushar Waghela, Saptarshi Naskar, Snehasish Maity, Justin Tyler, Prandeep Kalita etc. have all the tropes of Postmodern imagery. The strategies of making these images can't be missed. In many instances the figurative motifs are evoked often digitally synthesized and manipulated and placed on a pictorial space of no specific semantic dimensions and without any apparent syntactical interlink. The overall finesse in some cases, as regards figuration, chromatic handling, textural and tonal works, linear elements, appears to have the tidiness of computer graphics even when it is partly or wholly a high quality technical execution by the artist himself. In other frames these unrelated forms and figures include visual quotes from, or references to, photography, pre-modern art, such as Kalighat pat, miniature painting, ad visuals etc. often as a major component of or as a clue to the meaning. The result may be pastiche-like imagery collaging, juxtaposing or yoking together seemingly mismatched motifs or multiple ideas. Nevertheless, the interface of these disparate figurative elements adds up to a charged visual strongly gesturing to generate a meaningful content of the obvious or oblique ironic critiques or comments addressed to contemporary issues diversely related to life and social reality. The viewer's response might begin as one to an engaging visual puzzle but if he is ready to be intrigued, teased out of thought and yet capable of a writerly approach to these strong-veined pictorial constructs he might relish in them a visually consumable intellectual feed.
One cannot entirely be unaware of their strong genealogical link with modernism. In fact the terms late-modern or postmodern, nebulous as they are, might hover in the air around these works as one watches them but the only thing the viewer has to make certain is the presence or absence of the modern in them. Does this new figurative completely delink itself from the modernist tradition that survived residually even among the Baroda artists who revived the figurative practice? Is there nothing beyond what has already been described and defined as Postmodern? If the answer in either case is simply a no, then there is nothing more to be expected from GenNext art. In that case art of the GenNext has arrived ending the uncertainty the not-arrived part of their status quo. We can't keep them any more in the contemporary category but straight away brand their art as postmodern. But there is a big if - if what I have mentioned above as their strategies of image-making fits their art like a glove.
This glove is a free size item created not by the artists but by the critics whose job is branding a new art practice and formulate its principal features such as those I have done above to characterise the new figurative, even though very sketchily. The most operative term is strategy. Any new art practice that rebels against an exhausted tradition is spurred by the young artist's may be a GenNext artist's new experience, new sensibility, his opening up of a new vista of art. He doesn't think in terms of a new strategy of image-making. He wants to mate his experience with expression, he needs, and creates a new form for a new content neither of which is an exclusive independent entity like a hand and a glove tailored to fit the hand.
In the early stage of a new art movement, a new art practice, the artist depends entirely on his own resources of experience and fresh vision, which he defines exclusively by the practice of his art, unaided by the perceptions of the viewer or the theoretical discourse of the critic. This is a period of art history when a paradigmatic shift threatens to break upon the art scene of the day which thrives on the outdated but unchallenged values. The art audience and art critics are still uncertain about the impacts of the new art practice and yet to come to terms with it. This is the moment of art's pure creativity. The artist turns out work which has yet to be labelled, yet to be theorised and greeted with perceptive critiques. But all this is to happen very soon. For new art needs appreciative criticism, new practice founded on the solid base of new theories to reach to the art public grown over the years on traditional aesthetic and generally averse to be shocked into a new concept of art.
As critiques and theories come to the aid of it, the new art movement gathers momentum but it has by now crossed the early stage of creative purity. For, now the critics get the upper hand or it is the glove they tailor of theories, of aesthetics, of what they formulate as the strategies of making radical images which becomes the most visible part of new art, not the hand inside. True, theories do not precede practice and are definitely informed by the latter. But once new art comes into vogue, much due to the service rendered by the critics, theories inform not only art viewing but also art practice. They enable viewers to penetrate the surface of new art in vogue, often opaque and obscure. Also the artists, after the first flush is over, or those who come later to follow the elders, often create images by mastering the formulated strategies of image-making. Then one can choose to do an art already labelled, not art that awaits or defies labelling or be given the status quo, call it contemporary; or GenNext when the artists are very young.
--Manasij Majumder
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