I start from the premise that the possibilities for art are something that everybody has. In other words, everybody has something inherently creative and artistic in them. And it is in the nature of social life that there are ways to realise those possibilities. In fact, those possibilities are what make the world a habitable place.
As a teacher I teach my students the “Aesthetics of everyday life” course and we do a variety of things. One of the questions I ask is, how do people reclaim public space and how do they make it their own in a growing city such as Bhubaneswar, where so much is controlled by the power-that-be, by the state, by governmental institutions, by big businesses?
My interest is in the everyday practices that ordinary people engage in on a daily basis to contend with those organisations, structures and sources of power.
For example, I am interested in gardens — not the Ekamra Kanan, but gardens that are created, let’s say, by people who don’t own any land, who do not live in the suburbs and have a yard or a patch of ground in which something can be grown. And so, what I see here in a form of improvisation that is, for me, a key to survival. Improvisation is really where I would start in thinking about the aesthetics of everyday life.
I do not make that distinction between aesthetics and survival. What I do not like about the distinction is the notion that to be art, something has to be strictly for beauty. The arts of everyday life are highly utilitarian and they give form to value. That, for me, is what an art of everyday life is, something that gives form to value.
Let me try to talk about all this in terms of what it is not. It’s not about bringing art back into the everyday world, because I do not believe that art was ever left out in life or society. And it is not about discovering that what we normally consider as art in museums or galleries also occurs in the everyday world. It is neither of those. It is about the arts of living, by which I mean giving value meaningful form.
Art involves everything. It includes domestic interiors — the table, food and language. It also includes the arts of sociability, conversation, etiquette and dress. On a larger scale, it’s about gardens, parades and processions — all of which are very much alive in our time. So it’s a mistake to think you have to go elsewhere to find them. All you have to do is walk with your eyes open and senses alert on the streets of old Bhubaneswar, which is extraordinary.
They are performance arts par excellence. That is where the everyday art lies in action, people, fashionable simple clothes, flowers, vegetables and bulls.
Let me emphasise that I am not worried about the art world catching it, or recognising it. That doesn’t interest me, because the difference between what I call the arts of living and the art world has to do with differences in their mode of the exchange.
There is a fundamental paradox in the art world, because the ultimate value of art is seen to lie in its immediate commercial value.
Cut it any way you want, the art world is basically a commercial market, where the stakes are extremely high.
I do not know of anything in the world of that physical size and weight that can command those kinds of prices, and I take that as a defining feature of the art world.
In my humble opinion, money has nothing to do with aesthetic power; it is about the market.
In my view, aesthetic power has nothing to do with money. So art that is defined by the art world and all its institutions is not personally where my heart is and where my interests are. Let me pick up again on that notion of the work of artists who are not professionals but not amateurs either, and of work that is truly “contemporary” and not just contemporaneous, because that’s really an important issue.
The amateur-professional distinction is, for me, largely an art-world distinction, and I do not want to import art-world categories and art-world values into this realm that I am calling the vernacular, because I think what that does is prepare the ground for the art world to absorb that which is happening in everyday life, and I am not interested in the art world absorbing it.
Yes, in its own term, and making its own way.
To give you an example, the people who put up these stations of the cross processions, what does it mean to ask whether they’re amateurs or professionals? That’s not a meaningful distinction. Do you say of people who are pious and who venerate a saint — do you ask if they’re amateurs or professionals? It is an irrelevant distinction.
First of all, I would like to say that the amateur-professional distinction is a gate-keeping operation. It is a way to keep some people in and some people out — that’s what the distinction is about. At times, this distinction is reinforced by theoretical approaches that could be termed as gate-keeping in.
This distinction is upheld in the form of criticism, and the criticism will then govern future actions. So it’s gate-keeping any way you want to count it.
All these distinctions are meaningless to me. They are meaningless because all art is political. Some art makes political issues an overt subject, but do not tell me that formalism is not political. To suggest that some art is political and some art is not is bogus.
If by aesthetics one means beauty, virtuosity and skill, and when one says that — one is referring to materials and execution, and particularly to practices that are learned within a fine art tradition in an institutional setting with accreditation — that’s a very specific definition of what “art” is.
But if you take my approach, which has to do with giving value to form, that form may or may not be beautiful, it may or may not be the art of a skilful artist, it may or may not be an example of craft. But meaningful form and value for me is at the heart of what art is.
