On 8 August 1998, we have the honour to have Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam from Dhaka University, Bangladesh to hold a dialog with us.
Am 8. August 1998 haben wir die Ehre, Herrn Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam von der Universität Dhaka, Bangladesh zu einer Gesprächsrunde bei uns zu haben.
His IMPRESSIONS and COMMENTS
I reached Germany on the last day of July, 1998, in what appeared to be
the height of summer. The days were hot and oppressive, but the nights
were cool and pleasant. It was unusual weather, by most reckoning, and I
naturally made the best of it.
My first stop was Germersheim where I was invited to attend a seminar on
the literatures of regions and nations organized by the Scottish Studies
department of the University of Mainz. There I spent a few hectic days in
the company of scholars from three continents, discussing topics and
sharing ideas. The seminar itself was a round of deliberations in
plenaries and small groups, held in the cool and comfortable rooms of an
old, stone building. But no less important as venues were the beer
gardens across the street which most participants actually preferred! The
seminar was a kind of intellectual feast that tends to drag and become
overwhelming towards the end. I was therefore looking forward to my few
days in Bonn and Cologne, where, in the company of my artist friends, I'd
have a first hand exposure to German art. Maruf Ahmed, who lives in Bonn
and has a studio at Cologne, was to be my host. He has already made his
mark in art circles in Cologne through more than two decades of dedicated
work. Jay Koh, another artist friend of mine, who lives and has a studio,
Arting, in Cologne, had invited me to give a lecture on contemporary
South Asian art and the post-colonial situation to a selected group of
artists-- not just painters, but creative people working in different
fields.The audience was also expected to participate, and cover the other
end of the spectrum, i.e., the German/European situation, and how they
see the art of other countries. Jay had himself done this in a number of
countries in the past few years, including Thailand and Bangladesh. I was
present in his last colloquium in Dhaka, where many young artists turned
up. There were many questions, many queries. In the end, everybody had
spoken out; there was general consensus on some areas (the role of an
artist in a developing society, the need for cross-cultural
understanding), but there were individual opinions, too, which the others
appreciated. In another such colloquium, Jay used video footages to
launch his discussion, and encouraged participants to propose their ideas
in a visual frame. It was an invitation to come out of the set pattern of
discourse, and the participants enthusiasistically followed up.
My meeting with the creative people of Cologne was set in the afternoon
of a rather hot and steamy day, and it was no fault of those who chose to
remain out of door, since on such days the riverfront and watersports
become vastly more attractive than a lecture on the post-colonial
experience in art. The gathering was therefore much smaller than
expected. A few artists, film makers, a philosophy student, and one or
two interested people made up the audience. Jay was there, and so was
Maruf, who had to drive me all the way from his flat in Bonn. The
discussion began rather uncertainly, as I found the task of introducing
my topic a bit ponderous, given the outdoorish mood in the air. But soon
I overcame this initial uncertainty, as I began to see that the small
audience was not only attentive, but also quite well informed. As I
finished my presentation, the audience began to join in, first by asking
questions, then by giving their opinions. I found the responses and
reactions most illuminating, since I had laboured under the illusion that
German artists, like most of their European counterparts, were not much
interested in what went on around the world, except for some stereotypes
and mythic frames of reference. For example, I expected them to have
known about the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Hussein , or the fim maker
Satyajit Ray, but not about those belonging to the so-called fringe. But
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the 'fringe' is not that an
unknown quantity with this group. I myself am particularly interested,
as part of my subaltern historiographical research, in exploring the art
of the 'fringe,' since so much of the truly remarkable art is being
produced by the artists sidelined by the mainstream and the academies:
women, ethnic artists working with their own motifs and themes, the
amateurs, among others. My colloquium was thus quite satisfying at the
end, although I wish there were more people in the audience.
My thesis that afternoon centred round three cognate ideas. I wished to
make a case for the so-called third world artists as victims of neglect
and misinformation because of their political-economic situation. My
point was not that the west's assessment of these artists is a
pre-requisite for their acceptance in its galleries and academies, but
that that assessment, if and when made, should be based on terms of
reference unique to their situation. The west's preferences and
prejudices should not colour its perception of these artists. Mine was an
attempt to get rid of a mind set (which some critics see as a hard to
get rid of orientalism) that sees virtue only in the exotic and the
mythic, and disregards anything that resembles the west's very own
constructions, such as western modernism. Taking the case of modernism as
an example, we may see subtle operations of an ideaology that places the
east at the other end of the assembly line-- as consumers-- of this
modernism, not as its manufacturer. The term third world is also
something that I dispute: it is a coinage made by the west, solely on
economic and political considerations, and is therefore, immensely
restrictive. I tried to point out that the artistic productions in the
east should be taken on their own terms. If the east formulates a western
form of modernism, it is ultimately not an imitation, but a reformulation
of the concept, since every interpretation of an experience (including
the 'modern' experience) is a new creation. And as a new creation, it
always charts out its own distance from the existing opus even while
contributing to it. The western stereotyping of non-western art is
therefore, a fundamental negation of the creative mind, which, in every
geographic, ethnic, cultural or political region, refuses to perpetuate
sameness, and is content only when a new configuration of experience or
feeling is achieved.
I have tried, in many of my previous writing on art, to propose a new
understanding of Asian, particularly South Asian art. My task became
rather difficult at one point when some Bangladeshi artists began
practising a form of art that, in the absence of suitable 'labels' (art
critics, art galleries, and even some artists themselves like to have
such labels for comfortable classification and categorization), was
called postmodernist. Now, postmodernism has been a particularly western
formulation, which the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson has called 'the
cultural logic of late capitalism,' and therefore quite specific to the
late-capitalist cultural ethos of the west. But both modernism and
postmodernism have relevances and resonances in the east that are very
much local. These are determined by a cross current of social-cultural
and historical events that cannot be understood if the context is taken
out. It can also be argued that the economic, political, social and other
forces that created conditions for modernistic or postmodernistic ideas
to emerge in the west are also operative in the east, though in different
guises and forms.To insist on their watertight division is to ignore (or
even deny) the forces of global change.
Jay Koh's video presentations also emphasize this point. The media, more
than anything else, and especially after their globalization, represent
such forces of change. In my discussion, the film makers expressed their
point more enthusiastically and forcefully than the paint artists,
although the artists too, at the end, agreed. The meeting ended with some
shared understanding and realizations that would, I hope, help in the
promotion of a new understanding of Asian art.
Syed Manzoorul Islam