The current era, arguably above all others, demands our close attention to several competing global concerns. It entices us with ever moreelaborate and decadent distractions, which collectively test our convictions and reason while tantalizing our desires. Responding to this, Rathin Kanji's works embody the rapidity of change in our modern society while simultaneously tapping into a new aesthetic which balances fragmented imagery, text and collaged material with a philosophical program aimed at alerting viewers to the peril of environmental destruction and societal upheaval. Kanji's intimate compositions,which reflect the turmoi l and tumult of his native India, seek to chronicle the joys and discomforts of experience, even as it threatens to fall into disjuncture.
Were his compositions cynical, self-indulgent, or rudimentary, his frame work might be dismissed as merely academic. But the multiple layers of humor (free of any hint of the aloof superiority that inheres in irony) that Kanji injects into his works transform them from doom-and-gloom soliloquy to resigned-but-blunt, mirthful comic responses to consumerism and globalization. His works-which often express themselves as conceptual associations between the written word and the deliberate anthropomorphizing of cities-rely heavily on juxtaposition and stark or high-contrast color that both directs the eye and compels theviewer to deep contemplation. Likewise important is Kanji's need to comment on the risks inherent in world capitalism. He seems to ponder whether the promise of freedom offered by our era's newly-expanded interconnectivity does not, in fact, also make our lives more atomized. As such, Kanji's works assay and epitomize the dilemma of our as-yet-unnamed, "post-postmodern" era.
Kanji's works frequently juxtapose numbers and text with geometric fields of red, blue, yellow and black (which, upon close examination,reveal themselves to be simply-applied grid work, acrylic paint, newsprint, stenciled lettering and other collage). On the hermeneutic level, his works employ highly culturally derived elements (the above collaged materials) in the service of parable-like instruction. On this point Kanji's work can be seen as a herald of the consequences of change in his local Kolkata community.
Modern artists sought to discover the essence of beauty and aesthetic value, through indulgence in formalist exercises, however the instead introduced skepticism regarding the value of art. This gave way, in the postmodern era, to a preoccupation with self-conscious pastiche, with allegory, and with simulacra. Questions regarding artistic content, modes of criticism, and the value of originality raised during both of those eras are in noshort supply, even now. Still, artists today seem less interested in entertaining debate over critical and aesthetic concerns, leaving them more determined to parse the power dynamic and to explore sexual and gender difference in pursuit of a relational view of art.
Arthur Danto's The Transformation of the Commonplace suggests that an art observer must attend to the non-exhibition quality of a work of art, looking not only to the visual elements within the work but also the "historical, rhetorical and philosophical contexts in order to comprehend meaning…in this way our interpretation constitutes the work of art."
Post-postmodernism was precipitated by a general collapse of international styles and schools in the West as a reference or arbiter of the avant-guard. This has been replaced by nationalist and local forms that reference mainstream media.
On this issue the art historian David Craven in his essay Art History and the Challenge of Postcolonial Modernism has observed that "the term 'style' now belongs much more in the domain of micro-cultural studies than in the macro-analytical field of art history. " Thus, Craven believes that one is left to "deal critically with the 'visual languages' and discourses of nation-states and national institutions…" For him, current art criticism deals necessarily with "discontinuities both in the arts and in society more generally." Likewise, Kanji's works are informed by the specific cultural and aesthetic issues of his cultural milieu through the juxtaposition and recontextualization of familiar elements. Kanji is freed from attending to a specific international program, leaving him at liberty to highlight local and even larger global concerns with wit and sincerity.
Though Kanji is quick to credit such modernist artist as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly as sources of inspiration for his work (see images 1, 2 and 3), the particular approach of his latest compositions is more in line with such contemporary and conceptual artists such as Adrian Piper, Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker (see images 4, 5, and 6). Piper's work resonates especially well with Kanji's in that both artists seem primarily to be interested in reinventing the relationship between viewer and artist.
Of Ms. Piper's work, critic Maurice Berger has noted (in the journal Afterimage) that "she has shifted the involvement of the spectator; neither artist or [sic] viewer is permitted the usual defensive rationalizations that exempt us from political responsibility of examining our own racism." Similarly, Kanji's work-through sharp color shifts and occasional echoes of text and imagery-aims to confound everyday relationships with the fragmentary nature of everyday life, and to conversely de-codify transition between idea and object (see images 7 and page 21).
All of this connects Kanji with current artists who seek in their work to bind their art up with the specific social, political and historical contexts in which they live. Kanji continues their efforts and unifies them by creating elegantly modeled constructions and placing them within urban architectural environments, and investigating the city's iconography (it's non-spaces and spaces-in-between) to create metaphors on his own elaborate ecology of scale and of issues such as transnational identity.
Berger, M (1990) The critique of pure racism: An interview with Adrian Piper. Afterimage, 18 (3), 5-9.
Danto, AC (1981) Transfiguration of the commonplace: A philosophy of art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilcott, Anne (1996) Is what you see what you get? A postmodern approach to understanding works of art.
Studies in Art Education, 37, (2), 69-79.
Craven, David. (2002) Art History and the Challenge of Postcolonial Modernism, Third Text, Issue 3, 309-313.