The Art History to Come: Vivan Sundaram’s Marxism in the Expanded Field (Geeta’s Bookshelf), 1968–2000

For Vivan Sundaram [1943–2023]

In 2000, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram made a portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur’s bookshelf titled Marxism in the Expanded Field (MEF, fig. 1). Framed and sectioned by a beaten band of tape spelling a famous line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air,” and executed nearly a decade after India’s neo-liberal reforms of 1991, MEF documents a suddenly precarious twentieth-century landscape: the aesthetics and politics of international Marxism.[1]

Monuments to this landscape’s heterogeneity comprise MEF’s representative field. The books on the shelves include social histories of art (Max Raphael, John Berger, T. J. Clark, Arnold Hauser); feminist critiques of culture (Griselda Pollock, Janet Wolff, Linda Nochlin); materialist histories of ancient India (Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, D. D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar); works related to the Frankfurt School (György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno); poststructuralist and postcolonial writing (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida); and writings on revolution (C.L.R. James’s 1938 The Black Jacobins, an edited volume from 1968, Régis Debray and the Latin American Revolution, reflecting on Debray’s 1967 Revolution in the Revolution?, Puchalapalli Sundaraiah’s 1972 Telengana People’s Struggle and its Lessons). The collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky are arranged on the bottom shelf, an illustrative “base” for the towering “superstructure.”

 Revolutionary art, likewise, is cited throughout the work: Honoré Daumier’s The Uprising, from the revolutions of 1848; Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which commemorated the July Revolution of 1830; Diego Rivera’s portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the peasant leader of the Mexican Revolution; El Lissitzky’s lithographs for Victory over the Sun from 1923, a reflection on the 1913 Futurist opera that, arguably, initiated the avant-garde project adopted by the early Soviet state, and an apposite poster from a year later by Alexander Rodchenko, “Books Please! In all Branches of Knowledge” (figs. 2–5). Famous photographs of assorted individuals associated with the hopes and failures of the twentieth-century—A. K. Gopalan, Walter Benjamin, M. K. Gandhi—are folded across or worked over the spines (figs. 6–8).

Though it immediately registers as a constructed work, MEF retains documentary ambitions; here, it seems to say, is the evidence. And the evidence, hauled into one place and one plane, is overwhelming. A first response is to deflect its sheer mass, so it follows that the only published words about it are: “A shelf belonging to [Sundaram’s] wife, art historian and critic, Geeta Kapur, is crammed with books whose spines give us a fascinating glimpse into the political and philosophic range of interests of this brilliant writer, while tantalizingly withholding any information.”[2] Density makes MEF legible (it is about Marxism) at the same time that it makes MEF opaque (what is it about?). In soliciting such a response, MEF allegorizes Marxism itself in its late-twentieth century condition: a word, a weight, a serpentine labyrinth. Sundaram’s framing tape, a return to first principles, suggests that MEF offers a balm to this condition.[3] Our focus here will be on how and why this balm, which depends on pictorial construction, is the work of art.

Procedure

MEF is a digital print of a composite montage. The books on the shelves were taken from different parts of the Sundaram-Kapur household, arranged in real space, and then photographed.[4] A visual field—cutouts of colored prints (e.g., the Delacroix); rubbings and stamps on transparent sheets (for ex. Benjamin); postcards (e.g., a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo)—overlays the books, either folded across them or secured by pushpins. Additionally, specific regions look as though they have been directly stamped or photocopied: in the top row alone, from left to right, this includes Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913, fig. 9), the portrait of Gandhi, a lateral tableau of peasant action by Chittoprasad, and the picture of Gopalan (fig. 9, fig. 6).

In its procedure, MEF is a reminder of the historical avant-garde.[5] Sundaram cites Cubist collage, which introduced the readymade world to the realm of painting, through a cut-out of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (fig. 10).[6] Collage’s subversive possibilities, as oneiric masquerade through cutting, are indicated by Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (fig. 11).[7] Finally, Soviet photomontage, which re-synthesizes collage to a seamless, fictive, field, is quoted through Rodchenko and a fragmented film still from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.[8] In each of these citations, as well as his overall procedure, Sundaram is following a technical spoor that has at its heart the question of the integrity of the work of art—spliced and joined, cut and pasted, fragmented and totalized, MEF is at once dialectical and unified. 

If MEF cites the avant-garde procedurally, it cites the history of art pedantically. Sundaram’s use of highlighter yellow, thumbtacks and Post-it flags mark the imperative to study what is being shown, and the works recall slide transparencies and postcards collected on research visits.[9] Sundaram’s reference to art history’s primary work, looking to study, in its pedantic flavor, along with the “expanded field” of MEF’s title, his frequent characterization as a “bricoleur,” and his primary format in the 1990s—installation art—all corroborate a loss of faith in the traditional method (comparative looking) and ambitions (materialist historicism) of the discipline.[10] I will argue here, however, that Sundaram’s references to that discipline’s history demonstrate the same earnestness with which he returns to the Manifesto.

Which brings us to Geeta Kapur, whose bookshelf, in name, this is. MEF’s compositional precedent is Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Émile Zola (1868) in which the artist paints his partisan supporter in his studio, amidst books and reproductions, notably Manet’s own Olympia (1865), which Zola had defended (fig. 12). Kapur had done similar work for Sundaram’s generation of artists and MEF reflects, as I will show below, two formative moments of collective action in Sundaram and Kapur’s careers—1968, when they, along with other artists and theorists of color, were witness to the student protests in London, and 1981, when they, along with a group of artists at the MS University of Fine Arts in Baroda, undertook a new project of figural realism in India. These moments produced a future-oriented practice, an art history to come, centered on the relationship between the history of painting and the attentive beholder. This relationship was prescribed a social objective: radically de-hierarchized relationships between people through the material intermediary of the artwork.

1968

In 1968, I stopped going to art school. I was in the art school to do the history of cinema, then lived in a commune and wanted to be an activist and not an artist. And then I came to art. . . . I had not crossed over [from painting] into installation art, or new art, that was then being made in the Slade School . . . my Marxism, did say that there is a . . . certain respect for painting.[11]

So Sundaram writes in 2017, when he had securely crossed over into installation art. The same year, he made a large collage, 1968: Year of the Barricades, on a rough, progressively beveled, wooden support broken by a red flag (fig. 13). In it are pasted newspaper reports, posters, and photographs from the 1968 student movement in London (of which Sundaram was a part), Paris, Brazil, South Africa, and Tokyo.[12] In the top right corner, a series of enlarged details from the protests in Rio are cropped and pasted to shape what looks like the flattened bellows of a camera (a similar strategy, though sometimes ascending instead of descending, is used throughout the work) (fig. 14). The smallest of these details lands in two jammed reproductions of mid-century gestural painting: one looks like the “neo-tantra paintings” then being peddled by the Indian Academy of Fine Arts, another like French tachisme. Immediately beyond this chasm are five of the six paintings Sundaram himself made in 1968 (the sixth is to the far left in the same line of sight). Which leads us to ask: what was his Marxist respect for painting in 1968?

In the six pictures, or the “London Paintings,” that Sundaram made that year, he constructs painting as a surface of contradictions. In each of these works, smaller pictorial regions, blocked off by line and color, juxtapose pictorial space (distant or close), simulated texture (rough or smooth) and pictorial effect (mechanical or organic). One of these paintings, May ’68, is built with bright color—fiery yellows, oranges and reds; cool purples, blues, and white—drawn to section the canvas (fig. 15).[13] Like MEF and 1968, May ‘68 is split down the middle, here by a striped part-M, echoed within it in broken red amidst a swirling black ovoid cosmos of circles and crosses. Squares and bars are contrasted to glimpses of painterly life on the far right: potted plants and a brown tree trunk. Textural regions produce shifting perspective: the brown area within which the cosmos rests, for example, is marked with flecks of green and white, which gives the impression of soil tilted upwards, while the brown shaft to its right looks like it’s immediately in front of us.[14] Such shifting is heady; the eye is overwhelmed.

Kapur has referred to her physical response to these paintings as “vertigo,” a “spatial lurc[h],” or a “disorientation effect as achieved by a movie-camera.”[15] While the procedure itself is technical, a translation of the camera to painting, “a close-up and a long-shot” since as a “painter he has only a single frame to work with, so he includes the far and the near through drastic telescoping,” the procedure’s motivation is political.[16] Not only do these paintings incorporate a pictorial vocabulary for revolution—in May ’68 a pair of calipers that look like twin sickles, a gust of fiery yellow between them—they are also aimed at agitating the beholder into action.[17]

Kapur, who had been formulating in 1968 a thesis, In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Postcolonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting at the Royal College of Art with the Marxist painter Peter de Francia, also believed in what Sundaram described as the “respect” for painting.[18] She did so for a very specific reason: it was the medium that fully embodied a critique of modernity from a constructive historicist position. Kapur’s argument is complex and deserving of richer treatment, but the contours are clear enough. Modern oil painting, beginning with the Gustave Courbet and the revolutions of 1848, had a continuous critical tradition against the experience of industrial capitalism. If oil painting fully embodied this history of critique, it did so by being at odds with modernity—it was a process of slow, deliberate, construction.[19] Kapur believed, in 1968, that it was this quality that made painting important in the third-world struggle against capitalist imperialism.  Digging slowly and deeply “into the soil” of the land’s history, painting, as a creative act, “makes it fertile again.” (Kapur, In Quest of Identity). Painting’s time, as well as its long external history, brought together indeginism and internationalism, giving the postcolonial artist the opportunity to articulate a nascent, archaic, culture without falling back on nativist or civilizational roots. The concrete activity of painting made the creative and social “quest” of postcolonial identify resolutely dialectical. 

The elements, or conventions, of painting that the postcolonial artist should adhere to, according to Kapur, are threefold. The first two are historical—the construction of “pictorial space,” or the division of the canvas and the use of pictorial “elements” to construct the canvas, including color, line, and simulated texture. The third is directed at the future: the production of a “pictorial syntax,” a combination of the first two, as the meaning produced by the interrelationships between various elements in space, that “indicates the mode of apprehending experience.”[20] By presenting pictorial syntax, the postcolonial artist presents a critical account of her contemporary reality, the long past of her tradition, and the past of capitalist modernity. By apprehending pictorial syntax, the beholder is made aware of her reality, and so ready to transform it.

It is such a beholder that Sundaram’s 1968 paintings are addressed to. In May ’68 stands a white silhouette of a human being demarcated in blue. A red heart of dots fills her chest. A profile of her brain is connected to a tree trunk next to her. Her hand looks broken and ineffective. She is watching us, she is our surrogate. Sundaram here introduces not only the scissor and the camera to the brush, jerking in us physical responses, but a third element who will come to play a significant role in the history of modern Indian painting: the represented human.

1981

In 1981, Sundaram, along with five other artists, was part of a momentous exhibition, Place for People, devoted to a project of figural realism.[21] In her contribution to the exhibition’s catalogue, “Partisan Views About the Human Figure,” Kapur doesn’t write about the artists in the exhibition, but instead about the history of art that justified their cause, “a tribute to the imaginative concentration in their work.”[22] Kapur’s focus was the importance of the human figure to both Indian art from at least the second century BCE and to twentieth-century painting, right up to the artists featured in the exhibition. Two features characterized this realism’s traditional resources: idealized portraiture and serial narrative, drawn respectively from ancient Indian religious sculpture and medieval Indian painting. Their translation to easel painting, understood as the bearer of modernity, was of contemporary relevance: “to let people come back into pictures” or to make in painting a place for people, and to narrate the “story of this protagonist” by making painting for the people, so reinvigorating “the reciprocal energies between art and life” (Kapur, “Partisan Views”).

Central to Kapur’s understanding of realism is a question Marx asked in his Grundrisse (a copy is in MEF’s lower third): why was Greek sculpture still pleasurable to us after the loss of their social world?[23] In asking this question, Marx begrudgingly concedes Hegel’s claim that the ideal at the heart of this pleasure is the production of the collective gathered in the form of the human being.[24] The same ideal is vital in Place for People, a literal justification of a pictorial space through which a human can imagine herself, in her lived life, collectively.[25] At the time of Kapur’s writing, that public is yet to be created. Accordingly, she reverses Marx’s charge: how do we make a social art in the present, built from the past, for the future? Elaborating on her position in 1968, the socially conscious artist’s task was to create such a public by representing it.[26] If the stress, in 1968, had been on the historical nature of painting as a material intermediary, in 1981, it was the representation of human figures through painting that was diagnosed as that history’s contemporary protagonist.

Space for Reverie (1981), a painting Sundaram made for Place for People, represents one such protagonist (fig. 16). A young painter sits, brush in hand. To her left, in a flush of paint, are the materials of her work: a crystal palette, two tubes of falling paint, a levitating paintbrush, an easel, and a painting. Behind her is an illuminated black square and to her right is a bright blue tower, a stepladder reaching to a passage through the roof. Both are references to revolutionary Soviet art—Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International. Here these symbols of revolution appear inside the studio, in a pictorial space for contemplation, behind the artist, waiting. Four elements of Space—a finished painting, painting’s tools, someone watching, and revolution waiting—clarify Sundaram’s relationship to those attending his work. Sundaram says, the beholder is privy to “the enormous amount of work I put in,” which is to be replicated by the beholder: “If he stops to look at this he’ll stop longer and he’ll be curious to see what’s there,” and if she wants to go discover what’s there, “the sensuous [as color, texture, details, optical effects] parts of the painting allow her to do that.”[27] This theory of art, and its dependence on the beholder’s reciprocal energies, draws on the tradition of the social history of art that Kapur and Sundaram directly inherit: the work of the work of art, as first outlined by Max Raphael, whose The Demands of Art sits atop MEF. For Raphael, the art of the past makes us ask why the world is, in fact, as it is. [28] It is a question that, lodged in the work of art, potently it awaits “discovery and release.” [29] For Kapur, Sundaram, and their artist-comrades, these questions were to be produced by works of art in their future, “What could the world become if it attended to the work of art?”

2000

In 1968, painting was history (Kapur), it represented action through contradiction (Sundaram); in 1981, painting was for the people (Kapur), it represented them attentively waiting for their future (Sundaram). In 2000, the content of both criticism and art was history itself. That year, Kapur published When was Modernism, a collection of essays written through the 1980s and 1990s. Kapur’s explicit aim was to rapidly historicize five decades of art in India, suddenly open to a global market. [30] In the same decade Sundaram, along with other artists, turned to multimedia practices under the distinct pressure of both neo-liberalism and Hindu fundamentalism.[31]

A year before MEF, Sundaram made Column for Marx, a tall pillar of Marx’s collected works, sealed for later. Two years before it, he filled jute bags with texts about uprisings in the countryside and strikes in the factory, in his History Project, an installation confronting the continued legacy of colonial repression in the Indian nation-state.[32] Five years before MEF, he arranged valises with his own family memorabilia in the Sher-Gil Archive.[33] Seven years prior to MEF in his 1993 Memorial, a room-sized installation, he entombed, cast, pierced, magnified, “embalmed, incarcerated, buried, exhumed, and resurrected” a newspaper photograph of a dead body killed in the communal riots of Bombay.[34]

But MEF itself returns to an older, two-dimensional, dream. It remarks on the fortunes of that dream in 2000, when its future had arrived in a distorted shape. MEF incorporates the procedure of the 1968 paintings, montage, without their immediate bodily effect. It proposes the attentiveness, without representing it, of the 1981 paintings. It seems to be a window looking on to the evidence of a world that is slowly closing, a last photograph of the Marxist commitment to painting. MEF is a “teaser in Marx’s own words,” Sundaram says, “all that is solid melts into air.”[35] In the Manifesto, the failure of one kind of revolution is the inevitable beginning of another.[36] So it is in MEF. As if to make this point, Sundaram’s twice reproduces Tatlin’s tower (figs. 17–18).[37] Between and below both, the pyramidical arrangement reinforced by adjacent cut-outs, is a reproduction of a famous photograph of Vladimir Lenin in 1918 reinstating the ideals of the Manifesto seventy years later: “We are living at a wonderful time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realized (fig. 19).[38] MEF’s reproductions share a similar, regenerative, hope. Neither revolution nor art are at stake in MEF, only the dream it historicizes.

MEF is, Sundaram has said, “a real bookshelf, a fake bookshelf, an object in itself, an artifact.”[39] It is easily read as a dry and incapable memorial, what Krauss described as the “negative condition of the monument,” a dry assessment of utopia, deradicalized, “functionally placeless.”[40] It can easily be seen as death itself: the entire structure is nailed in with flat-buttoned, pin-like, and cylindrical-disc pushpins as if it is a coffin; the books read as tombstones and go into dark graves; the Post-its are deflated flags, insufficient sheaths; the hammer and sickle a paper sacrifice. Everything here is miniaturized, cut, defaced, partial; ghostly, disappearing, melting.

And yet MEF is a monument addressed to us.[41] We are in this world’s future, and MEF is constructed with the assumption that we take it—through our attentiveness—and that we leave it—at its opacity. If we choose the former, art historians can learn lessons from it immediately. What we call “global modernism,” MEF says, is a gloss over the incredibly heterogenous collective drive first outlined in the Manifesto: internationalism. If painting was murdered elsewhere, MEF declares, it was born that same century in parts of the third world. A richer history of twentieth-century art’s social project awaits.[42] We might not be the people Sundaram and Kapur expected, but we are here, and the specter is upon us: what is the art history to come?