I have seen a whole lot of graffiti that is plain UGLY. Yes, that's a subjective assessment but I reserve the right to comment on anything, so why should this stop me?

And, then again, I have seen murals on city walls that are absolutely fantastic! I can think of murals in Berkeley, California and Los Angeles that are quite clearly a focal point for the community. The artwork depicts either the community's history, a sense of pride in their leaders or just a beautiful sunrise.

Mexican scientists have apparently found a way to discourage artists from expressing themselves. What's wrong about this is that it lumps together artists with gang-bangers, who post their nonsensical signs willy-nilly just to warn their enemies off of “their” turf. It makes it impossible for artists commissioned or voluntarily charged to create works of art in a community space for all to share and appreciate. I think this is plain wrong!

I know Diego Rivera, Mexican's foremost muralist, must be rolling in his grave.

Economist.com | Deleting graffiti

Via John Laxmi, the NY Times review of two photo exhibitions based on India, at Yale University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/arts/31COTT.html

October 31, 2003
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ART REVIEW | ‘TRACES OF INDIA'; ‘Company Culture'
Composing Indian History, One Carefully Framed View at a Time
By HOLLAND COTTER

NEW HAVEN – Life happens, but history is made, as in invented, cooked up. You blend together events, people and places, stir in ideology, and presto, you have a docudrama version of reality. The truth is in the mix somewhere.

Art, in its role as visual history, naturally shares this formula, most obviously in history painting, commemorative sculpture, religious and political architecture. They are all out to sell a point of view, and the more inventively or insistently they do so, the readier we are to overlook the manipulation or buy the message.

Few art forms are as magnetic as photography. None can record more faithfully or dissemble more convincingly. This paradox is the impetus behind two finely chiseled exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, “Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation,” and the smaller, complementary “Company Culture.”

Both are visual essays, think pieces. If you are allergic to such things, can't bear to read wall labels, or are firm in a belief that art speaks for itself, you might not consider the larger show to be an art exhibition at all. But if you're comfortable with an expository format and have the time and energy to engage with – which doesn't necessarily mean agree with – the show's arguments, there is a lot for you here, not least dozens of extraordinary images.

The story the two shows share begins with a historical coincidence: the invention of photography and the consolidation of British rule in India in the first half of the 19th century. The monopolistic merchant corporation called the East India Company, under the auspices of the British government, had been on the subcontinent for 200 years. The company initially came to buy spices and silks, but soon took over the shop. Britain supplied troops to protect its interests, and India was paternalistically embraced as part of the fabric of a greater Britain.

As part of this proprietorial arrangement (and as a way to make it popular at home), British artists were enlisted to capture the subcontinent in images. And their role is examined in “Company Culture,” a smart introductory show gleaned from the Yale Center's collection and organized by Morna O'Neill, a doctoral candidate in Yale's art history department.

Among the first arrivals in the late 18th century were William Hodges and the uncle-nephew team of Thomas and William Daniell, and they came with conflicted agendas. Although their job was documentary, even quasi-scientific, they were landscape painters steeped in the Romantic tradition. Not surprisingly, they filtered their new and overpoweringly exotic subject through a Romantic lens, softening and domesticating it. They also brought to it a distinct gloss with a built-in contradiction, depicting India as a classically timeless culture but one in sad decline.

Timelessness – the notion that the best ancient Indian art and architecture corresponded to a Keatsian ideal of imperishable beauty – suited British needs: it confirmed that India was indeed worthy of acquisition. The concept of decline had uses, too, justifying a protective stewardship and turning India into a vast museum filled with relics of better days.

India's architectural monuments, at once sublime and picturesquely crumbling away, offered evidence for both bolsters of the imperial ideal. And photography, with its vaunted objectivity, was well suited to conveying them. This is where “Traces of India,” organized by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, a former associate curator in the photographs collection at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, picks up the historical thread.

The medium, with its reputation as a mechanical recording device, unprejudiced, all-seeing, held instant appeal for the era's equivalent of art historians, intent on collecting, archiving and codifying India's elite ancient culture.

Pioneering archaeologists of South Asia like Alexander Cunningham, James Fergusson and James Burgess were enterprising and in many ways admirable men, who came to their task from unlikely backgrounds. Fergusson, for example, was an indigo planter who picked up archaeology out of sheer curiosity, and went on to uncover some of the greatest Indian Buddhist monuments. He was an enthusiastic proponent of photography as a scientific instrument, and back in England he researched portions of his highly influential books from photographs alone, often of sites he had never seen.

One section of the show is made up almost entirely of early pictures of archaeological sites, and they are thrilling. Sculptures now long since housed in museums seem to be sprouting straight from the earth; details of their carving come through with electrifying clarity. The photographers themselves – among them Linnaeus Tripe and later Felice Beato, Samuel Bourne and John Murray – worked with prodigious diligence.

Tripe recorded, in a series of 21 pictures, joined end to end in a scroll, an inscription running around the entire base of an important Hindu temple in South India. His undertaking, technologically awesome given the primitive equipment he was working with, seems to have been entirely self-assigned. It is also thanks to him that we have pictures – a few are in the show – of sculptural reliefs from the Buddhist stupa of Amaravati. He took them in 1858; a year later a group of these fabulous objects were sent to London, where, left outdoors on a wharf for a year, some of them were half-obliterated by the English weather and Victorian air pollution.

Apart from the Amaravati material, though, most Indian monumental art and architecture reached England in the form of photographic reproduction. And images like Beato's immaculately composed views of the Taj Mahal, and Murray's radiant three-part panoramic shot of the Moti Masjid, or Pearl Mosque, in the Agra Fort, inspired a vogue for Indian tourism, yet another form of invoking proprietary privilege.

Also with the aid of photographs, Britain concocted at-home adaptations of Indian design. Architectural forms – particularly those associated with the Mughals, Britain's imperial predecessors in South Asia – turned up in public buildings like the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and in festive spectacles like the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. In India itself, meanwhile, the British were designing government buildings in so-called Anglo-Indian style, with each new example duly recorded by the camera for international viewing.

But by midcentury, long-simmering anti-British sentiment in India exploded in a popular revolt that the British referred to as the Mutiny of 1857. Many soldiers and civilians, British and Indian, died in the conflict, and overnight the political climate in India changed. A retributive British government grew more controlling, and architectural photography found a new role as part of a propaganda campaign to promote images of British valor and Indian treachery.

Places where Britons had been killed were converted into shrines, their sanctity perpetuated and broadcast in pictures. In an infamous example of staged history, British military might was extolled in a photograph by Beato of the ruins of the Sikandar Bagh Palace in Lucknow, where 2,000 rebel Indian soldiers had been killed. Beato arrived on the scene a year after the battle. But to recreate its flavor, he had the remains of the rebels disinterred and scattered around the courtyard for the shoot.

>From that point on, the British Raj itself went into decline and ended, to assume a dramatized life in photographs, memoirs and “Masterpiece Theater.” And an independent India took charge of its own history, past and present, sometimes delineating it in part through ideologically charged representations of architecture.

The Taj Mahal sustained its Romantic allure: Indian movie stars and rock groups continue to pose in front of it. The Red Fort in Delhi, once a Mughal stronghold, became a symbol of the new nation, as illustrated in a school textbook picture from the 1970's in which Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addresses a crowd from the fort's ramparts while resistance heroes from earlier eras hover protectively in the sky.

Although many elements in this image are photographically derived, they are joined together as a painting in which naturalistic scale is off kilter and visionary events are treated naturalistically. In post-Independence India the role of documentary photography changed somewhat, at least officially. As the historian Partha Chatterjee notes in the indispensable catalog to “Traces of India,” Indians preferred to present historical events and cultural symbols in terms associated with sacred art rather than with the “profane realism of photography.”

Increasingly, he suggests, under colonialism Indians came to view the Western concept of reality – based on rationality and exemplified in a linear impulse to organize, categorize, collect and record – as morally problematic and intellectually delusional. Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, however, the politics of representation embedded in architecture and photography, and examined in these illuminating shows, is still operative in India today.

The 1992 destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya, built on the supposed site of an ancient Hindu shrine, ignited religious violence that still burns. And three generations of post-Independence Indian photographers – men and women, a mere handful of them known in the West – continue to record, interpret and invent an Indian history, that supremely charged epic that Fergusson described as “written in decay,” and that Rabindranath Tagore, with exquisite theatrical flair, declared resistant to “the cyclonic fury of contradictions and the gravitational pull of the dust.”

Om writes with great regret about how he is missing out on the Nasreen Mohamedi show at the Talwar Gallery in NYC. I have to confess I had never heard of Mohamedi before Om mentioned it in his blog. Given that I live so close to the city (well, relatively) I should really try and check it out before it closes on October 25.

Anyone else visited the gallery and seen the show? Want to send me a short 100-word report? I'll promise to post it here and credit you for it (of course!)

Talwar is showing her photographs from the 1960's and 70's, which she never exhibited. {From NYTimes}

The NYTimes is rightly fascinated by the blind making photographs. Read All About It Here.

And if you don't have a NYTimes account, you can read the article below.

Photographers Make Art as Another Way of Seeing
By ERIN CHAN

Ben Paige cannot see light; he cannot see anything. But to create photographs — his pictures are haunting, in black and white with light that swirls and sways and sprays — Mr. Paige does not need to see. Besides, in a certain sense, he already does.

Mr. Paige relies on concepts he has already visualized, and on what he hears, touches, smells and tastes, as well as what he remembers from the three decades before his sight went away. Sometimes, he has an idea days before he creates a picture. Other times, inspiration hits him as he walks into the photo studio.

He is part of Seeing With Photography Collective, which works out of the basement studio at Visions at Selis Manor, 135 W. 23rd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, a community center for people who are blind.

Among the others in the collective are Sonia Soberats, who, like Mr. Paige, takes the Access-a-Ride shuttle to the studio every Thursday, and Ed Bassuk, who has cataracts. He shuffles in each week from Chelsea with his assistant, usually toting a Peruvian felt hat as a prop and a disposable camera for candid shots.

When Ms. Soberats, 65; Mr. Paige, 67; Mr. Bassuk, 86; and others arrive, they navigate six sets of doors and a staircase to reach the studio in the basement, where they find other members of the collective and some sighted volunteers.

To people in the collective, photography is more than a hobby: it is a chance, in a way, to see again. “I put all my heart and soul into it,” said Mr. Paige, who lost his sight to cataracts 35 years ago. “It means everything to me.”

The collective has put together a 54-piece exhibition called “From Within: A Photographic Exhibit of Work by Visually Impaired Artists,” which runs through Oct. 24 at the Hudson Guild's Gallery II at 119 Ninth Avenue, between 17th and 18th Streets. Last week, several in the collective headed to Arnheim, the Netherlands, to talk about their methods with the sighted and the blind.

The instructor, Mark Andres, started teaching photography to people with impaired vision 17 years ago at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit organization focused on vision rehabilitation. Five years ago, after experimenting with photograms, which are produced by exposing objects on photo paper, Mr. Andres started leading the collective in a technique called light painting. So far, the group has embraced light painting with the zeal of a thrill seeker trying a new roller coaster.

Members of the collective incorporate one another in their photographs, turning friends, many of whom they have never seen, into art. They capture scenes and concepts they have already constructed mentally — for example, confinement in a doghouse, a metaphor for the difficulties of being disabled in a world built for those who are not.

For his part, Mr. Paige wants to evoke fear in his photographs. On a recent Thursday, Mr. Paige set up to shoot a subway ride with three passengers reading newspapers, their heads on the seats beside them.

“It's the train from hell,” Mr. Paige said. “I do very scary pictures. It makes people stand up and pay attention. When people say `Wow!' that's when I know I've accomplished what I'm looking for.”

As Mr. Paige sat on a chair that would soon become a row of subway seats, Stephen Dominguez, a photographer for 16 years who has only partial sight in one eye because of glaucoma and cataracts, helped him set up.

Using the collective's usual method, Mr. Paige left the shutter of his Speed Graphic open so that he and Mr. Dominguez could manipulate different aspects of the scene. That way, they could capture multiple images on a single frame.

Handling his flashlight as deftly as a laser pointer, Mr. Dominguez highlighted human torsos, subway poles and rubber mice. He muted other items, mainly people's heads. As the lighted items' images were recorded on the film, the nonlighted heads remained dark. Mr. Dominguez lighted them only when the passengers shifted positions and their heads rested on top of the makeshift subway benches.

When the lights came on, there on the film were the headless newspaper readers with their lost heads on the seats beside them. But when Mr. Paige heard Mr. Dominguez describe the photo, he was not fully satisfied. He started over. After four tries over two weeks, Mr. Paige finally heard a description he liked and declared his photo done.

Ms. Soberats's intentions are different. She seeks beauty rather than fear. For her, creating photographs has not only instilled a sense of pride — she insists on doing all the lighting — but also serves as a form of therapy. In 1991, glaucoma took her sight, a few months after Hodgkin's disease killed her only son and a couple years before ovarian cancer killed her only daughter.

Ms. Soberats worked through her grief and found an outlet in photography two years ago. She first came to the class to learn how to take pictures of her family, and eventually found a form of self-expression.

“When I tell people I do photography, they don't believe me,” she said. “When a person achieves something that others think you can't because you are blind, you feel it much more.”