Subject to Change without Notice - 2004

Subject toChange, without Notice Chitra Padmanabhan

In 1957, Albert Camus spoke on art and society at Uppsala University in Sweden. If an artist desires to communicate “... about all and to all, one has to speak of what we all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all.” Today more than ever before, artists need to express this reality and break the spell of distraction perfected by mass cultures. Their arsenal is formidable: fast-changing screen images as the real thing; the deification of eternal youth; the promise of unending consumption; the market replacing the community with the consumer. The essence of this world is to produce more of the same–a replication of images and symbols ostensibly to facilitate individual ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’. The violence of appropriation that underpins the iniquitous relations between powerful and disadvantaged states or within societies is papered over with homogenized perceptions of development and art as never-ending consumption and entertainment. Even nature seems a human creation, eternal and unchanging, thus the notion of paying the price for spoiling this residence on Earth is unthinkable. Witness the strong tendency in art to idealize nature even as the reality of ecological imbalance as a concomitant of uncontrolled development has dawned upon the world. The terrorism of toxic waste, oil spills in seas, air pollution, global warming, and radiation effects produced in the pursuit of unsustainable lifestyles has created faultlines of unimaginable destruction on Earth. Among the few artists who have succeeded in transforming conventional mediums to express this disquieting reality is German graphic artist Klaus Staeck, whose mass posters question unbridled development with devastating satire. The poster of the ugly duckling, victim of an oil spill, says it all: no fairy tale transformation for it, only a promise of death. Nearer home, artists like Vivan Sundaram have powerfully articulated existing ecological-economic patterns that go back to colonialism (Riverscapes, 1992-93). A recent ceramic