Concept

Each artist is an underground warrior. He fights a covert war against the
system that subjects people to misery. An artist in the contemporary world
is a dodger, who walks like a gentleman in the streets with a colour
spray-can hidden in his garments. When people are not looking he paints the
walls with graffiti and runs.

This aesthetic rebellion is quite emblematic in our times. Artists have
realized how incapable they are even when they do such covert social
rebellions. Hence, when they look at their own art they feel like laughing.
This attitude is all about positive negations; continuous displacement and
destabilization of the objects and their meanings. But the systems in which
the artist and his works operate subsume each silent rebellion to the level
of convention.

This is how tragedy turns into farce, not because it repeats itself or
happens for the second time. Karl Marx, in his monograph on Eighteenth
Braumiere wrote, `History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as
farce.’ It does not mean that good art only deals with tragedies. But it
deals with the social notions about tragedies. It is not the artist who
makes it a farce in the second occurrence. The system itself plays
instrumental to this.

Marcel Duchamp faced this tragic sense of farce or the farcical sense of
tragedy. He witnessed, how the war (critique) waged by artists in general
and himself in particular became blunt aesthetics. “I threw the urinal into
their faces and now they come and admire it for its beauty. The choice of
these Ready-mades was never dictated by any aesthetic delectation. Such
choice was always based on a reflection of visual indifference and at the
same time total absence of good taste,” Duchamp wrote. He found farce itself
becoming a laughable tragedy.

Today’s artist too finds his war (social-spiritual critique) waged through
the works of art getting nullified by the immediate history. Donald Kuspit
puts it in this way, “(In a sense, the history of 20th century avant-garde
art) is the story of the conflict between art struggling to achieve spirit
by purifying itself to the point of radical immanence…and art struggling to
radicalize spirit by resisting and finally nihilistically rebelling against
the social world, including the world of administered art, in the name of
the self.”

In such a scenario what would an artist do? He can laugh when he sprays
paint at the walls and run. That is the fun of it. When, they take the
artist seriously, he can laugh secretly at it. When they do not take him
seriously, then too he can roar with laughter. Jean Michael Basquiat, the
American graffiti artist did that. In a sense, all the artists included in
this show carry the smile of Basquiat. Their works are like intentional
graffiti where history and a farce occur in simultaneity.