Hari Kunzru
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Hari Kunzru introduces a visual essay of Pakistani artists @ Granta.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )We hear a lot – perhaps too much – about ‘identity’ in relation to South Asian art. Whether it’s national or personal, this elusive quality is often seen as the primary concern of South Asian writers and visual artists, to the exclusion of all other aesthetic categories. By contrast, those who can lay claim to sufficient whiteness or Westernness are presumed to be the unreflective owners of secure but troublingly authoritarian identities whose dismantling is the proper task of progressive artistic practice. It’s a formulation which has, after a generation or so of post-colonial criticism, become an orthodoxy.
High Noon, as the title suggests, stages a confrontation with this brittle identity politics and claims a kind of luminous clarity, where shadows and ambiguities disappear. Noon is when mad dogs and Englishmen are the only creatures out on the street. High NOON is also a punning physicist’s term for certain states of quantum superposition, when particles exist in both of two possible states, so perhaps there’s also a suggestion of kairos in the title, the ‘time of chance’, that suspended moment when decisive action may bring about great and significant change. Clearly, for Pakistan, such a time is at hand.
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