A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art

In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists' political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur's practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.

Table of Contents:
Preface  vii Introduction: Radical Stakes  1 1. Earthly Ecologies  40 2. The Edifice Complex  72 3. The World, the Art, and the Critic  96 4. Urban Economies  129 Epilogue: Late Styles  160 Notes  185 Bibliography  211 Index  225

About the Author :
Saloni Mathur is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and coeditor of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia.

Review :
“This critical retake on the work of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram offers a deeply informed reading of their joint and separate works but also turns the biographical norm inside out, reading their lives as illuminations of their tempestuous times and not simply as cases or examples of larger processes. It will be read with keen interest by anyone who cares about the making of modern art worlds in places like India.” - Arjun Appadurai, Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University “Saloni Mathur's A Fragile Inheritance immerses the reader in the long march of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, leading figures of India's avant-garde in criticism and artistic practice. Against the background of the indescribable complexity of India's many languages, political parties, and aesthetic movements, Mathur traces parallel and intersecting careers with a brilliant sense of the improvisatory, provisional, and timely character of their numerous interventions over half a century. Renouncing any claim to survey the art of India, or to provide a progressive narrative of relentless novelty, Mathur provides an in-depth account of works, projects, ideas, and the situations in which they arose. Writing ‘alongside’ rather than ‘about’ the work of these two essential figures, Mathur offers a striking model of engaged critical practice in a project that is far from finished.” - W. J. T. Mitchell, author of (Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics) “Mathur’s condensation of two difficult-to-summarize careers is a remarkable achievement.... To return to Kapur and Sundaram is a radically generous and participatory act, an invitation to reimagine our limits by slowly going over things we thought we were ready to leave behind." - Meghaa Ballakrishnen (CAA Reviews) "This densely written book encounters not only fundamental questions of art and its preservation, but also of writing about art, and itself can be seen as an innovative example of the latter. Further, it addresses the sociocultural and political embedding of art in the postcolonial context, touching also upon ethical questions. Therefore, this book is by far not only relevant for readers who want to know about or deal with Kapur and Sundaram." - Maja Jerrentrup (South Asia Research) Rich and luminous…. A Fragile Inheritance is an essential, thoughtful and riveting work that asks the addressee to co-participate in the making of its meaning. - Emilia Terracciano (Third Text) "Quite unlike any other study of the art of modern and contemporary South Asia, A Fragile Inheritance is a deeply informative work that stresses the intellectual and political stakes of modern art practice and its discourse in India and the Global South.… Mathur's analysis …, superbly informed by methodological insights and comparative work by other international artists, are among the most accomplished readings of modern art from South Asia, and can be easily assigned as stand-alone essays in undergraduate and graduate university syllabi." - Iftikhar Dadi (Oxford Art Journal)