 For Roger Martin Buergel, art discourses are never meant to be simple. “In art, and also in thinking about art, you want to gain and preserve a certain level of complexity,” offered the reputed curator who is from Berlin, studied art, philosophy and economics at the Vienna University in the 1980s, and has been the artistic director of such international shows of contemporary art as documenta (the twelfth edition in 2007 at the town of Kassel, Germany). Buergel’s talk this fortnight, titled “Undoing History”, may not be easy to grasp. “Audiences have to learn that it [discussing art] needs an intellectual and sensual effort. Or just patience,” he suggested in an email interview.
At the talk, Buergel expects to discuss what “could be called the impossibility of realism”. “It has to do with the question, Can the present change the past?” he said. In terms of art, “The status of historical events, no matter how big or small, will always remain precarious.” To illustrate his point, Buergel offered Sanjaya Narrates, a series of watercolours on paper, by the Bangalore-based artist Sheela Gowda. Made in 2004, the series consists of 14 fragments created from a single photograph that had been shot by a French photojournalist in west Asia at the time. “The original shows a Palestinian father holding his boy in his arms, and two crying women,” said Buergel. “In formal terms, Gowda scatters the single photograph into fragments that will never add up to a total picture. In other words, the image is no longer about a particular historical event, but rather emerges out of the very process of re-visioning, by which memories are balanced against perceptions.”
 Buergel is no stranger to superficial art gatherings or convoluted rhetoric. In fact, not long after his turn at documenta, and after about two decades in the field, he unexpectedly stated that he’d had enough. “I had decided to leave the art world,” he recalled. “I had grown tired of its intellectual vacuousness and decadence.” He said that a number of projects then were aiming “either at disenfranchised masses, or at a global elite”, and, according to him, “both audiences are unbearable”. He has, since then, worked as an academic, pursuing subjects like the one he will deliver a talk on.
The idea of “re-visioning” the past is certainly not specific to artistic endeavours, clarified Buergel. There are, to his mind, politically obvious reasons to intervene in the ways that the past is processed. For instance, with Gowda’s work, there are several instances where the image is no longer about a particular event, but rather of memories balanced against perceptions. In essence, the use of images and work from the past could potentially represent events in a different light, which is where the aspect of artistic responsibility could play a significant role.
For the talk, Buergel said that he would draw upon his interactions with the likes of Amar Kanwar, Atul Dodiya, Geta Kapur and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, among other artists, writers and filmmakers, to address issues concerned with political and social content in artistic work. Although, none of this was to say that he placed impossible expectations on works of art. As he’d stated in a previous lecture, it would be a mistake to think of art as “a repair business for removing misery and injustice from the world”. In affairs of activism, and welfare especially, Buergel admitted that artistic measures were quite “useless”. Nevertheless, he added that even if art can’t repair social ills, it can help “generate breathing spaces for the daily fight”.
In order to do that, however, art institutions need to convey a few “anti-populist truths”, advised Buergel. The first step therein is perhaps most difficult, he admitted: to get people to realise that “there is a difference between a museum and the museum shop”. |
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