The moral economy of the street: The Bombay paintings of Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan

Third Text

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 151-163

  Zitzewitz, Karin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

Aesthetic theory; Contemplation; Gieve Patel; India; Mumbai; Painting; Street life; Subjectivity; Sudhir Patwardhan; Urban space

Indexed keywords

EID: 68849131541     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528820902840623     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. Gieve Patel, 'City Landscape', How do you withstand, body?, Clearing House, Bombay, 1976
2. In a special issue of the Indian monthly Seminar considering the crisis in the city, see Gerson da Cunha, 'Decline of a Great City', Seminar, 528, 2003, available online at http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/528.htm, 13 September 2007
3. P K Das, 'Manifesto of a Housing Activist', Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, eds Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1995, pp 170-84
4. Arvind Rajagopal, 'The Violence of Commodity Aesthetics: Hawkers, Demolition Raids, and a New Regime of Consumption', Social Text 68, 19:3, autumn 2001, pp 91-113
5. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, especially pp 188-99.
6. Appadurai has followed up his more theoretical work with more ethnographically specific studies of locality, including his 'Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai', Public Culture, 12:3, 2000, pp 627-51 and
7. 'Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics', Public Culture, 14:1, 2002, pp 21-47.
8. 'Urban Physiognomies', in Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life, Sarai, New Delhi, 2002, pp 8-13, and the informally published projects associated with PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), a centre founded by Appadurai in 2001 to sponsor action research projects in Bombay. Available at http://pukar.org.in.
9. Walter Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1977, p 163
10. For an account of the strike, see Hubert van Wersch, Bombay Textile Strike, 1982-3, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992
11. Patwardhan's comment was shown in K P Jayasankar and Anjali Montiero's documentary film, Saacha (The Loom), as cited by Anne Rutherford, '"Buddhas Made of Ice and Butter": Mimetic Visuality, Transience and the Documentary Image', Third Text, 20:1, January, 2006, p 30
12. I follow Charles Taylor in tracing this relationship between autonomy, dignity and recognition back through Hegel to Kant. See his 'The Politics of Recognition', in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994.
13. Gieve Patel, 'Contemporary Indian Painting', Daedalus, autumn 1989, pp 198-9
14. 'Near and Far', introduction to Sudhir Patwardhan: Paintings, Centre George Pompidou, Association Français d'Action Artistique, May 1986
15. Susan S Bean, 'Gateway Bombay', Gateway Bombay, exhibition catalogue, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, 14 July 2007-7 December 2008, p 17
16. The drawing, 'Leper', is published in Ranjit Hoskote, Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer, Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2005, p 166.
17. Neville Tuli, Indian Contemporary Painting, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1998, p 350
18. The medical gaze was the subject of poems published in his first volume, Poems, in 1966, and the body itself was the subject of his second volume of poetry, How do you withstand, body?. For a brief discussion of the impact of the body on his work, see Mary Archer, '"Working with Images is not Enough": An interview with Gieve Patel', MSS, artist collection (later published in Uomini E Libri, 124, Milan, September-October 1989).
19. On the form of his look, see Sudhir Patwardhan, '"Gieve Patel: Looking into a well"... beyond Metaphor', Art India, 8:4, Quarter 4, 2003, pp 86-9.
20. Gieve Patel, 'Dialogue', Art India, 5:1, Quarter 1, 2000, p 47
21. Gieve Patel, 'On Sudhir Patwardhan's "Town"', Sunday Observer, Bombay, 30 December 1984
22. but he quotes himself in 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p 188.