Creative Impulse

SKS: From there you went to Dallas for your MFA?

KR: Eventually, yeah. I spent a year in between in Kolkata.

SKS: A critic says that you were “miserable” after you went to Kolkata after college. Why was that?

KR: (Chuckles). Time and place! I think I had some kind of romantic idea that I was going to finish my undergraduate studies and go to Kolkata and be an artist; that I'd just show up and it'd all happen. And as in most things like that, it doesn't happen, no matter where you are. I was miserable mainly because at this point it sounds like too harsh a word, but I think at that time I was pretty miserablebecause I had a hard time connecting with a community I could identify with: the right contacts, the right people. Of course, most of that was my fault. I didn't go looking hard enough. So I did a quick turnaround and said, to hell with this, I'm going back to the States. But of course, that's logistically hard. I had to find a graduate school that I could attend for free and on a scholarship, which is how I ended up in Dallas, where I did my MFA.

SKS: How do you think your work fits into the legacy of the “end of painting” debate of the 1970s?

KR: It's interesting to think about. I became interested in painting fairly quickly because when I was being trained as a student, it seemed like the worst possible thing to do. It was perceived as the least intellectually challenging, completely dead, moribund practice. And so that was clearly an immediate attraction. I think most artists have a contrarian strain in them that draws them into looking for the kinds of things that are rejected wholesale in any milieu. And I was interested in that immediately…okay, so why is this not interesting? And I entered into a painting dialog through that lens, in a way. I also discovered fairly quickly that I was just interested in pictures; that thinking about images and their reception and dissemination in popular culture interested me much more than thinking about objects. And most importantly perhaps, I was very invested in trying to find a place to enter the narrative as a brown artist within a larger global context  I didn't see too many people who looked like me or shared my story in the books or museums, you know?  And I was starting to see how they were able to enter it via various other avenues: through film, through installation, through theory, but very rarely through painting. So it never felt to me like I was contending with any “end of painting” moment historically. On the contrary, it felt full of possibility.

SKS: So when you were an undergraduate, you were already doing something else with painting?

KR: Sure. I was working in a very minimalist vocabulary, but working with scripts, finding ways to turn the Devnagari script into a kind of minimal language. I was making paintings that were essentially using these kinds of marks. I was looking for ways to enter this larger context. You know, I had a very simple, and on some level very basic kind of ambition - I wanted to be the guy in the museum, but as a painter, because I don't see any of myself represented there. As you can imagine, all the models of my education were pointing toward a deeply western discourse.

SKS: How have you found the critique of your work so far in India and abroad?

KR: (Pause) Hard to generalize as such. My experience in India is really hard to talk about generally, because it's very much through the lens of one show that I did, which was covered extensively. But the questions seemed to be much more directed toward establishing how I positioned myself: do I see myself as a diasporic artist, Indian artist, or an American artist…, which are really not that interesting to me

SKS: Critics have mentioned that you don't consider yourself part of the south Asian diaspora.

KR: I don't think of it that much, to be honest.

SKS: Why? Because you came here pretty much as an adult?

KR: Sure. If I were a first generation American, that'd be a completely different experience. So I think of myself most of the time as a painter with a biography that includes growing up in Kolkata and who lives in New York and who is deeply invested in living in New York. I'm totally interested in and committed to and energized by New York.

SKS: In the critical reception of your work in the US, do you find yourself misrepresented? Essentialized? Overdetermined?

KR: No…well, mostly no. Of course, there are things that get written sometimes that are utter nonsense. On the other hand, for the most part I've resisted a single-channel view of my experience. All artists want to resist essentialization, and I think it becomes particularly important for non-white artists to be aware of the dangers and pitfalls of the possibilities of essentialization that exist constantly. But I think it's also imperative on you as the person setting that context. Maybe I live under the delusion that I have a little more control over it than I actually do. And if I chose to set my context specifically as a south Asian artist living in New York, I could. If I chose to claim a role specifically as a diasporic artist, I could. I mean, I claim all of that.

SKS: But sometimes the context you set for yourself is overridden by the art establishment.

KR: It's a battle. It's always going to be a battle. Academies and markets are going to categorize you, and your job as an artist almost always is to resist those categorizations. I think most artists try to resist that. So yeah, I do try to resist it, always. At the same time, I'm not interested in resisting it to the point of obliterating that context, or claiming a position that doesn't acknowledge my position vis-à-vis the dominant culture. But it's like negotiating that little passageway, which is what I do in my work anyway.

SKS: What is it about the global art scene that intrigues you, acknowledging that it's not a monolithic thing?

KR: In my trajectory as an artist I've witnessed a massive expansion of the parameters of what constitutes mainstream discourse, which I think is fantastic. None of this existed when I was a student. That's a pretty remarkable moment to live in.

SKS: How has New York changed as an art hub from the way it was thirty or forty years ago?

KR: I know just from my experience that there are far more working artists here from other parts of the world, like me, from the non-western world, than there were forty years ago. It continues to be both a viable and an unsustainable place, because as we all know, it's no joke living in this city.

SKS: But apart from that, what about its power to say the final word about art?

KR: I don't believe it holds that singular authority any more, and I think most people don't believe it. And I think that is a very good thing. Of course, there are people who would still argue to the contrary, but mostly they are not relevant. And I just want to emphasize that it's better, working as an artist, not to be operating from a position of total and complete authority.

SKS: In your experience, how have you found the relation between the artists and the art writer in the current art discourse? Barnett Newman once said that he hated every critic on this planet. Ironically, he didn't even like Greenberg, who championed abstract expressionism.

KR: That's a different model of thinking, isn't it? Modernism operated very much from a position of the artist as the creator with a capital C, standing outside and above whatever cultural milieu they worked in. And that's just not a very valid model any more, obviously. It's been thoroughly demystified. I don't think practice should be led by theory; it should be the other way around, from the artist's perspective at least. But I don't know if I necessarily see an adversarial relationship between the artist and the critic.

SKS: What strikes you most about the current art scene in India?

KR: What strikes me is that the most interesting work being done in India is driven by performance, things that involve some aspect of theatricality.

SKS: Do you see, in the current globalizing phenomenon in India, a kind of blind borrowing? New media, for instance, is a big trend.

KR: That's part of what I call a festivalism tendency; art that's made for large international festivals. And that's not work I'm interested in, for the most part. Festivalism, to me, is this expansive sense of production, which involves outsourcing, hiring…a small-scale Hollywood model, if you will; a model that demands finding a lot of skilled labor and utilizing that to produce these massive, spectacle-driven extravaganzas with intimations of a very vaguely generalized, fuzzily political, global arty discourse. Then there is this other model that is about being an individual, and that's the model that I'm drawn to.

SKS: What do you think about Kolkata's current art scene?

KR: I think it needs a larger infrastructure. It has no way for its artists to find support. My brother's gallery (Experimenter) plays an important role in that.

SKS: Is infrastructure the only thing that's needed? What about most of the art itself?

KR: (Laughs loudly). You know, that's another six-hour conversation!  I don't think very much about it because I don't find it that interesting. I don't have that deep knowledge of particular artist's practices, but I haven't seen that much which excited me to want to dig deeper.

SKS: Do you have any shows planned in Kolkata?

KR: Not at the moment. I hope it'll happen at some point. I'm sure it will, but at this point there's no specific plan.

SKS: And elsewhere in India?

KR: Couple of things in the pipeline next year that I can't really talk about yet.

SKS: When you recycle these images, like Babri Mosque, etc., there must be a different kind of reception in India. Has the specificity of the images led to a critical conversation?

KR: No. That's why I don't have much of a response to it. I'm often asked this question: how is your work received in India? And my honest answer is: I don't know. Maybe they don't think about it at all. It hasn't led to any kind of engaged critical conversation.

SKS: So your work hasn't been written about in Indian magazines?

KR: It has. But what's been written isn't that interesting, to be honest (laughs loudly). But you know, in all fairness, they are often just reviews of shows and newspaper interviews. That's necessary and important writing, but it rarely leads to any substantive engagement with the work. For any real art structure to thrive anywhere, the writing has to be a critical component. And I think that is still evolving in India.