FIELD NOTES 01
An Expanded Questionnaire On The Contemporary
(5) Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” 703. (6) Ibid., 704. (7) David Hopkins, After Modern Art, 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. (8) Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloch, Art Since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004). (9) For example, see Partha Mitter “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90:4 (2008), 531-548, 531. (10) Amelia Jones, “Introduction: Writing Contemporary Art into History, a Paradox?” in Amelia Jones ed. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 3-16, 3. (11) For instance, recent texts such as Themes of Contemporary Art, Theory in Contemporary
Art , and Defining Contemporary Art take the mid-1980s globalization as their point of departure. Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, ed. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. Theory in
Contemporary Art: Since 1985 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Daniel Birnbaum et. al. Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2011). Other texts begin in the 1970s, for instance Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970 (London: Laurence King Publishers, 2012). (12) For a historiographical study of this phenomenon, see Dan Karlholm, “Surveying Contemporary Art: Post‐War, Postmodern, and then What?” Art History 32: 4, 712–733. (13) Nicholas Bourriaud, “Altermodern” in Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), unpaginated. (14) Ibid. (15) Okwui Enwezor in Hal Foster el. al. eds. “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October 130 (2009), 33-40; Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” in Altermodern, unpaginated. (16) Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” unpaginated. (17) Geeta Kapur, “sub Terrain: Artists Dig the Contemporary,” in Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel, eds. Body.city: Siting Contemporary Culture in India (New Delhi and Berlin: Tulika Books and The House of World Cultures, 2003), 47-83, 47. (18) Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, Ghar Pe was organized under the aegis of the Society for Nutrition Education and Health Action project Dekha Undekha: Conversations on Art and Health.
Dekha Undekha was the first in a series of workshops that the Society has initiated in order to generate dialog between civic services administration and marginal communities in India. Conducted over a period of one year, Dekha Undekha evolved through a series of workshops with twenty women from Dharavi. Textile artist Susie Vickery, photographer Sudharak Olwe, and ceramists Anjani Khanna, Rashi Jain, and Neha Kudchadkar led the workshops. Building on these workshops and working closely with the twenty women participants from Dharavi, the artist Nandita Kumar conceptualized and curated Ghar Pe. Although the workshops that ultimately led to Ghar Pe were 79