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ARTICLE : Art of Freedom - The What And The How
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Subject: ARTICLE : Art of Freedom - The What And The How
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Title : Art of Freedom
The What And The How
Author : Soumitro Das
Publication : The Statesman
Date : October 16, 1996
A society that codifies norms of artistic representation
to make them conform to any other is not a free society.
A free society is one in which artistic freedom is poten-
tially absolute - it is up to the artist to use as much
of it as he wishes. The demands of an artist's discipline
must take precedence over collective or sectarian ideals.
In reality, there are a certain pressures emanating from
the milieu in which the artist operates, some of which
may be law, but more often than not exist in the form of
religious and ideological taboos and social conventions.
In other words, artistic freedom, beyond a certain thresh
old is a matter for debate, struggle and conquest. The
agreement itself is tacit and it is necessary to risk
going beyond the thresh old to discover there was one in
the first place. This is a dialectical process in which
confrontation with society is a necessary moment in the
complex and tortuous interaction between a work of his-
torically critically dimensions and the public to which
it is addressed.
CONSENSUS
The problem is necessarily modern. There have been
societies, in the past where no such confrontation took
place. None was needed since there was a degree of
consensus between the ethical and aesthetic choices made
by the artist and the ethical and aesthetic universe of
he public. Because both were part of a broader social
consensus the public was restricted to an elite repre-
senting an order on whom the artist conferred, by his
work, a certain legitimacy.
This is true, for instance, of all religious art. These
societies were not free, even though they permitted
certain liberties that were not available to artists who
worked under politically free regimes. Nudity, for
instance, was not considered scandalous in Renaissance
Italy, but was in Victorian England. The concordance
between political and artistic freedom is not absolute,
especially in democracies where social conventions,
political myths and other taboos acquire a certain force
due to the numbers involved and can interfere with artis-
tic expression. A society can permit the enunciation of
political truths, but can, at the same time, be very
touchy about its cultural identity, even when that iden-
tity is sclerotic and anachronistic. Cultural conserva-
tism often endangers political freedom; examples are not
hard to find.
The problem of artistic freedom, therefore, can only
arise in a society which is divined in its own conscious-
ness, a division that the artist can exploit in order to
express his own individual personality. A distinction
must be made between works of art which are considered
subversive because of their political or ideological
content and those which are subversive because they
challenge cultural norms of representation. Artistic
freedom is-linked to and dependent on political freedom,
to a certain extent, but it. true dimensions are often
determined not so much by content, as by form, not so
much by what is said or depicted as by how.
For instance, the statement, "The British raj was a
glorious period in India's history" may be considered
shocking, but never equals the impact of a fictional
narrative or a painting in which this "glory" is repre-
sented with the power, the skill, the rhythm and the
harmony that a writer or painter of talent. The how is
what makes the what scandalous.
This is because the what can be reduced to the demands of
objectivity - the accepted methods by which facts can be
disputed or established. It can be recuperated, in the
name of established collective ideals. But the how repre-
sents absolute subjective truth - take it or leave it. It
is not a fact, it is not open to argument. And yet, in
spite of being a vehicle for what is perhaps an utter
falsehood, it can captivate. this is what makes it dan-
gerous, an amoral tool at the service of tyrants - for
examples, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will a good
film which also happens to be a celebration of Nazism -
or an audacious instrument of provocation and cultural
renewal.
What is surprising is that almost all major controversies
over artistic freedom - with the exception of Salman
Rushdie's Satanic Verses - over the last century or so
have revolved not around political questions, but around
representation of sex, above all, the female sex: Flau-
bert's Madame Bovary, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil La-
wrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Joyce's Ulysses, Henry
Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. it
is now M. F. Husain's turn to be hauled up in court for
allegedly depicting Hindu goddesses in the nude.
The Husain case is interesting because it shows how
content can be misunderstood and rendered controversial
by form. After all, the BJP finds nothing scandalous or
obscene about the graphic representations of sexuality at
Khajuraho and Konarak. In a different context, pornogra-
phy flourished at the time Flaubert and Baudelaire were
hauled up in court - in the same year, 1857 - and no one
minded.
CIRCUMSTANCES
It is, therefore, not the representation alone, but the
manner and the circumstances of it that transforms it
into a critical conductor of social temperature. It is
the desacralization of an object revered, or held sacred
by a class of persons as Section 295 under which Husain
is arraigned puts it, in the realm of public discourse,
that is objectionable. The nude figures in Khajuraho are
not obscene because they are clothed in religion. Pornog-
raphy does not matter because it is an underground phe-
nomenon anyway; it belongs to the realm of privacy
(pornographic literature in a dentist's chamber, for
instance). But Molly Bloom's monologue is a non-religious
expression of feminine sexuality - that has been held
sacred by all religions and all societies, in spite of ,
or perhaps because of, the innumerable outrages of which
it has been an object - and figures in a work of litera-
ture, an object of general use, of considerable persua-
sive power and prestige.
The how is essentially an instrument of desacralization
and if it is used very often against political myths,
religious and sexual taboos, it is because the sacred
shelters behind them. Section 295 applies to two types
of desecration: of places of worship and of objects held
sacred by any class of persons. The first type does not
apply to the artist, only to the BJP. The second is,
indeed, problematic. What does it mean? Especially for
the freedom to represent?
It is possible to understand artistic freedom - given
that this freedom is potentially absolute to include ,
the right of an artist to desecrate, deliberately and
wilfully, "an object held sacred - including religious
figures by any class of persons". But, more often than
riot, it is not even necessary to go that far. It is
sufficient that an attempt be made to renew or reinter-
pret an icon or a motif, to give it a radical subjective
twist for the orthodox to start brandishing their torch-
es. The expression is vague and if it is taken to quali-
fy freedom of expression, dangerously liable to misuse.
NO DANGER
If, for instance, a class of persons were to hold Nathur-
am Godse sacred, would an artist be contravening the law
by desecrating him and insulting those who have built up
a cult around his presence? Not many would both,. These
are, therefore, matters of consensus and convention and
all consensus and convention, howsoever massively sanc-
tioned, can be challenged. It does not automatically
represent a danger to public order and tranquility, No
work of art has ever led to the disintegration of an
entire society or to the collapse of public morality. If
it did, that society and those morals would not be worth
preserving anyway.
A final word on the abjectly apologetic tones in which
Hussain's defence was organized, careful to render obei-
sance to the weight of tradition and faith and to manage
potentially inflammable religious sensibilities. This is
the mistake that Rushdie made and paid for, "accepting
the truth of Islam", going around shaking hand with
treacherous mullahs in the naive belief that he would be
let off on good conduct. This is hardly the manner in
which one speaks to the rabble. This is what has immo-
bilized the frontiers of artistic freedom in this coun-
try, if not actually helped in its erosion. What should
have been made clear is that an artist, in a free socie-
ty, is net automatically bound to respect religious
sensibilities, can give public expression to his disre-
spect, is willing to confront the public with his convic-
tion. there should be no appeal made to incomprehension -
if you understand, fine, if you don't shout or worse.
This works much better. Proof: now that Rushdie has gone
on a limited offensive, makes no bones about the subver-
sive import of his work, that he has gained a measure of
respect for his position even among his adversaries. Kow-
towing before fanatics, implicity or explicity, is always
counter-productive.
