What Tests the Ruse of Representation?
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What Tests the Ruse of Representation?
Geeta Kapur
12 minutes ago
'I find my articulation turn into a confessional device.'
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
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The following is an excerpt from Geeta Kapur's 'Introduction' to Speech Acts, published by Tulika Books, 2025.
The title Speech Acts has a ring of immediacy with a claim to performative skills. At the same time, it is an extensively theorized term with nuanced and stylized transmission of meaning. Speech acts assume affective consequence – persuading, convincing or alerting your respondent in terms of feeling, thought and action. It is my intention that such articulation comes forth as speculative. Speech acts, driven by urgency, use abbreviation to skip doubt. In this mode there is need to place utterances in different contexts and see how the repetitions mutate.
'Speech Acts', Geeta Kapur, Tulika Books, 2025.
I want to be able to do some of this in the cluster of texts that I have written or spoken, revisited, reiterated and contrasted, over the last two decades.
Speech acts of artists, citizens and anarchist interlocutors who create frisson as they enunciate – this is the exigent force that we may track. Speech acts ignite overexposed forms; words, images and gestures are sworn to the demand of 'subjective truth-telling' by tricks of narrativization; the ruse of representation is tested in its political deployment.
…
In the first decade of the twenty-first century (after my book When Was Modernism was published, in 2000), I slanted my perspective to foreground the documentary genre as a form of enquiry and with it the concept of the avant-garde, relocated in mid-twentieth-century histories of decolonization. I formulated a critique of the homogenizing and authoritarian inclination of the nation-state as well as its inverse, the disempowerment of the nation-state within an enlarging vortex of global capitalism. As cultural practitioners we must be able to recognize the focal disorders – ideological, literal or surreal – of the very lens that 'documents'.
This book of essays, talks and interviews does not engage with individual artists, in whose thrall I have written saturated but also dedicatedly formalist texts, included in a forthcoming (though impossibly belated) volume titled Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice. That volume is to be a palimpsest of material worked on over years, where I navigate shifts in the represented artists' work as also my own focal intensities. But for now, I have been hooked away by a set of tracking arguments that relate to the 'documentary turn'. In this smaller book (with no images), I test, in the form of speech acts, variously used terms within my expanded sphere of criticality. I try to develop a way to shape a witness position that the documentary vision multifariously offers.
…
In the first section of this book… [titled essays] there are two short essays, 'Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South' and 'Aesthetic Bind'. 'Proposition' and 'bind' are, in a sense, contrary terms. But they suggest a contrapuntal engagement involving ambiguity and traction which enables certain recondite forms to develop. My attachment to the terms proposition and bind may indeed describe my approach to the field of art and politics.
…
The second section includes lectures delivered in 2013 (at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Iniva, London), 2016 (at Haus der Kunst, Munich) and 2017 (at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven).
The text titled 'Notes on Practice' is a shredded outcome of these different talks. I have gained the gumption to stitch and weave these into a ragged banner. As I began to improvise on the lines and paras I had frequently spoken around the term 'practice', I figured a desire to play with my text-form as well. Referring to praxis, a complex materialist concept, I was also attracted to current discourses on practice that are playful, provocative and generative. From labour to craft to art to theory to governance to political action and, further, to subtly distributed features of being, doing, thinking and making. The result is what I call a ragged banner announcing my own (forthcoming) 'practice'; it also probably says something of my willingness (now) to risk failure within the template of meaning.
…
The interview is a form unto itself. You are asked to respond to someone else's preoccupations, and you find yourself inventing new modes of thought and utterance. Everything you say gets an inflection; it even savours imitation of the speech-form used by the interlocutor. The entry of another voice and the imaginative rendering of intersubjectivities may produce consolidated truth-claims, or, equally, a dialogue that deflects the two speakers further apart and provides a wrenched dynamic.
…
The last conversation with Ravi Sundaram and Ashish Rajadhyaksha puts me in a place where everything I have said is under review. … Beginning the dialogue, Ravi Sundaram from CSDS used a contrarian vocabulary and suggested that I go to the brink and see where, in the worldwide neoliberal contemporary, the 'ruins' of modernism stand; and where migration histories and the expanded concept of 'slavery' can be deployed to dramatize capital's devastating regime of disempowerment. He invoked Okwui Enwezor several times, seeing him as a curator of ideas and artworks that changed the order of things in contemporary cultural discourse. I couldn't agree more.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha … believes that if you are inclined to work with modernism – historically and in the present – your method, even as it may enumerate disjunctures, counts as conciliatory.
…
My responses are engaged and emphatic. I appreciate the scraping down of my ideological and aesthetic assertions even as I continue to ignite them. I am impelled to see modernism at the stake, but with some of its passion and impunity smouldering still.
… The terms modern and contemporary, radical and avant-garde; decolonization, migration and diaspora; demodern and decolonial, have all become polemical features of art history in academia …
We also find the subject, indeed subjectivity, (re-)entering the discourse in ingenuous ways, rendering experience through phenomenological understanding and with the quest for dialogic articulation as itself a form of praxis.
In his book Dissensus, Jacques Rancière says,
This means that there is a certain undecidability in the 'politics of aesthetics'. There is a meta politics of aesthetics which frames the possibilities of art. Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfil its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.
I would like to believe that melancholy is part of what I, as perhaps many others, understand to be the process of critical 'becoming': that which recognizes the stutter and wager of subjectivity, produces split vectors of doubt and claim, and places us at the precipice of choice. With increased volatility driving the contemporary – and my own advancing age – the ground trembles. And I find my articulation turn into a confessional device.
Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologised; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025).
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