2015/ 2016
The Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937-1968)
Gupta’s book project, The Promise of the Modern, examines anti-illusionism and abstraction (in painting, sculpture, photography, and experimental film), art’s infrastructure (critical ekphrasis, exhibitions, and supporting structures), and aesthetic flows (through Cold War networks and across the Non-Aligned Movement) to highlight dialogic links between formal concerns of modernism and art’s infrastructure. This leads her to methodological questions centered on the absence of a teleological unfolding of modernist form in the former peripheries. Art History presents modernism as a crucial break from Renaissance perspectivalism. Yet, rooted in a particular history, such an account cannot be extended globally without revising both modernism’s narrative arc and conceptual projections accumulated in terms like avant-garde, figuration, abstraction, and flatness. Thus, alert to the ways in which aesthetic form paralleled debates on urbanity, technology, and modernization and the extent to which such precepts arose from local epistemes but precipitated global interlocutions, Gupta uses the contingency of modernism, the elasticity of its formal and social impulses, to script a polyglot history.
2014/ 2015
The Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937–1968)
Gupta’s book project, The Promise of the Modern, examines anti-illusionism and abstraction (in painting, sculpture, photography, and experimental film), art’s infrastructure (critical ekphrasis, exhibitions, and supporting structures), and aesthetic flows (through Cold War networks and across the Non-Aligned Movement) to highlight dialogic links between formal concerns of modernism and art’s infrastructure. This leads her to methodological questions centered on the absence of a teleological unfolding of modernist form in the former peripheries. Art History presents modernism as a crucial break from Renaissance perspectivalism. Yet, rooted in a particular history, such an account cannot be extended globally without revising both modernism’s narrative arc and conceptual projections accumulated in terms like avant-garde, figuration, abstraction, and flatness. Thus, alert to the ways in which aesthetic form paralleled debates on urbanity, technology, and modernization and the extent to which such precepts arose from local epistemes but precipitated global interlocutions, Gupta uses the contingency of modernism, the elasticity of its formal and social impulses, to script a polyglot history.