The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [36]
Hart’s claim that jyonti painting cannot be understood by applying concepts of Western art is either trivial or false. If she means that Western painting does not traditionally include elements of Hindu mythology and is not painted on whitewashed mud walls by fluent speakers Hindi as part of marriage celebrations, then indeed jyonti painting fall within Western categories. But that is no help to Hart’s position. She would rather have us believe that jyonti painting is not even art sense.” At one point she attempts to dramatize the cultural difference between jyonti image producers and Euro pean artists:
The Western producer of a painting destined (he or she hopes) the wall of an art gallery and possibly for the wall of a great museum is conscious of him- or herself as “artist” making an posed, and separate from everyday life. These products proclaim, Look at me, I’m art!” The producer of the ritual images in a Hindu village is not conscious of herself in this parpaticular way. She is producing an image that derives its meaning from the part plays in life, rather than as a contrived, posed object.
Leaving aside the adequacy of this as a general account of Western art, it is clear that Hart is comparing here two completely different categories of activity. We are presented with the image of the ambitious Western artist operating in a professional market of agents, dealer galleries, money, and museums. Against this familiar image she gives humble Indian women who decorate the walls of their houses with conventionalized religious designs as part of making a village wedding special. In Hart’s sentimental account, “a woman, a mother, lovingly creates beautiful, emotion-filled, auspicious, important images for her own children for the purpose of helping them, of supporting them so they can succeed and be happy in the next stage of their lives.”
The contrast is nonsensical. The history of the West is replete with countless mothers and prospective mothers-in-law who have labored embroidery, knitting, and sewing, “producing” beautiful artifacts their children’s weddings, either as part of a trousseau or as decorative elements (e.g., decorated cakes) for the wedding day. These beautiful— beautified—objects can be as lovingly created by European as by Indian women. Much of this output is cloth or fiber art, but it would also include decorated ceramics and items of house hold furniture, such cradles. Some of these objects make reference to religious themes of and protection. Why has Hart failed to cite comparable Western traditions of dowry or trousseau arts to place in relation to the jyonti paintings of Uttar Pradesh?
On the evidence of her text, she is guilty of the very ethnocentrism so blithely accuses others of. She studies a genre of folk art in culture and, seeing that it is painting of a type, looks within Western culture to discover an analogue in painting. But if you want a comparison for a jyonti painting, it is absurd to look at a Mark Rothko hanging New York gallery. paintings belong with domestic and dowry traditions. Elsewhere in her essay Hart complains of the West’s tendency to place a greater value on high-art traditions than on traditions. In fact, Hart is doing exactly that herself: she is so impressed these Indian forms as painting that she fails to acknowledge women’s craft traditions associated with marriage celebrations trousseaus in her own culture. They too display loving and devoted exercise of skill and aesthetic judgment.
IV
I turn next to Susan M. Vogel, whose writing on tribal arts displays eloquence and intellectual sophistication unmatched by the previous Yet her wonderful book Baule: African Art, Western Eyes contains analysis reflecting a point of view similar to theirs: “This book,