Iconography in Contemporary Times and Contemporary Iconology

Iconography is a ‘pointer’ to the relevance of culturally recognized
images, contained upon their own self. A sign is an arrow mark to a
direction which separates itself from that direction. In this sense, an icon
diff ers from a sign in the sense, the former doesn’t diff erentiate itself from
what it depicts. Th is is like writing a commentary upon a painted Chinese
calligraphy picture. Every commentary written on a Chinese classical
painting ‘about’ what is seen on the picture surface not only ‘interprets’
but also ‘intervenes’. Intervention is to
further engage a visual, while interpretation
is to presuppose that such a visual is already
concluded. Iconography, in its classical sense,
since it alleges a divinity to the meaning of
the visual it addresses, arrests the meaning of
such a visual forever. Th at visual—depicted or
construed–is also imprisoned forever within
a certain divine meaning. Hence the irony
with faith is that the iconography engaged to
liberate the faithful is in itself a collection of
imprisoned visuals, represented or evoked!
A confi rmed pre-fi xed meaning to a
composed visual/verbal representation in
order to pledge sincerity to a ‘faith-beliefsystem’
is iconography. Hence altering icons
is an attempt to alter its meaning(s), which is
also an attempt to erase the earlier meaning
to a certain extent. Th e alteration of Pagan
symbols into Christianity, the shift of Hindu
symbols to elsewhere be some examples for
this. In other words, altering the essence of
icons ‘is’ violence that leads ‘to’ cultural as well
as mundane violence. Cubism’s infl uence not
only showed a way of Modernity to Indian
art, but also was articulated to escape from
anything that was ‘fi xed’—meanings, icons
and faith! In other words, if classical icons
assign meanings to select visuals, Modern
art in general and Indian modern art in
particular wanted the very visual to become
‘the’ meaning. While in the West a la Clement
Greenberg, the diff erence between the premodern
and modern was also the diff erence
between the experience of surface and depth
in relation to represented realism. In India
it was to re-articulate the over burdening
nature of an already existent iconography.