Pop Art

H.A. Anil Kumar

The poster of “Dabbang” cooling glass, photos of a tribal girl with contemporary gadgets, stenciled and repeated images in fine-arts paintings, paintings upon fiber glass sculptures, paintings based on what is considered classical Indian painting tradition from Ajanta and miniatures in the web world, Che Guevara on T-shirts; all in all, in the same ‘situation’, on the same street, at the same time, calls for redefining Pop art culture in India or reassign a new name for such preoccupation, which pledges to differ from ‘the’ European Pop art – Anon

The past plays a huge role in art and its history. One wonders as to how be past when it was present and how is it past, then. What did art rely upon when it ‘was’? Ravi Varma’s school of visualization is a classic case in point. His ‘representation’ of Gods and Goddesses not only found equal space in the pooja (offering) rooms as well as bachelors’ dens but also lost the awareness that those Gods/Goddesses are mere ‘representations’. How else do Gods exist if not through representation? This is the foremost of Pop’s (not Pope’s) contribution to Gods!*1* Pop, in Indian culture, is a watered down version of sampradaya or tradition that is considered as the backbone of visual discourses, since/ from Ananda Coomaraswamy to the current defenders of the RWS (Right Wing Spiritualism).