Chiraag Bhakta’s exhibition Why You So Negative? posits negativity as a state of opposition. Bhakta negates the appropriation of Indian yoga traditions into Western fitness and wellness culture, as epitomized by the collection of books and artifacts comprising his installation, #WhitePeopleDoingYoga. #WPDY is the cornerstone of Bhakta’s exhibition at Human Resources Los Angeles, which also includes new material collected by the artist and a durational performance by collaborating artist, Nikhil Chopra.
Bhakta’s installation counters the museum view of South Asia as a cultural space without contemporary, local stakeholders. #WPDY asks art audiences to reflect on their own status as consumers of cultural practices of which they understand little. Consumerism puts artists in an uncomfortable position – as both purveyors of commodities and a kind of status object themselves. The desire to acquire, and control, the creative expressions of people of color is not exactly support, as Bhakta’s experience at the Asian Art Museum, made clear. As museums increasingly present and collect work by artists of color – if still at a fraction of the rate at which they represent white artists – this newfound prominence is belatedly if ever accompanied by an increase in people of color represented within the museum staff, specifically in the curatorial department. Truly, the default at museums is to be tacitly hostile to people of color unless we are serving a decorative purpose. Developing an art career can feel like an act of civil disobedience.
The Freer Sackler exhibition was compelling in its explication of yoga as a practice that embodies the complexities of ahimsa – a term popularized by Gandhi to refer to the doctrine of non-violence as political resistance. Ahimsa is a negative term: it is the antithesis of himsa, often translated as “strike”, or violent action. However ahimsa is more complicated than simple pacifism. Krishna, on the battlefield at the climax of the Bhagavad Gita, advises Arjuna, his king and charge, not to hesitate but to decimate his opponents. In doing so, he offers, the violence is justified so long as righteousness of intention and detachment from personal outcomes is maintained throughout the battle. One must be guided by duty, not by reward, but one is not actively dissuaded from taking up arms. Right action is rather informed by personal abstention from any Earthly rewards that one’s actions might produce. This Hindu construction of ahimsa is not shared by Jains, a pacifist faith also indigenous to the subcontinent, nor by several branches of Buddhism in east and southeast Asia. For Bhakta’s purposes, though, abstention is an effective battle cry.
Collaborator Nikhil Chopra spent nine days in September living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, traversing the collections and creating a large drawing based on the experience. His performances introduced acknowledgement of the violence on which the Metropolitan collections are founded, from the European conquest of the indigenous Americas to the transatlantic slave trade to the Sackler and Koch money that built the institution. Museums are hostile spaces for people of color – monuments to our erasure, filled with the fruits of our labor. To engage with the art world, it helps to maintain a practice of detachment.
