20/01/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/19oPYgwYpB/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Vrinda Agarwal, a doctoral student of art history who worked with BN Goswamy, thinks of his art historical practice as having “an object-based approach” that he thought students were moving away from, that they were not really seeing. “He was not as much a theoretical person, which a lot of American academia does not appreciate,” Agarwal said. Theoretical propositions and jargon were anathema to Goswamy’s thinking and, therefore, his writing. The art historian Preeti Bahadur Ramaswamy, who studied under Goswamy, recalled how he would always come into the classroom and ask, about a painting, “‘What does this work mean to you? Speak about it.’ It was always about responding to the work and taking it from there,” she told me. “Data, material, period, style, et cetera, is always there. But you need to engage with the work of art first. Find a point of entry into the work of art. The rest will follow. It is a kind of levitating.” Looking is its own form of rigour.
But uneasy questions linger. When we interpret and theorise an object—say, a painting, or a film, or a book—how far do we go before we can no longer see it? Before we realise our interpretation has dislodged itself from the object? On the flip side, how much does immersion into the work of art, which many call “romantic” and Ahuja calls “valorizing the experience of art,” render the reading oversaturated, overwrought?
Read Prathyush Parasuraman's essay on BN Goswamy’s strategies of seeing:
https://caravanmagazine.in/books/bn-goswamy-strategies-seeing
