Productive Failure

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at Florida International University, Miami

This monograph sets out to write new transnational South Asian art histories - to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. However, this is done through a deliberate productive failure - specifically, by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach that is regularly assumed for South Asian art histories. For instance, one chapter explores the abstract work of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. I also examine whiteness, the invisible ground upon which racialized art histories often pivot, as a fraught yet productive site for writing art history. As the book progresses, art historical writing includes a range of practice-led forms, such as curating exhibitions or my affective engagement with visual culture. Overall, I suggest methods for generating art history that acknowledge the complex web of factors within which art history is produced and the different forms of knowledge-production we might count as art history.

This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy.

1 Introduction: Towards creolising transnational South Asian art histories
2 Authorship: Anish Kapoor as British/Asian/artist
3 Form: queer zen
4 Subject matter: writing as a racial pharmakon
5 Space/site: writing queer feminist transnational South Asian art histories
6 Practice-led: producing art, producing art history
7 Affect: belonging
Afterword: Toward writing indigenous transnational South Asian art histories
Index