Raghubir Singh at the ROM: Genius, pioneer ... monster?
When is a photography exhibition not just a photography exhibition? When it’s attended by a preface of disturbing allegations of sexual violence against the artist himself, who complicates matters by having died almost 20 years ago.
That was the dilemma faced by the Royal Ontario Museum when, late last year, the pioneering, late Indian photographer Raghubir Singh, who died of a heart attack in 1999, was accused of rape by a former assistant, the New York-based artist Jaishri Abichandani. She brought the allegation forth in the most public of ways: a protest outside Singh’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s Breuer gallery, where Modernism on the Ganges, the career-spanning survey of Singh’s work — his first since his death — was on view.
Museum officials allowed the protesters, many of them holding red signs connecting Abichandani to the burgeoning #MeToo movement, to enter the exhibition, where they walked slowly past Singh’s life’s work before assembling as a block, tingeing it with the stain of alleged brutality.
It was a powerful moment, regardless of the specifics of the situation. Singh’s remarkably rich and humane images of Indian life occupying the same space as an allegation of his monstrous behaviour seemed to be the crossing of the art world’s closely maintained parallel lines: his canonized status as artist, and his more complicated standing as a human being.
Art institutions have long been indifferent, at least publicly, toward the moral fibre of the artists they display. Were that not the case, innumerable bad actors — Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Egon Schiele, to pick a few — would have been expunged from museum collections long ago.
We are now, of course, in different times. Not grappling with a fuller view of our various icons, in hindsight, is a gruesome exclusion, a disservice to both their victims (though it’s almost always “his”) and to audiences, for whom such issues might open deeper insights into their work. The notion that an artist’s flawed behaviour has no bearing on the work they produce is wilful blindness.
Singh standing in as Canadian museum culture’s sacrificial lamb is an accident of timing more than anything else. The suddenly urgent, daunting aspect of his career came to light mere months before the show was to open.
The ROM couldn’t ignore the allegations. It could have cancelled the show entirely, which would have been an easy out.
Instead, the ROM wisely promised a platform: #MeToo and the Arts, now occupying the main-floor Thorsell Spirit House, which is free to the public. Modernism on the Ganges lives three stories above it, in a sealed gallery into which little leakage of such concerns seems to have occurred, though the ROM promises signage up above and down below, to make the link.
Downstairs, the ROM makes explicit that the allegations against Singh were the catalyst for the display, which it broadened into a timeline using an array of news articles outing powerful abusers in the culture industries (starting, naturally, with Harvey Weinstein in October of last year). #MeToo and the Arts’ main event, though, is really a video, in which an array of people from across the culture industries and gender advocates grapple with the dilemma and its confusions.
“Of course you can separate the art from the artist,” declares Ferne Downey, the president of the International Federation of Actors, a little exasperated. “But can you?”
Well, let’s see. Upstairs, in Modernism on the Ganges, you encounter what amounts to a very clean, standard display of often arresting images, articulately composed and bursting with colour. Above all, it crackles with playful, dignified humanity. In Singh’s eye, the poor are not downtrodden, or at minimum retain a dignified defiance. The endless crowds are dynamic, not oppressive, their action is confluent and kinetic, not fractured or chaotic. The pictures feel composed, part of a greater flow.
If this is the work of a monster, the images he creates are remarkable cover, though I doubt that was ever a thought. People are complex, and to contain contradictions is simply to be human; this is no excuse, but it is a fact.
The better question, and one being asked most often, is whether the darkest of those elements preclude the kind of canonization that Modernism on the Ganges seems to represent.
As ROM director Josh Basseches told me in an earlier conversation, writing out morally objectionable figures throughout history leaves unbridgeable gaps in our understanding of a cultural continuum. What we can do, he said, is speak about them honestly, which the ROM is trying to do.
But until the next Picasso extravaganza arrives refitted with bluntly told tales of his various abuses, let’s not declare victory just yet.
Singh is no Picasso, though to deny his place in contemporary photography would leave an inexcusable gap in that story, too. The ROM was drawn to the show, organized by the Met, precisely for the counternarrative it presents. Singh was a contemporary fine art photographer working almost exclusively in India, and in colour, when the history of art photography was owned by the west, and in black and white.
Even as a disciple of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the co-founder of the Magnum Agency, Singh felt a profound dishonesty in trying to capture India without the vibrant colour it seemed to demand.
“Black and white are the colours of photography,” grumped the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank in 1961, shortly after his epic tome The Americans was published, defining “serious” documentary work for at least a generation. Singh, undaunted, disagreed. What’s perhaps most striking about his images is the enlivening humanism his devotion to colour brings to them.
Singh was a devotee of Cartier-Bresson in one way: His belief in the “definitive moment,” neither posed before nor cropped after, an image captured in the immediate now. Singh practised this method to resolute perfection, using technical tools far less advanced than what we have today. It’s remarkable that, for subjects often in motion, Singh could create stillness: A man diving from a flooded temple on the Ganges is suspended in horizontal flight, as though strung in the air by wire; a pair of Indian girls arc high above a crowd on a rope swing, parallel to the ground as people meander dully by.
Singh often spoke of a “democratic eye,” capturing the roiling chaos of Indian life with a technique that was both vibrant and still — extraordinary moments alongside the everyday. His pictures contain multiple layers and elements happening simultaneously, the ordinary and extraordinary side-by-side in the tangle of contemporary Indian society. His eye is humane, playful and formal all at once, with colour as his guide: A small cluster of men hunkered down in the desert heat, the image all sandcoloured and grey, sparks with the fuchsia-coloured popsicles in their hands; multi-armed statues of the goddess Kali cluster in a sun-bleached courtyard, where one man seems to be fishing something out of the other’s eye.
But the very best picture here — and trust me, it’s hard to choose — is a disjointed scene in a Delhi market, where a young man, at the centre, blurred, is surrounded by what appear to be smaller images of shoppers passing by. Actually, it’s a mirror shop — a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colour, where Singh waited until the multiple reflective surfaces each held something pictureworthy, all at once. The layers he captures in a single image are, to me, dizzyingly humane as he extracts from a faceless crowd multiple images of individual people, declaring each one to be singular and unique despite the crush.
At the top of the frame, Singh has placed himself, reflected in a mirror and looking through the viewfinder. It’s partly a tribute to his friend, the great American contemporary photographer Lee Friedlander who made a career of such oblique appearances in his own images; but more than that, I think, it’s Singh declaring himself not a cold observer of Indian life, but intimately involved, passionate for and sympathetic to its complex dynamics.
Can someone with such obvious humanity be capable of something so cold-blooded and awful as rape? The allegation nags at my viewing of these images, an itch I can’t scratch.
When I saw the picture Monsoon Rains, of three women drenched in the torrent of a wind-whipped storm, I felt a twinge of revulsion — that Singh, maybe, was less their sympathetic to their plight than lasciviously watching as their saris clung tightly to their wet flesh.
“Maybe” is the operative word. With art, the vast majority of the time, we live in quiet, unquestioning reverence, the artist’s mastery of form elevating them to a plane beyond questioning. Any effort to bring them back down to the ground where questions can be asked, even if no answers can be given, will not be easy.
But it will be honest, and that’s reason enough.