1. Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 374–76. 2. Elizabeth Harney, “Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London,” in “What Is an Avant-Garde?” special issue, New Literary History 41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 740. 3. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 6–7. 4. Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001,” in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, ed. Iwona Blazwick, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 16–41; and Geeta Kapur, “Delhi,” in Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes, exh. cat. (London: Phaidon, 2013), 89–112. “Proposition Avant-Garde” by Geeta Kapur, the preeminent theorist, critic, and curator of contemporary art in the Indian subcontinent, takes the form of thirteen core claims related to the conditions and urgent challenges of the aesthetic field in India. The proposition is pitched from a specific axis, the geopolitical South, and through a decisive set of historical energies—from Bandung to Fanon to Négritude—that reshape the dominant story of radicalism in twentiethcentury art. Here, Kapur has enumerated all manner of temporal, social, and geopolitical contingencies that constitute the “seismic terrain” of our world today, and put forth the perennial problem of art’s possibilities for existence within it. At the heart of the proposition is Kapur’s call to “continue with the term avant-garde,” to imbue it with “dense and diverse (cultural) annotation,” and to give “valence and purpose to the key avant-garde dialectic,” namely, the imbrication between art and life across the widest possible political scale. Kapur’s investment in the idea of the avant-garde should by now come as little surprise. The concept is a recurrent one in her theoretical writing about art practice in the Indian subcontinent since the 1990s, appearing in several of the essays collected in her influential book When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000). In the book’s final chapter, for example, titled “Dismantled Norms: Apropos an Indian/Asian Avant-garde,” first published in 1996, Kapur argued that the notion of the avant-garde needed to be “unstrung from the logic of a Euro-American master discourse,” and connected to the “hitherto unlogged initiatives” that belonged to specific national or regional histories like those of India and/or Asia.1 Kapur’s response in that essay to the American theorist Hal Foster has been described as “one of the first serious attempts to converse directly” with the long history of intense discussions about the avant-garde in Euro-American theory.2 In enacting what she called a “deliberate deflection” of Foster’s argument, Kapur drew attention to the narrow geopolitical frames and continued indifference to the non-Western world that shaped existing debates on the avant-garde. She thus made visible what Paul Mann has referred to as avant-garde theory’s “discursive economy,” namely, its own vested interests in institutions of thought.3 In later essays, she appeared to harness the concept more firmly to the locus of the city, in particular, to the disruptive possibilities contained in the volatile cityscapes of Mumbai in the 1990s, and the fraught urban expansion of New Delhi in the first decade of the twentyfirst century.4 The current proposition by Kapur to “continue with the term” by reinforcing “the postcolonial with an avant-garde discourse” therefore recalls and reactivates these earlier efforts, and raises several questions at the outset. Why, it seems reasonable to ask, does Kapur remain attached to the concept of the avant-garde in relation to contemporary art practice in India, when this concept has been increasingly disparaged as outdated, exhausted, or overexposed? How should we understand the centrality and organizing role of the avant-garde in Kapur’s art criticism and theoretical imagination over time? What is to be gained from continuing with this concept, or at least taking her proposal to do so seriously? And how might such questions themselves alert us to the changing role and identity of theory itself within the unfolding trajectories of art in the subcontinent? Saloni Mathur

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对卡普尔“前卫命题”的回应

1. Geeta Kapur，《现代主义何时：印度当代文化实践论文集》（新德里：Tulika，2000 年），374-76。2. 伊丽莎白·哈尼 (Elizabeth Harney)，“后殖民骚动：达喀尔和伦敦的先锋派”，“什么是先锋派？” 特刊，新文学史 41，没有。4（2010 年秋季）：740。3. 保罗·曼，前卫的理论-死亡（布卢明顿：印第安纳大学出版社，1991），6-7。4. Geeta Kapur 和 Ashish Rajadhyaksha，“孟买/孟买 1992-2001”，世纪城：现代大都市的艺术与文化，编辑。伊沃娜·布拉兹维克，exh。猫。（伦敦：泰特出版社，2001 年），16-41；和 Geeta Kapur，“德里”，在未来的艺术城市：21 世纪前卫，exh。猫。（伦敦：Phaidon，2013 年），89-112。印度次大陆杰出的当代艺术理论家、评论家和策展人 Geeta Kapur 的“Proposition Avant-Garde”，采取与印度美学领域的条件和紧迫挑战相关的 13 项核心主张的形式。这个命题是从一个特定的轴心——地缘政治的南方，以及一系列决定性的历史能量——从万隆到法农再到黑人——提出的，这些能量重塑了 20 世纪艺术中激进主义的主导故事。在这里，卡普尔列举了构成当今世界“地震地形”的各种时间、社会和地缘政治的偶然性，并提出了艺术在其中存在的可能性这一长期存在的问题。该命题的核心是卡普尔呼吁“继续使用前卫一词”，为其注入“密集而多样的（文化）注释”，并赋予“关键前卫辩证法的价值和目的”，即，在尽可能广泛的政治范围内，艺术与生活之间的融合。卡普尔对前卫理念的投资现在应该不足为奇了。这个概念在她关于 1990 年代以来印度次大陆艺术实践的理论著作中反复出现，出现在她有影响力的著作《什么时候是现代主义：印度当代文化实践论文集》（2000 年）中收集的几篇论文中。例如，在 1996 年首次出版的这本书的最后一章题为“拆除的规范：与印度/亚洲先锋派相符”时，卡普尔认为先锋派的概念需要“脱离欧元区的逻辑”。 -美国大师话语”，并与属于特定国家或地区历史（如印度和/或亚洲的历史）的“迄今为止未被记录的倡议”相关联。1 Kapur 在那篇文章中对美国理论家 Hal Foster 的回应被描述为“第一次认真地尝试直接对话”，这是关于欧美理论中前卫的激烈讨论的悠久历史2。卡普尔被称为福斯特论点的“故意偏向”，他提请注意狭隘的地缘政治框架，并继续对塑造了关于前卫的现有辩论的非西方世界漠不关心。因此，她使保罗·曼 (Paul Mann) 所说的前卫理论的“话语经济”变得可见，即其在思想制度中的既得利益。 3 在后来的文章中，她似乎更坚定地将这一概念运用到城市所在地尤其是 1990 年代孟买动荡的城市景观中包含的破坏性可能性，以及 21 世纪头十年新德里令人担忧的城市扩张。 4 Kapur 目前提出的通过加强“前卫话语的后殖民”来“继续使用这个词”的主张，回顾并重新激活了这些早期的努力，并在一开始就提出了几个问题。为什么，在印度当代艺术实践中，前卫的概念越来越被贬低为过时、枯竭或过度曝光，卡普尔为什么仍然依附于前卫的概念，这似乎是合理的？随着时间的推移，我们应该如何理解前卫在卡普尔的艺术批评和理论想象中的中心地位和组织作用？继续这个概念将获得什么，或者至少认真对待她的提议？这些问题本身如何提醒我们注意在次大陆展开的艺术轨迹中理论本身的角色和身份的变化？萨洛尼·马图尔