Indian Institue of Management 2000 M.B.A CAT - Question Paper

fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at
its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously
ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the thoughts where the two
principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very various account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian
abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism,
which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they obtain themselves bereft of the imaginative energy to negotiate the union of
metaphysics and painterliness.
Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed
off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or
trend guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The
remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of
their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their latest work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism
pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a
wistful, delicate beauty but stops there.
Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it
affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasised a call for new forms
of attention, abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in
an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to
reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship ranging from the painted image and the world around it.
But will they abandon their favourite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?


9. Which 1 of the subsequent is not said by the writer as a cause for abstractionism losing its vitality?
(1) Abstractionism has failed to reorient itself in the situation of changing human experience.

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