Introducing the “New Observationists”: Demystifying a potential tool to revolt in mobile exercise of visuals

Abstract

This is a paper on art and portable dissent that focuses on drawings, paintings, and graffiti by three prominent Indian artists secretly enthralled by the Kolkata and Bengal of the late 1960s. The focus is on avant-garde agit-visuals or an extension of social sculpture (Beuys) that reappear on house walls, white cubes, notebooks, posters, and travel diaries as a wet narrative that rescues social resistance. Despite a hidden dilemma, they generate a different audience by incorporating the local in cross border, keeping an unambiguity intact while bridging nonconformist art movements. The paper goes on to analyse how art has historically been recognised as an instrument of critical reflection, generally emerging as a dominant form against the despotism of a particular social class. They could be called "degenerate art "1 of the 21st century, as they (graffiti) illegally occupy walls. They were not commissioned or made, but survived decades of purge and reinforce a historical time that includes the dystopia of a surveillance society and the tumult of a physically recorded space. This paper will also explore how nonconformist art forms seek to dominate a dialectical discourse on art and resistance in a space infected by consumption. Overall, the implications of art will be discussed in order to understand its practise in terms of mobility and displacement, beyond form and colour in coordination with resistance.