Preliminary Note: November 2021. Fifty years ago the Tantra exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery was due to close. It didn’t. Popularity kept the show open and for me, the artist Chris Dorsett, closure still seems premature five decades later. We all know what became of tantra in the Western imagination, but the creative reach of this exhibition remains under-researched. Accordingly, everything on this new website is prompted by the survival of the bright red Tantra catalogue in my studio. Thus I intend to itemise, in an open access format, the triangular relationship between my work as an artist, an extraordinary exhibition, and my current affiliations with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Posts: In November 1971 the catalogue I purchased at the exhibition became a permanent fixture in my studio at the Royal College of Art.
Items: While I work on this site I am borrowing a second copy of the catalogue. It was annotated by Tantra‘s curator Philip Rawson.
Research: A key point is that Rawson mentored me as I set out as an artist-curator who combines contemporary art with museum displays.