In November 1971 the catalogue I had purchased at the Tantra exhibition became a permanent fixture in my studio at the Royal College of Art. It has remained with me ever since.
It immediately began to accumulate impromptu bookmarks often made from offcuts of my drawings, and these seem significant because they are a by-product of my long rumination on the educational thinking of Tantra’s curator Philip Rawson (see my uncatalogued items page).
Those of us who thronged the Hayward Gallery were also reading his landmark publication Drawing (1969). Indian aesthetics were at work in his activities as an art educator as well as a museum curator – he entwined passionate explorations of the ‘language’ of art with the sensible, embodied, and numinous values associated with philosophical reflections of the 10th century tantric sage Abhinavagupta.
A year after the Tantra exhibition closed he joined the staff at the Royal College of Art and became my teacher.
During the following decades, as I went about establishing my career as an artist-curator, Rawson mentored my engagement with museum collections.
The Tantra exhibition had demonstrated how contemporary art could be put to work in the service of historic material in museums. I have spent a lifetime exploring this idea.
Thus, my old Tantra catalogue now has many ‘loose pages’. They represent a great deal of direct knowledge which is, on the one hand, sensitive to the educative significance Rawson attributed to aesthetic encounters, but on the other hand, inflected by an acknowledgement that his famous bright red catalogue is now placed at some distance from a world that is post-structuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial.