Of Being and Nothingness
The representational world of Babu Eswar Prasad is an ambiguous site of unending tropes. Ambiguity shrouds the paintings via images/ objects drawn from varied sources like historical, popular, art historical and photographic. The viewers are made to respite for a moment from one image to another which leads to a stillness which is not silent. The sound is but not audible. This inaudibility is due to the flatness he thrusts upon the images along with their meanings. The flatness is an imprisonment of not just the objects but also their associate meanings. It moves you to a claustrophobic nothingness. The poetic space of clouds and sky which are referents themselves (drawn from Tibetan tangas or Buddhist scrolls) gives a hint of nature. But it seems a fake promise. The simulated environ though looks real is but a deception. The deception of it is felt when we are trapped in the vortex of interior with a fake exit. This is profligated by its opaque flatness that rejects your flight into the exterior. The moment you imagine to step out you are thrown inside. The paintings head nowhere. Existence is in captivity with meaninglessness or what can be said as overpopulation of tropes. There is an eerie chaotic noise that fractures the sublimity which the huge flat interior is supposed to create. This eerie sound is created by the human absence and the use of fragments. There is an antithesis between the simultaneous presence of stillness formally and technically constructed and the chaos of overlapping permutation of meanings.
His earlier landscapes had a joyous sublimity that takes the viewer to something beyond into the unknown fantastic world. But the present works creates a counterfit promise of this. It exists for a while but soon brings the viewer to the same place. In his earlier works one meandered from inside to outside and vice versa into the surreal world of impossibilities. The impossible architectures open up the space for free speculation. The images were like floating sensations. But now it is a trap. One wanders inside along with the objects which create a world of esoteric enclave. The historical gets trapped in the social, the social in the existential and the existential in the most basic of meanings. Space is trapped in time and the time within time and space within space. Meaning is not created as a whole but lies in its details. It brings different realities.
There is a constant play with meanings. Sometimes it’s in the analogy or in the interaction. Sometimes in isolation and sometimes get trapped in esotericism. It works like a “koan”. It never settles in a particular meaning making and always remains unconcluded and ceaseless and dispersed. Even the titles of his paintings highlight this contradiction and mystery. It’s the strategy of closure which Babu effectively utilizes to create an existential duality and its meaninglessness, its absurdities and illogicality. Everything returns to the now and here. There is no promise or possibility of moving out. It’s an empty fictitious beauty all around with simultaneous concrete existence of alienation and the claustrophobic boredom.
Rolliemukherjee
Videos
As a cinephile Babu’s engagement with the medium of cinema has maturely sourced out in his videos. A big collector of both parallel and popular movies his engagement with these videos has brought another fun loving and simple personality of Babu to the fore.
Notes from my diary is the first video by Babu done in a workshop conducted in Max Muller Bhavan in Bangalore in 1997. The video can be seen as an extension of his painterly language in motion picture. The presence of the being is relegated to the background sounds of noisy city life and other activities. What is seen is only the empty landscape devoid of any human activity. The shadows themselves speak for the life portrayed. The video is a montage of clippings from various films which are now historical classics. The play of shadows and light, the use of sound and silence, the absence of human are all the original sensibilities he has nurtured all through his artistic ovure.
“Splice” and “Dus ka bees” are two other videos which are strikingly in contrast with his painterly personality. Taking visuals from the popular cinematic imageries the videos are more a spoofs of the commercial genre of Hollywood and regional films. “dus ka Bees” is a take on the stereotypical representations in the regional and national films in India. The excess of sex, violence is brought within this short video by using the palimpsest of the cinema posters which adore the walls of the city. Cinema posters are generally aimed at generating the desire through clippings from the films. Machoism, titillating song sequences, romance and excessive violence are the basic scripts/ texts over which the most of the popular film genre dwell. This spoof replays the whole “filmi” with a background which is wonderfully collaged from various regional and bollywood films.
“Splice” is also a spoof of the Hollywood action thriller. It’s a trailer of the never to be made film. This mocks at the hypocrisy of the Hollywood which uses all strategies and technologies for marketing the desire. Here again the themes of sex, violence suspense are made fun of by using the same strategies. The anxiety generated here is a false one or it is about a film which is never made.
V.Divakar
Monday, October 13, 2008
catalouge for shyam Prasad, july2008
No Exit
“One cannot be free unless all are free”- Jean Paul Sartre
Though this quote by Sartre appears an impossible utopic vision, it actually brings forth the guilt every one of us has to live with. When I first saw Shyamprasad’s paintings and prints, what intrigued me is the feminine subjectivity in him. The female figure in his work is always the mother rendered as a faceless figure. What is significant is that she doesn’t become a personification or metaphor, rather stands as an ambiguity. She neither shows a negative nor positive force. His idiom is in between expressionism and realism. This makes his work open and closeted at the same time. Thus his works communicates neither information nor emotional sentimentality. Rather it brings forth the trapped human condition. One can easily connect it with Sartre’s titles of his plays like “The flies”, “No exit”, and “Dirty hands”. His works doesn’t promise any positive deterministic answer for the ‘man’ made atrocities where victims are made vulnerable and powerless.
His early works were generally either mask like figures or self portraits with some floral decorations filling the negative spaces. The way he handles his paint and motifs is very unattractive,* when we try to see his works from the specter of the gallery oriented art world. This haunting specter has left no option for the artists but be carried in its awe. The failures of radical alternatives outside the systemic structures have taught that confrontational aesthetics would be secluded and isolated and in the long run loose its own force against this giant machine of capitalism. The artists now have embarked upon the possibilities of working ‘within the given credos’ yet at the same time finding subversive extensions of their creative productions. This staying within the beasts belly can be seen as yet another strategy to survive the onslaught of the market forces. So this aestheticisation is nothing but strategies of survival.
Shyam’s work doesn’t permit any kind of such aestheticisation. It’s unattractive* ordinariness in rendering makes his work inconsumable and doesn’t end up becoming sensation bound. His loosely flowing lines particularly in his execution of flowers or sprouting branches are so flimsy* that it doesn’t define it and interestingly it works in an abstract level and creates a contradiction between the flower and blood stains. This is more evident in his etching “Rodin’s thinker with my flower seller”.
This ambiguity between something which is fragile and beautiful and something which is generally connected to violence and pain enhances a precarious space in his works. All his works are done in smudgy dusty tones of green ochre and grey. The only primary colour extensively used is red.
In his work there is always an immanent threat the child is to face. The child is recurring motif who is shown in a foetal position. Sometimes protected by a colacacia leave or is kept inside a jar or a flower pot or sometimes circled by a gigantic worm like form.
The images in his work doesn’t synthesis in a harmonic whole rather exist as fragments. This in fact works well in thrusting on an inexplicable fragmented existence. In most of his works he uses direct symbols of violence. The female and child are the victims and the pawn s of belligerent, phallocentric forces which is parochial and never permits a safe existence in a democracy.
His titles never talks about the tragedy [except one work which is titled as “lamentations”] but works as a mock at the upper and middle class aspirations for an unproblematic and optimistic world view and our unawareness about the societal ills and the lack of care for female gender. The thinker of Rodin is another leitmotif in his work which works as a symbol of an intellectual/artist and the failure to bring about any radical changes in majoritarian mental make up.
Rollie Mukherjee,
Art Historian,
Bangalore.
*Words like flimsy and unattractive are used in a positive connotation in his work.
“One cannot be free unless all are free”- Jean Paul Sartre
Though this quote by Sartre appears an impossible utopic vision, it actually brings forth the guilt every one of us has to live with. When I first saw Shyamprasad’s paintings and prints, what intrigued me is the feminine subjectivity in him. The female figure in his work is always the mother rendered as a faceless figure. What is significant is that she doesn’t become a personification or metaphor, rather stands as an ambiguity. She neither shows a negative nor positive force. His idiom is in between expressionism and realism. This makes his work open and closeted at the same time. Thus his works communicates neither information nor emotional sentimentality. Rather it brings forth the trapped human condition. One can easily connect it with Sartre’s titles of his plays like “The flies”, “No exit”, and “Dirty hands”. His works doesn’t promise any positive deterministic answer for the ‘man’ made atrocities where victims are made vulnerable and powerless.
His early works were generally either mask like figures or self portraits with some floral decorations filling the negative spaces. The way he handles his paint and motifs is very unattractive,* when we try to see his works from the specter of the gallery oriented art world. This haunting specter has left no option for the artists but be carried in its awe. The failures of radical alternatives outside the systemic structures have taught that confrontational aesthetics would be secluded and isolated and in the long run loose its own force against this giant machine of capitalism. The artists now have embarked upon the possibilities of working ‘within the given credos’ yet at the same time finding subversive extensions of their creative productions. This staying within the beasts belly can be seen as yet another strategy to survive the onslaught of the market forces. So this aestheticisation is nothing but strategies of survival.
Shyam’s work doesn’t permit any kind of such aestheticisation. It’s unattractive* ordinariness in rendering makes his work inconsumable and doesn’t end up becoming sensation bound. His loosely flowing lines particularly in his execution of flowers or sprouting branches are so flimsy* that it doesn’t define it and interestingly it works in an abstract level and creates a contradiction between the flower and blood stains. This is more evident in his etching “Rodin’s thinker with my flower seller”.
This ambiguity between something which is fragile and beautiful and something which is generally connected to violence and pain enhances a precarious space in his works. All his works are done in smudgy dusty tones of green ochre and grey. The only primary colour extensively used is red.
In his work there is always an immanent threat the child is to face. The child is recurring motif who is shown in a foetal position. Sometimes protected by a colacacia leave or is kept inside a jar or a flower pot or sometimes circled by a gigantic worm like form.
The images in his work doesn’t synthesis in a harmonic whole rather exist as fragments. This in fact works well in thrusting on an inexplicable fragmented existence. In most of his works he uses direct symbols of violence. The female and child are the victims and the pawn s of belligerent, phallocentric forces which is parochial and never permits a safe existence in a democracy.
His titles never talks about the tragedy [except one work which is titled as “lamentations”] but works as a mock at the upper and middle class aspirations for an unproblematic and optimistic world view and our unawareness about the societal ills and the lack of care for female gender. The thinker of Rodin is another leitmotif in his work which works as a symbol of an intellectual/artist and the failure to bring about any radical changes in majoritarian mental make up.
Rollie Mukherjee,
Art Historian,
Bangalore.
*Words like flimsy and unattractive are used in a positive connotation in his work.
august 2008,artconcerns.com
Primitively Modern Artist
Shreyas Karle is the winner of Bodhi Art Award 2008. A post graduate in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, Shreyas work with several mediums including video and photography. Interested in public art projects, he would like to see himself as a nomad who moves from place to place, ideas to ideas. Rollie Mukherjee speaks to Shreyas to know more about his art and views. Excerpts:
Rollie Mukherjee: Tell us something about your early works.
Shreyas Karle: The works I did during my bachelors were figurative and done in mixed media. I was dealing more with daily subjects and experiences, very mundane things around me. Right from the beginning there was some kind of narration that has continued in the works I am doing right now. When I look at those works, I feel they are like telling stories. Earlier it was more on the subjects around me.
RM: How did you happen to shift your works from paintings to public art?
SK: While in Mumbai I always wanted to do three dimensional works, but because of the space constrains I couldn’t. The whole transformation happened after coming to Baroda during my masters. In my earlier works and my recent works there are similarities in the sensibilities. Though the medium and approach has changed but the sensibilities I feel have remained the same. In Baroda I got a larger space and understanding faculty which gave way to convert almost all my works. The video on lizard which was titled as “rukavat ke liye khedh hai” are all part of our mundane experience.
I generally start with an idea and that leads to implementing it in different mediums. Like I did a graphical representation of an installation. These were rubber shoes of 5 feet which were hung above the eye of the viewers. Whatever I think I put it on paper and visualise how it will look if I make it an installation. There are a series of 13 episodes, which are compiled in a book format. It talks about certain visual narrative. Two classes in a society, they metamorphosis as shoes and how a man wants to conquer a shoe and the shoe in turn puts him down. The series goes in 13 episodes. There is another work called the number game.
At Sandarbh, (Chintan’s workshop) in Rajasthan I did bolta pahad. This is a huge hillock almost 100 ft. basically the importance of this work is that the site is on the highway. So people, who generally pass through stop there to relax, look at the site. So something you are looking at is looking back at you. Even if you see the deities in Rajasthan look very raw with huge eyes attached to them. So it was something kind of someone watching you. It remained for 6 months.
It was part of a residency in SANDARBH, Rajasthan last December. I was in this village called Partapur in Vagad district of Rajasthan. In this village there is a practice of eating pohas. So there are 60 to 70 kinds of pohas available. They have pohas for breakfast, lunch... They served these pohas on paper. Simultaneously I was also working in a different project in Rajasthan. One was also a collaborative project with another artist from Baroda (Hemali Bhuta), where we made metal painted boards which contained the information about the villages we were working in and placed them at the entrance of those villages. The other I was working was on the stories on the names of villages. I found some of the names of the villages very exciting, so I made an enquiry into why certain villages are named in a particular manner. So I got a story behind one village, I started hunting for the stories and asked different people. So I got other stories also related with the villages. What I wanted was to advertise my work. I wanted more people to come to me and tell all these stories. So I did this work so as to reach more masses. I made sun signs and there is very interesting matter written for every sun sign. I xeroxed it and distributed to the poha walas and told them to serve poha on this paper. It was interesting to see people how they would read it or somebody would only throw it the message was like after eating please throw it in the dustbin. Sometime there was no dustbin. Zodiac is something, which everyone is interested to know. The very first thing every one of us would read when we pick up the morning paper. Whether the person ids from a rural or an urban setup every one of us is interested to know about the future. So I wanted them to read it.
Another time what I did was I had printed the stories of the villages giving them the image of a stamp paper, where it kind of authenticates the stories. There is a kind of advertisement saying that if you are aware…
There are videos on the pohawalas and I documented them and interviewed how their business is and why they chose to do that.
RM: Most of your works has a tendency of mythologies and have primitive quality?
SK: I always was like being primitive. I feel that era was much better compared to today. I use generally the term that you should be primitively modern” I like to be primitively modern person i.e. are staying in contemporary times but with a primitive thought, the primitiveness within you which is very raw because it is raw it gives more possibilities of exploration. Because primitive age was something when everything started when you see in historical terms people had so many things to explore now we have come to point when everything has been contaminated.
RM: The work you did on identity, you seem to want to get into the skin of the other. You are going to different locations and trying to be like them. There is where in the public projects one can feel an identity crisis.
SK: Trying to be like them is not about my personal identity crisis. It’s like something where I don’t want to keep my identity as a kind of supreme thing. I mean I am not someone who is different from them. Here I enjoy two positions- one is an outsider, I become a third person so I look at the situation through a different angle. Second is because I am with them at that place I also enjoy being in the position of being one of them. When I am in Bombay, I never see Bombay as an outsider may look at it. Traveling in train is problematic for an outsider. But as a Bombaite I feel it as part and parcel of my daily routine. Probably for an outsider it may look very interesting; he may work on a project. That’s how the whole train culture in Bombay come out with a work. I may but not really but would pressurize myself to work on it because I am part of it. Because when you are part of the crowd you don’t realize what happen, you just move with the crowd. But the moment you stand apart from the crowd, you can see which way the crowd is moving so as I am in Bangalore I am trying to see things in different light.
RM: I feel when we are with the crowd we become more auto critical about the community and the people we are trying to study. Different kinds of things like sociological structures; studying different cultural habits come into question. This is the whole problem in some kind of interactive public projects, i.e., this is the whole problem of getting into the other culture. Like what happens when you enter into other cultural space as an outsider always we tend to maintain a kind of distance and we just try to neglect in getting into the complexities which otherwise we do when we see things within our culture or as an insider we view the community or culture.
SK: I don’t need to get into the complexities because I am not engaging myself as a person who has come there with a particular intension to do a kind of social activity or I am trying to convey some message.
RM: How you position yourself as an artist who is into public projects because we know generally public art is connected to activism?
SK: I really don’t want to position myself. I like the position of a nomad who doesn’t have to say that this is my identity and this is my position. I like toy around with an idea may lead to different things. I am just spilling the beans. So it depends on the viewers to analyze the situation in which manner how and where why. I am not sitting here to analyze why I have done these projects.
RM: One thing one can sense that you are taking a public project but ultimately it is becoming somewhere formalistic or becoming visual oriented which art has always been. Now how you see this take of public art, which has always been connected to sociology and economics. A lot of artist have taken this further and have done some developmental projects and some kind of activism they have worked over. How you feel you are moving because you are bringing at the end the aesthetic of it?
SK: I don’t really want to get into the intricacies of developing something for the society. I don’t start with that intension. My basic intension is to work with something, which I find it very amazing something that tickling my senses. That thing when it develops it may or may not involve social activism or certain social messages. I am not pressurizing anything. I am not getting involved in society. So I am kind of open to everything. I want to flow with how the involvement is going like. If you see the sign boards made they were made not with the intension to help those people and tell them that you are deprived of this so we have come as a messiah to help you out from this. It was an interaction with them. We became so close to them that they started seeing us as their family members they used to invite us for tea etc. we have to somewhere our role as artist and role as a human being. You can’t separate these two positions. If you are involving with something as an artist you need to involve with all your human qualities. Art is not something, which you can separate from your daily living that art becomes mundane activity then you enjoy something on day-to-day basis.
RM: You went to one village and recorded the whole oral tradition and oral history behind the naming of particular villages. As in one way you are working as a documenter like how earlier photographers and artist went to some cultural site and they documented the entire thing and write it down and this become part of a sealed history. Its not just a living history which oral tradition other wise permits like something fades with time and something gets molded itself with new age and comes in new form according to the contemporary demand. So it is always living. This is how oral tradition functions. So In a way don’t you think you also acted as the earlier documenters?
SK: If you want to put me in that position I don’t mind. Then I would say that yes I like to play the role of documenter. I like to play that role of an historian but that doesn’t make me a historian or a documenter because my approach with what I started is totally different. I have taken these roles to kind of reach a particular stand but I don’t know even by taking these roles where it is taking me. That I do not know point how the work going to be completed, which formats it, is going to come into what it will look like. I am totally clueless about this. What is more enjoyable for me is that process itself that I am going to some place talking to some people and getting feed back. When you imagine then you force something what you want to see, so it’s very mental thing. I think we need not make ourselves so saturated much that by positioning it somewhere or even questioning the artist somewhere how he is as social activist. If you are interested in activism then don’t stand in two positions you work as social activist not as an artist. You can’t be an artist and a social activist at the sometime. When you say that the project one has done is a contribution to the society then it is a manipulation of your own work.
RM: So how you see this new avatar of artist who is interacting constantly with the society and enjoying the process of such making?
SK: I see it more as a flexible position. Since you are coming as an artist for the third person you are a harmless person, you are not attached to any party or you aren’t attached to any particular school of thought. So he welcomes you. He opens up in front of you and because for him you are just going to depict certain things which he is giving then you can say. Those roles are time specific, those role are there because certain situations needs those roles. That situation demand a role of a person who is enquiring who is documenting things otherwise, I couldn’t have got what I have got from that.
RM: When art becomes interactive and social we come to know the criticality of certain area or community. We somewhere try to criticize some of the things. How you see this non reactive ness of your approach because if art is not connected to activism I am not saying a very hard edge activism, if it is not activism then it is better that we sit at home and do some sculptures and paintings i.e. what art in modernist period was. It was insulated. But when art decided to go outside it was with that intension of social criticism and it is not similar thing as we go somewhere and romanticize people of other culture.
SK: There is difference between of being a medium and being something, which is more rigid than medium for example a flowing river is a medium you put anything into it carries to the ocean. Ocean becomes a more rigid position it takes everything and settles it down and I feel it’s better for an artist to be a medium rather defining his position and also for others not to define him because art has always been a medium. Whether it is confined to a studio space or public space.
RM: Do you think your identity every time stays without problem when you interact with other communities? For example as person belonging to other community you face different regionalism. It is not that in certain situations our identity is not questioned and it is always that there is some pressure to define the identity.
SK: These are some initial public art I have done so probably what ever you are saying I feel right now I am still in the process of knowing. I cleared my position by saying that I don’t want to have any position I don’t want to decide whether I am doing something for the social cause or something related to particular society or a bunch of people. I am enjoying being a nomad not tagging myself with any thing and just being a medium i.e. transformed it into something else. It is more about transformation from one thing to another. It is not that I am only doing public art projects; I come back to studio and work. Many projects I started from my studio and I have gone outside and that accumulation has come in form of different works so why can’t they be called public art. It is not necessary that you should be with a society or outside the studio to do something to do public art. What does a cartoonist do? When he does political cartoons for paper? He is not necessarily part of that politics or part of the daily living of the people but what he does is he experiences all those things come back to his studio and sits at one place and narrates his experiences through the common mans view. I feel rather than making a more serious or jumbled up position for an artist it is better to keep him as a person…
RM: What do you think about the function of art in society?
SK: I am not saying that I am not achieving the function. I am trying to use art to do whatever I can for the society I am living in. Right now I cannot say that I am doing art because I want to solve someone’s problem because I am not in a position that I can do so but the day when I am in apposition I can use it for the betterment of say my immediate society is society of a group of artist. So if I can do something for them then there is larger community outside. Right now I can’t show that art is such a powerful tool for social change etc. everything has a phase you need to pass through. There is politics in larger term.
Right now I am not working for any social cause. But knowingly or unknowingly if there is any social cause conveyed through it I am happy about it. I don’t want to say that I totally want to negate it. I feel the way art plays a very vital role in making a person realize what he actually should be doing. Art guides you through a particular channel to actually show what you are suppose to do. For this you need to pass certain phases of life. Probably I am in those initial phases.
RM: Tell us about your present project?
SK: Few things I am working now but I don’t know whether I am going to take them ahead as works to be done. It is a basic research I am doing a series of informal interviews with different people probably artist/ IT background/ science background. Some people randomly on street. These interviews are not really intended to anything. I am not going to document them, keeping the thing open on what ever they want to talk about their personal view about the city or probably not about the city if I am talking to an artist he might talk about an artwork how it communicates to people etc.
Shreyas Karle is the winner of Bodhi Art Award 2008. A post graduate in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, Shreyas work with several mediums including video and photography. Interested in public art projects, he would like to see himself as a nomad who moves from place to place, ideas to ideas. Rollie Mukherjee speaks to Shreyas to know more about his art and views. Excerpts:
Rollie Mukherjee: Tell us something about your early works.
Shreyas Karle: The works I did during my bachelors were figurative and done in mixed media. I was dealing more with daily subjects and experiences, very mundane things around me. Right from the beginning there was some kind of narration that has continued in the works I am doing right now. When I look at those works, I feel they are like telling stories. Earlier it was more on the subjects around me.
RM: How did you happen to shift your works from paintings to public art?
SK: While in Mumbai I always wanted to do three dimensional works, but because of the space constrains I couldn’t. The whole transformation happened after coming to Baroda during my masters. In my earlier works and my recent works there are similarities in the sensibilities. Though the medium and approach has changed but the sensibilities I feel have remained the same. In Baroda I got a larger space and understanding faculty which gave way to convert almost all my works. The video on lizard which was titled as “rukavat ke liye khedh hai” are all part of our mundane experience.
I generally start with an idea and that leads to implementing it in different mediums. Like I did a graphical representation of an installation. These were rubber shoes of 5 feet which were hung above the eye of the viewers. Whatever I think I put it on paper and visualise how it will look if I make it an installation. There are a series of 13 episodes, which are compiled in a book format. It talks about certain visual narrative. Two classes in a society, they metamorphosis as shoes and how a man wants to conquer a shoe and the shoe in turn puts him down. The series goes in 13 episodes. There is another work called the number game.
At Sandarbh, (Chintan’s workshop) in Rajasthan I did bolta pahad. This is a huge hillock almost 100 ft. basically the importance of this work is that the site is on the highway. So people, who generally pass through stop there to relax, look at the site. So something you are looking at is looking back at you. Even if you see the deities in Rajasthan look very raw with huge eyes attached to them. So it was something kind of someone watching you. It remained for 6 months.
It was part of a residency in SANDARBH, Rajasthan last December. I was in this village called Partapur in Vagad district of Rajasthan. In this village there is a practice of eating pohas. So there are 60 to 70 kinds of pohas available. They have pohas for breakfast, lunch... They served these pohas on paper. Simultaneously I was also working in a different project in Rajasthan. One was also a collaborative project with another artist from Baroda (Hemali Bhuta), where we made metal painted boards which contained the information about the villages we were working in and placed them at the entrance of those villages. The other I was working was on the stories on the names of villages. I found some of the names of the villages very exciting, so I made an enquiry into why certain villages are named in a particular manner. So I got a story behind one village, I started hunting for the stories and asked different people. So I got other stories also related with the villages. What I wanted was to advertise my work. I wanted more people to come to me and tell all these stories. So I did this work so as to reach more masses. I made sun signs and there is very interesting matter written for every sun sign. I xeroxed it and distributed to the poha walas and told them to serve poha on this paper. It was interesting to see people how they would read it or somebody would only throw it the message was like after eating please throw it in the dustbin. Sometime there was no dustbin. Zodiac is something, which everyone is interested to know. The very first thing every one of us would read when we pick up the morning paper. Whether the person ids from a rural or an urban setup every one of us is interested to know about the future. So I wanted them to read it.
Another time what I did was I had printed the stories of the villages giving them the image of a stamp paper, where it kind of authenticates the stories. There is a kind of advertisement saying that if you are aware…
There are videos on the pohawalas and I documented them and interviewed how their business is and why they chose to do that.
RM: Most of your works has a tendency of mythologies and have primitive quality?
SK: I always was like being primitive. I feel that era was much better compared to today. I use generally the term that you should be primitively modern” I like to be primitively modern person i.e. are staying in contemporary times but with a primitive thought, the primitiveness within you which is very raw because it is raw it gives more possibilities of exploration. Because primitive age was something when everything started when you see in historical terms people had so many things to explore now we have come to point when everything has been contaminated.
RM: The work you did on identity, you seem to want to get into the skin of the other. You are going to different locations and trying to be like them. There is where in the public projects one can feel an identity crisis.
SK: Trying to be like them is not about my personal identity crisis. It’s like something where I don’t want to keep my identity as a kind of supreme thing. I mean I am not someone who is different from them. Here I enjoy two positions- one is an outsider, I become a third person so I look at the situation through a different angle. Second is because I am with them at that place I also enjoy being in the position of being one of them. When I am in Bombay, I never see Bombay as an outsider may look at it. Traveling in train is problematic for an outsider. But as a Bombaite I feel it as part and parcel of my daily routine. Probably for an outsider it may look very interesting; he may work on a project. That’s how the whole train culture in Bombay come out with a work. I may but not really but would pressurize myself to work on it because I am part of it. Because when you are part of the crowd you don’t realize what happen, you just move with the crowd. But the moment you stand apart from the crowd, you can see which way the crowd is moving so as I am in Bangalore I am trying to see things in different light.
RM: I feel when we are with the crowd we become more auto critical about the community and the people we are trying to study. Different kinds of things like sociological structures; studying different cultural habits come into question. This is the whole problem in some kind of interactive public projects, i.e., this is the whole problem of getting into the other culture. Like what happens when you enter into other cultural space as an outsider always we tend to maintain a kind of distance and we just try to neglect in getting into the complexities which otherwise we do when we see things within our culture or as an insider we view the community or culture.
SK: I don’t need to get into the complexities because I am not engaging myself as a person who has come there with a particular intension to do a kind of social activity or I am trying to convey some message.
RM: How you position yourself as an artist who is into public projects because we know generally public art is connected to activism?
SK: I really don’t want to position myself. I like the position of a nomad who doesn’t have to say that this is my identity and this is my position. I like toy around with an idea may lead to different things. I am just spilling the beans. So it depends on the viewers to analyze the situation in which manner how and where why. I am not sitting here to analyze why I have done these projects.
RM: One thing one can sense that you are taking a public project but ultimately it is becoming somewhere formalistic or becoming visual oriented which art has always been. Now how you see this take of public art, which has always been connected to sociology and economics. A lot of artist have taken this further and have done some developmental projects and some kind of activism they have worked over. How you feel you are moving because you are bringing at the end the aesthetic of it?
SK: I don’t really want to get into the intricacies of developing something for the society. I don’t start with that intension. My basic intension is to work with something, which I find it very amazing something that tickling my senses. That thing when it develops it may or may not involve social activism or certain social messages. I am not pressurizing anything. I am not getting involved in society. So I am kind of open to everything. I want to flow with how the involvement is going like. If you see the sign boards made they were made not with the intension to help those people and tell them that you are deprived of this so we have come as a messiah to help you out from this. It was an interaction with them. We became so close to them that they started seeing us as their family members they used to invite us for tea etc. we have to somewhere our role as artist and role as a human being. You can’t separate these two positions. If you are involving with something as an artist you need to involve with all your human qualities. Art is not something, which you can separate from your daily living that art becomes mundane activity then you enjoy something on day-to-day basis.
RM: You went to one village and recorded the whole oral tradition and oral history behind the naming of particular villages. As in one way you are working as a documenter like how earlier photographers and artist went to some cultural site and they documented the entire thing and write it down and this become part of a sealed history. Its not just a living history which oral tradition other wise permits like something fades with time and something gets molded itself with new age and comes in new form according to the contemporary demand. So it is always living. This is how oral tradition functions. So In a way don’t you think you also acted as the earlier documenters?
SK: If you want to put me in that position I don’t mind. Then I would say that yes I like to play the role of documenter. I like to play that role of an historian but that doesn’t make me a historian or a documenter because my approach with what I started is totally different. I have taken these roles to kind of reach a particular stand but I don’t know even by taking these roles where it is taking me. That I do not know point how the work going to be completed, which formats it, is going to come into what it will look like. I am totally clueless about this. What is more enjoyable for me is that process itself that I am going to some place talking to some people and getting feed back. When you imagine then you force something what you want to see, so it’s very mental thing. I think we need not make ourselves so saturated much that by positioning it somewhere or even questioning the artist somewhere how he is as social activist. If you are interested in activism then don’t stand in two positions you work as social activist not as an artist. You can’t be an artist and a social activist at the sometime. When you say that the project one has done is a contribution to the society then it is a manipulation of your own work.
RM: So how you see this new avatar of artist who is interacting constantly with the society and enjoying the process of such making?
SK: I see it more as a flexible position. Since you are coming as an artist for the third person you are a harmless person, you are not attached to any party or you aren’t attached to any particular school of thought. So he welcomes you. He opens up in front of you and because for him you are just going to depict certain things which he is giving then you can say. Those roles are time specific, those role are there because certain situations needs those roles. That situation demand a role of a person who is enquiring who is documenting things otherwise, I couldn’t have got what I have got from that.
RM: When art becomes interactive and social we come to know the criticality of certain area or community. We somewhere try to criticize some of the things. How you see this non reactive ness of your approach because if art is not connected to activism I am not saying a very hard edge activism, if it is not activism then it is better that we sit at home and do some sculptures and paintings i.e. what art in modernist period was. It was insulated. But when art decided to go outside it was with that intension of social criticism and it is not similar thing as we go somewhere and romanticize people of other culture.
SK: There is difference between of being a medium and being something, which is more rigid than medium for example a flowing river is a medium you put anything into it carries to the ocean. Ocean becomes a more rigid position it takes everything and settles it down and I feel it’s better for an artist to be a medium rather defining his position and also for others not to define him because art has always been a medium. Whether it is confined to a studio space or public space.
RM: Do you think your identity every time stays without problem when you interact with other communities? For example as person belonging to other community you face different regionalism. It is not that in certain situations our identity is not questioned and it is always that there is some pressure to define the identity.
SK: These are some initial public art I have done so probably what ever you are saying I feel right now I am still in the process of knowing. I cleared my position by saying that I don’t want to have any position I don’t want to decide whether I am doing something for the social cause or something related to particular society or a bunch of people. I am enjoying being a nomad not tagging myself with any thing and just being a medium i.e. transformed it into something else. It is more about transformation from one thing to another. It is not that I am only doing public art projects; I come back to studio and work. Many projects I started from my studio and I have gone outside and that accumulation has come in form of different works so why can’t they be called public art. It is not necessary that you should be with a society or outside the studio to do something to do public art. What does a cartoonist do? When he does political cartoons for paper? He is not necessarily part of that politics or part of the daily living of the people but what he does is he experiences all those things come back to his studio and sits at one place and narrates his experiences through the common mans view. I feel rather than making a more serious or jumbled up position for an artist it is better to keep him as a person…
RM: What do you think about the function of art in society?
SK: I am not saying that I am not achieving the function. I am trying to use art to do whatever I can for the society I am living in. Right now I cannot say that I am doing art because I want to solve someone’s problem because I am not in a position that I can do so but the day when I am in apposition I can use it for the betterment of say my immediate society is society of a group of artist. So if I can do something for them then there is larger community outside. Right now I can’t show that art is such a powerful tool for social change etc. everything has a phase you need to pass through. There is politics in larger term.
Right now I am not working for any social cause. But knowingly or unknowingly if there is any social cause conveyed through it I am happy about it. I don’t want to say that I totally want to negate it. I feel the way art plays a very vital role in making a person realize what he actually should be doing. Art guides you through a particular channel to actually show what you are suppose to do. For this you need to pass certain phases of life. Probably I am in those initial phases.
RM: Tell us about your present project?
SK: Few things I am working now but I don’t know whether I am going to take them ahead as works to be done. It is a basic research I am doing a series of informal interviews with different people probably artist/ IT background/ science background. Some people randomly on street. These interviews are not really intended to anything. I am not going to document them, keeping the thing open on what ever they want to talk about their personal view about the city or probably not about the city if I am talking to an artist he might talk about an artwork how it communicates to people etc.
june/july 2008,artconcerns.com
Mistakes are Actions
Aron Johnston, Fulbright Research Grantee, 2007-08 believes in the brilliance than the actual intention of the painting. He tells Rollie Mukherjee about his recent solo show titled “signs unseen” held at Chitra Kala Parishath, April 2008. The conversation sheds light on his early works and the sojourn in India. Excerpts:
Rollie Mukherjee: After seeing your entire oeuvre of works one can observe that from abstraction you have moved to the “pop” approach and again you are heading towards an abstraction but with a difference. Now you tend to focus more on “language” as any other pop artist with greater emphasis on semiotics. Your abstraction seems more to be well planned / calculative (the definition pop artist gave for their works) and imitative of popular images and text.
Aron Johnston: What was common among the abstract expressionist (particularly if you compare De Kooning and with Pollock) was the activation of the body and immediacy of thought with their body into canvas. However, if you talk about my work it is often not about my body. May be it is because of its size that it might have some relation with body or viewers body, but surely its not about my body or my immediate thought either. Whereas De Kooning was doing reactions in his paintings, one stroke led to the next stroke and so on. I kind of set up a situation where strokes create a next action and I am kind of separate from that. Well it’s (for me) a matter of defining or developing a system that creates an action that I feel comfortable in making. Therefore, if there was an artist or a group of artists that I can connect to at least with the systematic physical aspect of art, it would be Jasper Johns or Robert Indiana. For example Robert Indiana created a number system in his work so all his paintings had to do with numbers or numerology.
Therefore, we can say that the system activated his joy of painting. With Jasper Johns, it is with his series of letters. He did not have to think about what he had to paint so he says here is the subject now all that is activated is action or activation in the painting which happens in my paintings also. I found something systematic. So now, I don’t need to think about the subject and now I am part of the system and I am merely the vehicle of its production and that’s where I get my creative joy. That does not necessarily explain why I like to destroy the images.
I don’t know how to categorize myself. I don’t really think myself as an abstract painter and even though I look at abstract artists, they are not the people I put myself with or align with. I think of artists like Kosuth or Baldessari are my real influences and my real favourite is Magritte. Because the way Magritte plays with language, I like him. But if you look, my paintings they have nothing to do with the physicality or representations of Magritte. I am influenced more by Magritte than Pollock (even if they do look like abstractionists).
The work, titled “slick burger,” is my first work where I started intentionally exploring the idea of language. There is the text “slick burger” and the image of a train. It looks like a piece of signage. But it’s all invented. This work came out of an argument I had with an art critic. He said “if your work was “slick” you can sell it in New York or Paris gallery or you could never make it as an artist.” I think my art is more like a cheese burger. It is very hard to handle. When you eat it you enjoy it but it gets all over your hands, face and shirt, its messy and so I came up with the idea of “slick burger” because it’s a phrase which doesn’t really make sense. I used the text with an image which doesn’t really make any sense with the text because that was something I believed and I liked. Art for me is like a slow moving train. It is some thing you can sit and watch.
This is where I started to break away from this kind of linear thinking and stopped putting very distinct meanings to my work. The developing goal was to create an absence of meaning with things that seem meaningful.
RM: You had done a street installation in Bangalore and told that you desire to continue more such public displays like any other sign boards. Also you said you believe “art” is non transient and timeless. So what role do you want your art to play, because knowing popular art like sign boards have a transient quality and ends with fulfillment of its purpose?
AJ: If we think about what Kant said about the idea of disinterestedness, an artist puts all of his interest into painting so that the viewer can come and sit in front of a painting and get relaxed by separating from their own interest. From the artist devotion to interest, from this state disinterestedness develops. I liked that theory.
I like things full of too much information, my passion for colours and my interactions to text as form. So then, I create away. They fuse together so the timeless part you are talking about is not stuck to any one viewer. I hope that theoretically, someone can come up to a work and they can try to explore it. They can’t bring too much of their own interest to it. So the only option to it is that they have to relax and be disinterested but that doesn’t mean they don’t like it but it means that they can’t put too much of themselves in that. Therefore, they relax before it that may be the “aura” of it like the Sistine chapel. It is loaded with so much information and the subject matter is so powerful that all you can do is feel, becoming to it. A person does not have to believe in some thing to understand the AWE. You can create so much information that it creates no information that is when it is bigger than… what ever. That is when it touches the void.
RM: You said that you want to make art out of mistake. How did you arrive at this idea of making art? You generally use mediums which are generally considered antithetical to each other.
AJ: Mistakes are sometimes more brilliant than the actual intention of the painting. Painting exists in many parts. The first part is the idea or concept. Then there is part of the painting that exists in the act of making. When you are making a painting, you don’t think of anything. The act of painting becomes the Art and the third part, and there are many more parts thereafter, is when you can analyze what you have done and start finding out mistakes and in my paintings right at the end these mistakes make the work happen I was trying to control it. I spend weeks with the painting and never saw it and then the minute the paint starts to dry and I start to come out of my activation only then does it started to reveal itself as something else. Therefore, my idea coming into the painting wasn’t what I got when I finished it. Which was perfect, that is exactly what I want. I want my idea or concept to be motivated not just as a definition but by action, mistakes are actions that I can take if they work fix if they don’t. I am the coach and the team; the field is the artwork not the opponent.
The work titled “lessons in knot tying” is about the confusion of being tied up in observation or meaning. When you put this order of ABC together with the other images, its (the artworks) intention is to be confused, you actually need to follow a process. Normally to become less confused you need to follow an order I am trying to reverse that. So, this is the painting. In my work, there is chaos but there is an order to create that chaos. In that piece, I have used so much wax that it’s poring over the sides. It is almost like encaustic. I put wax, then draw with crayon, and keep doing this. I draw, heat and then seal it. I use the hot gun to melt the wax, do the drawing, and repeat. This is a very hard to achieve. If I want the drawing to melt faster or slower, I need to adjust the distance of the heat gun. I need to do this process very fast to keep up with the setting time. I am trying to control the material but I am always out of control. The process inspires mistakes. No body can understand this part, I am not sure whether to do it myself, but hopefully they can feel it.
The train in slick burger was printed on a big piece of paper (48 inches) it was printed with non-archival ink and so the ink will fade. So now, the image hardly exists any more. To me this is part of my work. It is breaking down. Its intricate, its part of its beauty, its ability to fall apart. I really like the idea that my artwork is in a state of entropy when the meaning becomes so obliterated / obscure the concept only grows stronger with decay.
I wrote my manifesto on a piece of corrugated cardboard. I wrote on top of the row then on bottom. I wrote on three different sides of the corrugated ridges. I did it so many times so that it became like a black space. It was called “manifesto of every nothing” to mean that it had everything which means it has nothing. So the idea was that the more information I put in, the more likely I am to gain disinterest. Therefore, what I was constantly doing was that each time adding more and more to achieve less and less, touching the void. It is more like a maximalist than minimalist is.
RM: The other day you talked a lot about geo-centrism, anomalism and Diasporas. Do you deal with such socio political and cultural conflict in your work?
AJ: I always like the idea but intentionally talking about geo-centric thoughts or political ideas, those are in me already. So, the work is going to capture some of that but I don’t want my work to be about that so it is this conflict that I create. That is created between me fighting the intension to say something and my intension to create just the visual. I allow the conflict to exist in the painting. Sometimes it’s more apparent sometimes it is less apparent. When it is less apparent I feel more successful when it is more apparent, it is too easy to read. I want the viewer to feel it not know it. I guess not knowing the absolute meaning in my work creates a feeling or conceptual connection similar to such ideas. Geo centric and diasporatic thoughts are ultimately about not knowing to varied extremes.
RM: Do you suffer in defining your work as a high artist dealing with popular from the so called pressures created by galleries and institutional spaces which constantly compel one for definitiveness/ category?
AJ: I would like to be in a category of art where high art happens but you can’t make Art with the intention of it being High Art. Something else outside of the art defines it as high art. Low art also happens – it’s in fact the consequence of not being high art. The person who defines the highs and lows of art is not me. I can only make it and I think, yes its fun for me if my art is in a gallery but the person who gets to categories what art is, then it is not the maker but the observer, the critic, art historian, it’s the society, its time, all these factors. I have actually no control over it. So I think at one time I dabbled with the high art thing then I realize that for me to attempt to do something which is out of my control, is just silly and really a waste of time on my part. All I can do is make art. If some body recognizes it’s relevant then it gets elevated. With more people liking, it gets elevated more. I can’t control that. Folk art exists as an art form. If we take it out of its context/ situation it starts becoming high art. The part of art that I hate is this but I need to relax too.
RM: Do you think self refrentiality in your work an ego trip?
AJ: All artists are narcissist, if they say they are not they are kidding themselves even they are making artwork and it is because they at some point want to see themselves. Once you recognize (ego) then you say; now I can look back and can make it better. Now the trick is that the only way to look at (yourself in your art) is to see history what are the things in history that define you and you look at other art. Albert Einstein said creativity comes out of covering /masking your influences, so he looked at the different physicist. He was building on the ideas of others to define himself. So once he came up with this defining idea, then he only built on top of it with his own ideas. So as artist, we take part in same thing. We look at history and out of it we choose what we really like. Then you put it together like in a soup and mix; then start building on it to define yourself in your art.
“No longer is the challenge to compare my work to others. No. The idea is to develop a personal history from Art history so that others can compare my work to my work.
It is only at that point when there is a marker for true progression in my development.”
(From the presentation)
This was popular in 70’s with artists like Chuck Close in US. He was looking at other artists but then he got the point when he was doing his large pencil drawings and paintings and then started looking these paintings in comparison to his own paintings then looking back what was their in his mind, He created the identity that nobody else has, even to this day. Nobody can reach him. Only Chuck Close can reach Chuck Close. If you copy it (his method) its still just copy. So the trick is to find a why that the person viewing your work first gives reference to your work.
RM: Some of the works you did before coming to India seem to have direct influence of Jasper Johns and Rausenberg, not only in their use of materials but also the strategy of depersonalisation that is talking about your personal symbolically through objects.
AJ: In some of my works the images are all references to the size of my body like a self-portrait. In “lessons in Knot Tying”, I have shown my pants dropped, which is a vulnerable state. The painting, which is leaning out of the wall, that is a portrait done out of wax and plywood and crayon.
I have used all of my personality in a general way. The self-portrait is reference to my self yet; it can be a reference to viewer as well. It is more of a generalized self-portrait. So at the top you see ABC there are three methods of how to tie a knot and in the middle right at the point where there would be my waist or upper thigh is the text all twisted together and at the bottom are my legs. This is the point hard to think about. With my pants in that situation, I am exposed, but the only thing that you are seeing not my upper torso and my gentiles but it is my artwork. So my art work here is equated to my naked body but you don’t really make that jump right away, even though that is the kind of metaphorically imparts the material I use. It is not an easy material to handle, as is art. It should not always easy to understand and digest. So, the material becomes important.
If you recall Jasper Johns paintings “target.” He has this big target and stations at the top that can be opened to reveal castings of his body. Johns was referring to saint Sebastian. He (Johns) was the target. Johns was a homosexual man who was using this symbolism in his artwork to talk about his identity. However, when we look at his work, identity is the last thing that we think about. We think about this beautiful target, then we open the boxes then we can make connections to different aspects of the self. My work operates in the same way at times. I don’t think any artist can make an artwork, which is not about themselves. Think about it even the attempt to do so would be in its self a selfish endeavor. A person cannot get out of oneself. It would be impossible. The challenge would be to make artwork, which has nothing to do with your self. I don’t think it can be done. I think it’s impossible.
RM: What are the differences you find between Indian and American cultural signs?
AJ: You don’t see these signs in the US. All this type of advertisement disappeared from the US 40-60 years ago. I am generalizing, especially in Texas, billboards were banned in places and many regulations were created over the past years too reduce the visual clutter. It (hand painted signs) slowly disappeared. There are still some signboards but it is not all over the place but before that it happened. Back in the 70’s, you could drive in the city and the first thing you see is the signs all over the city. That started disappearing, and then on top of that sign paintings were replaced not by digital works but offset printings. As a result, companies could print these gigantic prints, which were cheaper than the paintings. So just as here, signboards are being replaced by flex. One of the benefit of doing this comparison and contrast is that as it (painted sign hoarding) is fading here now and you are getting a massive benefit or influx of this is digital pop art, the art of popular culture is changing.
So, in the 1950’s and 60’s Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, and Oldenburg pick it up on this idea of popular culture and the creative benefits there to exploit. Here is where the cultural change is happening, when it was observed, felt and exploited. They manipulated these visual images in America and pushed it (POP) to its limits. Now if we think theoretically we feel what was happening in then there should happen in India now. But the same thing is not happening here. If the template of history is true, where is pop art in India? Indian culture has strange yet unique artistic ideas. Why then does pop art not happen in India now? All of the ingredients are here. Theoretically, pop art should be taking off.
In Atul Dodiya’s work – his whole body of work I like. If you open up the shutter what is beneath that shutter is his self. What is outside is the surface of his nationality, that is to say his cultural identity is his own identity. It has all the signs of pop art but India is wonderful in that sense that some Indian artists are not afraid of utilizing a post modern sense. Working all the way back to dada and working a bit of futurism and take a bit of pop and also from their own cultural nationality and they fuse everything together. This makes something unique and distinctly Indian. In a way some artists in India have skipped over pop using only what they need from it to make artwork, that I think, exists in a realm all it own. Where I do not think artwork in US can manage such things. Because it (US Art market) has bastardized the global body and everyone (the world at market) is looking at it but it (US art market) in turn is not looking out to other global and cultural influences, other than to collect and buy. I don’t think that we in the US are leaning and utilizing global ideas to our full potential.
It is only recently that I have being able to understand traditional modern in Indian art. It took me a lot of time to understand it. I feel conflicted because I am not Indian so I would feel odd using traditional Indian modern in my own work. It is like I can put on all the clothing and try to look like an Indian, but I am not and we would all know that I am not. I just cannot mask my identity. Where as if I was an NRI living in the US the opposite is not so true. The opportunity to be seen as global is more likely because they are fortunate to live in both worlds. Their identity is broad it is more of a global mindset. I am not sure how to over come that other than, for me as an American, to try to understand the world out side my own cultural limitations.
RM: Tell us about the project you are handling under the Fulbright Grant?
AJ: I can answer this question in three parts. The program is awarded to different professionals from different fields. The specific award I received was a student Fulbright Grant. The ultimate goal of the grant is that we are coming over here to do research but at the same time we are a sort of cultural ambassador. So, I am representing an aspect of my country. I am not like my own country/state/ government; I am not like the Hollywood stereotype of what an American is. I am like a regular guy who happens to make art. That is the intension of the Fulbright, to introduce the idea that the US is heterogeneous and is not only about policies, politics and popular culture. Every individual in the world can be confused by the three P’s of their own countries.
I came to India to conduct personal research to understand the Indian culture. As a result I have come as well to dispel preconceived perceptions and myths. (Not that I ever thought this, but) No body is riding elephants here. I have yet see any one break out is spontaneous dance or song and at the street corner there is not a man playing music to a cobra. Getting to know the real India is the second part. I have come over here and allowed myself to observe and take part in things that are not cultural norms to me and to be open to new ideas with out bias.
The third part is the actual project. I altered my project after coming here. My initial idea was to study the materials and methods used by different signboard artists. I was more interested in knowing the processes and manipulation of materials by these artists. However, I abandoned the idea after coming here. The artists where all but gone. I took it as a gateway to study the people who had made signs. It helps me in seeing how India is changing. The old India versus the new India and the conflicts that the people deal with every day as a result of globalism, problems which even you and I deal with. So, globalization is something that belongs to all of us. I deal with it in a different way from how a sign artist might deal with it. That’s another aspect. The most important part of Fulbright grant is the interaction. I become part of the community I am studying and I don’t try to make my own norms or American norms, but investigate and discover new norms. That’s what I need to take it back with me. Sometimes it’s a great project and at other times it’s an experience.
Aron Johnston, Fulbright Research Grantee, 2007-08 believes in the brilliance than the actual intention of the painting. He tells Rollie Mukherjee about his recent solo show titled “signs unseen” held at Chitra Kala Parishath, April 2008. The conversation sheds light on his early works and the sojourn in India. Excerpts:
Rollie Mukherjee: After seeing your entire oeuvre of works one can observe that from abstraction you have moved to the “pop” approach and again you are heading towards an abstraction but with a difference. Now you tend to focus more on “language” as any other pop artist with greater emphasis on semiotics. Your abstraction seems more to be well planned / calculative (the definition pop artist gave for their works) and imitative of popular images and text.
Aron Johnston: What was common among the abstract expressionist (particularly if you compare De Kooning and with Pollock) was the activation of the body and immediacy of thought with their body into canvas. However, if you talk about my work it is often not about my body. May be it is because of its size that it might have some relation with body or viewers body, but surely its not about my body or my immediate thought either. Whereas De Kooning was doing reactions in his paintings, one stroke led to the next stroke and so on. I kind of set up a situation where strokes create a next action and I am kind of separate from that. Well it’s (for me) a matter of defining or developing a system that creates an action that I feel comfortable in making. Therefore, if there was an artist or a group of artists that I can connect to at least with the systematic physical aspect of art, it would be Jasper Johns or Robert Indiana. For example Robert Indiana created a number system in his work so all his paintings had to do with numbers or numerology.
Therefore, we can say that the system activated his joy of painting. With Jasper Johns, it is with his series of letters. He did not have to think about what he had to paint so he says here is the subject now all that is activated is action or activation in the painting which happens in my paintings also. I found something systematic. So now, I don’t need to think about the subject and now I am part of the system and I am merely the vehicle of its production and that’s where I get my creative joy. That does not necessarily explain why I like to destroy the images.
I don’t know how to categorize myself. I don’t really think myself as an abstract painter and even though I look at abstract artists, they are not the people I put myself with or align with. I think of artists like Kosuth or Baldessari are my real influences and my real favourite is Magritte. Because the way Magritte plays with language, I like him. But if you look, my paintings they have nothing to do with the physicality or representations of Magritte. I am influenced more by Magritte than Pollock (even if they do look like abstractionists).
The work, titled “slick burger,” is my first work where I started intentionally exploring the idea of language. There is the text “slick burger” and the image of a train. It looks like a piece of signage. But it’s all invented. This work came out of an argument I had with an art critic. He said “if your work was “slick” you can sell it in New York or Paris gallery or you could never make it as an artist.” I think my art is more like a cheese burger. It is very hard to handle. When you eat it you enjoy it but it gets all over your hands, face and shirt, its messy and so I came up with the idea of “slick burger” because it’s a phrase which doesn’t really make sense. I used the text with an image which doesn’t really make any sense with the text because that was something I believed and I liked. Art for me is like a slow moving train. It is some thing you can sit and watch.
This is where I started to break away from this kind of linear thinking and stopped putting very distinct meanings to my work. The developing goal was to create an absence of meaning with things that seem meaningful.
RM: You had done a street installation in Bangalore and told that you desire to continue more such public displays like any other sign boards. Also you said you believe “art” is non transient and timeless. So what role do you want your art to play, because knowing popular art like sign boards have a transient quality and ends with fulfillment of its purpose?
AJ: If we think about what Kant said about the idea of disinterestedness, an artist puts all of his interest into painting so that the viewer can come and sit in front of a painting and get relaxed by separating from their own interest. From the artist devotion to interest, from this state disinterestedness develops. I liked that theory.
I like things full of too much information, my passion for colours and my interactions to text as form. So then, I create away. They fuse together so the timeless part you are talking about is not stuck to any one viewer. I hope that theoretically, someone can come up to a work and they can try to explore it. They can’t bring too much of their own interest to it. So the only option to it is that they have to relax and be disinterested but that doesn’t mean they don’t like it but it means that they can’t put too much of themselves in that. Therefore, they relax before it that may be the “aura” of it like the Sistine chapel. It is loaded with so much information and the subject matter is so powerful that all you can do is feel, becoming to it. A person does not have to believe in some thing to understand the AWE. You can create so much information that it creates no information that is when it is bigger than… what ever. That is when it touches the void.
RM: You said that you want to make art out of mistake. How did you arrive at this idea of making art? You generally use mediums which are generally considered antithetical to each other.
AJ: Mistakes are sometimes more brilliant than the actual intention of the painting. Painting exists in many parts. The first part is the idea or concept. Then there is part of the painting that exists in the act of making. When you are making a painting, you don’t think of anything. The act of painting becomes the Art and the third part, and there are many more parts thereafter, is when you can analyze what you have done and start finding out mistakes and in my paintings right at the end these mistakes make the work happen I was trying to control it. I spend weeks with the painting and never saw it and then the minute the paint starts to dry and I start to come out of my activation only then does it started to reveal itself as something else. Therefore, my idea coming into the painting wasn’t what I got when I finished it. Which was perfect, that is exactly what I want. I want my idea or concept to be motivated not just as a definition but by action, mistakes are actions that I can take if they work fix if they don’t. I am the coach and the team; the field is the artwork not the opponent.
The work titled “lessons in knot tying” is about the confusion of being tied up in observation or meaning. When you put this order of ABC together with the other images, its (the artworks) intention is to be confused, you actually need to follow a process. Normally to become less confused you need to follow an order I am trying to reverse that. So, this is the painting. In my work, there is chaos but there is an order to create that chaos. In that piece, I have used so much wax that it’s poring over the sides. It is almost like encaustic. I put wax, then draw with crayon, and keep doing this. I draw, heat and then seal it. I use the hot gun to melt the wax, do the drawing, and repeat. This is a very hard to achieve. If I want the drawing to melt faster or slower, I need to adjust the distance of the heat gun. I need to do this process very fast to keep up with the setting time. I am trying to control the material but I am always out of control. The process inspires mistakes. No body can understand this part, I am not sure whether to do it myself, but hopefully they can feel it.
The train in slick burger was printed on a big piece of paper (48 inches) it was printed with non-archival ink and so the ink will fade. So now, the image hardly exists any more. To me this is part of my work. It is breaking down. Its intricate, its part of its beauty, its ability to fall apart. I really like the idea that my artwork is in a state of entropy when the meaning becomes so obliterated / obscure the concept only grows stronger with decay.
I wrote my manifesto on a piece of corrugated cardboard. I wrote on top of the row then on bottom. I wrote on three different sides of the corrugated ridges. I did it so many times so that it became like a black space. It was called “manifesto of every nothing” to mean that it had everything which means it has nothing. So the idea was that the more information I put in, the more likely I am to gain disinterest. Therefore, what I was constantly doing was that each time adding more and more to achieve less and less, touching the void. It is more like a maximalist than minimalist is.
RM: The other day you talked a lot about geo-centrism, anomalism and Diasporas. Do you deal with such socio political and cultural conflict in your work?
AJ: I always like the idea but intentionally talking about geo-centric thoughts or political ideas, those are in me already. So, the work is going to capture some of that but I don’t want my work to be about that so it is this conflict that I create. That is created between me fighting the intension to say something and my intension to create just the visual. I allow the conflict to exist in the painting. Sometimes it’s more apparent sometimes it is less apparent. When it is less apparent I feel more successful when it is more apparent, it is too easy to read. I want the viewer to feel it not know it. I guess not knowing the absolute meaning in my work creates a feeling or conceptual connection similar to such ideas. Geo centric and diasporatic thoughts are ultimately about not knowing to varied extremes.
RM: Do you suffer in defining your work as a high artist dealing with popular from the so called pressures created by galleries and institutional spaces which constantly compel one for definitiveness/ category?
AJ: I would like to be in a category of art where high art happens but you can’t make Art with the intention of it being High Art. Something else outside of the art defines it as high art. Low art also happens – it’s in fact the consequence of not being high art. The person who defines the highs and lows of art is not me. I can only make it and I think, yes its fun for me if my art is in a gallery but the person who gets to categories what art is, then it is not the maker but the observer, the critic, art historian, it’s the society, its time, all these factors. I have actually no control over it. So I think at one time I dabbled with the high art thing then I realize that for me to attempt to do something which is out of my control, is just silly and really a waste of time on my part. All I can do is make art. If some body recognizes it’s relevant then it gets elevated. With more people liking, it gets elevated more. I can’t control that. Folk art exists as an art form. If we take it out of its context/ situation it starts becoming high art. The part of art that I hate is this but I need to relax too.
RM: Do you think self refrentiality in your work an ego trip?
AJ: All artists are narcissist, if they say they are not they are kidding themselves even they are making artwork and it is because they at some point want to see themselves. Once you recognize (ego) then you say; now I can look back and can make it better. Now the trick is that the only way to look at (yourself in your art) is to see history what are the things in history that define you and you look at other art. Albert Einstein said creativity comes out of covering /masking your influences, so he looked at the different physicist. He was building on the ideas of others to define himself. So once he came up with this defining idea, then he only built on top of it with his own ideas. So as artist, we take part in same thing. We look at history and out of it we choose what we really like. Then you put it together like in a soup and mix; then start building on it to define yourself in your art.
“No longer is the challenge to compare my work to others. No. The idea is to develop a personal history from Art history so that others can compare my work to my work.
It is only at that point when there is a marker for true progression in my development.”
(From the presentation)
This was popular in 70’s with artists like Chuck Close in US. He was looking at other artists but then he got the point when he was doing his large pencil drawings and paintings and then started looking these paintings in comparison to his own paintings then looking back what was their in his mind, He created the identity that nobody else has, even to this day. Nobody can reach him. Only Chuck Close can reach Chuck Close. If you copy it (his method) its still just copy. So the trick is to find a why that the person viewing your work first gives reference to your work.
RM: Some of the works you did before coming to India seem to have direct influence of Jasper Johns and Rausenberg, not only in their use of materials but also the strategy of depersonalisation that is talking about your personal symbolically through objects.
AJ: In some of my works the images are all references to the size of my body like a self-portrait. In “lessons in Knot Tying”, I have shown my pants dropped, which is a vulnerable state. The painting, which is leaning out of the wall, that is a portrait done out of wax and plywood and crayon.
I have used all of my personality in a general way. The self-portrait is reference to my self yet; it can be a reference to viewer as well. It is more of a generalized self-portrait. So at the top you see ABC there are three methods of how to tie a knot and in the middle right at the point where there would be my waist or upper thigh is the text all twisted together and at the bottom are my legs. This is the point hard to think about. With my pants in that situation, I am exposed, but the only thing that you are seeing not my upper torso and my gentiles but it is my artwork. So my art work here is equated to my naked body but you don’t really make that jump right away, even though that is the kind of metaphorically imparts the material I use. It is not an easy material to handle, as is art. It should not always easy to understand and digest. So, the material becomes important.
If you recall Jasper Johns paintings “target.” He has this big target and stations at the top that can be opened to reveal castings of his body. Johns was referring to saint Sebastian. He (Johns) was the target. Johns was a homosexual man who was using this symbolism in his artwork to talk about his identity. However, when we look at his work, identity is the last thing that we think about. We think about this beautiful target, then we open the boxes then we can make connections to different aspects of the self. My work operates in the same way at times. I don’t think any artist can make an artwork, which is not about themselves. Think about it even the attempt to do so would be in its self a selfish endeavor. A person cannot get out of oneself. It would be impossible. The challenge would be to make artwork, which has nothing to do with your self. I don’t think it can be done. I think it’s impossible.
RM: What are the differences you find between Indian and American cultural signs?
AJ: You don’t see these signs in the US. All this type of advertisement disappeared from the US 40-60 years ago. I am generalizing, especially in Texas, billboards were banned in places and many regulations were created over the past years too reduce the visual clutter. It (hand painted signs) slowly disappeared. There are still some signboards but it is not all over the place but before that it happened. Back in the 70’s, you could drive in the city and the first thing you see is the signs all over the city. That started disappearing, and then on top of that sign paintings were replaced not by digital works but offset printings. As a result, companies could print these gigantic prints, which were cheaper than the paintings. So just as here, signboards are being replaced by flex. One of the benefit of doing this comparison and contrast is that as it (painted sign hoarding) is fading here now and you are getting a massive benefit or influx of this is digital pop art, the art of popular culture is changing.
So, in the 1950’s and 60’s Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, and Oldenburg pick it up on this idea of popular culture and the creative benefits there to exploit. Here is where the cultural change is happening, when it was observed, felt and exploited. They manipulated these visual images in America and pushed it (POP) to its limits. Now if we think theoretically we feel what was happening in then there should happen in India now. But the same thing is not happening here. If the template of history is true, where is pop art in India? Indian culture has strange yet unique artistic ideas. Why then does pop art not happen in India now? All of the ingredients are here. Theoretically, pop art should be taking off.
In Atul Dodiya’s work – his whole body of work I like. If you open up the shutter what is beneath that shutter is his self. What is outside is the surface of his nationality, that is to say his cultural identity is his own identity. It has all the signs of pop art but India is wonderful in that sense that some Indian artists are not afraid of utilizing a post modern sense. Working all the way back to dada and working a bit of futurism and take a bit of pop and also from their own cultural nationality and they fuse everything together. This makes something unique and distinctly Indian. In a way some artists in India have skipped over pop using only what they need from it to make artwork, that I think, exists in a realm all it own. Where I do not think artwork in US can manage such things. Because it (US Art market) has bastardized the global body and everyone (the world at market) is looking at it but it (US art market) in turn is not looking out to other global and cultural influences, other than to collect and buy. I don’t think that we in the US are leaning and utilizing global ideas to our full potential.
It is only recently that I have being able to understand traditional modern in Indian art. It took me a lot of time to understand it. I feel conflicted because I am not Indian so I would feel odd using traditional Indian modern in my own work. It is like I can put on all the clothing and try to look like an Indian, but I am not and we would all know that I am not. I just cannot mask my identity. Where as if I was an NRI living in the US the opposite is not so true. The opportunity to be seen as global is more likely because they are fortunate to live in both worlds. Their identity is broad it is more of a global mindset. I am not sure how to over come that other than, for me as an American, to try to understand the world out side my own cultural limitations.
RM: Tell us about the project you are handling under the Fulbright Grant?
AJ: I can answer this question in three parts. The program is awarded to different professionals from different fields. The specific award I received was a student Fulbright Grant. The ultimate goal of the grant is that we are coming over here to do research but at the same time we are a sort of cultural ambassador. So, I am representing an aspect of my country. I am not like my own country/state/ government; I am not like the Hollywood stereotype of what an American is. I am like a regular guy who happens to make art. That is the intension of the Fulbright, to introduce the idea that the US is heterogeneous and is not only about policies, politics and popular culture. Every individual in the world can be confused by the three P’s of their own countries.
I came to India to conduct personal research to understand the Indian culture. As a result I have come as well to dispel preconceived perceptions and myths. (Not that I ever thought this, but) No body is riding elephants here. I have yet see any one break out is spontaneous dance or song and at the street corner there is not a man playing music to a cobra. Getting to know the real India is the second part. I have come over here and allowed myself to observe and take part in things that are not cultural norms to me and to be open to new ideas with out bias.
The third part is the actual project. I altered my project after coming here. My initial idea was to study the materials and methods used by different signboard artists. I was more interested in knowing the processes and manipulation of materials by these artists. However, I abandoned the idea after coming here. The artists where all but gone. I took it as a gateway to study the people who had made signs. It helps me in seeing how India is changing. The old India versus the new India and the conflicts that the people deal with every day as a result of globalism, problems which even you and I deal with. So, globalization is something that belongs to all of us. I deal with it in a different way from how a sign artist might deal with it. That’s another aspect. The most important part of Fulbright grant is the interaction. I become part of the community I am studying and I don’t try to make my own norms or American norms, but investigate and discover new norms. That’s what I need to take it back with me. Sometimes it’s a great project and at other times it’s an experience.
artconcerns.com,feb2008
Mysterium Tremendum*
Young British artist, Barbara Ash recently presented her sculptural installations at Bangalore’s No.1.Shanthi Road. Reminding the human beings of their mortality through the play of sweet kitsch, the artist made a strong statement, says Rollie Mukherjee in her review.
“Dance footloose on the earth” was the title of the show by Barbara Ash at No.1, Shanthi Road, Bangalore from 2nd to 6th January 2008. Barbara Ash is an English sculptor and this sculpture installation was part of her project which was conceived during her artist’s residency at the Bangalore Art centre. The Title is a take from Horace’s Odes which says –“now is the time to drink, now is the time to dance footloose on the earth” which calls for a celebration as life is momentary and it is going to end. The whole of the gallery space was converted into a surreal wonder land, inviting the viewer to embark a playful journey towards the mysterious and serious questions of existence.
At first when you enter, a colossal 7 ½ feet thermo coal Bunny rabbit encounters us, dominating the Fairy world she has created. The flowers done in Polystyrene P.V.A Plasticine, toy cars done in Fiber Glass, simple floral layout on the ground in pink rangoli are done almost with a child like innocence and expressive ends. You are lost in the fantastic world of the ‘twee’ (sweet Kitsch). But under these kitschy layers are deep questions of existence, authority and hegemony.
This kitschy colourful fairy world works at two levels- as sumptuous consumption and also as a wrap. It hides any physical signs of mortality/ decay. The electrified blue coloured foetuses( only 4inches) lying at each regular interval is surrounded by the mandala of flowers which acts as roads and signs of skull over it as a decorative motive is used as memento-mori (an object kept as a reminder that death is inevitable). Thus at one level she makes us celebrate the nature force which is all surpassing and in plentitude and on the other she brings in the issue of death and the fast paced materialistic world. In this dialectical relationship there is a woven oxymoron which creates a disorder in the stability of an otherwise fictional world and engenders moments of ambivalence/ disruption or vulnerability. Thus she combines the pleasurable with something which is terrifying. It’s inherently threatening because the elements of nature which loom large over humans who are oblivious about their death.
Her works demand “readings” as a text. Sometimes the meaning is continuous and at other times intimately discontinuous. It simultaneously operates literally and allegorically; from aesthetic to philosophical. She has perceived a fragmentary/ non linear approach where the meaning lies in zigzagging levels. She titles different pieces separately but put them under the unitary linking title “dance footloose on earth”.
There is a network of interconnected themes. Also there is a constant flux/ play between what is emphasized and what is de-emphasized like the colossal 7’1/2 feet bunny as authoritative or the vacuum cleaner as labour saving device, western dream as a man driving a car, development as turtle. This creates ambivalence.
In her recent installation one also cant avoid the dynamics of inter cultural dialogue where she sees the conflict between the two societies of England and India from the spectre of binary which is fixed. She uses Hoover or the white man driving the open top sports car as a symbol of technocratic, materialistic west and turtle as symbol of slow pace underdeveloped pristine world untouched by so much of modernization. She is of course more critical of her own culture (western) but she sees India as timeless world unaffected by the globalized, commodified and undergoing a neo-liberalization process.
Thus she avoids seeing the “orient” which is far more complex and heterogeneous. She negates to see the orient as untouched by western colonialism and imperialism which has brought in a complex heterogeneous plural world order. There is a denial to see the postcolonial societies where the elements of tradition and modern cultures collide and form a very anachronistic hybridity which could be perplexing for a western eye.
But by pulling all our attention to the world of material and human’s impending mortality one enters into the larger question of power/ authority which rules our life. Is the huge imposing figure of a bunny rabbit shown as an authoritative like state head or patriarchal head? Or is it the power of nature over technology? Thus her work is intense and operates in an open ended manner and gives way to varied interpretations and pulls us in different directions. Again a reversal where one is reminded by her how any time nature can show its vengeance. There is a terror sublime created where the vast nature appears annihilating or threatening mankind who in their race for pleasure accumulation and luxury.
If one sees her entire body of works done between 1998 to 2007 there is a stylistic/ thematic continuity that preoccupied the artist for years. Her deliberate choice of child like form and popular kitschy colors makes her work significant when one sees it in the context of class and gender issue. Clement Greenberg used the term kitsch as derogation and his version of modernism gained universality and strategically this left out the experiences and creation of women/ non-white, non-western cultures. Thus on these lines her work becomes a strong voice against this. Her work whether it is engaging with gender issue or alienation always talks about existentialist alienation and materialism.
By using teddy bear as Eve she refuses to represent female body which calls for male gaze. By making it sit authoritatively and in one work even her size is larger than Adam she fractures successfully the so called stereotypical designation the patriarchy labels women as sexual, fragile and subservient. Eve becomes an irresistible symbol of power and strength in her hand and also by using the teddy bear image as eve she dissatisfies men and refuses to portray woman as objectified /commodified form. The eve looks like a child and is non-sensuous and it is this which makes it looks sweet and lovable.
She also attacks the catholic obsession with virginity. The works ‘Sitting pretty’(2001), ‘All that glitters’(2002) , ‘Play things’(2005) brings in this dilemma of the female existence which is caught up in religiosity and morality norms set by society.
Her use of allegory and the created surreal dreamy world is so open-ended that it always leaves scope for the reader for his meanings. Another interesting thing about her work is that sometimes symbol ceases to operate as a symbol and just stands for itself. The gigantic peacock (Oxbridge Strut,1995), though she connects it to humanity’s pride can also be read as standing for itself ie nature itself which appears to be supreme and acts as a synedoche of its absence/ presence - as nature’s ghost in the age of industrial globalization and seems to threaten mankind with its sublimity. Her language oscillates between something familiar and something fantastic, literal and metaphoric. She breaks the “author” as an authorial owner of his or her meaning and leaves the work as a text which can be read and reread and is free to create a subtext even at times counter text.
* The title of the essay is taken from Rudolf Otto’s concept of Mysterium Tremendum (mystery that makes you tremble)
Young British artist, Barbara Ash recently presented her sculptural installations at Bangalore’s No.1.Shanthi Road. Reminding the human beings of their mortality through the play of sweet kitsch, the artist made a strong statement, says Rollie Mukherjee in her review.
“Dance footloose on the earth” was the title of the show by Barbara Ash at No.1, Shanthi Road, Bangalore from 2nd to 6th January 2008. Barbara Ash is an English sculptor and this sculpture installation was part of her project which was conceived during her artist’s residency at the Bangalore Art centre. The Title is a take from Horace’s Odes which says –“now is the time to drink, now is the time to dance footloose on the earth” which calls for a celebration as life is momentary and it is going to end. The whole of the gallery space was converted into a surreal wonder land, inviting the viewer to embark a playful journey towards the mysterious and serious questions of existence.
At first when you enter, a colossal 7 ½ feet thermo coal Bunny rabbit encounters us, dominating the Fairy world she has created. The flowers done in Polystyrene P.V.A Plasticine, toy cars done in Fiber Glass, simple floral layout on the ground in pink rangoli are done almost with a child like innocence and expressive ends. You are lost in the fantastic world of the ‘twee’ (sweet Kitsch). But under these kitschy layers are deep questions of existence, authority and hegemony.
This kitschy colourful fairy world works at two levels- as sumptuous consumption and also as a wrap. It hides any physical signs of mortality/ decay. The electrified blue coloured foetuses( only 4inches) lying at each regular interval is surrounded by the mandala of flowers which acts as roads and signs of skull over it as a decorative motive is used as memento-mori (an object kept as a reminder that death is inevitable). Thus at one level she makes us celebrate the nature force which is all surpassing and in plentitude and on the other she brings in the issue of death and the fast paced materialistic world. In this dialectical relationship there is a woven oxymoron which creates a disorder in the stability of an otherwise fictional world and engenders moments of ambivalence/ disruption or vulnerability. Thus she combines the pleasurable with something which is terrifying. It’s inherently threatening because the elements of nature which loom large over humans who are oblivious about their death.
Her works demand “readings” as a text. Sometimes the meaning is continuous and at other times intimately discontinuous. It simultaneously operates literally and allegorically; from aesthetic to philosophical. She has perceived a fragmentary/ non linear approach where the meaning lies in zigzagging levels. She titles different pieces separately but put them under the unitary linking title “dance footloose on earth”.
There is a network of interconnected themes. Also there is a constant flux/ play between what is emphasized and what is de-emphasized like the colossal 7’1/2 feet bunny as authoritative or the vacuum cleaner as labour saving device, western dream as a man driving a car, development as turtle. This creates ambivalence.
In her recent installation one also cant avoid the dynamics of inter cultural dialogue where she sees the conflict between the two societies of England and India from the spectre of binary which is fixed. She uses Hoover or the white man driving the open top sports car as a symbol of technocratic, materialistic west and turtle as symbol of slow pace underdeveloped pristine world untouched by so much of modernization. She is of course more critical of her own culture (western) but she sees India as timeless world unaffected by the globalized, commodified and undergoing a neo-liberalization process.
Thus she avoids seeing the “orient” which is far more complex and heterogeneous. She negates to see the orient as untouched by western colonialism and imperialism which has brought in a complex heterogeneous plural world order. There is a denial to see the postcolonial societies where the elements of tradition and modern cultures collide and form a very anachronistic hybridity which could be perplexing for a western eye.
But by pulling all our attention to the world of material and human’s impending mortality one enters into the larger question of power/ authority which rules our life. Is the huge imposing figure of a bunny rabbit shown as an authoritative like state head or patriarchal head? Or is it the power of nature over technology? Thus her work is intense and operates in an open ended manner and gives way to varied interpretations and pulls us in different directions. Again a reversal where one is reminded by her how any time nature can show its vengeance. There is a terror sublime created where the vast nature appears annihilating or threatening mankind who in their race for pleasure accumulation and luxury.
If one sees her entire body of works done between 1998 to 2007 there is a stylistic/ thematic continuity that preoccupied the artist for years. Her deliberate choice of child like form and popular kitschy colors makes her work significant when one sees it in the context of class and gender issue. Clement Greenberg used the term kitsch as derogation and his version of modernism gained universality and strategically this left out the experiences and creation of women/ non-white, non-western cultures. Thus on these lines her work becomes a strong voice against this. Her work whether it is engaging with gender issue or alienation always talks about existentialist alienation and materialism.
By using teddy bear as Eve she refuses to represent female body which calls for male gaze. By making it sit authoritatively and in one work even her size is larger than Adam she fractures successfully the so called stereotypical designation the patriarchy labels women as sexual, fragile and subservient. Eve becomes an irresistible symbol of power and strength in her hand and also by using the teddy bear image as eve she dissatisfies men and refuses to portray woman as objectified /commodified form. The eve looks like a child and is non-sensuous and it is this which makes it looks sweet and lovable.
She also attacks the catholic obsession with virginity. The works ‘Sitting pretty’(2001), ‘All that glitters’(2002) , ‘Play things’(2005) brings in this dilemma of the female existence which is caught up in religiosity and morality norms set by society.
Her use of allegory and the created surreal dreamy world is so open-ended that it always leaves scope for the reader for his meanings. Another interesting thing about her work is that sometimes symbol ceases to operate as a symbol and just stands for itself. The gigantic peacock (Oxbridge Strut,1995), though she connects it to humanity’s pride can also be read as standing for itself ie nature itself which appears to be supreme and acts as a synedoche of its absence/ presence - as nature’s ghost in the age of industrial globalization and seems to threaten mankind with its sublimity. Her language oscillates between something familiar and something fantastic, literal and metaphoric. She breaks the “author” as an authorial owner of his or her meaning and leaves the work as a text which can be read and reread and is free to create a subtext even at times counter text.
* The title of the essay is taken from Rudolf Otto’s concept of Mysterium Tremendum (mystery that makes you tremble)
artconcerns.com,oct2007
Pulsating Questions
Tangerine Art Gallery recently presented a group show of eminent and upcoming artists’ works on paper in Bangalore. Rollie Mukherjee and V.Divakar visit the show and raise a few questions regarding the images treated by the participating artists.
One of the changing phases in the art trend today is the preference for the conventional and cheap medium like paper. Relegated only as just part of an artist oeuvre during his study towards artist hood, the works on paper have slowly gained grounds in the art markets for its nearness and spontaneous aesthetic.
The exhibition titled “Pulsating Rhythm on paper” brought together some of the big brand names in the field and also some upcoming artists. What is the peculiarity of hosting a show like this? Is it just the medium of paper? Or the artists’ varied approaches towards the same? Are there other signs which could be gathered along side the medium alone?
Overall the concerns were visibly about the urbanity, modernity, war, environment, gender and uncertainty. The works of Alok Bal, Sanjeev Sonpimpare, T.V.Santosh, Mithu Sen, Riyas Komu react directly to the happenings in the immediate surroundings. Pradeep Mishra, Manjunath Kamath, Nikita Parikh and so on try to create alternative existential spaces of their own, where the structures are picked or referred to but rearranged allowing oneself to dwell upon without calamity and these works also offer a subtle critique.
Alok Bal’s long serious engagement with environment is efficiently worked out in a more sensitive language away from the earlier juxtapositions and simplistic allegories. The recent water colors have the potential imageries where the urbanity is a continuing dilemma rather than just a lament for the lost nostalgia of perfect nature. The bountiful and lush green flora and fauna is remembered through the lonely bird and the dried tree. The sun dial becomes the halo of the dried tree. Does it talk about the present where we are left only with the dried trees? What is natural now is then the dried tree! Can the usage of the dark colors read as the dark smoke smudged future waiting? Shall we see the peacock as the symbol of humanity’s pride? Or is it just the last remains of the endangered colorful life? Though the medium is water colour it remains opaque and doesn’t allow the space to be read beyond. Is it also symbolizing the opaque hopeless situation mankind is left with?
If those are his concerns of nature Nikilesh Baruah seems to still dwell upon the idea of nature as an escape. Braruha’s work looks Romantic and can been seen attempting to show existence in a precarious situation of trying to balance or ready to jump. The unmanned boat slides to a direction of its own; machine’s own destiny. The vast expanses of spaces can be seen as something which stands for what is not there. Hence there is an urge to create, to live within such expanse. There is a sense as Allen Carlson’s “all virgin nature ...is essentially good”. Pradeep’s rose plant can be read as a simple allegory of the surviving hope. If at all it’s a war ravaged land there still lay a sign for love and brotherhood. Also if it’s the artificiality of the grafted plant there still lay the hope of regeneration.
Manjunath Kamath’s surreal and poetic images talks about the transience and hollowness in existence. He tends to make simple associations which are not necessarily logical. Also is the intuitive usage positive and negative which is playful yet aesthetic. He shares some similar approaches as Yeswanth Desmukh.
A normative definition of art that centers a form concentrated through the elimination of non essential seems to be the concern of Deshmukh. Also the correlative approach towards the essential form with a common object of daily use is an important preoccupation. Is he doing the reverse process of the abstractionists? Mithu Sen’s imagery is minimal but strong in its dealing the issue of the gender. The consciousness of the female body and the violence inflicted to it is overtly expressed. Though expressionistic in language the medium of water colour is handled with utmost control like some Zen paintings where the flow is in accordance with the inner urge and expression. But unlike Zen paintings her water colours are aggressive. The materiality of the paint fascinates and horrifies at the same time. Such intimate spontaneous style creates a space in which the viewer contemplates not only the image but also to his or her relation to being.
Nikita Parikh creates designs out of traditional rangoli like motifs. Over the surface are layered the images of a bottle and other vegetative motifs. The traditional images of women seem to become themselves the package designs of the bottle. Does the title “sab bhoomi gopal ki” suggest something other than the general religious understanding? Interestingly though the title encompasses all the land to Gopal pictorially no ‘man’ finds a space. Is it a plot? The smudged charcoal over the decorative design also seems to stand for a life other than just ornamentation. Similarly Piyali Ghosh tries to create forms which are both human and animal in a peculiar landscape. Does the anthropomorphic form suggest a duality?
Pooja Iranna’s well executed water colours are very simple and interesting for the corners might be architectural or might be seen as structures themselves overlapping each other. Rathin Kanji and sanjeev deal the issue of urban life with its consumerist imposition and the problems insecurity. Zakkir Hussain’s water colors are casual and intimately worked out. There is a sense of oneness with the surrounding, life and existence. Riyaz komu seems to rather talk more about the medium than the surface speaking as subject/s. He leaves the work open ended by allowing the work to talk in a multiple ways. Is the noose, for the paper which is rolled, meaning the work is died and is set up in a coffin? Is it talking about the ultimate destination of the work? Is it a blatant critique on the gallery system? Or does it take its vocabulary from the recent popular political hangings?
One would also try to read the now ‘in vogue’ mediatic realism and its probable effects. Though in this age it is hard to escape the glamour of the media image artistically how much does it extend its creativity is a debatable question. Julia Kristeva in her “New Maladies of the Soul” 1993, has critically analyzed the collapsing of the psychic space in our culture. She says our dependence on media images is similar to that of antidepressants / psychotropic drugs which we take to ward off emptiness and depression in life. But instead of countering the problem we are losing the power of imagination and our psychic space has become as flat and depth less like media images which are surfacial. The argument posted here is not to speak against influence of media but can be seen as a lament of creativity due to its market oriented push.
Tangerine Art Gallery recently presented a group show of eminent and upcoming artists’ works on paper in Bangalore. Rollie Mukherjee and V.Divakar visit the show and raise a few questions regarding the images treated by the participating artists.
One of the changing phases in the art trend today is the preference for the conventional and cheap medium like paper. Relegated only as just part of an artist oeuvre during his study towards artist hood, the works on paper have slowly gained grounds in the art markets for its nearness and spontaneous aesthetic.
The exhibition titled “Pulsating Rhythm on paper” brought together some of the big brand names in the field and also some upcoming artists. What is the peculiarity of hosting a show like this? Is it just the medium of paper? Or the artists’ varied approaches towards the same? Are there other signs which could be gathered along side the medium alone?
Overall the concerns were visibly about the urbanity, modernity, war, environment, gender and uncertainty. The works of Alok Bal, Sanjeev Sonpimpare, T.V.Santosh, Mithu Sen, Riyas Komu react directly to the happenings in the immediate surroundings. Pradeep Mishra, Manjunath Kamath, Nikita Parikh and so on try to create alternative existential spaces of their own, where the structures are picked or referred to but rearranged allowing oneself to dwell upon without calamity and these works also offer a subtle critique.
Alok Bal’s long serious engagement with environment is efficiently worked out in a more sensitive language away from the earlier juxtapositions and simplistic allegories. The recent water colors have the potential imageries where the urbanity is a continuing dilemma rather than just a lament for the lost nostalgia of perfect nature. The bountiful and lush green flora and fauna is remembered through the lonely bird and the dried tree. The sun dial becomes the halo of the dried tree. Does it talk about the present where we are left only with the dried trees? What is natural now is then the dried tree! Can the usage of the dark colors read as the dark smoke smudged future waiting? Shall we see the peacock as the symbol of humanity’s pride? Or is it just the last remains of the endangered colorful life? Though the medium is water colour it remains opaque and doesn’t allow the space to be read beyond. Is it also symbolizing the opaque hopeless situation mankind is left with?
If those are his concerns of nature Nikilesh Baruah seems to still dwell upon the idea of nature as an escape. Braruha’s work looks Romantic and can been seen attempting to show existence in a precarious situation of trying to balance or ready to jump. The unmanned boat slides to a direction of its own; machine’s own destiny. The vast expanses of spaces can be seen as something which stands for what is not there. Hence there is an urge to create, to live within such expanse. There is a sense as Allen Carlson’s “all virgin nature ...is essentially good”. Pradeep’s rose plant can be read as a simple allegory of the surviving hope. If at all it’s a war ravaged land there still lay a sign for love and brotherhood. Also if it’s the artificiality of the grafted plant there still lay the hope of regeneration.
Manjunath Kamath’s surreal and poetic images talks about the transience and hollowness in existence. He tends to make simple associations which are not necessarily logical. Also is the intuitive usage positive and negative which is playful yet aesthetic. He shares some similar approaches as Yeswanth Desmukh.
A normative definition of art that centers a form concentrated through the elimination of non essential seems to be the concern of Deshmukh. Also the correlative approach towards the essential form with a common object of daily use is an important preoccupation. Is he doing the reverse process of the abstractionists? Mithu Sen’s imagery is minimal but strong in its dealing the issue of the gender. The consciousness of the female body and the violence inflicted to it is overtly expressed. Though expressionistic in language the medium of water colour is handled with utmost control like some Zen paintings where the flow is in accordance with the inner urge and expression. But unlike Zen paintings her water colours are aggressive. The materiality of the paint fascinates and horrifies at the same time. Such intimate spontaneous style creates a space in which the viewer contemplates not only the image but also to his or her relation to being.
Nikita Parikh creates designs out of traditional rangoli like motifs. Over the surface are layered the images of a bottle and other vegetative motifs. The traditional images of women seem to become themselves the package designs of the bottle. Does the title “sab bhoomi gopal ki” suggest something other than the general religious understanding? Interestingly though the title encompasses all the land to Gopal pictorially no ‘man’ finds a space. Is it a plot? The smudged charcoal over the decorative design also seems to stand for a life other than just ornamentation. Similarly Piyali Ghosh tries to create forms which are both human and animal in a peculiar landscape. Does the anthropomorphic form suggest a duality?
Pooja Iranna’s well executed water colours are very simple and interesting for the corners might be architectural or might be seen as structures themselves overlapping each other. Rathin Kanji and sanjeev deal the issue of urban life with its consumerist imposition and the problems insecurity. Zakkir Hussain’s water colors are casual and intimately worked out. There is a sense of oneness with the surrounding, life and existence. Riyaz komu seems to rather talk more about the medium than the surface speaking as subject/s. He leaves the work open ended by allowing the work to talk in a multiple ways. Is the noose, for the paper which is rolled, meaning the work is died and is set up in a coffin? Is it talking about the ultimate destination of the work? Is it a blatant critique on the gallery system? Or does it take its vocabulary from the recent popular political hangings?
One would also try to read the now ‘in vogue’ mediatic realism and its probable effects. Though in this age it is hard to escape the glamour of the media image artistically how much does it extend its creativity is a debatable question. Julia Kristeva in her “New Maladies of the Soul” 1993, has critically analyzed the collapsing of the psychic space in our culture. She says our dependence on media images is similar to that of antidepressants / psychotropic drugs which we take to ward off emptiness and depression in life. But instead of countering the problem we are losing the power of imagination and our psychic space has become as flat and depth less like media images which are surfacial. The argument posted here is not to speak against influence of media but can be seen as a lament of creativity due to its market oriented push.
Artconcerns.com,july2007
Paris Autumn: Pushpamala Speaks
Internationally acclaimed artist Pushpamala N recently presented her 2006 film Paris Autumn at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore. Rollie Mukherjee and Divakar catch up with the artist to know more about her film project. Excerpts from the interview:
Rollie Mukherjee and Divakar: The title Paris Autumn reminds us of R.B.Kitaja’s famous painting titled ‘The Autumn of Central Paris’ (1972-74), in which he generates a narrative out of fragments and randomness and also refers to the 17th century authority and has a sense of historical catastrophe. Did you in any case refer to this painting?
Pushpamala N: Of course my work is about Paris but I didn’t think at all about Kitaj’s work. It’s a coincidence. Since I was in Paris in the autumn I thought the title would suit.
RM&D: The way you end the movie clearly shows that your focus was more on psychological exposition or description rather than on crime solving and so the narrative has a sense of incompleteness. The angst remains…
The First Visitation-video still by Pushpamala
PN: My work doesn’t have a pessimistic ending. It has an upbeat ending. It might be an existential thriller but structurally I based my work on a quote by Walter Benjamin, where he says that Paris is like Mt Vesuvius. As it is fertilized constantly by volcanic eruptions in the same way the city of Paris is fertilized by constant revolutions and out of its lava artists are born.
RM&D: In your earlier photo-performances like Phantom lady, Dard-e- Dil, Native Woman or Kismet you were talking about the stereotypes by getting into the skin of the characters by masquerading or imitating the characters which have shaped the psyche of the people in the subcontinent. Now what role do you play in this video?
PN: In this video I am myself as a character for the first time. Some people said my work is very nostalgic. But I don’t think so. I used varied styles and merged histories. The film is actually very contemporary though it talks about 16th century history. Initially I wanted to recreate the ghost exactly like the character Gabrielle who was 25 years of age. I had a friend who was willing to do the role but she was double the age of Gabrielle. It would be ridiculous if she had to dress up like the painting and I felt it’s not necessary. I insisted her to dress normally and because she was also fashionable and a typical Parisian, she looked elegant in the contemporary dress. So it has nothing to do with 16th century look at all.
I have used a lot from my earlier work Phantom lady. Lot of people told me that the chapel scene is like the film Da Vinci Code. I myself have not seen it.
In this work history keeps coming. Like the Louvre building was erected by Henri IV and the chapel in which I shot by was his first wife Margo. Like in the film Phantom Lady you get simultaneously a grandeur and humble setting this work also if you see the chapel everything over there is fake. There were copies of Michelangelo. Everything was copy. You get a sense of kitsch and grandiose at the same time. Everything is put together, its looks very funny.
RM&D: Past is something which comes and goes. Interestingly your film has a quasi documentary mode and you simultaneously sway between the 16th century and contemporary time/space.
PN: Actually it’s a very complex film. I wanted to use history in the work very carefully, in the sense that I wanted to be very brief but meaningful at the same time. This is of course not a fiction. It has a documentary sense as well. During my stay in Paris there were lot of tension and hostile atmosphere. I didn’t shoot the riots directly. It couldn’t happen. We were even attacked. So I got most of my images from Google.
The film has different textures. Most people asked why I used images from Google, when everything was so personalized. Why this particular history? I feel this because it is so much to do with my culture and from where I come. Moreover this particular history has been forgotten in France. Louis XIV, Louis XVI who belongs to the same family is remembered but not Henry IV. This part has become like prehistory.
RM&D: In almost all your earlier works you have talked about a stereotypical representation of Indian women. Even your first video talks about a perfect /ideal domestic mother fulfilling her maternal duties without questioning the culturally assigned roles. In this video how do you perceive feminity? Particularly a character like Gabrielle who on the one hand was regarded as an icon of love and intellectually reputed women and on the other hand known as “the dutchess of filth”?
PN: I don’t want to directly deal with feminity as such in this film. Gabrielle’s history was very complex. It was said that she and her sister was society beauties and their father pushed his daughters to become mistresses of powerful men. Henry IV was childless from his first marriage and his relation with Gabrielle was very famous love affair. She was in her early 20’s and was intelligent and very powerful woman. She was very complex character. Whether she was poisoned or she died of miscarriage is still a mystery. Even this period can’t be seen in black and white. That was a very complex structure, moralistic men patronized prostitutes. It was nothing like Victorian period. There was no king for 30 years in Paris. It was a very turbulent period. There was continuous warfare. The king of Spain was trying to control France.
So she cannot be a stereotype. She is a very specific historical character. She can’t be this or that. She is very complex.
RM&D: How do you categorize your recent work? Is it a feature or video or something in-between? Away from Gothic thriller did you have any inspiration from film Noirs or neo-noirs which invite the viewers in its game?
PN: Noir, I have used only as a style. I don’t want my movie to be this or that. It’s so boring if you fit into types. The footage of the riots was available in black and white. I like noir style, fast thriller form. I didn’t want slowly pace history narrative. I like the book “In the Name of Rose”. It’s not a very usual detective story. It talks about crime, murder at the same time also about knowledge, religion, moral and social material. It’s about investigation. It’s a thriller but serious.
Lot people found a strong influence of Da Vinci code in my work. I was more affected more by “In the name of rose”.
RM&D: Are you voicing any subjective position?
PN: I don’t want to. I was conscious of it. I didn’t want to talk about “gaze”. It has become cliché now. Men look women, women look…
Western filmmakers come here and without working much or having much knowledge about our culture they comment about it. I am going from a non- western country and commenting on the social problem there. Most reviews which came about my work felt that the riot part is unimportant or something added up.
In fact I was concerned about it from the very beginning. The movie starts by focusing on the painting of Caravaggio “Fortune teller” in Louvre. I start with an Egyptian woman reading the palm of a French man. It started with that, as I wanted to give some warning about the future.
More and More the French Government kept the racial problem under the carpet. Nothing is done about it. The riots actually happened at the suburbs of the city. In the 70’s workers quarters were erected all around the factories outside Paris. Slowly the factories got closed down. These quarters are having very inhuman conditions of living. These congested building blocks were made like beehives.
RM&D: why did you make the movie out of still photographs?
PN: In the past I had already worked with still photographs. So I felt it would be a further extension of it. The way I have used headings before each chapters so that there is no mystery, everything is announced before the things are happening. Initially I wanted to use voiceover but for this I needed a very continuous narrative with a beginning and an end. But my materials were very disjunctive and there were lots of facts. I needed to explain a lot of things. Here in Paris Autumn I wanted to use text as “Rastriya Kir”. I didn’t want to use the scroll pattern; rather I wanted to explore the text in different ways by abbreviating it. I used the comic book format and also google information format. Google format has different scripts. Speaking is far more conversation. I wanted to use different tones/ voices.
RM&D: What were the problems you encountered while editing or montage?
PN: The editing and sound design in my movie is done by a trained photographer Sankalp Meshram. He himself is a filmmaker, a FTII product. I do my creative work on the editing table. It’s not a technical thing at all for me. Actually we worked on sound and image simultaneously. Generally we do a rough cut and give it to a sound designer but for this film we were creating sound/visual and script together which is usually not done. We put all the materials together and made chapters separately according to the narration. We segregated the chapel scene from that of house and café. Made the narrative visual and sound together. It took one and a half month for editing this 35minutes film. Normally a three hours commercial movie editing is done within one month because they have a set story. In this case we developed the form and editing simultaneously. The editing was done in two sessions. First we put all photos in sequential order and try to figure it out what that was all about. It can’t be a linear narrative I thought. First I wanted to use the material as a diary or travelogue. There was a need of a huge structure which can directly be connected as my project was to use Euro- French visual culture/cinema/popular art/theatre. Actually I didn’t have a movie camera, so I started working with a still camera.
RM&D: How did you frame your subplots to create different layers of meaning within the otherwise historical ghost narrative that is allusion to riot (Godhra) by images of riots in Europe or the subtext of your cultural position by means of music and sound?
PN: I stayed in a very beautiful building in Paris but didn’t know anything about the story of Gabrielle. Fortunately, I met a young photographer named Cedric Sartore who showed his keenness to work with me. I rented the room from a gallery owner who stayed downstairs and he told me about Gabrielle’s tragic death. I saw the original painting in Louvre. Initially I want to recreate the painting. Finally I changed the idea. It is the shot of ghost. I edited in India. I took black and white photographs in contact prints. The ghost in the film is not a real ghost. It’s an omen. Whenever I see her she directs me to violence first to 16th century religious war or the second time I encounter her in the chapel she directs me to the recent riots. I don’t want to directly talk about anything. The 16th century was religious; the present day is both religious and racial. I don’t want both to be connected very directly. They are like different chapters of book but formally different.
RM&D: Your move we feel is from a very parody/ comic mode to a very serious one.
PN: No, I don’t think so. Some people consider my Paris Autumn in fact to be very funny. Even in my earlier photo stills “Phantom Lady” or “Sunhere Sapne” there is an undercurrent of sadness or melancholy. So what I am trying to say is that there is not one thing but different things happening.
RM&D: in your earlier interview you have stated that your works are primarily oriented towards the audience of the Indian Subcontinent. Now with this video where would you place your audience?
PN: Why not people of vernacular background understand my work? Why are you seeing my work as a commercial movie? My movies are not shown in theatres like commercial movies. In Heggodu, which is a cultural centre in Sagar, Karnataka, they have their own cultural village theatre centre. Every year they have cultural workshops and international film screenings. The synopsis or a longer explanation of the film is given to the people before the screening. Since my childhood I saw movies of different languages without knowing anything about the language even without subtitles. I don’t generally use dialogues because I am not a professional actor nor are the people I ask to act in my movies know anything about acting. Moreover I need to work with low resources. I love Indian silent films with titles in 3 languages, local/ national/ international.
I am directing at some audience who have seen my photographs earlier. Also there are certain practical things, I can’t act. Its very difficult to mug up the lines. Problem is also to work with computers. Most people also prefer English. I am planning to do movies in 3 languages but I want to show to the same audience. In my Paris autumn I have no dialogue or speech. I use only text. Moreover I am talking to the people who know English. You cannot contain the whole world. I am of course talking to specific people. I am showing my work in both art shows and film festivals sometimes in the form of installation also. Paris Autumn was in fact screened in Bangalore film festival, also as a solo show in Milan film festival. Film Societies are screening my movies.
RM&D: what are your future projects are you thinking of returning to your earlier conventional ways of sculpting sometime?
PN: I keep on improvising. I don’t know. I generally work from one work to next. I take a long time to work. I want to do one more movie on recipe. I have to work out how to make use of visuals and text differently. You have to wait and see!
Even if I return to sculpture it would not be conventional!
Paris Autumn
Video made from Black and White photographs
35minutes, English
Production: Pushpamala. N
Script and Direction: Pushpamala.N
Photography: Cedric Sartore, Pushpamala. N
Editing and sound: Sankalp Meshram
Cast: Pushpamala, Ghost: Gabrielle Soyer, Cedric: Cedric Vincent.
Friends: Bernard and Gwenolee Zurcher, Galeristes.
Computer Friend: Cedric Sartore.
Internationally acclaimed artist Pushpamala N recently presented her 2006 film Paris Autumn at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore. Rollie Mukherjee and Divakar catch up with the artist to know more about her film project. Excerpts from the interview:
Rollie Mukherjee and Divakar: The title Paris Autumn reminds us of R.B.Kitaja’s famous painting titled ‘The Autumn of Central Paris’ (1972-74), in which he generates a narrative out of fragments and randomness and also refers to the 17th century authority and has a sense of historical catastrophe. Did you in any case refer to this painting?
Pushpamala N: Of course my work is about Paris but I didn’t think at all about Kitaj’s work. It’s a coincidence. Since I was in Paris in the autumn I thought the title would suit.
RM&D: The way you end the movie clearly shows that your focus was more on psychological exposition or description rather than on crime solving and so the narrative has a sense of incompleteness. The angst remains…
The First Visitation-video still by Pushpamala
PN: My work doesn’t have a pessimistic ending. It has an upbeat ending. It might be an existential thriller but structurally I based my work on a quote by Walter Benjamin, where he says that Paris is like Mt Vesuvius. As it is fertilized constantly by volcanic eruptions in the same way the city of Paris is fertilized by constant revolutions and out of its lava artists are born.
RM&D: In your earlier photo-performances like Phantom lady, Dard-e- Dil, Native Woman or Kismet you were talking about the stereotypes by getting into the skin of the characters by masquerading or imitating the characters which have shaped the psyche of the people in the subcontinent. Now what role do you play in this video?
PN: In this video I am myself as a character for the first time. Some people said my work is very nostalgic. But I don’t think so. I used varied styles and merged histories. The film is actually very contemporary though it talks about 16th century history. Initially I wanted to recreate the ghost exactly like the character Gabrielle who was 25 years of age. I had a friend who was willing to do the role but she was double the age of Gabrielle. It would be ridiculous if she had to dress up like the painting and I felt it’s not necessary. I insisted her to dress normally and because she was also fashionable and a typical Parisian, she looked elegant in the contemporary dress. So it has nothing to do with 16th century look at all.
I have used a lot from my earlier work Phantom lady. Lot of people told me that the chapel scene is like the film Da Vinci Code. I myself have not seen it.
In this work history keeps coming. Like the Louvre building was erected by Henri IV and the chapel in which I shot by was his first wife Margo. Like in the film Phantom Lady you get simultaneously a grandeur and humble setting this work also if you see the chapel everything over there is fake. There were copies of Michelangelo. Everything was copy. You get a sense of kitsch and grandiose at the same time. Everything is put together, its looks very funny.
RM&D: Past is something which comes and goes. Interestingly your film has a quasi documentary mode and you simultaneously sway between the 16th century and contemporary time/space.
PN: Actually it’s a very complex film. I wanted to use history in the work very carefully, in the sense that I wanted to be very brief but meaningful at the same time. This is of course not a fiction. It has a documentary sense as well. During my stay in Paris there were lot of tension and hostile atmosphere. I didn’t shoot the riots directly. It couldn’t happen. We were even attacked. So I got most of my images from Google.
The film has different textures. Most people asked why I used images from Google, when everything was so personalized. Why this particular history? I feel this because it is so much to do with my culture and from where I come. Moreover this particular history has been forgotten in France. Louis XIV, Louis XVI who belongs to the same family is remembered but not Henry IV. This part has become like prehistory.
RM&D: In almost all your earlier works you have talked about a stereotypical representation of Indian women. Even your first video talks about a perfect /ideal domestic mother fulfilling her maternal duties without questioning the culturally assigned roles. In this video how do you perceive feminity? Particularly a character like Gabrielle who on the one hand was regarded as an icon of love and intellectually reputed women and on the other hand known as “the dutchess of filth”?
PN: I don’t want to directly deal with feminity as such in this film. Gabrielle’s history was very complex. It was said that she and her sister was society beauties and their father pushed his daughters to become mistresses of powerful men. Henry IV was childless from his first marriage and his relation with Gabrielle was very famous love affair. She was in her early 20’s and was intelligent and very powerful woman. She was very complex character. Whether she was poisoned or she died of miscarriage is still a mystery. Even this period can’t be seen in black and white. That was a very complex structure, moralistic men patronized prostitutes. It was nothing like Victorian period. There was no king for 30 years in Paris. It was a very turbulent period. There was continuous warfare. The king of Spain was trying to control France.
So she cannot be a stereotype. She is a very specific historical character. She can’t be this or that. She is very complex.
RM&D: How do you categorize your recent work? Is it a feature or video or something in-between? Away from Gothic thriller did you have any inspiration from film Noirs or neo-noirs which invite the viewers in its game?
PN: Noir, I have used only as a style. I don’t want my movie to be this or that. It’s so boring if you fit into types. The footage of the riots was available in black and white. I like noir style, fast thriller form. I didn’t want slowly pace history narrative. I like the book “In the Name of Rose”. It’s not a very usual detective story. It talks about crime, murder at the same time also about knowledge, religion, moral and social material. It’s about investigation. It’s a thriller but serious.
Lot people found a strong influence of Da Vinci code in my work. I was more affected more by “In the name of rose”.
RM&D: Are you voicing any subjective position?
PN: I don’t want to. I was conscious of it. I didn’t want to talk about “gaze”. It has become cliché now. Men look women, women look…
Western filmmakers come here and without working much or having much knowledge about our culture they comment about it. I am going from a non- western country and commenting on the social problem there. Most reviews which came about my work felt that the riot part is unimportant or something added up.
In fact I was concerned about it from the very beginning. The movie starts by focusing on the painting of Caravaggio “Fortune teller” in Louvre. I start with an Egyptian woman reading the palm of a French man. It started with that, as I wanted to give some warning about the future.
More and More the French Government kept the racial problem under the carpet. Nothing is done about it. The riots actually happened at the suburbs of the city. In the 70’s workers quarters were erected all around the factories outside Paris. Slowly the factories got closed down. These quarters are having very inhuman conditions of living. These congested building blocks were made like beehives.
RM&D: why did you make the movie out of still photographs?
PN: In the past I had already worked with still photographs. So I felt it would be a further extension of it. The way I have used headings before each chapters so that there is no mystery, everything is announced before the things are happening. Initially I wanted to use voiceover but for this I needed a very continuous narrative with a beginning and an end. But my materials were very disjunctive and there were lots of facts. I needed to explain a lot of things. Here in Paris Autumn I wanted to use text as “Rastriya Kir”. I didn’t want to use the scroll pattern; rather I wanted to explore the text in different ways by abbreviating it. I used the comic book format and also google information format. Google format has different scripts. Speaking is far more conversation. I wanted to use different tones/ voices.
RM&D: What were the problems you encountered while editing or montage?
PN: The editing and sound design in my movie is done by a trained photographer Sankalp Meshram. He himself is a filmmaker, a FTII product. I do my creative work on the editing table. It’s not a technical thing at all for me. Actually we worked on sound and image simultaneously. Generally we do a rough cut and give it to a sound designer but for this film we were creating sound/visual and script together which is usually not done. We put all the materials together and made chapters separately according to the narration. We segregated the chapel scene from that of house and café. Made the narrative visual and sound together. It took one and a half month for editing this 35minutes film. Normally a three hours commercial movie editing is done within one month because they have a set story. In this case we developed the form and editing simultaneously. The editing was done in two sessions. First we put all photos in sequential order and try to figure it out what that was all about. It can’t be a linear narrative I thought. First I wanted to use the material as a diary or travelogue. There was a need of a huge structure which can directly be connected as my project was to use Euro- French visual culture/cinema/popular art/theatre. Actually I didn’t have a movie camera, so I started working with a still camera.
RM&D: How did you frame your subplots to create different layers of meaning within the otherwise historical ghost narrative that is allusion to riot (Godhra) by images of riots in Europe or the subtext of your cultural position by means of music and sound?
PN: I stayed in a very beautiful building in Paris but didn’t know anything about the story of Gabrielle. Fortunately, I met a young photographer named Cedric Sartore who showed his keenness to work with me. I rented the room from a gallery owner who stayed downstairs and he told me about Gabrielle’s tragic death. I saw the original painting in Louvre. Initially I want to recreate the painting. Finally I changed the idea. It is the shot of ghost. I edited in India. I took black and white photographs in contact prints. The ghost in the film is not a real ghost. It’s an omen. Whenever I see her she directs me to violence first to 16th century religious war or the second time I encounter her in the chapel she directs me to the recent riots. I don’t want to directly talk about anything. The 16th century was religious; the present day is both religious and racial. I don’t want both to be connected very directly. They are like different chapters of book but formally different.
RM&D: Your move we feel is from a very parody/ comic mode to a very serious one.
PN: No, I don’t think so. Some people consider my Paris Autumn in fact to be very funny. Even in my earlier photo stills “Phantom Lady” or “Sunhere Sapne” there is an undercurrent of sadness or melancholy. So what I am trying to say is that there is not one thing but different things happening.
RM&D: in your earlier interview you have stated that your works are primarily oriented towards the audience of the Indian Subcontinent. Now with this video where would you place your audience?
PN: Why not people of vernacular background understand my work? Why are you seeing my work as a commercial movie? My movies are not shown in theatres like commercial movies. In Heggodu, which is a cultural centre in Sagar, Karnataka, they have their own cultural village theatre centre. Every year they have cultural workshops and international film screenings. The synopsis or a longer explanation of the film is given to the people before the screening. Since my childhood I saw movies of different languages without knowing anything about the language even without subtitles. I don’t generally use dialogues because I am not a professional actor nor are the people I ask to act in my movies know anything about acting. Moreover I need to work with low resources. I love Indian silent films with titles in 3 languages, local/ national/ international.
I am directing at some audience who have seen my photographs earlier. Also there are certain practical things, I can’t act. Its very difficult to mug up the lines. Problem is also to work with computers. Most people also prefer English. I am planning to do movies in 3 languages but I want to show to the same audience. In my Paris autumn I have no dialogue or speech. I use only text. Moreover I am talking to the people who know English. You cannot contain the whole world. I am of course talking to specific people. I am showing my work in both art shows and film festivals sometimes in the form of installation also. Paris Autumn was in fact screened in Bangalore film festival, also as a solo show in Milan film festival. Film Societies are screening my movies.
RM&D: what are your future projects are you thinking of returning to your earlier conventional ways of sculpting sometime?
PN: I keep on improvising. I don’t know. I generally work from one work to next. I take a long time to work. I want to do one more movie on recipe. I have to work out how to make use of visuals and text differently. You have to wait and see!
Even if I return to sculpture it would not be conventional!
Paris Autumn
Video made from Black and White photographs
35minutes, English
Production: Pushpamala. N
Script and Direction: Pushpamala.N
Photography: Cedric Sartore, Pushpamala. N
Editing and sound: Sankalp Meshram
Cast: Pushpamala, Ghost: Gabrielle Soyer, Cedric: Cedric Vincent.
Friends: Bernard and Gwenolee Zurcher, Galeristes.
Computer Friend: Cedric Sartore.
Art concerns.com,may2007
CAVA: Another Apparatus
Taking Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) as an example, Bangalore based art critics, Rollie Mukherjee and V.Divakar explain how a state funded art institute indoctrinates students with hegemonic ideas, through its physical and conceptual presences.
“It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the class struggle, that it is possible to explain the ideologies existing in social formation. Not only is it from this starting point that it is possible to explain the realization of the ruling ideology in the ISAs and of the forms of class struggle for which the ISAs are the seat and stake.”
- Althusser in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.
This essay is deliberately structured into two parts. The first part is a narrative and the second is a critique. We as writers, assume that the reader is aware of the Althusserian formulation of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The first part describes the physical apparatus of CAVA with its all shortcomings. We talk of certain institutional deficiencies because it helps the system to portray itself as a smooth and natural functioning entity. The second part is a critique of the ideology present in the material relations and functioning of the institute. Being the only institution run by the state in Karnataka it offers glaring and evident examples of state policies and ideology. The peculiarities owing to the cultural traits in this part of the country have defined and also clothed the ideology of the state in interesting ways.
CAVA in Old Building at Aloka.
The Institution
The Institute of CAVA (Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts) was established as a modernizing limb of the CTI (Chamarajendra Technical Institute) in 1982. It was visualized to fulfill the creative needs of the modern India and also that of Karnataka. C.T.I having already produced artists of prominence like K. Venkatappa, K. K. Hebbar, S. N. Swamy, Pavanje, R. K. Laxman, CAVA started with an ambitious idea of setting up an institute in the lines of Shantiniketan and Baroda. With Sholapurkar as the full time Dean, a group of lecturers was picked from all over India to take the responsibility of nurturing the young talents. The institute was given the Rajanilaya building in Aloka which is 10 kms away from the city of Mysore.
The serene and idyllic atmosphere was ideal for developing an institute in the lines of Shantiniketan. Yet time and again the college premises have been shifted to the C.T.I building. The reasons stated are the lack of infrastructure, transport facilities, stationeries and canteen facilities. Interestingly, without fulfilling all these requirements, the campus was shifted back to Aloka again and again. This has cost quite a sum for the institution and has affected in the academic activities of the students. Not to mention the leakages of funds in the process. Now the institute is situated in the city centre having lost the ideal Aloka. The building is situated beside the main road that leads to the Mysore Palace and is opposite to the Government K.R. hospital. The institution shares the building with other state government bodies. Even Cava is recognized sometimes only with the land mark of the State Handicrafts outlet called Cauvery Emporium or the State leather outlet Lidkar. The other part of the building is the city Central library and Chamarajendra Technical Institute. Situated in such a location which is a major tourist spot in the vicinity, the college has chance visitors. They peep into the otherwise idle gallery and then stray into art departments. At times they do buy art from the students and lecturers. Hence, such visits are always encouraged.
The main entrance to the institution is through a small doorway leading to upstairs and it ends in the gallery. The Dean’s room is located at the centre and adjacent to it one can see a dingy store room kind of place that accommodates the art history department. The painting department, when it was functional used to be opposite to the Dean’s chamber. This MFA department was the erstwhile administrative office. The graphics and the sculpture departments are towards the left wing of the gallery and painting, photography, library, applied arts and computer lab are on the right wing. The foundation classes are now housed in the CTI open halls. The administrative office and the sculpture MFA are now in a new building. Earlier the whole college used to function from a single corridor. Now the college shares the ground with CTI. The markets and other commercial establishments create an environment for the college! The bus stand and railway station and the famous Jaganmohan Palace museum housing a major collection of Ravi Varma are within a two kms. There is a reason for giving such a detailed description. This ambience provides representational source for the students.
The students who join the institute CAVA are mainly from South India. The majority comes from the home state Karnataka and a few students come from the neighboring states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Generally the students are from rural and semi- urban areas around Mysore and Bangalore. The students who opt for the courses generally come with a background in signboard painting, traditional sculpting etc. Some of them are drawing teacher diploma holders and commercial artists. Many of them come from traditional artisan families. Yet another lot belong to rural art culture. And another group of students enroll for they find there is no alternative for them. The intake is however prescribed according to the lines of class and caste as seen in any other academic institutions in the state. It would be clear then how much allotment is given for the respective categories. The system is for 100/50
GM
50/25
Group1
4/2
Group2
15/8
Group2B
4/2
Group3A
4/2
Group3B
5/2
SC
15/8
ST
3/1
The same system applies for the lectures and the administrative staff.
Curriculum
The curriculum gives stress on the importance of developing individual sensitivities in response to the immediate environs. This has been till now a major trait of CAVA. The students are encouraged to sketch in the market place, bus stand, railway station, hospitals, folklore museum, road sides and of course landscapes in and around Mysore. This daily activity casually finds its place in other assignments like creative compositions and memory drawings. The students are informed of the importance of developing a personal language. Thanks to the disparity in sensibilities amongst the teaching staff ideological clashes erupt at times. The sensibilities vary from academic, decorative, surface abstractions, radical movement’s motifs, popular images, quasi (pseudo) traditional indigenous tendencies and some times a mixture of many. Many a times owing to an absence of a rigorous political and theoretical background (Art Historical) the languages become stylistic and students are bound to be influenced by these tutelage.
This situation is further aggravated by the influences exerted by the state run academies like the Lalith Kala Akademy and Shilpa Kala Akademy. Many students participate in the annual shows and workshops and win prizes. A majority of the teaching staff even competes along with the students and also wins major awards. Interestingly, many of the staff members hold official positions within these academies. The state run academies generally prompt the artists to create decorative art (like Souvenirs and table top items). These decorative objects emulate modern and traditional elements in them so that they look pieces of high art while remaining assembly line products.
Though, officially the students in CAVA are not asked to do ‘Akademy sponsored kind of art’, they while helping out their teachers to do such commission works, naturally get influenced by this kind of art production. CAVA being the only state funded art institution in Karnataka, the nexus between the staff members and state run Akademies is quite strong and vicious. As the art history department is only nominal, perhaps, ornamental (one permanent teacher for all the BFA and MFA students), there is a very low chance of these students getting exposed to the History of art in a progressive way. Art history is taught in such a breakneck speed so that students learn it for the sake of writing ‘examinations.’ The students find their own ways of updating themselves in art history by talking to the practicing artists and referring to the newly available sources. As there are very few galleries in Mysore, students often rely on secondary sources for updating themselves.
The library boasts a collection of 5497 volumes with one qualified librarian and an attendant. The library made a recent purchase of books worth Rs.45,782/-. Interestingly, one finds that the purchases are not done based on the academic value of the book, instead even the advisory committee for purchases too has gone by the face value of the books. ‘Da Vinci Code’ is one amongst the recently purchased lot! However, this is one of the libraries that has a good collection of contemporary art and art history books. The students get immensely benefited by this library as the staff members are quite co-operating.
The department of Photography and Photo journalism in Cava is the only institute in India offering specialization in these areas. The department also has a Qualified Professor for Photo Journalism, a technical assistant for Photography and an attendant. It has studio facilities also. The NAC self study report 2005, suggests that the students graduated from the department are well placed in different media inside and outside the country. The department of Applied Arts has been instrumental in creating a conducive atmosphere without interference and influence which has enabled the students to work hard to develop and search avenues with their own skills and updating abilities.
Workshops and Seminars
The institution with its substantial funds is able to bring eminent personalities from the respective specializations for workshops and seminars once a year. Workshops are also conducted by willing artists, former students with national, regional and international recognition, related to respective departments through the state and central academies, through personal connections and visiting foreign artists. It is when such workshops and interactions happen the students are thrown open to challenges. If it is free from interventions (of state through funding and other technicalities and individuals) the workshops succeed in encouraging the students.
Other activities
The students in Cava have engaged themselves with a lot of other activities like theatre, cinema, organizing film festivals, writing, public works, sports, dance, commercial works, participating in workshops and camps organized elsewhere. As a community, students protest and conduct strikes for achieving their demands. The student community here celebrates festivals and even participates in the government sponsored festivals. Recently CAVA started an annual fair in order to bring more public participation. Students and staff members join their hands to celebrate festivals in the campus and rituals are simulated within the campus.
Critique
We have seen how the physical structuring of the institute creates certain attitudes and acts amongst the students and staff members. Now let us see how the ideology functions from within these physical structures. The centrality of the gallery cannot be missed at this stage. How does it help the students to reproduce the relationships of production within the academic structure? How does it create subjectivities within these relationships of production? The centrality of the gallery is not only the centrality of the building but it functions as the centre of all what is being produced there. The gallery becomes a space within the premises which defines the ultimate destination of the works being produced hence also the cause for a certain character of the works of art. It presupposes the trajectory of the journey of a work of art produced in CAVA or elsewhere; it has to reach a gallery. Though the students are not instructed to produce works of art for galleries, they are unconsciously conditioned to produce works for the gallery/ies as suggested by the central gallery of CAVA. The system reproduces or reinstates its modality of operation as work of art’s natural destination is only the gallery and the buyers thus creating conditions for the further reproduction of the same relations of production (art- gallery- art) and so forth naturally submit willingly to the naturalized system of labour- product – market/ investment – exploitation- labour..
If you again look upon the language preferences this idea dominates and hence the production to a certain amount is also effected. Also guarded are the disciplinary boundaries. Though experimentations are allowed, radical departure from the given is not allowed. If at all some one attempts such a departure it should be done very subtly, without affecting the personal and academic relationships.
The lack of female teaching staff (only one permanent staff in the Department of photography and photojournalism in the whole college) within the practical courses has created a lack of the ‘other sensibility’. As usual it is laughed at or neglected. The female students definitely lack this subjective support for guidance in understanding the artistic criteria and concepts. The masculine definitions of art and ideas are left with no critique subjecting the students to accept this subjectivity as natural.
The role of state Akademies is very crucial in creating consent on aesthetic production. These academies, as they are funded by state, through their activities, embrace dissenting voices and through persuasion and conferring of awards homogenize them ideologically. When the artists are encouraged to do quasi-modern and quasi-traditional works of art, in fact the state produces a particular environment for a particular kind of art. The relationship between the state and the works of art/artist is further reproduced through multiple engagements of the artists at various levels, especially when such levels are funded and protected by the state. The celebration of Hindu festivals within the campus shows how the students are indoctrinated with the state ideology in the name of national culture. The colonial legacy of incorporating the intelligentsia towards the achievement of social governance and control is carried forward when the state supports the artists/intelligentsia to reproduce its own outdated modes of cultural reproduction.
If you look through the untouchable issue of caste in education as the table suggests, the allotment refers to the participation and “accommodation” of different castes and class. The members of the teaching staff who were absorbed directly after a period follow the rooster system now. Incidentally, barring a couple of posts all the existing teaching staff comes under the privileged communities. If you look at the vacancies in every department, a total of nearly ten posts, one can see all belong to the reserved socially underprivileged communities. Due to obvious reasons they have been kept vacant till date. This would easily substantiate the kind of subjective leanings of the teaching. The reasons are sometimes openly hinted by the staff. Interestingly, in twenty five years CAVA has only three full time Deans and the rest as just in charge. Also except a few, most of the Deans appointed by the state are bureaucrats who have no knowledge about art. Sometimes it is felt that the vacancies are not filled in order to keep the students innocent. If new approaches are brought in by the new teachers, what would happen to the ideological structure of the institution? Though sounding naïve, it has some sense in it. Thanks to this, the CAVA graduates at times find it difficult to cope up with the art national art climate.
Taking Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) as an example, Bangalore based art critics, Rollie Mukherjee and V.Divakar explain how a state funded art institute indoctrinates students with hegemonic ideas, through its physical and conceptual presences.
“It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the class struggle, that it is possible to explain the ideologies existing in social formation. Not only is it from this starting point that it is possible to explain the realization of the ruling ideology in the ISAs and of the forms of class struggle for which the ISAs are the seat and stake.”
- Althusser in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.
This essay is deliberately structured into two parts. The first part is a narrative and the second is a critique. We as writers, assume that the reader is aware of the Althusserian formulation of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The first part describes the physical apparatus of CAVA with its all shortcomings. We talk of certain institutional deficiencies because it helps the system to portray itself as a smooth and natural functioning entity. The second part is a critique of the ideology present in the material relations and functioning of the institute. Being the only institution run by the state in Karnataka it offers glaring and evident examples of state policies and ideology. The peculiarities owing to the cultural traits in this part of the country have defined and also clothed the ideology of the state in interesting ways.
CAVA in Old Building at Aloka.
The Institution
The Institute of CAVA (Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts) was established as a modernizing limb of the CTI (Chamarajendra Technical Institute) in 1982. It was visualized to fulfill the creative needs of the modern India and also that of Karnataka. C.T.I having already produced artists of prominence like K. Venkatappa, K. K. Hebbar, S. N. Swamy, Pavanje, R. K. Laxman, CAVA started with an ambitious idea of setting up an institute in the lines of Shantiniketan and Baroda. With Sholapurkar as the full time Dean, a group of lecturers was picked from all over India to take the responsibility of nurturing the young talents. The institute was given the Rajanilaya building in Aloka which is 10 kms away from the city of Mysore.
The serene and idyllic atmosphere was ideal for developing an institute in the lines of Shantiniketan. Yet time and again the college premises have been shifted to the C.T.I building. The reasons stated are the lack of infrastructure, transport facilities, stationeries and canteen facilities. Interestingly, without fulfilling all these requirements, the campus was shifted back to Aloka again and again. This has cost quite a sum for the institution and has affected in the academic activities of the students. Not to mention the leakages of funds in the process. Now the institute is situated in the city centre having lost the ideal Aloka. The building is situated beside the main road that leads to the Mysore Palace and is opposite to the Government K.R. hospital. The institution shares the building with other state government bodies. Even Cava is recognized sometimes only with the land mark of the State Handicrafts outlet called Cauvery Emporium or the State leather outlet Lidkar. The other part of the building is the city Central library and Chamarajendra Technical Institute. Situated in such a location which is a major tourist spot in the vicinity, the college has chance visitors. They peep into the otherwise idle gallery and then stray into art departments. At times they do buy art from the students and lecturers. Hence, such visits are always encouraged.
The main entrance to the institution is through a small doorway leading to upstairs and it ends in the gallery. The Dean’s room is located at the centre and adjacent to it one can see a dingy store room kind of place that accommodates the art history department. The painting department, when it was functional used to be opposite to the Dean’s chamber. This MFA department was the erstwhile administrative office. The graphics and the sculpture departments are towards the left wing of the gallery and painting, photography, library, applied arts and computer lab are on the right wing. The foundation classes are now housed in the CTI open halls. The administrative office and the sculpture MFA are now in a new building. Earlier the whole college used to function from a single corridor. Now the college shares the ground with CTI. The markets and other commercial establishments create an environment for the college! The bus stand and railway station and the famous Jaganmohan Palace museum housing a major collection of Ravi Varma are within a two kms. There is a reason for giving such a detailed description. This ambience provides representational source for the students.
The students who join the institute CAVA are mainly from South India. The majority comes from the home state Karnataka and a few students come from the neighboring states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Generally the students are from rural and semi- urban areas around Mysore and Bangalore. The students who opt for the courses generally come with a background in signboard painting, traditional sculpting etc. Some of them are drawing teacher diploma holders and commercial artists. Many of them come from traditional artisan families. Yet another lot belong to rural art culture. And another group of students enroll for they find there is no alternative for them. The intake is however prescribed according to the lines of class and caste as seen in any other academic institutions in the state. It would be clear then how much allotment is given for the respective categories. The system is for 100/50
GM
50/25
Group1
4/2
Group2
15/8
Group2B
4/2
Group3A
4/2
Group3B
5/2
SC
15/8
ST
3/1
The same system applies for the lectures and the administrative staff.
Curriculum
The curriculum gives stress on the importance of developing individual sensitivities in response to the immediate environs. This has been till now a major trait of CAVA. The students are encouraged to sketch in the market place, bus stand, railway station, hospitals, folklore museum, road sides and of course landscapes in and around Mysore. This daily activity casually finds its place in other assignments like creative compositions and memory drawings. The students are informed of the importance of developing a personal language. Thanks to the disparity in sensibilities amongst the teaching staff ideological clashes erupt at times. The sensibilities vary from academic, decorative, surface abstractions, radical movement’s motifs, popular images, quasi (pseudo) traditional indigenous tendencies and some times a mixture of many. Many a times owing to an absence of a rigorous political and theoretical background (Art Historical) the languages become stylistic and students are bound to be influenced by these tutelage.
This situation is further aggravated by the influences exerted by the state run academies like the Lalith Kala Akademy and Shilpa Kala Akademy. Many students participate in the annual shows and workshops and win prizes. A majority of the teaching staff even competes along with the students and also wins major awards. Interestingly, many of the staff members hold official positions within these academies. The state run academies generally prompt the artists to create decorative art (like Souvenirs and table top items). These decorative objects emulate modern and traditional elements in them so that they look pieces of high art while remaining assembly line products.
Though, officially the students in CAVA are not asked to do ‘Akademy sponsored kind of art’, they while helping out their teachers to do such commission works, naturally get influenced by this kind of art production. CAVA being the only state funded art institution in Karnataka, the nexus between the staff members and state run Akademies is quite strong and vicious. As the art history department is only nominal, perhaps, ornamental (one permanent teacher for all the BFA and MFA students), there is a very low chance of these students getting exposed to the History of art in a progressive way. Art history is taught in such a breakneck speed so that students learn it for the sake of writing ‘examinations.’ The students find their own ways of updating themselves in art history by talking to the practicing artists and referring to the newly available sources. As there are very few galleries in Mysore, students often rely on secondary sources for updating themselves.
The library boasts a collection of 5497 volumes with one qualified librarian and an attendant. The library made a recent purchase of books worth Rs.45,782/-. Interestingly, one finds that the purchases are not done based on the academic value of the book, instead even the advisory committee for purchases too has gone by the face value of the books. ‘Da Vinci Code’ is one amongst the recently purchased lot! However, this is one of the libraries that has a good collection of contemporary art and art history books. The students get immensely benefited by this library as the staff members are quite co-operating.
The department of Photography and Photo journalism in Cava is the only institute in India offering specialization in these areas. The department also has a Qualified Professor for Photo Journalism, a technical assistant for Photography and an attendant. It has studio facilities also. The NAC self study report 2005, suggests that the students graduated from the department are well placed in different media inside and outside the country. The department of Applied Arts has been instrumental in creating a conducive atmosphere without interference and influence which has enabled the students to work hard to develop and search avenues with their own skills and updating abilities.
Workshops and Seminars
The institution with its substantial funds is able to bring eminent personalities from the respective specializations for workshops and seminars once a year. Workshops are also conducted by willing artists, former students with national, regional and international recognition, related to respective departments through the state and central academies, through personal connections and visiting foreign artists. It is when such workshops and interactions happen the students are thrown open to challenges. If it is free from interventions (of state through funding and other technicalities and individuals) the workshops succeed in encouraging the students.
Other activities
The students in Cava have engaged themselves with a lot of other activities like theatre, cinema, organizing film festivals, writing, public works, sports, dance, commercial works, participating in workshops and camps organized elsewhere. As a community, students protest and conduct strikes for achieving their demands. The student community here celebrates festivals and even participates in the government sponsored festivals. Recently CAVA started an annual fair in order to bring more public participation. Students and staff members join their hands to celebrate festivals in the campus and rituals are simulated within the campus.
Critique
We have seen how the physical structuring of the institute creates certain attitudes and acts amongst the students and staff members. Now let us see how the ideology functions from within these physical structures. The centrality of the gallery cannot be missed at this stage. How does it help the students to reproduce the relationships of production within the academic structure? How does it create subjectivities within these relationships of production? The centrality of the gallery is not only the centrality of the building but it functions as the centre of all what is being produced there. The gallery becomes a space within the premises which defines the ultimate destination of the works being produced hence also the cause for a certain character of the works of art. It presupposes the trajectory of the journey of a work of art produced in CAVA or elsewhere; it has to reach a gallery. Though the students are not instructed to produce works of art for galleries, they are unconsciously conditioned to produce works for the gallery/ies as suggested by the central gallery of CAVA. The system reproduces or reinstates its modality of operation as work of art’s natural destination is only the gallery and the buyers thus creating conditions for the further reproduction of the same relations of production (art- gallery- art) and so forth naturally submit willingly to the naturalized system of labour- product – market/ investment – exploitation- labour..
If you again look upon the language preferences this idea dominates and hence the production to a certain amount is also effected. Also guarded are the disciplinary boundaries. Though experimentations are allowed, radical departure from the given is not allowed. If at all some one attempts such a departure it should be done very subtly, without affecting the personal and academic relationships.
The lack of female teaching staff (only one permanent staff in the Department of photography and photojournalism in the whole college) within the practical courses has created a lack of the ‘other sensibility’. As usual it is laughed at or neglected. The female students definitely lack this subjective support for guidance in understanding the artistic criteria and concepts. The masculine definitions of art and ideas are left with no critique subjecting the students to accept this subjectivity as natural.
The role of state Akademies is very crucial in creating consent on aesthetic production. These academies, as they are funded by state, through their activities, embrace dissenting voices and through persuasion and conferring of awards homogenize them ideologically. When the artists are encouraged to do quasi-modern and quasi-traditional works of art, in fact the state produces a particular environment for a particular kind of art. The relationship between the state and the works of art/artist is further reproduced through multiple engagements of the artists at various levels, especially when such levels are funded and protected by the state. The celebration of Hindu festivals within the campus shows how the students are indoctrinated with the state ideology in the name of national culture. The colonial legacy of incorporating the intelligentsia towards the achievement of social governance and control is carried forward when the state supports the artists/intelligentsia to reproduce its own outdated modes of cultural reproduction.
If you look through the untouchable issue of caste in education as the table suggests, the allotment refers to the participation and “accommodation” of different castes and class. The members of the teaching staff who were absorbed directly after a period follow the rooster system now. Incidentally, barring a couple of posts all the existing teaching staff comes under the privileged communities. If you look at the vacancies in every department, a total of nearly ten posts, one can see all belong to the reserved socially underprivileged communities. Due to obvious reasons they have been kept vacant till date. This would easily substantiate the kind of subjective leanings of the teaching. The reasons are sometimes openly hinted by the staff. Interestingly, in twenty five years CAVA has only three full time Deans and the rest as just in charge. Also except a few, most of the Deans appointed by the state are bureaucrats who have no knowledge about art. Sometimes it is felt that the vacancies are not filled in order to keep the students innocent. If new approaches are brought in by the new teachers, what would happen to the ideological structure of the institution? Though sounding naïve, it has some sense in it. Thanks to this, the CAVA graduates at times find it difficult to cope up with the art national art climate.
writing on Surekha, Art concerns.com,april1 2007
Communing with Urban Heroines
Rollie Mukherjee and V. Divakar, Bangalore based art critic duo looks at the latest video works of Surekha and articulates the concerns of artist while testifying them with their critical knowledge. These videos were recently shows at Goethe Institute Max Muller Bhavan, Bangalore.
The ever changing metropolis constantly demands the inhabitants to cope up with its amalgam of contesting definitions. Each individual in turn tries to negotiate with these urban phenomena through the frames and structures they see and inhabit. The recent show “communing with the urban heroines: a culture specific visual project” by Surekha can been seen as an attempt to negotiate with the identity of the upwardly mobile middle class women.
The exhibition touches upon the manifold demands of urbanity, its effects and also her varied concerns as a ‘female’- a volatile highly reflexive signifier. This comes through her representations of stereotype, alienation, escape and the socially negotiated identity of the female subject. She also intertwines personal with social/political by bringing the autobiographical. Thus tends to universalize the specific (class). Her use of metaphors flexibly shifts from one theme to another. The natural elements like fire, water and earth are the key tropes. She contextualizes myth/folklore in a urban (middle class) space where her body becomes a important signifier.
Janaki – Between fire and sky (diptych), 1.28 mins
This work though doesn’t bring in the sinister image of death in a loud voice rather pinches at the sensory level about the crudity of our existence. It evokes both psychic distress and serenity inducing a sense of burden and relief simultaneously.
Aestheticization veils the physical signs of morality/ decay. It interplays the familiar with that of fabulous. The metaphor of infinity is erected vertically against death and endlessness reduplication it invokes silence by measureless-ness of death. Thus her notion of death is based on the culturally constructed notion of mortality and resurrection. She uses the aesthetic of subtlety.
Again and again defying time and gravity
The 2 minutes long video brings a two way narrative of the textual/verbal and the visual. This makes the work intriguing because the textual message is more referential i.e. it has to rely on memory images which are indirect medium of the mind. The viewer is allowed to create the narrative in between the visual and the verbal references. This enables her to connect the most concrete with the abstract without abandoning the concrete presence. The narrative is how there is always the defying and the accepting traditions within the feminine and which is free and which is imitative of the structure and is passive.
Three fragmented actions of silence
The first video shows a woman creating a rose flower out of the petals stored in her mouth. This is cobbled with a negative image doing the reversal. It is followed by the video titled ‘red river/ blue river’. The lines on the palms are rendered in blue and red layers. Slowly the palm throbs and creates forms which look sometime familiar and at times abstract. The third video uses her own image which is superimposed by frequently popping images from popular culture which enhances the tension between signifier and the signified. These works operate in-between the biological and social realms and overlaps one realm over the other. This reminds one of Julia Kristeva’s “new melodies of the soul” which describes the drive as “a pivot between soma and psyche, between biology and representation”. By juxtaposing shots contradictory to each other she evokes emotional and distracting ambience of modern metropolis. Her aesthetic is one of subtlety.
The boiling concept/ burning concept
Both these videos are placed face to face one showing a superwoman in a domestic space making tea and the other show her burning out on a treadmill/gym. What should one take these images as? Are they mockery or are they the documents of the urban heroine’s routine to become a super woman? The middle class women dilemma of assuming the identity which is the admixture of patriarchal definitions of tradition and also modern women is overtly visible. The question passes through without taking a position which is at a dialectical relationship with the masculine definitions of tradition and modernity.
Bhagiyarathi bringing water
Bhagirathi a folk character derived from Kannada folk story "Kerege Harra" offering to the lake in which a woman is sacrificed.
Here she re-contextualizes the folklore with the contemporary social context of murder and suicide. Death is here aestheticized. The sub-text of pain/decay is shrouded by fascinating visual. The same strategy operates in the flower for the kitchen where the flowers are kept neglected at the corners of the kitchens. There is something strange and familiar at same time. The fairy tale's usual ending "happily ever after" is problematised. In 'Bhagirathi….' there is a disjuncture between the visual language/ performance and the audio description of the folklore.
Janaki.. / A strange moment of stillness/ Making home
In this neither the overwhelming might of the nature nor its sublimity that is invoked. As we know sublimity upsets the balance of nature and art to make nature preeminent. Here she brings the vulnerability and fragility and nature as all embracing and identifies it with the feminine. As the environmental experience is not exclusively visual it also invokes sensory modalities. Environment is thus not interpreted as a material surrounding but a socio- physical context in which we participate.
Her performance videos shows her own body as raw material emphasizing the author as both subject/ object of pronouncement and incorporating personal experience for public dialogue.
There is a preference for a confessional instructive didactic realism, but this shows how language becomes a tool to talk about political and problematize the larger dominant orders but at the same time it can be slippery, ending up privileging one over the other,. We know feminism supposes that art doesn’t speak for everyone and that it privileges some kind of speaker over the other. But as we also know that there can be no single feminist aesthetic because women belong to different socially stratified structures and different aesthetic preferences and vocabulary of interpretation, neither there can be a universal definition of urban heroines and their experiences cannot be the same.
What one can attempt is to undo the fixed binaries that define feminine. Practically one need to relocate oneself and interrogate the complex systematic diversified terrain of caste/class/gender thereby using medium culturally as a instrument to define social practices.
Rollie Mukherjee and V. Divakar, Bangalore based art critic duo looks at the latest video works of Surekha and articulates the concerns of artist while testifying them with their critical knowledge. These videos were recently shows at Goethe Institute Max Muller Bhavan, Bangalore.
The ever changing metropolis constantly demands the inhabitants to cope up with its amalgam of contesting definitions. Each individual in turn tries to negotiate with these urban phenomena through the frames and structures they see and inhabit. The recent show “communing with the urban heroines: a culture specific visual project” by Surekha can been seen as an attempt to negotiate with the identity of the upwardly mobile middle class women.
The exhibition touches upon the manifold demands of urbanity, its effects and also her varied concerns as a ‘female’- a volatile highly reflexive signifier. This comes through her representations of stereotype, alienation, escape and the socially negotiated identity of the female subject. She also intertwines personal with social/political by bringing the autobiographical. Thus tends to universalize the specific (class). Her use of metaphors flexibly shifts from one theme to another. The natural elements like fire, water and earth are the key tropes. She contextualizes myth/folklore in a urban (middle class) space where her body becomes a important signifier.
Janaki – Between fire and sky (diptych), 1.28 mins
This work though doesn’t bring in the sinister image of death in a loud voice rather pinches at the sensory level about the crudity of our existence. It evokes both psychic distress and serenity inducing a sense of burden and relief simultaneously.
Aestheticization veils the physical signs of morality/ decay. It interplays the familiar with that of fabulous. The metaphor of infinity is erected vertically against death and endlessness reduplication it invokes silence by measureless-ness of death. Thus her notion of death is based on the culturally constructed notion of mortality and resurrection. She uses the aesthetic of subtlety.
Again and again defying time and gravity
The 2 minutes long video brings a two way narrative of the textual/verbal and the visual. This makes the work intriguing because the textual message is more referential i.e. it has to rely on memory images which are indirect medium of the mind. The viewer is allowed to create the narrative in between the visual and the verbal references. This enables her to connect the most concrete with the abstract without abandoning the concrete presence. The narrative is how there is always the defying and the accepting traditions within the feminine and which is free and which is imitative of the structure and is passive.
Three fragmented actions of silence
The first video shows a woman creating a rose flower out of the petals stored in her mouth. This is cobbled with a negative image doing the reversal. It is followed by the video titled ‘red river/ blue river’. The lines on the palms are rendered in blue and red layers. Slowly the palm throbs and creates forms which look sometime familiar and at times abstract. The third video uses her own image which is superimposed by frequently popping images from popular culture which enhances the tension between signifier and the signified. These works operate in-between the biological and social realms and overlaps one realm over the other. This reminds one of Julia Kristeva’s “new melodies of the soul” which describes the drive as “a pivot between soma and psyche, between biology and representation”. By juxtaposing shots contradictory to each other she evokes emotional and distracting ambience of modern metropolis. Her aesthetic is one of subtlety.
The boiling concept/ burning concept
Both these videos are placed face to face one showing a superwoman in a domestic space making tea and the other show her burning out on a treadmill/gym. What should one take these images as? Are they mockery or are they the documents of the urban heroine’s routine to become a super woman? The middle class women dilemma of assuming the identity which is the admixture of patriarchal definitions of tradition and also modern women is overtly visible. The question passes through without taking a position which is at a dialectical relationship with the masculine definitions of tradition and modernity.
Bhagiyarathi bringing water
Bhagirathi a folk character derived from Kannada folk story "Kerege Harra" offering to the lake in which a woman is sacrificed.
Here she re-contextualizes the folklore with the contemporary social context of murder and suicide. Death is here aestheticized. The sub-text of pain/decay is shrouded by fascinating visual. The same strategy operates in the flower for the kitchen where the flowers are kept neglected at the corners of the kitchens. There is something strange and familiar at same time. The fairy tale's usual ending "happily ever after" is problematised. In 'Bhagirathi….' there is a disjuncture between the visual language/ performance and the audio description of the folklore.
Janaki.. / A strange moment of stillness/ Making home
In this neither the overwhelming might of the nature nor its sublimity that is invoked. As we know sublimity upsets the balance of nature and art to make nature preeminent. Here she brings the vulnerability and fragility and nature as all embracing and identifies it with the feminine. As the environmental experience is not exclusively visual it also invokes sensory modalities. Environment is thus not interpreted as a material surrounding but a socio- physical context in which we participate.
Her performance videos shows her own body as raw material emphasizing the author as both subject/ object of pronouncement and incorporating personal experience for public dialogue.
There is a preference for a confessional instructive didactic realism, but this shows how language becomes a tool to talk about political and problematize the larger dominant orders but at the same time it can be slippery, ending up privileging one over the other,. We know feminism supposes that art doesn’t speak for everyone and that it privileges some kind of speaker over the other. But as we also know that there can be no single feminist aesthetic because women belong to different socially stratified structures and different aesthetic preferences and vocabulary of interpretation, neither there can be a universal definition of urban heroines and their experiences cannot be the same.
What one can attempt is to undo the fixed binaries that define feminine. Practically one need to relocate oneself and interrogate the complex systematic diversified terrain of caste/class/gender thereby using medium culturally as a instrument to define social practices.
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