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.