Return of Chittaprosad and printmaking in Contemporary Indian Art

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..Chittaprosad I Kayyur Martyrs I Subbarayan, a police constable, who participated in police beating at Kayyur fell into the hands of protesters on the very next day. People were enthusiastic to handle him. But leaders discouraged them. The police man was asked to lead the protest march holding the flag. He did it since there was no other go, when he got a chance he jumped into the river and tried to escape. But he got drowned in the river. Then peasant movement and Congress were strong in Kayyur and suburbs. Police and vested interests took Kayyur incident as an opportunity to suppress revolutionary movement. They charged a case against 61 people in Kayyur and around. Of them the court decided five to be hanged into death

40th issue editorial for Art&Deal Magazine 

by Rahul Bhattacharya (Notes) on Monday, 8 August 2011 at 13:31

I don’t know what kind of a difference the Chittaprosad show will make to the art viewing public of Delhi. Of course everyone who has seen the show has fallen in love with it and the show has played a very important role in bringing back the memory of Chittaprosad and the political zeal of his practice. It is at this point of ‘politics’ that the mind wonders as to how does being an appreciator of Chittaprosad and being an industrialist causing famine in tribal areas go hand in hand? It is almost tempting to declare this as being scandalous… labeling it as some kind of dangerous schizophrenia. But when insanity rules it is the sane who become mad.

Strangely enough there could have been a different entry. A hardcore leftist activist was just one part of his personality that affected his aesthetics; Chittaprosad also loved beautiful flowers, folktales and many such mundanities. He had his own aesthetic tensions between Stalinist art, European modernism and Indian folk. Actually the greatness of Chittaprosad lies in precisely these multiple points of entries. Thus, it was quite amusing to watch the leftist politics of Chittaprosad being highlighted in a show organized and showcased for an audience who practice exactly opposite to what he preached.

    Before I move on I need to drop in and say that the five volume book edited by Sanjoy Malik if exemplary and for the first time provides us with a rare art historical insight on Chittaprosad, and bringing back a lot of faith in art historic scholarship.  

    As the mind further wo/andered as to why/were his political art was splashed in a gallery’s PR notes and press reviews and not his sublime water color, still life, flowers or the Ramayana series! Maybe this is a betrayal of the continuing inability of art history writing to engage with aesthetics and be more comfortable talking about the content value of an art work. The value of art is but a coming together of object/lessness and how that is represented. There is a growing negligence in talking about modes of representation (simply putting a flower can be depicted in hundreds of different ways).

    This started when art history revolted against the over bearing rule of stylistic analysis. It’s slowly dawning to some of us that maybe the baby has been thrown out with bath water. In this period developments in the world of Theory also ensure that the very terms like ‘artist’, ‘style’, ‘mark making’ had all become almost too layered to be able to negotiated through but the factor which contributed the most was (possibly) the exponential investors boom in contemporary art and how in our hurry to seduce this market, we (art writers, gallerist, curators, artists) reduced art only to the level of the surface neglecting the complicated questions of artistic process.

    Parallel to the Chittaprosad show, in the warehouse of the 3rd Pasta lane in the Abhay Maskara gallery, a six week open door printmaking residency of T Venkanna began. This residency has recent parallels in the Religare Art residency and the long running practices of KHOJ. What makes the T N Venkanna residency at 3rd Pasta lane special is its focus on printmaking in a gallery space which is acknowledged to be ‘cutting-edge and experimental’. Traditional graphic art (the kind that Chittaprosad used) has been dismissed as obsolete and redundant. Again the great period of investors’ boom and its fixation on canvasses combined with its inability to understand the concept of editions spelt the doom. Also clearly there was less money to be made by selling prints then by selling canvasses. Maybe printmaking is the only medium that was first declared dead by the galleries and the latent interest got snuffed out over a period of time.

    A five volume book will never be published about it, but the real journey of contemporary print making in the years of 2000- 2010 has been that of extremely talented print makers converting to be extremely mediocre painters, and the system actually encouraging it.

Ina Kaur I Reclaiming Identities I Etching

 Thankfully there seems to be a turn around. In the last couple of years artists like Chandramohan, T N Venkanna, Preeti Sood, Ina Kaur have successfully managed to present print making as a vibrant contemporary art form and one day we will be very thankful to studios like Chap in Baroda, Garhi in Delhi and of course the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Bhopal to keeping the practice alive in a hard unforgiving decade.  

    How we have faith in art as a practice, and how that reflects on our engagements with art as a product will have a deep impact on how art develops. One important lesson to learn is that the market is but a part of the society.