Throwing the 'Book of Said' :

“The images in the series titled "India Poems" were produced between 1999 and 2004. Most were shot with an aging Rolleiflex, though some of the earlier images were made with a Nikon FE2”

‘May be Removed at Will’ could have been a warm harmless compilation of the chemical-process sepia-toned photographs that constituted the series ’India Poems’. It could have been a displaying of Waswo Waswo X’s early journey.  I did not know Waswo when he came to India, started travelling, taking pictures, falling in love; but the Waswo i know of today has been opening up  notes on orientalism in a manner that  i would love our contemporary academics to. But getting into these questions of culture, power, gaze...has the capacity to take away our power to ‘remove the intervening word/image’. 

In these years of the 2000s  (2000-2012), the art making and viewing culture of contemporary art has changed a lot. Those were the early times of the formation of ‘post colonial’ as an ideological practice, now heavy dose of neoliberalism has made ideology (as a lived practice)  unfashionable and yet in contemporary art,  politics has become as canonical as form was during modernism.  This change is even more dramatic in the context of photography...that has only recently forced the door and arrived on the round table of contemporary art practices in India. What struck me most was that formally these photographs (’India Poems’) was against-the-grain and formally far different from what we know and acknowledge as the mainstream of  documentary photography in India (Richard Bartholomew, Raghu Rai, Ram Rahman, Raghubir Singh, Jyoti Bhatt, Dayanita Singh) Yes, these photographs were definitely not playing to the Cartier Bresson ‘style’ of  the ‘western eye’ (both in the context of documentary and photography), nor was it in the (then) new wave coming in from the Royal College of Art London and New York.

The show has no catalogue, it comes with a booklet, a beautifully written short story by Waswo, which not only anchors the show and captures the changing history of the images.  It also goes a long way in helping us to mock situate-(contextualise) Waswo in the genre of the hundreds who comb the country called India, with cameras around them...clicking its mundane exotica. For a person who has been so sensitive about his location as an outsider...and has been increasingly made conscious about his ‘orientalist’ gaze, this mock/strategic situating works as a mode of subversion  against the gaze the artist is himself subjected to. However, it also short story also helps us to understand Waswo’s self-consciousness as a photographer/artist, his personalisation of the picturesque and his strange falling in love with India.

The choice of sepia-tint itself is telling...Waswo was showing ’India Poems’ in the dominant days of black&white photography. The warm brown tints associated with sepia photography give pictures a classic, old-fashioned feel, adding a sepia tone to a black and white photograph softens the image, giving it a warm, nostalgic feeling. This engagement with nostalgia marks the undercurrent of Waswo’s engagement with art. For most photographers the notion of analogue has been restricted to the medium, and the technical mastery of it. Waswo is one of the very few for whom the analogue is a worldview, precious and political. The love for the process, the journey, time and subjectivity inform the semantics of analogue for him, and this transcends the mode of printing and engulfs the manner in which the artist engages with the subject.

The show ‘May be Removed at Will’ takes this engagement with the gaze and subject matter further and has to be seen in the backdrop of his (exhibition and comic book) ‘Confessions of an Evil Orientalist’. The automated presumptions that the visuals of the India Poems series invoke have been skilfully inverted. We are no longer looking longer looking at photographs, but at etched glass and sepia tinted framed sculptures on the wall. This artistic strategy makes an intriguing and interactive exhibition. Words jupm at your eyes just before they pop in your brain...somehow preempting and stopping the pop...one takes a step back and comes closer again being drawn into the culture infused image text divide.  Waswo forces us to update our encounter with the politics of orientalism, re understand the 'western gaze' and bring back the importance of authorship in art theory.

post title

sometimes it is the mornings
other times its the dawn

no reason to get excited
says the little voice in repeat

bustling climax of the cinema-scope
and the horrors in my heart

we get amplified by the helplessness
and the joker in my soul

tough to learn not to dream
i am not that kind of a man

yet another excuse to smile
as we go with the flow

i somehow still get excited
when i hear of jumps

sometimes its the hope of a flight
other times its dawn

untitled/sugar is bad for you?

sometimes it is the mornings
other times its the nights
words have their memories
as we go on missing coffee
the deep brown enchantments
sugar is bad for you
just one more day to come?
or is it the beginning of timelessness
something has got broken
maybe just the uneaten bar of chocolate
or the forgotten comic book
maybe there is no answer
but you shall never die

the rise of the winter moon
or the painting that i love
the first time i ever saw
and the irritation of having to write
a dead parcel on the highway
sugar is really bad for you
just one more day to come?
or is it just helpless memories
always waking up to do the mending
and dark chocolate still soothes
as we go on missing coffee....
we need to be good with words
and they shall never die

untitled/will you ever taste fish?

softness and facial hair
the predictions of fashion?
no underwear in the discotheque
the mister is not excused

sandwiched said the soft voice
between time and eternity?
 life has other answers
but you have to be in disguise

answers come and answers go
will you ever taste fish?
its never so hard to die
its just a little hard to give

a flight long awaited
should we atleast live?
menstrual blood on open lips
the taste of things to come

ten days to change the world
shall i give up curd?
its already dark right now
tomorrow cant't be far

untitled/8

                                      heated arguments and buring tears
                                      flow from the soul as days pass by
                                      the memory of all that it has encounterd
                                      refuses to heal
                                    
                                      i have called it stubborness sometimes
                                      in anger fulled by memory of deep scars
                                      everything about the life i had forsaken
                                      does not let memories of the future fade
                                     
                                       heated arguments and burning tears
                                       like the hot mountain spring will help the soul
                                       washing the memory of all that it has encounetred
                                       will make it heal ,

 

One Rock: conversations with eternity

Today one of the most important shows in the history of Indian abstraction opens in Chicago.  Deepak Tandon’s One Rock manages to break a frontier and reach a space where Indian abstraction has not gone before. Over the years Deepak Tandon has been developing a language that seeks to embody the Vedantic/Tantric concept linking Oneness and Shunya…exploring its links with harmony, eternity and wholeness. Yet, Tandon has persistently refused to ‘fall’ into the formally stagnated neo-tantric school of abstraction.  After years of inventing and re inventing, with this body of works, one sees Tandon offering a language that breaks the formal stagnancy of the neo-tantric school, yet retaining its conceptual depth and philosophical anchoring. 

What is the language of silence and purity? Can these two concept metaphors be understood/expressed in visuals created and seen in the contemporary world? How does one express in a visual language and yet keep the magic of silence and purity intact? These questions form the very basis of the metaphysical / artistic journey Deepak Tandon embarked upon as he began to weave together this body of untitled digitally manipulated photographic prints, and videos that form the body of One rock. Right from the very beginning, Tandon’s journey has been about understanding nature, understanding life and living through nature and having art as the medium through which the understanding is practiced and expressed.  It’s been a long journey, a beautiful journey…yet bringing him to a point wherein he needed to re understand language, form and expression for his art to be able to dance in tandem with his soul.

 Finally, with One Rock Tandon arrives These works are a major step forward in the history of abstract art in India, managing to break away from the Euro American understanding of abstraction. This show marks a significant departure from the motif based meeting ground of art, metaphysics and re citation of tradition. Abstraction till now as a major practice has not been able to go beyond the referential image. It is the abstraction of referential images (landscapes, dream spaces, Mandalas) that have marked the major body of abstract art that has emerged from India.  The circle, the triangle, the square all these symbol metaphors Vedantic/tantric cosmology have gone on to define some of the most acclaimed contemporary abstract practice. Tandon manages to open up direction of the representation of the cosmic eternity my focusing on the experience of art making and seeing, rather than on the domains of meanings and definitions. 

There are only two works that the artist chooses to title. Here, the purpose of the titles is not to fixate meaning, but rather to open up multiple interpretations, using tangents to tug our minds into the core of multiplicity that is central to the abstract imagination for Tandon.  A silent mirrored and looped video is titled watERwHole , semantically opening up possibilities of reading/understanding the work in its first literal sense as water being the key merger, thus symbolizing the ‘whole’, or reading it as ER wHOLE referring to the female as an embodiment of completion and birth, or even at a more commonsensical level of the water hole being the center of life in a desert. Another video is titled shuddh I hinting towards the process of shuddhi (purification). However when one sees the pristine rock layered with fresh mountain water and the pure gurgling sound, it seems that the work is announcing shuddh I = "I am pure". 

For the artist the practice of making and viewing abstraction has been a long journey in search of the potential to art to take us beyond the cultural materiality. Tandon is not just a child of Indian philosophic thought, he is also a child of post colonial India, its journey to reimaging the world, define for itself a notion of progress, growth and happiness. As an individual who is deeply invested in society, metaphysical imagination for the artist has been important in being able to imagine the world and society outside the colonial commonsense. To be able to break away from the language + commonsense nexus, over the years Deepak Tandon has been developing a language that seeks to embody this Vedantic concept of Oneness and eternity.


 The contestation over the semantic and philosophical implication of the infinite is crucial to opening up new horizons of understanding life, existence, development and history. This is important as a window that helps us imagine the world outside a linear idea of progress and development. Deepak Tandon’s work begins to take special cultural value in the realms of imaginations outside neo liberalism, and gives us entry into an alternative globalised aesthetics, giving us approaches to Humanism from a framework which is outside Euro American modernism.  The quietness that One Rock creates implodes the meaning of an image.  In a spell of wisdom, it gives the power of the image to generate moments, which challenges the basic tenets of human behavior, succeeding to replace desire with love, confusion with tranquility and lust with union. It is this coming together of eternity as ‘oneness’ that forms the basis of One Rock..