Four Case Studies – Direction for Art and Practice in contemporary India

Second Part of this 3 part Upload.The first part can be viewed on - http://noplacetodie.blogspot.in/2012/02/four-case-studies-direction-for-art-and.html#!http://noplacetodie.blogspot.com/2012/02/four-case-studies-direction-for-art-and.html

The aesthetic point of view :

When visiting art galleries and talking to a few industry drivers, gallerists and directors of art spaces, they were all talking about one thing: now that the market is perceived to be down, they want to discover new talents and work with young artists. This is as much an delusion as the notion that older and more established artists are no longer active, involved and thus have no more value. Like anywhere else, people are obsessed with young and emerging artists, yet the difference is that the Indian art structure hasn’t diversified to have the intellectual and theoretical capacity to address and take advantage of the ongoing practice of more established artists and their artistic relevance.

(Maybe) this is because, art criticism and critical engagement with artworks is almost non-existent in India. Art criticism doesn’t exist as a course in art academies. Much of the writing and catalogues produced concerning contemporary art in the past decade were works commissioned by galleries or individual artists to give credit to their artists and practice. It’s hard for most to understand and acknowledge the importance and value of independent criticism and unbiased opinions. 
Led by Geeta Kapur, Rummana Hussain, Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundarm a few artists and art critics in began envisage a distinctive position in international contemporary art. When one reads Geeta Kapur’s seminal text for the six artist show Place for People  (Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 1981 ), one witnesses a claim for a post colonial avante garde to be based on thematic figuration. She succeeded in syncing us with the David Hockney lead post Greenbergian shifts in the Euro American  art world. Armed with the power of post-colonial thought, new art and art history began questioning of the  western modernist ideas such as formalism (which ruled Indian art academies), but with it brushed aside many various other artistic impulses.  

At the same time, art history in India itself was being taken over by of cultural studies. This contact supposed that a painting or a sculpture was begun to be looked at more as a carrier of signs and not as an aesthetic domain. Such impact from cultural studies meant that meaning conveyed through pictures and the ethics of that meaning got more value than the construction of the image itself. The word ethics itself was understood in a politically correct neo liberalist way which foregrounds liberalist political correctness.

With the onset of the international market, capital and know-how India as a whole has embarked on the journey and process of gradually placing issues brought from Indian context into the larger cultural background of the world, in a lively and creative way, setting up the platform to be a part of the multi-culturalist consumption phenomenon. What we tend to forget is that art is much more exciting and alive than this ideology of political correctness contemporary curations would lead us to believe. The political correctness of the curators here is a machine that has drastically suppressed cultural memory and filtered out the content moulded in a new globalised language. Stylistic dialogues that were shaping up during Indian modernism and early post modernism (like the conflicts between the Kerala Radicals, the Baroda Narrative School, Post- Swaminathan Abstraction) were largely disrupted or forgotten.

The Argument:

How hegemony shapes commonsense cannot be explained through blanket arguments. What one did observe however was that artists increasing felt the need to think of their works in terms of an image. Art writers complimented this trend by reading the work almost literally like texts. Moreover, in sophisticated art theory the author had been declared dead, so it gradually became unfashionable to talk about the gestural, the ‘manner’ the ‘style’. Maybe this is not so problematic, as much as harm caused by our loss of skill to read an image in terms of its excess. In theory we all knew that the image has an excess that far outweighs the domain of meaning, yet the only manner in which we engaged with the excess was in terms of size. Curation too, played a key role, doing largely theme based shows, and it is only in the arena of new media that mainstream space for purely formal works were encouraged.

As the first world falls into chaos, and the focus increasingly falls onto the local, we begin to realise that the knowledge dominance of contemporary neo liberalism is being questioned on the streets of Europe and America. Also that the financial world is travelling in which evryone is confused about changing tastes, markets and viewship. The idea of the audience is shifting. Yes we are at an early stage of the shift, but increasingly some artists are coming out bolder in their journey away from the content. There have also been artists who have resisted the hegemony of spectacle and content which have straddled art criticism and practice, and there is a sudden new interest in viewing them, and trying to contextualize their practice in contemporary art.

I am going to focus on four such artists. M Pravat, GR Iranna, Saba Hassan and Sambhavi Singh, to talk about this shift in more detail. I have been seeing their work in various capacities, as a friend, as a critic, as a curator. I will attempt to layout how these shifts in practice and viewership have imprints of hegemonic shifts possibly worth investigating.

Four Case Studies – Direction for Art and Practice in contemporary India

First Part of a 3 part upload

Laying the ground :

Among the many developments that marked developments in field of contemporary Indian art in the last few years (actually about a decade now) has been the dominating focus on works that prioritize socially and politically charged subject matters over stylistic experimentation and conceptual investigation. Artists that created social realist, political pop works that provide for and conform to a kind of collective imagination of a Indian society have been gaining so much recognition since the late 90s. Soon we came to see a trend where in the mainstream believed in playing down technological and formal density in order to purely divert the attention of the viewer towards the content of their depiction. Their insensitivity to the method and obsession with materiality and social content runs through their entire practice that leaves little room for anything else.

The optimism of the market gave a huge boost to the confidence and ambition of the players and continues to feed into a ‘bigger means better’ frenzy. There are resources to open large galleries, stage expensive productions, mount large-scale exhibitions, produce large catalogues and host luxurious opening night parties. All of a sudden everything is possible. Artists responded to such optimism with attempts at mega-productions. Artworks and art practices are discussed and perceived, not from an artistic and conceptual point of view, but from new criteria such as their size, production budget, market price and preference of collectors, and then (finally) their meaning. (Thankfully) The global trend of buying and exhibiting Indian art on an international level didn’t really reflect the artistic thinking and working in the country but instead indicated the growing importance of India as a economic power and a cultural phenomenon.

***

Somehow these two phenomenon are interrelated, and it now sets in that the success of contemporary art, was not entirely an artistic triumph. The works of art that caught the international attention during this period were attributed to a more ideological connotation than what their innocent creators designated them to be and categorized as various forms of political statements by foreign curators and critics. This was then translated into a market interest that would go on for years and energized the practice of many Indian

artists and curators.

In fact, the extraordinary success of these artists and their sudden wealth has been a curious phenomenon in the Indian art system. This particular value system has been magnified and underlined by the established neo liberal pragmatism of the entire Indian society. An artist’s success and recognition is always and purely measured against his market price and performance. There is almost no other way to approach and discuss an artist’s work apart from what kind of social realist content the work carries and how this can be translated into an impressive price.

Report on the Delhi Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi by Sophie Ernst

published in http://khoj2006publicart.blogspot.in/

A version of this article was also published in the Art India Magazine

Report on the Delhi Burqa Projection Workshop (background to the performance)- The Delhi Burqa Projection workshop was conceived and led by Sophie Ernst, video artist and Assistant Professor, SVA, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She centered the performance on six young Muslim women students of Jamia Milia Islamia University (Nazia, Padma Renu Sonowal, Heena Yusuf, Sana Jafri, Bushra Hassan, Rukshana) who were the participants in the two-day workshop conducted. The workshop was centered on issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ in the context of young Muslim women, embracing, political and religious and aesthetic concerns.

A part of the process of the workshop was to make the participants shoot short videos, which were later, edited by Sophie. The process of the workshop itself included elements of drawing and certain other forms of communication like debates on ‘freedom’ for Muslim women in the public sphere and more specifically in public spaces, and ending with sessions on training the participants to video shoot and eventually leading up to the participants shooting short video footages.. Sophie later edited the video footages, and these footages became a key medium (as imagery to be projected) in Thursday’s performance. (I have not attended the...details picked up through fragmented conversations with the workshop coordinator)

Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi: The event was framed, as a ‘Performance’ Students of Jamia Milia Islamia would be presenting their work done during workshop. After the workshop the Sophie along with the participants, choose a location for presentation. The goal was to present the work in a public space and open up the dialectics of the workshop to a wider audience. The sites chosen were lodged in the narrow lanes behind Turkuman Gate...a mosque outside Al Noor Hotel, and Chitli Gali. The young students presented six short video pieces, as they negotiated their way through the chaotic crowds and their unfamiliarity with equipment.

The participants took turns playing an actor, wearing a white burqa, walking through the space, while the one of them playing the operator would be tracing her movements with a video beam. The white burqua became the screen where the video clips where projected. The bright shaft of light coming from the projectors acted as a device which flattened the three dimensional volume of the actors transforming them into images on which the video clippings were super imposed.

However if one has to frame the Burqa projections at Turkman Gate as a Performance then it is imperative that one will intereogate the ‘performative’ aspect of the event and negotiate deeper into its contextual value. Sophie Ernst’s workshop and the Performance leading out of it, cannot be viewed in isolation and needs to be seen as a carry forward of a similar project she did with students of Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, leading to a ‘Performance’ at Delhi gate, Lahore. I have not witnessed the Lahore performance, but video footage of the ‘performance’ has been edited and presented by the Sophie as almost as an independent product. The video filters out the entire locational ambience and showcases the ‘walks’ in fleeting cuts (re) presenting the performers almost as if they are icons sleek and fleeting across a ramp.

Sophie lets her instincts of a video artist take over at two crucial junctures of the process...first as the editor of the video clippings shot by the participants, and most importantly as the agency who shoots and edits the final ‘performance’. As a video artist who exercises near complete agency over these two key areas (determining the look of the projections and determining how the ‘performance is re-presented), Sophie’s authorial instincts overtake the spirit of a workshop and cast it as an site of art production over which she exercises a dominant agency.

However, what I find most disturbing about Sophie Ernst’s intervention is the ideological formulations informing its foray into the ‘politics of representation’. The burqua has become a universal symbol of ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’; it has emerged as an easy trope enabling artists to comment on issues of Islamic patriarchy and repression of women in the public sphere. However, in both the Lahore and Delhi workshops, Sophie ‘casts’ college going young Muslim women, who do not wear burquas in their day-to-day lives and drapes them with burquas.

Though the act of projecting video footages developed in a workshop around issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ on the burqua, and acting it out in (Muslim) male dominated public space can be subversive, the subversive potential is undermined by Sophie predetermining the suppression in their lives and superimposing a outsider’s notion of ‘freedom’ onto them. Moreover at a formal level, the manner in which the bodies are reduced to a flat screen, which enacts a role predetermined by Sophie, allowing them to be completely objectified, very problematically raises the very questions of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ which the workshop and ‘performance’ were allegedly seeking to address.

It is true that certain ‘poetic’ moments emerged, that evening and the ‘performance’ did generate a lot of local curiosity. However the moments were nearly too fleeting to register, and the crowd that had gathered did not get to interact with either Sophie nor with the workshop participants, thereby weakening its impact as an intervention in the public sphere...in the sub continent it is way to easy to draw crowds, the real test is what one does with them.

A short note...taking off from HG Arun's photograph: The Other (from the series Feed)

A short note...taking off from a photograph: The Other (from the series Feed)


Images set off associations....a late saturday night party..staying up post party...reading some Tehelka back issues. This work of Arun's flashed across my mind as read through a report on the Sang Parivar's enterprise of making cow urin cola. So enamoured we are with our tradition, that we think lacing soda and poison with cow urin (gau jal) and calling it is our best retort to American cultural imperialism. This image came flashing back as I read on...and the head of the Haridawar based gau shala and manufacturing unit ( run by the Cow Protection Board of the RSS) was passionately explain how they built up a caste system, the caste hierarchy of the ox...he went on to talk about how it was scientifically proven that cow urine has beneficial for heath in an all encompassing way. I began to wonder what stops us from engaging a bit more closely with our common sense.

One does not need to a skeptic to realize that the properties of urine are dependent on consumption habits. Since Agnivesh Tantra was written ( a 4th century AD text containing the seeds of Ayurveda) the consumption habits and availability of fodder for cows in the sub continent have drastically been altered.
Am my mind woke up and started racing lazily I remembered an Indian Express article mentioning that the Cow Protection Board has been injecting steroids to increase urine production (administered with steroids to increase milk production), one did not know whether to laugh or to cry.


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a note added by a friend:
Everything is distorted. The more i think about it, the more it seems that we function mostly due to our ability to distort what we see. Ugliness is masked under necessity, kitsch and charm, under a string of terms designed to subdue a need to cry foul at a visceral degradation of most things around us. steel and glass seems acceptable, until you step out of the city and notice it surrounded by hills and it finally dawns on you that there's something wrong with what you have accepted.

Image details: medium: digital photograph on archival paper, astroturf Size: 47" x 28" x 3"; unique work ( 119 x 71 x 7.7 cms) Exhibition History: Shown at the Nature Morte , and the Sakshi gallery. sold. Buyer unknown

new trends in re mixing the blues

the return of analogue aesthetics in a digital world.

(publisged in the march edition of art&deal)

It all began in the early nineties in the name of multiculturalism, but the technology behind the change was largely influenced by the ‘digital’. ‘how that journey was we will come to later...but it seems that the journey is ending. some people are even declaring that we are heading towards a post digital art world. before we go any further lets reflect on what post digital means. In one sense, post-digital refers to works that comes from a stylistic rejection of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favor of errors, glitches, marks and artifacts.  And in another sense (as in the term post-modernism) it refers to the continuation or completion of that trajectory.

Post-digital includes a number of sub-genres, and  most of it is based on playing with the aspect of process. In music, photography, painting (but not yet sculpture), one sees a return of what was previously being ‘photo-shopped’ as ‘noise’.


In terms of aesthetics this return is, already, well under way. The manifestations have
arrived even before we cared to notice. Way back in 2004, Nero Player added a new option in their equalizer section. It was called radio. To any who might have wondered why such a feature -which was essentially a manipulation of the digital to re present  it as analogue- was introduced when the mainstream was moving towards making the analouge sound digital, well the answer is that the Nero research and development team read cultural trends and predict a boredom with the finished-hood of digital,  when we were just beginning to understand the dominant trends in the mainstream.

At this juncture let us try not to theorise here, but first to observe.  to avoid pitfalls of cultural generalization, one needs to make it clear that one is not talking about universal trend movements...but more of what could be sun terrain shifts in the south-asian culture scape. more specially about emerging urban pockets and what kind of aesthics could influence fashion. the first traces of it began to occur with the advent of chinese mp3 players and eventually cell phones. the cheap technology naturally distorted sound, and very soon created a culture that loved it.  parallely  in certain pockets of music began to be often presented with, bare mathematical structures, stripped back modular repetition and long form minimalist drones. As it spread thorough what is generalized as ‘rave parties’ and also though some minimalist jazz lovers, it also began to enter bollyhood with some rahaman remixes.



Then suddenly there a sudden burst in we based art, abstract geometrical forms, pixel thin lines, delicate but simple lightness, the privileging of negative space, and the distinct absence of information.  Album covers slowly began to consist of minimalistic geometric designs verging to total blankness (in contrast to the digital design “Photoshop art”).  Yashas Shetty  ...And how it Rained..., sound and software installation - 2006 at the Apeejay Media gallery, was way ahead of times, a truly cutting edge experiment with sound distortion and abstraction. however for a long time it seemed that Contemporary Indian Art had become so insulated, that it would not respond to this sub terrainian  sweep with popular culture. Having cultivated an entire generation of consumers and patrons with the finish of the digital, could painting go analogue again?.


Many noticed the large drip on the Shubodh Gupta canvas during the 2009 art summit. however that stylistic trajectory was inconsistent and many did not know what sense to make of it. even now its difficult for buyers and collectors to showcase and sale works carrying errors, glitches and marks. This discomfort is part due to the age and class bias that rules the consumption of contemporary Indian art.  Music is mostly free or affordable and transient,  allowing makers and listeners to experiment and thereby music is mostly ‘free’ to capture the latest in cultural taste. however ‘fine art’ is much more insulated, and often reacts to the entrapment of its own history. Thought the decade of 2000s one saw traditional print making disappear form the domain of mainstream gallery practices. This is no way a reflection of taste, but more a reflection of how in a new neo liberal , multicultural world obsessed with digital finish, gallerists and traders ‘forgot’ (and also could not reinvent) the language thought with the formal joys of an etching and lithograph could be translated into sales. thus we witnessed a strange  phenomenon where in such works were widely praised in private conversations, but were actively discouraged to enter exhibition space..and over the years some very talented print makers were forced to turn in to boring painters.


indeed we are yet very far form moving from the placid beauty of the digital to the picturesque landscape of noise, marks and mistakes but we are not that far that it not around the corner. shibu Natesan has always been one of the trend setters in the domain if indian urban fine arts. looking at shibu’s work at the 1x1 gallery stall at the 2011 art summit, one can clearly see that the ‘mark’ is coming back to ‘action’. rough finish and gestural marks were the dominant in their return (and maybe making such a visible return only after his early college days, even though they sometimes surfaced in  his water colours). Then Shibu is not the only one. Having been through his ‘digital’ period, Sudershan Shetty has been very strongly ‘analogue’ in his aesthetics, and in works Baiju Parthan and Riyaz Komu showed at the show TECH-CUT-EDGE REVELATIONS, one can see that experiments are gathering pace and roots.




In a sense this was bound to happen. the smoothened out digital finish was very attractive till it was very new....then slowly it made its journey form being attractive to being the norm. it pervaded the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, ‘Art’ and ‘Kitch’, (and if one goes by the current Devi Art show ‘Vernacular in the Contemporary’) the aesthetics of the digital have entered how urban India wants to see craft’. In such a context, boredom is but expected. it is but obvious that as fashion trends change...coolness will take a new meaning and it seems the meaning is being found in the craziness of noise, rather than in the mirror of sleekness.

So what was the multi-culturalism story all about.  Nothing much actually, beginning with the need of euro-america to expand markets, fulled by the collapse of the cold war economy, a neo orientalist fantasy developed that convinced many that the entire world is in the same plane. maybe this led to a certain sanitation of the surface, this sanitized surface was the allegedly new global surface. equally at ease in Delhi and London. the local context suddenly became the ‘noise’ to be eliminated. globally we are now witnessing a return of the local, and all the noise....is just coming back.

review ofVidisha Saini at Matthieu Foss Gallery

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 at 18:11

Over some years now Vidisha  Saini has been experimenting within various schools of subjective documentary photography. Dayanita Singh and Gauri Gill traversed from an objective photo journalistic approach to a more personal, and a more subjective understanding of documentation.  Vidisha on the other hand began her journey with the personal;firmly entrenched in her passion for mediumistic and thematic experimentation. From there she deals with the fact that she cannot escape the documentative impulse of photography as a medium.

Till Death Do Us Apart Is a series is a perfect example of Vidisha’s explorations of the subjective groove within contemporary documentary photography. She introduces the series as
“Looking at a photograph of oneself as a child, one asked, “Mumma, did I ever visit the beach when I was young?” Everything that is known of childhood is through these questions. Over the years, when cynicism for people takes over, objects and spaces become better companions to share emotions. It is through them one tries to answer, ‘What would I look like when I die?’”

Done (almost) immediately after her college days Till Death Do Us Apart has gives us a window to what Vidisha documents and what is that personal engagement with both the lens, and the object she captures and shows. As one looks at more (for example Toys “R”We?, it becomes clear that there is a strong impulse towards storytelling, and that objects for her are outside the animate inanimate boundaries. Both the above cited works were shot and put together almost parrely to Pratibimb and Showtime.
Vidisha Saini 2010
It is in this context that this exhibition finds its place in Vidisha’s story telling.  In spite of their large scale, and the spotlight of being her first solo, this series is actually just a part of a collection of stories she has been clicking, researching and representing over the years. The fact that the gallery chose to show this body as a first show, can be a bit misleading for the audience in understanding the various layers of Saini as an artist. The fact that these are the first body of her works to be shown in a major way tells us a lot about the idea of marketable photo graphs, and a strong fascination for the spectacle.



What is indeed fascinating is that even while dealing with ‘classical’ documentative  subject, the artist’s impulse it weave in the deeply personal, to make the project be a medium of telling a very personal story. Both the projects pretend to be anthropological in nature, yet they interest the artist not for the socio-economic or even cultural documentation mode.  For example, in the Pratibimb series, complexly by passing the current problems that theBeherupiya community face in terms of material and cultural survival, the interest is (almost) purely in the visual and in the performative elements.  The artists’ fascination for those 42 days in which theBehrupiyasadjust­ their man­ner­ism and garb accord­ing to the char­ac­ter they impersonate, and the fascination with such ritually time bound role playbecome the prime inspiration. Similarly is Showtime  the misery and the decay of contemporary circus is temporary suspended.  Vidisha’s childhood does not belong to times when circus was in its glory, so for her there is no decay. However in the circus the artists meets her love for the stage, and meets participants who have tangible stage anxieties. The sexiness, glory and nervousness of ‘show time’ lures Vidisha bringing out connections with other forms of expressions like performing arts that she is very close to.

Vidisha Saini 2010

Amongst all this hedonism of subjectivity and personal narratives, one should not miss out the kind of relationships  Vidisha builds around her subjects. The concept of play, and lens based dialogue are explored in various experimentations right since her earliest projects like  Cloud, Tree,Candy Floss (her self initiated workshop series with under privileged kids  using the lens and  photographs to make conversations, to translate personal experiences and as areaction towards a particular situation. )
Showtime in particular gets into a dialogue based mode by conceptually framing the series as “portraits of circus artist’s made a few minutes before or after their act.”    Exploiting the gaps between performing and posing, the series  tells the artist story about one’s altering identity, the co-existence of several, and the relationships between them.

Review of Rajendra Dhawan's show

Untitled Oil on canvas 26 x 32" 2011

[This was a difficult piece to write; those days i was editing Art&Deal and had stepped up to write this review. Realized Dhawan's paintings were not only about re presenting, but also about 'seeing'. To be able to undersand that zone of 'seeing'  took up a project to click 200 pictures of my small room in Kolkata - only then i could write. ]

It is (maybe) only in abstract painting that post colonial Indian art has reached heights that transcend its own post coloniality, and stakes claim to an easy dialogue with the mainstream of global painting. Maybe it’s the absence of content that enables it to bypass the otherwise marginality of post independence Indian painting.  When one walked up the steps of gallery threshold to see Rajendra Dhawan’s solo, one simply got transported from the busy simultaneous exhibition openings in the narrow lanes of Lado Sarai, and got transported into a quaint European museum. Even in the opening crowd there was silence. There was some mild chitter-chatter but…everyone was looking at the paintings, and exchanging joys in whispers.  It is as if the chatterati had unknowingly stepped into a chapel.

Each work invited you to spend some time and gaze…and in the oil washes, transparent hues of blues, browns and reds- one has hardly ever come across such minimal surface building, and yet, one is able to see the artist managing to create such vast depths within the canvas. Slowly it dawns on you that these may be landscapes. Before you know it, they appear…and then disappear again.

They say the sight of Rajendra Dhawan gazing away at a Gaitonde painting, deeply lost in thought, is one of the most poignant moments of Indian art history. Last month,  on some afternoons, one could see Raza sitting in front of Dhawan’s paintings, deeply engrossed and completely oblivious to the world. If one has to situate Dhawan within the practice of abstraction, it becomes clear that he is one of the masters of the rare genre of master landscape-abstractionists. Ramkumar and Padamsee are other artists who also come to mind. Except for Raza, the above mentioned names  have been seminal is showing a direction in abstraction which is just surface building, not geometric, not neo tantric, working within the zones of mindscapes and landscapes.

Untitled Oil on canvas 32 x 39" 2011

Of course a show like this could not be seen at the opening, so one had to come back again and again. With the changing direction and intensity of light, the hues would change meanings. (This show must have been very difficult to light). These changing hues brought one closer to imagining these as landscapes, gently changing mood as clouds drift by. As the landscapes disappear and the painting reappears in its pure formalism one can see influences from Rothko and Rauschenberg, especially in the dialogues between silence and movement. However, one hardly ever gets to see such Zen -like minimalism…many parts of the canvas are simply left untouched, and some parts are brilliantly under-painted with single layers of very dilute colours and dry brushes. Yet, areas of his canvasses are deeply opaque…violent and scarred. In this viewer, it brought back memories of all the wounds that we constantly inflict on the earth or the deep scars that rest in our psyche.

Dhawan’s work seek a balance between the referential and formless, and to achieve such, he works with the compositional divisions of space, and the flow of color tones on the canvas. These become the tools with which the artist hides and yet reveals referentiality.  One may see endless fields in the dark blue of dusk, or deep forests in moonlight or one may simply change the gaze, and get engrossed in the formal harmonies, the deliberate noise, hieroglyphic scratchings and the play of dark and light.

Untitled Oil on canvas 13 x 16" 2011

In Dhawan’s artistic practice, there is a certain opposition to the post modern with the spectacular image. As one of the founding members of the ‘Unknown Group’, and through his teaching practice in Belgrade, Dhawan has been a part of resistance movements which nurtured  painterly abstraction in post modern Europe.  The paintings offer us a space to rest our eyes, and in them, there is enough chaos to stir our souls. In this age of visual bombardment… images are designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that bounces off into the recesses of your overfed conscious. This life, lived in an overdose of spectacles has numbed our senses for ever. When we travel we are busy clicking and hardly ever just seeing. Our eyes cannot rest, and are constantly  bored. In these times Dhawan offers us a different mode of seeing. This mode of seeing is not only operational in the viewer, but has had to be first digested by the artist. It’s the quaint silence of a tranquil mind, etched with pain.


venue - gallery threshold
written for Art&Deal Magazine
Rahul Bhattacharya on Sunday, 11 December 2011 at 05:03

When Talking Is High Art

British-German artist Tino Sehgal’s work ‘creates’ conversations between strangers in urban societies. Someone should tell him about Kolkata’s famous addas
Published in Open Magazine

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BY Rahul Bhattacharya EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

Tagged Under | conversations | Tino Sehgal | urban society

Conversations

THE PERFORMANCE HAS NEVER BEEN SHOT Sehgal insists his works reside only in the space they occupy, and in memories

We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilisation will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space


—Formulary for a New Urbanism, Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] October 1953, printed in Internationale Situationniste #1
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One of the earliest critiques of urban societies is that it renders human interactions difficult, creating a sense of alienation that doesn’t stops haunting city dwellers. This constant feeling of alienation and the need to alienate, which defined early concerns with urbanism, is what the above quote from the Situationist International website responds to, calling for an intervention through ‘performed situations’. This seems especially pertinent in developing countries, which are witnessing massive refurbishment and redevelopment of cities, leading to a speeding up of urban life.
The notion of creating a situation has, in many aspects, fundamentally changed the notion of performance and how the viewing public interacts with it. Tino Sehgal consciously decides to carry this notion of performance into the visual arts with This Situation, an acclaimed piece that travelled to India in collaboration with the Goethe Institute last week.
One Sunday evening, walking into the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata, visitors were confronted by a group of six people in everyday wear, deep in discussion on philosophical issues. Whenever the performers noticed a new visitor stepping in, they would stop the discussion to greet her with, “Welcome to this situation!” The players subsequently changed  their positions with movements frozen in slow motion, and one of them would then open a quote with slow movements (often evoking the poise of classical sculptures) and quote a hypothesis from the intellectual history of Euro-America without naming the author. The quotes were varied, invoking economics, art, ethics and technology. However, it soon became clear that the choice of quotes and contexts showed an affiliation with liberalist resistance to the ethics of late capitalism.
At about 7 pm that evening, a middle-aged woman walked into Experimenter Gallery and was momentarily stunned when the performers broke off their conversation, inhaled deeply, and sprang a collective “Welcome to this situation!” greeting at her. She stood for a while and soon found her place among a small group seated on the floor. Initially, she avoided eye contact, and it took her time to understand what was going on. Soon, seeing the audience participate in the discussion, she realised that it was a conversation she could join too. One could see that she was straining to understand the current discussion around the importance that economics should have in our lives. Eventually, she chose not to participate, and when she noticed that people were actually allowed to get up and leave when they so wanted, it visibly made her feel more comfortable. In a while, she left.
As a performative mode, some silent members of the audience were even asked: “What do you think?” On the other hand, other members of the audience stepped up and freely participated in the discussions. Eventually, over the course of two evenings, one could see a continuation of the thoughts and concerns that the performers and audience kept coming back to.
This Situation is conceived as a collapsible travelling structure, performed only by people trained or authorised by Sehgal. During the Goethe Institute tour, at each stop, three or four local players performed with a two-member German team under the direction of Sehgal’s close associate, Louise Höjer. Like all interpreters of Tino Sehgal’s works, they were selected carefully, and were required to rehearse at local Goethe Institutes.
Speaking to the performers after the first evening, one got to know the structure of the performed situation, of the two-day training workshop that preceded the enactment, the nature of the quotes used and the trained slow motion as a mode of ‘performitivity’. One also learnt that this is a copyrighted model and the same set of quotes are repeated globally.
There did descend a sense of discomfort with the assumption on the part of the artist about the universal applicability of the model and quotes used. One had also hoped that the artist would have travelled with the performance himself to listen to various concerns raised at new locations. This lack of willingness to listen is characteristic of the European understanding of the modular.
Sehgal’s stance against the excessive materiality of the high-art culture leads to material embodiments of art—catalogues, photographs, films—being wholly absent in his work, even at the secondary level. While this emerges as a grand resistance, it also takes away the possibility of understanding the relational aesthetics between the public spheres in which this is performed, making it harder still to listen to differences.
This work travelled from Mumbai, through Bangalore to Kolkata and by the time this is published, a performance would have already happened in Delhi. Searching online for reactions to this work, one came across largely European and American awe of this Situationist transgression into an art gallery, and the possibility of collective thought and a civilised exchange of ideas between and among strangers.
Among the Indian cities where This Situation has travelled, Kolkata has been the most resistant to the new wave of urbanism sweeping the country. Maybe it is one of the few remaining cities which has not (yet) confronted an absolute disappearance of civilised conversation between strangers. In fact, the adda is almost as famous as This Situation as a module (though it is not copyrighted). The city is also familiar with interventions in the performer-audience relationship in the works of the late theatre personality Badal Sarkar.
Perhaps that is why instead of awe and fascination, the city greeted This Situation with a welcome familiarity and mild amusement.

Notes on the ‘Famine Series’ paintings by Ramkinker Baij

Published in The Art&Deal Magazine as cover story for Art and Society

I encountered this painting during the Museum Collection exhibition at the Art Konsult Gallery. A little known work hardly documented and never really discussed as a Ramkinker Baij masterpiece.  There is an universal ambiguity regarding the title of the work because around the time ( 1970’s) it was not fashionable in Indian art to leave major work “untitled “ as a title. An initial inquiry suggested that this work belong to the famine series and was attributed to 1973. This naming and dating created a zone of confusion for me as I was unable to locate a series called famine in Ramkinker’s oeuvre .If at all one can identify famine series within Ramkinkar’s body of work it would be a series of water color done in the 1940’s. there is almost no evidence of him having done significant oil on canvas work around that time. The famine in the painting itself seemed to be limited to the figure of old skeletal man with a begging bowl and the child whereas all other figures especially one of the lady carrying bowl in hand seemed extremely healthy and instead of the classical famine iconography of dying animals we see two healthy cows ploughing the field in the background.

The painting belongs to the renowned collector Dr. Mahesh Chandra and discussions with him reveal that there was an allusion to the artist’s mother in this work. This info led me to a psycho-analytical reading of the work drawing reference from a few painting s of Ramkinker Baij which depict child on a mother’s lap. However here the mother is young and the child is uncared for, old and starving. It made me think that the mother in the painting could possibly be ‘mother India’. The woman seems to be looking elsewhere, as if in a rush. Eyes firmly fixed towards the far away horizon. Was it a reference to Mother India’s neglect for its poor?  An early critique of how the nation was more interested in the rich getting its resources at the cost of the poor?  Though Ramkinker had very well known and well laid out socialist ideology this reading seems a little far fetched.  Then it also seemed quite plausible when one looked at the landscape in background where the trees almost mimic factories. Ramkinker brings back his early experiments with cubism to hint at a ghost industrial landscape. This rendering of the landscape led me to believe for a while that indeed this painting could be a subaltern critique of the nation as a mother. This reading also gained prominence in me as clearly there was no famine in Bengal in 1970’s.

However, from my knowledge of Ramkinker’s biography there was no reason to assume that he had that kind of a psycho-traumatic relation with his mother or the country and it was still not making sense to me. It is at this point that I called up Mr. Pranabranjan Roy, one of the most important knowledge archive about post-independence modernism in Bengal. In my conversation with Pranab da I learned that Ramkinkar had personally narrated this story behind this painting to him, and it was actually a reference to an incident that he heard from his mother in form of a story. When Ramkinkar was very young and his father would be working in fields, his mother would carry food for him every afternoon. On one mundane summer afternoon while going to the field his mother encountered an old starving man and he was begging her to give some food. His mother thinking that the food was meant for the artist’s father in her moment of duty ignored the old man and went to feed her husband lunch. While returning back, the dutiful wife saw that the old man had died. This story never stopped haunting the artist and a few years before he died he painted it on canvas. This story which Ramkinkar narrated to Pranabranjan Roy for a moment seems to be end of a journey which the painting took me through. It’s been a few days since that conversation and all my earlier observations came back to my mind, not as ex observation which have been negated or proved wrong in light of new Knowledge but as my observations which I was seeing in a new light. There are no wrong or right interpretations of a painting. This painting being located in a particular story does not take away the fact that a rural landscape has been rendered in the manner of an industrial one. It does not negate the fact that the resource are going to the people who have at the cost of have-nots. It does not negate the fact that it’s a story of a mother momentarily for getting whom she should taking care of. However there is a detailing that one cannot ignore. Even with a faraway look, her eyes fixed to horizon, and in a rush the “mother” is still aghast. Her face is wide open and her dilemma is still captured.

It was quite interesting to first hear of and then physically see that the ‘canvas’ is actually three canvasses stitched together. It took me by complete surprise and at a point even led to question the dating of the canvas. In the 70’s RK was quite well known, old and respected, he had retired as a professor/ head of dept. from Shantiniketan. Though falling ill he was doing large public commissions. Surely he was not poor to procure a canvass of his desired size.  Then my conversation with PR revealed that the dating of 70 authentic.  It was at that appointed that it dawned to me that I might be using the contemporary notions of art as a commodity on this work of art by Ramkinker. May be this is not important. May be it was more important to think of not wasting any canvas. Shantiniketan artists of his time were known to create masterpieces on scrape piece of paper and just throw them or give them away. An instinct which we may never understand because we come from a society that if a particular art piece is not recognized  in Capital terms then it almost loses’ its reason to exist.

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 at 16:07

Conversation with KP Reji

  Taste sellers

For mattersofart -artist of the month 2007 september.

R.B- In your works there seems to be a certain coming back to the idiom of the narrative. It is not like the 80’s narrative where the ‘meaning’ seeks to be located in the intentionality of the artist.  This time, the artist seems to be stepping back and hinting at the narrative possibilities through a play with images. Giving a greater space for the audience to enter and interpret.

K.P.R- My challenge is there, painting has a history over thousand years old, and many artists have explored so many possibilities. Am trying to do something different there and find a space there…that is the challenge. One sees so many paintings, you have known the histories and yet you have to find something. At the end isms are a small matter, the process of painting will carry on, and it is through all this we will find our way.  Consciously or unconsciously ones works will have a connection with ‘this or that’, but there are possibilities within ‘this or that’.

R.B- And you are constantly trying to achieve that.

K.P.R- Yes , and when you are in need you will get it, because you are trying for it. There is no doubt about it.  

R.B- there is a refreshing simpleness about your works. It is not that the complexities are not there; it is about you digesting the complexities.

K.P.R- It is not about making it simple, it is about not making it complicated. You can enter it easily, that is the structure, and maybe it comes from the subjects I paint. The idea is not to make it complicated and yet keep the taste in it.  

R.B- your works have a very specific cultural and local inspirations background, do you think their values are consumable to people who are not exposed to these cultural specificities?

K.P.R- I think the more local it is the more global it becomes. There are things we can share with anyone, otherwise I cant enjoy Iranian movies or I cant enjoy Tarkovsky, but you see one can enjoy expressions across cultures, I can enjoy anyone like say Chaplin. Even the kids…they will atleast be laughing seeing his movies.

R.B- For you it seems that a successful painting is that can touch human sensibilities across cultures.

K.P.R- Of course, it is in one sense, it is in all sense, and a painting is really enjoyable if it can touch a basic human cord. It is important to keep the core of your expression and remember that you cannot please everyone.

R.B- When you make a statement like touching a ‘human cord’, it would be nice if you can experiment with modes of showing your works, making them more accessible.

K.P.R- I would really like to show my works in more places and in different kinds of spaces, but my mode of working is very slow. I am always in doubt…whether certain elements or colours are really helping the painting or not, and then I will be keeping my works for a long time and I will be changing things all the time, until they seem appealing to me. There is no way to know between the four colour which particular one is disturbing…it is a long process. I keep seeing a lot of paintings, and they will sometimes inform me that certain colours are not working in my painting…and through all this basically I am not producing much work.

R.B- I am not talking about gallery shows here.

K.P.R- Any show, like this solo, I had a commitment for the last three years, finally I thought I should do it. Mainly I spend a lot of time filtering things out, that’s what I feel.

R.B- You have a ‘solo show’ coming after a long time, is there a certain concentration efforts towards it.

K.P.R- I don’t look at a ‘solo show’ as a project, which has to be executed, it is more like ten ideas, which are finalized and shown. And it is not that I think because it is a ‘solo show’, elements of each work have to mix, but also in the process of reading my works for this show, I am avoiding some works.

But then there are certain things, recently I was invited to a camp in Kerela, it was a nice opportunity to travel in that region and also to go home, but I had to say no, I have a ‘solo show’ and it is a commitment. I will not say I denied the invitation, instead I think I missed an opportunity. In my mode of working a ‘solo show’ is a big thing, it takes a lot of time…maybe I will be spending a lot of time sitting in front of a painting, at the end there is not much work I am producing. 

 just above

R.B- Do you have any regrets for that?

K.P.R- Yes there is a bit of regret, it means fewer people get to see my works…it is only in one or two galleries, and it all ends in a catalogue, they are not traveling much. And it is not only about me, some of the really good artists are often only exhibiting abroad and you get to see only the photographs in catalogues.  Some Indian contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya you will really like to see original works. Galleries have to be a little more thoughtful about spreading works.

I want to show my works in Kerela, Baroda, and many places.

R.B. – Will you be doing a preview in Baroda.

K.P.R- As you can see my studio space is too less, so I tend to send my works across after they are finished. There are three works you can see, two I am still working on and the other I kept it just because you were coming down for the interview, and I thought atleast one finished work should be there.

Then now it is the rainy season, and I don’t want my works to catch fungus, these are artist’s problems you see. I would definitely like to show my works in Baroda before taking them to Bombay, but I cannot do it.

R.B- When one see your works over a period of time, say the last eight years or so, are you happy with the changes and continuity that mark the trajectory of your works?

K.P.R- Yes I am happy with the changes, and as for the continuity you said, when you see continuity and there is continuity, and if there is continuity, it will continue.

R.B- Do you ever feel the anxiety of stagnation?

K.P.R- No, I don’t think I will stagnate, as long as I have the process of finding new challenges and analyzing things and how they are happening.

Of course, sometimes when you are working there is a doubt about a particular painting, you will start with full hope and then you feel that this image is not working…and things like that…you stop there.

R.B- Are their any paintings of your that you don’t like?

K.P.R- It is not the paintings that I do not like, sometimes I am not happy with my painting if I had the capacity to paint it better…that kind of feelings I have sometimes.

Like the ‘Taste Seller’ and the ‘Merchant of Four Seasons’, now I am repeating them…‘Merchant of Four Seasons’ I thought was a good painting when I first did it, now I see it could have been much better, so I am doing it again

R.B- there is a certain kind of class representation one sees in your works, a lot of it is about the life and moments of the lower middle class, is there a ideological consciousness about this.

K.P.R-I have always painted people like this…right from my student days. Initially I was not conscious about it, but I heard it from many people. Then later I saw it and recognized it. I have always painted thing that are close to me and around me.

R.B- You mean thing that you can relate to…

K.P.R- No, it is not about relating to things, it is painting the things that you know and are sure about.

The salt seller that you see in that painting, the idea came when I was staying in Nizampura, one guy will come with the salt like this, the thing about him is that there is no money involved in the transaction. These people used to carry a weighing scale, and they will measure salt with the things the consumer is giving. If you want salt then you give him things like plastic bartans, he measures salt using the things you give as weight.

Then it struck me that that he is a taste seller…namak is taste, and then with that there is an entire history of salt and the barter system…especially in India. …and is through all this the painting came.

I don’t know how much of all this, the painting is communicating, but I am trying.

R.B- One final question, it has become a near mandatory final question to a painter featured in mattersofart as the ‘artist of the month’. Is mediatic realism dead?

K.P.R- It is not dead. No form of expression actually dies…if things happened like that painting itself would be dead centuries ago.  It is more got to what you can do with it and how you can use a language to say new things. Many artists use mediatic realism to follow a trend or to hide their skills, but then someone like T.V Santosh uses the same language to make very powerful commentaries. One should really know what to do with an image.