Crafting a New Contemporary.

We are at a time when the word contemporary is being challenged in art and it no longer stands for a digital, conceptual utopia. It is now understood as an operative fiction and to successfully operate within it, an artist has to constantly regulate (manipulate) the division between the past and the present. Otherwise, it is almost impossible to go beyond the placid celebration of the indifference between historical and fictional narrative. Muktinath Mandal plays with this very indifference, re weaving memories into myths as he fights to hold his romanticism against the neoliberal takeover of history and memory.

 Muktinath is a one of the few (new) contemporary artists who does not pretend that the Global can easily stand for the Local, he takes recourse to re-presentation, transforming local narratives into an effective critique of contemporary progress, yet not shutting its doors on utopia.  Local folklore, religious beliefs and rituals tied to the popular, yet deeply attached to the cultural history of his childhood are integral to the artist’s imagination.  ‘Lallu, Nillu aur Mitthu’ (oil on canvas) , is a portrait of three sisters, retrieving memories of a culture when extreme happiness was felt in siblings getting new clothes stitched out of the same yarn, the excitement and shyness of going out together and the innocent conquest of desire.   The iconological and painterly detailing comes from a love, empathy and sentimentally which had disappeared from the digital, neo liberal definition of the contemporary...making it cold and alienating.  

 In terms of formal and stylist evolution, ‘In the Name of River’ (charcoal, acrylic and pastel on canvas) is a water-shed work signalling significant formal interventions in representation of imagery. It is in the photographic and post-photographic culture of the image that the contemporaneity of the contemporary is most clearly expressed. The image interrupts the temporalities of the modern and nature, alike.  Muktinath uses the medium of painting to create a subversive iconology that allows him work within the zones between myths and realities, re working personal myths into contemporary memories.  Trained in deep-rooted academic realism, Muktinath found deep connections with mediatic realism due to its connections with the popular. Yet he is one of the first artists of his generation to re define mediatic realism from a post digital, post conceptual context.  Moving away from the wallpaper like, glossy digital finish that dominated painting, the artist re defines mediatic in more local, non-urban terms. Painting thus stops being just a medium, and becomes a political act, and we see the artist increasing exposing (flaunting) the painterly or linear constructions on the surface, finding confidence to do away with the compulsion of the ‘digital finish’...tarnishing the mundane cosmopolitanism of mediatic realism through a deep affiliation with social realism.

 

‘100 Letters’ ( ongoing pen, acrylic and ink series on collected postcards), exemplifies the potential of post conceptual painting to  work within the polemics of aesthetics and politics. Choosing to mask, hide and expose; Woking with a drawing style that rembers the ‘repotage’, Muktinath challenges the notions of  objects, surfaces, archives and art. The postcards are collected from friends, relatives and family in Tulia, a village near bursting metropolis of Kolkata. Tulia, for the artist is not only home, but also a metaphor for resistance to late capitalist greed, its very existence inspiring the improbable combination of nostalgia and hope.  Electricity is yet to reach Tulia, yet it is a land of education, culture, knowledge, ethics and (sub?)alterity. 

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Rahul Bhattacharya

24.08.2012

A Short Note on PostmodernIsm

PostmodernIsm 

Dilli Dur Ast: A lens based artist camp in the walled city of Delhi.

Written as the Critic in Residence:Published in Art India Magazine 2006

Three very different artists…completely different approaches to the medium called lens…some very decent chemistry…and some great hunger to explore…you get the makings of a good artists camp. Not that all work that has produced is very good…they have their own tryst with failures…but then again, the point is not always centered around object hood.

When I approach a theme based workshop…it is always important to be able to grasp what influence the structure of the workshop has on the artist and her methods. It has been quite interesting to grapple with the way Atul Bhalla, Himanshu Desai and Gigi Scaria have tried to impose a structure on the workshops and how they went on to take different roots. The workshop started with the artists going on early morning walks, taking still/video footage and meeting people in the neighborhoods around Turkuman Gate. Quoting a line from the concept note#,

“The idea is to intervene or understand the city in which we all live more closely with”   

it seems that structure of the workshop was predefined by the desire to be the flâneur: to intervene ‘visually’ into a romanticized space, armed with a certain greater access to ‘knowledge’, and with certain desire to explore and re-present the ‘other’, maybe in an attempt to understand the ‘self’ better. At an overtly political level there is a positioning of this workshop in the discourses around identity.

“The walled city of Delhi also poses certain questions on the "modern'' identity of an urban citizen. What exactly makes the old city different?… “What exactly contributes to a city's boundaries to exist?…The 'boundaries of a city’ function today more as a metaphor than specific geographic locations.”#

However, the workshop was not really about macro political concerns like the schizophrenia of urban identities; it was more about a focused retreat, which inspired a particular kind of self/artistic introspection…often playing out intimately political articulations.

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Atul Bhalla: Early morning ducumentation 

Display of Atul Bhalla's Piao

Atul Bhalla has had a long running with water…centered on its aesthetics and politics. Coming from a sanitized environment and dependent upon ‘bottled’ water, he has been drawn to the various (still) available sources of free water. For Atul the walled city has been like a resource overflow, harbouring in it an infinite collection/variety of free drinking water sources: Piaos established by Muslim, Jain and Hindu religious institutions. Still surviving as the only visible source of free drinking water, in a city where the middle class takes branded water as a recent reality.

But reading this nature of involvement only through the prism of politics is too much a single layered reading of Atul’s engagement. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos. Atul reveals in being very consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategizing the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction…usually passed over as ‘mundane’.  Through this last month Atul has had a near meditative engagement with his process…, the  early morning walks, exploring the space, discovering the histories… it has been a journey in many ways. A journey rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take. The set of still photographs clicked in a the course of the month, document various Piaos in the walled city, shot with a great fondness for ‘form’ and a fine talent for locating beauty. 

footage clipping. Artist enacting the Halal

Atul’s experience of the workshop and his notions around art production went on to take a completely radical turn around the second week mark of the workshop. Researching on the various lore and legends around water, Atul stumbled across the phonetic connection between Bahisht, and Bhishti. One the Urdu word for life and the other a water carrier made from goat hide, used to carry water through dry parched deserts. Atul was fascinated how the Bhishti a product of an act of killing can have a semiotic resonance with Bahisht. 

The semantic overlapping is infact because of a long-standing understanding of water as life. Drawn and intrigued by this phonetic parallel Atul set off on a journey to create a Bhishti from the very scratch…to create a source of life by taking life first. The entire experience of learning the Halal and eventually doing it and from then on to getting the Bhishti made has been a parallel performance played out in the backdrop of this workshop.

The video, which captures the Halal, strongly challenges the ‘image’ of a Halal embedded in our psychic.  The focus is rooted in the experientiality of the artist…showing the blood and struggle of the animal were easily available means to make a startling video, but that is simply not Atul’s style. The video is instead a very disturbing piece more because an artist has turned ‘butcher’ for a morning a yet ‘the event’ is showcased in the most tranquil manner possible.

***

Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  

***

Clipping from Gigi Sicaria's video 'Chitli Quabar'

Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  

 

Gigi_Scaria_Old-Cityscapes: Exhibition dispaly

still from Gigi Scaria's video  'Search   2'2

***

Himanshu’s engagement with work production has been an interesting duel between imposing his gaze on the walled city, and learning back. However, Himanshu Desai is more of an ‘actor’ than a listener. His video ‘Scenes from a Hallucination’ is a revelation of a new age re visitation of the flâneur. In a certain sense, the video is also an introspection of the artist’s own engagement with hallucinations…using fragments from others’ stories Himanshu tries to communicate his own anxities.  

What takes the video to a greater aesthetic realm…beyond an out cry of an introspective soul is the artist’s long term engagement with sound and how that engages with his use of visuals. Himanshu revels in making sound videos…but this particular one has been a jump for the artist in the manner in which he has treated the visual dimensions. However it needs to be pointed out that the video has many elements of class voyeurism, and in a certain sense it does come from his ‘high speed’ work production mode. Sometimes I have found the video a shade over rendered…but mostly ‘tripped’ on the artists construction of ‘hallucinations’.

It was even more interesting to follow the artist in his postproduction phase. When he moved into making posters and various other paraphernalia, which were needed to give a screening a ‘movie hall experience’. But the efforts of this phase will be witnesses when it all comes together on the open studio day. Meanwhile Himanshui has gone on to shoot and edit another video…a lens based critic of the workshop….

Stills from 'Scenes from a Hallucination'

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As this report is finished the artists have entered their last phase of planning the display…the zeal to showcase the months work and their personal journeys in very strong. Then the finished works will slowly begin to speak louder than the process. One must admit that it has been a great pleasure seeing artists work through the entire period of the workshop to be a participant in the delights and the anxieties