Savita Apte: Indian Highway: Contextualising the Contemporary

Savita Apte

In India, tradition is generally understood as elastic, constantly evolving and reinvigorating. There is a certain Western tradition that is considered unchanging, outmoded and static. These distinctions present an unusual cultural paradigm. Consequently, Indian art forms are communicated with an awareness of an enduring consciousness of the past as relative to the present.

Although Indian art does not manifest a seamless history from the prehistoric urban civilisations of Mohenjo Daro to the present, there are definite continuities of style and form. In Indian Highway continuity is most discernable in the exterior continuous painting by M F Husain, with references to both tradition and Indian modernist imagery. The contemporary artists presented in Indian Highway, may be seen as the most recent manifestations of an unbroken tradition sustained for five thousand years; their practices are infused with a traditional iconography. For instance, N S Harsha references the social and political role of Indian miniatures with a contemporary inflection.

Art is one of the principle agencies through which Indian society has perceived and defined itself. Through consecutive incursions, the assimilation of techniques, materials, ideas and forms have been selective, meaningful, creative and often, highly original. Indian art through the centuries manifests a palimpsest of influences with unbroken formal and stylistic characteristics traced to the earliest phases of urban civilisation. For example, one of the oldest sculptural pieces in India is a bronze figurine of a dancing girl. She stands, right hand on hip, knee bent, hip thrown out in one direction and her head counterbalanced facing the other way.[1] Known as a tribhanga pose, this posture typifies the Indian female figure typified in the 12th century Chola bronzes. Apparent in successive centuries the tribhanga pose infiltrates both contemporary sculpture and painting as evidenced in the works of Husain.

As a member of the Progressive Artists Group, the first cogent group of artists in the post colonial Indian period, Husain and the Bombay Progressives projected themselves as the newest expression of tradition as well as instigators of revolutionary conventions simultaneously establishing the precedent for contemporary Indian art practice.[2] This awareness that tradition offered formal and stylistic direction enabled the Progressive Artists to evolve a modernism unique to India. The Progressives did not reject tradition in favour of a more exotic other, but accessed, assimilated and incorporated tradition to evolve a new visual culture. Exquisitely refined artistic traditions as well as popular cult imagery, vibrant folklore, myth and legend infiltrated and enervated Indian modernism.

In the service of religious architecture, art was produced for practical ritual use and functioned through the symbolic power of divine forces, which were contained and represented in sculptural and painted forms. Sculpture was more sensuous and vigorous, counterbalanced by painting which was more lyrical and tender. The distinction between two and three dimensionality is intentionally blurred in cave paintings, which like subsequent temple sculptures demonstrate the synaesthetic intention of Indian art and exhibit the syncretic use of a multi layered media. There is a notable absence of recession; instead all of the figures advance towards the eye so as to engulf the viewer. This visual equivalent of surround sound is the result of the controlled use of almost equal tones. Directional light is absent, and figures appear to bask in their own light. The full effect is complete only when all the senses work in harmony and the eye is subordinated to the totality.

Wall paintings and temple friezes were created for an audience un-conditioned to linear reading demanded by text. Instead, these forms were intended to be perceived by scanning. Piecemeal scans facilitate the shifting viewpoint and multiple perspectives of the continuous narrative. Multiple images compress the scheme into a simultaneous description of various actions and past, present and future are concurrently apprehended. Contemporary experiments in cognitive psychology have demonstrated that scanning vision imposes its own non-linear scheme on narrative technique.[3] The eye moves from centre to periphery, alternating regularly to yield a spiralling path through the image without coming to rest at the centre, in accordance with the Indian concept of time. Stylistic logic demanded that movement and gesture be described in terms of the space in which they occurred. The result is every thing is foregrounded; everything is simultaneous, existing in the eternal present. Time and existence, were not conceived of teleologically but as a system of interconnected cycles with the past coexistent to the present. This belief encourages the sympathetic referencing of tradition. Although creating images did not compete with the divinity, linear perspective did. The concept of linear perspective and a vanishing point was deemed unimportant since humanity was not the centre of the universe: that position was reserved for the Supreme Being. Whereas time was the principle of change, space was seen as the principle of conservation.

From the 3rd century CE texts were compiled on the origin of art to illustrate a divine source and interrelationship of the arts. Art forms were categorized dependent on whether they elicit visual or auditory sensations or a combination of both. According to myth, and eloquently phrased in the Visnudharmottarapurana in the story of King Vajra, the arts are both interrelated and knowledge of one presupposes knowledge of the others. The pious and devout ruler, hoping to make his own idol, asks the sage Markandeya to reveal the secrets of image making, principles closely guarded by priests and art guilds. Though the sage appreciates the king’s sentiments and his position, he enquires if the king knows the techniques of painting. The king confesses he does not, but asks to be taught painting as a pre-requisite to learning sculpture. The sage informs the king that to learn the basics of sculpture one must first learn to dance. To learn dance, one is required to have rudimentary knowledge of instrumental music, which in turn needs a foundation in vocal music. King Vajra comes to understand how painting is related to sculpture, sculpture to dance, dance to drama, drama to poetry and poetry to music.

Notwithstanding this interrelationship between the art forms, each conforms to its own specific canon of creation and appreciation which in turn are codified in specialised treatises, not compiled solely for priestly theoreticians as they also provided practical advice for artistic production. Significantly this did not curtail the artist, rather the strictures were liberating, encouraging time-honoured forms which reiterated, glorified and perpetuated the Cosmic Law maintaining all life.

The codified texts also counselled the viewer in aesthetic appreciation, introducing the notion of rasa (aesthetic pleasure or rapture) first described in the treatise on dramaturgy: the Natyasastra written by Bharata, who enumerated the elements, gunas (virtues), dosas (faults) and alamkaras (ornaments), aided in the development of rasa and anticipated modern theories of semiotics. These elements were the source of the fundamental features of Indian art: ornamentation, narrative and figure which singly or in combination continue to characterise Indian art.

Rasa, with origins in the theatre, was challenged, extended and elaborated over the centuries to embrace other arts.[4] Rasa theory expanded to facilitate a semantics of emotive communication by equating different colours and gestures to a range of human emotions and further treatises demonstrated that rasa was dependent on a amalgamation of bhavas or emotions and were elicited in complex combinations by a work of art. In spite of the demands of this multifaceted connoisseurship, Indian aesthetic theories were resolute that the prerequisite of an informed viewer did not presuppose art to be the purview of an elite minority. Art was integral to ordinary life and is deeply woven into the religious warp and secular weft of India.

Rather than being constrained by formulaic interpretations art forms were liberated by the introduction of the concept of dhvani, which privileged the notion of suggestibility and layered meanings. Dhvani emphasized subtle aspects of art beyond style to generate subjective interpretations. According to the combined theory of rasadhvani, aesthetic pleasure was independent of the imitation of an external reality manifested by art. Rather, art was successful if it leads the spectator to a state of mind freed from the perception of both reality and imitation.[5]

A truly aesthetic object stimulated the senses while exciting the imagination and transporting the viewer. Successful art possessed not just abhida (literal meaning) and laksana (metaphorical meaning) but also vyanjana (suggested meaning). Rasadhvani affirmed artistic communication was achieved through the act of artistic creation and the intentionality of the artist. The fundamental assumption was that communication was the basic function of a work of art; therefore rasadhvani allocated equal responsibility to the genius of the artist and the perceptive acumen of the spectator. Rasadhvani encompassed the depiction, inference and transmission of emotion through art. Although the artist was of prime importance in suggesting a particular emotion, the viewer was equally as important because of his perceptibility to suggestion. This acknowledgement of individuality, for the artist as well as the viewer makes Rasadhvani relevant to twenty first century critics and artists. In the twentieth century, this principle was echoed by Marcel Duchamp both with his exposition of the urinal and his recognition that the creative act was not performed by the artist alone; that engagement with a work of art presupposes a form of interpretation.[6] Both viewed the artistic creation as the agent of a dialogue between the artist and the informed spectator. Accordingly, a lack of communication between the artist and the viewer may result not only from poor artistic quality but also insensitive spectatorship. The responsibility for communication or lack thereof, lies equally with the artist and the viewer.

The traditional focus on line and narrative is contemporised by Harsha’s who often incorporates everyday rites and rituals with global events. This personal idiom is assembled from a combination of Mughal, Rajasthani and Pahari sources assimilated within a contemporary context and incorporated with Ajanta and Mattancheri mural techniques. In Indian Highway, Harsha’s wall painting recalls these traditional cave paintings married successfully with the contemporary format of the miniature investing it as he does all his paintings regardless of size with a sense of monumentality.

Hybridity and the eclectic appropriation of tradition produced rich art forms reflecting the pattern and rhythm of Indian life and highlighted the relationship and interdependency between purush (man) and prakriti (nature). Art continued to be a celebration of the multiplicity of life and form; its principle focus remained the cosmos in all its profusion. In a society largely dependent on oral transmission, art provided a visual means to reinforce the philosophies of everyday life in the service of religion. Sculpture especially confirmed the multidimensional hierarchy of interdependence in Indian society. Each body and hand movement was imbued with meaning to create a language of motion to impart the sacred myths while promising the transcendence of mundane human existence to an ultimate divinity.

The interpretation of works of art that originate in cultures unfamiliar to one’s own is a difficult but not insurmountable process. Cultural specificities can be explained and world views can be translated. However, as the theories of deconstruction have illustrated insight into different cultures is not a natural process and aspects are lost in translation; nowhere is this better exemplified than in the visual arts with their inherent difference of signifiers.

The pervasive use of symbols and signifiers in Indian art is vital to decoding a world of impermanence and illusion: ideas from Indian religions such as the concept of maya, which deemed reality to be a function of the mind limited to the purely physical in which everyday consciousness becomes entangled. This concept of reality and illusion continues to the present day, not as a doctrine but as an attitude towards life. It is articulated and nuanced in the video works of many Indian artists whose works highlight contemporary manifestations of the concept of maya. Video art is an accentuation of two dimensionality and illusion. As such it demands an immersion from the viewer and an absorption into its continuous narrative structure in much the same way as sculptural friezes dating from the third century BCE made in the service of Buddhism. Ancient artists like their contemporary counterparts, did not depict reality but the friezes are replete with naturalistic details which demonstrate keen observation and exhibit many of the qualities that were to become distinctive features of Indian art. Stupa and temple friezes evidence an abundance of human, animal and plant motifs and the characteristic continuous narrative structure. The video works in Indian Highway are merely contemporary expressions of a continuous narrative.

Rich treatises on art, artistic traditions and techniques were preserved for generations by means of oral transmission. Each artistic guild communicated and conserved both the paradigms of art and their own specific stylistic secrets through the guru shishya organisations which encouraged apprenticeships and promoted workshop structures. Accordingly, the language and terminology of rasadhvani pervaded the vernacular languages of India ensuring its endurance and continued relevance.

The intimate relationship between painting and sculpture nurtured over centuries devolved with the Islamic catalyst. A divergence which resulted from an altered world view and manifest itself in an efflorescence of painting which combined the best of the Persian qalam ( literally, pen) with indigenous practice, under the courtly patronage of the Mughals. At its height, Mughal art exhibited an urbane wit and elegance and a documentary recording of courtly pursuits. Mughal miniatures embraced linear flattening, multiple perspectives and reduction, heralding a phase of a high artistic refinement.

Colonial art education signalled a change in patronage and shifting tastes and presented artists with a significantly altered world view; consequently the imitation of reality became paramount. Like previous cultural upheavals, India’s encounter with colonialism was far more complex than a simple polarisation of attitudes.[7] The subject matter, theme and medium of art changed and with them, the status of the artist. Art was used to record new experiences but it also served to reinforce older paradigms. During this period, the strength of the visual image in forming a pan-Indian identity was fully exploited and art began to play a critical role in the political struggle for independence. Throughout, village and tribal art forms continued to engage with tradition and to invigorate Indian artists. These art forms maintained a more direct approach and immediate appeal.

In the age of internet access and concomitant ease of travel, international influences have been absorbed, incorporated and assimilated with unprecedented immediacy. Indian artists reflect local concerns using global languages and vice versa, weaving contemporary narratives into traditional formats. The continuing relevance of figure, narrative and ornament, the fundamentals of Indian art, are today refracted through institutional education, shifting patronage and identity politics.

Indian highway is a testament to the indispensability of tradition and the unique sanctuary and re-invigoration that tradition allows. This living tradition permits the past to co-exist with the present and is constantly being reshaped by contemporary artists. Each innovation re-inflects the language inherited from the past. Tradition is used as a catalyst and not considered a monolithic force. Contemporary Indian artists recognise tradition for what it is – not a seamless, unchanging, unified entity, but rather, a continuously evolving, consciously invented and regularly improvised phenomenon. They recognise that the notion of tradition is rooted in social life rather than time alone and that traditions are created through the selection of certain historical events and invented pasts.
 

Notes

1. From the prehistoric Indus Valley civilisation of Mohenjo Daro 2300-1750 BCE.
2. Known either as the Progressive Artists’ Group or the Bombay Progressives, the group was instigated by F N Souza and comprised of M F Husain, S H Raza, H A Gade, K H Ara and S Bakre. For an exhaustive account of their antecedents and their role in Indian modernism see S Apte, Unchallenged Dichotomies: Modernism and the Progressive Artists Group, unpublished Ph.D thesis.
3. See The Psychology of Graphic Images by Manfredo Massironi
4. Most notably by Abhinavagupta c 975-1025.
5. See Jhanji, R Aesthetic Communication, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi,1985 for a more detailed account of the various theories of aesthetics as well as a chronological analysis of the commentaries that led up to the rasadhvani theory.
6. Marcel Duchamp, from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957
7. See Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha who have rewritten the colonial encounter and re examined post coloniality.

Ranjit Hoskote: Signposting the Indian Highway

Ranjit Hoskote

You Can’t Drive Down the Same Highway Twice…
…as Ed Ruscha might have said to Heraclitus. But to begin this story properly: two artists, two highways, two time horizons a decade apart in India.

Atul Dodiya’s memorable painting, ‘Highway: For Mansur’, was first shown at his 1999Vadehra Art Gallery solo exhibition in New Delhi. The painting is dominated by a pair of vultures, a quotation culled from the folios of the Mughal artist Mansur; the birds look down on a highway that cuts diagonally across a desert. The decisiveness of this symbol of progress is negated by a broken-down car that stands right in the middle of it. The sun beats down on the marooned driver, whose ineffectual attempts at repairing his vehicle are viewed with interest by the predators. In the lower half of the frame, Dodiya inserts an enclosure in which a painter, identifiably the irrepressible satirist and gay artist Bhupen Khakhar, bends over his work. Veined with melancholia as well as quixotic humour, this painting prompts several interpretations. Does the car symbolise the fate of painting as an artistic choice, at a time when new media possibilities were opening up; is the car shorthand for the project of modernism? Or is this an elegy for the beat-up postcolonial nation-state, becalmed in the dunes of globalisation? In an admittedly summary reading, ‘Highway: For Mansur’ could be viewed as an allegory embodying a dilemma that has immobilised the artist, even as he contemplates flamboyant encounters with history in the confines of his studio. Should Dodiya retrieve the elegiac high seriousness of the past symbolised by the courtly Mansur; or should he align himself instead with the defiant, playful Khakharesque avant-garde, risking his claim to posterity on a precarious wager? [1]

Contrast Dodiya’s painting with a recent, untitled video work by Shilpa Gupta, extracted from an ongoing series concerning the contamination of everyday life by militarisation, and shown at the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). Gupta shot her video while driving from Srinagar to Gulmarg along National Highway No: 1 in Kashmir, a region over which Indian forces, Pakistani irregulars and Kashmiri militants have fought with increasing ferocity since the early-1990s. The subject matter of the video seems, at first sight, to be perfectly innocuous: we are presented with a blurred, continuously unfurling view of fields, trees, scattered buildings and sky. Over the visuals, the car radio and the polyglot cross-talk of the vehicle’s occupants compete for aural attention. But the video is interrupted with metronomic regularity; each time this happens, the image seizes up, the sound track hangs in raucous mid-note. The cause of each such interruption is identical: every few yards, the camera spots a soldier, one of nearly 500,000 deployed throughout the Valley of Kashmir; the video is programmed to alert us to the brutal militarisation of a landscape once synonymous with idyllic beauty. In Gupta’s work, we find ourselves addressed by the artist as decisively politicised subject: she acts as documentarist and commentator, and as an undercover agent who does not produce propaganda but conveys the urgencies of a conflict zone through a visual meditation that is paradoxically subtle yet declarative, ironic yet passionate, ostensibly objective in its transcription of a quotidian act of passage yet empathetically partisan in its oblique portraiture of a site of oppression and anguish. [2]

Dodiya (born 1959) is a major presence in the generation of Indian artists that came to prominence during the mid-1990s; Gupta (born 1976) is an equally key figure in the generation of artists that has come to prominence since the turn of the century. While Dodiya has established a strong national context for his work with major international shows only since 2001, Gupta’s trajectory has followed the opposite course; her work has been shown widely on the international circuit and only recently has been presented at home. And although their careers overlap and their works have been shown together in a number of survey exhibitions internationally, the distance between their thematic concerns and formal choices is instructive. It is not merely symptomatic of the difference in outlook and opportunity between two generations. Taken as two ends of a spectrum, Dodiya’s homage to Mansur/ Khakhar and Gupta’s Kashmir video allow us to chart the dramatic transition that has taken place in contemporary Indian art during the last decade. I will reflect on some of the major aspects of this transition, writing as one who has participated intensely in the contemporary Indian art situation since 1988 as critic, theorist and curator; but also as a friend and co-conspirator, with artists in various image-making and discursive adventures.

The Market and the Margins
The global attention contemporary Indian art has received in recent years has been focused mainly on the boom in the Indian art market. While such dazzling visibility might possess tactical value in the short run, it will eventually be exposed as premature and specious. Premature, because the boom has largely been the result of steep escalations in price orchestrated by the interests of a narrow collector base; and specious, because the volumes of trade diminish to their correct measure when viewed, for instance, against the corresponding international auction-house sales figures for contemporary Chinese art. Also specious, because much of the compelling work of the imagination in India is being conducted beyond radar range of the market, at those richly productive margins where a self-critical art practice bypasses the studio-gallery-auction house circuit to forge solidarities with other disciplines and cultural practices.

This rubric embraces not only video and intermedia art, but also social projects and new-media initiatives, interfaces between image-making, pedagogy and activism, and research and archival projects. Within ‘Indian Highway’, this tendency in contemporary Indian art is represented by Ravi Agarwal, who attends closely to the crises of ecological devastation and the important public question of environmental change; Amar Kanwar, who addresses the complex politics of violence in the Indian subcontinent; and the Raqs Media Collective, whose three members combine a commitment to dissent and its defence with their articulation of plural, layered narratives of place and belonging as a guarantee against the monopolistic claims of religion, nation and State. Agarwal, Kanwar and Raqs were all, interestingly enough, first presented in the context of international contemporary art by Okwui Enwezor in his Documenta 11 (2002).

If I were to describe the changing ecology in which Indian art has developed during the last decade, I would annotate the Indian art market boom as reflecting a resurgent economy, and identify it as only one among four key vectors of change, the other three being: the schisms and scissions within the Indian nation-state, which have altered the textures of public life and the scope of cultural expression; newly available media and technologies of image-making and communication; and transcultural experiments in travel, dialogue and collaboration.

Although the first decade of the 21st century is not identified with any single, major political event (as the 1990s were with the cataclysmic violence following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, 1992), this period has borne witness to the deepening of the schisms that afflict India. While the ascendancy of the Hindu-majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party was broken electorally by the centrist Congress Party and its allies in 2004, the national debate remains sharply polarised. An aggressive, upper-caste Hindu majoritarian movement claims the ground of hypernationalism; it is opposed by equally assertive subnational movements and lower-caste mass mobilisations. Since successive governments have followed a policy of even-handed populism, aimed at appeasing the ultra-orthodox in every community, the general tenor of public life has grown illiberal, intolerant of dissent or idiosyncrasy. This has had a particular effect on the artist’s claim to intervene in the national debate; the artist’s freedom of expression has been infringed repeatedly by the discourses of politicised religiosity and ethnic pride, most viciously in the case of MF Husain, a foundational figure in the history of modern Indian art. The nonagenarian painter, writer and film-maker has been self-exiled in the UK and the UAE, due to a sustained campaign of legal harassment and mob violence by the Right. At the same time, wresting opportunity from catastrophe, many artists have been prompted by the situation to mobilise alliances with writers and cultural activists, to organise platforms of protest against illiberalism and censorship. [3]

Alongside these political developments, Indian artists suddenly found themselves in possession of newly available technologies of imaging and communication from the late-1990s onward. The advent of advanced video technology, the internet, graphic interfaces, virtual-reality software and digital retrieval systems has amplified the scope of artistic production and also, crucially, transformed the nature of artistic practice. For many artists, the work of art has been rendered unstable, versional, re-programmable and open-ended; it is no longer the irreducible summation of a process so much as it is a provisional statement of the process, not a destination but a log entry. [4]

The globalisation-era potential of the Indian art world was most productively realised in the variety of transcultural experiments in dialogue, encounter and travel beginning in the late-1990s. With agencies like the Japan Foundation, the Goethe Institute, the Triangle Arts Trust, the Prince Claus Fund underwriting these experiments, Indian artists, critics, theorists and curators benefited enormously from the cross-fertilisation of ideas that took place in residencies, workshops, conferences, collaborations and exchanges held both in India and overseas. The most revolutionary outcome of these transcultural experiments was the transformation of perspective for an entire generation of Indian artists who abandoned the colonialist centre-periphery model of the world – in which the West was always the donor and the non-West always the recipient of contemporary culture, marked by belatedness, imitation and permanent apprenticeship – becoming socialised into the world as an assembly of multiple, improvisational, self-renovating modernisms, a conversation among regional trajectories of the contemporary. [5]

The Changing Locus of the Studio
One of the most palpable changes that took place in Indian art practice during the early years of the 21st century was the transformation of the studio. Until relatively recently, most artists worked in single rooms hived away from their homes or in close proximity. Now many artists, such as Krishnamachari Bose and Riyas Komu in Mumbai, have found it possible and indeed necessary to extend their studios into factory-style production lines, with work departmentalised and delegated among an army of assistants. For another kind of artist, such as Ashok Sukumaran, the studio has become portable, virtual and tactically mobile: often no larger than a laptop opened up and worked on in airport lounges and while on residency in remote parts of Europe or North America; often, the studio has no materiality beyond an exchange of drafts and diagrams via email. And yet, both for Sukumaran and Shaina Anand, his collaborator in a series of social and community-based projects, public space often becomes the widest possible studio space: they tune into social relationships, trace the contours of political asymmetries of access over sidewalks and hydrants, map the invisible metropolitan architecture built around electrical connections and cable television networks.

The economies of making in which Indian artists now operate may usefully be described by the opposition of distribution and delegation. By distribution, I mean a participatory process of art-making that is fundamentally democratising and transformative; that empowers its participants with information, skills and a potential autonomy; that activates an audience. Under this rubric, I would place the Raqs Media Collective, the Cybermohalla initiative undertaken by SARAI in the shantytowns of Delhi, the discursive platforms orchestrated by CAMP (Critical Art and Media Practices) in Bombay, and the PeriFerry festival of the arts organised by the Desire Machine Collective in Guwahati, in turbulent north-eastern India. In all these projects, expressive and critical activity fold into one another; collaborations among artists, theorists, curators and activists are encouraged; and an effort is made to convene a new and engaged audience for cultural practice from among various social classes. The work of art, in this sector of the contemporary Indian art scene, is emphatically a verb rather than a noun.

Delegation, on the other hand, implies the production of individual art works whose realisation – for reasons of scale or technical complexity – requires mixed teams of art-school-trained assistants, technicians and labourers. While its apologists present this tendency as a return to the 16th-century atelier, it is really a simple industrialisation of art practice inspired by the practices of 20th-century monumental sculptors, functioning between studio and factory. This operational method is a response to the voracity of collectors, to cavernous exhibition spaces and the pressures of a career that typically begins with art school recruitment and pursued by complex negotiations with dealers, gallerists, collectors and investors across the globe.

The Collaborative Production of the Contemporary
The artists represented in ‘Indian Highway’ are participants in defining the contemporary, – collaboratively produced across the abandoned borders of Cold War geopolitics. As we escape the conventional narrative of modernism and the contemporary as universally executable programs exported across the planet from art world institutions of Western Europe and North America, we realise the global contemporary proceeds from highly differentiated starting points, from vigorous theatres of the Now being staged in Abidjan and Buenos Aires, Jakarta and Bombay, Rabat and Beirut, Seville and New Orleans, Manila and Ljubljana. The contemporary is a series of entanglements among diverse histories of political struggle, cultural vision and artistic exploration. In this context, the Indian art situation offers an extraordinary traversal of choices and temporalities.

With four generations of artists working simultaneously and prodigiously, and subscribing to one or another of at least five major perspectives, contemporary Indian art is festive in its diversity. The gamut includes artists whose work has evolved from critical apprenticeship to the Schools of Paris or New York and found anchorage in a renewed classicism or a renegotiated Sublime (M F Husain, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, Mehlli Gobhai); artists who formulate a language reflecting the local and immediate mapped onto sophisticated and historically informed references to the 1960s Western avant-gardes (Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Rameshwar Broota, Gulammohammed Sheikh); artists whose subtle politics of self has inspired them to combine autobiography with allegories of the nation-state (Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, Subodh Gupta, Dayanita Singh, Gargi Raina); artists who deconstruct fixed identity through the ambiguities of plural belonging, often in risky, performative modes (Bharti Kher, Nikhil Chopra, Tejal Shah); and artists who confront terror in an epoch whose leitmotifs are occupation, torture, surveillance, migration and genocide (Krishen Khanna, Baiju Parthan, Praneet Soi, Sumedh Rajendran, Riyas Komu).

Such entanglements, which I have elsewhere described as forming ‘continents of affinity’ mapped in contradistinction to nationalist and Cold War geography, are increasingly being recorded by new curatorial and theoretical frameworks emerging from India. Significantly, 2008 marks the first time major biennales were co-curated by Indians – Manifesta by the Raqs Media Collective and the Gwangju Biennale by me. [6]

Correspondingly, the rubrics of debate have changed. The tedious themes that dominated much discourse in the Indian art world between the 1950s and the 1990s have been rendered irrelevant. The anxiety of national identity, typically phrased in the form of apocalyptic binaries such as ‘Indianness vs. internationalism’ or ‘tradition vs. modernity’, has receded; the chimera of auto-Orientalism, with its valorisation of a spurious ‘authenticity’, to be secured as the guarantee of an embattled local against an overwhelming global, has been swept away. I speculate the vacuum left behind by this lapsed, unproductive rhetoric will gradually be filled by awareness that transcultural experience is the only certain basis of contemporary artistic practice. As the cultural theorist Nancy Adajania and I have argued elsewhere, transcultural experience – and the corresponding stance of ‘critical transregionality’ – gives the cultural practitioner “strategic and imaginative freedom… to link regions on the basis of elective affinities arising from common cultural predicaments, jointly faced crises, and shared choices of practice.” [7] This is not a means of escaping the urgencies of the globalised local; rather, it underwrites a responsible and responsive encounter with the contemporary with all its multifarious provocations. The Indian highway is a work in progress; it has, to paraphrase the visionary modernist poet Mohammed Iqbal, ‘many more horizons to traverse’.

(Gwangju, October 2008 – Bombay, November 2008)

Notes

1. For a discussion of ‘Highway: For Mansur’ and the suite of paintings of which it forms a part, see Ranjit Hoskote, ‘An Autobiography in Fifteen Frames: Recent Works by Atul Dodiya’ (exhibition catalogue essay; New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1999).

2. For a discussion of Gupta’s works based on the situation in Kashmir, see Nancy Adajania, ‘A Shadow in Search of a Body’ (Introduction to Shilpa Gupta; Bombay/ New Delhi: Sakshi Gallery & Apeejay Media Gallery, 2007).

3. For an account of the foundational proposals of postcolonial India, framed through the debates among Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, among other thinkers, see Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998). For a study of the major social and political developments that have taken place in India since Independence, see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: A History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New Delhi: Picador, 2007).

4. For a detailed account of technological change and its effect on Indian art practice, see Ranjit Hoskote, ‘The Elusiveness of the Transitive: Reflections on the Curatorial Gesture and Its Conditions in India’, in Joselina Cruz et al eds., Locus: Interventions in Art Practice (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2005), pp. 225-237.

5. For a substantial account of the opening up of transcultural exchange and dialogue, and its formative influence on the younger generation of Indian artists from the late 1990s onward, see Nancy Adajania, ‘Probing the Khojness of Khoj’, in Pooja Sood ed., Ten Years of Khoj (New Delhi: Harper Collins, forthcoming, 2009).

6. Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Scales of Elaboration’, in Okwui Enwezor ed., Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions (curatorial essay in the exhibition catalogue of the 7th Gwangju Biennale; Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008), pp. 40-53.

7. See Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Retrieving the Far West: Towards a Curatorial Representation of the House of Islam’, in Shaheen Merali ed., Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation (London / Berlin: Saqi & Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2008), p. 121.

Riyas Komu

Riyas Komu

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Born in 1971, Riyas Komu graduated with Painting as his specialization and has since than extended himself to sculpture, photography and video installations. He is also a recipient of K.K. Hebbar Foundation Scholarship and Bombay Art Society Award, 1996 and Maharashtra State Art Prize 1995. Komu was a participant in the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007 curated by Robert Storr. His other prominent museum shows include Paris-Delhi-Bombay, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crossroads India Escalate at Prague Biennale 5. Other prominent museum shows include Concurrent India, Helsinki Art Museum Tennis Palace, Finland; Indian Highway, Museum  of contemporary Art, Lyon; Herning Kunstmuseum, Herning, Denmark; India Awakens: Under the Banyan Tree, Essl Museum, Austria; Finding India, Art for the New Century, Museum of Contemporary Art; Milan Museum show, curated by Daniella Polizolli and India Contemporary, GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, Hague; India Now: Contemporary Indian Art Between Continuity and Transformation, Provincia di Milano, Milan, Italy, India Xianzai: Contemporary Indian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Shanghai; Modern India, organized by Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) and Casa Asia, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture at Valencia, Spain. His recent solo shows include Oil's Well, Let's Play!, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan; Subrato to Cesar, Gallery Maskara, Mumbai in association with The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai and Safe to Light, Azad Art Gallery, Tehran.

Riyas Komu says that his work draws from the public domain. His subjects are charged with significance bringing about a disturbance depicting an element of political disquiet. For Riyas, art is a medium for social comment on the situations the world is facing today.” Komu deploys portraiture, also, to register a cryptic side or oblique remark on contemporary culture. Riyas Komu’s recent paintings and sculptures propose a bold re-formatting of the genre of portraiture. Komu’s portraits are close-up shots of nameless and dispossessed individuals redeemed, visually if not materially, from the flux of life at the margins of globalization” – Ranjit Hoskote.

“Riyas Komu’s recent paintings and sculptures propose a bold re-formatting of the genre of portraiture. Komu’s portraits are close-up shots of nameless and dispossessed individuals redeemed, visually if not materially, from the flux of life at the margins of globalization. These are faces of people captured in the attitude of waiting, of foreboding or memorializing: these are faces of witnesses, who depose before us, silently obliging us to acknowledge the genocides and mass migrations, the famines and desolations of our catastrophic epoch. Komu deploys portraiture, also, to register a cryptic side or oblique remark on contemporary culture. He does not not permit us direct and easy access to his subjects: in his handling, the portrait become a fateful reminder: we see the Other as framed by the televisual eye, for Komu’s figures are often marked as though with masking tape or black identity-protection bands or partially concealed by lattices. Signs of immunity from recognition, these semiotic interpolations double as threats of de-personalization: the rawness of the human predicament is sometimes camouflaged by these refinements, whoch convey both security and constraint in relation to Komu’s figures”. – Ranjit Hoskote

He paints pictures based on photographic references from the print and television media. His subjects are charged with significance bringing about a disturbance depicting an element of political disquiet. For Riyas Komu, art is a medium for social comment on the situations the world is facing today. His canvas has youthful and the immersion in urban iconography is perhaps most evident in his works. What is remarkable about the paintings of Riyas are the multiple media he uses. The works in oil are thick and over-layered, and this gives them more dimension and life. The figures and the backdrop spring out and hit you and there is no escaping from what first appears stark and simple and seem to get more and more complex as it grows on you. About his video: He has a passion for making documentary films. The one he worked on a couple of years back had an unusual theme –“The politics of nostalgia and food.”  A video movie of eight minutes, it was shot on the streets and roadside restaurants of Mumbai. “The documentaries I make are an extension of my feelings and views, and they have similar themes, toughing life’s many facets”, says Riyas.

His recent solo ‘Mark Him’ was held at The Guild, it mainly consisted of photographs. About these works Riyas says, “I have not known a greater joy than that of watching guys in shorts kicking a ball around. I have done the feetie myself a number of times. But there has always been a gnawing feeling in the back of my head that kept on saying: the best of goals are not always 'the best of goals'. So I set one for myself — to use art to redeem the place of our footballers in the society, in our history. Therefore, MARK HIM”.

Contesting National and the State: K K Hebbar's Modernist Project

by HA Anil Kumar


An attempt to grasp and understand Modern Art in India is to agree to travel in a vehicle which is extremely hegemonic in nature, with too many 'left over' from within that hierarchy. It is high time for that vehicle to stop and get an overhaul done before it traverses more sophisticated premises. In other words, the deletions and inclusions of Indian Modern Art (IMA) indicate a 'selection' of artists- and hence art works and art situations- framed and hung as 'the' Indian Modernists. The selection itself speaks about a certain epistemological politics of rejection, which, perhaps, is more evident now rather than when it was initially 'framed'. This is also an Ulmerian*1* attempt to take note and contest if possible the critique of IMA as well as the 'modernist' avatar of that very critique itself, with the help of the dialogue around cultural expressions in paravisual artistic activities in India! Hence every time an Indian Modernist is being referred to, addressed or explained, now, it also means:
(a) An addressal of the silenced ones, not only those from the 'other' gender,
(b) A re-construction and endorsement of the cultural imagination that a single, singular object (alone) makes an artwork ('Meaning follows Object' that sounds like 'form follows function', an architectural dictum, and never the other way round); and
(c) The consideration of an elaborate critique of 'Art' as unwarranted, indulgent and “too much of reading” as a taboo.

In other words, there is no Indian Modernist Art beyond its construed institutional imagination! The 'power' (structure) of this imagination also marks the outermost boundary of the overall personality of this Modernity. The specific characteristics of this imagination was constituted in the form of singular objects, aided by specific (ity of) celebrated authorship (like the Bengal Masters and the Bombay Progressive Groups); and an uncritical idealistic (almost metaphorical) position for those authors/artists/art experts.*2* Thus it would be hypocritical and/or innocent to consider or assign an 'absolutist' position to IMA, as it might (or might not) be in the case of European Modernity.

The apparatus of modern art, in general, as and when it is 'upgraded', redefines what Modern Indian Art means. At least ideally it should be so. The only seemingly relevant question to be posed, now, by the Indians about Indian Modernity is “whose 'Indian' 'Modernity' is it?” with a stress on both the italicized words, simultaneously! This implies that Indian Modern Art is yet an incomplete project, in the making, whose fate is decided by its critical apparatus and the power structure it hails from, that undergoes a metamorphosis, time and again. Or, how democratic and dramatic it would be to treat IMA as an ever incomplete project, and consider how it would then (alone) intervene beyond its 'timely' boundaries. The pleasure of 'sharing' (note the 'left' utopia in the highlighted word) is always a thorn in the rejoicement of the celebrity status!

In this background of slightly disengaging thought process, and a clear pleasurable demand for a spoke into the turning wheel*3*, added with a warning about danger of yet 'retaining' a simplistic definition about IMA, I would like to contemplate on such and other notions about modern art, possibly, through a monographic mode. Towards this, I would like to reflect upon the making and breaking of one such Indian Modernist Artist, K K Hebbar or Kattengeri Krishna Hebbar (15th June 1911- 26th March1996)

Hebbar's relevance lies in his serving of this very nationalist position of an Indian modernist very irrelevant. He was a diasporic-from-within, neither a nationalist nor a regionalist. Hence Hebbar is a vertical split in the imagination of artistic Nation-State: Actually his works belonged nowhere, which implies that they neither belonged everywhere. Those who have written, debated (hardly), discussed his works categorized him as a Progressive Nationalist in English and as a State Hero in Kannada! This is what I term as splitting the notion of Nation-State vertically! The question to be asked is: Where does one place that creative output that refutes both the national and the regional?

While the Cholamandalam artists consumed the regional, the Kalabhavan artists created the regional; Hebbar was actually contesting the regional. Both Yashavantha Chittala and Hebbar hailed from a linguistically oriented geographic identity (Karnataka) and problematised such belongingness in their creative outputs*4*.

Why does one refuse where they hail from, and in turn, why do they address such refusal itself in their artistic construct? You want to forget, but before that want to make that very act of forgetfulness an everlasting act. Arguably, the better known contemporary friends of Hebbar (Husain, Raza, Gade, and Tyeb Mehta) were all in the process of 'construing' the urban-metropolis while Hebbar was refuting this very process of addressal, a genuine reversal of the Indian Modernist Agenda. Nehruvian ideology was to 'construct', 'be constructive' and be involved in nation-'building' process. The currently resounding urban 'real estate' meaning that such terms evoke, now, is rather a post- Indian Modernist evocation, connected to such critical progressive utopias. However the origin of such positivist attitude was held to be something that was to be forced in a nation which had newly gained an identity of its own self, owing to political independence. Being progressive and seeing progress only in the modernist production was perhaps the main drawback of the writings about the progressives!

Hebbar was either silent about it in 'person' or protested about this by 'representation' both of which can be wrongly refuted by those who presume to know his works thoroughly. One of the reasons for this is that the initial decade's post-Indian independence which produced 'visual signs as cultural representation' later found a historic past to these signs (concepts like the living tradition). Postivisim, a la Nehruvian project was an attempt to position Hebbar in the National-feel of Indian art history. However, the same Hebbar, as seen by the Kannada critics*5* tried to place his paintings and drawings as a homage to regional flavour, that too within the cultural past of South Canara, which lies to the western part of Karnataka. Here is a catch-22 situation, wherein the nationalist Hebbar is pitched against the region-specific Hebbar. In the former case he is a tiny figure among the first urban Modernist while in the latter case, he is a hero who projected the otherwise remote and unknown South Canara flavor of performative practices of Kathakali, Yakshagana on a nationalistic canvas. The vertical divide that Hebbar was subject to, through his creative representations, makes him a true internal-diasporic, who stayed in Bombay all through his professional years, yearning for the long lost 'home' only through representations. Neither did he return back home (like say Chagall) nor did he forget it, nor did he legitimize the physical space he lived in Mumbai.

However, the formal readings into his works, through his persona alone, and the group belonged to, are so mesmeric that those who hold on to it, more sullenly after reading my point of view, represent that very formal analysis to which paintings and painterly representations suited more than anything else. Hebbar held drawing in that extreme position where exactly his co-creators held for or against oil media. His 'drawing lines' are a title availed to him due to his subconscious approval of replacing the national/modern/painterly through deconstructive-nation/contested modern/linear depictions.

Interestingly, the major body of works that Hebbar produced is inter-textual. Be it the 'Nagamandala' painting, his Yakshagana drawings, his live production of dance performances, all in all are (a) negotiative acts and question as to how the representational media and devices of static visual culture could intervene with other 'nationally' recognized and endorsed non-literal art forms. An internal diasporic producing inter-textuality is the last thing that a positivist, nationalist (alone) body of writings and criticism around the Indian modernist art preferred or would prefer.

He was perhaps 'the' only theoretically acknowledged Karnataka artist to have undergone an 'urban-Diaspora' experience, painting:
(a) Memories of the rituals from his childhood rural hometown; and
(b) The world events that came to him through the news media.

In this sense, he experienced and represented a certain multiple-alienation, and 'translated' them into contemporary visual premises. For instance, the folk-tribal-traditional visual language became a subject of his mainstream art. His experience of the urban Diaspora and his concern for the ethnic language metamorphosed into a subject that mutually recreated each other through his works. His "Nagamandala" painting, for instance, has an urban international painterliness as a style, while the subject matter is specific to the Western belt of Karnataka. Being a witness to the major art events, movements, and socio-political happenings to 20th century India, Hebbar- like MF Husain- and his works, can be summarily grasped as a container of (a) various painterly styles, (b) belonging to deviant genres and ages, (c) that too alive in an age when internationally the Euro-centric critics announced the 'death of painting'.

He wrote and spoke a lot about being 'national' while the State he hails from has officially endorsed him as 'the' visual representative of the Kannada cultural nationalism. The only State Government museum for a post-independent artist of the State is dedicated to him and his works (Hebbar section, 1996, at Venkatappa Gallery). He was instrumental in being the pedagogic support to the first generation of contemporary and postmodernist artists from the State in the 80s. He personally took care of availing scholarships and morally facilitating to art students, who wanted to study in established art schools at Baroda and Santiniketan.

An anecdote says that his work was chosen for the coverage of a major catalogue of Indian art in the Japanese Fukuoka Museum because he was "the least controversial" among Indian artist personalities! Being democratic might be inevitable for an internal-diasporic. This was perhaps in honour of his Tagorean outlook of being aware of the ill effects of confirmation to the nationalistic ideologies. For him a successful idea executed badly and the mark of a tired brilliant attempt led to legitimizing ideologies. His overall works, together, are interested in passing through various styles and media (oil, drawing, illustrations, and writings) rather than confirm to various 'isms'.

Hebbar stretched the definition of an 'art personality' by making it both interactive and inter-disciplinary. Towards this, he illustrated landmark literary works of the like of Dr. Shivarama Karantha and was known for demonstrating line drawings during live performance. In the background of the fact that 'demonstrating' art was a Modernist (but not contemporary) preoccupation of art teachers, Hebbar's attempt to make it interactive paved way to the future public-art formats, particularly in Bangalore. This could be considered as a certain aesthetic Diaspora.

Ideologically, he was neither left nor right, but was keen on--and often succeeded in- inculcating what was best of those two and their off shoots, that could effectively address the question of the twentieth century phenomena of 'alienation' and 'Diaspora'. Hebbar artistically existed in a 'home-away-from-home', not only through his lifestyle but also in the way:
(a) he stretched the rudiments and language of art (by painting in deviant styles),
(b) got involved in art activism (by empowering a whole generation of artists to widen their perspective of art) and thus
(c) laid foundation for public and community art (through artistic demonstrations of performances, in public).



 Footnotes:
[1]     Gregory Ulmer, article: “Object of Post-Criticism”, in 'Anti Aesthetic Essays in Postmodern Culture', Ed: Hal Foster.
[2]     For instance the question as to why Hebbar's select set of artworks are housed in a museum, alongside K Venkatappa (at K Venkatappa Chitrashale, Bangalore) and more importantly why the rest of the Karnataka Modernists have been un-represented are questions that belong to such heroic-narratives, about Indian modernists, through modernist critique.
[3]     Read: the novel “A Spoke in the Wheel” by Amita Kanekar. The narrative involves the demand for a factual reportage about Goutam Buddha's life, posthumously; hindered by the institutionalized and authoritarian re-articulation. In the end, the book (to be) written by Upali is subject to deconstruction in a situation controlled by Emperor Ashoka. The deconstruction of Indian Modern Art's heroic narrative is so much authoritative frozen that forget about the addition of subtraction of its protagonists, even an attempt to re-arranging the mapping of the modernists and their representation, currently, is undesirable, though it might yield rich dividends.
[4]     Chittala's novels deal with intricate, miniature-like detailing of the Bombay houses, chawl, roads and is a thorough map that can be rendered only by a pronounced 'outsider', who wishes to retain the outsider-ness as a tag. If Chittala digs deep into the grain to prove otherwise, Hebbar refused to bring this refusal to 'belong' to either Bombay or elsewhere, by relying upon only on what he 'imagined' (in his paintings) and what he 'saw' (in drawings) about the 'past'.
[5]     G.Venkatachalam, B V K Shastry and S N Chandrashekar wrote in regional papers, but main in two languages. No matter what their outlook about Hebbar was, it did not--and will neveraffects the way the 'national' art historical agenda considers the artist.

Seeing is Very Important - Jogen Chowdhury

Seeing is Very Important………

Jogen Chowdhury in conversation with Adip Dutta, Kolkata, January, 2011.


Adip Dutta: You are a practicing artist and have been a pedagoge, how has it been?

Jogen Chowdhury: In my case both has complemented each other. In art, if one is not a practitioner he cannot be an effective teacher. Practice enriches and revitalises you. It creates scopes for a mature perspective. I believe, today when I take a critical stance towards any art, intellectually and logically I can afford to do so because I have a long standing experience of a practitioner.

Adip: Could you be a little more elaborate?

Jogen: 1965/66 saw the Salon de Mai in Paris. It was one of the highly rated shows of avant- garde works produced by young artists. I still have a catalogue of the show. The Works reflected attitudes of iconoclast. Just not the works but also the projection of the artists in the catalogue was different. I remember one of the artists published a photograph in the catalogue which showed him seated on a commode in the toilet. It was funny but yes, very different at that point of time. Then I was overwhelmed by the works, the event (exhibition). There was an apprehension to question its credibility. But today when I leaf through the catalogue the same works seem to have lost all appeal to me. Therefore I would say it is my practice that has reinforced an understanding of art and the truth in it.

Adip: How do you understand or rather recognize the truth?

Jogen: I feel it is established by the artist. It depends entirely on the artist on how he gives back the excitement regarding any matter. If he gives back the same in hundred times or thousand times, he communicates the truth that he has experienced. The intense emotion builds up the truth bit by bit. When I stand in front of a van Gogh, the excitement is communicated. I feel the vibration.

Adip: Is emotion important to you than the cerebral factor?

Jogen: I think it is vital. I do not undermine the cerebral factor. The cerebral factor, no doubt, brings in a break through, but it runs the risk of producing replicas. In conceptual art the break through is like a spark. It is like a container holding possibilities. But any attempt to duplicate the spark leads to dead replicas. Here the saturation is faster than painting, sculpture or rather what you call conventional practices. The success of conceptual art lies in its initiation of making the narrow by-lane, emerging and deviating from the mainstream.

Adip:  It seems your faith in painting remains unrevised.

Jogen: As a matter of fact yes. A good painting surely stimulates me more than say installation art. Seldom I see a spark in it. Joseph Beuys' work in Kassel is one such example. Here I liked the idea, the material like stone and tree etc. You see such similar works by so many artists later. But once you have seen his work it is very difficult to disassociate him from others.  This is the problem of conceptual art. This does not happen in painting. In fact it took a long time for Modernism to saturate. I don't sit in judgment.  It is a matter of taste.

Adip: What do you think of the future of painting?

Jogen: Painting shall remain and it shall continue to remain relevant. It reflects one of the basic truths of life. The act of painting is almost like a basic instinct.  It starts with the scribble of a child and grows to a complex and mature work with layers of interpretation. It is like the mother activity that gives way to numerous forms of activities. These activities shall settle and mature. Time shall prove their credentials. I say this not to mean that I believe in categories. But I am a painter. Painting is my medium. My orientation centres around painting.

Adip: How does your mind works when you conceive a work?

Jogen: Seeing is very important to me. As I come across things, people and situations in everyday life, I often come across magical moments. These are real happenings. But there is an element of surrealism in them. There is strangeness in them. This encounter with strangeness instigates me to record things. Almost in an act of writing I draw them on note books. Dispassionately I look at them later. I revisit them from time to time. Works start to emerge. In course of the execution I again rediscover the magic. It has so happened that the entire definition of the happening tends to change at times when I revisit this records much later. As I evolve the meaning and therefore the focus shifts. It excites me. This involvement not only concerns aesthetic experiences, but also leads to a process that graduates the mere act of painting to art.

Bikash Bhattacharjee

Bikash Bhattacharjee: Subverting the Seen

Profile

by Rita Datta


When it comes to Bikash Bhattacharjee, you must begin with ways of seeing. All art, to be sure, is about ways of seeing. Particularly, representational art. Artists see things differently from you and me. Where you'd see only a urinal, artistic vision discovers a fountain. Would any New Yorker recognize Broadway from Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie? And though you are able to make out that somebody is screaming in fear or horror, have you ever actually seen any Norwegian look quite like the skeletal figure in Munch's iconic work?

Much of modern art, thus, keeps the viewer in a state of overawed mystification: and, of course, far away from the galleries. But with Bhattacharjee, you seem to immediately feel comfortable. He seemed to see what you see. So that you not only see but also recognize the images. Somebody's face, perhaps, or the just-so folds of a sari; an unkempt desk or a period terrace. If a caption says Kakima you linger over the portrait because you might think you know her or maybe somebody very much like her. A boy by a marshy pond may not have clear features but his distended tummy, lean limbs and, above all, the very way he stands declare both his village identity and a barely-veiled curiosity about someone or something outside the frame. When a sacrificial goat looks back at you in mute resignation you feel, yes, yes, you've seen it before, seen it many times in fact.

And yet, not quite. Because he saw what you saw, but not in the same way. Bhattarcharjee's lens would lend a startling twist to a known scene so that it became somehow different, unique. So that something you had seen so often and had grown stale and lost its particular visibility, was reborn. So that it became art, and not just faithful illustration.

Bhattacharjee's strategy, in other words, was one of subversion rather than revolution. He only rarely inflicted the big theme on you or the big style. Like the American artist Andrew Wyeth whose influence he repeatedly stressed it was usually the everyday, the known and the seen that he adopted as his subject, meticulously rendered, but skewed with disconcerting twists and smudges, highlights and shadows, into a beguiling image on the canvas.

If you look at his watercolours and oils what strikes you most is the flux implied beyond the frame. As though he had just intruded upon a narrative flow in which the bizarre seems to lurk just beyond the banal, and picked out a moment of critical disjunction or paused to freeze it. For, there's always a palpable refrain of the before and the after, in the now, of uneasy shades beyond the apparent.

And that's what makes you think of another important influence on the artist: Italian neo-realist cinema, which wove delicate tapestries of minutiae as the ambience into its humanist concerns. For Bhattacharjee, too, an inclusive humanism, the core allegiance of his generation of educated and mostly left-leaningBengalis, is the wellspring of his art. And, like the best of neo-realist films, it is the minutiae, the little physical details that help his art both transcend the immediate and mediate between different narrative layers, the socio-economic and the psychological.

Bhattacharjee, who was born in 1940, lost his father at the age of six and grew up in North Kolkata during a period of seminal socio-political churning famine, communal riots, the Partition and the Independence which also led to a massive displacement of people. But it wasn't so much the forces of History that he lived through in the mid-1940s the violence and deaths and avalanche of refugees that came to haunt his art as they did in the case of some his senior contemporaries, Somenath Hore, Zainal Abedin and Chittaprasad or those of his own generation like Ganesh Pyne and Jogen Chowdhury.

What proved to be more crucial to his creative inspiration in the initial years was his private lore. His relationships with people and things and the neighbourhood, observed, absorbed and recreated, with empathy but not without a lode of irony or even, at times, anger. For while he was a participant in this life he was also, simultaneously, an observer. He was, thus, both chronicler and critic in probing the milieu he had grown up in. It was a milieu that was very Bengali, very North Kolkata, a locale of strange juxtapositions: grand old mansions besieged by signs of imploding decay; dour middleclass respectability and low life festering in dark, cramped alleys. Its street urchins and widows, its marble statuary and tiled floors, its deities and pujas would come to inhabit his canvas. Indeed, he was as rooted to his locale and social milieu as Wyeth was to his.

The one period that did leave a permanent impact on his art was the early 1970s when, for a few years, the city came to be gripped by what today's Communist establishment would surely call an “infantile disorder”. The frustration simmering among educated young people can't be explained merely in material terms: the lack of jobs and the Congress party's machinations to regain and retain power. Their despair over the Left's increasingly comfortable relation with parliamentary democracy, despite the Left's vocal opposition, would also have stoked rebellious ardour. With sneak strikes by the Naxalites leading to daily body counts and retaliatory searches, killings and torture by the police, a climate of fear and suspicion had enveloped the city. This was the time when the artist's Doll series was seen, making Bikash Bhattacharjee a well known name in the field of art.

What was remarkable about these paintings was their insidious disquiet. There was no reference to violence. But to see a doll rummaging, frantic, in a chest of drawers, high above the ground, its chubby legs hanging dangerously; or to see it emerge, warily, from behind a blind, rundown wall, summons the kind of precarious dread and bewildered vulnerability people felt at the time. Other works where violence was shown are as powerful with their mix of emotion, acid and anger. The ethical humanist in Bhattacharjee spoke in a clearer voice in Homage to… Its bouquet of heads is curiously lambent in the dark. Five are dead but made to look innocuously asleep and one is dying. Evoked with a few deft touches of the crayon, it is an image that transcends the local narrative to turn into a universal image: of adolescent romanticism and protest quashed by brutal State power. Another well-known work, Interview-which has a lady's manicured hand hold a mike to a blindfolded and bleeding young detainee who could even be dead-isn't just sharp in its comment on the media but on the public itself which devours strident coverage.

Indeed, a few deft touches were all it took for the artist to infuse lines and shadings and strokes with atmosphere, with luminous life. He lent amazing yet elusive body to the limpid glow of watercolour, best seen in his Dekhi Nai Phirey series. Some of his conte/graphite/pastel works, on the other hand, were archly reticent, often playing up the texture of the medium and the surface on which they were executed. In fact, every medium, whether oil, gouache, watercolour, pencil, pastel, or conte, was slave to his will, as he disrupted photographic realism into the extra-real, the strange, the fantastic, and the sinister with surprise dislocations, insertions and smudges, slivers and pinheads of highlights and a web of shadows that, particularly, sculpted faces into probing portraits.

And indeed, his portraits especially of women are some of the finest examples of his artistry, whether of an anonymous Muslim woman, Laila, or the assassinated Indira Gandhi. That he wasn't seduced from his kind of exacting verisimilitude into expressionist distortions or abstraction at a time when Clement Greenberg's damning of “illusionist methods” had come to be accepted as an axiom of modern art, speaks of his honesty to himself. He never hesitated to list the artists who inspired him: Rembrandt and Vermeer, among others, and even Sargent and Whistler, and, of course, Wyeth; Abanindranath, and particularly the Arabian Nights series, and the style of Hemendranath Majumdar.

He thus declared quite openly that his style was not original. But in choosing trompe l'oeil as his métier, he bore the daunting heritage of the Renaissance and the masters of representational art. Few here had the technical felicity to dare in this direction. And yet, easy skill may not always stimulate creativity. If just a few strokes are all it takes to produce an eye-catching picture to be snapped up by the market, there's bound to be unevenness in standards.

Like most creative people, whether artists, film-makers, musicians or writers, Bikash Bhattacharjee didn't always produce great art, despite his unerring technique. But, interestingly, his last few exhibitions revealed a new direction in his work, a new timbre in his tone. He was moving away from the style he had been working on to a more turbulent, expressionist idiom. Could it be that he had reached the limits of his kind of realism and felt the need for a greater thrust to portray the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium? Religion was being crafted into a poisonous and violent weapon; the economic and social ideals of the 1960s were being casually upturned; a new kind of terrorism was taking shape; and the Left was increasingly seen to be without a conscience. Could it be that the nightmare images he had made in the late-1990s and the early 21st centurythe fierce beasts, ruthless police and grovelling sub-human beings under dark skies (Quest No 1 and Quest No 2) or a crass and hardened public figure in a welter of seething, surging paint (Inauguration of a Letter Box)-reflected a growing cynicism? Though it's pointless to speculate, the thought is inescapable. Was he, perhaps, on the verge of creating something completely different, something art-lovers were yet to see? There's no answer to that question because now we shall never know.

Jagdish Swaminathan

A Conversation with Jagdish Swaminathan

by Vinod Bharadwaj

Jagdish Swaminathan is among India's foremost modern artists. He claims to work in the spirit of a man possessed. He is among those artists who are also able to express themselves with ease in words. Holding a conversation with Swaminathan is a revealing and intellectually stimulating experience.

Vinod Bharadwaj: Tell me something about your creative process when and how do you like to work?

Jagdish Swaminathan: There was a time when I would work till late into the night. But it's not easy to work with colours at night, yellow in particular. Moreover, the time of work is related to a painting arriving at a point where it would progress on its own. Initially I liked to go for impasto with thick colours - I would use the palette-knife quite a lot, which I no longer do. The application of colour has become quite 'fine'.

VB: What kind of inspiration do you need for painting?

JS:  I can find solace even without having done anything at all in the manner of speaking. The most difficult part is starting on a work... But once I start then it is a different matter.

VB: What do you consider as central to your growth as an artist?

JS: I feel I am not one of those artists whose work is totally free of any intellectual dimension. I am more concerned with having an emotional perspective in relation to the intellect. Not that I have an intellectual perspective on emotions. All that I am saying is that intellectualism has a place for me in explaining things.

VB: Do you like to talk about your work or do you believe a work should speak for itself?

JS: I am yet to meet an artist who would not like to talk about his works. All of them claim they wouldn't say anything whereas other than that they talk little. To understand a painting an explanatory comment is not necessary. The ideal situation would be that you see a painting and receive from it what you can. But artists are quite vocal about their art.

VB: What special elements do you notice in the contemporary art landscape?

JS: The contemporary art movements have thrown up quite a few superficial points of view. The depth which the artists of the Progressive Group possessed is no longer to be found... Some of the Indian artists have undergone a transformation. For example before his arrival in Europe Tyeb Mehta, in the manner of Progressive artists, would use 'brush stroke' and palette-knife to create the core image. But he gave up this practice on his return to India and flat colour surfaces came to be seen in his works which were completely devoid of any brush-stroke or palette-knife. I have this feeling that he has distanced himself from the modern western tradition, for which nearly all the Progressive Group artists had fallen... Earlier, the entire burden was on managing the brush and the palette-knife. Now there is freedom from this compulsion... It's not a matter of Indian art or Western art. Had we continued to follow the tradition, nothing would have been possible. Total rebellion alone has brought about results. The truth does not lie in slogans, though here I remember that famous artist Miro. Surrealist artists were moving ahead shouting against the French state: 'Down with the government'. But Miro had a different slogan: 'Down with the Mediterranean'. Because that's where everyone had one's roots. Everything that predated it got erased.

VB: Taking into account the acute difference between the Western and Indian art, many critics take you as a hardcore opponent of the West. How do you react?

JS: There is nothing like West or East confronting today's artist. But the influential tradition is the western tradition and one has to have doubts about it. At least I do. Our artists are emerging from a background crowded with a diversity of stories, opinions and philosophical viewpoints. The basic question is whether one needs to be aware of them or not. The philosophy that there's only the colour and the canvas and nothing more is not right. Most of our philosophical theories are based on Indo-Anglican interpretations. It is this perspective which has given us faith in Ajanta, Mughal miniatures etc. At a London exhibition of modern artists like Husain, Ramkumar, Gaitonde and others, an 'intellectual' present there had introduced them stating that they were the very modern artists of India promoting western awareness in their country... In the West the tradition of the modern man is a dying tradition. There, the modern art passed through the self-oriented consciousness of Modigliani and moved towards what was completely object-oriented... I count the Western civilisation as dying, not the Western man. Many thinking souls out there are against their own civilisation.

VB: What do you have to say about the fitful attempts in India to make a 'superstar' out of a modern artist on the strength of money and glamour?

JS: Most of the artists are quite shrewd. But this opinion need not be extended to their art... When the economy in a society is driven by market forces then every man has to put up a constant fight...  I am not suggesting that this is all right. There must be artists out there who are beyond such material concerns but most of them introduce themselves quite aggressively... But a majority of them is alert to market forces. It would be a misguided belief to expect that an artist could change the whole society within his lifetime. In that case he should give up his work and devote himself solely to bringing about social transformation. Other than the marketplace where else does the artist have a dialogue with society? The easel and the painting will remain an artist's personal property and not the people's and that's the truth.

VB: Only a narrow class of viewers is interested in your art. Do you sometimes get depressed by this?

JS: The fewer the viewers the better. Two, four, ten... I don't look out for too many of them. Even if one of them is able to find what he may be looking for...

VB: Birds, mountains etc. are the familiar faces of your work today. Do they signify repetitiousness? As an artist what is your level of awareness about this tendency?

JS: In the last 18 years my art has passed through five well-defined phases which is quite a lot. What happens is that when you see a recognisable object, and notice it time and again, then you come to 'feel' it's repetition. . Either you are doing less or doing more; nothing is the same every time. The artists who continue to alter their narrative or subject-objects, even in their case the colour scheme and the range remain the same. On seeing one of my paintings you cannot say with certainty that it's Swaminathan's line. I do not have a particularly special way of drawing a bird. In my art the 'form' does not originate with a point. That is there as if already in place. That's why when Geeta Kapur compares me with Paul Klee, it's not the right comparison. I regard Klee highly. But I never followed Klee's artistic aims. In Klee's art and in the development of his line there's a rhythm, whereas for me the line already exists.

VB: Among your early experiences what is it that you consider important in your development as an artist?

JS: In my childhood, while at school, I had only two passions Hindi poetry and painting... In the final years of my school and the early years of my college days I wrote a large number of songs.

VB: What is it in particular among your early days which you find significant?

JS: Difficult to say. I had very strong romantic inclinations within me. I kept Jigar [Moradabadi] Saheb in high esteem. I even set out to write his biography... My father was in the government service. The life was at the level of a babu. I was quite attracted by this contrast. Like a devotee totally given over to the worship of god, he would completely immerse himself in the world of poesy.

VB: You tend to devote a lot of time to the Akademi. Don't you feel inconvenienced?

JS: I do feel a lot of inconvenience. But I take up such assignments prompted by a sense of social responsibility. Sometimes I feel defeated as well... But it's also in my nature to struggle so as to have my say as well as my space. Many leading artists, who feel disillusioned after long years of association with the Akademi, might change their opinion if the circumstances again become favourable. During the last Trienniale the late Rosenberg had said that this kind of work was essential the struggle to get approval for a movement whereas Morris Graves...  was so scared on seeing the burgeoning crowds of Calcutta that he was driven to return to America. But we are surviving in this situation.

This interview was originally published in Ravivar (1979), in Hindi which was a newsweekly by Anandbazar Group