On view till September 4, 2012
Essay
A Floating Object
In his speech to the International Congress of Aesthetics in
2007, Gulammohammed Sheikh says, referring to the folios that comprised of the
Hamza Nama
‘The most striking example of the Mughal experiment are the large folios
of Hamza Nama in which about a hundred artists worked over a period of fifteen
years (1562-1577) to illustrate Persian tales of a rebel who is often
identified with the uncle to the Prophet. Despite the Perso-Arabic location of
the narrative, which also includes exploits of the hero in distant lands, the
stories are totally set in the Indian context, with local flora and fauna,
architecture, and dramatis personae derived from a variety of racial types.
What is most significant is the fact that the collective nature of the work
does not result in a cacophonic collage, but projects an image of multiple
visions, each in relation to as well as independent from the others. For
instance, the tenor of loud faience patterns matches the animated intensity of
figures, keeping the spatial planes alive with resilient tensions. This reveals
in some respects a quality of life – of living together of communities, each
with a definite view of the world in dialectic interaction with the other.
Difference is not a sign of disorder or disunity.’[i]
Gulam’s works have explored multiplicities
and simultaneity[ii].
He says,
‘My interest in these
forms triggered the exploration of multiple portrayals, without a linear
sequentiality, with an intrinsic order that would hold it all together. So if
you worked with a frame as I did, the question was how to break it, and bring
multiple stories within its borders with several entries and exists, to enable
the viewer to enter from one story into the other: either from the point he
chose or the points that the paintings would suggest.’[iii]
In taking a leaf from the works of Gulam, this exhibition is
structured outward. Threads are drawn from the center of each work, reaching
outward to link with other centers but are not intended to form a composite
whole. The works themselves form a center from which planes and angles emerge
that may or may not coincide with the planes and angles emanating from other
works. Gulam’s Mappa-mundi series is based on the Ebstorf Map, itself created
sometime in the thirteenth century, is an example of a Medieval European map of
the world. In the ancient map, the known world is represented with a circle and
perspective within the map -of the people, places, roads and animals that
inhabit this world- is geared towards the eye of the viewer. In the same
manner, Gulam’s Mappa-mundi also shifts perspective toward the eye of the
viewer. As such Gulam’s work however, incorporates several openings, spaces
between the roads and pathways into which the viewer walks and finds that hilltops
are leaning toward bottom, while in another section, one sees cranes hanging
upside down. In the center, a fort like building, painted in by Gulam,
interrupts a panoramic photograph of Jerusalem, while underneath Japanese trees
extend downwards like roots into soil. The image of the map thus incorporates
multiple images seen from multiple perspectives, in one place delineated by the
circle formed around them.
This ‘opening of an image
in time’ [iv]also
subjects time to a border as indicated by the circle, suggesting perhaps that
this world and all its components are this
world, and as such despite the border around its elements send the idea of time
in several directions at once. In other words simultaneity extends not only to
the multiple images but also to the time they inhabit, indicating that time is
both a wave and a particle to paraphrase the theory of light.
Rather like the notes of The
Waste Land, the works of Gulam should come with footnotes and references.
Much like the poem (which is now widely regarded as incomplete without
footnotes) however, the multitude of images, stories, lives and times in Gulam’s
works speak in several voices and in a multitude of languages, underlined by
the choices, or rather the non-choices of their author, and communicate the
rhythmed nuance or structure that permeates the multiverses he creates within
the visual image itself.
‘The world as it came to me, however, came almost invariably manifold,
plural or at least dual in form. In art, painting came in the company of poetry
and images from life lived, from other times, from painting, sometimes from
literature, and often from nowhere, emerging together through scribbled
drawings and words. The multiplicity and simultaneity of these worlds filled me
with a sense of being part of them all. Attempts to define the experience in
singular terms have left me uneasy and restless; absence of rejected worlds has
haunted me throughout.’[v]
For Gulam, the experience of
living and working in India carries an additional resonance. He says,
‘… (It) means living simultaneously in several cultures and
times. One often walks into “medieval” situations, and runs into “primitive”
people. The past exists as a living entity alongside the present, each
illuminating and sustaining the other. As times and cultures converge, the
citadels of purism explode. Traditional and modern, private and public, the
inside and outside continually telescope and reunite. The kaleidoscopic flux of
images engages me to construe structures in the process of being created.
Like the many-eyed and many-armed archetype of an Indian child,
soiled with multiple visions, I draw my energy from the source.’[vi]
Gulam has created multiverses
that are rooted in historical fact and fiction. Influenced by Sienese painting
which was, ‘…an act of love offered with
tenderness, humility, and passionate conviction. Every surface of paint
simmered with a feeling of touch, with the result that the walls in the
paintings smelled of human warmth’. He is also firmly rooted in the nature
of multitude of narratives, where the characters and the physical attributes of
a location rather than a framework indicate location. So a work is not wholly
site specific (with the exception of City for Sale) in as much as experience
based, mingling with specifics related to memory, history, tales and folklore
and a leveling of time.
The physicality of the work draws the viewer into the pathways that
cross those of the printed image and the painted image and there is a distinct
discursive and educational aspect to the work. In particular the physicality of
a meandering allows for a contemplation that is natural, and not framed or
forced as such, and where the edges of comprehension spread far beyond the
visible edges of the paper. The encapsulation of lived experiences, told tales,
and narrated fictions are also in part physical recordings of journeys real and
imagined, on part of the artist, which we as viewers are invited to take. As
such there is also an abstract construct in place that enlarges the parameters
of the work by removing any attempt on part of the viewer to envision a linear
narrative.
Gulam’s works also have a
poetic logic which incorporates, the languages of memory (personal as well as
collective), contexts (historical and contemporary) and structures (pictorial
and conceptual) coalescing in a unique logic of the imagination, that permits a
view of history as without perspective and a mode of composition that does not
forget the past but incorporates it and moves beyond it to offer a space of
contemplation. Lastly, Gulam’s work goes beyond the limitations of coherent
logic while conveying the deep complexity and truth of the hidden phenomenon
and impalpable connections of life, while offering us, the viewer the
opportunity to discern the lines of the poetic design of being.
Tushar Joag describes himself as a public intervention artist,
who uses a combination of satire with an acute sense of the ecosystem within
which his chosen subjects – the objects that are both man made and organic -
participate. Fiction, fantasy and fabrication abound in his work but also
underscore the appropriated mythologies that lend themselves to molded formulation.
Tushar draws from comic book figures (superheroes), from the farce of authority
(postboxes), from practical concerns to quixotic ones (Shanghai Couch), but more often than not they come together to form
composites unconfined by the outer edges of the possible.
In Pests, Joag creates
a fantasy that plays with reality in such a way that the former can easily be
taken for the latter, but which also recalls visually the vision of filmmaker/director,
Guillermo Del Toro mixed in with a healthy dose of farce. Bulldozers with wings
populate the skyline, humming one thinks, in anticipation of the planned
bulldozing of the building at center of the image, which for its part is trying
in vain to escape. The skyline of Mumbai in the background flickers between the
leaves and flowers that cover the base of the building in the foreground. The
building façade forms a face with its balcony acting as a stretched out mouth,
and Mickey Mouse ears cap off its roof. The addition of Mickey Mouse ears to
the face of the building recalls the world of Disney which, in the words of
John Berger, ‘is charged with vain
violence. The ultimate catastrophe is always in the offing.[vii]’
The catastrophe in this case: its demolition. The tilting tower –at the other
end of the building, turns into a symbol of the ineptitude of construction,
echoing the tower of Pisa, and more specifically the older (Victorian)
construction that is particular to the architecture of pre-independence Mumbai.
New construction looms in the background. The building balances itself on its
two hind feet, which in this case, seem to be taken from the feet of the four
lions of the Ashoka Stambh.
Sudhir Patwardhan’s Couple,
oil on canvas from 1976, seems to refer to the teeming yet constrictive
nature of the people living in Mumbai. In Couple
a man and a woman sit side by side, the woman’s torso faces forward while her
head faces right, away from the man. The man sits with one hand in his lap and
one on the woman’s thigh. Set within the brooding dark background, which
offsets the skin of the couple, the portrait of an intimate space, a dark
brooding alienating space, echoing repressive sexuality mingled with discontent
and stoic acceptance. The skin of the couple is glowing in some parts of the
upper torso, the color of golden beetroots in the sun, while in the lower half,
deeper yellow ochre. A few sections of the skin ranging from vivid green to
bruised and darkened browns and rust, suggests decay, and fear. The work is
both evocative and deeply disturbing and presents the couple as figures that
speak of isolation and familiarity echoing the nature of the human, as an
individual and as a part of a whole, constantly negotiating between the sense
of the incomplete and the inevitable.
In Sumedh Rajendran’s collages and sculptures, form creates - even
as it morphs with the inorganic - a fluidity that is powerful and precarious.
Sculptures mounted on the wall or fabricated within collages attest to the
fragility of form in space, and display the gaps between the reaches of each
material. The gaps between each material, whether of white background space –
usually a wall - or in the case of free standing sculptures, are the breathing
nodes of his works. It is through these nodes that Sumedh’s works speak of the
incongruence of the objects he assembles, as well as the weight of the material
they are fabricated in. His figures are weighted forward and backward to
others. They are melded together to sometimes lean on each other. All this
occurs without a firm back grounding, and this particular mode activates the
space around these figures. It activates a longing for support, alongside the
subtle fear of falling over, but more importantly it activates in return the
figures and objects. In this particular work, Sumedh activates the space by
creating a distant horizon, a looming set of mountains across whose plane the
figure of the man and dog, conjoined together are placed at center. The figures
are linked to the mountains in the distance by a winding thin line of road.
In Ranjit Hoskote’s essay for the catalogue, ‘Final Call’, Hoskote
says,
‘The objects assembled together to form ‘Final Call’ , although they are
developed around the friction between incongruous entities fused together, are
deliberately engineered: they are signs of the complex and interdependent life
that this planet leads, where every participant in the existential process
likely imperil every other.’
It is the absurdity and the incongruence of the objects used and the
material that catches our imagination. Rather than illustrating a specific
idea, its function is to startle us with the authentcity of the actions
inherent in the associations between material, object and space, and the depth
of the artistic images formed. Sumedh’s works
have a fluid, sensous yet jarring
version of reality at odds with itself –isolated and multifarious- playing on
space that is open yet within the confines of form, with the absense of an
obvious grounding element which is instead indicated by the fluidity and malleability
of the materials used.
In contrast there is a brooding quality to the still life
photographs of Prajakta Potnis’ works. In a confined space, we are given access
to the private life of a vegetable while it ruminates its mortality. The frame
of the still life – the inside of a refrigerator - partially darkened, serves
as a room, a private space - while the subjects of the still life – a
cauliflower, groups of tomatoes - form portraits. But there is a duality inherent in the shelf
life of a vegetable in a refrigerator and the growth of other bodies (organic)
that attach themselves to the vegetable as it sits in hibernation. The time
element between portraiture (eternal) conflicts with that of a living thing
(transient) within a space that is intended as a tomb. Amidst these frictions,
the irrepressibility of growth in whatever form (seeping, crawling, gestating
and perhaps encroaching) becomes a nefarious action; a hidden act of survival
in mutated form.
There is no escaping the implication of the contact between the
organic and the inorganic. In Potnis’ case, the battleground is a private
affair carried out within the confines of the organic body, where the action
occurs in terms of change and violence within the body, at a microscopic level,
rather like the faces of George Condo’s portraits, where the interaction
between subject and environment entombs itself on the face of the subject by
way of organic growth that is just below the skin, pulling the face in a
grotesque parody of court jesters. It is the growth reaction that sets off a
melancholy in the environment. In contrast, the works of Sumedh and Joag
indicate an awareness in the inorganic, a playfulness, and a willingness of the
inorganic, the man made, to conjoin with the organic, where the conflict is oft
times, not couched in overtly antagonistic terms yet has wider implications
that stem from without rather than from within the organic. The three works
postulate together, the transference of consciousness from organic matter to
inorganic matter that is physical and material, the ordered organic and the
unexpected eruptive/disruptive fractures of unstoppable mutations/growth, and
the absurdity and inevitability of such mutations.
In K. P. Reji’s works on canvas the line between private and
public is deliberately blurred; as such a frame is removed. Just as the walls
in his constructions of houses are removed and stripped of their protective
measures, so are the protagonists of their garb. Reji’s works usually work as
tableaus, with several figures performing acts on/within the same visual plane.
The removal of hierarchies, of planes of action effectively removes comparisons
of inside and outside. Yet again there is a conflict between the acts of being
and the transient nature of being. More
importantly there is subtle friction between the two that also extends to the
telling of disjointed narratives, occurring simultaneously on the same plane.
Zakkir Hussain’s works on
paper are inhabited by strange creatures. Mutilated, funny, pathetic and evocative, they give off
a sense of intense psychological churn bordering on the disruptive. This
violence of vision, thought and internal struggle, manifests itself in bold and
disturbing visuals that draw us into a nether world within. Sometimes quiet and
at others aroused and bursting outward, serving as a reminder that at a micro
or a macro level we have to contend with ourselves.
Gieve Patel’s bronze sculptures from the Eklavya/Daphne series provide in this exhibition a nexus between
‘branching and breaking’[viii].
Taken from Greco-Roman mythology and Indian mythology, the stories of a water
nymph (Daphne) who rejects the love of Apollo and is transformed into a laurel
by the Gods to escape the attentions of the Sun God, and Eklavya, a young
prince of a confederation of jungle tribes who, in order to enhance his
knowledge teaches himself archery, but attains such skill that he quickly
becomes a threat to the ruling order, who demand that in return for scholarship,
for knowledge so attained he provide payment by presenting his right thumb
severed from its hand to his teacher. Thus returning the knowledge attained by
unsanctioned learning. In the words of
Ranjit Hoskote,
‘Both Daphne and Eklavya
are figures maimed or ruined by forces that demanded their submission: the
nymph who defies the sun-god’s lust, the hunter who dares to equal the
warrior-prince, both punished for their transgression. Patel interprets both
figures, and other presences from myth, dream and waking life, with the energy
of an artist responding vigorously to the promptings of his material. The
impress of the shaping hand is everywhere in these works: in the textures of
flow and knot; in heads that turn sharply on their shoulders; in the twisting
of a wrist and the torsion of a female body that is vulnerable as a girl and
resilient as the earth; in mouths that open to allow water and weeds to gush
out, images that mark a persistence of concern from Patel’s paintings, being
strongly reminiscent of such paintings of Patel’s from the 1980s as ‘Crushed
Head’ and ‘Drowned Woman’. Breaking and branching are the crucial movements
that captivate his attention: nodes of pain, but also of growth.’
This nexus of growth and
pain is echoed by the transgression of hierarchies that dictate the linear
transference of knowledge -which assumes superiority- as well as the physical
nature of conquest. In both, the physical precedes and conquers the nature of
knowledge (reason, harmony and the transfer of knowledge), while recourse or
survival occurs only in the physical realm (the transfer of consciousness into
a different physical matter and the payment of a thumb as a token of
knowledge). However the gap between the physical and the state into which
knowledge is contained is not as vast as it may seem. Knowledge is also
ingrained into the memory of the body, into the organs of the body, such as the
skin, sense, smell etc, all of which form memory along with a physical
impression. Using the fingers for example to transfer memory, sense and feel by
using a physical material to create a form also underlines the above while
creating a transference of consciousness that leaves an indelible impression in
the form of the solidity of form; a body of evidence that states the fact of a
physical presence. To go from ideas of
knowledge to the physical nature of knowledge (whether carnal or skill based)
the body is needed as a mediator. In the case of Gieve Patel’s works the
placement of the body in a physical form not only delineates the lingering
presence of a body but also informs the landscape and the absence that it may
form into and out of. The presence and the absence of a body, its surroundings
and the forms it may take, to transfer consciousness, knowledge or simply its
own potential for abstraction forms an imprint that resonates with its own
unique tonality.
The effort of the exhibition is to extend multiplicity and
simultaneity to the collection of works herein. They are not linked by a linear
narrative, concept or theme. However they are bordered by the walls of the
space within which they are simultaneously exhibited, and are also therefore
free to activate the space they inhabit, free to associate with other works, as
incongruent absurdities in relation to one another, as rhizomatic connections,
as interruptions of hierarchies or a discordant strum of poetic logic,
unfolding in privately held time or publically and collectively acknowledged
time. They provide multiple visions, spaces, and narratives.
Furthermore they create open-ended movements that generate
transference of consciousness of form and content and the incongruent nature of
reality and fictions, and rather than display a fixedity in narrative form,
they seek shifting modes through which to travel. As such each artist forms a
center, where each work is treated on its own terms and left free to associate
with other centers.
The attempt is also to engage the viewer to view time as a
uniquely individual concern rather than a linear structure that runs throughout
the exhibition. To go further, the works in the exhibition though thematically,
contextually and in form, are and can be seen as disparate objects, they can
also be seen as objects whose established history and place in a canon as being
separate from the works themselves, although available to lend context (though
it is up to the viewer to seek history), and it is in this co-dependence yet
isolation where each work takes on a character and an individuality that allows
a viewer to choose their own entry and exit.
Renuka Sawhney August 7, 2012
Renuka Sawhney is a writer based in New York.
[i] International
Congress of Aesthetics 2007 “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures” Among Several
Cultures and Times Gulammohammed Sheikh
[ii] Horn Please, In Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh.
[iii] Horn Please, In Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh.
[iv] Horn Please, In Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh.
[v] International
Congress of Aesthetics 2007 “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures” Among Several
Cultures and Times Gulammohammed
Sheikh
[vi] Catalogue, “Place for People”.
Bombay and New Delhi, 1981
[vii] Francias Bacon and Walt Disney (1972) by John Berger
[viii] To Break and to Branch, Ranjit Hoskote
