Three Questions by Artists and Three Unpalatable Answers

(Ram Kinkar Baij)

In Baroda, during my month long sojourn as a Guest Faculty I came face to face with three pertinent questions: one, should an artist be vocal about his work? Why the senior artists are not experimenting? Why curatorial note and the works of art exhibited against its context look so disparate?

The first two questions came from a young practicing artist and the third question came from a couple of Art History students who did Curatorial Module under my guidance. To be very frank, the first two questions amused me a lot for the simple reason that these had been ‘the’ pressing and irritating questions that the artists of the yester years too faced/raised. And they still remain. I was rather sad after listening to the third question because from the students and also from my personal experience I knew that many artists are still clueless about the curator’s role in their profession.

Let me try to answer these questions one by one:

An artist need not necessarily be vocal about his works. Having said that I should add that there is no harm if an artist could talk about his work intelligently. There are many artists who still feel that they are born to create and not to talk and they falsely believe that talking is not a creative act. Talking could be a creative act and at times it could move people more than a work of art would. There are several artists even today who are very good story tellers and myth makers (about themselves) who would eventually bring all those stories to their works, which are apparently less narrative but more emblematic.

(Nandlal Bose)

So there are two strong opinions about an artist vocalising (about) his/her works. One, one could elaborate upon the visual using verbal means. Two, you could be sparse in words but could be eloquent in your silence. There are sub-categories in these two too: one, some elaborates a lot because there is nothing other than those words in their works. Two, some remain silent because there is nothing to talk about those works. These two are negative categories. Now let us think about two positive categories. One, artists talk about their works because they work with certain concepts and ideas and such verbal elucidations are prerequisite to put across the meaning of the visuals and vice versa. Two, some artists remain silent because they know that they are lucid enough in their works because their notions and actions do not differ much in their works.

There are artists who talk a lot about their works because they think that talking about the works makes them look intelligent and their works intellectual kind. There are artists who remain silent because of exactly the same reason! During 1990s, when post-modernism became fashionable thing in Indian art scene, artists started working with ephemeral objects and non-tangible ideas. Hence, they needed to speak out about the reasons behind such works of art. Then there came this scenario when idea overtook the visual expressions; there too the artists were expected to talk more about the visual side of the works than the visuals could talk about themselves. Then slowly, with anything as visuals, if you were capable enough to talk intelligently and convincingly, you could pass it off as intelligent works of art. Those people didn’t understand either the visuals or the artists talk remained the exclusive discursive realm of such art and felt a lot inadequate. This resulted into a lot of fakery and shallow talk on anything. There came to have a scenario when you need to go back to a library after visiting an exhibition.

(Benode Behari Mukherjee)

In the other extreme case scenario, artists remain silent or talk about other things but their art, most do so mainly because they do their art out of impulse and out of ‘divine’ inspiration. This was a modernist notion that artists created works because they were divinely inspired. Ram Kinkar Baij was an artist like that but at the same time he had Nandlal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee as his predecessors and contemporaries who in fact had done a lot of talking and ideating both verbally and visually. This had not denied them of their share of divine inspiration and also did not exclude Baij from having a share in the intellectual pie. We can see that the artists who followed the Santiniketan tradition became more like the talkers and ideologues of that school than the exceptional one like Baij even when they vouch in his name. Look at K.G.Subramanyan, A.Ramachandran and many others who all follow this philosopher-combo pack as established by the doyens like Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandlal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee. One could see that none became ‘like’ Baij though they all idolized him because to be Baij-like was the most difficult proposition for any artist. Baij’s silence on his works came from the fact that the works were self explanatory whereas all the other doyens needed a premise to establish their visual language. Sometimes silence is golden but to have golden silence you need to excise all the brass and copper from your existence.

Hence, I would say one could talk if the works demand talking. One could remain silent if one’s personality is inclined to silence and also he/she feels that there is nothing much to talk about. But as far as a critic is concerned (in that case a historian and a curator too), whether there is verbal text or visual text or a text with no words, it all functions more or less alike.  For the critic (an intelligent and perceptive one), visual as well as verbal texts coming from an artist is the primary text which is liable to be deconstructed and reconstructed, analysed, appreciated or discarded against the historical knowledge/s. So is the silent text; silence is also a text which could be dissected with the circumstantial texts, accidental texts, peripheral texts and so on. Hence, it is not necessary for an artist to talk; talk only when he/she has an intelligent and sensitive statement to make. Even if an artist talks a lot, even if he/she brings a whole lot of knowledge system to substantiate the visual side of a work of art, then too, one need not be impressed by that because the verbal texts could really overtake the visual text, nullifying the latter in the process. Chances are less to happen the other way round. Whenever there is a powerful image that stands closer to the mediatised knowledge visually or verbally, this becomes self referential and is passed across easily. Today’s artists, in that case, find the biggest challenge from a knowledgeable society that just does not wan to take artists statements just because it is said by an artist.

(KG Subramanyan)

The second question is whether the senior artists are to do experiments with their visual franca or not. I do not think that the senior artists are ‘expected’ to make any visual experiments. And if someone makes none can stop them also. Artists like Christian Boltansky, Aneesh Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Ai Wei Wei and so on are not young. They still make experiments with their art because they are dealing with the mediatised concepts, ideas and philosophies. They are the kind of artists who constantly respond to the society, the changing socio-economic and political systems, cultural making and so on. So their art cannot remain stagnant. That does not mean that an artist like Krishen Khanna or A.Ramachandran has grown stagnant only because they have been painting in a certain way for quite some time. There are artists who have experimented enough to reach a ‘formal style’ and they find their formalism is capable enough to express their personal responses to the society or any other aspect. For many, art is like a form of living; just like gardening or growing vegetables in the backyard. They do the same thing but get pleasure out of it. There are some artists who have the attitude of the trekkers; some trekkers go to the same terrain to do trekking and some other each time find a new and more difficult terrain. Age is not a limit there. So I would say that any artist who is continuing with a particular style for long time, we should be lenient enough to see his/her work as a sort of gardening and a lively process that gives him/her enough pleasure and life sustenance. Young artists are like young dogs and monkeys; very intelligent and inquisitive. They could dare climates and opinions and come up with elegance and atrocities as well. Let them, that’s all I could say.

(A Ramachandran)

Regarding the question about the curatorial disparities: Curators are generally well meaning people who want to ideate through works of art and through a project. I am not talking about those curators who by virtue of having no editors or no censorship in the country on this front call themselves curators. I am talking about the people who are curators, trained academically and have a considerable number of years of experience in the field to back them up.

My students told me that when they talked to a couple of senior artists in the said show (which they went to see and found the discrepancies in what was shown and what was said), they talked very disparagingly about the curator (the curator who is appointed by the gallery to which the artists have pledged their lives, dignity and works) and said that curator or no curator they are not going to respond to any curatorial ideas. Their job is to make art and whatever be the curatorial point they are going to present only what they want to. I know these two artists; they are senior ones and one of them calls himself a scientist and a philosopher.

In fact, those artists who agree to participate in a curated project and then overthrow the curatorial ideas and present whatever they want are to be called as ‘beings sired by many’. I say ‘sired by many’ because when you agree to participate in a curatorial project you are making a social and cultural pact with the curator whoever he or she is. That pact is more valuable that the art that one does in the studio. The moment an artist agrees to be a part of a curatorial project, he makes a commitment with the curator in the joined ideation, which does not allow an artist have his whims and fancies. Curatorial projects are controlled fissions and fusions. To understand this, artists should grow brains. The arrogant artists are to be called self serving creatures and should be treated as enemies of culture and people.

(all images are for representational purpose only. image courtesy internet)

The Artist/s who Predicted the Kerala Deluge: KT Mathai, Rajan Krishnan and Sukesan Kanka

(KT Mathai with Climacterics. 2008 pic courtesy The Hindu)

Do you remember an exhibition titled ‘Fairy Tales from a Lost Land’ by artist KT Mathai? This exhibition was held exactly ten years back at a private gallery in Kochi. During the last ten years Mathai’s style has changed but his concerns remain the same; his perennial love and reverence for the mother earth. The people and locale that come in his paintings repetitively have transformed to take some ethereal and beyond the real forms; but they all hover around, play, worship, dance, whirl and mourn in and over the same land; his land, his village, the village that he loves, the village that he refuses to move away, the village where he was born, brought and has now set up his life. He has been the chronicler of the village Arakkunnam, near Eranakulam which has taken the shape of another Macondo in his visual narratives.

I pick out Mathai out of the whole lot of artists in Kerala today not because others are irrelevant but Mathai is more relevant than anybody that I could think of. When none was listening he was sending his silent yet loud visual warnings to his state; his works captured the scars created by the earth movers, JCBs as they are fondly called, all over the places. His works apparently looked so appealing in their reds, greens and blues. While the green stood for the overpowering but slowly diminishing green cover of the state the blues represented the fluid nature; the rivers. What made the paintings move beyond the romantic renderings of a recluse artist and made them starkly political (a word which was not in vogue perhaps a decade back) were the red patches that added visual rhythm to the paintings. They were in fact the gnawed portion of rich earth by the avarice of the human kind; the land mafia protected by local lords and political overlords.

(Another Climacterics by KT Mathai)

Mathai did not say that a landslide was in the offing. Nor did he predict any flood and deluge. But what he did in his paintings was the depiction of the damage that the human beings were inflicting upon the very earth which in fact providing home even to her tormentors. Mathai’s was not an aggressive artistic stance. He knew that he could not fight the land mafia. But he kept his guard as high as possible and upped his antennas always. Like a concerned citizen, whenever he got an opportunity he exhibited the works that framed the scars of earth. They were overtly beautiful so that even the blood of the earth looked like piece of visual treat. His work ‘Climacterics’ says it all. One of his works had an image of his young son playing with a JCB Plastic Toy while at a distance the real JCBs were performing their vandalism.

Ten years down the line, we see the landslides, exactly at the places where Mathai would have painted. But we know that none heeds the warning signals sent by an artist in his works. They may buy it and finish its critical journey and confine it into some drawing rooms. Journalists may breast beat in their reports covering the exhibitions. Eventually nothing happens. But Mathai has been relentless. In 2012 April he did a performance titled ‘Transparent Pact’ in collaboration with his village Arakkunnam and the parish there. He brought a blessed sapling from the church and took it out in a village procession as it were the crucifix icon and planted at a clearing opened up by the JCBs over a period of land mining. I had given a cover story to Mathai in the Art and Deal magazine which I was editing then. And I attach my blog link on the same performance and my views on it (http://johnyml.blogspot.com/2012/04/transparent-pact-performance-for-our.html). At times people should heed to what artists are trying to say. They need not be overtly political or social activists-kind of artists. They could be as simple as an artist like Mathai. Often prophets look very ordinary.

(works by Rajan Krishnan)

When I write about KT Mathai’s works, I have to mention the works of Rajan Krishnan, who while living, tirelessly depicted the receding line of Kandal forests, which were the repositories of rain water and rare fauna. Kandal forests were taken over by high rises and bungalows. And today you see rich and the powerful, just like the ordinary mortals, standing on the second floor terraces and balconies folding hands and pleading to be evacuated from their waterlogged homes. Rajan painted the scenes after the apocalypse has already happened. He had envisioned such a scenario, while Mathai knew the silence before the storm. 

(Kara by Sukesan Kanka)

We have another mad prophet among us in the guise of Sukesan Kanka who has recently painted a work titled ‘Kara’(Shore) and has been fighting a local fight back in Thrissur to save environment. The fight might have looked like a tussle between egoistic neighbors. But Sukesan has a point to say. If you make boundary walls everywhere what you make are future floods. He said it in early this year when he presented the work ‘Kara’ in a solo exhibition titled ‘Min(d)rive’ in February 2018. In Kara you see a sort of breaking away of land masses and in each piece you see a human/saintly being gesticulating each other, perhaps underlining the absurdity of the human acts that create ruptures all over. On the right side of the painting one could see a visionary pointing out to the horizon as if to show the impending doom. But we need a deluge to realize that the earth under our feet is being washed away. 

The Last Temptation of S.H.Raza and the Question of Authenticity

(SH Raza. source net)

The Raza Foundation, New Delhi mounts a show of Syed Hyder Raza’s ‘last works’ in Delhi’s Triveni Art Gallery. According to one of the Trustees of the Foundation, Ashok Vajpayee, ‘the major works from this period are with the artist’s favourite galleries. What we see here are the ones that the departed artist had ‘willed’ to the foundation from his private collection. The very next day of the show’s opening a young artist had raised some doubts about the ‘authenticity’ of these works. As per the rumours (as in the case of many artists who are dead and gone), this young artist felt that the works on display were ‘fakes’ or were done by someone else and got ‘signed by’ an ailing Raza. “If it was authentic,” an irritated young artist said, “why they felt it important to have a video of the artist on the wheelchair sitting before a canvas and making very slow, deliberate and laboured strokes on the canvas, shown in the gallery?”

I am an art critic quite familiar with the ‘fake’ and ‘forgery’ theories doing rounds in the art scene. Occasionally, I too have commented on that topic. Even when Raza was alive and more or less everyone in the art scene in Delhi knew that he was incapacitated to certain extent, the Foundation was posting pictures of the artist at the canvas working diligently from a wheelchair. Like many I too had then thought that the Foundation could have been a bit more discreet in this matter and they should have saved the images for a later date. Somewhere, the Foundation felt that it was imperative to have the ‘working’ Raza’s pictures in the public domain to prove that the works that had already been under the cloud of doubt were in fact the ones done by the artist himself however fragile and hardly driven he was. One does not need to learn rocket science to understand that those efforts of the Foundation were carefully orchestrated for registering the authenticity of Raza’s work thereby making indelible and indisputable provenances for the future auction markets. Nothing wrong with it, I say.

(The Raza Show by the Raza Foundation. all pics from Raza foundation face book page)

Subtlety, yes ‘subtlety’ could have been the best policy in this matter, as I suggested elsewhere, which could have saved the Foundation from the stains of suspicion. According to me in the case of Raza, he needed no other authentication than his own creative career, devoted collector base, loving gallerists, authentic auction records and a number of artists who he had personally mentored, and innumerable visitors and admirers who used to register the moments and works through various modes that include photographs, diary entries, journals, blogs, articles, videos and so on. There are only a few artists in Indian art scene whose works are strictly documented from their modernist origins to till date. Of them I would count Raza leading the pack along with K.G.Subramanyan, A.Ramachandran, Bhupen Khakkar, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Neelima Sheikh, Manu Parekh, Madhvi Parekh, Paramjit Singh, Arpita Singh, Ved Nayyar and Gogi Saroj Pal. Most of them had/have galleries that have been working diligently to prevent spill over, interpolations, inauthentic additions and unexpected disputes.

The seams of a collection of works by an artist or a set of artists that seem well stitched and finished might pose some unsavoury moments and hurdles for the secondary market as well as the auction market. The fluidity and porosity of the boundaries of a collection or to be precise, the works of an artist or the artists cultivated by the auction houses and secondary market/s, ironically help the market for those artists grow as more and more works get added to the stream with carefully constructed authenticities and provenances. It is ironical mainly because an auction market functions on authenticity of the wares that it brings under the hammer but at the same time, the fluid edges of the market allow the entry of the works with no proven provenances and through various processes of tests and researches let them to gain authenticity therefore long term legitimacy. We have never seen what happens to a work of art whose authenticity is publicly questioned. We do not have any evidence of it after its withdrawal; whether it is destroyed or kept aside or suspended for authentication or re-introduced elsewhere in another time.

(from the show)

However, the auction market players do not have want to take much of a risk these days. Auction houses are, like the art fairs, facilitating market/business agencies that do not have any hold on the conditions and circumstances a work of art or an artefact is created. Nor do they have any power to alter the genius of the artists so that the works of art could be produced according to certain pre-existing market parameters. But if we look at the scene more realistically, we come to know that such helpless platforms decide eventually the quality of a work of art. That means, the erstwhile neutral platforms become involved participants in judging what is permissible and what is not. So a really authentic work of art could be thrown out by an auction house thereby nullify its very existence anywhere in the art habitat, and in the meanwhile it could simply create absolute No Nos into major works of art. That would be writing the requiem for the galleries, museums, trusts and foundations. With the arrival of auction houses a lot of job opportunities in the art market have now become a thing of history. Art historians, critics, art writers, art consultants, small scale galleries, experimental spaces and so on have lost their relevance and have been replaced by auction house experts.

This has created a counter situation where the existing galleries, fairs, museums, big time dealers have come together to create their own provenances and authenticities for the works of art and artists they are dealing with. Making their provenances indisputable is the primary concerns of most of the major galleries today. One can see why galleries like Delhi Art Gallery and Chemould Art Gallery underline the authenticity of their works through heavy publications. The unprecedented involvement of the auction houses in the art market has started threatening the existence of the galleries and small scale private museums. Crony capitalism is the result of it. A very few galleries, museums and Trusts are literally trusted by the auction houses; and a major chunk of the galleries are simply thrown out of the game by casting doubts on the works that they deal with. Go to a small gallery and find a Husain or a Raza there, your primary reaction is that ‘it must be a fake’ whereas it must be authentic and purchased with hard earned money. But what it lacks is an artist’s authentication certificate or related papers. So the scene has become quite Orwellian; someone can prove that you don’t exist or you have never existed.

(from the show)

That could be one reason why the Raza Foundation is extra careful about creating authenticities for the works that are willed to them by the departed artists. However, at present I am not here to cast aspersions on the authenticity of these works of art. I see this exhibition in a different perspective. Works done between 2011 and 2016 are exhibited here and as they are done by an ailing artist, we cannot say that they are his masterpieces at the same time we cannot say that they are ‘minor’ works either. They are works of art by an artist who even when he was partially immobile due to age and ailments had the grit to hold his brushes and work on the canvases placed before him. Perhaps, more than oxygen cylinders and other life supporting systems could, these art paraphernalia could help him live on as if her were following a flickering light which gives the impression of being inert and mobile at the same time. The strength and surety of strokes vary depending on the health conditions; hence you may see a work in 2012 pretty weak while a work in 2015 of the same kind quite strong. Raza, I think might have sought the help of assistants to do the basic diagrams and the colour filling is all done by himself, it seems for Raza if it is not about his colours and the way of application, they could be anybody’s. I salute the spirit of the artist who has even gone to remember his Fauvist and Impressionist days quite subconsciously in his works. In one of the horizontal works he even creates a sort of convex mirror illusions through some unsteady brush strokes. The evocative strokes of the smaller works underline the fact that this artist had the creative strength in him. One could use all the jargons that are generally used for authenticating the abstract works. But I do not want to pick up even one of those words. These works of Raza are more ‘authentic’ than his previous works I believe because each work here shows how he literally lived his life in them; they were irregular spells may be but life is after all life. Raza did not retire from art. Life retired from him. So was the case of artists like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Henri Matisse and our own K.G.Subramanyan.

  

Tom Vattakkuzhy: Painting as Alchemy

(Tom Vattakkuzhy)

A work of art transforms the immediate world into a suspended world. It is at once an erasure and displacement, often imparting the possibility of renewal and retrieving. An artist achieves this rare alchemy through making the familiar unfamiliar, nudging the apparent into a perception, which is unique in framing and rendering. There the light emanating from a forty watt bulb could turn into the golden sheen that engulfs the works of Bernini. Any creative expression that could transport the viewer into a realm of future is hailed for its ability to help conceive the inconceivable while a work of art that takes the spectator to back to the delicate annals of history is often held in awe and reverence for its sheer capacity to evoke the aggregate of creativity in its perfection. In Tom Vattakkuzhy’s paintings one sees the latter and experiences a sense of suspension (of belief) which need not necessarily be done willingly. Yet, the experience is poetic and if I may use the word spiritual then it is spiritual too.

(Work by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

Tom Vattakkuzhy posts his paintings regularly in the social media and there he reaps hundreds of likes, mostly from the peer group that knows what all are involved in the making of a work of art even if many of the ‘likers’ are not excellent in practicing what they understand, believe or preach. As I said before, what makes Tom’s paintings attractive and often intriguing is their ability to suspend the immediate world that is represented within the painting as well as the one in which the paintings find themselves. The latter world could be the studio of the artist or the social media/gallery where these works are exhibited. Till recently Tom’s works used to get published in some mainstream literary magazines as the illustrations of the printed literature. In this sense, we could see Tom’s experience as an artist is doubly honed, one by conjuring up painterly events for himself and two, by making painterly responses to supplement and complement the given literature. Such honing of skills has all the chances of making an artist slightly confused when he/she changes the ‘location’ of their creativity. Some gifted artists, of late in Kerala have become successful in virtually transporting their exhibition spaces into the magazines by creating illustrations like the way they create their paintings, without external/editorial interventions. The credit also goes to the editors of those magazines who let the artists be what they are.

(work by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

In West Bengal, it has been still a living tradition of inviting the artists to make special cover pages for the Diwali issues of major literary magazines like ‘Desh’. Though, in Kerala, the magazines have not established such traditions (even today no Onam special feature artists’ works as cover page), magazine illustrations have had changed the general perspective about art. There had been a huge lull in this practice since the advent of new millennium (exactly with the closure of the Malayalam India Today) and the tendency of the magazines was to assign certain artists to illustrate the literature and it seemed that all of those artists had the brief to ‘re-create’ a certain feel of lines, forms and expressions which the editors considered as successful examples in a few mainstream magazines. On the other extreme, the magazines went for highly sentimental naturalistic illustrations that satisfied the expected and commonplace demand for aesthetical visual pleasure. Tom Vattakkuzhy and C.Bhagyanathan came to magazine illustrations in late 2000s which after almost one and half decade changed the illustration scene of Kerala for good. In fact today once again many artists work freely as illustrators though the compensation packages are minimal and sparse.

(work by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

Magazine illustrations, when it comes into the hands of a gifted artist, operate quietly independently of the literature once freed from the context. It creates another interesting scenario; once the illustrations declare their independence outside context of literature, it becomes imperative for the literature to make efforts to belong to those pictures. While the illustrations of the stalwarts like M.V.Devan, Namboothiri and so on showed their indebtedness to the literature those were based on, the illustrations of Tom and the artists of his ilk stand independently, creating a new world for themselves. This does not mean that these artists challenge the autonomy of literature or supersede the demands of it. On the contrary an artist like Tom has generated a creative mechanism and style that is autonomous even when it is done for a piece of literature. Hence we get a scenario where two autonomous entities are brought together and in the conjoining a strange familiarity is created. I would call it an event of mutual catalysing where the components remain unaltered while together they undergo a process of change. Tom, of late has become a master of this process, by deliberations of his artistic imaginations and executing skills.

(work by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

Tom is a bit like J.K.Rowling, the author of Harry Potter series of magical novels. Rowling turns the familiar London into a magical world; there are trains, stations, schools, colleges, students, hostels, vaults and so on as in the contemporary world. But the moment they enter into the narrative mode of Rowling, they transform into magical entities. There is nothing in Tom’s painterly world that is strange and unfamiliar. But when we see them within the emblematic narratives that Tom chooses to paint they look ethereal, distanced and divined. Clad in a Renaissance hue, each mundane act of life turns into Eucharistic. They look like the moments culled out from the Bible or Tohra or any divine book of order, morality and punishment. Each person and object in Tom’s paintings assumes Biblical connotations; perhaps that is the only device that both the artist and the viewers have to see and interpret. A sense of guilt and confession looms large in the paintings of Tom and he finds almost impossible to dispel that pall of gloom by adding some cheerful element in it. Each character, even in the intimate relationship with the other, cannot escape the Biblical connotations. For example, his series ‘Lessons of Life’, the mother and child never look like an ordinary mother and child; they are painted with mythological and epic strokes.

(The controversial illustration by Tom Vatttakkuzhy)

My observations gather momentum and weight when we recall the incident where Tom’s illustration on a piece of literature was withdrawn from the public after some church authorities registered their protest against the said illustration. The story of Mata Hari was the theme of the play which was published in Bhashaposhini, a major literary magazine with a considerable history behind to back it. Tom’s illustration, which was published as a cover page also, showed a nude Matahari sitting amongst group of nuns in a Eucharistic moment. The illustration was an independent painting (in the sense I explained earlier) and the artistic intervention was only in the ‘denuding’ of Mata Hari. When the protest against the painting gained momentum, the magazine apologized to the church and the believers (that’s how a magazine with a lot of history does these days) and withdrew the magazine from the stands and re-issued with a new cover page by another artist (which also met with protest from another caste community on the same case of hurt sentiments). During all these commotions, Tom maintained a stoic silence and he never explained his views on the controversy. In hindsight, perhaps that was a good strategy that he adopted which would make his and his family’s life smooth. Tom is no confrontationist though a good conversationalist and a declared sceptic in approach.

(an illustration by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

I believe, Tom’s grounding is in religion; not in its ritualistic and dogmatic side but in its aesthetic side. He more or less lives in a time where Da Vinci and Michael Angelo could have easily lived. I am talking about the period of Renaissance. Tom’s aesthetical approach is that of a Renaissance artist and also that of the Dutch artists during the same period. Apart from the said Renaissance masters, Tom adopts his thematic schemes from the masters like Vermeer, Jan Van Eyk, Rembrandt and so on. Also in some of his recent works like ‘Song of Dusk’, he relocates the American painter Edward Hopper in his works as very subtle visual reference. Tom almost Malayalisises Edward Hopper in the case of lights that he uses to illuminate his painterly images. What we see in this painting is an eerie moment, which perhaps for a rural Malayali is a normal daily moment. A group of boys (four of them) go for an evening dip in a pond near their ‘home’. The steps leading to the pond show that the home is a raised ground and it gives an indication that it is a hilly region. The liminal light of the dusk almost gives an eerie feel to the painting and we understand that the foreground of the painting and the boys there are almost rendered in near darkness.

(Song of the Dusk by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

The more I look at it the more I see a moment of Baptism. The boy in the water is like John the Baptist. The one who gets into the water could be Peter. There is someone who has already done his ablutions and is drying himself. He wears a red loin cloth. Another one who stands with his back to the viewer is a witness. I am interpreting this taking Tom as the unalterable author of this painting while assuming that he turns the mundane into divine; the quotidian into painterly or literal. Seen in this context, the ‘home’ above is no longer is a home but a church built on the rock of faith. One could clearly make a comparison between the yellow light outside and the sanctum/altar space drenched in a red; the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Or is it a nativity scene? The yellow sheen could evoke the light of the pen in Bethlehem. The sanctum must be the delivery room in red. The sky is lit up. The three kings are taking bath with one witness/angel to lead them to the place. They are cleaning themselves up to receive the Son of God. Or am I just imagining things. But that is where Tom wins as an artist. He could create a series of ambiguities within the textual traditions available. At the same time he could remain free of the clutches that would otherwise hold a religious artist within the fold.

(an illustration by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

Finally, I would like to give a very different and normal interpretation of this work, ‘Song of Dusk’. I would strip all the religious connotations and the possible biblical hue away from the painting. It is just an evening scene. In the rural belts in Kerlala these days one could see labourers from other states (Anya samsthaana thozhilaalikal) who are called with a generic name ‘Bengalis’. They do any kind of work starting from washing cars, working as home helps, masons, carpenters, plywood factory works, restaurant workers, security guards and you name it they are there to work. They call Kerala as Indian Gulf. You wouldn’t believe that for their financial remittance there are evening branches of banks and some banks even work on Sundays. The book stores and music and film stores stock Bengali, Hindi, Assamese and Odiya books, films and music. There are schools for the children of the migrant labourers. Some have even passed the school final in Malayalam medium. And as icing to the cake, some act in mainstream Malayalam movies!

(Song of the Dusk by Tom Vattakkuzhy)

Many of these ‘Bengali’ labourers who live and work in the hilly regions (as farm and plantation workers) often rent out an old style house that is lying abandoned for long, for dirt cheap rents and live together, saving money on the rent front. This house in the painting seems to be one such house where these labourers and farm hands live. Despite the lights you don’t feel the ‘homeliness’ of a home in its depiction. It looks like an abandoned house which has been occupied recently and is not fully functional. The absence of a woman or women is palpable in its bareness and lost nature. The four men who are bathing at the pond must be four labourers cleaning themselves up in the cool water after a long and hard day’s work. The silence that is felt embracing the painting shows the silence of these young men lost in thoughts about their hearths back home in that killing twilight moment. The time looks so pivotal at this moment; the twilight. They are neither here nor there. They are in transit. The Malayali migrants have experienced it once in the Gulf countries. All the migrants have felt the twilight moments as incisions done by surgical blades in the soul. Tom too has gone through it and experienced it. This painting perhaps is an autobiography of an ordinary Malayali camouflaged in the stories of the Bengali labourers. Who knows for sure? That ambiguity is the charm of a good work of art.

T.M.Krishna Needs the Dalit Musicians, Not the Other Way Round

(TM Krishna, source net. all pics sourced from net)

Parai dance and Paraikkoottu are subaltern dance-music cultures from/in Tamil Nadu. Subaltern is a very academic word. To make it more straight, let me say, they are the Dalit percussion and dance forms, sometimes played in the occasions of death. T.M.Krishna, the Magsaysay award winning musician, in his book titled ‘Reshaping Art’ quotes Deepan, a Parai dancer: “The reason we perform during death is simple. If a human being does not dance listening to the sound of the Parai, then we can confirm that he is dead.” I am fascinated by this statement. This book published by Aleph in its spotlight series at once a good read and a problem in itself.

(Reshaping Art, book by TM Krishna)

This book is problematic because of the author himself. Hailing from the Brahmin community, after excelling in the technicalities and nuances of Karnatic music, and even after gaining considerable number of rasikas for himself, T.M.Krishna decided to chuck it all. Slowly and steadily he realized how Karnatic music had become an exclusive caste-ist and classist genre where the paraphernalia of its teaching, learning, practicing and performing is fixed around a dominant religion, its upper caste value systems. Krishna explores the history of Indian dance and music which are hailed to be classical these days and says how these genres had to fight with the western art forms to gain legitimacy as classical forms. In the course of such authentication, these forms demoted some original forms and styles as vulgar and made the performative spaces sanitized of subaltern/Dalit music and dance forms.

(Gana exponent Michael)

T.M.Krishna made waves in the elite music scenario of Chennai which is the high seat Karnatic music as he decided to take his performance to the sea beach where his audience where random people from the fisher folk and the curious onlookers who generally did not attended music concerts of ‘this kind’. The aversion of the audience slowly turned into curiosity, then to engagement and later into participation. Today T.M.Krishna is a champion of the idea of democratising music and dance and to this end he even barges into the public transports with his team and performs kacheris. He also works with NGOs working in slums and performs for the slum audience and also has initiated ‘poramboke music’, music from the left over places/spaces.

(Marana Gana Viji, one who sings of death)

Krishna means well and he tries to puts it across well but often he climbs up on the high horse of preaching about the sublimating side of art. Though he debates the word spiritual and spirituality in the book, the language slowly climbs up to the abstraction that stands close with the classical understanding about classical arts. Krishna knows one thing that even if he is a pioneer in breaking the barriers from the up to include the ones from the other side of the fence, the ones who work from the other side of the classical line of art and music do not need Krishna’s mediation. Tamil Nadu has this rich tradition of folk and subaltern/Dalit/Adivasi music and dance traditions and with or without Krishna’s intervention these will survive especially in a situation where Dalit discourse is gaining traction and parlance among a larger audience.

(Paadariyen Padippariyen scene from Sindhu Bhairavi movie)

While discussing this aspect of the varieties of musical performances, Krishna feels the heat and he is anxious about the fact that his interventions may go redundant sooner than later. So he warns the practitioners that the popular culture is out there to incorporate or co-opt these subaltern musical and dance experiments for commercial purposes leaving the masters of subaltern music high and dry. The fact is that it has already been done and it has been going on for quite some time. It was Ilayaraja who in early 1980s brought in the subaltern sounds and music into the mainstream Tamil film industry but value addition that he did was the smooth camouflaging of those music styles with the dominant Karnatic styles. But Ilayaraja has always been unapologetic about his heavy borrowing from the folk traditions. In a film called Sindhu Bhairavi (1985) by veteran director K.Balachandar, there is a sequence where the protagonist who is a Karnatic musician is asked to sing in local music style by one of the female audience. Ruffled by the demand he mockingly asks her to sing it and prove whether lofty ideas could be sung in local music. She sings. That song brought National Award for Chithra. Krishna has not minded this fact.

(Ilayaraja)

If you follow the episodes written by Krishna you would come to know that it is Krishna like a missionary going around and attending the Gana performances, Koottu performances and parai performances. The practitioners of it don’t come seeking Krishna’s interventions. If you look at the number of Gana singers in Tamil Nadu, you would come to know that many of them are much more popular and influential than Krishna himself. But mind you; they are dark skinned hip hoppers who do not articulate themselves in English. Listen to the Gana music of Marana Gana Viji, Gana Sudhakar, Gana Michel and so on, you would come to know that Krishna is a nobody to preach them and in a way ‘include’ them. The reality is, they just don’t want. But Krishna tries his best. If you look at the Tamil film industry, the major fast numbers that have become cult songs are taken from Gana styles and Parai style or Koottu style. Aalumma Dolumma of Ajith, Anjele of Surya, Varuthapedathe Vaaliba Sangham of Sivakarthikeyan, Mari of Danush and so on come directly from Gana base. D.Imman, the new music sensation of Tamil film industry picks up his songs from the street, I say.

(music director D Imman)

Krishna feels the heat of being rendered redundant by his ilk with the arrival of Dalit music. In such situation he can do nothing but join the subaltern force. In the early 20^th century in Kerala there was a social movement called ‘To make the Namboothiris human beings’, which meant Making Brahmins into human beings. The Brahmins where ill treating their women almost confining them into homes and rendering them as sex slaves. The rebellious Brahmin youth wanted the things to change. So they made several efforts to change the discrepancies in customs and rituals so that humanitarian revolutions could be effected within the community. To certain extent they had won it through theatre activities. What Krishna has to do today is to go back to his Brahmin origin and try to change the thing there. That means, there is a huge need for him to fight within the community than seeking allegiance of Dalit musicians to push his idealistic views on inclusive music. Krishna tries a very done to death rebellion; taking Karnatic music to sea shore villages and into the public transport system. Of late he has also started singing the poems of Perumal Murugan. I feel that he is just cashing in on the popularity of Perumal Murugan’s literary life and the controversies around it. Tomorrow he would sing a chapter from Arundhati Roy’s essays or novels. Or he would sing a chapter from Das Capital in Karnatic style. But what difference would it make? It remains in the Karnatic style. To change the content you need to change the form also. Filling in content in a given form was the early modernist tradition where the poets filled the poetic forms with erotic content. When the real modernists and progressives came in, they facilitated changes in ‘form’ also. Sad thing is Krishna could never become Gana Micheal. He can be T.M.Krishna only. There is a latent book inside this book because someone from the other end of the spectrum also should write a book on how they see Krishna’s Karnatic music at slums and in buses. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak asked, can the subaltern speak. I say, of course, not only they can speak, they can sing too. They would say, please, Krishna, mind your business.

The Patriots - A Short Story

(Source: net)

The Patriots

They are around thirty people. Young and raring to go at anything.

All of them have different haircuts. Some are mushroomed. Some are puffed at the sides just above the ears. Some are taken off completely making a patchy curve starting from the right temple and reappearing at the left.

I could feel their breath around me. I think of snarling dogs in animation movies. They are just that. But they behave as if they were directly from the war movies, complete with armours and assault rifles. They have even camouflage lines all over their faces.

I am just imagining things. Am I frightened while standing right in the middle of this young crowd that exudes a sense of aggression, definitely not adulation?

One of them has a T-shirt on with camouflage pattern. Rs.150/- for anything, I think for I have seen them in the pavement. But he feels so confident in it. He is taller than me and I looked down as he talks about his country. Yes, ‘his country’. I see the seams of his trousers rolled up and pushed into the ankle boots.

He holds his mobile phone as if it were a grenade to be lobbed at me, if there is a provocation. I know anything could happen then. I have offended them.

You would be surprised to know the scenario. I have just finished a speech. A few minutes back I was on the stage there inside these huge door panels, where these young men now crowding me were my audience. Something I have said about the country seems to have understood differently.

Someone opens the door and walks out and with him a mild fragrance and a whiff of cool air come out and follow him to the foyer like a trusting dog.

I look around and see similar crowds in some parts of the foyer.

These young men have come from different colleges and they are there for an integrated workshop for the youth. Male and female experts from different walks of life have come to give them short speeches. Yes, short speeches but sooner than later I realise that each short speech could last for an hour.

My speech was short indeed. But the interactive session was a bit longer.

Now in this foyer what you see is the continuation of that interactive session.

‘How could you say that soldiers and primary school teachers are to be given the same respect?’ They insist asking. I feel a strange hiss in their voice and the rising aggression in their bodies.

Their fingers twirl. They could catch hold of my neck at anytime. Between those terrifying fingers and my logical neck there is a very small distance which could be measured by the satisfaction that my answer would give them.

I smile, first unto myself and then to them. I have faced such situations before. Facing hecklers is a part of my job.

“For me, primary teachers do a better job than the soldiers at the country’s borders,” I say taking special care of the smile on my lips.

‘Do you have anybody in the army?’ One of them asks.

“No, No relative of mine works in the army,” I say.

‘That’s why you don’t know the pain’.

“Is it necessary to have an army man at home to know the pain of a soldier?” I ask.

‘Because of them you could sleep without worries’, one of them pitches in.

“I am not sure about that. My sleep does not have anything to do with the soldiers. But I do lose sleep over what they do at some places not only in our country but elsewhere too,” I reason.

‘We are ready to sacrifice our lives for our country’, the guy in camouflage T-shirts moves in.

“What else does a primary teacher do?”

He does not sacrifice anything.

“So according to you, fighting in the army fatigue is the only way to serve the country? Or is it always necessary to make sacrifices to serve or love one’s country?”

‘What do you do with the enemies then?’

“This is exactly where I talk about the primary school teachers. If they teach you who is our enemy and who is our friend, and also tell us ultimately there are no enemies or friends, then this overt love for the country wouldn’t arise at all.”

‘But we have enemies.’

“What do you do if I say having enemies is a sort of illusion spread by the state? If we understand history and economics, we will understand this whole idea of war is just a game played periodically by vested interests not by the soldiers. And soldiers in fact should be peace keepers not war mongers.”

The boys go silent for a moment. I find a gap to insert another argument.

“A bus conductor, an engineer, a nurse, a doctor, a carpenter, a cobbler, a vegetable seller or anyone who pursues any job diligently does serve and love his country, if really has one. It all depends whether the country wants his love and service or not.”

The boys look confused. But at the next moment they regain the density of their blindness.

‘We are patriots. You are a traitor. You fail to see the enemy. It is as good as colluding with them.’

“I don’t have enemies from across the border. They don’t make my life hell. But my fellow citizens do it. They beat up my brothers and sisters for sitting on a chair, riding a horse in a wedding procession, for sporting a moustache, for taking a cow to the market, for passing an examination with good marks, for washing themselves in a public pond, for dressing up well, for just being free and proud. What do I do with those tormentors? Will the soldiers of this country save my brothers and sisters from such insults?” I shiver while I say this.

‘Sir, you are a guest here. Otherwise.....the answer would have been different.’ Someone gnashes his teeth.

“This is what exactly I say when I say primary school teachers are important when it comes to the shaping up of a country and its psyche. I think your teachers too have lost the plot and they have taught you something else,” I tell them politely and try to move out.

‘Hail thee Mother Country’, they call out behind me, obviously to jeer at me.

I hold my head high and walk out of the foyer as their exhortations grow high, wild and frenzied.

 Still I could feel the loud slogan ‘Hail thee Mother Country’ stalking me with a bare dagger clenched in its fist.  

Honourable Prime Minister, Please Consider Making No Comments on Art

Portrait of PM Narendra Modi by Veena Abhyankar (pic courtesy Indian Express)

Post-modernism gives this freedom for anything to be an artist. It also does give the freedom to anyone who would like to be an art lover. If anybody could make art whether it is shallow or deep in terms of meaning, then anybody else also gets the right to make a judgement on that work of art. Hence, if our Prime Minister, Mr.Narendra Modi congratulates a home-maker artist for her efforts in paper-quilling art we cannot complain. But there is a danger; that too a very grave one! If the Prime Minister goes on congratulating the works of art being sent to him by enthusiastic artists (who are academically trained or self trained or partially trained under a real or virtual tutor), it could create certain roadblocks in the art history and criticism in this country. Before I go into that let me tell you why I am forced to write an article like this.

Hanuman, Karan Acharya, PM Narendra Modi (pic courtesy Financial Express)

Today’s (24-5-2018) Indian Express, a national daily, in its Delhi edition publishes a four column story complete with a picture of the Prime Minister, Mr.Narendra Modi, which is created by a Pune based home maker, Veena Abhyankar who has been practicing paper-quilling for the last three years. Paper-quilling is an art form created out of differently coloured papers of different properties by cutting, pasting and twirling them aesthetically. I do not have any problem in an artist who does paper cutting and twirling to make that particular genre of art. Though not in the same mode there are contemporary artists in our country who use paper in various ways to create their works of art. For example, Sachin George Sebastian makes wonderful city-scapes and complex art works out of twirled and twisted paper and his works are internationally exhibited and appreciated. We have also Dilip Chobisa who uses paper in various ways in order to create 3D illusions. Paper has been a favourite medium of many especially the hobby artists. But remember Post-modernism gives complete freedom even to the hobby artists to claim a place in the larger history of modern-contemporary art of any country. It is only the discretion of the art historians and critics save the country out of such onslaughts.

PM Narendra Modi

Of late our Prime Minister has literally taken a cultural route to win the hearts of the people (read voters). Cultural nationalism that his parent organisation (the RSS) preaches is slightly different from the cultural expression that many an artist practices in this country. But the Prime Minister of our country is neither an art historian nor an art critic, nor is he a connoisseur of art and aesthetics. When you are rich, yes aesthetics and a love for the cultural comes naturally to you because that is the only way that the rich could claim a place in the collective memory of the country for there are many rich people doing the same thing such as buying the same brand high end cars, living in cosy farm houses in the same posh area of the city, flying to the same tourist destinations, playing in the same gambling dens, staying in the same five star hotels, wearing the same high end fashions and mixing with the same right kind of the people/celebrities. But when it comes to art, they all prefer to be unique and individualistic. Yes, they do all buy Damien Hirsts and Subodh Guptas, but they also buy works of art that are not possessed by any other rich man. Power also gives a right to the people to make an opinion about art. When the rich and the powerful talk about art or anything, that becomes the rule of the day and many people emulate it. Mr.Prime Minister can privately love a work of art that attracts his imagination. But when he does it in public, it might become a national example and such an aesthetic could become a national benchmark, dismissing or suspending all the other kinds of aesthetics prevalent or practiced in the country.

Karan Acharya, Hanuman image

When Mr.Prime Minister was touring Karnataka, campaigning for the recently held assembly elections, he had praised on Karan Acharya, a boy from North Kerala, a self trained graphic artist who has set up start up company with his friends to do business with the big animation houses and graphic design studios. He came to limelight a few years back when he did an angry Hanuman’s face, going by the macho image of the Bajrang Dal, a extreme right wing Hindutva outfit established in the name of the monkey god Hanuman. This picture of Hanuman was made into a sticker and it had found its ways to the windscreens of Mumbai taxis and it had got its due press space at that time. Like any other sensational news in this world, this too had its run for a couple of days and had subsided. It was Mr.Prime Minister who picked it up again during his Karnataka campaign trail and praised the artist for making such a ‘wonderful painting’. It was suiting to the purpose of Mr.Prime Minister and he did not mind saying good words about a work of art though it was done in whatever intention had turned out to be a fuel to the aggressive right wing male politics that gets played out in the Indian streets, especially in the places where the minority communities live. Mr.Prime Minister was definitely turning himself into an aesthetician for He simultaneously paid rich tribute to a cartoonist who turned out to be a plagiarist and a provocateur by doing vulgar and misogynist cartoons.

Angry Hanuman poster

Ms.Veena Abhyankar from Pune might not have thought of any of these when she sent a portrait of Mr.Prime Minister in the medium of paper quilling. But the Prime Minister praised her high saying that ‘her passion for learning new things is admirable...’ This may sound a very simple and patronising statement from a senior statesman who heads the country. But we have to understand that Mr.Prime Minister has chosen to praise a work of art which has a portrait of his in it or rather I would say that it becomes a work of art for him as it is his portrait. Still I give the benefit of doubt to the Prime Minister. Even if it was a painting of a sun rise he would have definitely praised it. But then the problem is, what kind of a sun rise it is and why he has chosen to praise it. The praising from the state head comes unqualified. The statement then becomes irresponsible because the majority of the populace in the country is unsuspecting about an apparently humanitarian and aesthetical comment of the Prime Minister. Even his worst critic would say that at time the Prime Minister is very sensible and sensitive. But unfortunately, I have to say that the Prime Minister is indiscreet when it comes to praising works of art or it could even be said that the Prime Minister chooses certain works deliberately to praise not just because his portrait in it but because it suits to his political purpose.

His foraying into the field of art should be seen with apprehension. I say this mainly because the Prime Minister is not a natural appreciator of arts. He may be receiving thousands of paintings and thousands of books, pieces of music and so on. As the state head he deserves all those gifts and artistic attention. But he does not choose to see all of them and we cannot expect him to do so also. It is here we expect him to be a bit discreet about making comments of works of art and finding easy ways to be an aesthetician. The Prime Minister is at fault here even if he is making an innocent comment on an otherwise harmless work of art, he is doing a great damage to the contemporary art of this country. The main reason is that the Prime Minister is not looking at the contemporary art that are being presented in the major galleries and museums in our country. He is not picking and choosing the works of art from there and making such comments of accolades. He is not even finding a few minutes from his busy schedule to speak about the great artists who are still alive in our country. He is not taking a few minutes to speak about the artists who are bringing us international recognition to our country. We have been a country where the entourage of the Prime Minister carried artists, musicians, historian, journalists, scientists and so on during his/her tours to the international countries. Mr.Prime Minister has severed that tradition. Okay, no issues. But how can the Prime Minister choose the worst kind of art (I humbly make use of my professional standing to make this statement) and showers praises on it? It is in effect altering the vision and aesthetical approach of at least those people who believe in him. When he has an aggressive majority, his words become almost dictums and laws, especially in the tender issues like aesthetics. When Karan Acharyas and Veena Abhyankars are brought to lime light, what happens is our reputed artists get removed from it and they lose their social as well as mental space. That in the long run would put the country in danger.

Karan Acharya

Mr.Prime Minister could make any number of opinions on art. His right as the state head and his existence within the post modern discourse allows him to express his views freely. But they should be conveyed privately and discreetly. If it becomes a norm, the artists who are simply doing their hobby and have an infantile or childish enthusiasm to hear good words from the higher ups get undue social space which would corrupt the minds of the people who otherwise think and view art in a totally different way. Our country’s hobby artists and mediocre artists have turned the Lalit Kala Akademies into degenerating cultural establishments. I was one of the national jury members for the national exhibition selection by the LKA, New Delhi. I found at least twenty per cent of the artists sending the portraits of Mr.Prime Minister in various guises including doing yoga, thinking that these images would give them the right to be in the national exhibition. It is a very dangerous sign. Either the Prime Minister should consider not making any comments on art or he should do it quite often about the contemporary art and artists of our country. Our media also should think about whether such loose statements of the Prime Minister should be highlighted in detail or not. While today’s Indian Express covered the Man Booker Prize Winner and the Polish Writer, Olga Tokarczuk in one column in the 21^st page Veena Abhyankar gets four columns in the 9^th page. That puts everything in perspective.