(Soumen Bhowmick)
Legend goes like this: Someone, after seeing this monumental
work, ‘Guernica’ asked Pablo Picasso, “Is it about war?” Picasso reportedly said:
“It is not about war but there is war in my lines.” There are several versions
to stories pertaining to Guernica. Yet another person asked the artist: “Did
you do this?” “No, you did,” Picasso said. He was telling the viewer who
perhaps would have thrown his lot with the Franco regime that the war was a result
of his apathy and the apathy of many others like him. Had they decided to the
autocrat in the beginning itself Guernica would not have been bombed. At
Triveni Gallery, New Delhi, when one stands before the drawings of Soumen Bhowmick,
if at all one asks whether he has done it, he would definitely say, ‘No, you
did it’. What Europe was going through in 1930s, we have it right here and now.
When the Fascist forces are in an upward swing, artists have to retreat to the
wastelands of broken imageries; Picasso had done it, exactly the way T.S.Eliot
had sung it with a great force in 1922. Now in India, Soumen in his works does
the same.
(work by Soumen Bhowmick)
I do not have any intention to compare Soumen with Picasso.
In fact such comparisons could only bring embarrassment to a sensitive artist
like Soumen, and if I attempt it, it would be quite unbecoming to my declared
stance as an art critic. Yet, I would say, Soumen has the same force and
sensibility that Picasso had shared with all his contemporaries who stood
against the forward marching of the fascist forces in Europe. Today in India
where culture is a spectacle intermingled with quasi-spiritualism packaged and
marketed in corporate style, such voices and expressions of Soumen may not get
enough attention for the minuteness of his scale and the creative arrogance to
stand straight. Those who have waded through slush and rain on the Yamuna bank
in order to catch a glimpse of the displaced cultural spectacle would
definitely not venture into a small gallery space where Soumen’s works are
exhibited. Middleclass patrons of spirituality and ‘culture’ are always like
that; they want a medium to forget and self-deceive than to mull over and
respond. Culture for many today is a drug so is religion both divests the human
beings of their rational and cognitive abilities.
(work by Soumen Bhowmick)
Soumen’s show is titled ‘Chronicles of V’ and the artist
explains it in his small brochure as an abbreviation for ‘Vigilante, Vendetta
and Vengeance’. According to his elaboration, he has taken this ‘V’ word from
the 19th century Spanish parlance which originated in a society where
people turned the executors of law and order when the government authorities
largely failed in dispensing justice. Soumen, as a young man carrying the revolutionary
spirit in his personality, art and life style, thinks that if each person
becomes ‘vigilant’ then definitely the social injustices would never happen.
One should not go to the far off lands like Spain to understand the meaning of ‘vigilant’.
It was right here in our philosophy which always gives stress to ‘Arise and Awake’
(Uthishtata, Jagrata in Katha Upanishad). In due course of time we have
forgotten the very idea of being ‘alert’ and today we have a totalitarian
regime in place. In such a scenario, an artist like Soumen responds to the
socio-political realities with a razor sharp perspective. He conceives a world
where everything has gone upside down. In his world or the world that creates
in his works everything has taken the feel of a vaudevillian show. Comedy,
necromancy, cannibalism and autoeroticism become the hallmarks of his dystopian
land.
(work by Soumen Bhowmick)
Karl Marx had said, History repeats itself first as tragedy
and then as farce. As far as Indian realities are concerned, history has
presented several tragedies; Bengal division in 1905, Bengali famine in early
40s, partition of India in 1947, Gandhiji’s assassination in 1948, Emergency in
1975, Babri Masjid demolition in 1991, Godhra in 2002, Muzafarnagar in 2014 and
so on were the prominent tragedies and even if Marx had tried to envision them
as farces he would have failed in it. But the election of the right wing forces
to the center was the real farce presented by a willing electorate; slaves could
not have chosen a better shackle than this one. Even if Soumen says that being vigilant
one could resist such negative forces, he recognizes the futility of this
resistance. In this confrontation between the oppressors and the oppressed both
of them in a bizarre decomposing alchemy changes into decaying flesh and
horrifying skeletons. Those who have fallen in the fight and those who have
still got time left to warm their seats undergo this degeneration and like
zombies they celebrate.
(work by Soumen Bhowmick)
I would call Soumen’s works as the scenes from a dystopian
Mahabharata in a Philip Guston mode. Here the war has become a farce; killing
and dying have become games to be played. The way war is contrived, the
resistors too are sucked into the war game. In the pandemonium of words,
symbols, gesticulations, trapeze acts, cannibalizing and erotic stimulations
and so on, the viewer sees the total collapse of sense and sensibility of our
times. There is no Gandhari to cry over the dead bodies, there is no Krishna to
pacify the heartbroken widows. Many a fighter have been cajoled into the mazes
of conspiracy and got them killed and a vast land of eeriness is left behind.
Only the Emperor and his sycophants are left in a devastated land. In their regalia
they look extremely comical; any king would look comical when he loses his
kingdom. A country without citizens and subjects does not need a king; that is
the irony of it. In the wilderness, like King Lear, one could just rage and
rave. Even the wise fools have been killed. That’s the reality Soumen presents
in his works. I have only one word of difference; for the artist vigilantes are
the upholders of civil rights but for me vigilantes are hooligans who with the
blessings of the government do moral policing to convert ongoing tragedies into
irresistible farces.
3 comments:
Best wishes Soumen,great! someone great like JohnyML wrote such a wonderful things about your creative journey . Congrats Bhai!
Real good...
Congrats. Excellent work done. Keep it up.
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