(Shantanu Lodh)
I just could not read what must be going on in his mind by
the looks in his eyes. They stare at me like two shiny black silver beads.
Those are the eyes of Shantanu Lodh who has been bedridden paralyzed since
October 2015 after a road accident.
Last week, Indian Express newspaper told us that Shantanu
was on the road to recovery. The photograph accompanying the news bit was an
old one but it suddenly gave us a new hope. He would struggle back to normalcy;
we would see the good old Shantanu Lodh who paused each sentence with a typical
Bengali ‘eh’.
Rare are such friends like Roy Thomas, a contemporary
artist, former colleague of Shantanu in the Mira Model School where this trio
‘Atul Bhalla-Roy Thomas-Shantanu Lodh’ taught in late 1990s, who would stick to
a friend in any dire situation. Roy Thomas has been visiting Shantanu in the GB
Pant Hospital in Delhi and also in Alwar, Rajasthan where Shantanu is currently
being rehabilitated at the Sapna Foundation.
Who is Shantanu Lodh, many youngsters and senior generation
artists may ask. Ten years is not that a long period, yet many must have
already forgotten him because after a scandalous and curiosity evoking
performance at Khoj in Delhi in 2005 Shantanu almost went in missing partly due
to familial issues and partly by choice. In January 2012, Shantanu participated
in an exhibition, after much coaxing and cajoling, curated by me at the Delhi’s
Gallery Ragini and was titled ‘A4 Arple’. A suitable reminder of Shantanu’s daredevilry
in art I exhibited his works next to the ceiling.
Shantanu did not come to the
exhibition opening.
(Shantanu Lodh at the Sapna Foundation, Alwar)
Almost two decades back, much before the officially
sanctioned, authorized and publicly celebrated ‘aesthetics of vandalism’ or
street art pieces started appearing on the walls of Delhi, in the
Kalkaji-Okhla-Alaknanda belt people spotted the presence of certain illegible
symbolic presentations and started wondering who could have been the person
behind. Those who knew art history understood they looked something like the
works of AR Penck, the German artist. Banksy was unheard of then.
Qualifications and nicknames like ‘space occupier’ were not even mentioned
anywhere. But someone was stealthily occupying the walls of Delhi.
A senior artist, who was living in that area one day, asked
me over for a drink and there she introduced the artist behind the mysterious
paintings on the Delhi walls. A fat, large eyed and somewhat potbellied young
person with thinning hair and fleshy lips was there at the drawing room who
reminded me of the young Diego Riviera, the legendary Mexican muralist. He was
Shantanu Lodh. We became friends. The senior artist was patronizing him.
After a couple of weeks, when I met her again in the absence
of the young artist, she told me, “He could be the next Krishnakumar.” I
smiled.
For the beginners I should say who Krishnakumar was.
K.P.Krishnakumar was one of the students in the first batches came out of the
Trivandrum Fine Arts College in mid 1970s. A young, sturdy and stout
Krishnakumar had the charisma to be a natural leader and in his times he led a
pack of artists. Then he went to Santiniketan, an unlikely place for him,
studied there, worked there, got into a few scandals and came to Baroda in mid
1980s to officially found the then nascent ‘Indian Radical Painters and
Sculptors Association’, which is known in its short form, the Radical Group.
Historians and the members of the erstwhile Radical group
are still at each others’ necks when it comes to pinpointing the circumstances that
led to the formation of the Group and also to the anointing of K.P.Krishnakumar
as the leader of the Radical Group. This group, in their manifesto declared
that the artists of the group stood against the ‘retrogressive aesthetics’
prevalent in the Indian art of that time. The retrogressive aesthetics that the
group members referring to was that of M.F.Husain, Raza, Souza and of their
ilk.
The poetic justice was finally done when Krishnakumar, KM
Madhusoodhanan and NN Rimzon (though not strictly a Radical Group member but a
sympathizer) who could fit together in ‘Pond Near the Field’, a five persons
show in the Kiran Nadar Museum that collects a vast number of ‘retrogressive’
artists and their ‘retrogressive aesthetics’ which the Radicals stood against. Time
is the great leveler, if not money would, don’t worry.
K.P.Krishnakumar committed suicide in 1989 in Kerala. That
incident brought the curtains down for the Radical Group and the members took
another decade to recover from the shock. Many went into hiding, some switched
fields and some went into sheer cynicism and yet another lot still live like
Radicals, fitting neither here nor there; living anachronisms.
The senior artist was finding another Krishnakumar in
Shantanu Lodh.
What did she mean by that?
Was she saying that Shantanu
could lead another ‘Radical’ movement in Indian art scene? Or Shantanu was as
strong an artist as Krishnakumar? Or Shantanu will suicide at some point? Or
simply he was a good boyfriend material?
(Indian Express report)
Shantanu’s Krishnakumar phase was short lived. The way a
Bengali understood Marxism and the way a North Indian middle class woman
interpreted it from books were two different things. I believe that was the
reason why Shantanu walked out of his first patron in Delhi. Many years later I
heard that one of the reasons why Manmeet, his estranged wife and artist,
walked out on him was his obsession with what he understood. A liberal
Communist, Shantanu took the liberty to wake his wife up at odd hours to
discuss art and revolution.
When people assume themselves as Sartre and Beauvoir, they
forget that the 20th century intellectual giants too had their
eating, shitting and sleeping times out of the Parisian cafes.
Whoever ejected or rejected you, you had somebody there at
Mandi House in 1990s. Mandi House was the physical whatsapp group of the
yesteryears, as far as the migrant artists in Delhi were concerned. You could
go there, sit in the library or in the canteen and wait for your friends to
come and they did. During the summer months, you could sneak into the Sahitya
Academy library halls to catch a nap in the temperature controlled interiors.
I had come to Delhi in mid-90s with no acquaintances or
friends. Someone had told me to go to Mandi House. I made my life in Delhi
because I went to Mandi House. I met everyone there. Shantanu too went to Mandi
House. And his life and art was shaped in that place.
Shantanu perhaps never wanted to become a school teacher.
But to live and survive in Delhi one had to do something. Shantanu had to live
here. And the best was to join a school where his friends taught. Atul Bhalla
and Roy Thomas taught in the Mira Model School in Janak Puri. Shantanu got the
job there as an art teacher.
These three young and emerging artists were moving in three
different directions. A heavy bearded Atul Bhalla was struggling to find a
language of his own through his paintings and watercolors. Roy Thomas was more
like a traditionalist who painted with the severity and sincerity of a painter.
He had already finished his experimental stage by making huge paintings on
tarpolin. Now he was painting canvases and was sort of managing between school
and studio. Shantanu was the unmarried one amongst the three and was considered
to be ‘more radical than others’ and could easily move into the intellectual
circles, ripples within the ripples created in Mandi House and then spread out
to Max Mueller Bhavan, British Council and Santiniketan, a rich neighborhood in
Delhi where some godfathers and godmothers of Indian art scene lived.
Working in the same school,
drawing more or less the same salary and doing their art created a healthy
competition between these three artists and I believe that it was Shantanu’s
presence that created the present day Atul Bhalla and Roy Thomas. I do not
intend to say that Shantanu taught them something or showed them the way. But
Shantanu did show them the possibility of doing and hoping; and at times simply
showing the mid-finger. Atul Bhalla grew into a conceptual artist and Roy
Thomas, a fine painter.
(Poster of performance or Performance poster of Shantanu and Manmeet)
There is an artist who lives in Old Delhi and comes to Mandi
House every evening. Even today he does it. I do not know for how many decades
he has been doing it. His name is Susheel Kumar. Though many of the
contemporary performance artists do not remember his name as he was not pushing
himself so hard to be in the mainstream and was rather very critical of it, he
has to be acknowledged for his contributions to Indian Performance art scene.
Susheel was the one who inspired the conceptual and performance artists in
Shantanu Lodh and Inder Salim Tiku.
Susheel grew cynical to the fledgling contemporary art scene
and moved around as a living critical vehicle than a doer of art before
withdrawing to his own shell of silence. His pivotal performance was carrying a
Buddha head in his hands and walking from the National School of Drama campus
to the Lalit Kala Akademi premises in Mandi House. It did not create such cry
and hue because India was still tolerant even after Babri Masjid.
Shantanu took up the threads where Susheel had left it. He
collaborated with large hoarding projects in and around Mandi House and mostly
the hoarding featured the pictures of both Shantanu and Inder Salim. ‘Hum Tum
Ek Kamre mein Band Ho’ said one of the hoardings. It was a criticism on the
galleries in India (retrogressive art!). Art was held captive in galleries;
that was what they wanted to say. Inder Salim shot up to fame when he cut the
tip of his finger off in a ‘secret ritual’ performed in an undeclared location
which was privy only to people like Susheel. The selective leak of the chopping
off of his finger spread far and wide giving a new halo to Inder Salim as a
‘legitimized’ practitioner of performance art in India. Inder and Shantanu
performance together against the gallery practices when they dressed themselves
up as two waiters who served wine and cheese during the gala openings of art
shows.
Manmeet was happening in
Shantanu’s life.
(Shantanu and Maneet performing in Delhi)
Manmeet Devgun passed out from Jamia Millia Islamia in late
1990s. And she did not want to paint. What she carried around was a camera and
photographing artists was her initial hobby. She too hung out in Mandi House.
A tough Punjabi girl falling in love with a soft Bengali boy
should have come with an expiry date as it has been the case with a few other
couples that I know personally.
Manmeet was a tough girl to chop off both Devgun and Lodh
from her name. Shantanu helped her in liberating herself as an artist. The new
millennium found them working together in a few projects that scandalized the
‘still conservative’ art community in India. The first one was the ‘Kissing in
Public’ poster project done sometime in 2003. The idea was mooted and executed
during a show curated by me in 2003 at the Arpana Art Gallery, Delhi. The show
was titled ‘Dreams: Projects Unrealized’. Though the present crop of conceptual
artists do not have a clue about the curatorial practices that prepared the
ground for them was coming from me, the stalwarts of Indian art came to visit
the show and went back dazed.
It was in this show Shantanu and Manmeet released their
kissing poster which was later to be pasted all over Delhi. They did it and it
was immediately removed or scraped by an uncaring public.
In 2004, I had grown disillusioned about Indian contemporary
art and was thinking of quitting.
Money had become the deciding factor of
Indian contemporary art in that year. It continued to be the same for another
seven years. I had to survive so I went to work in a Newspaper in Delhi. One
day in 2005, I got a call from Shantanu inviting me to Khoj. I was working as a
political journalist.
Reluctant I went there. I saw among people, dust, smoke
and the air thick with the smell of sweat and the beats of music, Shantanu and
Manmeet in stark nakedness letting their bodies to be ‘vandalized’ by the
viewers. You could write or painting on their bodies.
There was not an inch of space left in the bodies of
Shantanu and Manmeet. I felt like crying and I was humbled. I stood there
smiling at them. They came to me, looked into my eyes and we stood there saying
nothing. I was just reminded of the famous performance of Marina Abromovic; she
placed seventy two different torturing tools which had been used by the
perpetrators of punishment all over the world. She stood naked before the crowd
and asked them to torture her the way they wanted using those tools. Initially
they were reluctant. But someone started; a pinching here or there. Within a
few minutes Marina stood there like a ravaged land, her body bleeding all over.
People rejoiced in torturing her. The context was art. And they were just
participating in the ‘process’ of making a memorable piece of performance art.
Though painful, Abromovic proved her point. Given a chance, any human being
could be worse than the horrendous and hideous torturer in the world.
In the crowd in Khoj in 2005, I saw what Abromovic saw in Serbia
in 1974. Shantanu and Maneet called their performance with this title: ‘Hamam
mein Sab Nange hai, par Hamam Hai Kahan?’ (In the public bath everyone is naked
but where are those public baths?) They were referring to a socio-cultural
situation that decimated the beauty of openness and transparency in social
life. More or less in the same time Chintan Upadhyay had also did one
performance piece ‘Baar Baar Har bar Kitni Bar?” (Again and Again, Each Time
and How many Time?) In this performance done in Baroda, Chintan sat nude and
asked people to smear turmeric powder all over him.
***
(Shantanu Lodh performing in Delhi with a German artist)
Shantanu and Manmeet started living together. His father
moved in with them after Shantanu’s mother’s death. Shantanu was attached his
mother and he used to think that he looked exactly like her.
In the Mira Model School, he called us a few people (around
seven of us) and did a performance for his mother. Shantanu did not want to
make that performance a spectacle. It was a Sunday afternoon. He had made his
preparations.
In a tank we saw a few dark fish with sharp thorns coming
out their heads. Shantanu stood before the tank. Took out a pair of scissors
and cut off a few curly locks from his hair. He placed it on the tank and put a
few strands into the water. Then reverently he pushed his hands inside the
water in an attempt to catch the fish. First, they slipped away. Then they
began to attack. Shantanu began to bleed. He took out the bleeding hands and
dropped the blood on the hair and stood in silence for a few moments.
It was a performance that he did for his mother. We did not
ask for the meaning. But Shantanu told us that Bengalis ate the fish that they
loved.
The erotic connotation was palpable. The Oedipus angle was
too profane to discuss at that moment, which however I did when he did the next
performance at his home where he lived with Manmeet and his father.
(Chanchal Banga, an Indian
artist based in Jersalem, Israel also had performed a ritualistic act by
tonsuring himself with a coarse razor in full public view)
(Shantanu in one of his performance pieces)
Shantanu called ‘I Slapped my traditional Father’.
It is a series of photographs in which we see him in a very
special tea ceremony. Here Shantanu is the son/servant with no clothes on
serving his full clad father/master. The real life son standing before the real
life father nude becomes blasphemous only when the father is in the advanced
stage and the son is still young. Here is a Yayati moment and a lot of Oedipal
complications. I have written extensively about it and you may read it in http://artindia.net/johny/art6.html
Then Shantanu was not seen for a long time. We were looking
for him. We heard that he was separated from his wife and child. As usual, wife
takes all what the man has created, including children, and makes him flee. None
of us was surprised as making and breaking were quite normal in the art scene.
Then I heard that Shantanu had
gone in to some spiritual path. It was a very ironic course but very predictable
one. A staunch materialist is the one who is prone to become a spiritualist in
a given moment. The stronger materialism, the stronger is his fear to resist
the spiritual calling. When the wall collapses, he just tumbles over. It
happened to Shantanu. Peace is a birthright, hence I did not look at his
spiritual course skeptically. As Sree Narayana Guru had once said to a Yoga
practitioner, I too thought it was good for ‘fine bowel movements’. Yes, it was
good for his bowel movements. Shantanu shed a few kilos and looked happy and
trim. But with body mass he lost the zest for art making too. May be he was
making a different art.
(Another performance by Shantanu Lodh)
Shantanu is paralyzed now and if we could believe a best
friend like Roy Thomas, Shantanu is on his way back to his old self.
I believe, his very act of resisting death itself is a way
of showing mid finger to the Indian contemporary art scene.
Once, I was instrumental in organizing a small camp for the
‘nange bhooke’ (naked and starving) artists of my generation in a big bureaucrat’s
house in Delhi. Kaushal Sonkaria, Abhimanue VG, Mithu Sen, Shantanu Lodh, Shijo
Jacob and a few others were in the camp. They were given canvases to paint.
Shantanu did his classical act. He, a la Kasimir Malevich,
painted a hand showing the mid finger sign (we have it in whatsapp now) on a
white surface using white paint. He went on working it for three days (we were
given food packets as remuneration). From a distance it looked like a white
canvas. Once you moved closer you could see the mid finger glaring back at you.
The bureaucrat came, looked at it and understood. Herself being a
painter could not kick him out but kept her words for a later occasion. To my
surprise, on the fourth day evening, when the dignitaries were supposed to come
and see the paintings, Shantanu picked up his canvas, pressed it diagonally,
creating waves across the canvas and making the wooden stretcher jut out of
four corners like a badly broken human limb, kept it on the easel and walked
off. The bureaucrat came and in fully fury she asked me to re-stretch it. I
refused and slowly by the time the bureaucrats came Shantanu’s painting was
removed from the lawn.
The irony was, after a few months, I saw the same work
neatly stretched and exhibited in one of the exhibitions conducted by the
‘bureaucrat’. I think the organizer’s eye had missed the mid finger code hidden in it. I was happy to see it.
I would like to see Shantanu back. But at the same time I
know that Shantanu will never be the same one.
1 comment:
I am really sorry to hear the bad news. I will miss you dear Shantanu. It is true hopefully indian art will remember you always. Whether you're there or hear.
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