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)