Titles ah! Titles are the entry points in/of a work of art.
Most of the artists find it difficult to title their works. Some artists approach
their curators or even gallerists to name their works. They give them fancy
names and if they are really bored of things around, they would maximum call it
‘Untitled’. ‘Untitled’ is the state of being of a work of art; devoid of name,
location, particular meaning and intent. It expresses the artistic state of
being too. When the artists especially those abstract artists think that their
works represent nothing it is safe to call them ‘untitled’. But for many it has
become a title in itself; ‘Untitled’. It exactly sounds like the name ‘Anamika’
which means someone with no name. And it is one of the names preferred by the
intellectual types to call their girl children and I think it comes next to the
name ‘Aparna’. This untitled phenomenon is something like artists making diptych
and triptych. I have thought about it; the rationale behind splitting a work
into two or three pieces. According to my understanding idea of making diptych
and triptych comes from the old religious art where altar panels were split
into pieces and the narrative had to be broken. Some of them were portable and
some by virtue of the architectural plans, though immobile had to be divided
into pieces.
(Departure, a triptych by Max Beckman)
During the modern times, diptychs and triptychs became some
sort of an artistic norm when the works had to be transported from one place to
another; it was sheer convenience that prompted artists to split their works
into pieces. Besides, it also depended on the sizes of the canvases or papers available
for making paintings. Then, again it depended heavily on the sizes of the
studios from where the artists worked. Even today if you don’t have a huge studio
but you want to make a huge painting, the only way is to split up the canvas
and then work in pieces only to assemble in the exhibition spaces. However, with
huge spaces at their disposal artists still make diptychs and triptychs because
they too have become some kind of a modernist norm which is too alluring to
resist. With the idea of assemblages came along with the idea of installations
in the post-modern era, splitting up a narrative or object representations into
a few pieces and assembling them on the walls gained traction within the
display practices. Also it has given birth to a way of looking at art in
fragments and then making a mental picture about the possible narratives. This,
on the one hand has imparted the artist with certain amount of freedom in
manipulating the conventional mode of painting and on the other hand, it has
liberated the viewers from the tyranny of the modernist large scale works.
(work by Sunil Das)
I would rather leave that point regarding multiple frames
there and proceed with the idea of titles. I remember one of the modern artists
in India, late Sunil Das telling the students (I too was one then) why he used
certain red and black arrows within his paintings. Das’ paintings represented a
lot of bulls and women. One could see a deluge of movements and the display of
beastly strength in those paintings however, it was a bit difficult for us, the
students to make an entry into the paintings. Answering to a query regarding
this, Das pointed at the arrows in his paintings and said that they could be
seen as the entry points. It was a moment of revelation for me (I do not know
about the feeling of other students) because I knew by then that the eyes,
driven by the brain activities had the tendency to move clockwise and capture
the narrative within the painting. Even in the repetitive image based vertical
narratives in the Indian miniature tradition as well as in the zig zag
narratives of the modern narrative school the left to right orientation was
evident. But having arrows, doors, windows, cracks, rupture and so on within a
painting that could function as entry points was a new thing for me. Hence in
retrospection I found out that when a classical point of departure was absent
or rather hiding from the eyes of the onlooker, he/she could make an entry by
simply following a brush stroke, an arrow or any such suggestion within the painting.
(a still from the movie Day of the Jackal)
How does one approach a work of art when the point of
departure as well as the entry points I have aforementioned are absent? The only
extraneous clue to this entry is provided by the titles. Titles are at once a
name and an entry point. That is perhaps the case of any social organizing
principle. We tend to give name to accommodate a thing/person into a certain
existing order which is comprehensible to all. That means, a name erases
strangeness and otherness and functions as an inclusive method. Inclusion in a
particular order or system is also part of soft subordination and subjection.
Once, given a name, an object or a person cannot be out of the social narrative.
It does not leave any gaps that disturb the sense of fulfilment and security.
That’s why in the movie, Day of the Jackal, we do not come to know about the
identity of the person who tries to assassinate the French President. Hence it
becomes imperative to eliminate him from the narrative to regain security and
satisfaction. And does title/name matter so much to a work of art beyond it
being the entry point?
(Luncheon on the Grass by Manet)
Even in the modern art history, titles of the famous works are
attributed by someone other than the artists themselves. It could be an art
critic or journalist in a newspaper or an art historian himself at a later
stage when he writes about the work. The title ‘Luncheon on the Grass’, the
famous Manet painting which had apparently started the modern/Impressionist art
movement was given to it by the journalists as an explanatory term as it was
titled by Manet himself as ‘The Bath’ and the ‘Foursome’. Most of the works by
Vincent Van Gogh, as we know today are titled by the later historians and
writers and it is quite understandable when we realize that all those works
derive their names from the central image of the painting. Cypress Trees is
full of cypress trees, Starry Night is a starry night, Sunflowers is a painting
that shows sunflowers. Even his last painting, ‘Crows in the Wheatfield’ is an
explanatory title. But we know the paintings mostly by their title. Once they
are titled they are brought into the common order of art history and the
awareness about it. Hence, when we listen to a title like ‘Persistence of
Memory’ we cannot think about anything else but the melting clock painted by
Salvador Dali.
(The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even by Duchamp)
Smaller titles are remembered easily but the image can be
forgettable. Works of art with stark images or oft reproduced images are
remembered for their images and it not necessary that a name is remembered
along with it. The works of Da Vinci and Michelangelo are remembered even
without their titles for many of them are traced back to the commonly shared
mythological understanding. So is the case with Raja Ravi Varma. Now take the
case of the works by Rabindranath Tagore. We do not remember any title. But we
know them by genres like ‘faces’, ‘women’, ‘landscapes’, ‘doodles’ and so on.
Early modernists have this problem of being categorized in the genres. But there
are artists who remain in our minds for the titles; for example Marcel Duchamp.
‘Fountain’ is a title that evokes an industrially produced urinal. ‘Nude
Descending the Staircase’, we cannot think anything else than the painting
itself. ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even’ rings in the peculiar
image done by Duchamp. Except for a few paintings with specific titles like ‘The
Damsels of Avignon’ and ‘Guernica’ by Picasso, most of the works by this prolific
artist were titled by others according to their convenience and like in the case
of Tagore, by genres.
(Who are we, Were do We Come from, Where are We going by Paul Gauguin)
This automatically leads us to a question: Do smaller title
carry the magic or the longer titles? Smaller titles are to be remembered for
their brevity but to me longer titles make a lot of impact than smaller titles.
The work may be small or less ambitious but the titles could be really
impressive and enigmatic. But at times longer titles are given to more
enigmatic and philosophical works of art and in most of the cases the artists
are extremely conscious of this nomenclature. They know why they attribute a
certain name to a particular work of art. When we look at the work of Paul
Gauguin titled ‘Who are We, Where do We Come from, Where are We Going?’ despite
the sequential narrative in a horizontal format that trickily start from the
right to left we are hugely impressed by the gravity of the question itself. It
asks us to think about the origin of the human beings, their past, present and
future. Gauguin tired by debts and diseases it was naturally for him to ask
that question but his focus was elsewhere; he was asking this question vis-à-vis
the life and times of a girl child/a woman. He traced the life through her
physical growth, sexuality, old and death. Almost in the same time, in Kerala,
Kumaran Asan was asking the same question in his poem, Veenapoov (the Fallen
Flower). Gauguin inspires A.Ramachandran to do his ambitious magnum opus ‘Yayati’.
While Gauguin looks at the life of a Tahitian girl, Ramachandran picks up the
thread in the complicated life of King Yayati, Urvasi and Pooruravass. The
single word title ‘Yayati’ is further split into Ushus (morning), Madhyahna
(Noon) and Sandhya (Night); three stages of life, which is quite Shakespearean
in essence as the Bard had said (life) ‘sans eyes, sans tooth, sans ear and
everything.’
(How to explain picture to a dead hare by Joseph Beuys)
Another impressive title is by Joseph Beuys who in 1965 did
this pivotal performance on the impossibility of communication or the
possibility of gaps in comprehension, between what is said and what is
understood. He in his performance covered his face with golden foil and held a
dead hare on his lap and almost lamented how he could explain things to the
dead hare. The title of the work is ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’. I
could be a question raised to the political authorities who just do not
understand a thing said by the creative people. Also it could be the impossibility
of communication itself. I am once again reminded of Kumaran Asan when he said ‘God
has not given me a language so that I could show my soul to the other…today
language is incomplete and there could be communicative errors due to
questionable inferences’ in his poem titled ‘Thoughtful Sita’. In Beuys work
the longer title makes it philosophically deep and rooted.
(The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst)
A title that has intrigued one and all is by Damien Hirst.
In 1991, he did a very ambitious work by tanking up a huge tiger shark poached
from the Australian seas and displayed in a vitrine filled with the
preservative solution, formaldehyde. A work that scandalized the art world with
questions of aesthetical as well as production ethics carried a title, ‘The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. Death is one of
the greatest philosophical questions that world religions have asked and have
tried to find their own solutions. The one and only unavoidable phenomenon
Death comes to everyone but none seems to be having a trace of anxiety about
it. In Mahabharata, in Vanaparva, there is a section called Yaksha Prashna
where a Yaksha confronts Yudhishtira, the senior-most of the Pandavas and puts
some philosophical questions. The condition was that if Yudhishtira could
answer all the questions satisfactorily the Yaksha would bring back the dead
brothers to life (which has etymological connections with the Sophoclean event
in the confrontation of Oedipus and Sphinx). The Yaksha asks: What’s most
wonderful? Yudhishtira answers: ‘Day after day countless creatures are going to
the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be
immortal. What can be more wonderful than this?’ Now my question is what else
is said by Damien Hirst’s title, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living’.
(An Old Man from Vasad who had five penises suffered from Running Nose by Bhupen Khakar)
In 1995, late Bhupen Khakar did a painting which had also
scandalized the morally challengeable audience in India and the title was ‘An
Old Man from Vasad who had Five Penises Suffered from a Running Nose’. This was
a take on a folk story where a wise fool laughs at a goddess (Kalidasa at Devi)
upon seeing ten heads. He was wondering how she would manage if she catches a
bad cold. Bhupen twists the story to suit his purpose of making the hidden
obvious regarding a gay man. What would a gay man with overriding libido do if
he is irresistibly horny? In India, in those days the article 377 was not
scrapped and an intolerant society would have killed such a gay man itching to
masturbate which is shown as him dealing with a running nose. The same approach
is taken by Khakar in an earlier work titled ‘You Can’t Please All.’
(An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus by Surendran Nair)
The story of longer titles could also be seen in another
controversial work titled ‘An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus’
(2000) by Surendran Nair. This work was banned from a show at the NGMA, Delhi
and the exhibition titled ‘Combined Voice of the New Century’ curated by Prima
Kurien. India was ruled by the BJP then with a moderate Atal Bihari Vajpeyi as
the Prime Minister. However, the moral police of the time thought that Nair was
trying to vandalize the prestigious Asokan Pillar that has been adopted as our
national emblem by none other than a committee headed by Dr.Ambedkar who had
started the Navayana Buddhist Movement in India. Asokan was a Buddhist Emperor
or rather he was converted himself to Buddhism but the co-optation of the
Asokan symbols was a part of the right wing tactics to find a larger and deeper
history for itself and thereby denying that history to the Navayana Buddhists. The
curator was bold enough to close the whole show rather than removing this
particular painting and the painting entered the modern cultural history of
India as something that disturbed the ‘moral values’ set up by the right wing.
Somehow, since then Surendran Nair has used more and more Hindu imageries in
his highly sophisticated and stylized paintings.
(Yayati by A.Ramachadran)
Longer titles bring attention to the works. Do we need to
arrive at such a conclusion? Or is it accidental that the works with longer
titles at times get into some kind of controversy? Whatever it is longer titles
generate some kind of a curiosity among the viewers; if not at least among the
art historians. A single word title or a smaller phrase title could be like a
single punch on the nose whereas a longer one could be a barrage of punches and
kicks that make you an absolutely changed man! In more refined terms I would
say, a single word title is an invitation to a definitive (aesthetic) event
while a longer title is an invitation to a maze where the exiting task is all
at your own risk.
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