About Smaller and Longer Titles for/of Works of Art: With a Pinch of History

(Spoofing Damien Hirst with his famous work) 

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.