(Waswo X Waswo and R.Vijay pic courtesy Open Magazine)
‘Like a Leaf in Autumn’ is the latest exhibition by Waswo X
Waswo and R.Vijay at the Gallery Espace, New Delhi. Perhaps, these two artists
make the most successful duo in Indian art scene. They have not flown too far
away from the ground and also not too close to the sun. Hence, their output as
well as success has been steady all these while. Unlike the other duos in the
Indian art scene, Waswo-Vijay does not indulge in authorial ambiguity that
makes the style definite and recognizable while the roles are merged to become
one. Waswo-Vijay duo comes together to create a solid body of works but defines
their roles separately; R.Vijay as the visual executor (of course after much
deliberations and angry take offs) and Waswo as the conceptualizer cum
director. Together they make a perfect combination.
‘It Never Works the Way You Think’ is a work from this show,
which I believe captures the crux of the argument that Waswo as an Evil
Orientalist has been forwarding ever since he decided to make India his first
or second home depending on the season that he prefers to be in Udaipur. The
argument is simple: Can an artist from the other shores be an Indian artist? Can
an artist do away with locational adjectives that qualify his name whenever it
is mentioned in the land’s history as well as art history? We have had Nicholas
Roerich and Svetoslave Roerich from Russia who almost became Indians as they
chose to live in the foothills of Himalaya. We have had Elizabeth Sass Brunner
and Mary Sass Brunner the mother-daughter duo from Hungary living very much in
Delhi. They still hold their locational honorifics. Perhaps they wanted to be
known as Indian artists. Waswo, a Milwaukee-ian, an exceptionally different
provincial American who however knows his Duchampian tricks to be right in the
middle of the things but doing things well instead of playing chess with nude
models, but yes definitely capturing the hopeful visitors into images meant to
be eternal thereby giving them some lease of posthumous life, must also be wishing
to be known as an Indian artist. But the conflict is felt even when he
naturalizes himself with the history, politics and living surroundings of the
place.
(It Never Works the Way You Think by Waswo and Vijay)
This conflict is given visual embodiment in the constant
presence of a Bisleri bottle, a brand of bottled drinking water which initially
had become emblematic to the Westerners’ mistrust in the basics of India,
meaning drinking water and breathing air. In his works, we see a plastic bottle
inconspicuously lying around making its presence too strong to be
inconspicuous. Also the hat and the red polka dotted neck tie. The man is
either relaxing or reading, or he is simply trying to be someone who is not
himself. And all the other times he is running behind invisible butterflies
like a serious lepidopterist turning the very chase an occupation in itself. As
we do not see any butterflies per se, we have to understand that the artist is
in a wild goose chase within the wild but without the goose anywhere in the
vicinity. But this absurdity of a chase has deeper meaning when I see it in the
abovementioned conflict; of being in one place and belonging there completely.
Ruskin Bond, just because of his white skin despite his natural citizenship in
India, being an Anglo-Indian but more Indian and rooted than any Himachali,
still faces this issue of belongingness; Waswo can find some solace in Bond,
not James, but Ruskin.
‘It Never Works the Way You Think’ is an epiphany; a title
that reveals all his revelations. It does not happen in that way dear, he pats
himself and says. But the painting has something more to say. This is the tale
of Icarus; the son of Daedalus, the master craftsman. They were under captivity
in a tower and by looking at the eagles, they thought of escaping from there by
sticking feathers to their hands, making workable wings. They were defying
science (don’t ask from where they got wax for sticking the feathers. There is
no question in the story) and Daedalus had only one advice for his son; do not
venture too close to the sun for the fear of wax melting. But sons are always
sons before they become fathers. They rebel; and upon defying his father’s
words, Icarus flew quite close to the Sun and the wax melted and he came
dropping like a stone to meet his watery bier. We see the surrogate Waswo, painted
by R.Vijay landing on his nose in the vast ocean. This is the perennial fear of
the artist himself; do not go too close to the sun where you think everyone got
a place and there is hope for everyone. India is a tilted place still when
Waswo looks at it in terms of his own belongingness. I do not insist that Waswo
agrees with it.
(Starry Night by Waswo and Vijay)
My belief on this interpretation deepens when I see the free
standing severed wing, like in a no man’s land/space in between (neither here
nor there, the liminal space, perhaps an accursed space, which in India is a
called the Trishanku Swarga, which is a heaven and hell at once. It is heaven
because of the spatial buoyancy and it is hell because it is without roots.
Having no roots is hell. That is what all the immigrants feel and suffer. That's
why Ambedkar told Gandhi, ‘I don’t have a country.’), reminding the informed
viewer of the violated wing of Jatayu, the mighty bird that had tried to
prevent the abduction of Sita. In fact, the wing comes from Raja Ravi Varma’s
imagination, where interestingly both the abductor and the savior remain
hanging in the space and the poignant moment shows three different rasas, of
pity, valor and ferocity. Waswo removes all those and emblematizes the wing
with no space or a safe space in nowhere, and implies that even without a space
that wing could belong to the collective imagination of the people because it
belongs to the memory of the land. Waswo however is not a complainant; he sees
the hope of his rescue in an approaching boat which surprisingly has a sail in
the form of a wing. A boat with a winged sail comes directly from the
imaginations of hade, the nether world which is aspiring to be hell but not yet
one and there are philosophers for the oarsmen in the boat. Hence, definitely
Waswo has a chance of being there in the subaltern if not subterranean
discourse of art in India.
(An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus by Surendran Nair)
Waswo reminds one and all that it does not work the way you
think; it is not fatalistic like an Indian or Russian imagination where the
providential decisions, as in the Grecian interference of Godheads in the local
human affairs thwart the human aspirations. It is a pragmatic view of things
for Waswo. Man proposes God disposes is not the case; not even the Tolstoyesque
‘God Sees the Truth but Waits’. There is no god to see the truth or to dislodge
the schemes. But man made physical circumstances always collapse the attempts
and efforts. Waswo had seen it in Kochi when he had come to participate in a
Biennale collateral where his efforts to get his works back home were
questioned by the unionized laborers to which Waswo’s response was nothing but
dropping the artefacts and destroying them. So here he becomes a destroyer than
a maker, a master of destruction in the ultimate efforts to keep the personal
destiny in hand than letting it go to the hands of the muscled strangers or
political gods. But it is good to remind oneself that things do not happen as
we think. But it gives hopes to one and all to strive for it. And more importantly,
it is one Icarus reference in Indian art after the controversial work by
Surendran Nair titled ‘An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus’
where we see Icarus standing on the top of the Asokan Pillar waiting to launch
himself into space while he sees seagulls flying off to their homes. Here in
Waswo we see the parrots coming directly out of the miniature aesthetics and
flying home happily to the folios. I have been talking about Waswo all the way
but let me tell you whenever I talk about Waswo in this show’s context I am
talking about R.Vijay too.
JohnyML
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