When Someone Places Curio Shops over Art Galleries and Works of Art

(Screenshot of a message sent to me by a senior woman artist)

“Yesterday I was asked by a visitor to the exhibition why should he pay so much more for “an art piece“ when he could get something better finished and “finer” for a few hundred rupees from curio shops. He had also visited an exhibition at Fine arts college and could not see why youngsters should waste their time and talent making things out of “muck” and scrap. I did a poor job of explaining. Hope when you have time to spare you can write something for clearing such doubts.”

When I got this message in my inbox, from a reputed woman artist, what came to my mind instantly was the shallow understanding about art that people still carried in their minds. It reminded me of the statement that often people make when they see some masters’ works that apparently look naïve and child-like; hey, what is the big deal. Even my child could do this. Why does it take a great man/woman to do this stuff? The answer given to such bravado often ekes out stereotypical answers from the informed; yes, then why don’t you or your children do it?

This man does not differ much from such cynical people. Perhaps, he was not particularly sarcastic or condescending. He was just being real there! His idea about art lies something around a ‘finished’ product, something very Aristotlean, imitation of nature. While looking at the works of art that do not confirm his ideas about art as mimicking the objects and concepts, he feels that they are not up to the mark. And he does see a lot of art that are polished, finished, rounded and confirming to the commonly held ideas about art as mimicry.

(Aristotle)

However, this Aristotlean understanding of mimesis has a problem because the conceptualization of mimicry, while taking nature into consideration, obliterates culture from its discursive ken. Culture, as we understand today is the cumulative manifestations of the lives that people lived so far on the face of the earth. The early art did not confirm the ideas of mimesis though our ancestors were trying to imagine and execute the events, participants and objects exactly the way they had perceived them. They were trying to confirm but the confirmation needed more conceptual orientations and scientific understanding and overall development of brains that facilitated the accumulation of skills required to do sophisticated images and objects as we see today.

It too may take years for the human beings to arrive at the exact mimicry of nature in their creative expressions. They literally wanted the reflecting surfaces such as mirror and lenses in order to capture images and express them in verisimilitude. Imitation reflected truth and surface value was important for verifying the exactitude of that truth. The western thinking developed mostly around the Greek School of thought etched indelible marks in the minds of the people all over the world about the idea of exactitude, irrespective of the cultural variations chosen by the people in different continents, countries and regions. The western thought therefore moved around the existence of a complete body, a perfect body and an unblemished body that became the fundamental measure of beauty, truth and aesthetical as well as social acceptance.

Joseph Kosuth, taking directly on the Aristotlean idea of mimesis and also the Platonic idea of ideal form, produced a conceptual work of art titled One and Three Chairs, 1965, where he placed a chair on the floor, a photograph of a chair on the wall and a detailed dictionary definition on the wall adjacent to the photograph. The question was, which one is the ‘real’ chair there? Is it the wooden chair? If so, are all the chairs same in design and material? Is the picture, a chair? Or the definition of it? Between the concept, text and image, and even the object there is a chasm that has to be filled with ideas, culture and related discourses.

(One and Three Chairs- by Joseph Kosuth)

The man who came to see the shows and raised those questions himself is a confused person who needs a thorough education and experience in looking at and understanding the works of art, not only the ones that he sees in the galleries but also the ones that have become part of the history which are available through online and offline sources. The questions, thought cynical and sarcastic in sound and delivery, are good questions. That is one juncture where one start thinking about one’s own concepts about art and the works of art that are available for his consumption. He can get a finished product from a curio shop which would satisfy his aesthetical needs for the time being but once he is a regular visitor to the exhibitions, if he has a probing mind and ability to understand, he will definitely change his ideas on the nature of art.

Young artists are a different lot always. They are the people who respond to the world in a radical and new fashion compared to the old people whose eyes and brains are tuned to the fundamentals of life whatever changes take place in the material world. Hence, even if newer inventions challenge their materialistic and intellectual understanding, after the initial unsettling they land back to their time-tested understanding about life; exceptions are there in those categories though. Young people, on the contrary are dare devils, with a lot of curiosity to know the world and imbibe the ever-renewing technologies. Their ideas about the object(ive) world are different from those of the old people. When such ideas are made into expressions, the youngsters resort to unprecedented approaches and choose hitherto disused objects, materials and concepts. Those who look for beauty in the conventional sense, such works of art may be a disappointment. But the viewers, art collectors and so on, cannot live in a Chaplinesque dreamscape forever where the primal innocence is the driving force and the dominant theme. Contemporary works of art are meant to challenge the conventional ideas about art. When they are capable of challenging, the intelligent ones would say, what a challenge!

-JohnyML

Prof.B.N.Goswamy No More: A Quick Portrait of the Art Historian

 

(Prof. B.N.Goswami 1933-2023)

Prof.B.N.Goswamy, the renowned art historian is no more. He was ninety years old. A man who inherited his classy lifestyle and erudition during the tumultuous years of colonial era kept that on without compromising even after India gained independence. He was an IAS officer for a few years and left his administrative skills behind to do further research on Indian art, especially Pahari and Sikh art. His curiosity moved from recognizing the lesser known manuscripts and illuminations from the regional varieties of Indian miniature traditions and writing volumes about them, to the identification of artists who did signature style works in the courts of northern provinces since the Mughal period. He pored himself over innumerable volumes of documents kept by the temple priests whose relentless documentations of the donors in cash, kind and art, without losing the finer details such as the painters’ names, those of the donors and witnesses under certain chieftains and kings, and brought out volumes on artists such as Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India, Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State, Manaku of Guler: the Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State.

I met Prof.B.N.Goswamy personally in 2012, when I was invited by Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi to give an illustrated lecture. Prof.Goswamy, to my surprise, came and sat in the front row and kept listening to my rather lengthy presentation for slightly over one and half hour. After the lecture he shook hands with me and said he enjoyed looking at the contemporary works of art that were detailed in my presentation. Reading B.N.Goswami has always been a pleasurable thing. His volumes are written in chaste English but never pretentious or deliberately tedious and complex. He never encumbered his writing with unnecessary jargons. He could transport an art history enthusiast and a general reader to the layers of Indian art traditions prevailed in the northern provinces of our country both in his writings as well as in his illustrated lectures. He had this theatrical flourish in his presentations, which often ended with an image where Lord Krishna was presented in an absent form, through a blooming tree.

Prof. B.N.Goswami always reminded me of the late painter, Jehangir Sabawala; both of them exuded a sense of Victorian elegance. While Sabawala was aloof in nature (may be he was accessible to his friends, galleries, collectors and dealers, which I was not) but Prof.Goswami remained accessible to students and scholars alike, but never made himself a populist. He stuck to his methodology and writing style and did not traverse to the realm of contemporary art (except for once) as some art historians specializing in 19^th century or earlier centuries tend to do. Most of them believe that methodology makes art history; a sort of stencil application of the historical methodology over contemporary arts done in different contexts and intents, and make hybrid art historical writings, overtly jargon infested and opaque. Prof.Goswamy never fell into that fallacy. To put it differently, he did not emulate a Hindustani singer who thought he would rap for a change and cut himself a sorry figure.

Brijinder Nath Goswamy, that was his full name. I never knew it till recently. I was reading his book ‘The Indian Cat’, his last work on art history, approached through a different trajectory where he picked up a set of Indian traditional works of art where cats are depicted as a side character or a predominant one. In that book, one of his foreign friends calls him ‘Brij’ and I was curious. Like the book revealed another side of Goswamy, it also revealed to me that his name was Brijinder Nath Goswamy and his close friends called him Brij. In every person there are two persons, at least. One is for public consumption and another one for exclusive private use. How was B.N.Goswamy in private, did he always wore a scarf around his neck like some old film stars, or did he always sleep on a spotless bedsheet and so on, we are not privy to know. But the public personality of Prof.Goswamy was that of a meticulous art historian, always looking for a lost name of an artist and giving him his due acknowledgement in Indian art history, a delayed justice but what a justice!

We are going to miss Prof.B.N.Goswamy for a long time.

-JohnyML