When the Saints Go Marching Out

In my short trip to meet Shibu Natesan, one of the all time intelligent painters in Indian contemporary art scene, from my village, Vakkom in Trivandrum District, Kerala, I look at those people who are sitting idly at the road side. In my childhood there used to be a lot of wayside tea-shops where the workers gathered to have their morning tea and discuss the daily news. Irrespective of their caste, creed and economic status, these tea-shops unified them into one thread of social consciousness. They discussed politics, right from the state politics to the international politics including the imperialist incursions in Vietnam, success of Soviet Russia in resisting American Imperialism, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao, Kanu Sanyal, Charu Majumdar and so on. Now those days look so remote and could be seen only through the sepia tinted filters of nostalgia.

I cannot go on like that; get into the memory lane and talk longingly of those good old days. But my context is different. Perhaps, it is my deliberate training that I should be seeing the people of my village and its surroundings in the context of Indian contemporary art. I hurry through my memory; have I ever seen these people represented in Indian contemporary art? No. People are the last things to be featured in the Indian contemporary art. Objects have taken their places- the orgy of objects. Then I prod myself, is it necessary to portray people in contemporary art? Do people belong to contemporary art, or does contemporary art belong to people? Interesting, hmm.. I am getting into a very dangerous area.

Looking at the faces of the people who look at the bus in which I am traveling with their boredom filled eyes, I realize one thing.- they are all bored and they all have lost hope. They do not seem to know what really want in their lives. My mother tells me that all those people do not work but they want money. They all have turned greedy. But I am not able to discern their greed from their helplessness. On either side of the road, there are huge concrete buildings, concrete monstrosities coated with fluorescent plastic emulsion colors. The socio-economic disparity is clearly visible even in this remote village. People are divided vertically; on the one side there are people who grow richer and on the other side, the people grow poorer.

If this is the case of a comparatively well off and educated village, what could be the general case of the remote Indian villages? What would be the people doing? Are they affected or influenced or revolutionized by the art forms that claim to be dealing with the issues of people affected by the imported and home grown neo-imperialist forces? I ask a few people whether they know about Subodh Gupta and Aneesh Kapoor. None know. I ask them whether they know about Enron, Iraq war, American invasion of the poor countries etc- They know it, if not directly, they know it indirectly and they are angry.

What is our contemporary art doing? Or to be precise what is our contemporary artists doing? While expressing their angst against the American imperialism, the all pervading corporatism, ironing out of tastes through brutal indoctrination, making people into cannon fodders for imperialist wars etc, do they touch the nerve centers of the people in our country? Does the Indian populace in any manner energized by the Indian contemporary art? We talk about a growing market, an expanding market, a boom here or a boom there, a market collapse, a stock exchange recovery, hope for the years to come etc, vis-à-vis Indian contemporary art? What are we talking about? Are we forgetting people? Or Indian contemporary art is all about aesthetics minus people? When people are erased from the subjective consciousness of the artist, it cease to be art. I don’t know what else it would become. What I know is that it definitely cease to be art.

Let us see the kind of subjects that Indian contemporary artists deal in their works. They all deal with the issues ‘affecting’ people. Ironically people are their mainstay. Dislocation is one of the major themes our artists talk about. Dislocation and migration happen thanks to the grabbing of land from the people by multinational corporates and their Indian counterparts. People are given inadequate cash compensation or land compensation, which render people virtually helpless and hopeless. When they are not given any compensation, they are drawn into never ending legal disputes. Once thrown out of their own lands what people could do is to migrate to cities. In cities they become the garbage, constantly flushed out to the fringes.

Indian contemporary art deals with the issue of migration and dislocation so vehemently that, if it was every powerful in articulating, this issue should have been solved with immediate effect, as Indian contemporary art is one of the major economic forces of the country at this time. But why is it not happening? Are the artists not serious about what they are doing or are the people who are dealing with the art not serious about it? Arundhati Roy, the author who speaks her mind, says that in India now there are 56 million people dislocated from their homes. Out of this 56 million, several million kids of under five years die during the process of migration. Roy calls it a genocide facilitated by the state and the imperialist forces that work towards ‘economic well being’ of the country.

What has gone wrong with Indian contemporary art? Does it have a social responsibility? I talk to a lot of artists and they all look concerned about the issues, but with no results. If I ask, they say, how as individuals they can bring in positive social changes? Some artists have grown so fatalistic that they say that art cannot do anything towards social causes. Art has become a powerless tool, and it can now only generate money and more money. Let me remind you, it is not my observation, it is the observation of some artists. Arundhati Roy supports militant uprising of people (the Maoists) in the villages. The state calls it ‘Terrorism’ and she calls it the last resort of the people who wants justice. She says that the state has conflated poverty with terror, and also hunger with militancy. People are just asking for food and you are suppressing them with brutal state power. What are our artists doing? By painting or sculpting these issues and presenting them in galleries, do they think that their responsibility is over? Or can an individual artist take any kind of social responsibility at this stage? If not, then what is he doing in his canvases? A kind of masochism? I don’t know.

In Orissa, Christian missionaries and those poor people who just for food and education converted to Christianity are burnt down and brutally assaulted? There are so many successful Orissan artists in India. What did they do at that time? When Bihar was afflicted by the floods, what did our successful Bihari artists do? We all talk about secularism, but when it comes to defined terrorism, we all become Hindus, Muslims, Christians and so on. Money has blinded us and it has rendered us insensitive. I don’t say that all the artists should go out in the streets and work for social causes. But there are some risky areas where one should be able to talk boldly- but none talks. You can talk about terrorism and anti terrorism within the confines of the national discourse. But the moment you criticize your own national clichés, you are entering in a dangerous zone. So you make your arguments as abstract as possible. We, artists talk against terrorism, but we never concretely say that there is a state sponsored terrorism. A lot of risk involved in saying that. One artist recently told me, ‘We are going through a period where we are not able to speak what we want.” I don’t know he was making a critique on his own ineffectual life or he was just saving his face by generalizing it as the condition of our lives.

“People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the violence of the Indian state. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colours fade to black and while. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price”- Arundhati Roy.

Roy takes the stance with the ‘so called’ terrorists. She knows the risks. She is a celebrity author so the state cannot do ‘things’ against her that effectively. But our contemporary artists are far richer and popular (perhaps not) than Arundhati Roy, still why don’t they take bold stance on particular issues? I have an answer for that. Taking an analogy from Arundhati Roy, I would say, we have learned the technique of survival. How can we live in a society where there is abundance of poverty and struggle, and feel that our richness protects us from these? Roy says that we neglect and pretend that poverty and struggle just don’t exist. It is a survival technique because our hands are too muddy in the making of poverty and struggle for others. To continue with the analogy, Indian contemporary art is an area where high intensity flash lights are focused. It renders its edges blurred and dark with some kind of depth. We refuse to see the darkness as the light is so strong and the light, for the time being looks like eternal.

Meeting an Artist at Dilli Haat on a Hot Humid Afternoon

I get a call from Santhosh Babu, a friend, hypnotist and personal management trainer.

“Johny, Silpi Rajan is here in Delhi. He would like to meet you as he is having a show in Dilli Haat,” he says.

“I am in Mumbai,” I said, “I would definitely meet him once I am back in Delhi.”

After two days I am back in Delhi and I get a call. The number does not look familiar. I pick up the call even if it is the first half of the day, when I generally don’t pick up calls, fearing that the caller would give me some unpalatable message. It has become almost a superstition. I avoid taking calls even from my closest friends like Dilip Narayanan, Chintan Upadhyay, Manjunath Kamath, Somu Desai and so on.

“I am Silpi Rajan,” the caller says. I am just reminded of the talk between me and Santhosh Babu.

“Yes, Rajan, I know you are having a show at the Dilli Haat,” I said.

“Yes,” Rajan’s voice sounds happy. “The show is getting over on Monday, 6th October. Please do drop in. I want to meet you,” he says.

I assure him that I would go and meet him the next day.

Generally speaking, I hate to go and see shows because many of the shows do not offer me any kind of a ‘high’. I expect the shows to make me high, a permanent state of intoxication. I live in a perpetual high gained through reading, seeing good works of art and conversations with friends. I am a reluctant talker. But I can chat for hours with my friends, if it is online.

Hence, I force myself to get out of my studio/office in Chittaranjan Park and I head towards Dilli Haat under the hazy clouds that make Delhi a veritable hell. It is the advent of October, however the climate has not changed much. Few years back, things were different in Delhi. End of September heralded the change of climate. October saw the onset of winters. Now, accuse global warming for this climate change, Octobers are still hot and humid. I remember my favorite writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose characters lie in hammock in humid atmosphere, with an army of mosquitoes for company. In Delhi we don’t have hammocks. But wherever we sit, it is a hammock. We are in a permanent hanging state, under humid weather, with of course, mosquitoes for company.

I buy a ticket at the counter. It is Rs.15 for an adult and Rs.5 for a child. The recurring incidents of bomb blasts have hampered the spirit of the people. There are not many visitors. I go inside through the security gate. They just let me go. No frisking, no groping. There must be CCTV cameras around. If I am a potential terrorist, I am watched and my images are registered. Like any other Delhi citizen, I too am conscious of my public presence. I know by now that I am under continuous surveillance.

There is a banner with ‘Shilpotsava’ (The Festival of Sculptures) written on it. But I don’t see any sculptures around. The usual stalls with ethnic stuff spread around there and the poor village craftsmen wait for clients, anxiously. That is what makes my spirits down. The class and locational distinctions are well marked there. They are poor craftsmen. You are a rich city dweller. You are here to patronize them. I hate the situation. I hate the situation, in which I am forced to eat dinner while the village folks in their festive best sing songs to entertain you.

“Where shall I find sculptor Rajan,” I ask someone who looked like a government official in his lousy stereotyped clothes.

“No, idea,” he says and the boredom is largely written on his face. I just move away from there, suppressing the seething anger in me.

Suddenly, from one of the stalls, I hear a familiar language, Malayalam. I turn back and see a small dark man with a long grey beard speaking into his mobile phone. That is Rajan, I can tell you for sure, even if I am seeing him for the first time.

But then, it is not an exhibition that I see. It is a stall, where his sculptures are just kept on a small wooden table covered with a piece of white cloth.

“Hi Rajan,” I greet him.

He takes a moment before responding to my greeting with a smile. He is unsure of my identity.

“I am JohnyML,” I tell him vehemently to take him out of his confusion. I don’t know whether he expected me to be a different person. With my blue jeans and black T-shirt I don’t look like an art critic from anywhere.

Rajan holds my hand. I could feel the strength of that diminutive man. The hands, which have chipped a lot of wooden flakes and revealed a lot of sculptures. The hands that have taken life from its rawness and moulded into shapes. The hands that have seen utter poverty and utter disillusionment. The hands that have seen the appreciation of patrons and friends. The hands that smell and feel of life.

Rajan shows me his sculptures. The biggest sculpture here is maximum one and half feet tall and half a foot in width. Most of them are made in wood. And a few are done in clay. They all look like traditional and tribal sculptures reminding anyone of the totem poles and votive figures. There is a raw energy in the chiseled marks that define the contours. They are the figures of earth. They express the black man’s power and his feeling to be with the earth. They emanate a raw closeness to nature. They are the expressions of the primordial prayers of a natural human being

The sculptures are displayed in a five feet by two feet table. I remember the Sakshi Gallery Show of Ghesuram and Rajkumar from Bastar region. Their works also come from the same mindset and aesthetic attitude. Rajan has not got a chance to exhibit in big cities though his sculptures have been exhibited in some south Indian cities. Had he been found out by some gallery a few years back, he would have got a chance to work more.

Rajan is a school drop out. He dropped out when he was in seventh standard. Life was the reason for him to become a drop out. He became an automobile workshop mechanic. But somewhere in him, an artist remained dormant for years. And slowly he started working on available wood. A friend of him gave him a set of chiseling tools and that was the beginning of his artistic career sometime in 1980s. He worked in wood, in clay and in cement. These media that glorified poverty and struggle as the main features of artistic excellence, wrote so many things about his works. Poets wrote many words saying that he was the embodiment of black power. Some film actors collected his works, obviously to give an ethnic touch to their designed homes. He got some commissions to do public sculptures. But life was not easy for him.

In the front courtyard of his small home at Trissur, Kerala, there is an unfinished shed and a few rusting machineries. And this dilapidated shed has got something to do with the present show that I am seeing at Dilli Haat.

“I had taken a loan from the Kerala State Schedule Caste Finance and Development Corporation (KSFDC). It was for establishing a small scale industrial unit to produce wood works for interior decoration. Somehow, it did not work out as I could not find skilled people to work with me,” says Rajan.

The rest of the story sounds familiar and strange at the same time. Rajan could not pay back the loan amount. Several times the KSFDC people sent him notices. He was not finding means to meet the ends. Paying back the loan was the last thing one could do in that situation. Finally he got a Revenue Recovery notice from the department. He should pay back. If not, his property will be attached to the department. Then the Corporation made a proposal to him. In Delhi, there will be a Shilpostav and he could participate in it. If he could collect some money from sales, that could be used for paying back the debt.

‘That’s why I am here,” Rajan says.

I feel some kind of angst in me. I am working in a field where crores of Rupees are transacted on a day to day basis in the name of art. Speculations and stakes are high in this field. Artists have forgotten the small denominations of currency. And here is this artist, exhibiting his works along with tribal craftsmen, only to try out his luck; getting some money to pay back his loan.

“How do you price your works,” I ask him.

“Five thousand to eight thousand,” Rajan says with some kind of doubt. “In galleries, may be the prices could be high,” he adds.

I notice the banner in front his stall. The banner shows that the show is done on the aegis of the KSFDC. I feel like just tearing that banner and throwing it into the dust bin.

“Can I get the images of your works from internet,” I ask Rajan.

“No,” he says and he offers me a CD, which has all the images.

I realize that there is only one CD with him. If I take that he may not have another one to show if someone is interested. “Send me a copy of it once you get back home,” I tell him while writing down my address in his diary.

I mean it. I want to show his works to the galleries. I am sure most of them would not like to have it. But Rajan’s works need to be appreciated in a context, which functions within the contemporary art context. I am sure I will do it.

It is time for me to go. I say good bye.

“Five years back I had booked Jehangir Art Gallery. I have paid Rs.24000/- for it. Now I got the invitation from them. My show would take place in Mumbai in November 2009. Please do come,” he extends me an advance invitation.

Five years of waiting. That is quite something. And Twenty Four Thousand Rupees. That is too much for him. That is perseverance, I say in my mind.

Kerala has given him a name, ‘Silpi Rajan’ (Sculptor Rajan)- a title he carries with a lot of pride.

Did this title ever help him in his life? I wonder. May be, his nights are peaceful because he goes to bed with this feeling that he is a ‘sculptor’ and people know him as a sculptor.

How many of us in the contemporary art scene have got peaceful sleep these days? I ask myself while a sleepless night spreads before me like a guttural road in Delhi.

(The illustration is not Rajan’s sculpture)

Youngsters and Art Writing

Noted artist Bose Krishnamachari one day called me up, and while talking various things, he mentioned the name of one particular budding art historian/critic. He asked me, ‘Why don’t you give chance to such youngsters?” Perhaps, being a ‘not so much an internet person’, Bose might not have noticed this particular youngster regularly contributing to www.artconcerns.com, the e-zine on Indian contemporary art that I edit. “He does write for me and I think, he needs to really work hard on his writing,” I told Bose and reminded him that it was me who gave this youngster the first break as an art writer. Bose agreed but he added, “See, he is young. May be, he needs time to develop his writing skills. Everyone cannot be a prolific writer like you, who writes ‘three thousand words’ every morning.”

This ‘Three thousand words’ reference comes from an earlier chat between Bose and myself. During one of our discussions, I had mentioned him, how I practice and hone up my writing skills everyday by writing around three thousand words on anything. May be, I don’t write three thousand words everyday, but I do write at least 1500 words. I don’t write my pieces with an intention to publish. Most often I write to enjoy the flow of writing, the surprises that it imparts to me. I don’t know whether the young art writers practice ‘writing’ as an ‘exercise.’ If they do not, let me tell you, they should. As the editor of an ezine, I know most of the art writers in India through their works. I have not found any youngster with a total control over his/her ideas and language. Some people have ideas and no language skills and some people have language skills but no ideas. This is where the importance of writing ‘exercise’ comes in.

I would like to give a few tips to the young art writers in India. Before that, I would like to go through some anecdotes from my life as a writer. I started writing at the age of eight. My first creative effort was a poem. My father sent it to a children’s magazine and in the next post it came back with the editor’s letter, saying that it was not worth publishing. But writing and reading became an obsession for me in that tender age itself. My parents presented me with old diaries and I filled them with my words. The disturbed teenage years spent in writing stories and poems. I used to send them to the magazines and they used to send it back to me. I adopted pen names like ‘Johny Merrick Laxman’, ‘Alex John’, ‘Johny Laxman’ and ‘Janakiraman’. By the age of twenty I could publish a few poems and articles in various magazines. But publishing itself did not give me any satisfaction. It was writing, only writing that gave me the ultimate high.

In Baroda, as an art history student, my first ‘professional’ assignment was to write a catalogue write up for a British artist, Kate Bowes, settled there in Baroda. I wrote something and it was neatly rejected by Kate and her friends citing that it was ‘not academic enough’. I had not quoted philosophers and theoreticians. Kate Bowes later got married to the well known artist Shibu Natesan. Though my write up was rejected, I filled in my note books and diaries with my observations on art. I kept on reading all theoreticians and philosophers until I realized that it was not necessary to quote anybody, unless it was required for a particular argument.

Later in Delhi, as a 24 year old struggler, I spent my nights in writing using an old portable typewriter lent to me by Abhimanue VG, an artist. I started off my full fledged writing career with the Hindu Business Line in 1996. Preeti Mehra, a pious lady was my page editor and she used to rip my writings apart. I used to feel really humiliated and humbled when she re-wrote all my pieces in front of me. Tears used to well up in my eyes and I chewed in a late of humiliation. But that was a really a great learning point. Preeti Mehra honed up my writing skills. I am thankful to her, whether she sees this piece or not. Even today, I spend most of the time in reading and writing. After seeing my physique many people have asked me, ‘Do you read? Or you spend most of the time in gym?’ But then I tell in my mind, it is all about discipline. To become a good writer you need to be disciplined. A good writer is like an excellent martial artist. Bruce Lee once said, “I like that martial artist who can use one punch in hundred different ways than the one who knows hundred different punches and use all of them in only one way.”

I believe in Bruce Lee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez- both use one punch in hundred different ways. So my young writer friends, to become good writers ‘practice, practice and practice.’ In my gym, there is a poster and it reads, ‘Shut the Fuck up and Work Out’.
I want to tell you the same thing. ‘Shut the Fuck up and Work out’.

A few tips:

1. Read, if possible from cover to cover.
2. Read for experience, not for quoting.
3. Never try to remember anything that you have read. They will come to you
if you have read it with a passion.
4. Read the works of art using your eyes and mind. Don’t use any theoretical
crutches to lean on.
5. Write what you really feel, don’t try to embellish with high sounding words
and ideas to make it look like a well researched piece.
6. Write without fear and inhibition. It is you, who is the final judge of your
writing.
7. Write with a feeling.
8. Learn language as if it were your beloved. Play with it, tease it, knead it,
take it to the heights of passion, climax it and relax it.
9. Read the catalogues well and don’t follow any.
10. Write every day, every hour.
11. Devise a plan of action and discipline.
12. Speak less and write more. Endless hours of discussing a work of art will
not produce good art criticism.
13. Look at things around as if you were going to write about them in the next
moment.
14. Never pretend that you are a writer.
15. Just be an ordinary human being with a lot of feeling.

Then you become a good writer, if not, please go on complaining.

Learning to Give and Take a ‘No’

Saturdays are for retrospection and introspection. People switch from their formals to T-shirts on Saturday- that is also another way of introspecting a week that has gone, lean back, relax, browse through the mails, make some phone calls, fix up some ‘dates’, arrange a Sunday movie or dinner and be away from all what defines your profession. I do the things other way round. I wear T-shirts during the working days and on Saturday I wear formals and I feel that is the best to way to do introspection. Today (another Saturday) I think about the shows that I saw in the last few days. Yes, I saw good shows and bad shows. I heard friends’ commenting on the shows that they saw during the week. All of them agree on one thing- good works alone cannot make a good show. I can’t do nothing but agree with them.

If good works cannot make a good show, then there is something wrong with the whole conceptualization of that show. I refer to this particular group show titled ‘Popular Reality’ at the Stainless Gallery, New Delhi. A few close friends are the participants of this show and that was the only provocation for me to see the show. I went there and was greeted by a cycle rickshaw painted in red and decorated with some motifs. On it I found one signboard, obviously got written by some professional signboard painter, with the name of the show, name of the curator, name of the organizing gallery, names of the participating artists, and the time and duration of the show. Hmm…I hummed to myself. So it is about ‘reality’ and it is about ‘popular’; both these notions are there on the signboard. But something clicked in me. Yes, exactly on the same spot, I had seen mutant motorbike (a jugaad machine), red in colour, done by the artist Chintan Upadhyay and his collaborator designer. This work was a part of the opening of the Stainless Gallery and was put together by Sangita Jindal of the Jindal Group. Was the curator of this popular reality show, trying to comment on that particular work or it was just a gimmick? I could not find any theoretical or practical connection of this rickshaw with the entire show.

I saw a painting done by Josh PS, an accomplished young painter, another by Gigi Scaria, now internationally acclaimed multimedia artist (I mean, an artist working in different mediums including the so called ‘multimedia’). I see the beautiful drawings of Apuraba Nandi, the decorative pop-induced paintings of Dilip Sharma, some hazy works of Murali Cheeroth, a high serious but ironically reminding Joseph Kosuth kind of works by Vivek Vilasini and a few eminently forgettable works. Josh has done his job well, though the work looked hastily done. Gigi’s painting is clean to the maximum. Murali Cheeroth still struggles with idea and image selection. Vivek is intellectually smart. They look good in the show. But the show fails to evoke anything in the viewer.

Whenever I fail to engage the works of art on display, I do generally grab a glass of beer and drink it quickly so that I get some kind of high which would make my doors of perception open. This time, I did not even feel like having a beer as all my imaginative faculties were benumbed by such a dumb show. But then this question came to me: Why do these artists participate in such shows, even after knowing well that it is not going to click? Artists have always this answer: Our job is to work, and it is the curator’s job to make it click. I simply refuse to agree with this explanation of the artists. By now artists are aware of the quality of curators and quality of the fellow artists’ works. And also they are all intelligent enough to know what the curatorial concept means.
Many artists have refused to work with me only because the other artists in the list are not ‘up to their mark’. I never feel bad about it because I do understand that certain artists have set certain benchmarks for their works. They don’t want to be seen in a ‘crowd’. But there are many other artists who ‘just want to be there’. I don’t think, Josh PS or Gigi Scaria kind of artists now feel the need ‘to be there’. They have proved there mettle and worth in the art scene and it is high time that they resist offers from all kinds of ‘curators’. There could be obligations, the curators-cum-dealers might have helped many artists during their struggling days. But that cannot be a reason for giving their works away for shows that just don’t make any impact. It is important to learn to say ‘No’ and it is important to learn to take ‘No’. I think I have learned it over a period of time. These days I take ‘No’ very easily and I don’t feel any grudge against those artists who say ‘No’ to me. That’s the reason why I don’t do too many shows. That’s why I refuse to visit ‘curated’ shows that have the works from Gulam Mohammed Sheikh to Alka Raghuvanshi.

Fail Not Our Feast

I don’t know why I think about Macbeth in this early morning. It is just 3.30 am. My sleep is over. I want to sleep more but some apparitions move around me. I try to capture images from the shadows that fall on the wall through the window. One of the moving images obviously looks like Lady Macbeth, who facilitated the death of King Duncan. She has killed the innocent sleep so she would never sleep proper. Her hands are contaminated by the innocent blood of King Duncan. No perfume could wash the smell of it so she keeps on washing her hands. Blood calls out for revenge, even while drying up on the earth. Oh…I have killed so many people’s innocent sleep, hence I would never have a peaceful sleep. Now I know why I remember Macbeth in this early morning and why I look like the painting of Fuseli or Redon.
My family members don’t like me that much as I disturb their sleep by my early morning movements. The gurgling sound of washbasin pipe, the flushing of toilet, the clanging of kitchen utensils, the switching on of lights and everything that I do disturb their innocent sleep. Their nights don’t have any history. Their dreams are all very colorful and soothing. They can sleep like contemporary art, sans history and sans memory. Contemporary art is contemporary because it does not carry a historical baggage, it does not carry too many memories. It is an open receptacle and the passing time could fill in it with meanings, memories and histories. One day contemporary art too would become the art of the past, full of memories and full of histories. Then it would cease to be called contemporary art, or even if it is called contemporary art, then the term would be suggesting, not a movement, but a school, which has already become redundant, dead and gone. Contemporary art is like innocent sleep, because innocent sleep also gains memory and history in retrospection, in its intense present tense, it simply does not exist.

Sleep exists for those people who do not sleep. For Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, sleep exists because they are not able to sleep. Contemporary art exists for those people who are aware of history and memory and for those people who do not have anything to do with history or memory, contemporary art does not exist. They like contemporary art because it does not come with a baggage. So they buy it, sell it and forget it. They don’t have any problem to reduce the meaning of contemporary art into names and mathematical data. But for those people, who don’t sleep, who have killed the innocent sleep and have blood on their hands, contemporary art is all about meaning. They look at the sleeping face of contemporary art, and find it so empty and innocent. It is just there like a moment between dream and death. The subtle movements on its body could be interpreted into a sea. Yes, because only those people who do not sleep understand the value of it. Suddenly you feel like smothering it with your knowledge, your cruelty and your arrogance, exactly the same way Othello smothers Desdemona. You love it too much and you don’t want it to exist.
I am a somnambulist, when I walk through the galleries. I am a plotting count, when I think about art. I am a scheming warrior, when I see a work of art. I am an aggressive frontline fighter when I write about art. But I am like a superstitious listener when I hear the oracles of market predicting the future of Indian contemporary art. They remind me the notorious witches of Macbeth. They predict, or they want me to listen their predictions, that I am going to be the chosen on. Someone is going to lose it, someone is going to gain it and I am going to be that ‘gifted’ on to facilitate all these. I want these witches to explain their prophesies but I am not able to do that as I have become so superstitious about the role that they have assigned to me. I start imagining things. I don’t want to become the king. I don’t want to kill my brother and companion. I don’t want to kill my mentor. I don’t want to kill so many young things who work towards their futures. By believing in the predictions of the nether land, I have become so cruel. I kill innocent sleep every day and every night. I don’t feel being together. With the sword drawn from its sheath, I walk like a possessed one, amongst the contemporary works of art, looking for my innocent victims. You may have to gather all your forces to push me down for I feel I am the mightiest. I give you parties and before you reacht there, I get you killed on the way itself. But I am afraid of your apparition as I have told you yesterday, before leaving, ‘Fail not Our Feast’.

Donkeys in/and Indian Contemporary Art

These days I see a lot of cartoons as I have a three year old son who religiously watches certain cartoons everyday. Winnie the Pooh is one his favorite animation series. While watching it with him, I came across this particular donkey whose name is Eeyore. Eeyore, unlike other animals in the series, has a problem; he is existential and this existential issue comes from the constant falling off of his tail. It simply does not stick to his bottom. It falls off and his friends help him to find and fix it back. Besides, his house always collapses, however he tries to make it again and again. Eeyore, with his downcast eyes and tormented looks, is quite loveable. At the same time he makes me think about the representation of donkeys in Indian contemporary art.

In fables, myths and folk tales donkeys come quite often. Always the donkey is treated as a beast of burden, a butt of ridicule and the embodiment of foolishness. However, when it comes to Indian contemporary art, donkeys get a new status; they are treated with some kind of dignity. Recently a young friend of mine, Jyoti Patil who is pursuing a Masters Degree in Amsterdam, sent me a very personal write about her own life. In this ‘story’ she recounts one of her childhood experiences of seeing a group of donkeys in the middle of a road, blocking the flow of traffic. It was a Diwali time and those truant boys around even tied some crackers in their tails to scare them away, but they did not budge. After sometime, Jyoti found a baby donkey lying dead in the middle of the road. Those donkeys were mourning its death!

Perhaps, this touching scene was witnessed by Jyoti’s sister and artist Koumudi Patil also. A few months back, while discussing a gallery project, she came up with this idea of herding a group of donkeys within a gallery space. I thought of it as a good idea though I expressed my reservations regarding ‘executing’ it effectively in the Indian situation. “Had your work been devised for the Saatchi Gallery, London, you could have done it without much problem,” I told her, remembering how the Saatchi Gallery was opened at the County Hall, London, with hundreds of nude ‘performers’ roaming inside the gallery brushing shoulders with well-clothed ‘guests’. “In India, they may appreciate a donkey sculpture or a donkey painting. But I don’t think, we are grown enough to accommodate live donkeys inside the gallery. You may look for a dead donkey inside a glass vitrine full of formaldehyde,” I joked.

But donkeys are still a part of our art tradition. Especially during our contemporary times, the image of donkeys has become something very important and meaningful. It was Bhupen Khakar who first used donkey as a very strong image in his paintings. (I know that those artists who have painted Christian themes have profusely used the image of donkeys. But I am talking about the contemporary times. For me Late Bhupen Khakar is a contemporary artist). In his ‘You Can’t Please All’, Bhupen uses the well known folk tale of a father and son who try to negotiate the presence of a donkey in their journey. While a nude (self representation) figure stands and watches all these happenings there out in the world, from the lower right side corner of the painting, we find the life of donkey gets an important place in Indian art history.

K.M.Madhusudhanan is one of the contemporary artists, who has done a lot of donkey images, especially during his student days in Baroda, where one would come across a lot of donkeys in the streets. He had done a lot of etchings and drawings using donkey as a predominant imagery. Many artists of that time (late 80s), including the Radical Group of artists have used donkey as a predominant image in their paintings (the presence of boat and fish should also be remembered). Donkey for them, unlike in the folk tales became an embodiment of existential pangs and the thankless and fearful life of the human beings. I would say, if horse was the image that asserted the virility and power of the hopeful male human being during the modernist period of Indian art, donkey now represents the counterpoint of it. Donkeys have become a post-modern image of human suffering, migration, dislocation and dispossession.

Look at the works of Manjunath Kamath, he has done so many donkeys in his paintings. Though his minimal but effective narratives, he brings back the image of donkeys from the streets and folktales. These donkeys who we see in Manjunath Kamath’s works, are intellectual beings; in their silence they counter the magnanimous stature of the fake intellectuals. They are not donkeys that grew lesser than horses. They are not horses stunned by times. They are donkeys with their full donkey-ness but declaring their subaltern status as neglected intellectuals. Manjunath places them ironically and introduces them in his narratives structures that impart a lot of surprises.

In Jagannath Panda’s works, donkeys are the emblems of dispossession and dislocation. He emphasizes his migrant status through the symbols of goats and donkeys. Though, unlike Manjunath, he cuts down narratives in his works, Jagannath adds a kind of silence and desolation around these donkey figures. The presence of a donkey in the construction sites (where future townships are built) clearly shows the status of dispossessed migrants in these works. While Jagannath resorts to a kind of seriousness, Manjunath laughs at other happenings around through the mutant presence of donkey. In Manjunath’s works, donkeys laugh and they laugh like human beings in an ironical situation.

G.R.Iranna is another artist, who has used the image of donkeys effectively. Both in his sculptural and painterly works, he introduces donkey as a dominant imagery. Here, in Iranna’s works, donkey represents the victimized human beings, the man in exodus, the one who carries the wounds of an ongoing war and terrorism. In Iranna’s work, the donkey is a carrier of the wounded past, present and future of the civilization itself. In his pivotal work titled ‘Wounded Tools’ he shows a donkey, a life size fibre glass cast, with a saddle full of bleeding weapons in it.

Interestingly, donkeys appear in the works of Delhi artists. In the works of Mumbai artists one hardly sees any donkeys. May be in Delhi, one could see donkeys on a day to day basis. But to see donkeys the artists need to have ‘good’ eyes. Even in Delhi, there are many artists who when it is time to deal with the issues of migration and dispossession or the growing pangs of city life, directly come to the image of cows and bulls that laze around in the middle of the road and choke the traffic flow. The connotations are perhaps pleasant and approvable. But donkeys, the case is different. It tickles your conscience with their ‘unwanted presence’.

Donkeys with no affiliation to any political parties or any religious groups, still move around in our vicinities with their fore and back legs tried together. At times they run as if they were thrown into fit of madness. At times they bray and express their feelings. Most often they stand silently, looking down with sad eyes. If you morph the picture of the existential man on the roads with that of a donkey, you may find them merging well. Look, we are not horses, but we are donkeys, as seen in Indian contemporary art.

The Vulnerable Viewer and the Art Fatigue

Have you ever felt art fatigue- a kind of tiredness after seeing a lot of art or even a kind of tiredness that seeps into you when you actually stand in front of a work of art? I feel it a lot these days. May be, you also. Four exhibition openings on the same evening, at four far flung venues and you feel the urge to catch up with all those works presented in all those four shows. The first show makes you melancholic and the second one makes you tired. And the third and fourth…no…no …you are not going for it.

I have seen people sitting exhausted and drained at the steps of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museum, the Louvre Museum and so on. It is not the works of art that make them tired but the sheer size of the building and the vastness of the collection that these museums carry inside their bellies. It takes at least one week, if you really want to see each and every artifact in Louvre Museum. But you are a tourist there in Paris and you need to cover all the important museums in the available time and space. So you rush through the works, brisk walk before the works of art, occasionally stand in front of a work that you are familiar with through reproductions. You break all your previous records of viewing art, especially when you are in a foreign country, which has good museums.

At times I have a feeling that excessive viewing of contemporary art tires you out like anything. When there are too many openings on the same evening, my friends in Delhi call me up and ask which opening I am attending. Then we divide the opening amongst ourselves; you go there and I will go here kind. Whenever I attend an opening I remember a work by Barbara Kruger. In this work, she interpolates the image of a Grecian classical woman’s face with these words, ‘Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face’. When you are in front of a work of art, actually you feel someone is looking at you. Your brain and finer senses do over work when you are in front of a work of art. You become really vulnerable then and anybody’s gaze would strike you right at your face.

I feel, this over active senses impart you with art fatigue. There is an interesting proportion in the case of art viewing; the better the works the more vulnerable you become. Then again, the worse the works, the more tired you become. Basically, art appreciation is all about your own projection of ideas on the work on view. You go through your collective cultural consciousness, cull out ideas and references that make the understanding of the particular work possible. Work in itself becomes a medium to recognize your own subjectivity and its role in the cultural (political or social) understanding. Work of art becomes a ‘readerly’ text as Roland Barthes puts it. It is neither the catalogue nor the title that gives you a fuller understanding of it, but your own efforts, your own projections that makes it possible. Catalogues and titles can play only a role of mediation in certain ways.

Viewing is as tiring as making (of a work of art). Seeing more art means tiring yourself more. How can one catch up with four shows in a single evening? Impossible. But people do it and those who do it, generally do not see works of art- and I am sure it is quite true. There comes the social pressure of attending an opening thereby assuming the responsibility of viewing more and more works of art. This social pressure is something contagious and you feel incapacitated in a crowd, especially you have missed out some so called ‘important’ shows. Actually in an opening what do you do is enacting a social responsibility. You go there, meet people, drink socially, chat, bitch, mock, satirize and please the ego of the artist/s who is/are exhibiting on that particular evening. An art opening has only anthropological values, in which exchanging of gifts plays an important role. In art openings, you become a gift in yourself for the artist/s in question. You primarily don’t see art. What you see is the impression of that art and the impression that generally makes on people. It does not talk about the impressions of the people in exchange with the works of art.

Attending a marriage ceremony or a death leaves you tired; you attend such functions for the social thereby anthropological reasons. You attend openings also for the same reason and you become tired. I would not call those people who attend several shows in a day, snobs. They are not snobs, though snobbishness is one of the driving forces behind such attendance. They are the people who would like to be in a social chain that makes them comfortable and feel as a part of the group. It is a community feeling and a community is a location where you make social contacts and further your interests. It is a give and take, and it binds you with the society, thereby dispelling the fears of alienation. Members of the contemporary art communities are afraid of being alienated. They want to dissolve their individuality in the din of social exchanges that make them one with the society. In this way we all have become conformists to the group mentality.

Art fatigue comes from a particular awareness that you want to be with the society at the same time certain values that you cherish do not allow you to be a part. You alienate yourself from that society while you engage yourself with the works of art on display. As I mentioned elsewhere, you are already vulnerable before a work of art and the sense of preferable alienation makes your further tired. Art in our times really makes the viewer tired, because, I believe, each individual who doubles up as a viewer in an art community still carries that element of alienation (not in the Marxian sense but more in a Sartre-an sense) in his mind. You go back to home after attending all these openings, fall on your bed and bleed. Do you dispute?