Megha Joshi: A Lonely Goddess within a Familial Pantheon

(Artist, Megha Joshi)

September 2012. Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. United Art Fair was on at Hall number 12, which has become defunct now. I was the chief curator of the project which had gained a popular acronym, UAF. Artists from all over India came to Delhi; some artists came because they were participating in the mega project. Many other artists made it a point to visit the UAF because they thought that it was their Fair which would grow into one of the historical art fairs in the world. Things did not work out the way I had wanted despite my claim that I could help ‘cross the desert without a camel’ (that was the title of one of the articles that appeared in a mainstream daily); obviously, the desert in question was the art market and camel was the art galleries and middle(wo)men.

(Object by Megha Joshi)

Just outside the magnificent hall of exhibition (where world expos were held annually) there was a conspicuous structure made out of discarded rubber slippers painted in gold; a shrine that we often see in the small towns in North India, but here without an idol inside it. Artists and visitors were paying a serious visit to the small shrine and were returning with a hesitant smile for they could not make out whether the humble structure was a spoof or a serious work of art. It was many years before two young guys spoofed the fashionable conceptual installations by placing a pair of specs on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016) and seriously photographing it. Here in Delhi, however the Shrine of Slippers meant some serious business for the artist behind that impermanent piece of art was Megha Joshi, a then little known artist based in Delhi. She would go on to become one of the vocal feminist artists in India in the coming years.

(Works by Megha Joshi)

Megha Joshi studied art at the Fine Arts Faculty, MS University, Baroda. The art market of mid 1990s did not have much to offer a young practicing artist. So after education Megha (I prefer to use her first name in this article) went to Delhi where she was born and brought up and decided to join the television/entertainment industry as an art director. Many artists who took up jobs in other fields than art teaching went into oblivion only to resurface during the art boom that threw palpable money around by 2005. Megha had not left art altogether but was hesitant to make a reentry till she met Mukesh Panika of the Religare Art, who had come back from the US and taken up the top job in the cash rich establishment. For Panika, with the famous Eicher Building at the outer circle of the historical Connaught Place at the heart New Delhi at his disposal, sky was the limit. He initiated a project called ‘Connaught Place/Why not Place’ exploring the urban histories and contemporary stories.

(Torso QED by Megha Joshi)

Considering it as a launch-pad Megha came back to the art scene and the Shrine of Chappal was a defiant art/act emanated from her rebellious self which she unapologetically presented at the UAF, even giving some surprise to me, the chief curator. Megha surprised the art scene of Delhi once again, perhaps capturing the attention of the media and the connoisseurs alike in 2013. I was curating a show titled ‘R.A.P.E’ (pronounced ‘rape’) at the Art Bull gallery in Delhi and the idea of the curatorial venture came as a response to the horrendous rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on 16^th December 2012. Hailed as Nirbhaya, Singh was put through nerve wrecking cruelty by four men in a moving bus and after much uproar and protest raised by the public she was sent to Singapore for treatment where she succumbed to her injuries.

(Attractor and Sensor/Censor by Megha Joshi)

‘Nirbhaya’ had consolidated the middleclass angst, anger and protest. The incident also established beyond doubt that India still lived in middle ages with its chauvinistic attitude towards women in the society. I was the first one to respond to the incident through an exhibition and the abbreviation, R.A.P.E was a stand in for ‘Rare Acts of Political Engagement’. Megha was one of the participating artists and the work that she presented was titled ‘Object.’ A pair of prosthetic areolas pasted on a pair of rubber bulbs of the blow hones used in the motor vehicles, was erected on a pedestal using plated iron rods. The work gave an initial shock to the viewers and someone who couldn’t resist the itch to squeeze it did it and then it was history. Everyone rushed to blow it and the gallery space reverberated with the honking. Megha achieved not only what she wanted as the audience response but also a fair amount of fame for the coming days Delhi could see this work featured in almost all the newspapers and television channels. Megha Joshi happened on that day and it was in April 2013.

(Red Drawing Series by Megha Joshi)

Since then there has been no looking back for Megha. Hailing from a socialist family Megha has rebellion in her blood and the flamboyance in her personality somehow hides her communist leanings and socialist upbringing. As I mentioned elsewhere, Megha is unapologetic in her works and life. Most of the ‘feminist’ artists in India refuse to qualify themselves as ‘feminists’ because of the bad associations that the conventional society in India has been successful in attaching to the word. Megha comes out in a different color; she is often vocal about her feminism and never hides behind the word feminine. The same verve is seen in the choice of her themes and materials. Whenever Megha has a disturbing childhood memory to recollect and say it aloud in public, she does it with force and pathos; and she is never ashamed of shedding tears in public. The cathartic act of recounting and retelling personal tragedies absorbed as a part of historical understanding (therefore not necessarily personal in the strictest sense) is something makes Megha different from the lot of her contemporaries for many have the tendency to hoodwink the substantiating etymologies of their ‘works’ in artificial sophistication.

(Works by Megha Joshi)

Areola or the simulated appearance of it through various mediums is one the major modes of artistic expression that Megha has chosen to explore in her works. There is a series of areola works made of paper pulp in which a simple and upfront representation of it at once focuses and displaces the discourse to and away from the body part that is characterized by an areola in a female body, in other words, a breast. Megha does not attach any sentimental connection to breasts and the mammalian divinity attached to it. Rather Megha looks at them as a pair of abused, misrepresented and misinterpreted human/female organs from which natural functionality is eliminated by the cultural associations of eroticism. Hence, in her works areolas appear as stark representations as if they have gained their own personality and are liable to be portrayed as beings, or as broken ‘subjects’ perhaps due to violation or a deteriorating interface that discards all concepts of beauty, comfort and pleasure. Megha makes one of the biggest subversions of the areola by bringing them on the butt cheeks of a classical Venus like torso, in a quirky displacement of erotic zone. This work is titled ‘Torso QED’. Mutilated by history, the torso of an ideal female nude has lost the subjectivity and has become a mere torso for male appreciation and Megha’s intervention makes that torso lose its historical ‘objectivity’ of appreciation and gain the status of an erotic object.

(Wounds by Megha Joshi)

The displacement of a human organ should generate revulsion and embarrassment in the normal circumstances; or else it should create a sense of bizarre. That’s what happened when the westerners saw the representations of the Indian gods and goddesses in sculpture for the first time. But in the case of a female body, the displacement of an organ however does not make it bizarre but accentuates the male gaze to derive more perverted pleasure. And it is in the eyes of the (male) onlooker that perversion lies, says the artist by creating a series of photographs titled ‘Sensor/Censor’. In this series, Megha sticks the prosthetic areolas on various parts of her body that are generally seen as ‘decent’ upon public exposure. The presence of the areola turns these ‘dignified’ body portions suddenly into erotic zones. This magic of the society and also the framing of her body with a clear intention to catch the male gaze and its perversions add to the simplicity as well as the enigmatic nature of the work.

(Site Specific Installations by Megha Joshi)

Other major mediums that Megha has explored extensively are wicks, incense sticks, clothes and blinds. ‘Red Drawing’ is a series in which Megha skillfully uses red colored wicks that are used along with the drawings of a female torso, a surrogate self-representation in a way, exposing the simulated eroticized body parts in an attempt to demystify the female body and its physical effluences. Without exposing the body, Megha keeps her body on a table of pictorial format for virtually dissecting it in order to understand clinically about the corporeality that does not often ooze the juices of erotica, instead produces tears, sweat, pee and menstrual blood. The incense sticks have a direct connotation regarding the subjection of women within the domestic sphere strictly bound by religious dictums. They are used for expressing female genitalia, physical and mental wounds inflicted by such boundaries. Also red kumkum and hair, the symbols that visibilize the married status of a woman and the atrocities that she has to face by becoming a pawn in the family feuds, become Megha’s artistic mediums. Using the blinds made out of incense sticks and similar materials, she brings out the hanging torsos of women, an entity caught in the liminal spaces of existence; neither outside nor inside but in between the threshold, in a precarious hanging.

(Latest Drawings by Megha Joshi)

Megha has also ventured into ceramics, bronze sculptures and installations in public spaces. Irrespective of the mediums and spaces available for displaying her works, Megha explores the existence of the females within an apparently liberal but horribly restrictive society. There is no self-righteousness attitude in her works nor does one see a sloganeering feminism in her visual expressions. She positions herself as a witness and a medium. She works through memories and moments that could have the capacity to generate histories. The latest series of drawings, which she calls ‘unresolved’ both in terms of working and positioning catches her precarious existence within the home itself where the relationships between herself, her husband, children, pet, books, furniture, fridge, gas stove, vegetables, water in the pipe and so on are brought into focus. She identifies the brittle nature of relationships, the temporality of churning emotions, practicalities involved in wading through the cascading ordinariness, negotiating the emotional landscapes made askew by the intensifying tragedies around and so on and the present series of drawings comes to us an effort to see them in humanistic ways rather than something colored by ideologies. Still there is an effort to denude herself and incarnate as a lonely goddess within a familial pantheon.

-JohnyML

Men in the Chalk Circle: An Art Historical Perspective

(Man in the Chalk Circle by NN Rimzon)

In 1985, Kasauli Art Centre, New Delhi presented an exhibition, perhaps a first of its kind, titled ‘Seven Young Sculptors’. There was no curatorial claim in the humble black and white brochure though there was a ‘catalogue’ essay written by a twenty seven year old Anita Dube. The participating artists were also more or less the same age and this exhibition is said to be a trailblazer for the Radical Group of Artists who would later change the course of thinking about art in Kerala and elsewhere by fundamentally reimagining an art scenario through romantic and revolutionary terms; perhaps all the revolutions have a streak of romanticism in them. N.N.Rimzon was one of the participants as the others being K.P.Krishnakumar, Alex Mathew, Asokan Poduval, Pushpamala N, Prithpal Singh Sehdev Ladi and Khushbash Shehravat.

(NN Rimzon)

Rimzon’s work was titled ‘Man in the Chalk Circle.’ Influence of Brecht, the German playwright and his Epic theatre was very much in the air and his retelling of a 14^th century Chinese story by Li Xingdao as ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’ had taken not only the field of theatre but also the intellectual domain by force. It was a metaphor for making the right choice; may be the choice was between the natural owners of Germany, that’s the people of Germany and the artificial claimants of it, the Nazis. Partly action-oriented and partly existential the chalk circle had also forwarded the Hamlet-ian dilemma, ‘to be or not to be’ in a different light. 1980s had posed such a political as well as existential dilemma before the artists who had just come of age by passing through the fires of Naxalite revolution and the notorious political Emergency imposed by the late Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.

(Man with Tools by NN Rimzon)

(Speaking Stones by NN Rimzon)

‘Man in the Chalk Circle’ by Rimzon brings out this dilemma of the time. A man seated on the floor is seen inside a chalk circle that limits his freedom of movement. May be the man does not want to make a move at all because the posture of his sitting is awkward as the splayed legs show. His bulging eyes, remotely caricaturing the artist’s face itself in a brutal and comic way at once, looks into the empty space before him. You would see such vacant staring in the works of Ron Mueck in late 1990s and in the new millennium. I am not going to make any suggestion that this ‘gaze’ (which we could see later in the works of Ravindra Reddy also, a contemporary of Rimzon) is pioneered by Rimzon or something of that sort. However, the gaze of the man in the chalk circle is powerful enough to express his dilemma; to be or to be. The chalk circle, like the mythological Lakshman Rekha becomes an externalization of internal fears as well as the internalization of external limitations. It is interesting notice that for a long time in his career Rimzon kept on experimenting with circular or semi-circular forms that either bordered the central figure (Man with Tools) or defined his space almost suffocating him (Speaking Stones).

(Stand Still by Ajitkumar G)

The chalk circle is a metaphor that has become a reality in the recent times, especially when the spreading of the Corona virus became a socio-medical anxiety. Before we go into the details of it and how such chalk circles appeared in the works of artists, it is imperative to see a very important work, perhaps under-discussed, from 2014. Titled ‘Stand Still’ this process, happening, performative installation that turned living human beings into art exhibits or components of an exhibition was intricately political and overtly reflecting the mood of an ongoing socio-political and economic struggle right in front of the Government Secretariat in Trivandrum, Kerala. Ajitkumar G is the artist who made this timely work, mainly taking the cue from the history of an extended political struggle from 2009 to 2014. This installation-process-happening art exhibition took place in the conventional exhibition space at Vyloppalli Cultural Centre in Trivandrum for seven days. Perhaps, for the first time in history of art, a political protest was brought into a gallery space with the protestors turning into art works and viewers at once.

(Ajitkumar G)

To understand Ajitkumar’s interventional art piece, ‘Stand Still’ one also has to get a glimpse of the said political struggle which had inspired the artist. Despite land reform acts and promises from the successive governments, the people from the Adivasi/tribal communities in Kerala were denied socio-economic and political rights over their ‘own’ forest lands. Whenever they rose up in protest demanding right to land and live the state had suppressed them by using iron hands. In 2009, the tribal people came to the secretariat in Trivandrum and built hutments and lived there for months till they were given assurances. As the government retracted from the promise the people came again in 2014, now with a novel protest; standing and staring/looking at the people who went about with their normal daily chores. They made themselves into a spectacle while making the people around them another ‘moving’ spectacle as well. It was an absolutely novel way of protesting with the pavement becoming the liminal zone where the identities of the protestor and the onlooker collapsed, merged and rearticulated in the mental plane.

(From Stand Still by Ajitkumar G)

Ajitkumar used the same dynamics that he witnessed in the ‘Standing Strike’. The inspiration for the Standing Strike must have come from Turkey where a man named Erdem Gunduz stood motionless for six hours to protest against the government in 2013. Gunduz became a world sensation overnight and became an icon of a lone man standing and protesting. Perhaps Gunduz also came from the lone man who stood bravely before the Chinese PLA tanks at Tiananmen Square in 1989 during the pro-democratic protests led by students and youth of China. Standing up against injustice is both literally and metaphorically strong; when someone does it the dimensions of it increases. Ajitkumar moved his artistic project quickly to extend the protest to a gallery and called the project, ‘Stand Still’. Interestingly he too drew chalk circles for people to stand and stare. I do not know whether he had remembered the Miltonic invocation that they also served who stood and stared!

The ‘Stand Still’ project by Ajitkumar was interactive and participatory in nature. He changed the ambience of the conventional gallery and brought in deceptive mechanisms that tricked people’s normal viewing tendencies. With altered light ambience Ajitkumar made the visitors aware that they were going to witness something phenomenal. After a few painted images the people were brought in to a chamber of darkness. A white luminous circle told them to stand still inside it. Then the lights came on them as if they were the gallery exhibits. They could witness their reflection on the glass wall before them and could see the signage ‘do not touch’. While wondering what was on the light on the other side came alive exposing the standing tribal men who stared at them. Who was looking at who, was the perennial question arose then. Were the tribal people, who were temporarily brought to stand inside the gallery without changing their protest-method or attitude, the exhibits or the people who came to witness the installation/art project, the real exhibits? The simulation of the pavement dynamics of the protest was mind boggling and even the then opposition leader, the veteran communist, V.S.Achuthanandan felt that he was stared at by the victims of Kerala’s skewed land reforms.

(From Stand Still)

In the performative level, Ajitkumar did mean the abovementioned dynamics to develop within the gallery. But there was a latent and subterranean idea that he wanted to work into and bring out obliquely during the process of ‘exhibition’. The idea of standing still has a lot to do with the idea of very standing itself. As an evolutionary biology enthusiast, Ajitkumar did mention in the brochure written by himself that he wanted to take the whole discourse to the beginning of the human species where the homo species evolved into the Homo Erectus who could, for the first time in the history of evolution since then, stand erect. Hence, standing is a pivotal moment. Standing makes the human being and to stand one needs a place, a land. The tribal people were asking for a piece of land to stand and begin their life afresh. They were a duped people whose right over the forest land was taken away by force but ironically, assured in papers. It was a sort of internal colonization which has been on for a long time.

(Devidas Agase)

For me the idea of standing also about the idea of dignity which is not a palpable stuff. The dignity may be defined differently depending on the person, his or her status and so on. But dignity is something that gives a human being a sense of existence. Each moment human beings strive to be dignified in life. It is not material affluence that makes the life of the human beings dignified but their right to be what they are. To exercise that right to be what they are they need the right on resources and equal opportunity, both unfortunately are denied to these people. Of late, the Kashmiris are asked to reapply for their lands which they have been dwelling and owning for generations! This is stripping the people of their dignity and by standing up, a person could demand the dignity of life. One cannot sit down and ask for dignified treatment. Rising up for one’s right is important. Ajitkumar underlines that factor too in his project but reminding the visitors to stand still within the circumference of thinking provided by the artist and the people on the other side of the glass and in the pavement.

(Works by Devidas Agase)

Chalk circles have also become a social phenomenon when Corona virus struck. Social distancing (in fact a misnomer for physical distancing) was difficult to maintain in a country like India, especially with a booming population and congested urban spaces. Hence, the governments found out a way to maintain social distance by drawing chalk circles before the provision shops, ration shops and wherever there a possibility of people crowding. It is interesting to notice that the border line is not drawn as a square but as a circle. May be in the primitive imagination only circles and lines existed and the human beings later on invented other geometric shapes. So they use that primitive instinct to limit the movements. Devidas Agase, a Mumbai based artist picks out those circles from the street and brings them into his works. He documents the people’s activities in and around the circles with sympathy and cynicism alike. The multi-limbed figures in his works enact the normal human activities in and around the chalk circles that have by now left permanent marks on the pavements and roads each time reminding of the social distancing phenomenon though very few cares to practice it for their own sake. Agase do not lampoon them but registers the presence of the chalk circles in the contemporary history in his hallmark style.

-JohnyML

Sally Mann, Rahan Fathima and Their Children’s Precarious Selfhood: Victims of a Prejudiced Society

 

(Sally Mann)

Rehana Fathima, a social activist, former BSNL employee, model and outspoken feminist is denied anticipatory bail by the Supreme Court of India. Fathima is booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POSCO) for posting a video of her in a semi-naked way with her children, a 14 year old boy and an eight year old girl, drawing the picture of a phoenix on her bare bosom. The video had gone viral in the last month and with a day or two Fathima was subjected to terrible moral policing in the social media and a right wing lawyer filed a case against her for abusing children sexually. Kerala High Court also found her guilty of abusing her ‘own’ children and while passing the judgement the judge particularly mentioned the ‘facial expression’ of Fathima, which allegedly betrayed her erotic intent. Level headed people rallied behind Fathima and supported her case by arguing that her action was a performance art piece intended to demystify the female body.

 

(Video grab from Rehana Fathima's work)

This case brings the photography series ‘Immediate Family’ by the American photographer, Sally Mann, whose book with the same title had caused a huge public ‘moral’ outcry in the US in 1999. Mann had started photographing her two daughters, Virginia and Jessie, and son Emmett since 1989. All of them were in pre-puberty age and surprisingly willing to be a part of the photographic project initiated by their workaholic mother. In a television interview conducted in 2005, Mann said that she was at photography from childhood and she loved doing photography and related works without a break. Her children, growing under her and her doting husband, were privy to know the intricacies of their mother’s creative life and despite their tender age let themselves to be photographed by the mother, at times as per her direction and at other times, as per the direction of the children and often in a candid fashion.

 The photographs however generated a heated debated among the public as well as the intelligentsia took contradicting positions on the ‘Immediate Family’ of the well-known photography artist. They accused Mann of insensitivity and bad example as a mother. Some of them even accused that in the photographs the children looked as if they had already lost their ‘innocence.’ Sexual abuse by their mother was implied but fortunately there was no POSCO Act in the US at that time. The debate was historical as it pitted the rights of the children against the rights of the mother. In a sophisticated society such debates happen but it was the right wing mentality taking shape as public opinion in the country which would be the case in Kerala, India two decades later. Mann told her perpetrators that she found her children wonderful and as she was always working from home, and was in love with the American South, her intention was to see their growth in that ambience absolutely free and unprejudiced. Her intentions were clear and truthful, but that of the public and a section of the intelligentsia was vindictive.

The crisis of the photography is that when it is put to the public for perusal, analysis, criticism and pure aesthetical enjoyment the clash of ideologies is bound to happen. The relationship between the photographing subject and the subjectivity of the photographed subject is highly contestable in a public domain because it would have already created its own norms about that relationship. Photography professor Sarah Parsons in one of her comments on the series says, “Such are those around the motherhood and the protection of the children.” According to Parsons the possibility of the public’s judgement on motherhood and children’s protection cannot be ruled out. That means one could be the mother of the children in question but the society still has a say in their things. This view is equally disputed by many who see it as the denial of the children’s very right that these people are vouched to protect. Infantalizing them permanently and denying them the right to be the partisans in a project initiated by their mother and the knowledge that they have about the project is a prejudice against the children.

 

Courts in India, when it comes to the Fathima case seem to go with the majority, traditionalist public opinion that sees the whole issue as a deliberate attempt to collapse the age-old social norms by showing bad example as a mother and implicating her of sexual intent (towards her children). I do not know whether the voices of Fathima’s children are recorded and aired in public. But Mann’s children were vocal enough to say that the ‘nudity’ of the children that had offended the public was an affair of consent and they knew that their mother was shooting them. When the book was about to be published they got involved in the final editing and suggested the removal of a couple of photographs, not because they portrayed nude but they did not like the ‘expressions’ on their faces. Nudity was a not a problem to the children. Despite their mature age and the fairly good idea about their mother’s works and reputation they did not feel that the nudity in question was something of a motherly exploitation or a thing of shame. Their only complaint in fact was the mother’s workaholic nature!

 ‘Immediate Family’ is not a documentary photography series nor is it a surreal set of images though there are elements that could dub it both alternatingly. The children remain casual but in strange settings. They are cautious but in familiar settings. At times they are behaving or emoting according to the cue given by their mother. They are privy to the fact that in some of the pictures they are supposed to ‘obey’ rather than behave. In some they show complete indifference to the eye of the camera that is watching them; so do children behave when their mothers are watching over them constantly. Sometimes they are in gay abandon. The three children look like a single unit in some of the photographs and in some others they are just disparate components of an organic picture frame. In a documentary sense the viewers/readers could see the children’s growth and the changes that come to their bodies. And there is a point when the nudity, which otherwise is negligible had there been no framing of it ironically not by the photographer but by the public, almost becomes inconspicuous or negligible in the works. But what to do, the public sees only what they want to see!

 

There is something quite strongly Freudian about it. Look at the TikTok videos (this app was recently banned in India as it came from China) made by many parents in which their pre-puberty children don a major role. They appear as vamps, sirens, ogresses, witches, item girls, cabaret dancers and so on. Boys enact the roles of villains, rapists, heroes, chauvinists, thugs and muscle men. One could clearly see very young children transgressing into mature people in semi-porn movies. It doesn’t embarrass the parents but it does make the viewers wonder. But this wonderment is often seen as a reaction to the ‘talent’ of the children or the kind of humor and fun the scene evokes. No moral stance is taken against these videos. But when it comes to the art forms the brittle moral codes suddenly get challenged and people take up cudgels. This happens mainly because the sexuality in children is determined by the mature people. It is the viewer who sees the girl child who acts as an item girl, as a substitute item girl with full of sexual potencies. The child does what she sees in the television or films. Sexuality of the child is a social construct and it is not the child who is a potential victim of the abuse but the fear of the adult that he or she would turn into a child abuser himself. So it is a guard against himself rather than the children. A mother does not often belong to this threatened lot. Mann and Fathima are exceptions because of that.

 

Freud, however does not really think in the above mentioned terms. According to him, what a child does in his play time is almost an imitation of what the adults do in their play time. It is rather an imitation of the adults that helps them to understand the world as it is understood by the adults, which they think that is a privileged world in which their entry is restricted by many means. So their idea is to symbolically reproduce that order in playtime and become a part of that world in a sublime level. When the sublimity is lost and transgressed into the real world the childhood experiences of sexual explorations take place that eventually causes fear, shame, guilt and aversion to the opposite sex and so on. But both Mann’s children and Fathima’s children are not prone to such vagaries of the symbolic order at least in the acts they are a part of. But the court feels it differently because it plays to the gallery and the gallery is full of people who carry the fears of their adulthood itself and its collapsible moralistic nature. Ultimately, if Rehana Fathima goes to jail, she does that for the all the Indian adults who are afraid of own their sexual intents.

 

-JohnyML

 

 

 

History Paintings of the Pandemic Times: Looking at Abir Karmakar’s Works

(Artist, Abir Karmakar)

They are titled ‘History Paintings’. Slightly more than a foot in size these oil on canvas-paintings by Abir Karmakar, exhibited online in the GallerySKE platform, exude the cold neutrality of our times and their visual representations with edges blunted out of repeated mediating via various digital interfaces. They are history paintings because they frame the incidents that had happened in the recent, therefore contemporary history of the pandemic hit India. At the same time, they dispute the very conventional idea of history in which magnificent incidents find articulations in superlative terms, pushing the marginal events out of its frames. History is often created out of heroes. In this suite of paintings, history becomes applicable only in the context where the conventional history and these paintings share a sense of tragedy.

(History Paintings I and II by Abir Karmkar)

Tragedies affect people only when the heroic qualities of the protagonist in a narrative are forced collapse and the redemption seems to be keeping itself away because of the subconscious follies committed by the hero himself and the clever scheming of the antagonists around him. The fall of the hero brings in a sense of catharsis, leading to the purgation of ill wills and non-sublime feelings among the people who witness the tragedy. But here in the paintings of Karmakar, the scope of such tragic evolution is considerably curtailed due to the very repetition of a series of tragedies of the people who do not have any heroic qualities, and overlapping of sequential tragedies nullifying the previous ones with the unimaginable ferocities. Or it looks like that. But a curious perusal of the events depicted in this body of works perhaps would suggest a re-thinking about it.

(History Painting III and IV by Abir Karmakar)

True, the events and the embedded tragedies, due to its relentless repetition as mediatized spectacles, have been rendered cold, failing to eke out cathartic responses from the people who follow the events through/by/in various mediums. The closeness of the devices in which the tragedies are perceived also has diminished the complex nuances of such a national tragedy, making it a repeatable, replay-able and troll-able (for evocative purposes only for the time being) spectacle. But what Karmakar does in this body of small paintings is something that brings the tragic weight back into the events that have otherwise lost their gravity. The protagonists of irrelevance in the national discourse of health and security, easily dispensable errand workers whose pain has never been a concern of the making of a contemporary nation and its resurgent nationalism and economy, military might and so on, are made into real tragic heroes by focusing his artistic attention on them.

(History Painting V and VI by Abir Karmakar)

The choice of canvas and its size is pivotal in this discourse. They are small and done in oil. Size is what makes the viewer move physically; the smallness of it would bring the patrons and viewers closer to the works to ‘enjoy’ the cold pain that has been immortalized in the traditionally accepted medium of grandeur; oil on canvas. The insignificant subjects in the form of the migrant laborers, the abandoned spaces, the sanitation workers, ensnared laborers in the open under the blaring sunlight, man terrorized by the mere presence of policemen, social distancing made into reality through the spatial regimentation made out of chalk circles, closed shutters, empty railway stations and so on assume grandeur and magnificence like the historical settings in a literary genre of tragedy. Karmakar proves that history paintings need not necessarily be grand but small and significant through a special perspective.

(History Painting VII and VIII by Abir Karmakar)

However, whose perspective is this that the artist is able to replicate in his paintings? None can particularly locate the origin of these pictures for many or almost everyone in the nation has seen them in this or similar angles, highlighting the same tragedy of the migrant laborers and places under precautionary lockdown. In history everything happens first as tragedy and then as farce. Each illogically rude punitive blow fell on the starved bodies of the people became a farcical repetition of the same ruthless event that evoked only subconscious reflexive jerks among the people who could stay ‘wherever they were’. Hence, the perspective of the paintings belongs to the unknown or unacknowledged photographers who have either published them in the media or dumped them in the social media.

(History Painting IX and X by Abir Karmakar)

Karmakar not only adopts the images but also borrows the perspective of the photographer who created those images, which in the domain of artistic ethics is not a big issue (unless some photographer or agency comes up and raises a copyright issue). The real contribution of the artist here is the way he has rendered them and the choice of size and medium as I explained before. The treatment of color vis-à-vis the generic style of Karmakar is entirely different, emphasizing a sort of detachment from the very subject in order to avoid the indulgence of sentimentalism in his works. He has removed the real time from the works through the peculiar use of color which falls between ‘colorful’ and ‘black and white’. That is an interim time of either the gaudy space of Eastman color or the ill-processed pictures of early analogue color films. The removal of time earned through this color treatment makes the painting ‘historical’ as something exemplary denoting its efficiency to represent state’s impudence and ruthlessness anytime and anywhere in the world.

(History Painting XI and XII by Abir Karmakar)

I would like to mention one more point regarding the practice of the artist, Karmakar so far. Perhaps, it is the time that has prompted him to take up such a series which otherwise in his scheme of paintings would be something alien and unthinkable. The pandemic has brought many to a different track of thinking; basically about people around us. The invisible became visible though many did not want it to be so. Mere charities wouldn’t have alleviated their terrible experiences and plights. Set upon in a re-thinking mode, many an artist has trained their eyes from the interiors to the exteriors of their concerned existences. Karmakar has been an inward looking person with an eye for his own self and could be easily called a painter of his subjective interiority both in the spiritual/identity related and corporeal terms. The pandemic has, temporarily perhaps, made him to look outside not perhaps through a frame of his own subjective perspective but as seen by somebody, efficient enough to capture the fact of the time. Erased off of all sentimentalities and exaggerations in which the country as well as the world revel in these days, Karmkar in this body works has been able to create art which in fact is ‘Pre-Truth’ in nature and by using a different kind of ‘mediatized realism.’

-JohnyML