House of Memories and the Strange Pilgrimage of Objects: A Note on the Installation of Aakshat Sinha

 

 (Yaad Ghar, Installation by Aakshat Sinha)

Objects are the products of history. An object having an existence without history cannot be called an object. Objects are cursed to carry history with them. History, in turn is not the lofty stories of those who had won the battles, established monuments and registered their legacies in various mediums. History belongs to the people the way streets belong to them. Bound between leather covers, the annals may contain historical registrations that look profound. However, the shelves that carry such tomes, the chairs that are sat in to read those volumes, the accumulated darkness on the hand rest of those chairs, the inkpot and everything have got histories; nothing can escape the fate of being converted into a component of history.

 

Aakshat Sinha knows the relevance of history inscribed on the objects. For him collecting and accumulating are two different things. Collecting is practiced by someone whose interest lies in objects with special connotations that inspire his ideas and the classification that he does based on chronology or any other mode gives immense satisfaction to his curiosity in building an understanding about the world. One could call it creating a narrative universe through objects of worth. Accumulation on the other hand is a practice that is partially collecting but indiscriminate in nature. What comes into the hands of the accumulator does not go out only because the accumulator finds a value that transcends its object-hood and attributes it with a meaning intrinsic to the narrative universe of his making. Each object stands in association with the autobiography of the accumulator and by virtue of him being a social being the objects thus accumulated become the building blocks of a collective biography of the times that he has lived in. Hence, anyone one who sees the accumulated objects quickly finds an emotional association with them.

 

(Aakshat Sinha)

‘Yaad Ghar’ (the House of Remembrance) is an open air installation with such objects with collective history, accumulated and presented by Aakshat Sinha, a curator, artist and a mechanical engineer by profession. Museums are houses of remembrance because the objects collected and displayed in those galleries remind us of the histories pertaining to them. Those objects are the syllables of a grand narrative, each waiting for deciphering. The more remote are the objects in time the more they look distanced, romantic and enveloped by magic. Though well founded histories are written about those objects the magic of their detached existence, something separated from the labels, QR Codes, Museum manuals and the audio guides, goad people to weave their own stories around them. Museums are methodical and randomness cannot be permitted in its narrative. In Yaad Ghar, there is madness and randomness, but both presented with some poetic methods.

 

Right in the middle of the atrium of the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, Yaad Ghar stands like a makeshift place of worship with the objects arranged there look like parts of an esoteric ritual around the idols created out of random objects. The sanctum sanctorum is flanked by a two discarded mannequins salvaged from an old boutique run by Sinha’s mother at some point of time. Those erstwhile beautiful plastic human forms are now bandaged and bruised, wearing heavy facemasks worn while a chemical war or fatal pandemic rampage is underway. The chairs have been there at his home and the beanbags, the marvel cards and the knick-knacks also have been a part of Sinha’s life at some point. They are all memory holders; for the viewers, they are memory makers.

 

(Yaad Ghar)

Sinha, the self-styled accumulator of things believes that he is a hoarder. He just cannot throw away things. Hence, his house is full objects that reminds him of the life that he has lived so far. Imagine anything that you grew up with since 1970s till date in an urban center, Sinha has them all. Spring cleaning is the last thing perhaps he does every year and he cleans only to save those discards from disappearing. Sigmund Freud calls the collectors and accumulators anal retentive people. Children who are afraid of defecating because of their fear of losing something of their own are anally retentive creatures. As they grow up they learn to discharge the refuse and maintain personal hygiene. Grown-ups showing anal retention is something different; they know what personal hygiene means but they just cannot throw things away. They find strength in the materials accumulated; I should say, they find life in the objects that are capable of invoking exquisite narratives about their lived lives.

 

Keeping one’s own life open for the scrutiny of others is the driving motto behind most of the autobiographies. They use verbal narrative as a medium of explication. Here in Sinha’s case he uses the accumulated objects as his medium and interestingly everyone finds a little bit of themselves in those objects. Art of any kind is supposed to create empathy among the viewers and reliving the lived memories is the way to cathartic effects that leave the people relieved of existential burdens. Object based art as well as verbal and non-verbal aesthetical communications do the same thing to the onlookers. The installation of Aakshat Sinha too does the same thing; it draws people into the chaotic randomness of the objects and make them unspool the memories at the very sight of those objects; a Proustian effect.

 

Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist has created a ‘Museum of Innocence’. As he started writing a novel with the same title in 1990s he felt like collecting all those objects that he has mentioned in that novel and house them under a single roof. Slowly the novel and the museum evolved together, objects giving ideas to the novel and novel making the novelist to look for those objects from his childhood elsewhere. With the novel he completed the museum and today it is housed in a 19^th century building where the objects speak to the visitors irrespective of their familiarity with the novel’s plot or not. In Urdu there is a word for Museums, ‘Ajaib Ghar’, the house of strange things. During the colonial period, museums were developed as the cabinet of curios where the colonial masters, merchants and the new gentry collected exotic objects and opened it for their personal guests.  

 

Detached in and from time, the objects that constitute Sinha’s installation, Yaad Ghar also transform themselves as exotic things, their familiarity now shrouded by disuse and decay. They become uncanny objects, filling in déjà vu with its edges sharpened with unfamiliarity. The decaying objects impart a magnetic horror, as we see in the termite eaten pulp fictions carefully stuffed in a plexi-glass vitrine. They could have been confined to flames, erasing their existence even from the memory, but in Yaad Ghar they stay put with some kind of stale stubbornness only death can demonstrate. The installation as a total is a memento mori, a reminder of death and decay, the futility of accumulation but at the same time the unbearable lightness of being both in carnal bodies and in memories.

-JohnyML

Writing an Obituary about an Artist and it becomes the Writer’s Own Obituary in a Different Way

 

  (K.P.Valsaraj)

Artist K P Valsaraj is no more. Is it an obituary that I am going to write? Do I know him enough to write about his life or art, let alone his personality? I had met him once, spent a few days in a camp and had talked about art. Is it enough to write about an artist? I look at the social media thinking that I get some more information than that I know. Most of the artists, at least from Kerala, have condoled his passing. Everyone underlined his mild nature and silence that he maintained in a crowd. People remember him as a good person, devoid of blemishes. Goodness is a shroud, a public image that we all are destined to cover ourselves with, especially when we are dead.

 

If I am not going to write about Valsaraj, what am I going to ramble around? I would like to write about death. But I realize that death is a subject that cannot be contained in a small essay like this. Many have written about death so brilliantly that one feels like dying for the sake of experiencing that exquisite feeling imparted through the words. I understand that I am not qualified to write about death because I have not experienced death. However, I can write about someone’s death in the social media.

 

(A Work by KP Valsaraj)

Valsaraj was active in social media. They say, one’s character could be assessed by the books that he reads or keep. Today, in the age of social media, one’s personality assessment could be done by the messages that he posts or the information that he shares. While there are people who masquerade themselves as different people with high level of IQ and EQ through their carefully curated social media posts. There are others who expose themselves of their vileness through careless and mindless words. Valsaraj was not one among them. He posted what he liked deeply. Rarely he posted his own photos or his works. He shared mostly information and opinion that he thought socially relevant therefore closer to his heart. There was no posturing of an intellectual.

 

Some people are liked by others not because they are great in their field of activities but because of their public image as calm and composed person. They call it ‘a sorted personality.’ Dealing with a sorted personality online and offline is an easy affair. There wouldn’t be subtexts and innuendos or covert messages. Valsaraj came across as a straight person. His posts didn’t make much in the market of ‘like economy’. But death tells us that he had actually gained a lot of respect while living. There are people like that in the social media whom we miss if they do not post anything for a couple of days. Getting into that category is a really difficult thing. There other people who are simply tolerated because they are in our friends list. We may not like them or their posts. Their outbursts of self-righteousness may be nauseating for us, still we simply tolerate them.

 

(Valsaraj with Ramesh Khandagiri)

Artists die. Their families and friends mourn for some days. Then they are healed of his/her absence. Time heals them. They come back to their lives. Even when the families forget their diseased kin some other people elsewhere remember them once in a while. Not because the social media throw up memories but because they have left some deep impressions. When it comes to the case of Valsaraj most of them, including myself said the same thing; they had met him once in a camp or in some cultural program. The mourners seem to have lost the chance of talking to him because all of them said the same thing; they saw his tall and deep personality from a distance. A silence enveloped him always so they kept themselves away from him.

 

Isn’t it a miracle that a person whose life is an enigma to the rest of the world barring his family and close friends, liked by many in the same way; simply because they have not talked to him? Many haven’t even seen his works closely. Was he a celebrity, a reticent one? Not at all. He was a person who perhaps preferred to live a life far away from the maddening crowd of artists. He had a past and he too was arrogant when he was young and a radical, so said one of the posts. He was devoted to the ideology that he subscribed to in those days. He was a part of the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association otherwise known as the Radical Group (which some JNU professors finally called the ‘Kerala Radicals’). The Radicals were against the retrogressive aesthetics prevalent in 1980s. But the facts show us that they were not radical enough. They were against the money making artists. The art boom of 1980s (a temporary phenomenon that hadn’t impacted the art scene of India as a whole) brought forth the then middle aged and old artists like the Bombay Progressives. Everyone wanted a Husain or a Souza in their homes. That was the decade when Ravi Varma got it from both the sides. He was equally criticized by the retrogressive aestheticians as well as the radicals. Finally, Ravi Varma made all the money, so were the Progressives. The Radicals committed symbolic suicide followed by a real one.

 

(Young Valsaraj on a trip)

Valsaraj was against Expressionism, I should say because the artists accused of retrogression were painting in the Expressionistic style. So he time travelled to reach the period of Impressionism and Fauvism, an offshoot of Expressionism while his colleagues were working with various forms of Expressionism. So it was a contradictory and funny situation. Valsaraj however extricated himself and settled in the area that he had chosen. He did not change. When I saw him painting in 2018, I was astonished. He still painted in a derivative impressionistic and expressionistic style. Can I accuse him of being stubborn or Peter Pan-ish? No, I cannot. There are artists who works in a certain way even after known that the style of their choice was old and no more in fashion. Still someone pursues it, there must be an artistic stubbornness.

 

Who is going to write about artists when they are gone? People who knew them definitely will jot down words of emotion. But will there be someone to assess and appreciate his works, beyond an obituary? It boils down to the need for artists make their own legacies, legends and folktales so that they are widely circulated in social media or in friends’ circles. Isn’t it terrible that an artist passes off with no evidence than his works, but no stories, no legends and no folktales? When you are writing someone else’s obituary, in fact you are writing your own obituary because your writing adds to your legend and folktales. Hey, this man used to write good obit pieces. And here today he is gone so let’s talk about the obituaries that he has written till date.

JohnyML

Performing Painting for the People: A Thought

 

Standing at the stairs leading to the foyer I looked at the young people waiting enthusiastically in the lounge for the senior artist to start his demonstration. A live painting session was in progress there and the audience were mostly young artists and aspirants from the local art colleges. As per the new world order and its resultant customs, they looked at the artist and his canvas through the lenses of their mobile cameras. Some of them were clicking stills of the man who was engrossed in demonstrating his skills and some others were recording the session in videos thinking that they could study the nuances of the brush strokes and mixing of the colors later. Once the ritual of mobile mediation was done they all focused on the painting process with their own eyes.

 

What do the live sessions do to the young art students, I thought. Was it like a musician or a dancer performing before an audience? Obviously the performing artists impact the emotional level of the audience before they invite the attention of the audience to the nuances of their performance and technical virtuosity. Students of the performing artists do learn from observing their gurus. As far as the art students are concerned apart from the class room demonstrations that their teachers give they don’t get to see other artists making paintings or sculptures live. The art of making art is a covert thing; in the privacy of the studios artists make art and people are allowed to see when the work of art is finished. That’s is a sort of rule.

 

However, there are exceptions to this. There are artists who are comfortable in the company of others. They can draw or paint while someone is watching or talking. They are not afraid of their styles and techniques being copied or imitated. But others, whether they are afraid of copycats or not, they are comfortable in their private worlds. Even if visitors are allowed once in a while it is not for showing the process of working but to show them the finished work. At times, these reticent artists too reveal their processes before an audience especially when they are video documented for a mutually agreed upon documentary or when they are in a camp. Artists who regularly go for camps or workshops are not afraid of being before an audience while they do the work. Sometimes camps are organized for the benefit of the young artists and art students. Those artists who do not want to work before an audience do not go for camps. Nowadays camp means sight-seeing pleasure trips. Works are to be given to the organizers only when the artists are back in their studios.

 

One thing is sure that people never lose interest in watching an artist work. It is really the magic of making. Artists working amidst a crowd are like public performers, like street magicians and street artists. They are aware of the public and at the same time they know how to hold the interest of the public safe from waning. They take out their work materials as if they were magicians or a street vendor displaying his wares. The moment they start working a small crowd gathers and it swells into a strong one. Each line and stroke is followed closely by the attentive eyes. They twist and turn as the lines take different shapes. There is a physical response to the artists’ performance of making art. I have seen people waiting the works to be finished. It is not just about the lucky one who has been picked up as the model by the artists but also the onlookers. They all want to see the finished work and feel good about what they have just seen. Each one in the crowd feels that he or she should be picked up as the next model. None would mind if the artist is just making a landscape exactly the way the Barbizon School painters in the late 19^th century did in Paris and Shibu Natesan does these days.

 

Artists’ studios are highly guarded places. Artists are like the proverbial giants who sit over the treasures. But in history there are some artists who apparently showed their prowess in making art for the sake of others. Some of the artists are performative in nature and as I mentioned before they are ready to show their abilities at any given time. Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein and artists like them performed their paintings for others. Generally, art teachers are comfortable in performing before the students or other people. Photographs available in the archives show artists like Nandlal Bose, Binod Behari Mukherjee, Ram Kinkar Baij, N.S.Bendre, Prabhakar Kolte enthusiastically demonstrating before the students. May be that is one reason why there are so many students evolved like them in their artistic styles. They become part of a school, a style and a sort of philosophy. You may ask if it is good for the growth of the students. Replicating the style is a thing of past and was done to death with the demise of the guilds. Modern and contemporary art demand uniqueness and experimental styles from the artist. So following one artist or his style is not a thing to be cherished anymore.

 

The way art is taught in institutions is also changed. Previously, as we have seen already, demonstration was the prime way of teaching skill and style. Today, most of the artists and art teachers believe that art cannot be taught so the students should be left to their own devices. Art teachers should be just facilitators. They should be more like sounding boards who would help the students reflect on their art than hand holding them to make art in certain styles. However, it is observed that where the art teachers are practicing artists themselves the students feel like emulating the working methods than imitating the style. Following the work routine of the master/teacher is always good for discipline. It has also been observed that where the art teachers draw with their tongues than with their hands the students tend to do the same, eventually becoming preachers of sorts than artists, conceptual or otherwise.

 

Artists need appreciation from the public. Artists do not discern between the initiated and the ordinary folks. Artists are happy when they could arouse curiosity in others through their works. Artists, though sometimes reluctant in talking, feel soul satisfied when people spend time before their works. People in turn want to see how much they could grasp the magic of art, the hidden meanings of it. When they fail to do so, they turn their faces away. When an artist performs a painting before the people they get enthusiastic because it is a treasure hunt in an unchartered land with no GPS in hand. Artist him/herself guides the people towards the final point and it is an exhilarating experience.

 

-JohnyML

 

(All the pictures are from Lalit Kala Akademi Galleries where Prof.Pranam Singh performed a painting)

Art Market Comes to Full Circle when Art Fair Takes Place in Five Star Hotel Rooms and Loos

 

In a recently concluded art fair in Delhi, I was told, the works of art were displayed in a five-star hotel. What was exceptional in that, I thought. Even the great Indian master artists used to exhibit in five-star hotels where they befriended rich clients to fetch their art. Lobbies, foyers and banquet halls were used for exhibiting works. The trend seems to have never gone out of fashion. Most of the self-taught artists, them being often rich men and women, for reason that are peculiar to them prefer to exhibit in five-star lobbies because they find themselves in their comfort zone, where the haunt otherwise too to have coffee, to meet friends, to attend pool side parties and also to have a quiet sit down dinner with their nearest ones.

 

The fair that had been hailed as the country’s first hotel art fair however was different, as the photographs that I could scroll through revealed. They exhibited the works of art by major artists inside the hotel rooms and suite rooms. Some of pictures showed the works of art hanging from the walls of the toilets. A suite room toilet definitely has a spacious washroom where one could spend a lot of time, reading, napping and even contemplating on larger aspects of life. Sometimes they have paintings bought by the interior decorators working with the architects who in turn engage the so called art consultants who comb the scene for cheap works of art but colorful and enticing from the camp organizers who make some bulk buying deals with the consultants, who they know for sure would sell them for double price before the architect hand over them to the interior designers.

 

If you look at this scenario having an art fair in a posh hotel room is not a bad idea though it is a funny idea; some sort of self-devaluation for higher earning. A posh hotel room, notionally replicates the desires of good life and an aspiration for having the same comforts on a daily basis back at home. So the temporary nature of the hotel room where expensive works of art displayed for sale is emblematic of the permanent desire in the minds of the upper class, affluent class and the aspiring creamy layer of the middle class. When they see a work of art inside a hotel room, they project their own living space to the given space inside a hotel room and see how it would look in their own spaces. Rest is the matter of financial exchange.

 

Private galleries simply re-invent themselves in obliging to participate in a hotel art fair of this kind. The role of a private gallery was exactly the same in the old days. The white cube concept of a private gallery exudes the idea of a neutral space where a work of art would be presented whose intrinsic qualities are not compromised by any chance by the surrounding material conditions. The white space showered with white or yellow lights create a ‘valueless neutral space’ for the art buyers. The space around the work of art is neutralized by the distance given between two works. The neutral space where the art collectors, buyers, investors and art lovers projected their ideas about spatial enjoyment of the displayed items. It gave them space for intellectual and imaginative negotiations with the works of art.

 

When the character of the art market changed thanks to various domestic and international financial and cultural reasons, the white space in the white cube became a thing of past. A gallery space deliberately contrived to make it a twisted space became the fad. Often a large space with a high ceiling is chosen for a gallery. The spatial dimensions also showed how the dimensions of art works had also been changed. This huge space was divided by partitions that made the space within a complex structure. The walls were given different colors, slightly giving away the possibility of them replicating the interiors of the rich homes that went for differently colored and organized interiors. Art moved from the realm of the art viewers to the ones who could afford to own large real estate and bungalows where huge works of art could be displayed against fancy looking backgrounds.

 

Market was changing fast. Just before the pandemic years, the galleries cut down the number of exhibitions or they started showing together on a particular day of the week or month. This was either to cut the cost or to get the rich and the affluent in maximum numbers in one place so that they could be spared from the hassles of travelling to the same district to watch different shows in different times. While that was happening, simultaneously the idea of a viewing room was also forwarded by the gallerists. A viewing room is a cosy room with a comfortable sofa and adequate lighting where the clients could see different works of art before them brought in by the gallery attendant as per the demands of the buyer. It is more like going to a textile shop and asking to show different shirts or sarees from the racks. The owner of the gallery sat with them and entertained them with endearing stories about the art and the artists shown before them.

 

When everything fails and when the rich and affluent refuse to come to see works of art at your gallery what are you going to do? You will take the works of art to the rich and the affluent. On lazy Sundays, upon appointment the gallerists started sending works of art to the buyers’ homes for perusal. Wherever the rich went the art followed; they opened shops in the high-end malls, shopping arcades, airports, lounges, farm house areas, five-star hotel lobbies and so on. With the art fair going to the hotel rooms the art market seems to have come to a full circle. I am not surprised because of that. If the rich could have works of art in their washrooms, why can’t fair organizers have them displayed inside the loos of the rooms?

 

JohnyML

(Image source Net. All images for illustration purpose only) 

Displaced Targets and Soaring Ambitions of Artists

 

There is an interesting scene in ‘Modern Times’, the iconic film by Charlie Chaplin. With no other means left to survive, goaded by his girlfriend, the Tramp, character played by Chaplin becomes a waiter in a restaurant where music and dance presented on special occasions attract many people. New Year comes and the restaurant is filled with merry makers. He is about to serve a person who has ordered some chicken and wine. Suddenly the clock chimes twelve and it is New Year and everyone erupts in celebration. Confetti flies, music blares and the diminutive figure of Chaplin is submerged in the waves of humanity on its feet. He reaches his client with the tray and another wave of people takes him away. The charade raises a lot of laughter among the audience.

 

In the galleries when I stand before the works of art done by young people, proudly displayed in unimaginably ambitious scales, I remember the abovementioned scene from ‘Modern Times’. They are about to reach their destination, a point in aesthetical maturity and confidence, but something else sweeps them away. For an artist, satisfaction comes in two different forms; one, in the form of money and the other, in the form appreciation. Money is blind; it lacks discretion, most often. In art, money floods in the least expected terrains, causing cascades and landslides in the hillsides of morality. Artists are just human beings covered in the garb of idealism. Who doesn’t want a good flooding of money?

 

They are there, some works on the walls indicate. You feel a sense of excitement. You are about to find out a new artist from among the many aspirants who vie for the top position. Then you start imagining about the artist as a highly skilled, highly informed, highly vocal and highly savvy person. You think about him or her as someone who could sustain the level of excitement that he or she has just generated in you. As you move on you see more works that make you believe that you have really got gold on the walls. Your instincts are sharp and your fingers itch to key in some good words about those works. Suddenly something happens; the artist slips and falls in her aesthetics. From consistency she has just moved on to capriciousness. From determination, she has moved to the realm of doubts.

 

Could it be over confidence? That one could create works of art in different styles; some in contemporary flat style, some in impressionistic mode and some other in futuristic and cubistic. Is that the flair of the artist in handling various art styles or the lack of understanding about one’s own integrated intellectual and aesthetical growth that is displayed naked there on the walls? I am not sure. The artist in question looks extremely confident and she doesn’t have an iota of doubt about her varying styles. In one of the recent experiences that I had in a gallery, the artist looked extremely sure about her works done in different styles; a group show created by a solo artist. She is educated in one of the good art schools in London. And it shows in her ambitious paintings. But I just couldn’t understand why suddenly a series of paintings that are absolutely different in style and approach.

 

I knew that I need not look for an explanation from the artist. There were flowery words written about her by other people in her brochure. Besides, there was a statement by herself in words exuding overconfidence. I have seen such artists. They are child prodigies. Unlike Picasso who too was a child prodigy (an autistic person also, also revealed by one of his grandchildren, Marina Picasso), these prodigies are brought up in secured illusions in which they are the numero uno of art. Their proclivity in creating art is all about the skills shown in drawing something life-like. They draw and paint throughout their school days and are taken to various platforms where they come out as winners. This winning spree gives them the confidence to join an art school where their notions of art are shattered beyond recognition. By the time they gather themselves from the shock, they would have finished their graduation.

 

Out there in the world, with a fancy degree in art from an illustrious institution they find themselves in a liminal space where their naturalistic skills refuse to budge but their educational qualifications deny the entry of such skills in their works. So they have to find a midway. They try to do art that partly shows their naturalistic skills and their newly acquired modern and contemporary aesthetics. They remain like oil and water in their art which rest of the world knows but they themselves never acknowledge. Their egos are further boosted up when their works on display are bought by their wealthy relatives and friends. Once such favors are done they are irrevocably lost in the wilderness of misunderstood art. Thanks to their wealth and influence they are often treated as artists in the public domain and you could see their pictures along with the political leaders, corporate bigwigs and art patrons!

 

In another exhibition hall I came across another artist whose art is informed by the theories of feminism. In the wall text I found the artist introducing herself as an architect whose passion lies in making paintings. Somewhere I happened to see someone saying that the artist in her was awakened when the world was locked down during the pandemic years. Many during the pandemic years found out that they had an artistic side and when the world started calling itself a post-pandemic world they left their art behind and thought that the viruses at some point in their lives would give them another chance to be artists. But there were many others, for no reason decided to stick to their newly found self of an artist. Such people could cause more damage than repair when they try to exhibit the artistic side of their personalities.

 

The feminist artist’s lines, colors, images and the whole makeup of the painting betrayed her self-taught status. A little bit of Gaugin here and a little bit of Sher Ghil there. Some Manjit Bawa here and some Arpana Caur there. When none of them is around there were some elements from Gogi Saroj Pal. It happens, I told myself and moved on taking interest in her works. If she tries she could reach her destination, I thought. Then the Chaplin moment came before my eyes. She suddenly presented a Durga and Lion, a Shiv and Parvati and what not from the mythologies! Her secular thoughts seemed to have a sudden confrontation with the mood of the times. If there are no mythological works what would happen to my art, what would people think about me, she must have thought. Result is disastrous.

 

For most of the artists these days Chaplin’s fate in Modern Times seems to be an unavoidable existence. They want to reach their potential clients. But they live in a time of flux. Everyone is up on their feet and making merry. Artists struggle to reach their clients but they are carried away by other concerns externally imposed on them. They move away from the target and hit elsewhere. It is a blind charade where one could stick the tail into the mouth of a donkey. Donkey in the picture doesn’t mind that because he knows his tail had fallen long back. The blind artists try and become a laughing stock before the informed audience.

-JohnyML

(All the images are from the Net and they serve only illustration purpose. They do not have anything to do with the content of the article)

Art Critics as Vendors and Artists as Clients

 

(source internet)

In Mumbai, at the famous Jehangir Art Galleries Tuesdays are busy with exhibition openings. The galleries look like a packed parking lot where car waits bumper to bumper to find a space to squeeze in. One lot of artists bring down their works from the wall (still an easy task as they just need to pluck the threads off the hooks from the wooden channels. Conventional to the core, Jehangir exudes old world charm and nonsense as the authorities do not allow the artists to stick labels on the walls, let alone drilling them on to the walls to give a decent and contemporary looking display) and the other lot goes up; something that has been on for so many decades with an exception of those couple of pandemic years.

In the auditorium hall, often reserved for big scale shows with money bags to back them up, I see this panel text written by one of my old friends for a solo exhibition. I cursorily go through the text and it says a lot about the abstract works in display and at the same time they do not say anything particularly. That is the fate of those blurb writers who want to produce something out of nothing. Later in the evening, while I am at the gallery number one for a young artist’s solo exhibition where I have been invited as a guest of honor, a young lady is introduced to me as a budding writer. I do not know what the interlocutor has told her about me but I am surprised by her first question itself.

“Who writes the texts that accompany the paintings?” she asks.

I look around because I know that there are no texts to go with the works displayed there in the gallery. So I tell her there are no texts here. She throws a glance at the works.

“Not here. I am talking about there, in the Auditorium Gallery,” she says.

I do not want to tell her that I know the person who has written those words.

“Those are flowery words but confusing and I know they are intended to be so,” she continues, “but I want to know who writes such texts.”

I want to take her question in a different way. So tell her that it must be by someone who is well versed in art and art history. He could be an art critic or a curator even. There are writers who specialize in writing about art.

“How do such people get their clients?” she surprises me with the word client.

Now I am cautious. Clients. This lady who is just a new entrant in the art scene, may be an aspiring writer or a cub reporter from one of those rags published from the city, seems to be very confident about her selection of words.

“Good artists know who are the best writers,” I just tell her bluntly. “They don’t need to look for ‘clients’,” I emphasized.

“Oh, that means they must be having good social networking and wonderful PR skills,” she just doesn’t understand my mood.

I tell her that a good art writer never goes after the artists, on the contrary the artists seek them out. “I don’t seek any artists who could be my potential ‘clients’,” I try to be sarcastic.

But I fail to floor her with my sarcasm. She is dead serious about her premature knowledge about art. “I am a writer,” she says. I wish she added ‘budding’ or ‘aspiring’ before the word writer. But she is determined to be within the spell of her own stupidity.

“I want to get clients for my writing,” she goes on. I feel like walking away but in that situation that may look rude because she hasn’t lost politeness in her tone. She seems to have clubbed politeness with confidence in a peculiar way. Irritation creeps slowly within me.

“You may try with the artists,” I tell her.

She looks fuddled even if she has consumed only a cup of tea. As it is Jehangir Art Gallery people keep coming in. They click selfies before the works of art and generally waft through before the paintings. We look at them.

“That means you need to wait for the clients,” she persists.

“Art is not that easy stuff to write about dear lady,” I tell her.

She frowns and walks off. It looks like she wants to retort. Then I see her coming back after a few minutes when I turn my attention to other people.

“Sorry, I did not know about you. They told me that you are a great art critic and historian,” she says apologetically.

It is raining outside. I go to watch the Mumbai Monsoon that refuses to whimper away. Standing there I ruminate. Things have not changed yet. I remember the early days of my career as an art critic. I had gone to Delhi to become a fulltime art critic. Visiting galleries, artists’ studios, spending long hours with them, looking at them working in their studios, engaging with fellow writers, taking feedback from the readers, getting rubbished by the elders, gaining access to the younger lot etc. were part of growing up.

There were a lot of involvement. There was no reluctance to engage with art or artists. We never called the artists clients and artists never called us the same in turn. Artists and art critics never looked at the art buyers and collectors as potential clients. Everyone was a part of the general ecosystem of art.

What has brought all the difference, I thought?

Is it money market? Money is a reality and so is the market. They are interlinked. However, that couldn’t be the sole reason for this change in attitude of the youngsters. Somewhere down the line, devaluation of the artistic/creative engagement between the artists and writers has happened, I realize. Now they belong to different continents. Artists talk to artists; there too successful artists talk to successful artists and the struggling ones talk to their counterparts. If at all the financially successful artists talk to the still struggling ones they patronize them immensely.

Art critics also have lost their integrity, boldness and patience. They all want to be in the bandwagon and make money. True, everyone needs money in an environment where money speaks. But there is no direct connection between art, aesthetics and money. The monetary part comes when the work of art enters the market. Till a work enters the market and attract buyers for its intrinsic values, it is just a canvas with some colors (or any other medium). Medium is message, said Marshall MacLuhan. Now medium is massage also. Many artists make use of the intrinsic quality of the medium a virtue and eke meaning out of it.

There is no problem in it either. Art critics somehow fails to see it. They want to say good things about the artist and leave art behind or aside. Most often, if you look at the reports on art, it is more about the artist than the art in question. Somewhere even the art writers and critics have compromised. So they could talk about artists as clients.

May be the lady who talked to me was more truthful than the pretentious art critics. She, for the lack of other words talked about the artists as clients. But art critics, even after having all those words at their disposal, still call their clients artists!

-JohnyML

What do you Think When you Think of Writing About Art

 

(Pic courtesy: Google. Representational Purpose only)

I get invitation to attend art exhibition openings. They come through various mediums including personal phone calls. I hardly attend exhibition openings these days. I ask myself why have I grown so disinterested in attending the art dos. They are the platforms to do socializing and networking. And ironically, whenever I curate a show I expect people to come in hoards to attend the opening. If they too grow cold towards the openings what would be the result. Deserted galleries and lackluster inaugural functions. No artist would like it. No gallerist would like to see her gallery echoing her own sighs on the opening day.

Recently, a senior art critic asked me why I did not do the blog entries anymore. Writer’s block? she asked. I hadn’t thought about such a scenario. I had gone through such phases when words stood aloof. I don’t find myself in that situation now. I need a white page, a Microsoft Word page so that I could key in my thoughts without a break. There is no arrogance in saying this. My daily training has helped me achieve this. Yet, I do not write that much these days. Some kind of lethargy? Don’t I feel anymore the need to purge myself of my winding thoughts?

I want my writings to be clear and lucid. A reader should have easy access not only to the text but also to the content. Someone should not stand before my writing as if he was standing before a thick and tall concrete wall infested with graffiti and rhetoric. Easy access is a much mistaken concept. Most of the people think that accessible things are less valuable. You make something so complex that the very inaccessibility makes people look at it in awe. Words and ideas become like celebrities and VIPs locked up in fortresses made up of concrete and security measures. They come out once in a while to wave at the hapless admirers who scream at a single glace, the spreading of hands and the dimpled smile.

(Pic courtesy: Google. Representational Purpose only)

I do not write these days because I do not see good art that often. I could ramble around any subject for a long time but when art is before me, writing about it becomes the most pleasurable thing in the world. Artists who come up with pedestrian ideas and childish logic and done to death styles one cannot say much about their art. So I keep quite. I walk in front of the galleries even avoiding to look at their facades. They look like silent stupidity parked at turn unattended and left to rust. One should avert the eyes from such depressing sights.

Whenever I see the names of artists printed on the invitation cards they look strange and unfamiliar. True, I do not know most of them. I wistfully remember those times when I took pains to travel to different places and studios to see young artists working. That time has gone and the concerns that ruled artists in those times are also have become a thing of past. Today the concerns of the artists are different. They want to be a part of major exhibitions and international fairs. They want to be in international residencies and art camps. They want to be in a different world with their works. What do they address in their art, I ask myself and find no answer. I have heard from places that the youngsters too address the issues like migration, environmental crises, wars, poverty, human suffering and injustice. They are not different from our generation in that sense.

Where do they differ and how do they differ then? I do not have any clear answer here. Those young artists who are lauded by the private establishments that almost monopolize the art scene in India and elsewhere project themselves as the new age messiahs with a new language and approach. They use new materials and contemporary technologies. May be I am too old to understand the technology in a practical sense but I do understand their impacts in the contemporary human life and their influence in understanding the past and shaping the future. What I do not understand is the language that they use. They are wafer-thin and stand only because that there are armatures and scaffolds of words around them. They prop them up like dilapidated houses restructured by a whimsical architecture who excels in disuse of spaces.

(Pic courtesy: Google. Representational Purpose only)

I am a stranger to that. Like the international professional art critics, I could gush over the works that are shallow by digging them deep. I could post them regularly at the Instagram and amass followers. There is no problem in having more followers in social media platforms and making an influencer of sorts out of oneself. But when I think of it a sense of meaninglessness engulfs me. Why should I see those things that are not there? Why should I over-read things when they do not deserve reading at all? May be reading a visual text would give you some sort of high but all the highs are not good for health. You turn a liar, slowly and steadily.

Once I went to an all women art camp. I went through the works that were done hastily because it was a single day camp. Most of them had generated images that didn’t throw up any surprises. Same vaginas, wombs, blood, bird’s nest, eggs, splayed legs, kitchen utensils and so on. I thought, why didn’t they have any other self-image other than the stereotypical ones. Lynda Nochlin and other feminist theoreticians of her ilk had talked about reclaiming the female body from the clutches of the male desires and possessiveness. That was almost sixty years ago. The world has changed since then. How long are you going to make the same thing, ululating the female vulva, blood and tears?

I ask this question unto myself. What’s the point in saying the same thing in new mediums and materials? Can’t there be a different lens, a different ken and a different scale to see and measure oneself? If I say thing, I will be called a misogynist and a chauvinist. It is not just about the female artists, it is about every other artist. When you say the truth, they call you names. Better keep quiet.

 

-JohnyML