Francis Newton Souza: Pointing a Finger with Dirty Hands

- Vishal Tondon

This article appeared in Searching Lines, Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Vol 09, 2011

Souza began his career as an artist – according to his own confession – by doodling on the walls of his mother’s womb. I bet, even there he was making odious representations of a world he had yet to encounter. Soon, he was thrown into the midst of a detestable humanity, and being the pugilist that he was, he gladly took to the task of ruffling a feather here and bursting a bubble there. He carried on with his seditious activities in an unflinching manner and with consistency throughout his life. Subversion was not a strategy for Souza; he was the quintessential trouble child who never grew up.

He rebelled against the Father, the Mother, the Church and God. But to him God is not dead. The confrontation with authority is the very business of his life and is the motivation for him to live. To him, to be alive is to fight. God and authority are the alpha and the omega of his obsession. By taking an adversary position to the rebel, they justify his existence.  

Souza is a product of many traditions. Goan by birth, he spent his formative years in Mumbai. He studied at the JJ College of Arts and was expelled for engaging with communist activities. He was one among the Progressive Artists’ Group. Later, in the early 1960s, he moved to Europe, and finally made New York his home. Such is the diversity of influences on him and such was his virtuosity in putting inspiration to good use that it becomes hard to separate the Souza of one continent from another; a task made onerous by the fact that he is everywhere consistent in his rebellion – he is as seditious on one continent as on another. Christian by birth and upbringing, he makes it his mission to turn the tenets of his faith upside down. While Renaissance painters made humans look like angels, Souza, in his own words, sought to make pictures for angels that showed them what we humans looked like; demoniac and absurd.

I guess he looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw. The pock marked face of a man who could be loyal to none but his craft. You look at his self portraits and you know that he was as acutely derisory of himself as of others. He observes himself as a voyeur would. In the same manner that he, as a young boy, observed through a peephole his mother, naked and bathing. Souza’s admission into the world of grown-ups is effected through a transgression. But this is not an indiscretion he would later in his life regret. He is beyond regrets. Everything he does is the stuff of art. Souza the person is always subordinate to Souza the artist.

Souza’s trashing of religious authority and human nature, and his irreverence towards God expose the apparent meaninglessness of everything. Absurdist philosophy suggests three ways in which man can resolve the dilemma of having to live in a meaningless universe. One way is to commit suicide. The other is faith; to wholeheartedly embrace the authority of the higher power. The third way is to revolt against the absurd; this is done by derecognizing all religious and moral constraints and finding in life a meaning of one’s own. Souza’s irreverence is his way of revolting against the absurd. This is Souza’s version of existentialism. 

To Souza, God is not dead. Souza keeps Him alive just so he can trash Him again and again.

When I speak of Souza as the trouble child who never grew up, I also speak of his proclivities for the crude and the brazen. Just as in his college years he would scribble rough and ready images of vulgar sex on toilet walls, so would he do on his paintings meant for the more discerning viewer. It is to Souza’s credit that he would not allow age and experience to corrupt the adolescent in him. It takes the innocence of youth for a person to point a rude finger in our face, and there remained in Souza this pubescent until the autumn of his life. Yes, most of his better work is confrontational. And much of it is crude in its depiction of sex and the body. It would take the beholder to get over the initial moment of shock, and to linger over the work longer before he realized that the real subject matter was beneath the skin. Faced with his paintings of women showing full frontal nudity, can we see beyond the obvious? Do we have a vision for this kind of viewing? Or, are we so crude that we will not afford any credit to the person lingering behind her sex? 

Clearly, the joke is on us.      

Souza flays his female nudes apart. Picasso did this too, and his hapless mistress once remarked that he treated women in life just as he treated them on canvas. An element of sadism is palpable here. When asked about his pillorying of the female form, Souza is said to have remarked, “The woman who goes to bed with me, I treat her with respect.” However invasive the sexual act is, for Souza, the desire to get inside the body remains insatiable. It cannot be quenched in the face of social etiquette. It finds its gratification in art.

Few can elicit disgust as well as empathy for their subjects at the same time. Souza treated the female figure with neither respect nor awe, and his work is witness to his comfort with the female expressing her sexuality. He knew his female subject well enough to bring out her vulnerability as well as malevolence at the same time. Dali is known to have been in awe of female sexuality, even fearful, as we know from his painting ‘The Bleeding Roses.’ But Souza shared a kindred relationship with his female figures; they were as majestic, vain and disgusting as he himself was.

Souza’s strength is his interest in the formal aspects of painting; the figural possibilities are endless through permutations and combinations. This makes for his prolific body of work. His contemporaries who have consistently dealt with the notion of corporeality through formalistic means are Picasso and Francis Bacon and back home, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta, amongst others.

He is a maverick at cutting, distorting, mutilating and exaggerating contours and incidents. In his hands, even the holiest of figures and scenes are dehumanized. The figure on the crucifix is broken, bent and reassigned beyond recognition, and looks as debased as the grimacing figures around him. The dead Pope’s body has festered and the skin is drawn back to expose a sinister grimace. The blue of the Pope’s skin colors the bystanders and the entire scene blue. In the face of these pictures, it becomes difficult to reserve sympathy for one character and not for the others. Icons are reduced to their human element and their lives as earthly beings are recounted.  

John Berger has rightly said that Souza straddles many traditions, yet serves none. Servile adherence to any religious, ethnic or artistic school would have been oppressive to Souza. He was his own master. His philosophical estrangement from society recalls Camus’ Mersault from ‘The Outsider.’ This is a person whose perspective of humanity is not at par with that of the world around him. This becomes a cause for consternation for us, as we would like to know who is in the right; we or ‘the outsider.’ Clearly, ‘the outsider’, as he grew up, did not evolve according to the expectations and prescriptions of society. He retained nonchalance in the face of things we might find disconcerting. The people who judge Mersault’s fate are appalled by his inappropriateness; his refusal to cry in the face of his mother’s death and his frolicking with his girlfriend while out on a swim just after his mother’s death. While Mersault was completely unaware of his alienation from societal norms, Souza was acutely aware of it, and he put it to good use in his art. Camus has claimed Mersault as a Christ for our times; a person who will live life to the fullest, as per his own dictates, irrespective of societal pressures. Souza knew that his acute vision alienated him from mankind around him. He observed them from a superior position and everyone, including himself, was but a subject matter for him. True, this furnished him with a certain sense of vanity, but his narcissism in turn became his subject matter. We can see him take a jab at himself in his numerous self portraits. No wonder then that the illustrious and one of the greatest poets of our times, Ezra Pound, should comment on Souza’s gainful vanity. Once, at a soiree where he was reciting the Pisan Cantos, Ezra Pound is said to have remarked to an audience, “Souza is a great man, but I think he knows it.”          

Souza was not given to any sense of discretion when it came to praising himself. This is the person who once gloated merrily that he made more money selling his paintings than the prime minister of Britain.

Souza was very secure about his merits as a craftsman. Just as he went against the grain in his social life, so did him as an intellectual. While the art world had moved on beyond the modernist styles of painting, Souza’s faith in the expressive power of line and color remained unwavering. His work stood up for itself in the face of the 1960s Europe hostility to Expressionism. He could achieve this commendable feat because of his conviction in his work. In the sense that he was enslaved to no convention even as a thinker, Berger’s words ring true once again.

Souza’s dismissal of institution, authority and artistic traditions calls to mind Groucho Marx’s witty comment, “I do not care to belong to any club that would take me as a member.” But there is one grand tradition that the nonconformist artist devoted his life to lampooning. This is the authority of the Church and God. The derision of all that was holy was effected by his acerbic yet virtuous handling of religious-erotic themes. His persistent questioning of organized religion is testimony to his intense spirituality. Troubled he was, but he put his anger and loathing to good use. He used his anger and abhorrence constructively. Therein lays his merit. 

Heritage in Transition

- Vishal Tondon

This article was published in Searching Lines, Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Vol 09, 2011

I write this in reaction to the redecorating of the Department of Art History with a mural by the eminent and our beloved artist K G Subramanyan. I see this as a moment of heritage in transition. But momentous changes are always accompanied by teething problems which in this case is the undercurrent of resentment many people have towards this refurbishing.

When we ascribe heritage value to buildings and art objects, it goes without saying that we would expect these heritage symbols to be firstly, conserved, and second, protected against modifications. I will not comment on the happenings in the whole of Santiniketan-Visva Bharati precincts as my knowledge there is limited, but clearly Kala Bhavan has fallen short of taking care of many a heritage legacy on both the counts I mentioned above.

Many functioning buildings in Visva Bharati are falling apart for want of appropriate care. In Kala Bhavan, many of the murals painted by luminaries and their distinguished students peeled off the walls as scabs drift off diseased skin. The damp and neglected walls of offices and hostels were not able to hold on to the irreplaceable wall paintings. In the last few years, after decades of apathy and neglect, many of the walls and buildings having murals on them underwent restoration and conservation by experts from national restoration organizations like INTACH, but a large body of the lesser works have already been mutilated beyond a point of return. This apathy is symptomatic of a deeper miasm and it is reflected in the general condition of many of the older buildings under the care of Visva Bharati University, including some of the hostels.

For me, this is a point of serious concern for another reason too. We keep on harping about the word ‘heritage’ which has been reduced to nothing more than an abstract concept. If it were not so, then we would have consistently protected heritage structures from being modified. But does the concept of ‘heritage’ cover only inanimate objects and buildings? When UNESCO designates a site as a ‘world heritage site’, in the citation it mentions that the site is a testimony to “human creative genius.” So naturally, people – the creators of the heritage site as well as the inheritors - are included in the implications of the word ‘heritage.’ In the couple of years that I have been here at Santiniketan, I have felt that the term ‘heritage’ here often holds nothing more than a symbolic value now. Otherwise there would be more proactive fighters for the preservation of heritage. Well wishers are seen to make some noise every now and then, but their voices often lose steam.

What about the inheritors of this heritage? Are the students of Kala Bhavan inheritors of this heritage? Does their lifestyle reflect this heritage? What kind of a lifestyle are we providing the students who reside in the quarters provided by Kala Bhavan? While we lampoon each other in our futile attempts – futile because building after building is being altered all the same – to designate which structures are heritage and which are not, we invest far lesser time and money in the betterment of the dormitories where students reside in health and sickness. Some of the students hostels are in appalling state and the students in a college of national and international importance have to live in inhuman conditions. Such is the state of affairs in a college that has for decades claimed to be a torchbearer of Indian cultural renaissance.

Structure after structure was either neglected or mutilated beyond recognition in a national heritage campus, while the persons responsible for their upkeep either looked away or raised their hands in helplessness. Much of Kala Bhavan architecture that stood for the aesthetic that defined Santiniketan was maimed just as many of the murals in the corridors of hostels were choked by the smoke emanating from cooking utensils. Heritage and aesthetic value were discarded in favor of utility.

When I use the word ‘heritage’ here, let us not get technical about it. Heritage is not a value ensured by certificates and medals. It can also be in the sentiment that the building or the artifact holds for the persons who identify themselves with these objects. To rob them of their heritage is to rob them of their identity.

The implications of this new project at the Department of Art History, and the opposition to it are pertinent. While people outside of Kala Bhavan threaten this project with dire circumstances including public interest litigation, the project overlooks all forms of dissent including informal expressions of unhappiness with the project within the institution, and carries on purposefully. Do we realize how inheritors would look back at this project ten years down the line, when objectivity takes over? 

Unfortunately, because of this fiasco, K G Subramanyan, who we fondly refer to as Mani-da, is – on some forums on the internet – being spoken of in very irreverent terms. This is a bad omen. Everyone should have faith in the good intentions and the generosity of Mani-da, who has been kind enough to offer yet another mural to the campus. Mani-da is above petty campus politics. The problem lies elsewhere. The fault lies with all those who – in spite of their resentment towards this project – fall in line and unanimously assent to this project.

    

The dissent from within the institution, so far expressed only unofficially, is feeble and typical of Kala Bhavan attitude. While we the custodians of this heritage axe our own feet, some outsiders make noise in a vain attempt to raise us from our slumber. But none are as blind as those who will not see.

Mastermoshai Nandalal Bose’s studio stood there harmless and quaint, dignified in its old world charm. And while the long-established  Nandan and Amtala hostels – here I speak only of the hostels allotted to the Kala Bhavan male students – rotted away infested with livestock, dogs, rats and swine, we decided to touch up the Department of Art History. After all, when dignitaries and visitors come, it is the buildings at the helm that will define the aura and the manufactured recent history of Kala Bhavan.

Looks can be deceptive. When visitors come during Nandan Mela, they are dazzled by the glamour of light and sound breezing through the grounds of the Bhavan. And then they visit the hostel rooms of their wards, and are appalled by the abject sights they are met with.

There is a vast dissent to the makeover of Nandalal Bose’s studio doing the rounds on blogs and Facebook. That is all in the virtual sphere. But the chisel and the hammer are working away right now. The voices of dissent have been either too feeble in their unofficial lamenting and beseeching, or mere intimidations from outside threatening with dire consequences. Typically, there has not yet been a unanimous and official expression of discontent.

I am surprised that while people speak, overtly or covertly, for the preservation of heritage, no one speaks for the improvement of the living conditions of the students who are the inheritors of this heritage. I think this is so because ‘heritage’ is a larger issue with political implications. That makes the fight over heritage more appealing. There is no charm in discussing the lodging and boarding conditions of hapless students. 

Fine, let us have refurbished structures. Let us value novelty over the old and the dilapidated. After all, heritage is just a value judgment, and humans don’t survive on a staple diet of heritage. But before we think of redecorating and beautifying, let us try and make the living easier and more dignified, as was and is still imagined for Santiniketan. Let us look at the embarrassing hostels. How do they reflect on the heritage of our grand institution? How do they reflect on the responsibility we take of our wards? Let us look at the college buildings and some of the dismal studios that desperately need restoration. First things first. 

Sabir’s World; A Conflicting Existence Between…

- Vishal Tondon

Translated by Google

Sabir Ali's is a crowded world in which peoples from across different places and epochs are brought together as time gets crunched. Here time does not move in a linear fashion; it moves in cycles. Or to and fro. Unlikely elements come together to form a tableau, and the effect brought on is similar to that of simulation. Events and characters are associated metaphorically or allegorically. But the choice of the metaphors is not traditional; we live in a postmodern world where the whole of history is crunched, and any representation of the present conditions will have to call for a new inventory of images that will have to be culled either from our physical surroundings, or from mediatic or virtual worlds, and finally even from our subconscious.

A Conflicting Existence Between...

Thus the world Sabir represents will have to negotiate between the known and the unknown, the simulated and the ‘real.’ How real is real, will be a subject of interrogation for Sabir. In his canvases, ‘real’ people act out in ‘real’ spaces, ‘real’ circumstances and ‘real’ relationships. The phenomenological concern with reality, which has interested and even obsessed the humanists as well as the anti-humanists throughout the twentieth century, finds its visual equivalent in Sabir’s canvases. It is clearly intentional that most of the protagonists on his canvases live under the illusion of self-determination. While they live under the glad misunderstanding that they are players in the game of life. Is it not possible, Sabir suggests, that they are nothing but pawns in this game? Their notions of self determination are quashed by the situations Sabir places them in.

In the painting 'A Conflicting Existence Between...', we see an instance of consciousness as being causally constructed. The concept of the nation state as propagated by the nationalist machinery might not have takers in all of the country. Nationalism and separatism might be the synonyms for the same word ‘freedom’ for the different parties.  

Consider the figure of Van Gogh who recurs in Sabir’s paintings. In ‘Translated by Google’, the life story and the writings on Van Gogh’s achievements are transmuted into a jumble through a literal and mechanical translation. Human affairs cannot be subjected to such reductionist readings; an opinion that later anthropologists have reiterated time and again. All such a method would lead to is a pastiche of visuals and information.

But the figure of Van Gogh interests Sabir also in relation to readings on life and death. Van Gogh has a lust for life and he hopes to capture its reality on his canvases. But he is confronted by a sense of the unreality of the world, and the only emotion he seems to trust is the one which involves a risk of death. Van Gogh failed miserably to find happiness in his personal life. He is confronted with what he believes to be the mortality of all emotions, and the belief that what is real is that which involves the risk of death. Could this be the reason Van Gogh has famously said, "You have to risk your life to make a good painting." Contemplation on death becomes a passionate involvement; not a melancholic one. To deny death is to deny life.

The very neurosis that compels Van Gogh to cut off his ear also ultimately compels him to shoot himself to death. The compulsion is authentic, a testimony to his tortured nature. Every moment of his life is lived on the edge of the precipice from where he could plummet into an abyss deeper than the one he lives in. But he is not afraid. He takes on life with threats of effacement. The quintessential artist to Sabir is entrusted with the task of living the negotiation between life and death, and between what is timeless and what is mortal. Death as the consistent truth and the fate of every living being attains a quality of timelessness in Sabir's work. It traverses the epochs of The Annunciation, down to the medieval times – in Spain where we confront the massacre of the innocents as depicted by Goya, and in India where we confront a dying Inayat Khan – and finally down to our contemporary times where The Annunciation is linked to ominous symbols of death as in ‘The Good News’.

The Good News

‘The Good News’ again throws light on the capriciousness of human consciousness. What is purported to be good news for a people might actually be to the benefit of another. The promise of freedom comes as the promise of a new birth into a community. The angel – read an American soldier – delivering the ‘good news’ or promised freedom to an Iraqi woman is in a patronizing and superior position. The distinctions between good and bad, and real and unreal are blurred as the world hurtles towards disaster as suggested by the bomber plane flying above the figures.

The Luncheon on the Grass

In 'The Luncheon on the Grass,' everyone is a philosopher. They all, including the ass, have expositions to make, and their vulnerability is hidden delicately under the cloak of their knowledge as flimsy as a slip of cloth. The modesty they hold with regards to their knowledge is covered in negligees that are their black socks. They indulgently enunciate their empty verses, oblivious to the threat of mortality lurking in the background – burning bright adorned in black stripes – languidly approaching a beautiful woman whose life is under the threat of being snuffed out.

Detail. The Luncheon on the Grass

Does not the preoccupation with death foreclose any attempts at emancipation through human intervention? Does Sabir subscribe to the anti-Humanist view that man is ultimately doomed and can only be a pawn in the game of life? How does Sabir counter his apparent fatalism? It seems to me, he does so by suggesting a closer inspection of how we construct our myths and beliefs around the concept of death, and what these myths and beliefs say about us. Ultimately, what he suggests is self-introspection. 

Marich Vadh

The harshiya, the ornate border or mount that enclosed many of the miniatures from the Mughal Period, recurs in their modern avatar in Sabir's acrylics. Miniatures with harshiyas have often confounded those trying to study the miniatures from Mughal times. They could be either purely decorative, or an extension of the theme in the painting. What is of Sabir's interest is that many of the harshiyas are later additions to the original artwork; a tampering and modification of a story that was signed and sealed to its conclusion in the past. Do the techniques of such later additions tally with those of the original artwork? From a long shot, we would say yes. But closer inspection would reveal otherwise. History is a long process of the assimilation and trenchant equalization of disparate elements into classes, genus and species. So what we really see now in Sabir's painting is a relic of a harshiya. It is represented in a new medium; acrylic on canvas. It is only in his more iconic images like 'Marich Vadh', that the harshiya expands unhindered, and encloses the entire central image, thus fulfilling its traditional function. Otherwise, it is relegated to the task of creating ambiguities in space, and along with other elements like crevices and moors, building a tapestry of planes on which scenes are enacted. As for it’s more important and symbolic functions, it serves to bring disparate time zones in close proximity, as it diligently brings disparate cultures into the confluence of a narrative. Thus the dying Inayat Khan is covered in a sheet that carries a shoddy imitation of the masterpiece 'The Death of Saint Francis' by Giotto. In a world where the importance of events and historical objects has been equalized without regard to their individuality, mechanical reproduction brings the past and the present, the high and the low, and the East and the West together. It serves Sabir's purposes well that the Orient and the West can be brought into such proximity. The crux that holds these unlikely elements and peoples together in Sabir's work is their shared struggle to survive and their posture in the face of death.

The Dying Inayat Khan 1

In Sabir’s painting here, Inayat Khan is being compared with Saint Francis. What might appear to be an irregularity to most is to Sabir a valid comparison. Saint Francis' life is, as the legends go, a lesson that life can be more than a mere rehearsal for death. Legends also testify that Francis, at the end of a period of prayer and meditation, received the stigmata; symbolic wounds representing his identification with Christ. Earlier medieval representations of Saint Francis emphasized on his mystical aspect. Giotto reverses the emphasis and shows the saint to be more human and corporeal. Giotto's touch of humanism is a tribute to the saint who had a great humanizing influence himself. Sabir draws the image of the dead saint into the loop and juxtaposes it with that of the dying Inayat Khan the latter years of whose life were nothing more than a mere rehearsal for death. But there is dignity in Inayat Khan's acquiescent wait for death. A favorite courtier of Jehangir, he has brought on an untimely death unto himself by his addiction to opium. And now he reclines pensive – his body tattered while his face is resolute – looking death in the face and patiently waiting for it to take him into its fold.

The figure of Inayat Khan is an allegory for the reign of Jehangir, famous for its artistic outburst as well as for its decadence. Jehangir was a true connoisseur of art. He encouraged the artists from the imperial atelier to record the pomp and colour of the court, their hunts, battle, elephants, women, generals and slaves. As an irony of fate, Jehangir himself, in his later years, would become addicted to wine laced with opium. His slip into debauchery would mark his lapse into a failed administrator. The latter years of his life would become an allegory for the state of the Mughal Empire which would ultimately fall apart. Thus Inayat Khan becomes a metaphor for the condition of the Mughal Empire in his time.

The Dying Inayat Khan 2

Significantly, the figure of Inayat Khan is also an allegory for the conception the East has of death. Death is often equated with glory in the Middle East, and with liberation in the Far East. These traditions also equate life with misery. In India, this belief owes largely to the concept of life negation, initially brought up by Buddhism, and later assimilated into Brahmanism. By medieval times, centuries of inculturation with the Indian way of life and the impact of Sufi thought had infused into the Indian Muslim psyche a romantic acceptance of death as the liberator. Inayat Khan’s stoned eyes stare death in the face, but he looks placid and resigned to his fate. Sabir has painted another version of ‘The Death of Inayat Khan.’ At the corner of this painting, a soldier from Goya’s ‘May 3rd, 1808’, depicted as an angel of death, shoots out of the frame of the canvas at either a mortified Spanish insurgent, or at an indifferent Inayat Khan.    

You Have to Learn How to Eat a Dead Zebra to Survive

Death as the ultimate reality is a recurrent theme for Sabir. So is his interest in studying the nature of reality itself. The title for Sabir's painting 'You Have to Learn How to Eat a Dead Zebra to Survive' sounds like the tagline to a reality show. How real the reality shows are is anybody's guess, but yes, life is a struggle where fight or flight are the only two options available. “To eat a dead zebra” has connotations beyond the implied physical act itself. Sabir draws the word 'dead' again into the loop. The obligation to devour – whether literally or metaphorically – is accepted as natural. The very social structures built to sustain life, can in the process of growth and advancement, turn into a sarcophagus for the unfit. An allegory of Mother Nature?

You Cannot Control Life with a Mouse

Also, our consciousness is jolted when we are snatched from our familiar situation and thrown into the ‘wilderness.’ The painting ‘You Cannot Control Life with a Mouse’ gives countenance to our real feelings and intentions, which we do not excavate and examine as we go about our everyday ‘real’ lives. The protagonists in these reality shows begin to behave selfishly in a bid for survival when confronted with adversity. A woman is unable to rescue her drowning boyfriend – for whom she had professed undying love – for fear that her lifeboat might upturn in the shark-infested waters. In the supposedly unreal situation of a reality show, an uncomfortable truth about human nature is brought to the fore. In our ‘real’ everyday lives we do not examine these truths.  This canvas shows a mirror to our insecurities and selfishness that we are in our everyday lives able to contain under the surface; ‘real’ emotions like love get transmuted into apathy under the pressure to survive.

Detail. You Cannot Control Life with a Mouse

Reality as we understand is thus not within our control. The reality of today need not be the reality of tomorrow. Words get transmuted, as through the process of cloning, as they mumble out of the apologetic girl’s mouth. The notions of love get transmuted for the drowning man as he is abandoned to his death. The word ‘love’ has often been used in the same breath as the words ‘life’ and ‘death.’ In real situations, “love until death do us apart” finds its true meaning. Cynicism? Maybe. But then Sabir is only reflecting on what his consciousness has led him to believe might be ‘the reality.’

  My Friend Gautam Who Never Finished His PhD When He Fell in Love with a Japanese Girl

“My Friend Gautam Who Never Finished His PhD When He Fell in Love with a Japanese Girl” explores one of the key ideas of cultural theory, of hybridization. This is the emergence of new cultural forms as a result of multiculturalism. But the process of hybridization is uneven. And any fair evaluation of a culture at a given point of time would have to be based on a diachronic view of the system, that is, through time, as events or processes. The mere structure called ‘colonialism’ is not sufficient to understand the world of meaning in human behavior, of which interpersonal relationships and cultural expression are being discussed here. Gautam is reading Gibran. The sitter for Gautam’s girlfriend in the painting is not Japanese, but Korean. Japanese print technique is saddled up side by side with western realistic portraiture. But there is a message here. Love dynamizes the colonial structure by taking into account the speaking subjects – in this case the protagonist and his ‘muse’ – and their unconscious experiences.

Thus we see that an underlying spirit of humanism runs through much of Sabir’s work. The beings caught within the real and the unreal can let out nothing more than a scream of existential angst and come to terms with their ever-changing situations. Or they can, in a more pacifist way, muse poignantly in the face of death and long for a romantic reunion with God.

Subodh Gupta and the True Meaning of Things

- Vishal Tondon

 Three Cows, 2003

Subodh Gupta has been proposed by many writers as an important contemporary Indian artist. Arshiya Lokhandwala places him within the ambit of a new world order, where art has become yet another transportable commodity, this time one which might have the potential to legitimize national identity. Peter Nagy has his own insight; he says that through his work, Gupta alludes to the ostensibly banal themes of migration, consumption and commoditization by constructing “anti-monuments” that “portray the hopes, dreams and struggles of a common Indian today.”

These acceptable readings apart, I would on my part like to emphasize on the realism in Gupta’s work. The approach of realistic work is more pronounced in his drawings and paintings.

To begin with, no artist refers to their work as unreal or anti-real. Even non-representational art has always claimed to ‘represent’ a kind of reality. So why – after conceptual art became the norm and is still a highly preferred mode of expression – do artists like Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville and Subodh Gupta, to name a few, return to the realistic mode of representation on canvas?

Once Husain was asked why he did not paint abstracts. It has always been fashionable – at least it was until the early 1990s – for alumni of the Sir J J School of Arts to gravitate towards abstraction. In his answer to this question, Husain had said, “In a country with sixty crore people, how can I go abstract?” I think it is the same logic that validates the realism in Gupta’s work more than any other.   

In the kind of realism that Freud, Saville and Sudhir Patwardhan use to depict the human figure, the physical reality of the subject is emphasized with such insistence that it becomes impossible to disregard the primacy of the physical. The physicality of the subject is crucial and comes before any other considerations of the subject. The opacity of the body or figure makes it tangible, and all other aspects of the subject are contingent upon the existence of the subject as a physical reality in the first place; the body as an existentialist trap, perhaps? It is the same kind of realism we find in Gupta’s paintings. Consider his canvases ‘The Cow’ for example. The bicycle is loaded with cans of milk. The technique of painting may be described as ‘realistic’ or ‘hyper-realistic’ or even ‘new mediatic realism.’ At first glance, it may appear to be an innocent and witty representation of the mundane observed in everyday Indian life. But it is in the process of selection and omission – in his paring down of the subject matter to the essentials – that Gupta makes his mark. As Georgia O’Keeffe has said elsewhere, “Nothing is less real as realism. Details are confusing. Only by selecting, omitting, and emphasizing do we advance to the true meaning of things.”

Subodh Gupta’s realism, as I see it, is an attempt at getting to the true meaning of things. And the objective behind the representation of everyday objects in his art is to express their place in our lives; to depict them with poignancy as manifestations of middle-class aspirations and increasingly materialistic needs. 

A common thread in realist art is a commitment to the modern world and to things as they are. While the academic style of realism is still popular with many art schools in India – especially the ones with a colonial legacy – the onus in professional and political circles has since independence been on ‘revivalism’, ‘indigenism’ and even ‘modernism.’ But with a barrage of mediatic images since the 1990’s, visual expectations and visual memory and vocabulary has grown wider, and a new kind of realism has become acceptable in Indian art now. A ‘new mediatic realism’ – a term coined by Nancy Adajania – became a mode of expression for artists like Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Chintan Upadhyay, Shibu Natesan, Riyas Komu, T V Santhosh and Subodh Gupta amongst others. The technique, which would until then have been incongruent with Indian life, was suddenly validated by the center stage media images took in our lives and consciousness.

It is under these circumstances that Gupta took to his own kind of realism; one that speaks of ownership, identity, migration and aspirations all at the same time. 

In his depiction of inanimate objects such as utensils, vehicles and even animal waste, Gupta’s subject is essentially the human being. It is here that the words of John Berger ring true yet again; “Realism is not a manner, but an approach and an aim.”

The tautologies of photo-realistic painting apart, the turning of many Eastern artists to realism is a landmark occurrence in world art history; a landmark in the sense that it reflects a change in the visual landscape of emerging economies, shifts in value systems, the triumph of capitalism, and the persistence and sometimes even worsening of the woes of the lesser privileged classes.

Gupta’s works like the series ‘Saat Samundar Paar’ and ‘Doot’ reflect another kind of reality; the approximation of the modern and the vernacular in everyday Indian life. To me they also reflect the attitudes in popular Indian culture, especially in the movies and festivals, where incongruities are seen between the elements that make up an event. The music, the rituals and the ritual objects so incompatible with each other yet exist side by side; the inappropriateness of Bollywood music being played in a procession for the gods and fashion at these religious events being dictated by the movies. Hence, we see that the person with common desires and aspirations oscillates between the old and the new, the ‘highbrow’ and the ‘lowbrow’, the past and the present, and the personal and the political. This is the India where there is imbalance and chaos, and Gupta’s realism reflects this well.

 Saat Samunder Paar, 2003

Magic Processors: Jehangir Jani’s Work at Studio 1ShanthiRoad

Jehangir Jani has until recently been known for his works that tackled religious-erotic themes with wit, subversion and dark humor. His most profound works have dealt with gender, politics and religion. His significant bodies of work like ‘Faerie Tales…A Re-Look’, ‘Stories’, ‘The Dancer in the Tomb’, ‘Peers’ and ‘Great Expectations’ revealed his concern about the struggle between the individual and the hegemonic orders of religion and politics. But of late, his work has become increasingly light hearted and has taken a completely different trajectory that is equally engaging and relevant.

This September, when I went to studio 1ShanthiRoad at Bangalore to check in on how Jani’s upcoming show Magic Processors was shaping up, I was taken in by surprise. As I am wont to do, all I had expected to see was a collection of routine art objects. But what we had here was pure magic. A scooter on its onward motion leaving behind an evanescent streak of gossamer wings; a trail of butterflies. An office briefcase exploding and spewing around desirable objects from everyone’s wish list. Well, here is your chance. What is your wish? In a fantastic world with Magic Processors, everything is possible. You name it, and you got it.

Jani has earlier been called a maverick artist because of his impulsive and changeable affiliations towards various media. Just when he was neck deep into sculptures and installations, he would suddenly chuck it all and go on to create watercolors or paintings or videos. Or it could be the other way round. But with Magic Processors, we have in Jani a maverick in the true sense of the word. He lends his nonconformity to the objects he creates as well. With this recent work, which Jani produced during his residency at studio 1ShanthiRoad, he questions the dynamics of what we call ‘rationality’. In his concept note to the exhibition, Jani writes:

“Rational belief has made ordinary human lives one of drudge, and unfair circumstances have converted them to one of want, seemingly without respite. 

But…if there was magic??? 

If a briefcase was filled with cars, bikes and Blackberrys: a thief’s loot or a common man’s dream. 

If pressure cookers could conjure washing machines, mixers and fridges, or toasters could pop up televisions, the kitchen would become the fabled cave of treasures and the mundane would acquire a marvelous dimension. 

If scooters emitted butterflies instead of exhaust, and mincers converted guns into animals, and travelling in auto rickshaws became a cricket match, and so on, perhaps the world would be a wholesome place to inhabit. 

If it was simpler to lead a fulfilling life, perhaps we would not be on the brink of disaster as we are now.”

Touché.

Aladdin's Briefcase. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. Size variable

Flying Scooter. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. Size variable

Sim Sim Cooker. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. Size variable

Media Toaster. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. 42in x 45in x 9in

New World Maker. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. Size variable

Cricket Auto. Resin and recycled cotton fiber. Size variable

The Open Frame: A Film on S G Vasudev

By Vishal Tondon

The Nandan exhibition hall at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, was the venue for the screening of the film ‘The Open Frame’ on the 29^th of August 2011. This film tracks the artistic and personal journey of the veteran artist S G Vasudev.

The film is directed by Chetan Shah, who has the distinction of having been an assistant director on the film ‘A Passage to India’ that was based on the eponymous novel written by the canonical author E M Forster.

‘The Open Frame’ also boasts of having Navroze Contractor as its cinematographer. Navroze is an accomplished and well regarded film maker in his own right. Just the evening prior to the screening of ‘The Open Frame’, we had the pleasure of watching a film directed by Navroze. On view the previous evening at the Indira Gandhi Centre for National Integration, Santiniketan, was the documentary called ‘Jharu Katha’ directed by Navroze Contractor. I shall give more details of this screening later.

Coming back to the film ‘The Open Frame’, special mention needs to be made of the smooth narrative that was a result of the perfect collaboration between the director, the artist-subject and the cinematographer. The film itself was as painterly as the canvases of S G Vasudev.

‘The Open Frame’ exposed us to S G Vasudev’s formative years during the early 1960’s, and his involvement with the Cholamandal Artists’ Village at Tamilnadu. The artists’ village was the answer to a dire need; a space where artists could interact with each other, and through the involvement of the local artisans come up with the crafts products that could help sustain the community. It is also with regard to this background of indigenism that we must view and assess S G Vasudev’s work.

The narrative of the film seamlessly incorporates inputs by art historians like Geeta Doctor, colleagues like Amit Ambalal, contemporaries from theatre like Girish Karnad and Arundhati Nag, the artist’s journalist wife Ammu Joseph and gallerists like Geeta Mehra.

The film carried insights into the artist's work, the Madras Art Movement, and the Cholamandal Artists' Village by art historians like Ashrafi Bhagat and Sadanand Menon too. Sadanand Menon has earlier written the text for a book, titled 'Past Forward', on S G Vasudev's work.

The film also threw light on S G Vasudev’s contribution to the growth of the arts community in Bangalore by being a major inspirational force behind the setting up of the Department of Visual Arts at the Bangalore University. His endeavors have also helped nurture - through the assistance provided by the Arnawaz Vasudev Charities - young artists like Shantamani, N S Harsha and Ravi Kashi amongst others.

At the end of the film screening, there was an open session where the students of Kala Bhavan interacted with the artist, the film maker and the cinematographer, and were able to elicit insightful comments from them. 

The DVD of the film 'The Open Frame' will include a separate disc with footage arranged around discussions on various subjects, such as the concept and practice of the Cholamandal Artists' Village, the debate around art and craft etc.

Workshop on Curating Visual Culture, Kochi, Feb 2011

By Vishal Tondon

Recognizing the dire need for curatorial studies in India, the Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA), Vadodara, with Prof. Shivaji K  Panikkar and Santhosh Sadanandan at the helm, have conceptualized a traveling workshop series addressing curatorial practice. The workshop is an initiative of India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bangalore, and is funded by the Jamsetji Tata Trust.

The first of this series of workshops was held at Vadodara last year. The second workshop, with the thematic focus ‘Curating Visual Culture: The Questions of Region, Gender and Sexuality’, was held at the RLV college of Music and Fine Arts at Kochi this year between 7-12 February. I too was accepted as a participant in the Kochi workshop, and the seminar was a great learning experience for me.

The resource persons were from diverse but interrelated fields like art history, curating, gender studies, contemporary Indian History and activism. Professor MSS Pandian, who teaches Contemporary Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, enlightened us on issues related to the shifting relationship between nation and region, while Professor Nivedita Menon – again from JNU, and who has worked extensively on gender, feminism and sexualities – gave a very fascinating account on ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as biological and cultural constructs. Her presentation was dotted with many amusing anecdotes on how science, literature and society try to build the rigid binary construct of gender. Sunil Gupta, an artist, curator, writer and cultural activist, spoke on his experiences with the curating of an exhibition on photography and LGBT issues. Raimi Gbadamosi, an artist, writer and curator, made a presentation on his project, ‘The Republic’, which negotiates the meeting of race, power, language and social constructions. Sunil and Raimi have both, in their own separate ways, consistently through their work tried to combat the cabal of sexual, gender and racial discrimination. Rakhee Balaraman, who is currently Visiting Faculty at JNU, and who is presently working on a book titled ‘Twentieth-Century Indian Art’, explored through her curatorial concept how economic and physical limitations of space and women’s creativity function within an age of globalism and particularly within a South Asian context. Also, artist and curator Bose Krishnamachari made a presentation on aspects of his major curatorial venture called ‘Double Enders.’        

The participants formed an exciting cluster, as there were young curators and art lecturers sharing space with students. We were each asked to conceptualize a curatorial project and make a presentation on this. Surya Singh’s very interesting concept signified the importance of kitsch, found objects and communication technology in contemporary art practice. Akansha Rastogi, a fiery, young enthusiast, came up with the idea of archiving the private interior spaces of artistic production that is the artists’ studio! Sumesh Sharma’s grave and significant concept wished to work through the way proletarian aesthetics were reflected in contemporary art from Kerala. Gopika Jadeja spoke on the very fascinating pamphlet project of the ‘Five Issues Performance-Publishing Interface’ that she and her team have been working on. This interface explores the faultlines of region, gender, place and identity in India and elsewhere. Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, another young and enthusiastic curator, came up with a concept that explored how one could possibly adopt diverse spatial strategies of display within the gallery space. Jayashree Venkatadurai, through explorations of non-Hindu pasts of Tamil Nadu – and specifically Jain monuments – threw light on the plural sources of Tamil cultural practices. Nuria Querol presented a very informative paper on the impact of globalization on Indian curatorial practices. A very inspiring presentation by Kavitha Balakrishnan raised an inquiry into what are the difficulties in doing justice to the presentation of ‘an erotic being’ in a gallery space which is sacralised by ideologies. My own curatorial concept brought together works that expounded on the performative aspects of gender. Finally, Georgina Maddox, through a very spirited presentation, spoke on aspects of the queer gaze. 

  

On the last day, the workshop wound up with the viewing of an electrifying package of ‘Queer’ videos curated by Georgina Maddox, and with a valedictory session by Prof. Shivaji Panikkar and Santhosh Sadanandan.