Center for Buddhist Studies – Special Lecture Series, Visva-Bharati

- Vishal Tondon

The Center for Buddhist Studies (CBS), in collaboration with the Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati University conducted a Special Lecture Series on Buddhist Art and Architecture between the 23^rd and 27^th of February 2012. The emphasis was on an interdisciplinary approach that looked at the material at the interface of culture, art history and Buddhist texts.

The sessions were held at Havell Hall in Kala Bhavan. The choice of this venue is significant as the walls of Havell Hall are home to some of the best copies of Ajanta and Bagh paintings. The murals in Havell Hall were painted under the guidance and expertise of none other than the great master Nandalal Bose.

To present the lectures were invited Dr Heinrich Poell of Universitat Graz und Wien, Austria and Prof Dr Monica Zin of Freie Universitat, Berlin.

Dr Poell gave a series of extensive lectures over five days on the depiction of Buddha’s life in India and a few other Asian and South-East Asian countries. His project is a tour de force of the development of iconography and anthropomorphism in Buddhist art, and how this visual material reflects on the socio-economic and cultural conditions specific to their times in India and abroad. On day one of the lectures, he gave an overview of the visual material and proposed his thesis – which he would support with specific material over the next four days – on the choice of subject matter at each site of Buddhist activity. On day two, Dr Poell dealt with Bharut, Sanchi and Gandhara Buddhist art in detail. On day three, he elaborated on Amaravati, Kushan and Gupta Buddhist art. On day four, he gave us a tour of materials from later Buddhist periods from Pala in Eastern India, Indonesian and Burmese Buddhist art. Finally, on day five, he dealt with Nepal, Ladakh and Tibet, after which he summed up his thesis. 

The lecture sessions by Dr Heinrich Poell were chaired by Prof Dr Andrea Loseries, Director, CBS, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

On the 25^th of February, Prof Zin gave a very interesting and comprehensive presentation, ‘The Paintings of Ajanta – A New Interpretation.’ She opened up the subject of interpreting and reading the immensely sophisticated and complex art of Ajanta and demonstrated that an objective and intertextual approach would go a long way in expanding this highly specialized area of study. She encouraged more field work; her exhaustive material and her layouts of the Ajanta paintings are testimony to her own labors in this direction. 

The session of Prof Zin was chaired by Prof R Siva Kumar of the Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavana.

The very instructive ‘CBS – Special Lecture Series 2011-2012’ ended on the 27^th of February with a vote of thanks by Prof Loseries.    

 A lecture by Dr Heinrich Poll

Lecture by Prof Dr Monika Zin

Curating Queer Culture: Negotiating Opposed Sensibilities and Goals

- Vishal Tondon

Presentation done at the Workshop on Curating Visual Culture, organized by ACUA, IFA and Jamshetji Tata Trust. Jammu University, February 2012

I recently read the article “Culture Wars: Race and Queer Art” by Sunil Gupta. A very interesting article, it brings two important issues to the fore: of superimposed identities, where identities of color and race will have power over negotiation for gay rights and for the possibilities of a gay sensibility in the arts. So, we see that the black gay sensibility in the arts would be different from the white gay sensibility.

I would like to reflect on how the issues mentioned in this article are applicable in the Indian context.

The article speaks of conferences on ‘gay sensibility in the arts’ coinciding with the very influential Black Arts Movement. In the context of Indian gay practitioners of the plastic arts, the politics of representation hasn’t really taken the form of a movement where groups of artists form affiliations or collectives in a bid to tackle class or race issues. Until the 1990’s, it was only through their individual efforts that artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Jehangir Jani had taken into consideration class and caste issues consistently while tackling homosexuality.

Coming back to the article…

The article begins with a review by Scott Watson on the movie Pulp Fiction. Watson describes the movie as “vilely homophobic”. The two male protagonists in the movie, the Bruce Willis character and the crime boss, enemies at first, are able to come to a truce after the Bruce Willis character rescues the crime boss from being raped by a couple of homosexual and S&M inclined rapists. The review says, “Murdering queers and the satisfaction it brings is the ground on which the characters establish their truce.”

 Pulp Fiction (1994)

This is a queer reading of the movie. This reading may not be universally accepted. Yes, the protagonists – the Bruce Willis character and the crime boss – in the movie might have been homophobic, but that need not imply the movie was ‘vilely homophobic’ too. In the true spirit of pulp fiction, two characters that don’t get along are brought together in times of adversity; does it matter that the one rescued from rape was a man and not a woman? So, the mortification of the queer reader clearly owes to a kind of a gay sensibility. Should it not be possible for an artist/critic/viewer to look at artworks from the vantage point of multiple gazes? Artworks are layered and the reading of a movie like Pulp Fiction solely from the view of a monolithic gay male gaze would come in the way of a full appreciation of the movie.

The review further goes on to establish that sex with a man without his consent might not be so awful after all. The review says, “This awful torture is, as I’ve already revealed, a little anal penetration. A scene more or less like a Tom of Finland drawing – except for the withdrawal of the passive actor’s consent.”

In an instance of over-reading into the text of the movie, the review gives a Freudian twist to the relationship between the two male protagonists. The S&M sadists “are surrogates to act out the suppressed passion the men have for each other (which has led them to want to kill each other) and their murder of the queers is a kind of rite by which they take the passage back from the dark chamber where they’ve made love to the world of light and men.”

Clearly, the political aim of this review is to push the gay cause. But the movie Pulp Fiction could be read variously as homoerotic or homophobic. Clearly, reception of a work of art is a matter of sensibilities.

The article also speaks of a ‘gay sensibility in the arts’ in relation to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe’s muscular male models were sometimes engaged in sexual activity or posed with sadomasochistic props such as leather and chains. So here we have one suggestion as to what the gay sensibility would entail. Mapplethorpe’s clear, unflinching style challenged viewers to confront this imagery. Clearly the average gallery hoppers – a large chunk of whom were not yet sensitized to gay life in everyday situations – was not prepared to receive such representations. Moreover, one saw in his work a tension between pornography and art. A posthumous retrospective exhibition of his work in 1990, funded partly by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stirred a debate about government subsidies of "obscene" art and provoked Congress to enact restrictions on future NEA grants. 

 A photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Also, what held my attention in the article was that minority groups, given an atmosphere to work, will vie with each other under the twin pressures of the politics of representation and opposed sensibilities. Moreover, as has been explicitly stated in theories related to Sublatern Studies, one minority group – lesbian or gay in the context of our discussion – cannot stand in for another. Each minority group will have its own problems and politics and in the long run each will have to lay a claim to its own kind of transcendence.

The process of curating queer cultural fests would require beginning with the negotiating of problems from within the queer community. It would be naïve to assume that artists would cooperate on the basis of their shared empathy for one another’s sexual orientation alone. Superimposed identities and hybridizations may caste a veil between micro-communities within the larger queer community, and this leads to opposed sensibilities.

In October 2003, Humjinsi, a lesbian and bisexual women’s group organized Larzish, India’s first International Film Festival of Sexualities and Gender Pluralities. Everything that had any potentiality for activism was included in the list of themes and concerns that would be addressed; youth, child sexuality, women’s issues, sex workers’ rights, intersex recognition, campy takes on mainstream media, autobiographical sketches of transgender and transsexuals, LGBT fiction, and along with all this, masculinity and anti-globalization resistance too. Then how come, Vishwas Kulkarni, one of the participants who had submitted his short film for screening, came to accuse the Larzish team of gender discrimination?

Four years later, in the 2007 Art India issue on Censorship, Vishwas accused that his short, ‘Main Shayar Badnaam’, had been censored out of the festival ‘for its explicit content.’ Apparently, sensibilities were at clash here. It is possible that Larzish had reconsidered some of its policies; they had all the right to do so. It was not the end of the world for Vishwas either. He went along with his badnaam shayar to other parties, where they were welcomed. But what this episode foreground is very important. The process of transcending their social condition is not the same for the lesbian and the gay male community. Each one does it at their own pace, in their own ways, with consideration to the hurdles they may have to surmount. 

Main Shayar Badnaam (2003) 

Vishwas accused the lesbians of censorship at a time when the word “censorship” had assumed exceptional notoriety and the word “censor” had almost come to be used as a slur. We are talking about the outfall of the May 9^th incident at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda. The whole country was united in its outrage against violent acts of censorship. Vishwas chose to address the rejection of his film in a similar context of censorship.

In the next issue of Art India, Tejal Shah and Natasha Mendonca, co-founders and curators of the Larzish Film Festival, presented their position and the reasons behind the exclusion of ‘Main Shayar Badnaam.’ They clarified that they were not opposed to the content of the film or it’s ‘explicitness.’ On the contrary, they asserted that the closing section of the festival would have discussed pornography and queer desire, if things had gone well for the festival. The curators state, “We realized that while it used found pornography, ‘Main Shayar Badnaam’ did not conceptually or politically fit into the pornography section.” Moreover, the Larzish team claimed that they had to call off the entire pornography package; given the political situation then, they apparently could not easily show or have healthy and safe debates around pornography. 

In his article, Vishwas’s description of the lesbian as “An Amazonian woman – macho and managerial…”, even though used in good humor I would presume, has an undercurrent of stereotyping. To this, the curators at Larzish responded by saying, “Kulkarni’s article is problematic because of its antagonism towards lesbians and feminists. Unfortunately, his tone is symptomatic of the animosity that often prevails between political queers and non-politicized homosexuals. In particular, gay men fail to question their male privileges and internalized patriarchal attitudes, despite their minority status as homosexuals.” 

We see opposed sensibilities and goals between the two parties here. Also, it becomes apparent – as I have already mentioned earlier – that the process of transcending their social condition is not the same for the lesbian and the gay male community.

This brings us to the question of what kind of gay sensibility in movies are we talking about in the Indian context? Will it be different for mainstream screenings like at Larzish and Kashish, as from semi-private screenings enjoyed by social networking groups like GayBombay? This can only be resolved once the war against the censorship of pornography has yielded result. But there is also the social aspect to the development of the gay sensibility that is not homogeneous right now. Many from the gay community, especially youngsters, are seen to superimpose the heterosexual marital structure on gay relationships. The idea is to push their homosexual relationship in a least provocative manner, and to make it appear as stable and gracious. On the other hand, a high regard for sadomasochistic activities in the gay male community – probably owing to the conception that gay relationships are essentially embattled – finds manifestation in a lot of gay art, and its expression in cultural spaces makes a large chunk of the community queasy. If cultural festivals are to make any claims to social responsibility, then curating will have to take in consideration opposed sensibilities.    

 Film screenings at social networking groups like GayBombay          

Sensibilities came to a clash once again on the third day of screening during the Siddhartha Gautam Film Festival in Kolkata in March 2010. Here I speak of sensibility in terms of receptivity. Jhuma Basak, a mental health professional, was invited to the podium to comment on the movie “Assume Nothing” which had been screened just then. “Assume Nothing”, directed by Kirsty MacDonald, brought forward the concept of ‘performing bodies’ as compared to that of ‘biological bodies.’ So when Jhuma Basak spoke on how gender is performed, and to the mortification of the all-gay audience that even homosexuality is performed rather than purely biological, there was uproar. A larger portion of the audience, mainly students and working class men, found the proposition all the more objectionable because in their minds and their social circles, they had conveniently ascribed their homosexuality to biology; something beyond their control. The speaker found it an uphill task to have her point arrive home.

 Assume Nothing. A film by Kirsty MacDonald

On a different note, when it comes to the question of sensibility, some panelists on the selection committees of major Indian LGBT film festivals have lamented the quality of production as well as narration in the Indian entries.

That brings us to the sensibility of the practitioners themselves. The sensibility that determines a queer aesthetic. What is the basis for a presumed queer aesthetic? Is it just shared empathy for one another’s ‘queer’ sexual orientation? Or would the queer aesthetic allow plurality of styles so as to be able to express different cultures, traditions and socio-economic backgrounds?   

Do lesbian and gay male artists, or for that matter, even gay male artists amongst themselves, subscribe to a common gay sensibility?

The Larzish episode is an indicator that lesbian and the gay male communities would like to negotiate the implications of the term ‘gay sensibility’ on their own terms, and according to the dynamics of their own social conditions.

Lesbian and gay male artists are averse to function solely under the constraints of a shared ‘Queer’ identity. They might not like to be party to the strategic essentialism garbed as identity politics, as they are well aware that such positioning aligns them with hegemonic discourses that aim to achieve collective goals.

It is a paradox. While identity politics is the fountainhead of queer art practice, the practitioners might be queasy about being clubbed together solely on the basis of their sexuality or a forced common gay sensibility. Any judicious curating of queer culture would thus have to negotiate these opposed sensibilities and goals.  

MFA Final Year Display at Kala Bhavana; Negotiating Theory and Practice

- Vishal Tondon

This report was published in Art Etc magazine, Vol 3, No. 1, 2011

The final display, commonly known as submission, of the Masters Degree students at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, this year was held between the 20^th and 22^nd May. The diverse art works on show were in keeping with the proposal of a holistic structure to the practice of art as put forward by Nandalal Bose – the man who shaped the institution of Kala Bhavan. It was heartening to see attempts at experimentation and thinking out of the box; a very positive attitude that art students have begun to demonstrate at a young age, thanks to the internet and the culture of hopping into other art institutions and galleries for checking out art trends. 

 A display of Paintings by Sudipta Das

Kala Bhavan is a unique place to learn art; apart from the usual majors like painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and mural making, Kala Bhavan also provides a course in textile design. We at Kala Bhavan are proud of the fact that some of our students form the design department went on to join higher courses at NID and other premier design institutes after graduating from here. 

The final year submissions in art colleges have become an acid test. Students compete with each other to make the best presentation. With the occasional buyer walking in to take a look at the exhibits, it is natural that the students would put their best foot forward, especially as a preparation to face the world outside. 

The original and inspired efforts of some of the students were well received in their display. Distinctive were the works of Rameez Waheed Bhat from the Department of Painting who refuses to subscribe to trends. Through his art, Rameez tackles issues of alienation felt by the common Kashmiri and his attempts at self-determination. Also unique were the works of Josmartin LX. His art refuses to be slotted into categories. His search is phenomenological and his work introspective. “I am not searching for an answer,” he says. “I am the answer.” For him, the process of making the art work is everything. As for Sudhir Kamal of the Sculpture Department, one can only applaud his refined sensibility and his sense of aesthetics. Sudhir begins conceptualizing his work using elements from memories of objects from back home in Kashmir, like the shikara (a lake boat), and then transforming these completely by fusing them with objects of everyday use; what we finally get is a dialectic between memories and the objective world we inhabit in our present.   

  'I Am Not That' by Rameez Waheed Bhat

One exhilarating observation this year was about how some of the young and budding artists were able to negotiate theory and practice. An accusation has often made against the current art making scenario in colleges – not only at Kala Bhavan but also at other colleges outside of Santiniketan – of the deepening schism between theory and practice. With the culture of reading on the wane, art students are content with training themselves by looking at a spate of visuals, without going into the background or the logic of the formalistic or conceptual frameworks behind the art they see in books or in the art market. The result is a direct appropriation of form, on to which a weak concept is superfluously grafted, usually as an afterthought. 

But some of the students were able to successfully counter such an accusation. One would have to give credit to them; their very interesting display works were able to bridge the yawning gap between theory and practice. Engaging were the very private and introspective drawings of Caroline Dietzi. Her works are intimate. She says, “My practice of drawing can be seen as a meditative approach, whereas my photography is a compulsive act.” Suppayaluk Kongpech from the Department of Design also had strong conceptual frameworks in mind for her constructions out of appliqué. Kamlesh Pradhan of the Sculpture Department has consistently been working on the theme of human trafficking, and while one might say that his work is still in process, there was evident in his display a strong conceptual bent of mind. Shaik Azghar Ali’s work, evocative and macabre at the same time, was a strong comment on social anarchy and communalism. He introspects into the language of violence, and the vocabulary of this language extends into his work.   

  A work by Suppayaluk Kongpech of the Design Department

While assiduousness with technical finesse is expected and desirable, one soon realizes that the involvement in art making often begins and ends with an obsession with technical details, while content and comment are at times neglected. The choice of themes also sometimes becomes predictable; capitalism, globalization, demerits of the education system, industrial pollution, ecological destruction, and as one of the concept notes says, ‘rotten politics’. To save the viewer from disinterest, some of the young artists like Amal, Pankaj Borkar and Kumiko Tanaka came up with remarkable and challenging works. The humorous works of Amal from the Department of Art History came as a respite; his work was political without being judgmental or trite. Amal has done his dissertation on the history of cartooning in India; he is interested in the art of caricature and cartoons. We know the affiliation cartooning has with politics, and Amal’s approach to political comment is fresh and witty. Pankaj’s very futuristic-looking graphics were the result of his obsession with the structures and dynamics of cities. He is currently toying around with the theme of ‘the necropolis’ (an overworked, overcrowded, and decaying city). One very captivating observation he made in his concept note is, “I always wonder that these concrete, man made objects stay in the world long after the people who made them are gone.” Kumiko Tanaka, on her part, came up with a suite of sculptures called ‘The Iron Line’; the delicate, sinewy sculptures made out of long iron rods that stood out against a pristine, white background were a visual delight.      

 Sculptures by Sudhir Kamal

Kala Bhavan has often been accused of carrying the “baggage of heritage”. One can safely say that this opinion is not really valid anymore. The ‘baggage of heritage’, even when often evident in the artworks, may not be due to pedagogical imposition, or due to a lack of imagination. It might manifest itself as vestiges of the past, but only as a caricature of sentimentality for the bygone era. In fact, in the work of young artists like Nandita Karmakar, the past and the present collide to give amusing and entertaining results. Her installation was a little museum which, with wit and humour, reflected on how Rabindranath Tagore is represented by the Santiniketan tourist guides, souvenir shops and the Rabindrabhavan Museum. “Santiniketan is still Rabindranath Tagore,” she muses. “He is ever-present in the surroundings. The personality of Rabindranath Tagore becomes, through the auction of his image, larger than his ideology. But also of interest to me are the amusing stories related by tourist guides; they merge truth with fiction to heighten the aura of Santiniketan. That ensures good business. The memento figurines of Tagore have become a popular object. On the other hand, as you can see in the replica of ‘Udichi’ (the residence of Tagore) that I have created, Tagore is projected ideologically by the Visva Bharati authorities. This installation might be considered to be my homage to the two very good years I spent at Santiniketan.”      

To the credit of Kala Bhavan, interdisciplinarity in art practice is encouraged. There were some shining examples where some successful works were a result of throwing caution to the wind. Josmartin LX from the Department of Painting has made one permanent installation on the campus this year. Suppayaluk Kongpech too, with her strong concepts, was able to bridge the gap between art and design. In fact, her work proves that a strong foundation in a technical field can come to the aid of executing well what the artist has conceived and visualized. Also, this kind of work heralds a blurring of the line between ‘art’ and ‘design.’ 

Saroda Sagar’s suite of sculpture-installations, titled ‘Global Circus’, was impressive and his efforts were commendable. He says, “Each and every movement that the circus performers make is accompanied with a terrible risk. A minor failure may bring an obvious disaster. And every person in society is a performer in the global circus.” Sagar’s work is a comment on the flipside of globalization. Again, as is the case with Kamlesh Pradhan’s work, Sagar’s work is in the process of evolution, and it is hoped that very soon there will be a breakthrough in his vocabulary. Promising young students like Sagar, Kamlesh and Sudipta Das, who comment on themes like anti-globalization, anti-capitalism and anti-development, would do well to instill in their work the bite very young artists in Europe and US, whose work is derived from the tendencies of the Situationist International, infuse in their works . Young European artists like Ivan Argote and the ‘Be Yourself Movement’, with wit, dare and impeccable skill, work on similar political themes, although with a more well rounded understanding of the affairs they are addressing. 

While some of the works languished within the limitations of their medium, there were a few thrilling exceptions. Somnath Raha of the Department of Ceramics came up with some strong concepts and his works were imaginative and very political. So also Purna Chandra Sekhar Rao Reddy of the Department of Printmaking, whose large woodcuts are particularly inspiring. He often uses his self portrait in these images, and portrays the existential angst of man lost in a concretized and dehumanized world. Also, there is the pleasurable aspect of coming face to face with these larger than life woodcuts. The artist says, “The various textures and colors in my woodcuts reflect different moods and situations.”   

Kala Bhavan is unique in the setup it provides in terms of ample working space and some veteran educators from the field. With a few modifications in its pedagogical system, and by bridging the gap between theory and practice, one can make the most out of this set-up. The submissions by the students are a testimony to the fact that they are trying to achieve a professional quality in their works. It is hoped that while they align themselves with commercial galleries, they will also take academics seriously and try and make their works, under the guidance of their instructors, conceptually more strong.    

The final displays of the Masters Degree art students are getting to be a bigger affair by the year. A positive development is the exchange between art colleges, with students making it a point to visit other colleges to check out the works on display. 

Presentation has become the keyword. Swanky galleries propagate the idea of what art should and shouldn’t be, and how it should be presented. It is amusing to see that young and gullible art students sometimes come up with clones of work floating around in the art market; an observation also commented upon by the student Sudipto Mandal, through his very incisive and self-introspective neon-light installation work called ‘Imitation Dement; Sealed’. The students want to learn and hone their skills, but they are also eager to do well in the market. Glamour beckons in the form of gallery openings with glasses of wine tinkling and hors-d’oeuvre making the rounds. Some of the art students have been overheard murmuring to each other at such openings in Kolkata, “This is the kind of life I want to have!” We wish them the best; may all their aspirations come true!