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| The Tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka by Amrita Das |
Art making is no longer just
about paint and canvas or watercolours. It encompasses variety of media from
canvas to steel, glass and photographs to digital art, pottery, textiles and
jewellery. The whole gamut of human experience, invention and endeavour is a
medium of expression for the artists of this millennium.
This diversity may compound the
viewing process, but ideals of art keep the gaze affixed, generating greater
interest among the business community, than ever before. Today, art is a viable
instrument of investment. It no longer has much esoteric value, yet its
intangible, deviant voice is complex to decipher.
How does one look at works of art;
unravel their complexities? For me the question is not about art for art's sake but, about understanding art from the point of view of the human being that created it. Fundamentally, art making
is just another form of human expression. Then logically, understanding and
appreciating art is quite simply about recognizing the human state that creates
it. Can you truly divorce the human being from his art?
When I interviewed the artist
Satish Gujral, I went with a million questions and some reservations. There
were many incongruities in his work, which I could not reconcile. To understand
its diversity and contradictions, it is not art history that one turns to but
one’s humanity. It was in meeting the man, rather than the artist, that I found
some answers.
We see a young and emotional
Gujral in the brutal, anguished strokes that define his harrowing portraits of
Partition. He concedes the story of Partition was evocative of personal anguish;
that the horror and violence he portrayed, exorcised some of the disbelief and
horror of losing his hearing at the age of eight. The stark reality of this
enforced silence was “terrible” and subsequently shaped his whole being.
Painting became a means to substantiate his existence, for he says, “What proof
you have, when you cannot hear the sounds around you that you really exist?”
Gujral has worked in many media
from painting on canvas and paper
collages to some outstanding work in wood and
an architectural masterpiece, in The Belgian Embassy in New Delhi. Each phase of work is complete in
itself, not an adjunct to other media. This is disconcerting if looked at from
a narrow, orthodox perspective. However, seeing it from this artist’s viewpoint
of being inside a train in transition, where the constant changes allowed him
to ‘break’ the otherwise stifling silence; one realizes that we take much for
granted in our stereotyped expectations of artists and their creative
endeavour, losing track of the human being. How, when, where and why do we
separate the artist from the man?
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| Sandeep Singh |
Photography is no different to a
painting when it comes to seeing, for it reveals as much or as little as you
are able to see. Sandeep Singh’s photographs draw you into their silence. He achieves
this by the sheer starkness of imagery that precludes any kind of human life or
suggestion thereof, beyond what we can imagine or ferret from memory. You find
a large playing field with a football in the foreground, but not a player in
sight. There are empty benches and spaces made for human living but not a soul
around. It is positively eerie to see endless empty roads; a market devoid of
any human activity; or Terminal 4 at Heathrow, one of the busiest airports in
the world, with not a sign of human life. You think life on earth abandoned, and
ask why? Why has this neat, orderly,
technologically progressive world been abandoned by the beings that created it?
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| Sandeep Singh |
The photographer intentionally
seeks to separate man from his grounds, presenting modern design without its encumbrance.
It is his attempt to find silence in these urban-scapes, away from the “pandemonium
of post-modernity”. Singh believes that the basic premise of the post-modern
world, built upon questions deconstructing existing paradigms of myth and
reality; creates extreme anxiety in the human mind, causing us to run away from
ourselves, fragmenting the wholeness of being.
Lines, contours, geometric
patterns, vertical and horizontal lines, constitute the many elements that form
each picture. There is no singular point of interest but the scape is stark
nonetheless, because of the elimination of human forms. When I first saw the
images, it was like a breath of fresh air - a haven away from the crowded,
cacophonic spaces in India.
The more I looked, the more the stillness spoke through its depths, of a silence not always restful, but tormenting;
not empty but bursting to tell its story – your story and mine; for isn’t
reality a question of perception?
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| Satish Gujral with Alpana Gujral for Vistaar |
Art is inseparable from the man,
his emotions and quests. Satish Gujral further authenticates this when he says,
“artists are not men of ideas; they are men of feeling”. Their responses to the
world, governed by feelings of joy, inadequacy, pain and more is what they
express as they paint, sculpt or design. Gujral recently worked with his
daughter Alpana to design precious jewellery. Painter Thota Vaikuntam, joined
hands with Hyderabad
based designer Suhani Pittie to create unique necklaces - adornment for the
body, as opposed to walls; while yet another painter, Bose Krishnamachari
collaborated with Ezma to create a woven shawl masterpiece in Cashmere.
These and the work of many other artists were on display at Vistaar, a recent exhibition of
collaborative art held in New Delhi.
The emergence of new media, including
a renewed interest in the old, poses a challenge to painters of canvas. In
addition, Design and craft are gaining considerable significance as modes of
creative expression, making the ‘variety’ awesome and seductive but the painter
Mona Rai is not enamoured. She works stoically on the conventional canvas.
While her choice of materials does not necessarily define her as a paints’
painter, you cannot question her use of canvas or materials she employs on this.
Fabric plays an important role in Mona’s vocabulary, as do its processes and
techniques. She ‘dyes’ the fabric. She
sews it. She uses glitter, beads,
buttons, mirrors and threads, but works essentially as a painter and not as a Fiber Artist. 
She does not revel in the making
and use of fabric and its fibre, as the latter would, however she uses particularly, the same kind of materials to express specifically, her transition
from conventional painting on canvas towards this newer dimension. Rai is a
collector of the mundane and the useless. In her studio, she has accumulated a
variety of bottle caps, coins, cutters, pencils and discarded washers, along
with mud and sand as well as sequins, beads, glitter, powder colour and much
more. Although inspired by materials associated with the world of textiles, fabric
is merely the medium, not the essence of her expression. This allows a certain
irreverence in the handling of the material that makes the eventual ‘canvas’
visceral, violent and macabre, imbuing it with a sense of repulsion which is often what attracts Mona’s attention to
many aspects of life. |
| Madhubani Painting |
At the other end of the spectrum
of artistic expression, is Folk art. Largely identified with rural life, this
is both a personal and cultural statement of expression. Anyone in the
community is entitled to and able to create. It is an art form based on close
observations of Indian life, precluding any reference to Western Art. Within an
extraordinary mix of the ancient with the modern, folk artists record everyday
events of family and community life. Using colour and lyrical elements of line,
they express through a visual language that employs simplified form, ignoring
perspective and proportion.
Much written about, the work of
artist Madhavi Parekh cites her art as vital to reconciling the expressions of
rural India
with that of modern, urban India.
Being a first generation migrant to urbanization, enables her to draw upon
images, events, sounds and scapes etched in her memories of village life.
Untrained in the formal mode of Art education she uses a kind of naïve, ‘folk’
narrative to tell her stories.
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| Madhavi Parekh |
Modern, urban India, divested
of the romance of an ethnic identity is keen to reclaim its heritage by
iterating the importance of an infusion of folk elements in the Contemporary
Art vocabulary. However, for the rural artists, whose folk idiom is not merely a
memory, but a living discipline they naturally work within, categorizing their
work as ‘folk’ is derogatory. This dichotomy intrigues and questions the
positioning of our folk heritage vis-à-vis contemporary painting, because we do
not regard the work of these rural artists in the same way as that of the
modern-urbanized painter. Their brilliance seems eclipsed by the recognition
accorded to artists such as Parekh for an innovative stance afforded by her
changed environment. The fundamental reality of evaluating creativity in terms
of visibility and therefore recognition, poses questions about deemed
appropriate values. Yet the co-existence speaks of the vibrancy of a culture,
lending equal voice to the other
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| Manisha Bhattacharya |
Drawing from the depths of
tradition, beyond the realm of folk iconography are studio potters like Manisha
Bhattacharya, who transcend restrictive qualities of pottery. She does not
define herself merely as a potter, nor does she see herself as a designer; but
considers her work more in the
realm as that of an artist-craftsman.
Although not bound by pottery conventions even though her work does not
necessarily break free of them either, she is a self-confessed ‘addict’ of
working on the wheel. The vessel forms the basis of most of the objects she
creates, but the surface of each vessel is akin to canvas. Working primarily in
black and white, she manipulates the smoke on her pots, as a painter wields his
brush, using the Raku technique of glazing.
At one level, a potter is a
potter, so what sets Manisha Bhattacharya apart from the local kumhar? Is it her education? Is it her
world exposure? Is it the challenge of our times? Can Manisha and other
contemporary potters really provide an alternative to the local kumhar or has
the indigenous tradition of pottery making undergone such a sea of change that
we cannot turn the wheel to recast that mould?
Is it just the tradition of pottery
recast to deem a plate more than a mere platter to eat from, or is it an
evolution of the aesthetics of contemporary society? With the growing interest
in collaborative ventures between art and design and diversity in media of
expression, we seem to aspire towards a life that celebrates each dimension of
living, imbuing the functionality of the mundane with the expansiveness of the
spirit. Art in ancient India
was not a profession or an activity divorced from other spheres of living. It
was a way of life that nourished the man “corpus
anima et spiritus” The advent of
machines has challenged this concept, but the aesthetic ideals of contemporary
art seem to re-direct us towards this holistic tradition.
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| Manisha Bhattacharya |
