Footwork of Fantasy

Mumbai, for last ten years, has seen an emergence of alternative, subversive trends in art that enable and empower an artist to operate as a cultural practitioner of critical theory. Tushar Joag is not only a ‘product’ of this period, but also one of its many architects. Keeping aside his credentials as sculptor and installation artist, he switched his energies to conceive study-circles for familiarizing art-students with the socio-political realities and sometimes even to generate political action. Many artists would still know him as the man who, with his colleagues at the Open Circle, facilitated the visual art component at World Social Forum IV, Mumbai. Thus, Tushar typifies an artist who lives beyond the white cube of an art gallery.
Tushar’s recent show, “Willing Suspension” (at Gallery Chemould, August 5-26), marked his comeback to the white walls!
Alongwith a website representation of his larger project, the show had three kinds of works with different levels of intention : two canvases that pictured what a Mumbai local train is, with an instructional diagram of the footwork one has to make for a clever entry into a crowded train, a video (monoscreen) that explored the suburban rail traffic as a battleground of violence and peace in the city, and a sculptural installation that allured with fantasy-like innovations to board and commute on a train’s outer walls .

While the canvas and even the video were highly based on observed reality, the sculptural installation was an artist’s contribution. At once, it had overt ‘modernistic’ intentions to make human life easier, and post-modern subversive approach to what is being perceived as a ‘way of life’ …many a ‘Mubaiya public’ travel on the train’s outer walls with one foot on the window, but with a constant danger of life. Tushar’s attempt, through his deemed ‘devices’, was to eliminate that danger. Yet, by the very fact that this device is impractical and only a fantasy, Tushar had made his point. Instead of constructing some devices for a better world, he is into deconstruction of the reality that exists.

A more localized (no pun intended on the ‘local’ trains) observation of these works would help us to see the artist as a commuter himself, fighting and inescapable battle with a situation that his country, his city and his disposition as a suburban man. Where the agenda is to board a train and make oneself comfortable while in a train. What an accomplishment it is when MOST of the commuters meet this agenda, win the battle that they are forced to fight? Yes they do, even without the knowledge of their victory. Tushar’s work, then, has the value of artistic intervention that celebrates this unclaimed victory.

For the global audience that Tushar by now is familiar with, the work might infuse some insights in a local (pun sustained, not overruled!) life-situation. A fantasy as it may seem from a distance, a distance that we normally keep from the gallery walls, has already had entered the domain of reality through a clever footwork. The viewer no longer remains a distanced witness to what is shown. S/he is bound to be empowered to observe the ‘everyday’ of Mumbai closely.

- Abhijeet Tamhane, Mumbai, August, 2005

Old Maps for new mediations

What if a classic image, hitherto upheld as sublime, come to you as a mediated reality? Sachin Karne's recent works ^* do that, and open a pandora's box of questions. Questions about us, our world. The images Sachin chose to work upon, as a part of his 'Multiple' project, are Rembrandt's Nightwatch and Padmapani Bodhisattwa from Ajanta.

Art-/historical linkages

The reasons for choosing these images has a personal trajectory, of the experience Sachin had with two different cultures, in Netherlands and India. The images have been apparently become cultural emblems ,national tresures for the respective countries . Both images are potent with rasa : Shant Bodisattwa and Adbhuta Nightwath. While there might be hundred reasons to uphold their sublimity, Sachin Karne confronts these great works of art in atleast three ways :

1. using them as Multiples, a term synonymous with Andy Warhol, thereby subscribing to the anti-art and pop-art strands,
2. using them as backdrops for rather mundane images, and
3. yet rendering each of the multiple with hands, thereby bowing so much to the feudal dictates of 'love for art', that the exaggerated deference would mean discontent and dissent.

Mapping the (dis) content

Sachin has grown as an artist in Gujarat, the state which has made heady headlines in the recent past and thus has attained the dubious distinction of being a marvel of mediated realitiy .(The most recent 'reality' is that, Narendra Modi is now looked ONLY as a democratically-elected, constitutional head of a state!) However,
Sachin as artist-citizen seems to distance himself from the incoherent media headlines, to take a different vantage position that enables to think wider and deeper. In his process as a visual articulator, Sachin finds signifiers for introspection.
It is, then, a process of internalization of otherwise neutral signifiers, and disengagement of the already loaded ones. The warplanes sharing the skies with doves, soldiers posing for a photograph in a distant continent from their homes or the jubilant Babri demolition, the lotus flowers and a bowl of flames that override the lotus held by the lotus-handed Padmapani… do all of Sachin's images have an defined political context? Not so with the boy standing on a vertically dislocated springboard, circles of sex act, the self-portrait in a jigsaw with Warlol , a diver who jumps from one oblivion to another, children playing day-to-day games... are examples of 'non-loaded' signifiers who attain their roles only because the artist-protagonist wants them here.

While many artists have worked in the found/ searched images mode and celebrate/question the gamut of mediated reality, Sachin's aesthetic choices find a leverage with the larger world of unproved mediations and perceived realities. He would choose to render the flames in bowl in a sensual way, but the image of bound woman that makes a conceptual backdrop for the bowl may look poster-like. In showing us the museum object of a Buddha, Sachin would choose to underline the object, its metallic existence. The photographs, in his renderings, would conform to the Magritte- Foucault cannon of the 'depicted' pipe.

What happens, then to the 'Multiple' mediations of Nightwatch and Padmapani Bodhisattwa ? They becomne maps, perhaps! Conceptual maps for the distant experience Iraq in Europe, and for the Gujrat, maybe… or simply, maps where the culturally loaded-offloaded-unloaded images find a place for themselves.

Beyond Painting

Sachin Karnes videos, perhaps of the first works he did as moving images, had retained the overall aesthetic qualities of his paintings.Use of two to three colours being the foremost of visual quality, apart from the bubbles that find place in his works. While "Mirror image - prime minister's dream project' was a direct blow on the political will that would undertake massive road-building exercise
but let the social infrastructure burn, the ' Monolithic Truth Serum Test' featured Sachin himself, more than the presence of a self-portrait within a painting. Here, the so-called apolitical, disinterested and unengaged social roles of an artist are challenged by bringing the artist himself as a suspect, apparently in one of the blazing incidents. Both the video works were done at a camp organized by ARTunderground.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane, Wed, 23 Mar 2005.

^*Sachin Karne's recent suite of acrylic paintings on canvas was on display at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 19th March to 4th April, 2005. The Videos were also projected at the show.

The POSTER revisited

Jitish Kallat's new work, after much globe-trotting, was here again with Gallery Chemould, Mumbai this February. And for the more informed, it reminded of his no-nonsense ability as a 'poster' maker!
The poster, a commonplace visual in the bollywood city of Mumbai, has always been and invitation for Jitish.He has devised means to rethink the poster as an evocative visual than a direct communication. The work, six tall canvases, had colours that looked rather funky, somewhat Warholian, and one clear image : that of a street urchin. They bear the stamp of the street. Sadak Chhaap, as an NGO used to
call them. The works have a presence of additional signifiers : a scream in all the works, for example, but the street urchin becomes monumenatised in all these canvases.
For Jitish, who 'arrived' in the field (read : market) seven years ago with autobiographical, memory-intense works, the colours and corrosion of a poster were equally important. His work took off from the physical corrosion in paint to the computerized defacement of the image, and thus they had something abstract about them. Although he used all the advantages that a photorealist exploits, Jitish's
definite diversion from photorealism was visible in his photocopy transfers. Some artists from Mumbai were already using the photocopy transfer technique while Jitish mastered it. Then came the computer and its image-editing softwares, that helped Jitish try a different language of corrosion. Now on, the physical tampering with layers of paint was replaced by well-executed contours of a digitally corroded image. The abstract remained with him, while he was getting the images executed (may just by) projecting them onto the canvas.
With the scale of demand-supply ratio Jitish handles, his ouvre cannot now ignore the reproductive part. The newness, then, lies not with how he renders the image or how his canvases look different from the just-shown ones, but with what images he shows and why. The why aspect makes him contemporary.
Jitish knows this. He would talk about the Ramnami sect and his long conversations/emails with a (US-based) scholar who researched the sect. The ploy for self-defence, insists Jitish, finds its place on the skin. The urchins, he would reveal, have the defence mechanisms in their body language and, as if, under their skins. The urchins, to him, are the embodiment of chameleon spirit of the megapolis!
Appropriation of a distant research, tactical and critical ways to swallow it and apply to one's practice and revelations of reality that might not sound inductive. Jitish's argument is that post-NGO social observer. It is not community-specific, nor self-rationalising. Be it Malunde of South Africa or the Sadak Chhaps of Mumbai/Delhi, be they unemployed youth of Brazil, Botswana or Bihar, Jitish processes his data vis-a-vis the rarely asked questions, and surpasses the survey
mode to attain an endoscopic understanding.
The multiple images in his earlier works have lessened over time, and Jitish has perhaps learnt the pointedness of an Internet poster : one who posts on a public/group members' message-board on the web. The poster on the web has his/her defined signature and style. Yet, s/he would try and speak a language that might interest others, will invite response and, above all, will employ virtual communication to explore a reality out there, beyond virtual!

-- abhijeet tamhane.

Sanjeev Sonpimpare : Skeptics

Sanjeev Sonpimpare's painting, Chakki, was different from other works in his show, Skeptics
Sanjeev Sonpimpare's paintings were exhibited at Jehangir Art Gallery last December. The body of works had a strong presence of a virtual window that emerged out of a gradation of black to white tones.
Sanjeev employed this as an image itself, as if to symbolize victory of the computer over human hand, and then tried to defy it, by painting it himself. 'Something had to pass through the window', says Sanjeev, who chose the passing images. It began with a magazine cover, a reworked Mughal miniature painting, and went on to many other images. Individuals and styles that are said to have shaped the taste
of art-public in their respective times, Ravi Varma and Manjit Bawa, were under Sanjeev's gaze. The gaze of a painter who wants to outgrow the Mumbai- 1990s scene that shaped his generation. The same gaze comes upon sympathetically towards images that are closer to middle-class reality and challenges. The images that passed through those virtual windows had a curious connection with money/power and the lack of it. The Sceptics, as Sanjeev called the series, must have been an attempt for Sanjeev to reconcile his own aesthetic preference for working with surfaces, treating the image to be rendered in different ways, and his philosophical urge to ponder on life that he has observed and is living. The virtual that fragments the real into manageable pieces. However, the humour was overshadowed by the
quassi-surrealist looks.
Sanjeev's renderings looked somewhat loud. Did they have to be so, to amplify the presence of a human hand? Or was it because of the overpowering presence of tonal gradation in many of the paintings?
Sanjeev's recent works and his focus on life prove that Sceptics had a cathartic value for the painter himself.
- Abhijeet Tamhane

FILL : RELEASE Navjot's Videos

FILL : RELEASE

Navjot's activity in producing the two video works : Mumbai Meri Jaan (2004) and Lacuna in Testimony (2003), has been that of an artist and a resourceperson. The four-part and three-part works shown at different venues including Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai in November and have been traveling in Gujarat, have a finger- pointing at the parochial, right-wing ideologies that shun minorities. The finger is Novjot's; while the hands that have worked toward it are many.

For an artist who has been organizing people for the attainment of work(s) of art, these two videos seem an arrived effort. The (upto) 30-feet projections were technically almost flawless. What lets questions open is the artist's conceptual process that the work stands evidence to. Navjot's conceptual thrust has been vastly on sourcing of the images (still or moving, stocked or fresh) and relevant texts.
This sourcing process seems to have been preferred over formal conceptualization that guides and shapes the sourced data. For a viewer who does not cherish the importance of the sourcing process, the data looks incidental. The choice left, is to make the data communicate, loosing some aesthetic accent.

Yet, The four-part video work, Mumbai Meri Jaan (2004), can be read as a critical text pertaining the notions of belonging and uprootedness, innocence and street-smartness, shows the wicked ways of a megapolis to internalize its subaltern. There are many approaches open for a reader, and the best one is of a pre-bollywood Hindi film type narrative of a street urchin. For a reader aesthetically more informed, there are transitions of colour that make their own trajectories through the presented data.

The sourcing- data- presentation- formal choice paradigm becomes oblique in Lacuna in Testimony. The aesthetic- communicative values are trickier. Hierarchy of sourcing over formal choice is out and open, yet the visual treatment is subtle. Except for the end: the sea that embeds images from holocaust through Gujarat-2002 undergoes a colour transition from the natural tones to blood red.

What happens to the time spent with the two videos? While the journey through Mumbai's nitty-gritty is restless, the sea of violence is almost cathartic and abreactive. While the first fills images, the second releases them.

- abhijeet tamhane