Re-humanising Inquiry

Riyas Komu’s recent show, titled Grass*, was a suite photographs. Komu might be better known for his paintings and for the assemblages and sculptures that he designed for some recent shows, but he is rather a strategic visual artist. Grass was a part of this strategic, interventionist oeuvre. Komu, this time, chose to exhibit photographs that featured faces of adolescent boys and men in their twenties who work at a garage in his neighbourhood. A discerning viewer would remember Komu’s assemblages with used motorcycle parts. These were the boys who actually welded the parts. No doubt there was a sense of comraderie that charted a relationship between the artist and the boys. It was visible on the faces, the way they looked at Komu’s camera, with confidence and some kind of friendly eloquence in their eyes.

True, the relationship here was not equal, to begin with. The artist was from a ‘high’ social and economic class whereas the boys, low. What Komu has done as an observer of life and its implications, and more importantly as a rebel against those implications, is to defy and question the notions that define such inequalities. Who told you the boys were ‘lesser’? - the show asked a viewer. When you looked at each photograph and tended to stare at the eyes of a boy, behind the frozen photographic moment you saw signs life. A life that could have been full of troubles if measured and compared to the standard that we aggregate as living standards for a happy life. The world banks standards, by the WHO standards or even the rhetoric of Indian Constitution would disapprove the living conditions as unadvisable. Yet, the ease with which the boys carried themselves was a proof that they enjoyed life, wanted to enjoy it and as if, were sure to succeed.

What are their ideas of success? To own a garage, however small? To be employed as a driver with some big Seth? To go to ‘Dubai’, maybe? The pictures won’t speak up. Guesswork helps, in understanding that they must have had alternate sets of blueprints for a happy life. The show opened up these blueprints, and pointed to the historical as well as contemporary predicament of those who have to search for greener pasteurs. All this, when the Mumbai media have been anticipating the local political parties for an outburst against ‘outsiders’ to the city.

In strict photographic parlance, they were all Portrait busts. To overcome the classification and the prescriptive package of appreciation, the artist had employed a different technique : to print the photographs with all their sharpness, but in undertones. On a matt-finish archival paper, the gray, sometimes green undertone shades would invite an inquiry that precedes appreciation. The distance that the tonal loss attributed to these pictures was to be overcome by you, the viewer. Existence, here, was clearer than the object. All the pictures had names of the boys, but they were seldom legible. What would a white letter, on a five percent black look like? This technical strategy was congruent with their supposed namelessness.

The leftist-romanticist ‘style’ of demonizing the work conditions and then searching for a domesticated protagonist or an untamed hero has come a long way. The artist as a researcher has accepted the role of participant observer. Participant, in so far as s/he interacts with people or a group and then charts a strategy that re-thinks observations with a larger audience with due respect to human existence. For Komu, the humane re-orientation has been inherent since the days when he was an undergraduate art student. Not a PR statement by the artist, this. It is just a recollection by a writer who has seen Komu for last 8-odd years, when the latter struggled mend the ways within the JJ School of Art, Mumbai. With every work, since then, Komu has demonstrated his ability to re-humanise social-political inquiry, although his focal length differed every time.

I’d think of this show not as an exhibition that waited for applause. The success of Grass was that, it made Riyas Komu’s notes public.
-- abhijeet tamhane
* Grass : Riyas Komu, Guild Art Gallery.

The polemicist – turned- orator

Canopies and calligraphy, domes and decorative motifs… pots and coffins, burns and bullets… Riyas Komu entwined them in his recent show, with what seems to be an unending column - of religion and rivalry, piety and predation. The show at Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery in April-May, was called 'Faith Accompli', a title that had a smell of dreaded dreams and doom. Komu drew home the quandary of the debate over faith and power. The culture-specific forms that Komu conceptualized had the strength of addressing the universal. Komu's visual language attained new oratorial heights.

Komu's language has evolved with empathy toward objects which are closer to life (or death). It has not only valued precision and perspective but also materiality and measure. It has been with Komu since he was a student. Be it the red pots and photo frames or the use of tarpauline in "he used to believe EMS planted all the coconut trees in Kerala" (1998), his later engagement with watching news channels to distill the most evocative faces of commoners who have to bear the brunt, and the later experiments with the 'garage boys' at Borivli (also a part of his photographic work), who once facilitated his use of motorcycle parts that suggested a deconstructed human body. Lately, Komu used metal forms that directly denoted a religion or a party. These works form the base of his current language, where volume is as important as content. The size and repetition that adds to the volume were never used so directly by Komu, before 2005. In the current show, 'the Third Day' the scale of tin walls competes the frightening prison-cells, while the oversized, heavy wooden communion chalises evoke assurance and suspicion alike. The decorations on the canopies reach disturbing hights. ' My Fathers' Balcony' takes the myth of Noah's Arc in its stride. The repetition of red coffins and charred, holed pots make a high-pitched demand for something more than a second or a third look. The blood-red, coffin-shaped forms on the wall sport the sheen of a car you (wanted to/) own, and as you watch the' Tragedy of a carpenter's Son', your eyes feel the pale- cold touch of bare galvanized tin with its occasional corrosions.

With such content that intrigues the intellectually honest and commands emotional reflex, Komu has always been a polemicist. In the previous years, he took on the overlapping tasks of an interpreter, interrogator and advocate. Oratory comes with volume and pitch, which he has obtained now. Will this quality lead him to a major public art piece or will he be content with galleries and biennales, remains to be seen.

- abhijeet tamhane.

‘Kaikoo Banayaa?’

Art gets ready for questions on the street
(first published in Art Concerns )

For the ‘Kala Ghoda Art Festival’ (KGAF) that packed more than 150 films, dances, plays and street acts in nine days (February 3-11, 2007), the stationery aspect of the visual art segment was perhaps a respite for those who wanted an experience in totality, at their convenience. Here, too, one could list down some 33 projects by various artists or art galleries. With such a scale, the KGAF surpassed every other art-happening in the city, Dayanita Singh’s show and ‘Soft Spoken’: the 6-person show curated by Bose Krishnammachari, or the less-celebritised ‘Bombay Art Society Annual show’ included!

For the KGAF art segment to be talked about, the aspects were many. A street-art experience in Mumbai still retains its novelty. The other aspect was multiplicity (or the happy absence) of focus, and a good mix of young and established. As Brinda Miller, co-ordinator for this year’s visual art segment put it in pukka Mumbaiya hinglish, ‘Iss baar class bhi hai, mass bhi hai’!

The questions arouse when a discerning observer took to the streets to experience the class-mass responses to the class-mass art. The local (read vernacular) media made the same mistake of carrying the photographs of some artifacts for sale in the adjacent craft-stalls with naive captions like ‘an artist shows his beautiful art in the kala ghoda utsav’. The confusions about crafted beauty and communicative visual data remained intact, even without the share of such ‘beautiful’ photo-captions, while there were some other joys, rather contemporary to this year. People fell for the monumental scales, but were not afraid to ask, ‘Yeh Kya hai? Kaikoo banayaa?’ and a dialogue started.
Parag Tandel, the Thane-based lad supported by Pundole Art Gallery for his installation ‘Ambivert Space’, rendered an everyday object (the Nimboo-Mirch concoctution that, traders in the city believe, wards off evil) in a crafty way with threads. The work inspired many questions like ‘Kaikoo banayaa?’, and Parag or his friends would talk of this ‘unbranded product’ that serves the shops that sell brands, or the plight of nimboo-mirchi makers or sellers. Parag was also delighted that people, who otherwise would not touch a ‘real’ nimboo-mirchi fearing the axis of evil, dared to touch these crafted objects. This debutant artist won offers for a solo!

‘Jogya’ a nickname for Prashant Jogdand, is an artist who makes his presence felt at every KGAF. Jogya’s sculptural interventions implant human life on the trees surrounding the Jehangir Art Gallery. His trees with feet (2005), or with hands (2006), or lips and utensils (2007) can be thought of as an ongoing project with public memory. This artist who keeps a low profile also reflected on the importance of the unseen: his team displayed ‘snails on a tree’.

Natraj Sharma and N. S. Harsha, were the two cutting-edge artists who took to the street this KGAF, thanks to the Bodhi Art Gallery. Natraj’s ‘Alternative Shapes for planet Earth’ needed an open sky backdrop which it did not get, but the work was nevertheless appreciated. Helpful and tempting was the concept note that spoke and illustrated an artist’s journey back and forth painting and sculpture. Harsha’s work, biggest ever at any of the last nine KGAFs, confronted the laypersons and uninitiated eyes with equal awe.

A common visitor went rampant in his/her ‘photography spree’ at Harsha’s Aircraft, as well as Prashant Narvekar and Laxmi Nair’s ‘Helicoptook’: Prashant and Laxmi, a duo who graduaded from the JJ School of Arts and chose to exhibit after 5 years since, worked with the fantasy of an Autorickshaw equipped to fly. The most-asked question to them was, whether this three-wheeler with a stylized back-hood and wings to decorate, really flies.

Some less-interacted, yet potent works were displayed behind a row of stalls. Among them were three works by Himanshu S. and his team. ‘This revolution is for display’ sought inspiration from the Nineteen Sixties, while a direct take on the present-day was posed by ‘ Booked Street’, a re-enlivenment of the book-selling pavements that died at the hands of Municipal Council. ‘In Dog we trust’ had an interactive appeal, to lift the stuffed-toy doggies and do ‘whatever’ with them. Yet, the work was tucked in a place where there were a bit more ‘usual’ works on display, like the fantastic ‘any for six thousand’ offer by Tao Art Gallery.

Showcasing opportunities were aptly taken by some galleries, some lesser known to the city. Their shows this time were comparatively eloquent for the street-setting, even as they relied on wall-mounted or pedestelised stuff. The buzz word here was ‘reiteration’ of what one specializes in. Aakar Prakar of Kolkata came down to KGAF with ‘contemporary artists from the east’ and had pleasant surprises like (Delhi-based) Samit Das, the newly-opened Osmosis gallery reverted to brilliant-but-lesser-known artists like Madhao Imartey and Nitin Kulkarni, and ‘Red Dot Art’ stood steadfast with showcasing graphics.

Thirty three exhibits were a bit exhausting, too. The wit and wisdom in some works, like Kanchi Mehta’s ‘Smoker’, Hina Khan’s ‘Our old Scooter’ or street sculptures by Shailesh Dudhalker, seemed a bit sidelined because of the exhaustion. While these works attracted comparatively less interaction and Q-A sessions with the artists, a new dialectics of what and why to exhibit on the street was surely visible in these works. Some works, like ‘Hoardings’ by Prajakta Potnis-Ponmany, lacked the dose of supporting information in the absence of the artist.

In my opinion, the KGAF is about facilitating a ‘Pedestrians eye view of art’. It has been doing so for last nine years, but kudos! It did better this time.

- Abhijeet Tamhane, Mumbai.

Related link:
http://www.kalaghodaassociation.com/2007/

Unlikely Logos…

Intrigue is at the core of Justin Ponmany’s paintings. He has, over a period of last five years, gradually made them more and more hologramatic, a process rarely used by an Indian painter. Rarity of technique is not the end, though. It is the beginning for having an artist’s take on the medium commonly used to denote authenticity of a product or document. The debate on authorship is central to Justin’s work as he uses his canvas with searched (as against, found) photographic images and explores them with juxtaposition of other images or text.
The imagery in Justin’s recent body of work, for example, ranged from colonial monuments, the moment of childbirth, a dog… all supported with repetition of a word or two. The words, coupled with pictures, definitely had an invitation to the viewer to solve her/his intrigue, or at least to be at ease with the intrigue level you have.
Ask Justin about the efficacy of holograms and he would say he wants the technique because he intends to make his work look like ‘unlikely logos reflecting the dreams and despairs of today’ a word that intrigues you more! Justin’s holograms were supported by some drawings on graph-paper, and all the drawings had one form: that of Swastika. His canvases, too, showed the same, somewhat disturbing form beneath (or over?) the images. The graph-paper drawings were simple, they played with Swastika as if it were a mascot that tries to illustrate the words like ‘climb’. They almost had a childlike charm, and their adherence to the plotted points reminded of Rangoli designs, but central to them was a Swastika: a sign that has been downgraded in Europe to denote a politically incorrect ideology. Also within the contemporary Indian political-cultural practice, Swantika seems to be hijacked by the Hinduist ideology. The cultural construct of Swastika deserves a righteous subversion, a resurrection of sorts, to bring back the sign into its semiotic realm and then to attempt a new meaning. Justin’s drawings on graph paper did show signs of re-claiming the Swastika to a larger semiotics. His use of the same drawings as juxtaposed images on hologram-canvas challenged the known patterns of juxtaposition, and suggested a meaning elsewhere.

A logo has readability. It almost impersonates what it stands for. Justin’s logos were unlikely, for they did not say what they meant. Intrigue remains intact. Nevertheless, his use and subversion of colonial and contemporary images did stand for dreams and despairs of a glocal mind.

- Abhijeet Tamhane.

Toys and teasers for those who want to grow…

(Catalogue text for Narendra Yadav, Solo Show with Sakshi Gallery)

“Far from suggesting a literal or even symbolic representation of social (as against national) identities such as those of gender/class/caste and region, new art in India needs to suspend any direct address towards the social"
- Geeta Kapur, November 13, 1998 [1].

The sense-making strategies for an artist from India have changed, and India has been watching the change. Before Narendra Yadav took a studio space he had seen the upheavals around the millennium and its 'new age' ramifications on people's lives. Anyone who lives in a fast-growing district of the commercial capital of an emerging superpower must have taken some lessons from what one saw as the play of time. Narendra's lessons included a critical study: are people really thinking of themselves differently? Are the notions changing, or do they exist under a changed garb?

In a country whose father taught "indriya nigraha" by pointing to the three wise monkeys [2­­] , the attack on senses is imminent. Narendra does not lament on loss of nigraha. He does a monument to suit the changed situation, instead. A viewer might identify the monument with the crowds in Ginza of Tokyo since the 1960s or, more apparently, the mall-pub metroculture of Mumbai in recent years. The iconography is satirical and of course referential, but it does not pooh-pooh the Japanese or the Gandhian reference. The work owns a calm emotional tone, a wise smile on ourselves, wrapped in a most neutral-looking title.

The task to scrutinize and polemicize the self-illusory hedonism that surrounds the air of capitalism and consumerism has been taken up by artists before [3] . The strategy of subversion first emerged as a successful one, as if subversion is the most-sought attribute for turning your artists into heroes, a game that curators and catalogues and 'big' shows often play. In a scenario where an artist-observer is expected to take on the role of an entertaining agitationist, there are artists who, wittingly or accidentally, take up the task of subverting the game itself. They blur the borders of persuasion and polemics. One can sense these blurred borders in Narendra's work.

In his analysis as a participant-observer of purposeless hunger and self-indulgence (read, 'wellness'), Narendra suspects a Pavlovian conditioning. An ever-changing, ever-increasing association of stimuli and responses, that sets the rhythm of everyday actions. We all get to our cell phones when the bell rings, he observes in a temporal, performance-based work; and moves on to enquire whether an image of moving fan - video projection on the ceiling, brings some comfort and some sleepy feelings to the audience with eyes wide open. The foot that relaxes itself through a concrete pillar in ' Dust particles suspended in the air to perform pranayama' , annotates the enquiry with pathos and formalizes the empathy for the observed.

The systems that affect the values of a glocal mind in India are many: Bollywood, News Channels, IT… to name a few. Narendra points to the mediated feelings of being loved while you compete at the ‘Abhisarsthana’, or playing nemesis with ‘Stress-release toys for quick justice‘, while you are only bringing down some symbols of the so-called evil . The two works seem communicative to the brink of getting obvious, say their visual clues. But the problematique is sensed in their suggested or hand-driven movement. For the less obvious, seemingly 'complex' works, Narendra assists the viewer with his own titles, like ' Partially elevating apparatus based on a dogma requiring intervention'. The works retort values, and yet have an essential playful, interactive quality.
\nThe play element in Narendra Yadav\'s art is, to me, his reverence for the time. His works demand a chunk of your time in the gallery. They ask for your engagement, persuade you off the \'eye for art\' dictat. His approach is comparable to that of \'integrative arts\' as professed by educationists, to help them learn. Sarcasm or subversion is not the raison d\'être of Narenda\'s works. Nor does he want the viewer to be baffled and feel powerless for not being a thinker otherwise. The invitation to think is open, though; with titles that carry out their task to invite in a rather proactive manner. Narendra also looks back at the common reverence for text, and his titles like \'enery created by fluttering logic in the mid-air\', would invite to drill the text in favour of the matter.\n\n \nThe common audience to India\n\'s contemporary art is not only the uninitiated lot. It also consists of the formalist \'old art\' lot, over-initiated by the colonial art-teaching methods coupled with feudal inertia for artistic enquiry. I would like to imagine their reactions to Narendra\'s work. For instance, among his revolving works, Nelson Mandela toy/monument (colour blender) a stubborn formalist who would still see the \'treatment\' that Mandela\'s ears have undergone, but would be driven to the action of \'blending\' the what s/he has always seen as opposite colours. The reason for using Mandela (and not the usual Ganpati idol that 55 per cent of India\'s sculptors seem to incorporate in their shows unmistakably), lay not in having to do away with the ears, s/he would (hopefully) reveal, and be driven to think why Mandela is put as a mascot of blending opposite colours. Similar situations may occur for at least half of the works shown.\n\n",1]
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The play element in Narendra Yadav's art is, to me, his reverence for the time. His works demand a chunk of your time in the gallery. They ask for your engagement, persuade you off the 'eye for art' regime. His approach is comparable to that of 'integrative arts' as professed by educationists, to help them learn. Sarcasm or subversion is not the raison d'être of Narendra’s works. Nor does he want the viewer to be baffled and feel powerless for not being a thinker otherwise. The invitation to think is open, though; with titles that carry out their task to invite in a rather proactive manner. Narendra also looks back at the common reverence for text.

The layperson with reference to India's contemporary art is not only the uninitiated lot. It also consists of the formalist 'old art' lot, over-initiated by the colonial art-teaching methods coupled with feudal inertia for artistic enquiry. I would like to imagine their reactions to Narendra's work. For instance, with his revolving Nelson Mandela toy/monument called ‘Colour Blender’ , a stubborn formalist who would still notice the treatment that Mandela's ears have undergone, but would be driven to the action of 'blending' what s/he has always seen as opposite colours. The reason for using Mandela (and not the usual Ganpati idol that 55 per cent of India's sculptors seem to incorporate in their shows unmistakably), lay not in having to do away with the ears, s/he would (hopefully) reveal, and be driven to think why Mandela is put as a mascot of blending opposite colours. Similar situations may occur for at least half of the works shown.

There are three works which might pose Narendra himself as a formalist-poetic exponent… the most eye-catching 'Amniotic continents' has a definitive formalist bend, a more poetic 'Droplets drifting to unknown' is almost magical in its structure and spiritual in its suggestion, and the bread-slices with ‘designer’ egg yokes that flaunt streaks of colour. Confront these with his witty "kibosh" on art criticism, a conceptual work that knows how to keep the formalist instincts in their place. The artist's field of enquiry- human values and behaviour – may seem distant in these works, but they outline Narendra's broader spectrum of activity.

Narendra has a handful peers in his story so far. His efforts in exploring the substance of his sculptural works, in understanding the mechanics so as to outdo its spell, and in addressing newer issues that haunt a local as well as global audience, are certainly directed to shape the new sculpture from India.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane,
Mumbai, June 2006.

[1] Concluding remarks, quoted from a lecture : "What's New in Indian Art : Canons, Commodification, Artists on the Edge" at India International Centre, New Delhi; a part of ResArtis 6th General Meeting. Later published in the Marg volume: 2000 : Reflections on the Arts in India.

[2] The Nikko Toshogo Shrine, also known as the Sacred Stable, in Japan has a carving of three wise monkeys. Many scholars believe the monkeys were carved as a visual representation of the religious principle, "If we do not hear, see, or speak evil, we ourselves shall be spared all evil."
http://web-japan.org/atlas/architecture/arc05.html

[3] Barbara Kruger, 'I shop therefore I am' is one of the favorites.