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.