The Artist as Historian

Vivan Sunderam is known for devising sense-making strategy through his art. His interventionist use of picked and collected material has revealed the artist's role as a social being and as a visual communicator and at times, a historian who asserts certain visuals. His recent show at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, not only lived up to this reputation, but underlined the role of the artist-historian that Sunderam took.
Bad drawings for Dost, the title of the show, suggested some challenge to the taboos. Dost is affectionate than honourific, bad drawings should not be exhibited, and if at all one chooses to show them- one should not overtly say they are 'bad'… and so on. The 'Bad'ness of the drawings lied in their content, though. These were tracings from Bhupen Kakkar's various paintings and drawings. Given the extent of homophobia in the society we live in, the drawings were 'bad', notwithstanding their linear joy for a discerning viewer and their importance in the art-historical project. Avant-garde is often discarded as bad, and Sunderam's work skillfully challenged this tendency while underlining Bhupen's avant-gardist contribution . The skill was that of an orator: Sunderam's show was comparable, in ways, to an illustrated lecture that would assert how Bhupen's work negated the binaries in sex.
Sunderam had also employed the stitches and such other techniques that are conventionally not regarded as artists' technique. Every move that Sunderam made counted up to the impact. The use of the tracing paper itself, suggested the 'secondary' position that Sunderam would prefer to take vis-à-vis a great artist and his deceased dost, but it also provided the show with an allegory of the trace, the re-discovery. The use Graphite, (a material that is considered primary and is so intimate to the paper or canvas that many a time it gets invisible by the later layering of colour), was equally suggestive.
The Artist-historian's role that Sunderam played for 'dost', stressed the importance of the subjective, the partisan and alternative approach to history itself. While there is little doubt that the drawings Sunderam chose to work with, will be counted as Bhupen Kakkar's contribution, the show will be remembered for the historical assertions while not being assertive in a direct way. The show was a curious mix of non-assertive and instisting use of signifiers that summed up to the interventionist strategy Sundaram used.
-- Abhijeet Tamhane