If There Was Any Meaning of Fanfare in Art Shows I Should Have Liked to Herald This One with All of It
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If there was any meaning of fanfare in art shows I should have liked to herald this one with all of it. Anyone who knows the Indian art scene will know at a glance that this is a major exhibition. It comes after a decade of the Group 1890 exhibition (held in September 1963 ) which presented almost all the interesting work done by artists, younger and not so well recognised at that point. This group of artists started working seriously around 1963. With the exception of Gulam mohammed Sheikh-who forms a link with Group l890-these artists represent the next generation, given that generations in art history are closely telescoped and do not follow the chronology of birth-dates. The Group 1890 exhibiton was inaugurated by lawaharlal Nehru. I am doubtful if these artists would care to invite Indira Gandhi (or for that matter, any political personage in power now), although not every artist in the group claims a definIte political outlook and the work covers the entire range from the purely fanciful to the denifitely ideological. Speaking of Indira Gandhi and her Government it occurs to me that during these last ten years our ruling class has become more culture conscious and also perhaps more definite about what should constitute uclture for the Indian people. I believe the cultural bureaucrats would like the arts (including literature, theatre and film) to be both indigenous and socially relevant. Indigenism has come to mean the folk and tribal image and the occult image - a modernised version of tradition. To be relevant to the people, the work of art is expected to be realistic which in turn is coming to mean the depiction of social change. (This for example appears to be the current policy of the Film Finance Corporation which can effectively exercise its ideology because it is a financing agency for an art medium that cannot do without finances). There is a catch of course. Both tradition and revolution have to be interpreted in terms of the present Government's corrupt and safe radicalism. One might say therefore, that our ruling class prefers art to be indigenous, relevant and innocuous, A Government run by a liberal bourgeoisie does not of course enforce its ideology or suppress oppositIOn. Not at least in matters of culture. But as long as it functions on the capitalist basis the market takes care of that. When art is a covetous object and a saleable commodity, it ceases to be dangerous; it is easily divested of its motives and its inclinations. Therefore to make claims for a painting or sculpture-the most possessable of all art-forms-that it is subversive to the given value system or militates against it, is a bit far-fetched. But perhaps one might make another more fruitful distinction. One might say that by their very intention, their nature and mode of expression some works are innocuous and others are not. An artist who disengages himself from the myriad aspects of life, divests his work of content and abdicates all responsibility of meaning; when in other words, he exclusively concerns himself with form he may achieve a competence but he is bound to remain innocuous. A formalist approach is the safest one even when it is proclaimed in the name of the highest aesthetic virtue. The famous Clive Bell credo runs as follows: "A representative element in art mayor may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. ... ". I think the least one can claim for these exhibiting artists is that they do not believe in this narrow and outdatedly genteel credo which continues to be amazingly popular amongst artists and art lovers. I think these artists, very different from each other, would whole heartedly agree on this one point: that a representative element in art mayor may not be harmful but it is extremely relevant, and always important. There is no fake Indianness in this show although painters like Gulam mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar could not be more completely Indian. Sheikh bas always worked through the medium of his memory: memory of a provincial childhood in the rugged landscape of Saurashtra. And he has remembered lhis origins in a form that constitutes another memory-the pictorial tradition of the mlD1atures. In these paintings it seems the pain and fantasy of his childhood has found a redemption through persistent recollection. He has disentangled the hot breath from the trees he had been painting, and developed it into a full image of the past. Consider the painting, 'Relurning Home after a Long Absence.' Beginning with the immediate presence of his mother, his memory lifts itself on the wings of the angels, above the houses and mosque up towards the Prophet on his Buraq, in whose name his race was converted. With the nostalgia he has also unearthed and exoressed his dread of riots and marauding crowds. In the very remarkable painting Mao-II he gives a double dimension to fear: the aggressor and his victim are archetypal figures but placed as they are in an elaborate urban setting (watched by neighbours who are furtive witnesses to all violence) one recognises that the victim is society's scapegoat and the painting acquires its political dimension. Polttical in the largest sense, in the sense in which Ambrogio Lorenzetti (the Sienese master Sheikh so greatly admires and whose influence is becoming evident in his work) was political when he painted on the walls of Sienna's town hall, the allegories of good and bad government. He had all the fervent lyricism of the medieval tradition behind him. Sheikh too would like, by conscious choice, to place himself in relationship with the Indian medieval tradition and allegorize, on that basis, his contemporary experience. Bhupen Khakhar has an absolutely unique relationship with urban India. Until recently be had been pictorializing the bizarre aspects of the environment with the sort of humour and relish that everyone of us could enjoy without embarassment. Since about two years he has transgressed from the humorous (as he had from the start transgressed from sophisticated aestbeticism in a way the Western pop artists would envy) and now he is more likely to offend than amuse his viewers. Firstly, he paints a class of people that don't normaIly appear on canvas-the lower middle class, the lumpen elements engaged in their daily activities and professions. Secondly, he paints them in a mode as grossly banal as they themselves are, in fact rather in accordance with their taste. And then his style of pictorialisation-a cross between the late miniatures and the popular oleographs admits no easy criteria, because it -is at the same time naive and extremely cunning. But it is the way he combines in his representation crudeness and compassion that leaves one in a state of discomfiture. Whether it is the disheartened strikers, the gentle watch-maker or the lewd fellows telIing jokes before a fish-shop our c1ass- based sensibilities are a bit shaken. He treats his subjects with a sly sentimentality-cynically, mawkishly and then sometimes with real tenderness. One is forced to ask if what we regard vulgar may not also be vulnerable and whether our prissy notions of culture don't disregard much that is human. As for social realism, there is that of its own kind in the work of Gieve Patel and Vivan Sundaram, both of whom often use the photographic image as a starting point for their paintings. For some time Gieve has been painting members of the ruling class with a dead pan irony. His dignified ministers are set up like stuffed shadows; they are mouldering, becoming before our very eyes, heaps of fungus. But there they are, all on duty, wrapped in a musty aura. And who knows, our real life ministers would regard them gratefully, taking them for benign ghosts holding proxy for them on the conference table. Gieve has recenty begun a series of landscapes. He i:q painting the defaced landscape around an industrial metropolis that appears and disappears as the train shuttles across the suburbs, and dissolves in the eye like a formless blur. Looking at these painting. -one sees very little besides a rusted shed, an iron railing, a bit of track, all coated with smoke and soot. But one is reminded somehow that every such township is a slum. In Vivan's work the message is more obvious than in Gieve's. The blatant facts of -our society begin to seem inevitable: what Vivan does is to squeeze layers of mottled pigment through them until the image congeals and the fact confronts us with vivid insistence. When he is successful, the obvious facts become, via a series of juxtaposed images, warning signals-to say that the contradictions are liable to burst the all-containing system in which we are for the present preserved. The man in his marble swimming pool will drown as the red flames at the edge of the parched land leap up to tbe sky; the impeccable bourgeois in the golf course will be wiped off by the fumes of the poor. It is a question of breaking down the wall. He has done a portrait of Indira Gandhi in the mould of an Egyptian empress. But there is no pageant to proclaim her power, only a crazy destitute who has walked a long distance away from her .. and as spectators we cannot turn away, not until she sinks into the horizon like a gigantic obelisk and the old woman finds her way accross the ruin and rubble. There are three women painters in the exhibition.