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Bhupen Khakhar Is Nothing If Not Tantalizing

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Bhupen Khakhar Is Nothing If Not Tantalizing The luminescent figure of Bhupen Khakhar is nothing if not tantalizing. Indeed, like Tantalus reaching for sustenance, Khakhar seems forever just out of reach, with any concrete sense of the man remaining evasive. Though much has been written, discussed and theorized about this adored artist from India, both during his BHUPEN lifetime and since he passed away in 2003 from a spate of cancerous episodes, the surfeit of separate accounts and contrary material leads to only one consensus: namely, that he was a man who could not be encapsulated—either in real life, or on the page. As an KHAKHAR artist and writer, Khakhar lived out a life that was both habitual and radical. His breakthrough work between the 1960s and 1990s spanned the modern and the postmodern. With his notions of the local and the light-hearted, combined with forays into the global and the critical, he was remarkable in his singularity. “Bhupen was unique in looking at the quasi-modern and urbanity on the margins,” said art-critic-turned-artist Anita Dube when we spoke in January. “He occupied this slippery space, like a fish . and he lived in those slippages.” It was here, in the most unlikely of interstices, positioned somewhere between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, the community and the self, the (then very distinct) East and West, that he thrived. The core of Khakhar’s painting practice was located at a time when the elitist ideals of Indian modernism were starting to splinter and the space for immediate, homegrown and political impulses of art were beginning to open up. Being cognizant of his weighty role within this shift, yet never letting it be his sole driving factor, Khakhar forged a revered place for himself within the histories of art and writing in India and beyond. Touched by Bhupen At first the image of a common accountant—born in 1934 and raised in the chawls (multistory tenements) of suburban Mumbai—seems difficult to reconcile with the momentous descriptions one hears of him today. In our recent interviews, Indian gallerist Shireen Gandhy claimed Khakhar as “one of India’s most important artists,” whereas American academic Karin Zitzewitz positioned him as “a template for everything that comes after him.” These references speak to his position within the loosely categorized Baroda School—undoubtedly a pivotal force in steering Indian painting toward the indigenous and the story-like—and how, even within this commanding collective, he remained a significant outlier. Through the 1960s and ’70s the self-organized, experimental Baroda School gained momentum and notoriety as it proposed new “street” forms of figurative realism. Having joined the art criticism course at MS University of Baroda in 1962, Khakhar was surrounded by these novel forms and ideas, but remained largely self-taught as an artist. This was not, however, the reason for his lone trajectory and particular approach to art. What made Khakhar stand out was his distinctive life path, which gave him the exceptional ability to operate between careers, classes and sexualities. As a young, middle-class man moving to the conservative state of Gujarat in the 1960s, the artist-accountant became an engaged figure within the forward-thinking artistic community as well as the traditional business and religious ones. Just two decades later, as Khakhar had gained a level of critical acclaim from the local and international art worlds for his bracing take on painting, he went on to spearhead another reformative movement, by revealing himself as India’s first openly homosexual artist. Khakhar, somehow, made all these confluences and multitudes come together and seem possible. As cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote remarked in his essay “A Crazy Pair of Eyes”: “Khakhar demonstrated the Other, not as Love in the Time of Bhupen deviant or antagonistic to Indic society, but as part of that complexly (Opposite page) figured human tapestry.” BHUPEN KHAKHAR, Man Leaving The exhibition for which this was written, “Touched by Bhupen,” (Going Abroad), 1970, oil on canvas, 105.5 x 105 cm. Courtesy Tapi Collection, was staged in November 2013 at the Max Mueller Bhavan and Galerie BY JYOTI DHAR India. Copyright the artist’s estate. Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai, and was an exploration of 96 | MAY/JUN 2016 | ISSUE 98 Features artasiapacific.com 97 (Opposite page, top) BHUPEN KHAKHAR, An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered from Running Nose, 1995, watercolor on paper, 102 x 102 cm. Copyright the artist’s estate. Photo by Pablo Bartholomew. Courtesy Tate, London. (Opposite page, bottom) SHILPA GUPTA, ...and she said his cook had a runny nose, 2013, brass, 22 x 31 cm. Courtesy Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai. Khakhar’s enduring professional and personal legacy, ten years after his death. The contemplative artist Shilpa Gupta was among the 26 cross-generational artists, alongside Nalini Malani, Francesco Clemente, Subodh Gupta and Vivan Sundaram, to take part in the tribute show. In my interview with her earlier this year, Gupta spoke about what compels us to revisit this venerable artist’s work, and how one still tends to encounter the myth and persona of Khakhar, before experiencing his prolific oeuvre of paintings, drawings and writing. “Bhupen comes to you first as a personality, as stories, as an icon,” she said. “That informs the reading of all his work—but that’s also what makes you want to go back and look again.” Indeed, it can be difficult to ascertain where the character of “Bhupen” ends and his art begins, and how the appreciation of one biases the other, as the two seem to inhabit the same space of fictionalized truth. “Everyone has a story about Bhupen; everyone thinks they know him,” added curator Nada Raza, who has organized a major retrospective of Khakhar for June 2016 at Tate Modern, when we spoke in January. Among the stories that circulate between those he affected and inspired are ones that show him to be selfless, such as generously helping his friends through ill-health, and others that portray him as selfish, demanding of others and needing attention. He was known for his self-confidence and sociability; his studio was often filled with people whom he invited to visit. Yet other accounts reveal that for much of his life, he was isolated and ashamed at having to lead a secret life as a gay man. The funniest stories about Khakhar are often the most revelatory, though, such as those of him turning up to random funerals and pretending he knew the deceased, or his writing to peers about his imaginary wife “Savita.” His visual art certainly bears similarity to the literary realm of autobiographical fiction, drawing heavily on lived experiences and observations. And if his art mimicked his life, then his life, too, was shaped by his art. “He was always performing the role of an artist,” suggested Raza, a statement that is somewhat explained by Zitzewitz’s belief that Khakhar was interested in the “inauthentically authentic.” This means that he wanted to be able to embrace and perform all the things that one person could truly be—the many identities that people simultaneously and genuinely inhabit. Though his life seemed to be one witty, poignant performance, it is important to note that neither his practice nor his personality is said What made Khakhar to have come across as scripted or false in any way. Rather, much that Khakhar did and said appears to be tinged with a humorous, indulgent and make-believe quality. “Those who knew him closely stand out was his say performance was his drug,” noted columnist Sanjukta Sharma said after the “Touched by Bhupen” show. distinctive life path, One of the youngest artists to take part in the exhibition, Gupta is usually known for her interest in exploring perception, materiality and sociopolitical issues through a range of digital and which gave him the sculptural media. Admittedly knowing more about Khakhar through secondhand references, but still highly intrigued by his use of exceptional ability “provocation . and the way he challenges our gaze,” she decided to extract, appropriate and recontextualize the five-headed phallus in his well-known watercolor An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five to operate between Penises Suffered from Runny Nose (1995). Gupta’s version, titled ...and she said his cook had a runny nose (2013), is a relief of the phallic careers, classes and image cast in brass. The young artist’s work questions the memory and experience of an artwork, as her piece has specific resonances and meanings for those who know Khakhar’s painting, whereas sexualities. 98 | MAY/JUN 2016 | ISSUE 98 Features artasiapacific.com 99 it would remain fairly open for others. Gupta’s work also strikes a in hand and wings lightly dipped in rainbows, this portrait alludes to balance between the whimsical and the cerebral, the accessible and the multiple lives that Khakhar led as Sheikh’s “comrade-in-arms,” the equivocal, which is reminiscent of Khakhar’s own approach. as Hoskote calls him, in the pursuit of an individualistic form of art Born 25 years after Khakhar, contemporary artist Atul Dodiya and way of living. has often paid homage to the artist in his work. Of similar backgrounds—they share a Gujarati heritage and both grew up Phoren Soap in Mumbai chawls—the two developed a close, collegial and sometimes competitive relationship over the span of three decades. Much of Khakhar’s life and work has been documented in Timothy In reverence to the late artist, Dodiya’s painting Jal-Kamal (2013), Hyman’s 1998 monograph and Judy Marle’s film Messages from created for the “Touched by Bhupen” exhibition, depicts a ghostly Bhupen Khakhar (1983), as well as through retrospectives at the version of Khakhar’s intriguing work Ranchhodbhai Relaxing in Bed Reina Sofía in Madrid (2002) and the National Gallery of Modern (1975)—seemingly copied onto a canvas and placed in the middle of Art in Mumbai (2003).
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