aroopjournal

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EXCERPT: Kumar Sahani/Signs of silence

As a glimpse, the hurricane over New York was shown in white, like a soft, dissipating conch shell made of cotton wool and water, spreading from land to sea. Was it a representation? A prediction of what is yet to be? An imaginary mathematical projection to prepare the earth for the devastation to be wrought by it? If so, the experience of the flood should have helped us redesign our ark, as it has been done before, to contain the music of the spheres. As a charkravyuh with the key to exit or as a cathedral to enter or as a skyscraper to ascend to the stars.

Or, are we to hold it upon the cross of the Golden Section, arresting both pleasure and pain. Erosion, death, dematerialization, have for so long been countered by signs developed from those very processes: minimal spirals carved on to stone with tiny microliths that could themselves become ornaments to adorn the human body. Fetishes that are made of bone, pierced and strung together by fibre, in celebrating immanent affirmation of the self in love, in movement, in transformation.

Such is the magic of pendants, ear-rings, bracelets and other weapons that terrorise the evil eye and lock it in its own gaze, to and fro. Ward it off, if you will. With obscenity, comedy, television, breaking news, there enters the word of correctness as a masquerade of abuse, missiles of mass destruction, standards of Untruth, held aloft by Media leading the people.

What happens to the colour circle then with its synchronous diachronies? Close your eyes and you will see them in simultaneous contrast, not in as regular the pattern as the pixels in fixed proportions of rbg (red blue green) determined by

linear scansions, scrubbing all tangible noise out in number.

It is cold in here.

For no particular fault, not a grain of it is found to catch the light in its own

idiosyncratic desire.

Thank god, there is no measure yet for the Random.

Once you have set the aperture to let in what happens to be, you are still free to

throw some light on the phenomenon that unravels itself, shift the focus, pull

it during the take.

There will be refractions, reflections, rebounding and dispersing, resonating,

burning, bringing the molecules to bear a new bricolage.

Areas get inundated and geometries layer the surface, one tangential angle upon another, defying the regularity of known intervals to make a unique event in sudden eclipses.

#kumar sahani #film #filmmaker #art #indian art #artists #aroop

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EXCERPT: Mukund Lath/ Swaprathishta: Abstraction in Indian Aesthetics

to begin with, by ‘art’ I shall mean the art of ‘painting.’ Such an equation between the word and a specific art is almost established in ordinary usage. Even the notion of the ‘abstract,’ given the history of modern painting in the West, is singularly associated with that art; the concept, indeed, for us, is one that we are most self-consciously at home with in that field. Yet, needless to say, even in the field of art, the concept has a much wider implication, for abstraction as an aesthetic phenomenon is not limited to painting. Another word also current in the discourse on painting with an echo close to ‘abstraction’ is ‘non-figurative,’ even though the meaning is not quite the same. Such concepts clearly point at a certain relatively recent move in the world of painting that took place in the

West and is, along with much that we have taken from the West, a part of our discourse concerning painting, as well as its practice as an art today. What we must keep in mind here is that the importance given to the concept of abstraction is because it is considered a vital part of the emergence of a new ‘modern’ consciousness, with which it is thought to have emerged as a radically novel concept, becoming a part of an unprecedented self-reflexive, self-critical aesthetic insight and understanding. today there are, moreover, unmistakable overtones in our belief that the concept is thought of as not only new, but as introducing an almost axial change in our self-awareness of art. What is often stressed is this aspect of the rise of an entirely novel self-conscious responsiveness, which is, further considered to be an intimate, or even innate, part of the coming of modernity in the West, since the presence of un-selfconscious abstraction in earlier art, such as that of the so-called primitive cultures, is not denied.

It is in this context of what may be termed discursive thinking about the arts that the present essay would like to concern itself with the notion of the ‘abstract’ as it emerged as a self-conscious, well-thought-out notion in the discourse concerning art in India. Our discussion will lead us to arts other than painting, but that does not reduce the importance of the rise of a concept such as that of abstraction as a consciously thought-out notion. I shall be talking here of dance and music, with which organized descriptions of the arts (their Shastras), and reflective thinking concerning them began as a discourse in India. Let us keep in mind here that the concept, in its core, embodies a notion and practice of the art where art consciously moves away from the notion of ‘imitation’ that seems to be entrenched in its very idea, and willfully engages in creating imaginative worlds of its own.

In truth, notions such as those of abstraction or non-figuration do not merely connote a conscious move away from the idea of art as imitation, but point at a notion of art as an imaginatively free and autonomous activity that aims at creating something meaningful in itself, without a dependence on something outside of it. It is, in fact, such a notion of non-dependence which is the essence of the impulse that lies behind the significance given to ideas such as those of abstraction, and to think of such an idea as profoundly radical in its implications. What I would like to uncover here is the fact that such a ‘radical’ move in thinking about the arts was made quite a long time ago in India. It is unfortunate that we as moderns seem to have lost the penchant for historical self-reflection, a process which has been central to the upsurge of what the West terms its ‘modernity’. Our gaze in this matter (as in many others), is indeed, riveted by them. The attempt here may be taken as a small attempt at turning the eye homeward.

Related to the concept of abstraction, as we have noted, is the notion of the non- figurative.There is a single word, ‘amurta’ that we use for these two concepts in Hindi today. But if we attend to the meanings of these two English words,their implications are plainly not quite the same. The Hindi word brackets the

two meanings into one. One can argue that both abstract and non-figurative are parallel in spirit and essential significance, and so a single word can do for the two, since what is crucial here is the idea (as we have suggested above)

that art is not dependent on something outside of it for its formation or its meaning, and even when it does look outside of itself, it transforms the given and absorbs it into its own autonomous world. The word, ‘non-figurative’ (or ‘non-representational’) rather than ‘abstract’ seems to fit such a meaning better. For what the word suggests is not, literally, the absence of figuration, or representation, but a move away from such figures, forms and shapes that we find in the given external visual world, in order to create independent figures born of the painterly imagination. One might, strictly speaking, want to choose a better word (as we shall find in Abhinavagupta’s usage) but words such as non-figurative or its equivalent - non-representational - have become entrenched in usage and what they imply is clear enough. The Hindi ‘amurta’ seems, on the face of it, a translation of ‘non-figurative’ rather than ‘abstract’. But in usage it applies to both, pointing at a sense of imaginative autonomy that is present in both.

If we take even a slightly deeper look at the visual arts, all painting (and sculpture) can be understood as abstract, since the given cannot but be transformed in translating it into art. ‘Imitation’ is, in this sense, an inherently imaginative process; it necessarily implies abstraction by its very nature, for it cannot but transform the given in reproducing it. The very medium of an art makes this inevitable. The modern mode of abstraction is but a new way of doing it, for, otherwise, the whole history of the visual arts has plainly been an exercise in abstraction, though the word may not have been used, and what was done may have been understood as imitation. What is new here is the autonomy of self-realization. But this, too, has been thought of earlier as we shall see.The necessarily transformative character of ‘imitation’ was understood by Bharata, the putative author of the Natyashastra . And although this was in the context of theatre, what he has to say has obvious larger implications. Bharata defined theatre as imitation – imitation of loka (the world around us, especially the human world): indeed, his word anukarana, with which he defines theatre, is an almost exact parallel of ‘imitation.’ But this imitation, for him, had to be what he terms, ‘natya-dharmi’: it has to accord to the very character of theatre both as a medium and an imaginative undertaking. Loka, or the given world obviously cannot be reproduced on the stage, which has its own limitation as a medium, and also its own possibilities that are quite unlike that of the world of objects and of humans existing in a certain manner in a given frame of space and time. The theatre with its limited stage as a medium has to resort to its own resources in order to ‘imitate’ or represent this cosmic given. But this is not all. Theatrical imitation is not simply an outwardly representation of what we see. It tries to imitate the human state, the experienced life of the inner man: the complexities of his actions and emotions. And so we find that apart from defining theatre as anukarana, Bharata goes deeper into the nature of this anukarana and qualifies it by using phrases such as, bhava-karmanukirtana: theatre, in other words, is not just anukarana, but a retelling, or ‘re-presentation,’ of human actions and emotions. This requires an imaginative transformation of the given world in a deeper, more inner-looking sense: hence the use of dance and music and stylized (read ‘abstract’ for ‘stylization’ because it is plainly a form of abstraction, transforming the given in its own way) acting. Such transformation aiming at representing the lived life of man was also an integral part of the meaning of the term, natya-dharmi, the word here, clearly, indicating a deeper autonomy, that of imagination, that theatre as an art necessarily presupposes. What is important for us here is that the term natya-dharmi in both its senses involves a creative ‘re-production,’ call it ‘imitation’ if you will.

#INDIAN ART #india #indian aesthetics #critical study #critics #mukund lath #aroop #art studies #modern art #indian art

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Roobina Karode/ About Nothingness and nothing.

Vasudeo Gaitonde’s art holds its own presence for different reasons - no stiff geometries, no excess structures, no ornament and above all, demanding a break from habits of expectation and an overriding urge to interpret and seek meanings in the work. As he sought consolation in his work far beyond the human form, one could possibly get immersed in its slow revelations for long or quickly move on if looking for obvious references and recognizable objects. Gaitonde’s art evolves through a process that is intuitive but precise and follows its own logic that unfolds only to those who wish to enter deeper realms and reflect upon the infinite powers of perception. The introspective nature of the artist helps him arrive at new structures, stripped of everything that was previously known to him, or to us for that matter. His art results from his methods of meditative action, and demands an intensity of attention from the viewer.

If anything, Gaitonde’s paintings make visible a few faint whispers of silence and traces that they engulf within; in that sense, they are about nothingness. They do not really invite definition or description that may help decode the primary creative act. His works equally defy being essayed in words by art writers and scholars. Not surprising then that there is hardly anything in existence that is written on Gaitonde and similarly on a few of his contemporaries who worked in the abstractionist mode. Gaitonde’s approach to painting was preoccupied with the making of a new language, a mode of communication that could circumvent the dependence on the literal and the literary world. This distillation of a visual language that obliterates the familiar and the external to create subliminal images is interesting, especially in Gaitonde, who studied at the JJ School of Art in Bombay. Though the institution leaned heavily on to the figurative tradition and consolidated its reputation in the 1950s with masters who excelled in figural stylization, rebellion against the figure was also born from within the School. Some of the most significant artists who pioneered the modern abstractionist tendencies came out of JJ School - Gaitonde, Ambadas, Mohan Samant, Prabhakar Barwe, Prabhakar Kolte to name just a few. Art as an inner necessity was to become the central idea and an endless pursuit for them. Though the early phase of practice for many of these artists began with academic figuration, it is worth inquiring why many of them gave up figuration as they evolved, and why they never did return to it. In India, modernist assertions had already begun via modes of figural fragmentation, inspired by cubist and expressionist tendencies that were dominant in the early post-Independence years. The figural motif was put through various formal stylizations and visual transformations- attenuated, truncated, compressed, distorted and divested into a figural trace. Gaitonde in his early years as a painter started painting in a figurative style, but it didn’t seem to excite him as he was divesting it of narrative intent and trying to refresh its energies through colour impasto, heavy surfaces and outlines. The vocabularies of artists working then oscillated between quasi-realist and quasi-abstract tendencies. Perhaps the academicism that had such a stronghold in the curriculum of the JJ School pushed Gaitonde to break away from a set and readymade path, but not before he had learnt the rules of academic draughtsmanship that trained the artist’s hand to capture figures and objects in perfect line and gradations of tone on the flat surface of the canvas or paper. Gaitonde moved to abstraction out of choice and certainly not because of his inability to draw figures. In Bombay, there was a recognizable spirit of revolt and experimentation in the air when Gaitonde completed his diploma in 1948 and got pulled into the newly formed Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). The common sharing in the Manifesto referred to the belief in a universalized modern sensibility and the intrinsic value of art. While the Group advocated their rebellious stance primarily through the fiery F N Souza who spearheaded it along with M F Husain, S H Raza, K H Ara, and S K Bakre, Gaitonde remained peripheral to the activities of PAG and his quiet radicalism distanced him from the limelight of the mainstream. This influential group did not last long due to the headstrong individuals that made it up, but their friendships/compatriots continued for a life-time. S H Raza, the only living artist from the PAG reiterates that:

“In coming together as a Group, in our struggle, we were seeking to broaden the terrain of Indian art beyond the confines of the colonial art education. Our conversations and arguments continued and often we wrote letters, visited one another and kept track of how we were independently evolving.”

It is important to delve into the early years of Gaitonde as an artist when he had a small studio in Bombay at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute on the seafacing Bhulabhai Desai Road in the 1950s. It was the late Mr. Desai’s spacious bungalow turned into an experimental space for artists; it grew into a place for the meeting of minds where various practices and art forms were crossfertilised by the presence of Ebraham Alkazi’s theatre unit for drama, Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara School of Music, a bookshop run by Sakina, Tyeb Mehta’s wife, dance practice sessions of Jabeen, the film actress and studio spaces that allowed visual artists to paint and sculpt. An open house and free for all, artists gravitated to it for its stimulating environment, for spending time with their contemporaries, engaging in discussions and sharing views with musicians, poets, dancers, and theatre actors. Husain, Akbar Padamsee, Bal Chabda,Krishen Khanna and others frequently showed up at Bhulabhai. Artists bartered their paintings and sometimes bought works of their fellow travellers to support them and strengthen their solidarity. In fact, some of Gai’s works were acquired by Bal Chhabda. One can only imagine the synergy of the place at the time when it was vibrant and before it was razed to the ground to make place for a skyscraper. Gaitonde was exposed to the art of his contemporaries as well as to music, theatre, cinema, literature, all at once at Bhulabhai. He was often seen seated on a bench in the garden lawn in the afternoons, with his arms crossed, silent and lost in contemplation. The co-existence of the hustle bustle of mundane life on the city-street and the expanse of the sea beyond with its silent rhythms, raised deeper questions in Gaitonde, pertaining perhaps to the transient moment and his presence within it. Movement and stillness situated his consciousness in both the temporal and eternal realities of life.....

(Continued in the journal).

#art #art writing #vasudeo gaitonde #indian art #art crticism #critical writing #roobina karoode #aroop #raza foundation #modern art #asian art #world art

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Sayed Haider RAZA (Indian-French, born 1922)

Bindu Shanti, 2010

Galerie Patrice Trigano, Paris, France