The second makeover…


In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term 'culture industry' and called it an instrument of 'enlightenment as mass deception'. They did not refer or point to India, which was a complicated case. By that time, nearly four decades after Raja Ravivarma's death, the only culture industry that would fit into Adorno-Horkheimer analysis was the litho-print industry. This industry survived and flourished mainly on the images of gods and other Hindu mythological characters. So rampant was this industry in the mid-1940s that, the term "photos of gods" was gradually being commonplace.
The "photos of gods" had, and still have their own logic, rooted in the shift from litho-print to mechanical offset. Typically, the background is blue enough, to enhance the glittery gold effect with chrome yellow and lighter shades of brown. The cyan is balanced with magentas and yellows, and black would be minimal. God, the 'subject' of these 'photos', was so revered that women would dress them up with bits of cloth, mirrors, beads and sequins. The innocent, kitsch, somewhat gaudy tasveers are a collectors' item now, and a discerning western traveler to India would typically look for gaudier gods from a street shop that sells 'photos of gods'. A society that was being stripped of its non-mechanical, craft-oriented way of production thus reclaimed the dominance of emotional response than passive consumption.
This innocent resistance gave in, and became pacified by the emergence of the emergence of film in the culture-industry scenario of India. The 'photos of gods', then, were reduced to calendar images, and goddesses would invariably look like a film-actress. The Indian masses that consumed these calendars never thought of Parvati in some 1960s calendar as an incarnation of Vaijayantimala. The realms of religion and popular medium mixed at a convenient venue of calendar, and not in the sanctum sanctorum of temples. The powers, that religion and popular media wielded, had a limited truce, wherein the iconic content in film was subjected to religion. Thus, the first overhaul, the first makeover after Ravivarma and his successors in business and art, came from films, and it did not undermine religion.
Had the Indians opted for a second overhaul in their images of gods, the way for it might have been two-fold. First, the advertising industry that has become the truest example of 'culture industry' of the day. Even the Bollywood films, in their aesthetics and technique, let alone some of its content, are influenced by the blissful path that advertising has shown. A second way might have been photoshop techniques, atleast morphing your revered elders or beloved kids in the garb of a god. The Indian society, with all its nitty-gritty of religious, social and political values, has not chosen to mend the image of its gods for a second time. The society needs its god-posters, now larger than 'photos of gods' in places stipulated for their functional uses. (Some traditional and a few creative uses, like, to prevent people from committing any 'nuisance')
In the photoshop reality of image-making that we live today, technology is smarter and easier. It can make toddlers dance; it can make gods smile at you. It can even bestow a god with your own face, or any face of your choice. The gods now can be mixed and matched. Image-making is free, while image-viewing dominates you with the values you want. While the magic of photoshop has been playing with iconic itemistations of family photographs, it has not touched the gods, icons in themselves.
Rajendra Kapse paints god-like humans, and through his morphology, creates an icon which is not a 'given' god. The gods in his oils on canvas are not 'true' gods. They can not be recognized within the parameters of Hindu mythology. Instead, the men, women and children in Kapse's 'goddy' paintings are informed by the values bestowed unto us by the realm of advertising. It is human to laugh, to grin, to greed of laddus. The pearls of enlightenment that humans achieve form Advertisements, are the power of persuasion (even Lord Krishna had less of it, when he first tried to avoid the Mahabharata war), and a seductive articulation of one's own confusions. The advertising industry has also shown the way, to many, for presenting their masculine or feminine self in a lovable fashion.
Kapse has conceived the works with titles, and the convergence leads to what a crtitic would call the dimension of sound . You feel the word in its physical utterance, and the painted image leads paraphernalia that would follow the phonetic puns. The titles like Padukanand, Selfishwar, have phonetic puns that are fun in English, Marathi or Hindi. Beyond the fun, they embed the painted image itself with a sound that seems as if, has shaped the image.The possibility of interpretative, analytical content in these titles is deliberately ruptured by vernacular wit. Here, Kapse's position confronts the classical/ traditional Indian belief-system as well as Western rigour.
It is with this localized history, that Kapse's recent body of work presents itself to the global eye.
-- Abhijeet Tamhane,
Mumbai, September 2005