DOING and Nothingness
Doing and nothingness
The quest for perfection, or for ‘being’ God, as Sartre argues in his seminal Being and Nothingness, is a passion of human beings, and yet they reduce Him to his external materiality. The attribution of unattributed is then a prime project, the mainstream.
‘Reading Abstract works of art’ is another such project. Do we see the ‘nothingness’ or do we react to the visual attributes that we see in the work? What is nothingness-emptyness, barrenness? Are these spatial attributes to vaccum and void, fit to be called ‘nothing’? Do we react to the Abstract or abstraction? Do we sense the presence of the absence? Or do we react to what has been done, on the canvas of paper, that we would call a work of art?
Vilas Shinde, Satish Vavare and Sheeetal Gattani make their mark in this challenged territory of meanings, readings and attributions. Each has a specific way of ‘doing’ : Sheetal works with layers of paper and paint, and the remnants of what is not in the work, make the work. Vilas Shinde, with his occasions of paint, leaves unstructured forms that refer to abundance and absence. While Satish Vavare, in his drawings that are not necessarily ‘drawn’, dwells upon emptyness and the void that fills it.
The questions of doing, for the three, must have been those of choice. Between action and patience, beween regulation and anarchy. The works be themselves because of the exercise of these choices. A viewer appreciates the choices and the impact that they have left.
Yet, the question of reading remains. To relate to the works with terms like ‘erotic’, ‘foliage’ or ‘post-industrial’ would reduce the experience to an accepted label. One may construe the ‘naming’ experience as a necessary step for the negation of the named. Thus, the ‘blossom’ or ‘foliage’ would not mean the same. Evading any tangible terms might acknowledge the transcendence of the visual, but would lead to a mute, unconsummate path of unrealized experience.
The choices are now the viewer’s. To me, the dialectic of Indian contemporary abstraction neither demands mute Vipassanas, nor verbose Aartis. Curiousity about the act doing, coupled with an understanding for truth that the painting might keep unsaid, would balance our experience. Had the truth been said out, the painting would seize to be abstract. And if it does not arise any curiousity, it lacks the delights of a painting.
– Abhijeet Tamhane
The quest for perfection, or for ‘being’ God, as Sartre argues in his seminal Being and Nothingness, is a passion of human beings, and yet they reduce Him to his external materiality. The attribution of unattributed is then a prime project, the mainstream.
‘Reading Abstract works of art’ is another such project. Do we see the ‘nothingness’ or do we react to the visual attributes that we see in the work? What is nothingness-emptyness, barrenness? Are these spatial attributes to vaccum and void, fit to be called ‘nothing’? Do we react to the Abstract or abstraction? Do we sense the presence of the absence? Or do we react to what has been done, on the canvas of paper, that we would call a work of art?
Vilas Shinde, Satish Vavare and Sheeetal Gattani make their mark in this challenged territory of meanings, readings and attributions. Each has a specific way of ‘doing’ : Sheetal works with layers of paper and paint, and the remnants of what is not in the work, make the work. Vilas Shinde, with his occasions of paint, leaves unstructured forms that refer to abundance and absence. While Satish Vavare, in his drawings that are not necessarily ‘drawn’, dwells upon emptyness and the void that fills it.
The questions of doing, for the three, must have been those of choice. Between action and patience, beween regulation and anarchy. The works be themselves because of the exercise of these choices. A viewer appreciates the choices and the impact that they have left.
Yet, the question of reading remains. To relate to the works with terms like ‘erotic’, ‘foliage’ or ‘post-industrial’ would reduce the experience to an accepted label. One may construe the ‘naming’ experience as a necessary step for the negation of the named. Thus, the ‘blossom’ or ‘foliage’ would not mean the same. Evading any tangible terms might acknowledge the transcendence of the visual, but would lead to a mute, unconsummate path of unrealized experience.
The choices are now the viewer’s. To me, the dialectic of Indian contemporary abstraction neither demands mute Vipassanas, nor verbose Aartis. Curiousity about the act doing, coupled with an understanding for truth that the painting might keep unsaid, would balance our experience. Had the truth been said out, the painting would seize to be abstract. And if it does not arise any curiousity, it lacks the delights of a painting.
– Abhijeet Tamhane
posted by abhi at 11:41 PM
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