an Art Critic's Studio

It happened in Baroda last summer...

2007-12-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

Nobody of us, some 250 people inside the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) campus, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara (/Baroda), were there on some invitation. We perfectly knew we are here inside examination halls and any concerned authority has not solicited a public presence here.

Nor was the ‘moral battalion’ that consisted of a handful local Vishwa Hindu Parishad / Bharatiya Janta Party activists as well as some ‘Gujarat Police’, was expected here.

Yet, the Moral Battalion was different from the rest of us. We saw the display of works by students of Final year (Bachelor or Masters degrees in disciplines of Visual Art) as part of their examination, and we were here as well-wishers. The moral battalion, in turn, was surely here to obstruct the examination display, and to subjugate the FFA under the Modi-fied politics that justifies a pogrom.

The trouble was first evident at about 3.35 pm on Wednasday, May 9th, 2007; when one Neeraj Jain, a lawyer by profession whose white car boasts that he is an ‘advocate’ and whose white clothes amplify it, entered the campus. A havildar from the Baroda City Police accompanied this man with a ‘Kesariya Tikka’on his forehead (enough to declare him a proud Hindu). Neeraj Jain went straight to Printmaking Department of the FFA, where a 23-year MVA (Masters of Visual Arts) student of the department had chosen to display his examination work. Whie objecting to one of Chandramohan’s works, Neeraj Jain had a short-but- heated exchange of words with the art-student. Neeraj slapped Chandramohan, and made him leave the display hall. Neeraj and his accomplices took Chandramohan downstairs, then out of the Printmaking Department Building and ultimately out of the Faculty Campus.

A group of people with still and video cameras, mike-booms with logos of local TV Channels and a hindi channel ‘Aaj Tak’, were standing in front of Neeraj Jain by 3.45 p.m. and before they asked him any questions, Neeraj Jain was happily informing them of the ‘very peaceful operation’ that he did to save public life. The brief that these reporters got from Neeraj Jain was, ‘A student has willfully molested a cross… this act of disrupting public life should not go unpunished’.

As the TV ‘byte’ was over, Neeraj Jain chose to go to his men and say, ‘ now arrest the Dean… who has given a permission to hang these obscene works? Do they teach this here?’ He also complemented his men by saying : this is perhaps the very first time that we have not actually broken anything, nor have caused any loss of property… we have this as our plus-point. So, we continue to say we will not break of vandalise anything, but will go ahead with our fight against this obscene exhibition.

The oratorial skills that Neeraj Jain showed at the campus were quintessentially marked by his being ‘in-charge of the situation’, and eventually, of the campus that belonged to a State-run academic institution. By the same time, an unnamed terror (it is very hard to name this kind of terror in Gujarat, or you end up with a constitutional functionary’s name!) had its spell over the campus, and as a measure of safety, all the halls (that contained the works of art for the examination display) were closed and locked. Confusion prevailed, and the situation, at least, had to be understood first! Every well-wisher of the FFA present at the campus then, waited eagerly for some collective decision.

By this time, the Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) T. R. Parmar also appeared on the scene. Neeraj, who ruled the roost, talked to Parmar as if he is instructing something. The demands of arresting the Acting Dean (in the absence of the Dean, Deepak Kannal) and confiscating the work objected to, were made by Neeraj Jain again, and the ACP seemed to be trying to comply. Physically, it was impossible to move the huge cross-shaped work, but the Police, under the able guidance of the ACP, were ready with an empty van.

The reporters and cameramen ‘needed some visuals’ for the story. Some of them had photographed Neeraj Jain manhandling Chandramohan, but they seemed to know these images would only ire the powers-that-be in Gujarat. They wanted to photograph the ‘objectionable work’. For this, Neeraj Jain was helpful to the media! He decided to take a press-tour of sorts, inside the department. This BJP man made his intentions clear to the ACP. The latter hesitatingly said yes, and said to the media, ‘you will go there only for two minutes… not more than that’. Interestingly, this was the ONLY sentence that this in-charge of Police Stations under this zone of Baroda spoke directly to the mediapersons.

The press-party, led by (who else than) Neeraj Jain, went inside. Once in, Neeraj also objected to some other works by Chandramohan, and yet other works by ‘some other student’ displayed at a different hall in the same building. The tour lasted for five minutes, and the ACP, who accompanied Neeraj Jain, did not object. After coming out, Neeraj Jain offered to entertain the media… ‘Come for a cup of tea’ he said, and barring some three or four mediapersons who rejected the offer politely, Neeraj Jain left the campus with the reporters and cameramen.

The din in the campus seemed to be over, but everybody knew this is not a single incident… the ‘encounter- murder’ of artistic expression has just happened, only to mark a beginning of an ‘operation’ that would repress the advocates of cultural freedom. The repressive forces would be happy only when they see an all-pervading success and subjugation of their perceived enemy.

The peace-loving artists, art students and some teachers at the faculty had a meeting which took stock of the situation. The meeting made known to everybody that Chandramohan’s arrest was against the legal procedures. The police did not even have a proper warrant, nor did they contact any authority of the Faculty. This meeting was not enough, everybody knew, and the students and well-wishers wanted Chandramohan’s detention to end. Somebody suggested that one can go in front of the concerned police station, and this suggestion was upheld by many. A draft of a complaint against Neeraj Jain’s attempts to disrupt the campus was read out to everybody who signed it.

Apparently, this draft complaint was almost neglected by the police. They refused to register it as a First Information Report (FIR) of an unlawful act, but kept it only as an ‘application’, with a condition that it is written in Gujarati, the State language.

The voluntary gathering of students in front of the Police Station also had a support from some civil rights activists. They tried to mediate, but had little success. Venkat, a friend of Chandramohan whose name did not even appear in the so-called FIR filed by Neeraj Jain, was ‘freed’ by the police, while everybody in the gathering did not understand, why in the first place did the police detain Venkat! Then, it was known that Venkat was a person who had helped Chandramohan with some technical specificities of the so-called ‘objectionable’ work of art.

‘Chandramohan has to be given a bail. We have to follow the legal procedures. So boys and girls, please do not wait here. You can expect your friend (Chandramohan) to be freed when we take him to court tomorrow (on Thursday), and anyways, we are not troubling him… nobody has beaten Chandramohan’… these stunning words came from the Assistant Commissioner of Police, T. R. Parmar. Everybody chose to believe him… for more than one hour before this, some 200 students were sitting in front of the police station. They returned their dwellings, not knowing that Chandramohan’s detention would last longer and longer.

- Abhijeet Tamhane.

The tenants of history : Bombay Art Society and the hysterias that surround Café Samovar

2007-12-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

Borders are often a site of contests that make history. Café Samovar was born 43 year ago on the border, and continues to stay there: on the narrow passage between the Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastusangrahalaya ( previously Prince of Wales Museum) and Jehangir Art Gallery. Displeasures are not as old. They started when the Museum fenced its area with a barbed wire. By that time, the late seventies, Café Samovar was a name associated with film and art personalities. These and more well-wishers of Café Samovar protested the ugly barbed wire fence. The displeasures further grew when Jehangir Art Gallery asked its tenants, including Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar, to vacate the place. People like me, who have been visiting Jehangir, Samovar and Chemould, have chatted over the last decade about this great tenancy dispute.

‘When the Gallery was growing up, when the art scene was nascent, they almost invited us. Now they want us to go! Why?’, was the irate lament you’d hear from Kekoo Gandhy of Chemould or Usha Khanna of Samovar. Chemould gave in, and moved out of the Jehangir premises this month ‘for good’. Even before, the dinghy ‘Terrace Art Gallery’ moved out, when many of us came to know it was there… ‘Yes, for thirty years that Chetan did business with bad art’, somebody would say, and we all laughed and smoked. We all knew Chemould or Samovar could not be equated with Terrace Gallery, and when Chemould decided to move out, most of us seemed to know what loss it was to the Jehangir building, the Kala Ghoda locale. One was also happy, anyways, that the Chemould shifted to a much larger, contemporary space at Prescott Road.

Samovar now fights the lone battle of preserving the tenancy. The issue is already in court, and is sub-judice. To put things straight, the land belongs to Government of Maharashtra and who gave the occupancy rights to Prince of Wales Museum. Jehangir Art Gallery is a tenant of the Museum, and Samovar a sub-tenant. The Bombay Art Society has its very small office in the Jehangir premises, but the legislation about the inception of Jehangir Art Gallery makes special arrangements for the Society. The same legislation also states that the Society will use the Jehangir Art Gallery space for its annual exhibitions.

Things have changed since the legislations were passed some 54 years ago. Given the government’s understanding of cultural agenda that time, the Bombay Art Society under the leadership of (then young) people like K. K. Hebbar was the only trustworthy agency of change and betterment in visual art scene of the city.

Yet, last fortnight, the Bombay Art Society members had a public gathering that proclaimed ‘Samovar must vacate the space’. ‘Samovar started at a time when there was no restaurants and eating joints nearby. Now there are kiosks around the Gallery that feed the struggling artists. If Usha Khanna of Samovar boasts of having fed the stugglers way back in the 1970s, I would like to ask why are todays’ strugglers away from Café Samovar? What keeps only celebrities stand up for the Café?’ asked the speakers to a gathering of about 250 people, while the Bombay Art Society Secretary Gayatri Mehta declared, ‘the historical task of Café Samovar is over now. There is no point in still using the same space for a restaurant’. These protestors against Samovar had a so-called positive agenda: they wanted the Samovar space reclaimed for art exhibitions.

The same logic of ‘the end of historical task’ can fit the Bombay Art Society itself! The Society is no longer representative of the ‘talents in art’, nor does it command an undisputed trust in the art fraternity. To be sure, the Society cannot be stamped as retrograde, but it has, been unable to keep pace with the newer definitions of art. Issues of propriety, of ‘who asks whom to go and in what pitch’ assume an even greater importance when the matter is under the consideration of a court of law. The public meeting devised by the Society in mid-August 2007 can, at best, be called a display of hysteria. The hysteria stems from the fear of loosing one’s voice in the changing situation.

The situation changed because somebody toiled to do so. It was undoubtedly Café Samovar that valued the presence of eminent personalities. It did not discourage the ‘struggling artist’, until such artists could hardly cope with a rate-card that is not cheap by the city standards and leaves a chance only to order for an apparently lousy ‘ready tea’ to the struggling artist. Yet, Café Samovar now attracts a varied clientele that includes tourists and NRIs, lawyers and chartered accountants, the laptop-savvy yuppies and yes, some young artists and critics, too.

It became the talk of the metropolis on August 6, when some ‘noted personalities from art, media and cultural fraternity’ (read : celebrities) met the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to save the tenancy of Café Samovar, even as the tenancy dispute is sub judice. Some noted personalities went to the extent of demanding a ‘Heritage Status’ for the Café from the state government, which in its rightful capacity has duly refused to do so. The celebrities - CM meeting was so well covered by the media that the Bombay Art Society action may be seen rather as a reaction to it. The issues of ego between the Society and the Café are there, but they can be sorted out with a proper dialogue. In fact, such a dialogue has started at the informal levels. September 2007 will go further with the process. This is the juncture when people like the octogenarian Kekoo Gandhy, who happens to be a patron of Bombay Art Society, is not averse to the idea of being a negotiator between the two sides, but this remains his wish.

The court judgments notwithstanding, the hysteria is about getting a chunk out of the history. Any history of the ‘Kala Ghoda Art District’ of Mumbai would have a place for the Bombay Art Society, Jehangir Art Gallery, Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar (in chronological order). Nobody ever owns history. At present, it seems as if all these institutions that ploughed Kala Ghoda to be an Art District, are fighting it out for their place and want to reap from history here and now. These tenants of history vie for a self-contained future. And, it seems, nothing is going to stop them doing that.

- Abhijeet Tamhane

To Claim the space…

2007-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Vanita Gupta’s works always have a newer invitation, an intrigue that deserves to be taken along. It was some years back that she abandoned paint at once, and entered the territory of building her works with paper, glue and some fine cloth pieces. From there, she comes back to ‘Acrylic on Canvas’ works, recently (September- November 2006) shown in Singapore, New Delhi and Mumbai. The recent work has retained Vanita’s intense experiences in charting her own territories.

True, the recent work resembled Zen calligraphy at the first, rather hasty sight. One could even have a second, more deliberate look at the works as pieces of abstract calligraphy, done with a ‘Zen mind’: a mind that ‘gains nothing other than the realization that there is nothing to gain, and is thus more than ever in the world’[i].

So, what happens next? A debate, perhaps, between painting and calligraphy? Or, further, a complacent deception that inhabits our so-called ‘appreciation’? I would like to take a brief tour to the areas of my discontent with such complacency.

If one equates Vanita’s work to the pains and pleasures of Calligraphy, it will necessarily draw oneself to observe the black ‘stroke’ on Vanita’s milky white canvas, its solitary existence and its balanced positioning. Lauding Vanita’s effort as Zen, one can firmly point at the purity of experience, the essence of ‘the stroke’ that her paintings transcend.

Or, without overt references to Zen or Calligraphy, one might choose to look at these works as paintings, would expect the joys and highs of seeing a good painting and, most often, be fulfilled with the joys! From this position, one would are the pains and pleasures of Composition in Vanita’s work. The series of artistic decisions that she must have experience while making the work would haunt us while we, as viewers, are destined to cherish the ‘moment’ in her work. The entrapment of the moment through a series of moments would draw us to laud her works in words like ‘abstract in its most severe form’[ii].

Is there a third way? Can a viewer take some other ways of seeing, to match with Vanita’s effort to deal away with ‘habit, convenience and security’[iii] ? How far would the complacency with ‘Zen/Calligraphy’ set of our observations or ‘Composition/painting/ abstract’ schema be able to breathe with a Vanita Gupta work? If a viewer is sure, s/he gets some ‘echantment’ from the work? Can s/he spell enchantment?

I would suggest recourse to Vanita Gupta’s work as an art-historical critique. History of abstraction would give us references to Adolf Gottlieb’s brushwork or Robert Motherwell’s action painting in the 1960s, as formally relevant to her work. While Vanita, through her work, takes a position that goes far ahead of these reactions to the canonical western art history. Her work does not celebrate the existence of ‘painting’, as so-called ‘post-painterly abstractionists’ or ‘abstract expressionists’ seem to have done. Instead, her works strongly advocate an indulgence in acts like peeling or erasing the paint off canvas, not to mention the intended blankness of the canvas. These decisions make posit her work with a critique of what others did or do.

For sure, Vanita has not stopped charting territories of her own. The territories are opening up! One remembers her work in the late 1990s when she used folded paper, and left much for the viewer’s intrigue about what the inside of those folds would be like. In early 2000s, she continued her approach without resorting to folds. Her work now shows a strategy for claiming the space without actually using it! The nothingness and the wholeness, the Shunya and the Poorna seem to be revered in all her approaches, while her relation to these values has grown over time.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane.

[i] Fung Yu Lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton1952 , quoted in http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/lieberman/zen.html.
[ii] Deeksha Nath, Exhibition Catalogue for Vanita Gupta, Gallery Threshold, 2006. The observation further goes: ‘ By not beginning with a form ofreference or allowing the viewer to hinge the painting on the visual and material world, through her paintings Vanita goes to the heart of aesthetic experience, pure intuitive reaction’.
[iii] Vanita Gupta, an excerpt from her forthcoming Hindi novel ‘Anshi’, quoted in Exhibition Catalogue for Vanita Gupta, Pundole Art Gallery, 2006.

Why should LaVA spread?

2007-12-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

LaVA [Laboratory of Visual Arts] , a show that has traveled five cities in India (so far,) spread reactions everywhere. This huge installation worked like Bose Krishnammachary's critique of the existing (or non-existent) level of contemporary knowledge that India's art institutions have to offer. The show was completely interactive and had so much of choice element that, one's experience at the show would surely differ from others'. All the Books, all DVDs here were accessible, and your experience depended on what you choose to access. Nevertheless, the show had some visual content that annotated the show. The bookracks, the big and small video-screen tables and the walls, all were designed by Bose. While the furniture pieces were rendered in attractive shapes and colour, they looked casual enough to encourage you for sniffing out all your apprehensions for those gloomy grey, dusky steel or dull wooden book storages. Bose's bookracks were inviting. These shelves had an appeal of the aesthetic positions that Bose propones through his abstract paintings.

This ‘Laboratory’ was completely designed for the user. It was not only the hardware that suited as a user interface, but the Books and catalogues, Magazines and monographs, DVDs and CDs… i.e., the software, took into account the different tastes and preference areas. The printed resources engulfed almost everything under the visual art umbrella: contemporary visual art from India, US, Europe and Asia, modern and post-modern Art since 1940s, folk art, books about film, fashion, design, photography. There were books with biographical, polemical as well as educational overtones, studies that referred to surveys and details, books that you would like to share with your friends and students, or some books that you would prefer to savor in your privacy. An equal diversity of cinematographic resources awaited your time. Films ranged from Avant Garde to popular Bollywood.
The software and hardware, both served as entry points to a worldview, a positivist, optimistic attitude toward artistic expressions. Modes might be different, it told the user, but the goal for a more livable world is unequivocal. LaVA perpetuated Bose’s inclinations in more than one ways. His belief in coexistence of varying positions and different levels of understanding, that was amply proved by his curatorial initiatives like Bombay Boys, Double Enders et al, reflected in his choice of films and books. Also, the inherent rhetoric of personal-universal choice that assumes centrality when Bose curates, worked at LaVA. Bose assumed the position of a global citizen while he provided the ‘equipment’ at this laboratory and the place, while you were in it, demanded the same position from you.

The kind of response LaVA reaped, primarily underlined the absence of institutional framework to provide a site of such a wide-ranging contemporary knowledge. Then, it also provided some answers for a more responsible attitude to knowledge, atleast under laboratory conditions.

LaVA was a utopian space that chose to remain un-institutional. It happily dealt away with the institutional assumptions of perpetual existence. Instead, it disappeared when everybody wanted to visit it once again! Presicely by its ephemerality, LaVA attained the heights of a work of art. It raised spirits, it made you dream, it helped you think, but it refused the notion of serving you and being useful to you.

- Abhijeet Tamhane.

Some Notes on Political Art

2007-09-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Some Notes on Political Art
by "Caoimhghin O Croidheain" caoimhghin@yahoo.com
...
What is political art? What makes art political?
It is very difficult to define political art. Views onwhat makes art political can range from the idea thatall art is political (i.e. it either implicitlysupports or explicitly opposes the status quo) topointing out, for example, the obviously politicalmurals on walls around Belfast. As a way of narrowingthe former and broadening the latter I suggest here aview of political art that uses three categories:Portrayal, Promotion, or Projection.

Portrayal

In the first category ‘Portrayal’ covers art that says‘this is what happens if, is happening now or happenedin the past’. This kind of art describes events orsituations that people find themselves in as a resultof social or political structures. Any politicalperspective is implicit in the art but is alsofree-floating. For example, a painting of a white manwhipping black slaves describes a particular situationwhere the black man may say, ‘Yes! That is how we aretreated!’ yet the slave-owner may say, ‘Yes! That isthe way to treat them!’ Thus both sides can see theconfirmation of their point of view in the work ofart.

For the slaves, the ultimate effect of such art may bepositive or negative. In a positive sense it maycreate group awareness and solidarity, or, in anegative sense, it could also consolidate inertia, afeeling that nothing can be done to change thesituation. The art styles or movements of Realism,Social Realism and Naturalism could fit into thecategory of ‘Portrayal’.

Promotion

In the second category of ‘Promotion’ ways and meanstowards the resolution of the problem are presented.That is, a particular aspect of an event ishighlighted over other aspects. This aspect wouldconcentrate on the people or groups who are activelystruggling to change the situation in which they findthemselves. Thus one view of an event, that which would encourageothers or strengthen an activism already present, ispromoted over images of the event that may have theopposite effect. In this case, the politics ofrepresentation takes precedence over therepresentation of politics. Unlike ‘Portrayal’, this type of art is harder tomanipulate from an opposing point of view. Thepolitics is generally explicit and can have a positiveinspirational effect. The art styles or movements ofSocialist Realism and ‘Political Art’ (e.g. murals,banners, posters etc.) and Social Realism to a certainextent could fit into the category of ‘Promotion’.

Projection

In the third and last category ‘Projection’ refers toart that takes disparate elements and then recombinesthem to form a new image. It is an art which says‘This is what could happen or could be if ...’. Artstyles or movements such as Surrealism, collage,utopian or visionary images would fit into thiscategory. Such speculative art can have a positiveeffect of providing inspiration by suggesting ideasthat are outside one’s usual ways of thinking, and canbe implicitly or explicitly political.
For example, a picture showing the Rock of Cashel(ancient fortress in Co. Tipperary, Ireland) with aJapanese Shinkansen bullet train speeding by may be ajarring conjunction of images but suggests thepossibility of a super fast transport system inIreland. Therefore it has social and economicimplications for the Irish State which in turn makesit implicitly political.
However, like in the first category Portrayal,opposing political viewpoints can claim this image fortheir vision of the future. The same scene would beexplicitly political though, if, for example, ‘Workers of the world unite’ was written on the sideof the Shinkansen.
Thus it can be seen from the above categories that therepresentation of particular actions or the inclusionof particular types of text ties an image down to anexplicitly political perspective. The past, presentand future, with some overlapping, are also covered inthis way of seeing or defining political art.
.....
Further to my previous post on political art, anothercomment of John's struck me:
'Something about the role of the artist ininterpreting rather than documenting, perhaps?'

While I am taking photos am I documenting orinterpreting? I feel that I am doing both at the sametime. I am documenting in the sense that the image isa representation of a real event yet I am alsointerpreting in that what I choose to photograph[particular objects and places in time; particularconjunctions of objects] is highly interpretative. Howdo I separate out the two? Can I ever have control ofthe content? If a painting includes the latestMercedes car as a symbol of Ireland's burgeoningcapitalism, how do I know that a potential buyer isinterested in buying it because it represents his/herworld outlook and feelings of pride in Ireland'sburgeoning capitalism? How does the viewer know if I,the artist, included it as a type of criticism? MaybeI am not being critical but delighted with this newIreland. Does that mean that ultimately I can onlyreflect what is out there and with the passing of timethe image can be seen in its true context? [supposingof course that time is kind to my socio/politicaloutlook]. More and more I feel that I can onlyrepresent what is out there.
Everything I represent is a symbol of the now whichwill resonate differently with different people. Yetmaybe the fact of its representation makes itsexistence inescapable which is itself a form ofpolitical statement. That car did exist, and it couldonly exist because of a particular socio/politicalsituation pertaining in that society at that time.

...
I think that John is right when he says:
'But it is much harder, it seems to me,for art to be able to offer social critique - thatis, criticisms of the systems of social power andresultant structured social inequalities. Perhaps thisis due to this more important task simply being amore difficult thing to do; perhaps it is a symptom of artistic expression itself'

As an artist I have been trying to deal with thisproblem/issue for some years now. Previously I dealtwith it by offering positive images of what could bedone [as opposed to being 'agin capitalism'] byportraying people 'producing' rather than 'consuming'[eg playing music, doing traditional dance,demonstrating etc]. Then I worked on historical imagesof same and incorporated radical political leaders inIrish history. But I felt that this was becoming verylimited. I wanted to take control of the source of theimages too. It struck me that politics was all aroundme and I just had to go and find it. I went intoDublin city with my camera and looked around. Inoticed contrasts between the historical statues andtheir surroundings. I noticed Brinks vans coming outof shopping streets as shoppers went in. I saw the newAsian, African, and Russian shops on Moore streetwhich had been the domain of Irish working classstreet sellers. I took many fotos and worked on a newseries of paintings which I called 'Dublin: A City ofContrasts'. [see http://gaelart.net/].
I also tried to set out why it is hard for 'art to beable to offer social critique - that is, criticisms ofthe systems of social power and resultant structuredsocial inequalities' which I reproduce below. [It canalso be read with relevant illustrations on my artsite as well as notes on the Dublin series]

http://artcomments.blogspot.com/

2007-09-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Africa Pavilion, 'Check List Luanda Pop', was an interesting exhibition of work from some artists originating from Africa - and this is my biggest criticism of it: there were pieces therein by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as well.

The New York Times: HOLLAND COTTER on DOCUMENTA

2007-07-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Asking Serious Questions in a Very Quiet Voice
The format of the Biennale as a profusion of national pavilions is set; Münster is medium-specific. Documenta has no such restrictions. It’s a contemporary show, but it can encompass all sorts of material. This year’s edition includes 16th-century Islamic calligraphy, Central Asian embroidery and a stuffed giraffe.
It can also take any shape a curator wants to give it. Traditionally the show has been the brainchild of a single person. There are two this time: Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, a husband-and-wife team, who issued the kind of airy-weighty preview teasers that left you ready to hate what was to come. (European “serious” often reads as pretentious to an American ear. It’s a cultural thing.)
In any case, the show sustains its reputation for being an idiosyncratic, concept-driven affair. You go to glamorous, sun-splashed Venice to party, gaze and graze; you come to gray, pleasureless Kassel to think.
Documenta 12 asks us to do a lot of thinking: about mortality, about the obsolescence of modernity, about how to live an ethical life through art. But it advances its questions quietly, and a bit too quietly: the resulting low visual impact is a major flaw. The show is every bit as socially engaged as its video-heavy 2002 predecessor, but packages its politics in a different way, in unmonumental objects and installations by undersung, not to say unknown, artists.
Many art-world insiders didn’t have a clue in advance who had been picked for the show. And after the list was announced, they basically still didn’t know, so unfamiliar were many of the names. Apart from Gerhard Richter, with a small 1977 portrait; Agnes Martin, with one painting; and the California-based John McCracken, there are relatively few Euro-American A-list figures in sight.
This is far and away the most interesting feature of Documenta 12. By being almost perversely esoteric, at least by Western market standards, it takes the usual “international” roundup in another direction, away from the New York-London-Berlin trade route. In the process it delivers something approximating a truly global array.
With around 150 participants, the roster is fairly modest in size, but its geographic range stretches from the Canadian Arctic (with the Inuit painter Annie Pootoogook) to Southeast Asia (with the Singapore-born Simryn Gill, who now lives in Australia). It includes several artists from India and more than a dozen from Africa, not all of them predictable choices, as they are this year in Venice.
Latin America and Eastern Europe, and in particular the avant-garde movements there after World War II, have a significant presence in a show that defines “contemporary” as a state of mind rather than as a date, and that at least makes a gesture toward acknowledging modernity as an intercultural phenomenon, not an export from the West.
All this is in principle good. Also good is the suggestion of an awareness that “unknown” is a relative term. The Beijing-based Conceptualist Ai Weiwei may not ring corporate bells in New York, but he is a figure of Warholian celebrity in China and a major force in that country’s neocapitalist vanguard culture.
As if to make the point that that culture will eventually be our culture too, Mr. Ai intends to take 1,001 Chinese visitors to Kassel before the show closes on Sept. 23. Antique Qing dynasty chairs (which Mr. Ai collects) are spread throughout the Aue-Pavilion, the largest of Documenta’s five exhibition sites, awaiting their arrival.
As for the pavilion itself, designed by the Paris architectural firm Lacaton & Vassal, it’s a catastrophe, and one of the main reasons the whole business comes across as visually thin and disjointed. Press materials call the chain of boxy containers the Crystal Palace. But with its undivided space, brown concrete floors and cheesy blackout curtains, it resembles a run-on storage shed, and nothing looks good in it.
A second first-time location, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, is more inviting. An 18th-century palace high on a hill over the city, it offers formal gardens, panoramic views and an enchanting approach by public tram through woods and fields. It also houses an impressive fine-art collection that makes it an apt setting for Documenta’s selection of Islamic calligraphy and miniatures.
Culturally, the presence of such works has symbolic meaning for a German city with a large Muslim immigrant population. Aesthetically, the linear patterns of the written scripts, and the stories of conflict and devotion that the miniatures tell, correspond, however indirectly, to similar elements in contemporary work.
You can see the correspondence most clearly in an installation at a third building, the Neue Galerie. There, 1,954 geometric collages inscribed with numbers by the Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) hang within sight of a delicate, grid-based painting by Agnes Martin from a decade later. And between the two comes a sublime ensemble of linear drawings from the 1970s by the Pakistan-born Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90), accompanied by a few of Ms. Mohamedi’s tiny, handwritten notebooks.
These three women lived thousands of miles apart and were almost certainly unfamiliar with one another’s work, yet they shared a visual language that had very different meanings for each. It is worth noting that more than half the artists in Documenta 12 are women, most of them alive, well and hard at work. Of the 15 artists from the United States, 11 are women, which must set some kind of record for an establishment survey. When is somebody going to write the history of modern art as the shared history it is, with men and women equal participants?
No sharing is without a political dimension. This idea is spelled right out at the Fridericianum Museum, the main Documenta site in the center of Kassel, in a magnetic installation of archival materials. They document the 1960s work of the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale and the activist collective called Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, with which she was associated.
In the same gallery are photographs of a provocative 1979 public performance piece by Sanja Ivekovic, who simulated masturbation on the balcony of her apartment in Belgrade as a parade honoring President Tito marched through the street below. (She was spotted by the police and told to cease and desist.) They are joined by images of disruptive public performances by Jiri Kovanda in Prague and intimately private ones by Ion Grigorescu in Bucharest. And in an adjoining room there are periodic live performances by 12 dancers of a 1971 Trisha Brown piece to a Grateful Dead song. Together they send a message about art as a way of performing politics, a way for the individual to engage with a larger culture and with history.
Nor is such connecting a thing of the past. The show has its share of the now fashionable kiosks inviting viewers to plop down on pillows, watch videos together and, presumably, chat about what they see. A lot less tired-looking, though, is a film project by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski that hints at what such interactions can bring.
For the film, titled “Them” and installed at the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, a youth center some distance from downtown Kassel, Mr. Zmijewski asked four groups of Polish citizens, from conservative Roman Catholics to radical Marxists, to meet and debate their political convictions in the form of a communally executed paint-and-paper mural.
The exchanges started light: an older woman paints a church; a younger one cuts through the paper to open its doors. Nice touch, everyone agrees. But pretty soon the painting, cutting and collaging grow vehement, with repeated defacings and erasings matched by verbal confrontations until, at the end, the mural is trashed. The result is an acting out of Joseph Beuys’s famous statement that “everyone is an artist” and an example of political art that further divides rather than unites people, leaving them more mutually hostile than ever.
Art and politics take more conventional forms in paintings by Juan Davila and Kerry James Marshall, two of several artists who reappear throughout the show. (Mr. McCracken, Zoe Leonard, Lee Lozano (1930-99), Gerwald Rocknenschaub and Mira Schendel are others.) Mr. Davila, born in Chile and now living in Australia, produces cryptically allegorical visions of a world at the end of its moral tether. Mr. Marshall, born in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era, addresses the complicated and compromised position of African-Americans today in pictures of direct but subtle force. In a show intent on destabilizing stardom, he comes through as a star.
There are others. The Indian collagist C. K. Rajan; the Beninese sculptor Romuald Hazoumé; Jo Spence (1932-94), documenting her furious battle with cancer; Cosima von Bonin, with her blank, goofy, templelike installation; Atul Dodiya, with an illustrated book of poetry wrapping around a room; Bela Kolarova, with jewel-like assemblages from the 1960s; Florian Pumhosl, with his spare evocation of utopian painting of the past; Charlotte Posenenske (1930-85), with sculptures shaped like heating ducts; Ms. Leonard, with dozens of photographs of shop window displays and sidewalk sales, evidence of how cultural worlds at once come together and dissolve before our eyes.
None of these artists, except for Mr. Hazoumé, with a full-size boat made of plastic fuel canisters, does large-scale, theatrically punchy work. (And some of the most elaborate pieces, like James Coleman’s film “Retake With Evidence,” were terrible.) But then, most of the art seems to have been selected precisely not to stand out, but to mesh with everything else, to subordinate individual effects to a never-quite-defined whole, to make a large show that feels like a small show, a group show that comes across as a single piece.
This curatorial ideal was distilled in an installation by Ms. Carnevale. Filling a gallery, it includes sheets of ripped plastic tacked to the wall; a salon-style hanging of photographs of found abstract patterns; videos that allude, in a funny, offhanded way, to the war in Iraq; and film projectors that project only light.
It’s obvious that something is going on here, but what? There were no instructions, no statements, no polemics, no signature style. You wouldn’t know you were looking at the work of a single artist unless you asked. Visitors wandered into the gallery, scoped out the situation and looked confused. Most moved on fairly quickly; a few settled down to see what, if anything, would happen.
That’s the dynamic of Documenta 12 as a whole. Does it work? In the end, no. The first time through, its combination of new names and forms generates an excitement of discovery. It’s so great not to see everyone you’ve seen everywhere else. On a return visit the surprise has diminished, and the installation starts to look too porous; the curatorial ideas too obvious, pedantic and confining; the work too small, private, underdone, done-before.
I felt no desire to make a third visit (though I did), particularly to the deeply depressing Crystal Palace. And yet I came away with something that lasted: an impression that I’d never seen an exhibition quite like this before, a big, important show that offered so clear an alternative to bigness, that redefined importance in so dramatic a way. That may not be nearly enough for so prestigious an event, but if you think about it, it’s a lot.

Art market hot, but nobody knows what's 'in'

2007-07-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post

Want to know what kind of current art sells best? Roll the dice. Want to know what art curators like? Roll them again. In today's art world, there are as many directions as artists, and no one wants to pick among them. The market has always liked a one-of-each approach. Now everyone's bought into it.

At least that's how things look at this rare moment of stock-taking in contemporary art. For the next few months, the 52nd Venice Biennale, the world's oldest roundup of current creativity, is coinciding with the giant Documenta festival, a prestigious digest of the field that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. They're joined by the once-a-decade Sculpture Projects, a survey of public art that fills the streets and squares and oddest corners of Muenster, a medieval town a few hours north of Kassel.

In an art market that is by far the hottest ever, here's the wild range of recent work that's selling well:

$11.3 million spent on a stylish oil painting of a white canoe on a lake, by Scottish artist Peter Doig, who has been called a "quietly influential" figure. Jasper Johns is the only living artist who has ever sold for more.

$3.4 million for a giant photo of a dollar store by German artist Andreas Gursky. It is the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

$2.7 million for an installation of big spheres made of stuffed toys alongside wall-size versions of a stick-on room deodorizer, by California conceptualist Mike Kelley.

Notice the artistic principle that's governing what sells: The principle is that there's no longer any principle. The market plunks as happily for one kind of work as for its opposite.

Now look at the world's most important surveys of contemporary art this summer in Europe. Same non-principle applies.

In both buying and curating, diversification is preferred to investing deeply in one notion of what matters most in art right now. Trying to take stock of this moment in contemporary art is like doing inventory at Amazon.com: There's something for everyone, times 10 - even quite a bit that's very good - but little sense that some things matter more than others.

The art world's dominant direction is a random scattering. At the Venice Biennale, veteran curator Robert Storr has put the latest abstractions from German master Gerhard Richter near the folk-art figuration of Cheri Samba, a Congolese street artist. Both are around the corner from a huge, Japanimated video of a doll's house being flooded, which is not far from a sober installation of ephemera and photographs that document the life of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian activist and intellectual assassinated by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972.

At Documenta, curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack are giving big play to a slew of highly polished minimal sculptures by John McCracken, a 72-year-old American whose career is in revival. But the curators are equally committed, apparently, to a bevy of extra-sloppy, ugly-is-beautiful sex-themed allegories by Australian painter Juan Davila, born in Chile in 1946. You're likely to run into works by either artist sitting near a political video, a solemn black-and-white photo or even an antique Oriental rug.

People used to complain that for any work to have a chance, it had to support the narrow doctrines of the scene's most powerful arbiters. No danger of that today. The doctrines seem so meek, almost every kind of art gets equal attention. Maybe this new, noncommittal attitude is an offshoot of the strange fact that, despite all those broken auction records, no one's claiming that many of the latest pricey works will go on to matter deeply in the history of art.

Western society is bound up in the notion of consumer choice. It's as though the market's out-of-control success has made it the model that applies across the board in art.

According to old ways of thinking, the market was supposed to follow where the top end of the art world led, investing in the few artists picked out as important by experts with no money at stake. Today, it's the market that leads. It scatters its dollars here and there, then watches as the rest of us art lovers scamper to see where they have landed. Or at very least, the market watches as others imitate its scattershot approach.

Of course, any decent market is supposed to pay attention only to the price tags it can attach to things, not to the things themselves. It should be an equal-opportunity buyer and seller. What's strange about the current state of the art world is that the market's artistic laissez-faire has spread beyond the salesroom. It's as though curators, too, don't want to commit to where the market - in their case, the market for ideas - ought to be heading.

They put out a pile of varied stuff and hope to find takers for at least some part of it. Triumphant market principles - that variety is good for business; that what sells well is good - seem to take over when there are no bold artistic principles to rival them.

A tour through Documenta or the Biennale feels like a stroll in New York's crowded gallery districts. Some of the artists' names may be different. (Not for long; the galleries will soon pick up the unknowns.) But there's the same confounding range of suggestions for what should count as good.

At Documenta, for instance, curators are pushing the latest sculptures by McCracken - tall pillars or slabs, in slick lacquer or polished bronze, with the simplest of cubic geometries. But if you don't like that version of McCracken - or his 1960s pieces that the new work derives from - why not try another one?

For a little while in the 1970s McCracken made messy, brightly colored mandala paintings that reversed the fundamental principles of the glossy work he'd done before. Those are in Documenta, too, and just as well liked by its curators, apparently, as the rigorous sculptures that stand as their antithesis. Or as the work of radical Argentine conceptualist Graciela Carnevale, who invited unsuspecting art lovers to an opening in 1968, then locked them in the gallery to see how they'd break out. That moment is preserved in photographs that pop up more than once across the Kassel show.

In Venice, a video of a boy kicking a rubber skull in front of the bombed-out former headquarters of the Serbian army gets the same weight as the daily figurative doodles of a painter from Argentina, which don't seem to matter any more - or less - than the latest batch of two-tone abstractions from the brush of an 84-year-old Ellsworth Kelly. There's a kind of leveling effect that makes even the very best, most innovative work feel like just another option some artist is trying on for size. The funny thing is, this lack of focus represents a kind of trend, or at least a moment in the history of art that's different from the moments that have come before. There's an obsession with the past, given the lack of dedication to any potent view of what we need today; a new focus on good looks, given how well the market has rewarded work that doesn't even try to be profound; a last-ditch attempt, maybe, to fight the market with cerebral art that's barely even there. Yet all these feel more like the result of our confusion than promising ways out of it.

Publication date: 07-10-2007

DOING and Nothingness

2006-04-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

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

Marriage Merchandise: a post-www promo

2006-03-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

Marriage Merchandise: a post-www promo

Sherbagh cream, Baul Balm, Taj Honey, Gateway Body Paint , Bhopal Hamam Massage Oil , Chirapunjee Mist Oil, Sindoori love… were some of the 'products' on display at Mumbai's Gallery Chemould through December. The fantastic display was a 'promotional effort' by the website, www.arrangeurownmarriage.com, the people who gave you freedom to be married and (yet) be cool!
Many said the show was fun! Perhaps they sensed the fun poked precisely at them…
Hande's show was full of subtle satire. Had it not been the slightly exaggerated, the website and the gallery 'presentation' were sure to look like a real advert.
On her website, Hande is up with the 'merchandise'
The self-implicating satire posed as if one is really selling erotic products, inviting people to share their private experiences of an arranged marriage, and thus endeavoured to support the institution of arranged marriages. What better time could it have been for this pose, that today? There was a time when arranged marriages were considered unromantic (and the arts : literature, films, theatre, supported this belief), but now when everybody knows how to 'manage' her/his life, and there is a six-sigma for every act and chicken soup for every soul, it really doesn't matter whether you have a 'love-marriage' or an 'arranged marriage', ain't it? Moreover, with the advent of WWW, and numerous 'matrimonial websites' that give a dot-com ease to find your mate, the 'self arranged' marriages are here to stay…
Hand skillfully communicated these hidden notes using PR-copywriting language. The wall texts with her works read like promo-plans first, and then at some point the reader-viewer got the exaggeration. Once the reader cracks this 'atishayokti' (exaggeration) and at times, apanhuti (cryptic allegory) code, the communication was received! The text was accompanied by sculptural, photo-based, painted, and scrapbook visuals. Of course, in the same cryptic vein as text, these works took form of 'readily-framed miniature paintings for your bedroom', ' product display', 'poster'… the visual grammar that dominates in the world that needs 'info', was subverted here to reclaim the realm of art.
Thus, on the walls, the exotically-shaped bottles supposedly containing erotic anointments (sher bagh balm et al), that would look like a product display, called for a second look when the viewer sensed they are in solid glass. The 'bottles' had no cavity, and were not bottles! Every honeymoon destination 'promo' picture (that went with the work that called the 'users' to know what natural element they belong to, according to their zodiac sign) made wicked fun of the typical photo-poses of the newly-weds in their honeymoon-trip albums. These posy images were painted over the photos. These photo-based works had some digital perversions, too. And then, they also had some purposeless 'folk-art' that was brutally reduced to embellishments.
These visual and textual subversions addressed issues that are both global and local. It surely pinpointed the longing for a life partner in a caste-and gotra-bound Indian situation, the new-found consciousness toward achieving erotic nirvana that belongs to post- www India, and the spa-savvy, ayurveda- freak culture that is (we are always told,) 'fast becoming global'.
Hande insists that her work is not complete, and her project 'arrangeurownmarriage' will go on, with more interactive features. The problem that such a satirical work would face is that those who 'interact' might lack the same purposeful reason to make fun of themselves! Otherwise, if an artist chooses who interacts and who does not, the work looses its purpose, ending up in a coterie. Let us hope Hande evades this trap.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane.

2005-10-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-02-08T11:09:00.000-08:00

List of Mumbai's Art Galleries
Walk/Drive A : Flora Fountain, Kala Ghoda, Lion Gate, Regal Circle, Colaba Causway, Cuffe Parade, Nariman Point.

Pundole Art Gallery : 22841837
369. DN Road, Flora Fountain (hutatma Chowk), Adjacent to American Dryfruit Store

Jehangir Art Gallery : 22048212 (Anil, Arvind)
Kala Ghoda Circle (now Netji Subhash Chowk)opp. Elphinstonne College, MG Road.

Gallery Chemould :22833640 ( Mr. Ashley, Ms Oli)
First Floor of Jehangir Art Gallery, opp. Elphinstonne College, MG Road. (Chemould will get bigger shortly, at a new space in CST/ Fort area.

Museum Contemporary Gallery : 22844484
Behind Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum (Formerly Prince of Wales Museum), Maxmuller Bhavan, K. Dubhash Marg (rampart Row), next to Jehangir Art Gallery.

Bodhi Art Gallery : 6610 0124
28, K. Dubash Marg, I. T. T. S. House, Kalaghoda. Opposite 'Museum Contemporary Gallery'<

Artists' Centre : 22845939
1st Floor, Ador House, 6, K. Dubhash Marg (Rampart Row), Near Jehangir Art Gallery and Behind Prince Of Wales Museum, Kala Ghoda.

Haceinda Art Gallery : 22837232 (Puneeta)
Great Western Building, Ground Floor, next to Artists' Centre, Kala Ghoda.

Gallery Beyond : 22837345 (prema)
130/132, 1st floor, Great Western Building, Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg, Opposite Lions Gate,shahid Bhagat Singh Marg.

National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) : 22881969
Cowasjee Jehangir Public Hall, Opp. Regal Cinema and Opp. Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum (Formerly Prince of Wales Museum), MG Road. Regal Cinema Circle (Shyamaprasad Mukherjee Chowk)

Sakshi Gallery : 66103424
Tanna House, Ground Floor, 11-A, Nathalal Parekh Marg (Woodhouse Road), Colaba.

the Guild : 22848260 (Preeti)
28 B, Pipewalla Building, 58/70 Shahid Bhagatsigh Marg (colab causway),Opp. Camy Wafers, Colaba.

Jamaat : 22162957 (Pravina Mecklai)
40, Seventh Floor, Shirin South, Shahid Bhagatsigh Marg (colab causway), near Post office, Colaba.

Ashish Balram Nagpal's Gallery : 56385472
No.#7, the Courtyard, SP Centre, Behind Radio Club, Next to Athena, 41/44, Minoo Desai Marg, Colaba.

Gallry 7 : 22183996 (Chandra Doshi)
21, Old Cuffe parade Road, next to Atur Terraces, (before Hotel Taj President), colaba.

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery : 22023626 (Sandeep Prabhakar)
Ground Floor, Bajaj Bhavan, opp. CR-2 (inox) Nariman Point.

Piramal Gallery / Centre for Photogrphy as an Art Form (CPA) : 22029483
National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Complex, Experimental Theatre Block, First Floor, Nariman Point- NCPA.

Jehangir Nicholson Gallery : 22833737, 22833838
National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Complex, Library Block, First Floor, Nariman Point- NCPA.

Walk/Drive B : Nehru Centre and Breach Candy

Art & Soul : 24965798
1, Madhuli, Poonam Chamber Complex, Dr. Annie Beasant Road, Worli.

Tao Art Gallery (1,2 and 3) : 24918585
Sarjan Plaza, behind Lotus Petrol Pump, 100, Dr Annie Besant Road, Worli

Nehru Centre Art Gallery (+ Nehru Centre Circular Gallery) : 24964676
Discovery of India Building, Ground Floor, Dr. Annie Beasant Road, Worli.

Cymroza Art Gallery : 23671983
72 Bhulabhai Desai Road, between American Consulate and Breach Candy Hospital, opp. Snowman's Ice Cream Parlour. Breach Candy.

A Strongly Recommended Art Resource Centre:
Mohile-Parikh Centre For Visual Arts : MPCVA :22838380/81
National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Complex, Library Block, Ground Floor, Nariman Point- NCPA.

Some other spaces/ Galleries :

Pradarshak Art Gallery : 26462681
100. Kalpana, Plot No. 338, near Madhu Park, 12th Road, Khar. (Western Railway)

Alliance Françoise : 22036187 (Shireen)
Theosophy Hall, next to Nirmala Niketan College, 40, New Marine Lines, Churchgate.

Art Land 56350776
3rd Floor, Esplanade Mansion, Next to Army & Navy Bldg., MG Road, Kala Ghoda. Churchgate-CST.

Art Musings : 22163339
1, Admiralty House, Opp. Dunne's School, Colaba Cross lane, next to Sassoon Dock, Colaba.

Art Quest : 22150083
Shop No. 1, Daulat Building, next to Colaba Post Office, Colaba.

2004-10-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

Reviewing Live Art.

Philip Stanier
The unpleasant task of writing and reading reviews.

I have written and received bad reviews, and, I have written and received badly written reviews, the first can be unpleasant, but the latter is inexcusable. After recently witnessing some bizarre examples of reviewing in the mainstream press, I wanted to challenge the role of reviewers and reviews for Live Art, what we as artists and audiences should expect of them and how they could be written.

It is also vital to address this, as the coverage and quality of press for Live Art in the UK is shamefully thin and listings are virtually non-existent. It is remarkable that at a time when the sector is so active, that there is no regular dedicated publication to Live Art, and that other magazines do not see fit to cover Live Art, unless the event is connected to a gallery or larger event.

Where is our Hunter S. Thompson?

I recently saw a performance that received some reviews, and it was as if we had not seen the same performance. Their reviews refused to engage with the piece and were startlingly aggressive and poisonous. They had clearly spent most of their time coming up with insults, and I immediately rejected their comments. Yet, I kept thinking about them, and now, while I still find them idiotic and misguided, I realise that they are the most engaging reviews that I have read in a long time.

The purposes of reviews are usually identified as: To critically evaluate a performance, to disseminate information regarding the event to a larger potential audience, and to record it for posterity. However this is not the case, performance is either documented through video and so does not need recording through a review. Also, if the work is antagonistic to documentation, then it will be disseminated through word of mouth, and so the review, while still a valuable document in its own right would hardly seem to hold a key role in documenting for the future. So disseminating information through a review now seems somewhat outdated when our sector is highly networked and our marketing strategies are sophisticated and wide-ranging. As for providing a critique of the work, this is the part everyone has the most trouble with.

Matthew Goulish in his book ‘39 Microlectures’ suggests that the role of a critic is two-fold, the function being to cause a change in the critic or readers, a change that facilitates a singular understanding and unique experience of the work. The second function of the critic is to “understand how to understand” (Goulish, M. 2000:44). Through this the critic offers new perspectives through which we can understand and experience performance. The critic, when presented with a new piece of work, should propose new languages and new frames for its discussion, and can achieve this through the standard functions of reviews that include:

To document events.
To discuss ideas and their enactment.
To contextualise practice.
To critical evaluate practice.
To give accounts of personal experience.
To initiate a response.
To provide entertainment.

So for Goulish, the usual functions of reviewing, are secondary to the generation of understanding. However, the list above also displays the very reason for the poverty of writing in reviews. We say what ‘happened’ and what it was ‘about’, we say whether it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and why, we try and make ourselves look clever and finish with a sound bite to praise or punish the practitioner. This is a mechanical, indulgent and patronising approach, of no use to anyone but the reviewer. Unfortunately most reviewers are guilty of this to some degree and it is not easy to avoid doing it. Worst of all, because we are familiar and endeared with the kind of work we review, we repeat the same explanations of what work is doing, and avoid giving strong critique because we wish to support the field in which we ourselves operate. All of this means that reviews are discredited as sources of critical evaluation and as sources of documentary evidence. Our approach to writing reviews and the function of reviews needs to change to account for the changes in the art scene as a whole.

What we so often forget about reviews is their entertainment value. The best reviews have historically come from writers who provoked responses, who allowed their personality to be present in their writing, who were funny and outrageous. Where is the gonzo journalism of Live Art, where is our Hunter S Thompson? When we cut back on the personality, on the entertainment and on the provocative possibilities in reviews we end up with a bland and homogenised result. This is what we have too much of, empty descriptions of events. I would be happy to see more reviews like the ones I mentioned earlier, reviews that were provocative with their language and took no prisoners with their critiques, from reviewers who aren’t afraid to expose themselves in their writing, and dispense with tact and diplomacy when it isn’t really needed or wanted.

Four reasons for not reading reviews.

If it seems so simple to define the purpose of a good review, why then do we so often find those qualities lacking, and what takes their place that we find so objectionable? It would seem that the fundamental crimes in writing reviews are:

The creation of static or homogenising categories,
The promotion or abuse of one body of work in relation to another,
The promotion of ones own artistic agenda,
The lack of an active critique.

Embedded in this list are the reasons for the eternal frustration of artists with reviews, and the lack of serious academic valuing of reviews. Reviews occupy a peculiar territory, hovering between the artist and other artists, their audience and the public, academics and experts, funders and producers. As such they are driven towards the use and creation of categories by academic training, the implicit promotion of their own agenda as a result of often being artists, the valorising of one form at the expense of another by being supporters of the sector, and a lack of critique from fear of causing offence, being seen as unfair or even worse, lacking in insight or taste.

We should balance this by noting the increasingly common practice of artists writing sophisticated programme notes. Critics can feel threatened by the autonomy of the artist, the co-ownership of the language through which work is discussed and to some extent on whose terms it is discussed. But this actually provides an opportunity for the critic to engage more fruitfully in a discussion with the makers of the performance and the performance on its own terms, to make a more singular reading. It does seem however that some reviewers take offence from programme notes, we might assume that they feel threatened in this context, the writing seems effectively to deny the critic their opportunity. This is not the case; it is irrelevant whether the critic agrees, understands, or sees the point of such texts as long as critics can use them as an opportunity for a better review. The reviewer can accept the propositions made in such texts, or play devils advocate, provide an experiential review if the text is sufficient in giving a conceptual context for the piece. We can be harder in our critiques and more sophisticated with our writing when an artist raises the level of debate on their own work. In this way the validity of reviews could be somewhat restored.

Something worth reading.

What then is the practical function of a review, what should all reviews provide? Here are some suggestions:

A sense of the event,
An identification of the ideas present in, or applicable to the work,
A contextualisation of the work,
A critical engagement with the work,
An engaging or entertaining read.

These features should be interpreted in the broadest way possible. The sense of event could be provided through an almost infinite range of approaches to responsive writing. The freedom of writing as a form to move away from literal description indicates where reviews can demonstrate their distinct value in relation to other forms of documentation. The contextualisation and discussion of ideas in an event should be seen as invitations to the reviewer to find distinct means of placing and theorising events, rather than confirming the established means of reading a work. The best reviews are often those with a strong personal contextualisiation of the piece and the application of unconventional ideas.

It is easy to write an aggressive review and pleasant to write a positive one. My tendency in the past has been to review performances that I enjoyed, and if I didn’t like it, to be diplomatic. However, this is a habit that none of us should indulge any longer. It is clear that Live Art would benefit in numerous ways if its press were more impartial and firm with their critical feedback.

The critic as artist.

As a result of the relatively small size of the sector, our reviewers most commonly turn out to be artists, academics, promoters or enthusiasts. All reviewers are different, some are objective, others aggressive and others over-friendly. None of these types or attitudes are essentially better than the other, as each one lacks the comparative benefit of the other. What genuinely distinguishes one reviewer from another is their commitment to writing singular reviews, where the form and language of the piece responds directly to the piece observed.

A major concern is the prioritisation of the critic over the work, we must be wary of the critic as celebrity as it rarely serves the work when the reviewer is considered more important. It would seem that recently the overriding preoccupation of reviews has been to respond to the failure of objective documentation and the uncertainty of language, as such the identity of the reviewer occupies the gap left behind. However, to counter this problem we do have the critic as artist; and if the critique can be maintained this would not be such a bad thing. We have the benefit of reviewers who can write creatively in response to work they have seen. So rather than try to make all reviews and reviewers produce the same kind of writing and smooth over personal differences, why not do the opposite? Encourage reviewers to respond creatively, to acknowledge their limitations of knowledge and to be subjective, to challenge the conventional form of the review, while maintaining its quality and function.

For example would we accept artists reviewing their own pieces? Or critics writing reviews based solely upon their subjective experience? Perhaps alongside broadening the kind of language used in reviews, we could broaden the kind of writing that we consider a review.

Where are the artist statements, articles, interviews, diary entries, work-in-progress evaluations? Where are the arranged conversations, conclusions of meetings and reports of networking and training days? Where are the open letters, provocations and rebuttals? Strangely they all exist, it’s all out there, but it just hasn’t been gathered, edited and arranged. We can often find these things on artist’s websites, on e-lists, or left forgotten in a notebook. Or someone says ‘Someone should write this up’ but no one does. If you think someone should write it up, then you should write it up. If the Live Art sector wants greater and more involved press coverage, the first thing to do is to provide it for ourselves, the mainstream press and listings will only join in if they feel they are missing out on something.

Expect less.

We should expect less from our reviews, less understanding on the part of our reviewers, less objectivity in fact. But far from naïve and bland reviewing, this should produce more attempts to be singular with our responses to work, and give less concern to upsetting our peers, because we can take strong criticism and more importantly we want it. We need to provide a depth of consideration and quality of writing that equals the quality and depth of the work, and most crucially while remaining critical and honest to ourselves.

Artist should not expect reviews to give them publicity quotes, and you can call me a hypocrite for saying this because I have written poster quotes and used them. However, the less a reviewer tries to reward good practice with good reviews, the less power the false economy of reviewers as judges of work will hold influence. I for one do not go to shows on the basis of poster quotes, in fact I am more likely to stay away. Either I distrust the source, dislike the manipulation of the review, or find nothing of note about the quote itself. Most publicity quotes are banal, and those most creatively put to use are the ones least intended for use on publicity.

We need to have less respect for the views of reviewers, so that artists can make use of them freely, so that audiences can engage with reviews for what they are; the limited and subjective experience of one single person. If we can do this then an understanding of, a context for and a language to discuss work can begin to emerge.

Reviews are for posterity, but for those of us alive at the moment, spending our time recording the work of others for the interest of people in the future is a task I find a little tedious and missing the point somewhat. The future can work out what was important from what we leave behind whatever that may be. We should concentrate less on information for the future, and more on multiplying our understanding of what is going on now.

Other publications will not generally seek out new material or new reviewers unless they need to, so if we want coverage from them, we shouldn’t expect them to send reviewers, we should send them reviews of everything they don’t cover. As such, the most important thing that we as artists can do is to be proactive in reviewing our work for each other, and putting it where we can all see it.

When our critical responses match the quantity and quality of our practice, and when they exceed the coverage, sophistication and accessibility of other arts press, then the reading and writing reviews will be a far more rewarding process and the press coverage of our sector would be raised.

Sources:

Goulish, Matthew (2000) 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance, Routledge.

Flickr

2004-09-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

BOSE

2004-09-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

618, originally uploaded by abhitamhane.

BOSE KRISNAMMACHARI ( 1962-)

Life in the city, the company of books, and the lives of Artists are the intellectual passions for Bose Krishnammachari. This JJ School of Art graduate has been among the vanguards of postmodern painting in India. His unmistakable riot of colour, now embodied in his untitled works, was in the centre of his installations as well, while his meticulous figurative work would have a context. This intellectual element, however, never stops a viewer from enjoying a Bose work!

2004-08-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

ANJOLIE ELA MENON (1940)

Often called 'India's first female painter to attract a hub of publicity', Anjolie Ela Menon is also at the helm of meticulous collections of Indian contemporary art. Her oil-painting technique that resembled the master-painters had never stopped her from experimenting through the four decades she has painted. Iconography, for Menon, has no bounds. From Tibetan prayer flags to a street-portait, an old windo or chair to a Murano glass, her visual vocabulary is varied and vivid.

VRINDAVAN SOLANKI (1940-)

Thin, short, rapid lines make Vrindavan Solanki's image. The faceless portraits full with detailed personalization and cityscapes that have a face of their own, make their presence felf on the canvas and cansson paper. Solanki's technique that makes acrylics on canvas look like pen and ink , is well-rehersed. Beyound this, he has also worked with pastels and explored the delights of the colourful city life.

JATIN DAS (1941-)

He's gone places with his line and his sesuous geometry. While his oils on canvas and murals re-cast the Indian narratives, his drawings with ink, charcoal and pencils have revitalised the 'shringar'in Indian art. Jatin Das, now in his late sixties, has not lost his playful strokes.

ACHUTAN KUDDALLUR (1944-)

Layers of compelling, rustic strokes, one after aonther. Layers thatdon't cover, but reveal the inner world. They transform energies from dark to bright. Achutan Kuddallur is not a colourist, nor is he a good designer, though he has qualities of both! He is rather a romantic philosopher. What elevates his work is his romance with the canvas and contemplative drawing with his brush.

KASHINATH SALVE(1944-)

Kashinath Salve's still life have some connection with his earlier abstract landscapes. His focre is now focused, and his mind sees more complex connotations of otherwise mundane things. Salve, who's seen the heyday and decline of a major art institution, also knows the value of craft.

REKHA RAO(1947-)

Keeping influences away, Rekha Rao turned to her own self and has achieved it. In the process, she delved into the everyday experience and its visual traces on mind. Her work started with a poetic imagery, and during the last decade, she has remarkedly shown a labyrinth of the persoanl as well as the political, the public experince.

DILIP RANADE

Imaginative, not imaginary. Precise and pertinent. That's why his pictures pinch. He paints a world of things, and invokes thoughts. With his deep study of art history and Museology, there is a stram of keen observation that makes his work appeal to a commoner and a connoisseur alike.

YASHWANT SHIRWADKAR

Amused by India's date with the past, allured by the colours of her culture, Yashwant Shirwadkar paints scenes from Benares or Rajasthan. His impressionist brushwork bathes these scenes in bright yellow sunlight.

ANIL NAIK

Portrait-painting is Anil Naik's second language. His paintings are his own readings on human life. They speak this language fluently, and expressively. With an ingenious use of imagery, he elevates the experience of a portrait to that of a picture. Naik's study of the Western canon of portaiture from renaissance to pop and beyond, make the backdrop for his experimentation within the academic, 'JJ School' style.

Shibu natesan

Light does not make delusions, they are with the viewer. Light spreads evenly on humans and object alike. So does Shibu Natsan, with his passion for light and detached rendering of the figure. His pictures often take a photographic reference of a human image that has a strong, ever-lasting presence. Shibu deconstructs the photograph with his analytical skill . He does not negate the human factor, he just freezes it into a light that fascinats him.

SANTOSH KSHIRSAGAR

His study and understanding of calligraphy has grown out of sheer artistic passion for the letter-form. When he paints, he transforms it. Alphabet is not a literal signifier then, but a picture. There is dance, there is an element of spacial art in his work. Whenever Santosh Kshirsagar has painted a big work that sprawls several metres, even a bystander is amazed and touched by the performance that unfolds and the zen that works.

TV Santosh

His airbrush re-tells stories of a culture that was had a physical, visible presence. His pictures, though, would be seen in context of the metaculture of visuals, false and true. He sets aside the usually acceptible, so-called 'painterly' renderings and prefers a film-like finesse; perhaps to amplify the frustrations of a contemporary painter.

Arunanshu Chowdhury

Figurative and structured, his narratives are personal notes that address the public mind. His dreamlike backgrounds are studded with images that are seemingly simple, and he takes on to captivate a complex experience. His experience as a father of a boy, led him to an unpretentiously new subject for a male artist.

Puja Iranna

Growing up in a family of painters and architects challenged her to have her own visual language. She met it with her high EQ (emotional quotient). The result is her body of work that addresses the problems in abstraction, visual studies and picture-making! A sketch, a photograph or a digital deconsrtuction becomes her expression. Although her images come from architecture, the Music within wins over their geometry.

Rajan Fulari

A printmaker by choice, his abilities to mend technique have been appreciated over time. A mid-career artist now, Rajan Fulari deals with issues like religious conditioning and catastrophes. Rajan, who loves the world and its people, hardly needs any verbose justification for his work.

Shankar Sonavne,

His poise as an artist is as noteworthy as his tenacity. Shankar Soanvne's austerity with paint, his communicative images and occasional use of collage, will definitely be remebered.

Sejal Kshirsagar

A post- abstract- expressionist mode is a difficult terrain. Most practicitoners of this mode become refugees of minmalism. Sejal Kshirsagar refuses such refuge, and reverts to drawing. Innocent lines that flow fearlessly have made pathways in her picture-plane. Her concern is for the fragments of existence, that usually go unread, unnoticed.

Chintan Upadhyay

A brat in his art-school days, Chintan daringly addressed the visual cultures that were a taboo in India. A more sophisticated intervention by him came later. Chintan, in his recent work, destructures the Indian Miniature paintings by using them as a skin for the digital-age cyborg-like humans. Designer babies, his recent body of work, also articulated the post-biotech issues.

Pradeep Mishra.

He wants real people; and not the habituated 'art public' to see his work. Sensing the suffocation and staleness in the air, Pradeep Mishra, a young post-graduate from JJ school of art, tries to infuse new breath in it. Pradeep, who just finished is journey from extrovert pastiche to introvert imagery, is now conscious about the signified.

SANJEEV SONPIMPARE (1969-)

Sanjeev, with his keen interest in the paradoxes and dissonaces of life - here and now- believes in a conceptual consistency of the eternal. Clarity of Thought and action guides his creativity. His recent works speak about the predicament of the city life.

RIYAS KOMU (1971-)

Committment to humanity has driven Komu to observe life. While his works as a student at the JJ School of Art had a strong and often direct political content, his paintings now point to a global reality of opresseion and resistance. Life flows, and so flows history. Komu in his role as an iconographer of Human Life, also makes exellent use of signage. His recourse to Brügel or his quest for Ravi Varma has been seen occasionaly in his works, but clearly, his grasp of history is not occasional.

MEERA DEVIDAYAL (1947)

With an unpretentious understanding of the commoners' lives and aspirations, Meera Devidayal paints desires and histories, she immortalises the ephemeral. Driving further from collages and assemblages, she composes her paintings in a joyful, unpredictable way. As a woman of substance, her observations and apprehensions about women and society are indivisible from her emotional responses.

GOGI SAROJ PAL
An iconographer of womanhood, Gogi Saroj Pal narrates 'Herstory' in a completely non-narrative idiom. The singular, tenacious, often half-human and fantasy-like figure in Gogi's work shows the multi-dimensionality of being a woman. There is a playful, decorative element in her work, that quandarizes male-centric cannon of art history and cherishes the vernacular, mass-appealing image.

stilllife

2004-08-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

stilllife, originally uploaded by abhitamhane.

V A MALI -- STILL LIFE

Several painters complain about being ' curbed', by the commissionedwork. Many more abandon commissions because they restrict theirstyle. Contrary to these beliefs are the works by Vasant Anat Mali,who was commissioned because of his individual style. Mali was knownfor his brushstrokes and impasto, and hardly did he forgo thisidentity of his brush.Some of Mali's contemporaries, mostly his competitors, would call hispaintings 'carpet-like'. Upto the 1940s, when everybody else from theJJ School of art was was more or less following the Academic stylethat had been taught to them, Mali's painting would rather look likea collage of brushstrokes. It was this unmistakable quality of hiswork, pioneering in Bombay, that won him critical acclaim and fame. Hewas also conferred many a prize, because of his distinctive rendering.He employed stark Highlights and darker shadows to enhance hisvigorous strokes, and only where it was necessary to deal with thesoft, reflected light in his work, he would consider softer strokes.Thus, Mali's attempt cannot be said to be deconstructivist; but heshowed and taught the Bombay painter how the power of the brushstrokecould be enhanced and retained. Mali's pallette always had purples,mauves, pinks and sometime blues. Yellow came, to balance these cyansand magentas.The work, a Still life with carrots, has all these qualities of aMali. The drapes have those signature strokes once enviously dubbed'carpet-like'. A single source of primary light, perhaps the natural(Indian!) sunlight, has its marks with the bold white patches. Sobright is the light that the lines on the glass have their individual play of competing dualities of textures, also in the enamel white plate with a shadow of the knife and the the earthen pot that glows with its 'desi' glaze. The carrots and a coconut, because of their non-reflective textures, are rendered with a different strategy. The darker drapes alongside the wine bottle succeed in adding drama to this still-life, and the stage is set for the carrots, with scene one- the bright pink, and scene two- a pale, dull purple. Mali, better known as a portrait painter, was also famous for his illustrious use of props in his portraits.Take a close look at this still-life, can we call it a 'portrait of an Indian pot ' ?!
â abhijeet tamhane.

posted by abhi at 11:18 AM

AJA VILAP by M V Dhurandhar.

2004-08-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

ajavilap, originally uploaded by abhitamhane.

Ravi Varma had entered his twenties when MV Dhurandhar was born. To his credit, Dhurandhar has a distinction to present a "second generation model" of the fine balance between popular commercial art and academic realism that Ravi Varma was known for. In his own right, as a dutiful teacher in the British-run Sir JJ school of Art and also a successful painter, "Raobahadur" Dhurandhar was to impress three generations of artists. His renderings resonate his obsequious persona. Although his use of brush was almost ascetic, he had a princely eye for detail. No wonder this kolhapur-born artist, who
retained his Indian, vernacular values in the same breath as the high English etiquette; refines this very dichotomy when he paints!
Light, in Dhurandhar's paintings, is peculiar. It is flat. The transparency of colour is amplified in the drapes and on faces.
'Aja Vilap' is about the pathos (karuN.-rasa) that occurs when the mythological King Aja weeps and cries at the sudden loss of his consort Indumati. The myth of Indumati, a celestial damsel mandated to live a human life was to be freed only when a celestial garland would fall around her neck, narrated by poet Kalidasa in chapter VIII of his 'Raghuvam.sha', is an archetype of a husband's love for his wife. Aja asks the five elements why they took his beloved away from him. A rare gesture of sentimentality of the Indian warrior-male is epitomized in 'Aja Vilap'. Aja, in the painting, holds the garland in his left hand as he is looking with a startled face toward the heavenly powers that have made Indumati lifeless. Their clothes show how unaware the loving couple was of the worldy fears, and the marble architecture in the painting is clearly an addition by Dhurandhar. Use of architecture to show the princely grandeur was essentially a colonial concept.
There is an autobiographical reference to this work by Dhurandhar: the artist's first wife had passed away at an early age.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane

2004-07-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Compressed, Textured Spaces

Pastel shades and sober textures attend the compression of spaces in Satish Panchal’s paintings: lines that take angular curves, further divide these spaces. These spaces are not barren. They are full of Panchal’s strokes. Between the canvas and the colour, sometimes, rests a thin layer of paper. Is it for the desired texture? “Yes and No”, says Panchal, “I want the texture, but that’s not the only reason I use paper in my oils. It is the process of collage that helps me in contemplating my canvas. I’d never want my work to be monolithic”.
.
Panchal, now all of 69, is a devout printmaker. Gallery Chemould, Mumbai exhibited his paintings and some of his prints in July. The painter, who lives and works in Paris, was here for the show. While his paintings were ‘Oil collages on canvas and paper’, his prints were on a Perspex plate! “I used Perspex for its amazing possibility of producing hair-thin lines”, exclaims Panchal.

From the beginnings of his art career in the early 1960s, Panchal has explored his leanings toward spiritually motivated abstractionism. He left for Paris in 1970 with these leanings, but his first monochromatic paintings were exhibited in 1982. By this time, Panchal had found ways to direct his passion, the passion with which he had seen Malevich and Rothko retrospectives. Panchal’s oeuvre pays homage to Malevich (with its understanding of space), and to Rothko (with its understanding of colours). The dialogue between the two is what makes Satish Panchal’s work so interesting.

– Abhijeet Tamhane

2004-04-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait By Baburao Sadvelkar

Baburao Sadvelkar grew up at Kolhapur, reading books about world's great painters, while the painters of fame in his city were excellent in portrait-painting. Later in Bombay, at Sir JJ School of Art, his notions changed. Baburao, a 'devotee' of John Singer Sargent, JM Whistler and Augustus John, now paid attention to impressionists : Manet, Monet and Degas. Portraiture was still a passion for Sadvelkar, who wrote : days and nights, I used to work as a portaitoholic. My griefs and joys centred around whether I'd bring on my canvas the exact light and the resultant hues of my model. I wanted my models to be represented aesthetically, with the intriguing folds of their clothes, their limbs rendered expressively. Moreover, I wanted my portraits to suffice the high qualities of a good composition. For this I used to contemplate every patch, every gesture of my palette-knife even while I was not painting.
The Bombay art trinity, viz., Rudolf Von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and
E. Schlesinger, had appreciated Baburao's understanding of portrait-painting. But for Sadvelkar, these accolades were only secondary to his artistic ecstasy that would come only after a good portrait is done. For him, portrait-painting was, 'a spiritual and alluring act ', and his portraits with an impressionist-inspired portraits were truly a journey within. Sadvelkar climbed the ladder of success, but he seems to have distanced himself from commissioned portraits. He did not want his passion to be a lucrative skill.
This self-portrait, in his twenties, looks straight at you. Eyes open with a dream of becoming 'great artist', and lips that want to say something, lead us to the signature Baburao/ Bulganin cut beard, and the forthright shoulders that would late bear the art-directorship of Maharashtra state.
Baburao Sadvelkar's stylistic journey that began with his schooldayKolhapur landscapes in watercolour, went a long way ahead, to hisimpressionist-inspired portraits of 1950s and 60s and then to the'semi-abstract' themes that he handled with rollers and oils the1980s.This picture, Sadvelkar's self-portrait represents a juncture when hewas reckoning with the impressionist painters in practice and thehigh-modern ideas of art in theory. Though the impressionistic orgy ofcolour, common in the great french exponents of this style, isalmost absent here and is replaced by browns, it has a simlar displayof display colour sensations!The painting has free brushwork and lots of patches, prominent amongthese are the 7 to 9 pale ochre patches on the face and ear. theydefine this painting. The still brighter white patches balance thedark tones in a striking manner, and the browns establish the visualcontinuity. There is a scumble of Indian red in the middle, which isappropriated with strokes of similar shade on the shirt. There ishardly any drawing here: the act is 'painting'.The strokes in this self-portrait testifies the joie de vivre of ayound Baburao. Its compositional aspect leads the viewer from light todark, from under the head of the painter to his eye that looksstraight towards the future.
- Abhijeet Tamhane

2004-04-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

This article appeared in the Indian Express and the original URL is here .

the article, may serve some academic interest here: (Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.)

A matter of fraud
Suneet Chopra
The question of fakes in the art market keeps coming up again and again. Lately, the debate has become even more strident with a Calcutta based artist, Ajoy Ghosh, claiming works that sold at Sotheby's and Christie's as those of Gaganendranth Tagore were actually his. Indeed, the big auction houses are not above making mistakes, as we saw from a Satish Panchal work being passed off as one of Satish Gujral.
This work of Panchal was exhibited at Mumbai's Jehangir Art Gallery in 1965. It came up for sale in the late 1990s twice in London as a work of Satish Gujral and had finally to be withdrawn from the Bonham's sale in 1998 as Gujral declared in public that the work was not his. In fact, Panchal's style and signature are both very different from those of Gujral, so the fraud is both blatant and over-confident.
Moreover, the catalogue stated that the work had been bought directly from the artist by the Mumbai seller. Once it could be a mistake. But the work has come up for sale in Britain twice. So, obviously the Mumbai seller is someone who is given to conducting frauds more than once on unsuspecting buyers. In the interest of art, the auctioneers should make the provenance public, so that people know who is passing off fakes like these in Mumbai.
Indeed, Mumbai appears to be quite a centre for fakes. I remember an art dealer of Mumbai bringing a Souza head to Delhi and exhibiting it at a sale, when exactly the same Souza had been put up for auction by another Mumbai dealer. There was a confrontation between the two and both claimed to have letters of provenance and authentication. But nothing more was heard of the matter.
One thing is clear, however. These are not matters of accidental identification. They are matters of fraud. In fact, neither Calcutta nor Delhi are free from fraudulent selling. As the Ajay Ghosh case shows, the artist claims to have sold works that were signed by him. And they later turned up at an auction house as works of Bengal masters with the signatures changed. Here again, it is the duty of the auction houses to make the name of the seller public, for they must have documentary evidence as to where it came from.
Delhi too is not immune from this. Some years ago, a gallery known to stock Ganesh Pyne received a work that was obviously not one of Pyne's, but being passed off as his. Correctly, the gallery contacted Pyne, found out that the work was a fake and returned it. What it did not do was make the dealer's name public or start criminal proceedings against him. Without such transparency and clarity of dealings, we are likely to do considerable damage to the global market that our art has acquired in the last decade or so.
Some people blame artists like Jamini Roy and others who used atelier methods to mass-produce works with the help of assistants. Others blame the Bengal masters for signing drawings of their students as a mark of appreciation, which they are now selling as originals. But only the signatures are genuine. Both atelier production and the signing of students' drawings have helped the faking industry, but they are not fraud as neither Jamini Roy nor the Bengal masters sold works at inflated prices. Nor did they attempt to pass off these works as their's. Jamini Roy clearly told people that he signed work his assistants had made and sold such works at prices as low as Rs 100 each or less.
Generally, neither Jamini Roy nor the other Bengal masters made money out of the process and they were open about it. The fraud is being conducted by unscrupulous dealers who are bringing these works up for sale now as originals. So stock market practices are coming into the art market, it seems.
In fact, frauds and fakes in art have come up in a big way only as Indian contemporary art works have sky-rocketed, making frauds worthwhile. Also, given the fact that the market is king nowadays, with organisations like the WTO being given the freedom to violate national sovereignty, profitability is the sole basis of allowing institutions to exist, even in the spheres of education, health and environment. In such conditions, fraud is only an extension of the profitability argument. It is not an accident that linguistically too, lobh (greed) and labh (profit) differ only in matra, that also means quantity, apart from indicating the presence of a vowel in Hindi. Clearly, fraud and profit as the social ultimate are not unconnected. And attempts to control fraud must put limitations on profiteering, if not on profits themselves.
Where that is not possible economically, as in our present free-market climate, social controls alone can put limitations on it by demanding greater transparency of provenance in art to limit fraudulent dealings. They cannot be eliminated in free-market conditions. This naturally burdens the buyer with the job of protecting himself from frauds as middlemen cannot be relied on to do this in every case.
The buyer must demand documents of provenance with a clear promise from dealers that the money will be fully repaid if the work is shown to be a fraud in a certain number of years. This will go a long way in preventing fraud. To add to it, the buyer must acquaint himself with a broad outline of an artist's work and his technique so as to detect the more obvious cases of fraud. The new dispensation of profit as the sole basis for any form of development-social, political or economic-has now come full circle to the economy again as the fraudulent economy. This is the price we pay for speculative globalisation. So the buyer must learn to protect himself in these conditions.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.

2004-03-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

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