This beautiful single-seat 350cc Bullet belongs to Anil Sharma, agency producer at W+K Delhi.
His father, a Professor of International Politics, bought this motorcycle from a Gol Market dealership in 1979. Anil has lovingly rebuilt it for his 5-year old son who lives in London with his mother. We’re lucky to have it in our car park for the time being.

Today we have our last two presentations; by Vivek Vilasini and Murali Cheeroth.

I have this duty to introduce artists before the audience even if it is quite familiar with them and their works.

As you know by now, during the last five days we were having presentations by artists hailing from Delhi and Mumbai. Hence, Murali forwards a jovial demand before me. ‘You have been introducing only the Mumbai-Delhi boys and girls. Proudly introduce the Bangaluru Boys also,’ he tells me.

For those who are not familiar with the ‘boy-girl’ connotation, let me explain a little. In 2005, Bose Krishnamachari curated a show titled ‘Bombay Boys’, which predominantly featured all those young male artists from Mumbai, who now are known all over the world. Ever since, if there is a group from any city, they prefer to call themselves, part jokingly and part seriously, ‘—- Boys’.

So I introduce Murali and Vivek as ‘Bangaluru Boys’, to which Prasad Raghavan responds with statement, ‘Bangaluru Twins’.

That is almost true. Both Vivek and Murali have shaven heads and they are almost similar in body structure; tall and hefty.

Vivek Vilasini starts with his famous documentation series of people from Kerala, who carry the names of international communist leaders. Through this Vivek deconstructs the relationship between the sign and signified. A Ho Chi Minh is not the same Ho Chi Minh. He is a laborer in a dockyard in Kerala. A Stalin is not a Stalin. And you even find the names like ‘Soviet Breeze’. This series reminds you the work Foucauldian observations on Rene Magritte’s work ‘This is not a Pipe’.

Fellow artists are curious as they find these name and people so interesting and they would like to know the socio-cultural and historical context in which they names became fashionable in Kerala. During the revolutionary days of Post- WW II, Communist ideals were spreading fast amongst the people in India. Kerala had the first democratically elected Communist ministry in the world in 1957. People were so inspired by Communist dreams of a better future that they started naming their children with the names of international revolutionaries. However, this trend has ceased to exist in Kerala.

Hence, Vivek’s documentation series is an archive and memorial of a time that has celebrated Communism as the one and only solution to the human problems all over the world.

Vivek’s series on the commemorative Gandhi and Ambedkar sculptures in the public spaces shows how the nationalist ideals are abandoned and made scarecrows by the generations that thanklessly enjoy the fruit of our freedom fighters. These sculptures not only show the political degeneration in a country like ours but also show how the aesthetic dilution and interpretational vagaries change the look of these leaders in the contemporary times. Some images are almost in the morphing that causes unintentional ideological morphing too (as in a Gandhi head starts looking like the head of LK Advani).

The researches on creating a visual ensemble, which is aesthetically strong and visually spectacular take Vivek to introduce theatricality of Kathakali (the indigenous dance form from Kerala) into this works. From now onwards, Vivek makes socio-historical interpretations through Kathakali performers by re-constructing those socio-historical moments in a theatrical form.

Vivek’s digital works capture the uncanny possibilities of the abandoned. He says that the angle of vision that he selects from an innumerable possibilities of physically positioning himself before a set of objects, makes all the difference. The politics of critical aesthetics and convictions generated by it come from this selection of angle.

And Vivek emphasizes that he uses Kathakali images for attracting people to his art. However, this comment invites flaks from the audience as art’s primary role, irrespective of the mediums and images that it chooses to manifest, is attracting people towards it for whatever purpose. Vivek’s new series with women as protagonists also generates critical debate.

Murali Cheeroth is happy with my introduction. Murali, as a preamble to his presentation says that though his works have a lot of elements from the ongoing urbanization process not only in India but also across the globe, he does not want to delve deep into the usual clichés of displacement and agony caused by urbanization. Rather than getting into a wailing mode, he says that his works are more about debating the architectural spaces that define the urban location. It is not just about an engagement with the space, but all those equipments that makes these spaces possible.

Murali is a painter, an assemblage maker, a video artist and a performer. But he chooses to show his paintings here today. There is a human figure always seen falling or taking a leap into the void, in these paintings. Even if, for argument’s sake we can say that there is no void represented in these paintings, in total we see that all those constructions going down there from the leaping man’s perspective together constitute a void, the void created by modern history, history of architecture and war. Here creation almost anticipates destruction and the man’s leap is into this void of mutually nullifying creative and destructive forces.

The spaces that Murali creates in his paintings are minimal in nature. Their minimalism is accentuated by the gigantic presence of the equipments. And in the horizon line one sees certain monumental sculptures that stand witness to all kinds of constructions. Actually these monumental sculptures embody a sort of collapse within them. They represent another time and space, and their engagement with the present ritualistic as we understand that nobody cares the real meaning of these monuments though we see them everyday as in a regular ritual of seeing; a sort of vacant seeing.

Yellows, oranges and blues fill in Murali’s canvases as if the canvases are on fire. He deliberately treats in the background in an abstract mode as if lights are passing through a space without emphasizing the contours of that space. Hence, the light seems to be threatening and eerie.

A debate on contemporary architecture, its ideological presence in public spaces initiated by Atul Bhalla is followed by the presentation.

-JohnyML

Here are two artists completely inspired by movies and the history of film making. K.M.Madhusudhanan is known in the art scene more as a film director and video artist than a painter, which primarily he is. And we have Prasad Raghavan, a former advertising professional turned into a full time artist.

K.M.Madhusudhanan starts with his highly acclaimed short film titled, ‘History is a Silent Film’.

It tells us the story of Usman Bhai, a film projector repairer in Old Delhi. Usman got his talent in repairing projectors from his father. One may wonder a person like Usman Bhai is doing with the condemned projectors in our changing times.

Film projectors have become a thing of past. The person repairs them also live in memories. He goes through different kinds of projectors and tries to repair them. At times, these projectors come with spools of old films and documentaries. Usman understands the history of a degenerated world through these films and he comprehends his current predicament. But there is no escape. It is a passion, obsession and a trap.

Madhusudhanan, through the life of Usman Bhai tells us the history of film projection in our country. There are several dying professions related to films like this. Through the crumbling of a person’s life, Madhu tries to see the lineage of films not in the glittering lives of the stars, but in the lives of the unsung heroes like Usman Bhai.

The sound track is dominated by the noise of an old projector.

Madhusudhanan has two more films to present. ‘Self Portrait’ shows the life of an old street photographer, who struggles to keep his profession going even at the threat of the changing technologies. He works from the pavements of Old Delhi. He works also as a police photographer who clicks the pictures of the unidentified dead bodies. In his solitude, our protagonist develops these pictures of dead bodies, only to realize that one day all these dead people look like him. His face gets morphed into all dead bodies and he realizes death in life itself.

The third film titled ‘Razor, Blood and other Stories’ represent the nullified lives of former revolutionaries. They are the victims of state brutality. When the state appears before them as power incarnated, they want to take revenge. Though equipped with weapons, when the victim becomes skeptical about his own past, he becomes helpless, speechless and numb. He performs his duty towards the state, enjoy the pleasure of imagining a violent vengeance against the state, and goes back to his life of impotency.

In Madhusudhanan’s film, this strange relationship between the victim and the tormentor is debated. The barber, an ex-revolutionary, gets the policeman every day in his shop. If he wants he can just finish off the policemen who had once crushed the barber by his brutal power. But he fails to run his razor at the police man’s neck. He just imagines that he does that, not once again and again and again.

Madhusudhanan is an intense film maker with an intense sense of history and history of film making. He tries to grapple with the realities of film making through the lives of those people who are ousted from the glitter and glamour of it. Above all, Madhusudhanan’s engagement is with the history and story of moving images. His efforts towards creating a set of imaginary equipments for filmmaking involve the passion of a magical realist who wants to experience the world that has gone and the world that is yet to come, through the tools that he device for the purpose. It is a travel in and through history, time and mythology created out of the former two entities.

Prasad Raghavan introduces himself. He believes that a sort of control over the personal history of the artist is pertinent while engaging fellow artists with his repertoire of works through images and dialogue.

Coming from an advertising background, Prasad believe that the field of advertisement curtails the freedom of a creative person. You need to work towards result and if the boss rejects what you have done, you need to work again on it. But in the galleries, you are free to exhibit whatever you want there wouldn’t much interference from anybody.

It is not quite true. The audience responds to his idea about gallery and an advertising office in a negative way. They tell him that the people are particularly attentive of what they are watching in a gallery and once the images are out there in the public, it is going to be there for long for debate, assessment and criticism. Like an advertisement, a work of art too remains in the memory of the viewers. The more they see it, the more they become conscious of its relevance.

Prasad presents the ‘re-created’ posters and explains how he employed his knowledge on world cinema and poster making. Posters are direct and meant for a purpose and in his case Prasad manipulates the idea of poster in order to create a work of art using images and typography. He explains how he arrived at the charcoal drawings.

He jokes that once he started working on charcoal drawings, the gallerists started asking for more and more charcoal works. Prasad is not an artist to stick to one medium. He has always loved oil painting. He has worked with video art. He loves photography and above all he enjoys making monumental sculptural installations.

Prasad speaks of his recent solo show, ‘Shot Tilt’ at the BMB Gallery, Mumbai. And his ‘Decalogue’ series both in silkscreen printing and millions of compressed images collages impress the audience considerably and it generates a debate. Prasad’s recent drawings speak of war and its effects on people. He is a pacifist and he condemns the warlords all over the world through is images tinged with irony and black humor. Prasad also uses the ‘false promises’ created by the corporate world in order to offer a ‘better’ world to the consumers.

The debate that ensue moves around the artist’s critique on the advertising field as something that sells false promises. Prasad says that he is not particularly against the field where he has worked for many years, however, he would like to take off from the notions used in advertising and see them in a different context of critique.

-JohnyML

A Night in the Forest

Today we have our night in a forest. We are all excited about it. By four in the evening, we all set out for the forest. A few kilometers from Mountain Trail Resort where we stay, there is a deep forest that connects to the Kumaon hills. Leopards, wild boars, barking deer and many other animals are abundant there.

We need to trek down for almost fifteen minutes to reach a clearing where our tents are erected. The clearing is surrounded by tall pine trees covered with centuries old lichens and moss.

Strange sounds of birds and creatures accompany us during the downhill journey and the stories of leopard attacks are already doing the rounds amongst us. We are filled with a strange thrill and fear. We all expect the unknown and surely we don’t know what that unknown looks like. Could it be a dark monster with fangs? Or a jungle beauty with sparkling eyes and spotted yellow skin? Or perhaps even an ethereal beauty that comes to spirit us away?

When we reach there, the resort staff has already propped up a make-shift kitchen. And a bar too is set up on the ground. Some of us go for a trek and some of us hang around with drinks in our hands. We contemplate the beauty of the forest.

Eons of loneliness surround these trees and shrubs. The sounds that fill our ears are from another age. Sumedh remarks that the trees are organic beings waiting to be heard. They have something to tell us. But we don’t know how they are going to tell us their stories. They may embrace us with their soothing leaves or they may even strangulate us with their menacing hands. It all depends on how they feel about us.

Be reverent. Be considerate. Be soft and silent.

The night covers the forest and us in its soft embrace. The acoustic takes a different turn and tune. Moths fly around and some of them whisper unknown secrets into our ears.

Lanterns, high power search lights and mantle lights are lit.  A bonfire is made. And we all come around it.

Drinks flow. So do our spirits. The spirits residing in the forest watch us from their remote hideouts. We know we are being watched. But we can do nothing but do whatever under these invisible watchful eyes.

Sitting around the bonfire, our faces  take on a look of some secret cult followers who are here to perform some ancient rituals.

Murali Cheeroth transforms into another personality in a moment. He changes his facial expression just as a shaman changes his expression. Here, he is going to do a performance.

Murali moves around the fire and acts out a sad story; of a mother and her seven children. We hold our breath and watch him going through the pangs of emotions.

Then Vibha sings a Punjabi song. After that I sing a few Malayalam and Hindi songs.

Meanwhile, a discussion on art and society props up. The force of the arguments heats up the atmosphere. Someone asserts. Someone disputes. Someone apologizes and someone gets too emotional about Kanu Sanyal and the Maoists. And someone becomes too romantic and hums a few ghazals.

The tents become our refuge by midnight. Now the tents have become giggling chambers as the artists share their secrets and take pleasure on innocent jokes.

A few minutes later a symphony of snoring is played out from the tents. The music of slumber spreads across the clearing, wades through the pine trees and reaches to the invisible forces that guard us from their vantage points of existence.

A shadow of fear walks down from the hills and smiles at the tents.

-JohnyML

At times, when you see the work of an artist, you get the feeling that you may be touching their heart. When they speak to explain the images of their works, you feel that you know the person so well.

Today Pooja Iranna, Prajakta Potnis and G.R.Iranna made their presentations.

Pooja Iranna starts with one of her earlier works where she applies color to different layers of paper. Paper becomes not only a surface but also a field of minimal architectural constructions. She articulates a sense of relationship with people and with her surroundings. In the works that she had done during the nineties, Pooja shows her effort to understand the fragile human relationships.

In one of the works, Pooja depicts parallel lines that resemble railway tracks. In another one, there is a bridge sort of an image, which has a lot of bolts fixed to it. She says that however you may be attached to a person or thing, eventually you are still alone. You may travel parallel, but you would never meet. She believes in the dictum that says, ‘personal is political’.

Pooja constructs images and ideas. She refers to historical sites and contemporary constructions in her sculptural works as well as digital photographs.

In the latest series, Pooja attempts at set of sculptures created out of staple pins. Through a strange illusion, the fragile sculptures look monumental and architectural and she severs certain parts of these sculptures in order to emphasize the fragility ingrained even in the most solid constructions. These works seem to be an extension of her earlier constructivist works with digital photographs as surfaces.

Pooja never leaves her indebtedness to the idea of drawing or painting or sculpting with her own hands. She feels that it is as meditative and painstaking as understanding human relationship in a defined society. Pooja, without borrowing the crutches of feministic theories, stands alone and does her works with her mental and physical involvement that is quite natural to a woman who is culturally and economically fashioned in that way.

Prajakta Potnis starts with her latest digital works that are superbly shot within a refrigerator. She places tomatoes stuck with read beads inside one of the drawers of a refrigerator and photographs it from close quarters. The image that we see is a monumental installation inside a huge hall, which is lit up especially for this work. In another works, she inverts the image to show the trick involved in the earlier shot. And in yet another work, she places a cauliflower and shoots it. These images have several possibilities and allow for different interpretations.

Prajakta likes surrealist thinking. She likes the probability of improbable situations and images. She identifies the anxieties and fears of an individual living in the contemporary society. Her ideas become surrealistic and magical in a certain sense when she confronts innumerable walls that are in different phases of decaying, while imposing their ability to divide and ‘protect’. These walls in the urban neighborhood where she lives, impose a sort of fear in her that makes her to analyze the nature of it through her creative works.

In her earlier works, Prajakta attempted to convert the menacing nature of the walls into soothing fabrics. Her palette turned from grey to soft pastels such as, pink. In one of the recent works, Prajakta converts a room into a dark chamber with its contours painted in neon paint. The nature of the room changes as the neon light at once identifies its limits and opens up the possibilities of a rupture.

Prajakta thinks of the ‘walls’ as surveillance objects of your daily lives. She creates an artificial wall and drills holes in it and paints the holes, as if these eyes were spilling over to our lives. In another works, she creates an emblematic collapse of such walls by creating an illusion of stitches all over it using surgical needle and threads.

Metastasizing of fear and anxiety is Prajakta’s latest concern. In her recent sculptural installations she creates artificial growth on daily utensils and objects. She converts something intensely personal into argumentatively political.

G.R.Iranna, famous for his paintings and sculptures that deal with human subjection by the imperialist forces, starts his presentation with his well known sculpture titled ‘The Wounded Tools’. In this work, Iranna creates a donkey clad in tiger’s skin and carrying a basket of tools and weapons that are used by laborers and soldiers. They are bandaged and the blood stains visible in them.

Through this stark symbolism, Iranna says that the powers that be convert innocent human beings into beasts of burden who are sent to the field to toil for somebody’s benefit. The tools and weapons that could have been used for progressive deeds are now being converted into weapons of destruction. In this process even the weapons get wounded.

Iranna explores his ideas about royalty and imperialism and their effects in normal human lives through a series of images and symbols that are easily identifiable. The throne in his paintings transforms into a donkey in his sculptures. Charkha, the ultimate symbol of peace is now in an emergency ward. Buddha is now a broken image on a stack of tin boxes that symbolize the exodus of human beings from their rightful lands.

The blind folded imagery becomes quite stark in Iranna’s repertoire in the recent years. In his solo show ‘Birth of Blindness’ he has presented the sculptural representation of human victims, blind folded and set to wait for their decimation. The hooded imageries come quite often in his paintings, emphasizing his critique on injustice prevalent all over the world.

-JohnyML

Today we have illustrated lectures by Gigi Scaria, Atul Bhalla and Vibha Galhotra. These three artists, quite popular in contemporary Indian art scene more or less share a common interest in urban spaces and the issues generated by urbanization.

Urban issues have been a core debate in Indian art scene since 1960s. Late 20^th century saw how artists from a protected economy facing the pangs of a great change facilitated by the globalization of economics and the resultant urbanization. The previous generation of our artists handled this question of urbanization and the reflections of it in the human life, as existential problems; problems faced by the individual man. Individual man was the centre of all debates for them and the fast pace of urbanization for them was an incursion to their personal freedom, space and sense of judgment.

However, by the fag end of the last century, a new generation of artists reached a matured phase in their creativity and started looking at the urbanization process and problems posed by it not as something that affects the individual alone but as an ideological process that cuts across the boundaries of nations and different kinds of dynamics that activate the society, including economics and culture. Urbanization and the eased forms of commuting between continents and also the advanced communication facilities helped the artists to become more aware of the global nuances of urbanization and its ideological locations. They found that nothing could be taken away from the discourse of the urban and their works started reflecting how various strands of social realities give shape to this process of urbanization.

Gigi Scaria is one artist who treats urbanization as an ideological manifestation of power, politics and economics. His work ‘Wanderer amongst Clouds’ (watercolor on paper) shows as man (a la Caper David Frederich) standing on the top of a hill and watching over a city that has been constructed below him. It looks like a maze with people trapped in it. This man is a witness and a participant at the same time. The ease with which he sees the whole process below suggests that he could be the maker of it. Or he is a romantic who has taken a short refuge atop the hill. Or he could be the one who is expelled from his rightful land where now the city has taken shape. In this work, Gigi negotiate multiple issues of urbanization; the power that establishes it, the human beings who are destined to live in it and the ones who are expelled from it.

‘Real Terror Territorial’ is a painting (acrylic on canvas) that shows the map of Kashmir as a portrait. This surrogate portrait of a country/state shows how by making claims on lands, people in power fragment an erstwhile cohesive society. Each contour of the map is created by architectural structures. Together they produce a structure, which is strong and vulnerable at the same time. It is not just about urbanization. But it shows how through the lingua of architecture a nation is divided and claimed by different parties. Here urbanization is a façade for dividing a society.

In a digital print, Gigi deals with the construction of urban ideas through the images of a half made bridge in Delhi and the architectural magnificence of Shanghai city. In his video ‘Prisms of Perception’, Gigi presents how a old train passes one from to another showing the development of its own technology and design and finally collapsing the sense of chronology into a realm of re-thinking about progress.

Anoop intervenes by asking Gigi whether he intends to show the kind of fatalism that the urbanization process can bring in. Gigi says that though he does not look at it in that way, the fatalistic feelings and the kind of cyclic nature of creation and destruction cannot be avoided while comprehending the work.

Iranna wants to know whether Gigi is for or against urbanization. Gigi says that he cannot be for or against but could be reflective of it in his works.

Atul Bhalla starts with his photographic series on the drainage covers along the Marine Drive in Mumbai. These forty eight photographs arranged in a chronological order tell us the story of how Mumbai floods in every year. Through the registration of certain objects of urban administration Atul brings forth the issues of urban management subtly. He says that though there is no performance per se, the act of walking along the sea front and taking photographs of drain covers naturally involve a sense of performance that makes the onlookers curious.

Urban management has a lot of power involved in it. Right from regulating the water supply to the city to the selection of locations to which continuous water supply should be assured are handled in a series of photographs based on the pump houses along the Yamuna Embankment. Atul says that he is not an activist but he cannot avoid an activist’s role at times as the topics of his enquiry are political and need political solutions.

Atul’s involvement with Yamuna is well known. His earliest works on Yamuna are a series of sand and cement cast sculptures that replicate Bisleri water bottles. He explains how the basic unit of urban formation, that is water, is commodified and how the common people are pushed out from consuming clean water. Hence, in his works water becomes an ideological symbol that not only define who consumes but also says the status of the consumer.

Atul’s concerns with water continue in his series of performances and photographic works along Yamuna River. Also, he photographs the free water holes in Delhi.

Violence, which is contained and celebrated, is one integral part of Atul’s works. He shows a series of works in which he has dealt with violence.

The major question Atul faces from the audience is about his involvement as an activist. Atul says that he does not want to reduce the aesthetic involvement by projecting an activist’s role in his works. Besides, the audience questions him on the production of ‘series’. Atul answers that he likes to invite his audience to spend time before his works and also he wants to be less didactic about the topic by presenting only one work. He wants the viewer to go from one frame to another, following a certain kind of chronology and then break it at their will.

Vibha Galhotra looks at the process of urbanization as something that poses a menace to the people. Her work, a drawing in various frames shows a combined image of a dinosaur, JCB earthmoving machine and series of architectures. According to Vibha, these machines push the people out of their dwellings and pave way for urbanization. She envisions a monster out of urbanization.

Vibah’s urban camouflage work is a huge one. She morphs the images from Old Delhi and creates an urban jungle. Against this urban jungle she makes a few male mannequins clad in military fatigue designed out of the same backdrop. She says that it could be the future camouflage for the armies. In another set of works she presents a series of photographs in which people are seen wearing different kinds of masks to escape from pollution. Vibha refers to Nostradamus who had predicted by the 21^st century people would turn into pigs. By wearing a mask, people look like pigs, says Vibha.

The bronze works, which have a set of bricks embossed with her own initials, a honeycomb made out of trinkets and so on become emblematic of urban confusion. She also presents her earlier paintings, public projects and the works involving her basic training as a print maker.

When Vibha says honeycomb is emblematic of urban confusion, she is questioned by the audience for usually honeycombs are said to be the epitome of disciplined social organization. The audience also asks why she sees urbanization as a de-humanizing process, to which she says that she always finds it menacing and threatening to human life.

-JohnyML

Meta narratives, trans-lingual affirmations and transcending experiences

An audio-visual presentation, a slide show, an illustrated lecture, a debate on individual art practice- you call it any name, the first one in the series of discussions facilitated by the What Happens in Mukteshwar camp proves to be invigorating, interrogative and polemical. It has raised a lot of heat and helped in clearing a lot of dust that always gets accumulated around the individual practices of the artists.

I introduce the program. Perhaps, it is the first formal speech that I make before my friends during this camp. I prefer to call this camp as an effort to bring together the experiential, the nostalgic and the entertaining elements of a journey together. It provides a new, fresh and un-sentimental backdrop against which one could re-examine the aforementioned elements vis-à-vis that of the others.

Friendship is a great leveler. It pardons many a follies committed by a friend. But when it comes to debating the creative process and output of a friend, artists are very straight and their words often carry the precision and sharpness of a surgical device.

We have three artists today to kick start the presentation series; Parvathi Nayar, Anoop Panicker and Aji VN. By method or madness or even by methodical madness, the selection of the artists seems to be apt as three of them indulge in drawing as their predominant medium.

Parvathi Nayar, picks up from where I leave and she tries to connect the experiential and the nostalgic into a chain of frame of references. Her latest works, graphite on paper arranged as an installation, have images from a popular movie (Awara), the image of an old time film projector and a clinical depiction of a sperm entering an ovum.

Parvathi speaks of the juxtaposition of multiple layers of meta-narratives and fragmenting them at certain stages in order to evoke nostalgia and experientiality of history and events. It has political connotation as it consciously engages with the censorial clutches of the social psyche on the matters of love and sex, which often supply the theme for meta narratives in different mediums including films.

The artist continues to say how she, even while engages her works with the interpretational nuances of theory and history, remains faithful to a conventional method of making the drawings by hand, that too by making graphite strokes inch by inch. Parvathi had started it long back, looking at the particle movements in a cloud chamber. In her earlier drawings she had tried to capture the path of the particle movements, which later on gave way to clinical drawings and deliberate production of three dimensional commodities, strategically planned and aesthetically presented within the gallery space, pepped up with textual codes providing a parallel direction to the interpretation of the works.

Does the practice collapse into the realm of mediatic realism as Parvathi employs uses already existing images? I ask. But according to Atul Bhalla, it is not about mediatic realism though the readymade images are referred, it is more about the practice of drawing, with its capacity to renew itself in a new context without losing its conventional attachments with the individualistic pursuit. While Vivek finds her works contain an uncanny sense of humor, Martin would like to see her works shot in detail using micro lens so that the strokes could tell a different story about its making.

Anoop Panicker, in his recent works deals with the theme of ‘End of Fear’. Surprisingly, the medium that he uses to bring forth this issue is drawing; charcoal on paper.  Anoop speaks of the ‘trans-lingual affirmation’ of fear and the process of ending it. As a visual explanation of his theory, he presents three works with monumental images of pencils, standing vertically like skyscrapers, with the poster like inscription on them in English, Spanish and French.

This trans-lingual affirmation must be stemming out of the fear of trans-national affirmation of power by the imperialistic forces. The end of fear, as far as Anoop is concerned, has got a counter-colonial tendency as the human images in him are carefully selected from certain nationalities that had a history of liberating people from the clutches of imperialism and sadly falling back into the rut of authoritarianism.

To a question, Anoop says that he uses these different languages in order to suggest the colonial expansionism undertaken by these linguistic groups. It is almost like Empire striking back. At this point Vivek speaks of moving across the vast deposit of images in the global scene and behaving like a colonial plunderer who takes away images without the permission of the natives. Anoop agrees with it up to certain extent saying that there is a pleasure in the ending of this fear facilitated by the plundering, physically or virtually.

Anoop uses images that have strong political connotations. Some of his works are replete with a loaded symbolism. Decoding these dense images needs the primary cracking of the authorial intention. Madhusudhanan asks how the artist could separate the politically charged images from their contextual meanings and bring them into purely personalized realm. Anoop says that it is a question always to be debated along with counter-colonial practice. According to Gigi, the loaded nature of the images is not a problem as easy communication is not the primary intention of the artist always. I suggest that perhaps the proliferation of these images amongst the art audience would help to de-mystify its symbolism and the discourse could start on a ground of familiarity. Vivek says a magician sees a fellow magician as someone doing tricks and only to the audience it looks like magic.

Aji VN has three drawings to show and many more to skim through. Aji, settled in Rotterdam, works from memory. He uses colored papers as his surface and draws with conde. He does not use any photograph as his reference though there is a lot of photographic precision to his work. The first work that he shows before us has three nude yogis. He explains that nudity goes well with a set of people who are beyond time and space. His images have a ‘beyond time’ feel about them. But I tend to ask him whether he chooses nude yogis because that image is non-controversial in their own context. He says that he does not have such apprehensions and he loves to create images that transcend temporal affinities.

In Aji’s drawings, at times temporal issues come in. In the picture of a dead soldier, we do not see any soldier. In the horizontal frame what we see is set of vultures devouring something. The image of a machine gun shows that the invisible carcass must be of a dead soldier. Aji creates such a magic that the viewer feels that now the vultures are looking through the view finder of the machine gun. Violence begets violence and it is perpetuated endlessly.  Aji wants his audience to stand before his work at least for five minutes. He believes that he can take the viewer to a different plane. Anoop would like to know whether it is a spiritual plane or not. Atul says that this plane could be different need not necessarily be spiritual, which Aji agrees hundred per cent.

Aji works like a Shaman. The texture of the paper goads him to create suggestion and over a period of time, he says, that he has understood the power of suggestion. The landscapes in Netherlands and India come again and again in his works. He paints sea and landscape with the same passion. He says that they are like growth. Earth sprouts as plants, sea sprouts as waves, abandoned shores sprout as shells and broken skulls, happiness sprouts as people. Everything grows. It is fantastic and joyous.

Aji can go on show his works. He is like a charmer, he can charm the audience with his innocent speech and the humor generated out of it. But he is precise in his logic and execution of works. He belongs to a different league, which is always ‘high’.

The discussion ends there. Perhaps, it begins there as there are many more to come in the coming days.

Side Story:

Sumedh Rajendran, G.R.Iranna and Pooja Iranna arrive Mountain Trail at 10.30 pm.

While talking about the illustrated lecture someone says that it is going to be really grilling.

Iranna says he does not want to be grilled.

‘You need not be present there. Leave your name and date of birth. That’s enough,’ Sumedh Rajendran consoles Iranna.

-JohnyML

We have not got the full sense of conceptual art. We can accommodate anything in the name of concept. Many started believing that even if they don’t have any skills in any area, they can produce art. Somehow our art market too started believing in this false notion. Conceptual art has a great history. We need to learn that history and we need to re-think our conceptual art practice,’ says KM Madhusudhanan, an artist who has worked not only in print making, painting, photography, video art but also successfully learned and practiced the nuances of film making.

It is a cold and lazy afternoon. We have just arrived Mukteshwar and most of us have gone in for a quick nap. Gigi Scaria, KM Madhusudhanan and I do not feel sleepy thanks to heavy adrenaline pumping. When you are in a new place and also you feel that you have just a few days together, you feel like maximizing your engagement with your friends. Tired though, we embark on a discussion on why and how artists use a lot of assistants these days. It is then, Madhusudhanan makes this comment.

Madhusudhanan sounds right. Technological support and assistance is one thing, but getting assistants to paint or sculpt for you is another thing. If you look into history you find many examples in which artists making full use of assistants.

‘You can use assistants to execute your ideas. Perhaps, you are not able to climb up to a ladder and paint certain portions of your work, then you can use an assistant. But how can you employ an assistant to do a work that resembles ‘a work with your hallmark style’ that you had done at some point of your career? You are telling your assistant to make a work which should have these elements. Or you give a photograph and tell your assistant/s to do something based on that photograph and insist that it should reflect your style. Even if you follow all those theories about piracy, copyright and factory production of works of art, there should be something in your practice that moderates your ethical and moral thinking regarding the making of a work of art,’ I express my opinion.

‘I do use assistants when it comes to my videos and sculptures,’ Gigi Scaria pitches in. ‘But then it is my work and I am using the assistants as tools. I am not asking them to make a work of art that resembles some of my works. I conceive my works, I draw them, I decide on the materials and I choose my technicians to do the work. But when it comes to painting, I don’t think I can do the same thing. Painting is something that has a lot of a personal touch in it. If you are too busy, you may ask an assistant to fill certain portions in your canvas with certain colors. But you cannot let an assistant to do a complete work for you. I think we need to resolve this issue in a bigger way both in theoretical and pragmatic terms,’ Gigi says.

We wish our friends too come in and join our talk. But they are all tired after a long journey. Or even they are discussing certain art related issues in their rooms.

I have been contemplating on this issue for a long time. It is a very tricky issue. When you are clicking a picture, then it is your work. You may use technological assistance to develop the print in a huge format. Or even when you are creating a set to click a staged image, you are using assistants, but then someone is not clicking it for you. Even if you are using an assistant for clicking the trigger, you are not letting the clicker to decide on your image.

‘Film cannot be anybody else’s work other than the director’s.  The director knows his trade.  He knows the light conditions, he knows the art direction, he knows the script, he knows the continuity, he knows the camera angle , he knows camera work and even he knows his editing. Film is a director’s product. It is conceptual in every sense. But there is a director who does all the deeds or controls all what goes into the camera,’ says Madhusudhanan.

If that is the case, any artist can claim that he can even make his assistants to paint his works completely while having a complete hold on the output. It is getting trickier. The question of authorship comes in again. The question of authenticity comes in.  The question of art collection comes in.  The question of art dealing comes in. Are you selling and buying a product which is claimed by someone and done by someone else?

I think of film actors. They use body doubles to enact certain risky scenes. They use stunt men to do breathtaking stunts. But they don’t act a body double to act in the whole film and say that it is acted by the actor, not by the body double. A singer cannot use a double to sing for himself. A dancer cannot use a dupe to dancer for her. They can lip sync on stage, still they are using their voice in the track. What are the parameters that differentiate a singer or actor or dancer from an artist who deals with plastic art?

Gigi Scaria seems to have an answer for that. ‘Plastic arts are modeled by the artist.  A singer can sing without the help of another medium, a dancer can dance. But a plastic artist needs many other mediums to create a work of art, where he may be forced to use assistants.’

Sounds good. But the issue does not seem to be resolved. The question of authorial claim and its value comes back again and again.  Perhaps, a wider discussion might bring in more observations and more views on this.

What I overheard during the night party-

I like contemporary women writers- Parvathi Nayar.

I like them too but I don’t like them at times because they have a tendency to victimize themselves in these books- Priya Pall.

What about contemporary women artist, do they victimize themselves in their works? – A question which was not asked.

-JohnyML