Bhupen Khakhar I Obituary I 2003

Bhupen Khakhar 

Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings have this quality of drawing you irresistibly into his world. 

Bhupen’s life and work has been described as being ‘both exemplary and emblematic’. There was a definiteness, a consistency and a completeness about his art and life. Indeed everything about Bhupen seems to be the stuff of legend: it is interesting the way he created that emblematic quality about himself. He seems to stand iconic in the centre like those saints or national leaders, while all around him are vignettes, which are told stories. Stories of his open house, Pandu the cook, his famous friendships, his lovers, his generosity, his pranks, (he once hired a wedding band to play for a friend’s birthday in Kasauli), his writing and his aphorisms,(one of his famous aphorisms was ‘a bouquet of plastic flowers is an eternal joy to the eyes’) and his early catalogues as James Bond, or as a body builder, ridiculing himself-

Bhupen Khakhar had a mischievous, puckish quality and a terrific wit. He saw himself as  the Outsider - a‘Detective Inspector’ poking fun at the solemnity of the Indian art world. His early work was thought frivolous, and dismissed. The British critic Timothy Hyman writes of the artist Ram Kumar’s fury at seeing Khakhar’s work in the 1970s: he thought this was ‘caricature and in art there is no place for caricature’. In the process of playing the Fool, the Insignificant Man caught in the rigidities of Indian middle class life - (he wrote once in a catalogue ‘I used to immediately take bath twice with cold water following thoughts about sex’) - to the Melancholy Fool who ‘takes off his clothes before the world’ to expose his weakness in a half-embarassed, half-defiant way, Bhupen Khakhar  became a Master Painter.

Perhaps this had something to do with his ‘coming out’ as a homosexual: the more explicit the subject matter, the more structured and classical the work. Bhupen Khakhar always avoided artistic bohemia, he (unlike  Souza or  Husain) maintained a stolidly middle-class salaried man look, preferring to be seen as Common Man rather than Camp.

Bhupen Khakhar’s interventions in the Indian art scene were special, unique and extremely influential. Facing the prevalent formalised abstraction in the Indian art scene of the 1960s, he struggled to create an urban pictorial language equivalent to the hybrid Bombay Gujarati dialect that he grew up speaking. Trained as a chartered accountant and lacking any formal study as an artist, he was criticized for his bad drawing and lack of skill as a painter. With his passion for art and incessant hard work, he turned his bad drawing into expressing the clumsiness, the banality, the pathos as well as the monumentality of the life of the Common Man, of the lower middle class life that he was celebrating. He became a masterly colourist, taking from the bad taste, loud colour palette of calendar art to create his own highly nuanced, subtle and rich painting technique. In the process, he reinvented a familiar world, the prosaic everyday life of modern urban India and made it into art, making us experience it afresh. His death is a great loss to the art world and all of us who knew him well and were influenced by his work.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, 2003

La Centrale Gallery I pub.Montreal Canada I 2003

WOMAN ARTIST IN INDIA

N Rajyalakshmi, the fictitious Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, interviews the real artist Pushpamala N

NR: Ms Pushpamala, do you enjoy being called a woman artist? Isn’t it derogatory?

PN: Yes, some artists like one of my Professors in Baroda, Nasreen Mohammadi, who was a very fine abstract artist, did object to being called a woman artist. But since the 1980s I think there has been a very strong feminist consciousness and many artists found a whole new world of subject matter and felt empowered. Women artists now are doing some of the most exciting work in India, taking risks and breaking barriers with their practice! They have also become more articulate and confident -

NR: You chose to study sculpture. Was it difficult?

PN: I was a 40 kg weakling in art school, but I was always in the sculpture department. When I wanted to specialize, I asked my Professor whether I was too skinny to be a sculptor and he said, what you need is mental strength, not physical strength! That instantly convinced me! It’s hard work but so is making any kind of art.

Sculpture departments all over the world are very conservative. There is this image of huge bearded muscular men carving stone or welding metal- its very macho, and intimidating.

NR: But your work was recognized early-

PN: When I was a student in the 1980s in Baroda, I was part of a new generation of young sculptors who started doing strongly figurative sculpture in new materials. Our work was immediately noticed by the art world. The sculpture scene then was basically Henry Moore and abstract sculpture in stone and wood and metal. I chose to work in terracotta as an indigenous and ‘poor’ material.

( NR: Aren’t there very few women sculptors in India?

PN: Lets say there are very few good sculptors in India – and the most interesting ones are women! Like Meera Mukherjee of the older generation of artists from Santiniketan, who worked with the metal casting process of the Bastar tribals. Or Mrinalini Mukherjee who made large iconic woven hemp sculptures and now works with ceramics, Sheela Gowda who works with traditional materials like cowdung, thread and pigments, Anita Dubey who does surrealist conceptual work,  Navjot Altaf who has been working along with tribal artists in a tribal area doing very political work -  but the funny thing is, that most of these artists don’t come from a background of sculpture! They are trained painters, printmakers, even art historians. And someone like me who is a trained sculptor is doing photography and video. But everybody is using different kinds of media, which didn’t happen in the past. )

NR: Your work is funny. Isn’t it just satire and caricature? 

PN: You know, Ms Rajyalakshmi, women aren’t supposed to laugh out loud, to be boisterous? The world is full of jokes against women. But women, in fact, like all subalterns have a sharp sense of humour and wit. My use of humour relaxes the spectator but it’s very subversive. It’s also very aggressive! 

And women love my work. Men can be very embarrassed about it- but women seem to enter easily and identify with the fun, the satire, the sensuality, the pathos and the open self-revelation and confessional element in the work.

NR: Why did you start working with photography?

PN: My earlier figurative sculpture, which was mainly in terracotta, was too narrative, too real. I started moving away from it into a more minimal language, doing very strongly political, conceptual work in the 90s, responding to the violence and turbulence of the times. But then the work became didactic and spare -  I felt I had worked myself into a corner and was limiting the possibilities of my work.

The way I work with photography now, it is more expansive, more open, where I can put in all my interests- 

NR: Why do you use yourself in your photographs? Are you a narcissist?

PN: Narcissus was a Greek god who looked at his reflection in a pond and fell in love with himself. Women cannot be narcissists by definition, Ms Rajyalakshmi, because we can never love ourselves, we are always seeking approval from men and society!

NR: Will you say something about your recent work?

PN: My first photographic work, done in 1997, is a photo romance, Phantom Lady or Kismet, a film noir style adventure of lost and found twins set in the city of Bombay [Mumbai]. The Phantom Lady character is based on Fearless Nadia, who was a famous stunt film star from 1930s Hindi films. My next work, Sunhere Sapne [ Golden Dreams]  is the fantasy of a middle class housewife dressed in a housecoat and her alter ego, a mysterious woman in a golden frock with a bouffant hairstyle. The set of small hand painted black and white photographs have the sweetness and intimacy of old family photographs, but  it is shot like a thriller, and the content is dark.

Bombay Photo Studio is a series of individual studio portraits taken by Mr.  J H Thakker, big size sepia prints based on the typical family portrait or film star glamour pictures. My latest work, Dard e Dil [The Anguished Heart], a set of large handpainted photographs, is a tragic love story, a sort of Muslim social set in an old ruined mansion in the heart of Old Delhi. 

I am also working on an ongoing project with a photographer friend, Clare Arni, in which we are creating a series of images of South Indian women, like an ethnography of native types.

In all these, I play the protagonist or both the protagonists [I love using alter egos]  and use popular genres and archetypes.

I am also interested in referring to the history of Indian photography, which I see as the history of Indian modernity, which has had its own trajectory-

NR: But don’t you think you are reinforcing these stereotypes by enacting them?

PN: You know, I am much taller and larger than the conventional Indian woman. When I assume the character of the protagonist, the image changes immediately, becomes more powerful. And then I become an active agent, changing the popular images I work with- they become my own fantasies, projections of my own desires, and more nuanced, more complex. There is also a strong sense of vulnerability, of autobiography - so it goes back and forth between the personal and the social/political.

NR: Ms Pushpamala, there have been a lot of attacks on artists and women recently by fundamentalist groups. It is all about how women are portrayed or about enforcing a dress code. The accusation is that it is against Indian culture or traditional culture. Does this affect you?

PN: Women and artists are soft targets, easy to attack, Ms Rajyalakshmi. I was just thinking of the liberal climate that was there till the 80s. Savitri, an artist from a lower middle class traditional family who worked in a bank had an exhibition of ‘Self  Nude’  paintings , as she called it, in the early 80s in Bangalore. It created a furore and there was a hot debate in the papers for weeks about her work. She was very confident and articulate and defended herself stoutly. But there was no question of her or her exhibition being attacked - nor was it officially banned! A Tamil magazine in Chennai castigated her work and that was it.

Recently, in Bangalore there was an exhibition of photographs of the making of the idols of the Goddess Durga which was attacked by a group of men. They told the owner of the gallery to take down works that showed the bare breasts and limbs of the idols because it insulted the image of their goddess. This is ridiculous- it is a common sight to see the craftsmen making the images and  photographs of them are published everywhere! It is a way of intimidating people by irrational acts and creating an atmosphere for fundamentalism to grow. It is also very much to do with enforcing male supremacy and machismo.

NR: Indian artists are showing a lot internationally these days. Do you think your work can be understood abroad?

PN: No, maybe not all the layers, ‘in’ jokes, or references. But the work is performance related feminist art which I would say is its international context. Last year, when I showed Phantom Lady and my video Indian Lady in Montreal at La Centrale for instance, young people and students particularly loved the work. There is an image of India as either spiritual/ Orientalist, or as backward, rustic and disaster ridden. The funny thing is that people in the West and some people in India see Phantom Lady as ‘Western’. But the characters in Phantom Lady and the stunt and thriller genres I’ve used, have been popular types in Indian films for decades! And the shots of Bombay are at actual locations with real people in them. When we show internationally, I think we help break this ‘anthropological’ view-

Pushpamala N        

Bangalore  February 2003

Deccan Herald Bangalore I Book review I ‘Captured Moments- Shambhu Shaha’, Chandrima Shaha I ‘In her Own Right , Remembering the Artist Karuna Shaha’,Tapati Guha Thakurtha, Seagull Books I 27.05.2001

LITTLE KNOWN JOURNEYS

The two biographies bring to light the pioneering contributions of a candid photographer and a fiery artist. 

In a situation where there are hardly any publications on contemporary Indian art, Seagull Books have played an important role in commissioning and bringing out serious and consistently well- designed art books over the years. These two illustrated monographs on the Bengal couple, photographer Shambhu Shaha and artist Karuna Shaha, bring to the notice of the art world two different, perhaps neglected, kinds of journeys.

While for various reasons 19th century Indian photography has excited extensive interest and research, the history of modern photography remains largely undocumented. Shambhu Shaha was in some ways the pioneer, one of the first Indians to graduate from using a large format camera to a small one, and to specialize in candid photography. 

In an interview he says that he was so shy that he preferred to take photographs unnoticed, and later read in a journal that Cartier-Bresson took 'candid' photographs. That was exactly what he was doing, except that his technique was different. 'Cartier-Bresson used to keep his camera wrapped around his leg with black tape; I used a gadget that I attached to the lens. This was a sort of mirror that enabled you to see and shoot your subject, looking away from it at an angle of 90 degrees. 

Since his biographer, daughter Chandrima Shaha is a scientist and photographer herself; the essay is full of interesting information about the rough and ready inventiveness of the period. In another anecdote he talks about the enlarger he had to make because to buy one was too expensive in the 1930s. This consisted of a contraption made from the sliding copier of a camera; an aluminum cooking pot with a hole, with its inside painted black and a camera lens placed in it. It was with this makeshift enlarger that he produced some of his most famous photographs. 

Shaha learnt photography in the 1920s from the Nationalist revolutionary Hemchandra Kanungo, a colourful man who had just returned from exile in the Andamans and set up a studio in Shaha's hometown Midnapore. Kanungo took on students like a traditional guru, on the condition that they will later never turn away anyone who wants to learn from them. Shaha went through a rigorous academic training in drawing and painting before learning photography. Kanungo believed in holistic education, so besides concepts of light and shade, perspective and composition, they learnt ‘woodcraft, leather craft, bookbinding, printing, cooking, and English literature'. Shaha drew and painted all his life and felt that this early training helped him compose and print his pictures more sensitively. 

Women's Studies has opened up to scholarly research a whole world previously ignored; in a sense, valourising local struggles as vs. the grand narratives. Karuna Shaha developed a reputation in 1960s Calcutta as 'the lady who painted nudes'. Tapati Guha Thakurtha sees her as a pioneer who, while not featuring in the mainstream or avant-garde circuits, represents the struggles of the first generation of working women artists in the country. 

Karuna Shaha was the first woman student to be admitted into the Calcutta Art School in the 1940s. In the cloistered atmosphere of the art school a Matron was employed to chaperon the girls to and fro from the classes. In contrast, at home she faced the hard reality of having to support her family by teaching music and playback singing for films. As a young woman, she is fiery and tempestuous, doing relief work among the Burmese refugees and actively participating in the Quit India Movement. At this time she commits the legendary act of tearing down the Union Jack from the art school gates, for which she is expelled and sent to jail for two years. These years according the writer are strangely shrouded in the artist's memory, as if unimportant to her progress as an artist. Released in the 1940s, she tours with the IPTA, performing plays and meeting the stalwarts of the Left movement. It is at this time that she meets Shambhu Shaha who is part of the same left avant-garde. 

After an initial string of awards and successes Karuna Shaha sinks into middle class life, feeling increasingly isolated and professionally marginalized as a woman artist. In writing about her crisis, Tapati Guha Thakurta accepts the same parameters that Karuna Shaha worked in - the narrow Calcutta art milieu and the painter’s own fascination with academic painting. Throughout her life, the artist never seems to question her training in Western academicism or reveal any interest in any contemporary debates or art movements. 

It is interesting that in her three years in Florence in the early 60s, she does not look outside of the Academy to progressive currents and new ideas, but remains fascinated by the same nineteenth century modes that she had studied in Calcutta. In contrast, her contemporaries Nasreen Mohammadi and Meera Mukherjee, both highly individualistic and solitary artists, used their study in Europe to create strong contexts for their work - [International abstraction in the case of Mohammadi, and an interest in indigenous forms in the case of Mukherjee] - which sustained them throughout their creative lives. It is this failure to connect, and a certain orthodoxy of the imagination that seems to curtail Karuna Shaha's art and keep it firmly at the provincial level. 

Pushpamala N

Saffronart Art Cafe I Interview with Edgar Demello I 2001

A GALLERY FOR ARCHITECTS

Pushpamala n. interviews architect Edgar Demello

Architect Edgar Demello who recently opened the first architectural gallery in India, TAG&B or The Architecture Gallery and Bookshop at his old office on Cunningham Road in Bangalore, is interviewed by Pushpamala N.

Edgar Demello (born in 1947 in Abadan, Iran) studied architecture in the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and Urban Design at Delft University in Holland. He worked for a few years in Europe and came back to Bangalore in 1978 to start his own architectural firm Edgar Demello Architects.

He opened TAG&B in June 2000 in Bangalore.

PN: Edgar, why did you feel the need to start an architecture gallery in Bangalore? In the early 80s some of you had a discussion group called BASE, and then Raj Shetty formed the Discussions in Architecture Forum- DIAF. Has this grown out of that?

ED: Actually, there are not many architecture galleries worldwide. There are architecture institutes. TAG&B is a place for discourse among architects, a mediator between academia and practice. I used to teach part time and found that there didn’t seem to be a platform for the exchange of ideas, which myself and other architects had experienced in Europe.

Also, architects are not very comfortable about putting their work to critical appraisal by their fellows. The important thing that BASE did, which preceded the gallery was to allow us to do this, and put our work in context in a very free for all environment which as you know could get very aggressive sometimes!

Then the idea of TAG&B came about, to give a formal structure and to try and understand the process of design and building and not just the product. In the gallery, one of the most important and popular events is when architects discuss the process of their work – the mechanics of it- sometimes on site. For the students this becomes very important. And we really encourage people not to put any cosmetics on it – to talk about the whole mess- the mishaps, the problems with clients etc.

These events happen on Tuesdays and Fridays. Students come from Bangalore, MIT in Manipal and Hassan when we have video showings, slide lectures and exhibitions.

PN: But the general public is either indifferent or hostile to architecture.

ED: You know Charles Correa said that Mahatma Gandhi is not called the doctor or engineer of the nation, you call him the ‘architect’ of the nation, but in spite of that architecture doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by the public!

There are two things we want to do here: one idea came out the NAI (The Netherlands Architectural Institute). They have something called the school atelier, where school children come to the institute to be exposed to things architectural for instance, what is taking measurements… They are taken around the site and given projects, and exposed to history and processes.

We’ve been talking about this in BASE for ten years. Dev Bildikar the architect now wants to work out a programme for school children.

The other point is that we have to really believe that architecture is an extremely important part of our social consciousness. People say architecture is elite, we can’t afford it – is it possible for a gallery to mediate in this- to have confrontations and to provoke and engage people?

PN: Do you think this is because Bangalore, or Karnataka, never had major architecture schools or a major movement, or influential architects like for example the role that BV Doshi played in Ahmedabad? We never had a modernist movement.

ED: Very often the right patronage helps start certain movements- I think this is where Ahmedabad scores. There the big industrialists were concerned and wanted to invite people of international importance like Louis Kahn and Corbusier. It’s actually about finding the right people. Kasturbhai and Lalbhai got in touch with BV Doshi who had already worked with Corbusier in Paris in the early 60s, to start the architecture school – he had been talking to them about the Modernist movements in Europe. He got people like Bernad Kohn and Louis Kahn to start thinking about establishing an architecture school of excellence in Ahmedabad. A little earlier Vikram Sarabhai had already brought down Charles and Ray Eames, designers, architects and inventors, to set up NID, the National Institute of Design.

Something similar never happened in Bangalore… And Ahmedabad soon started to tie up with important schools in Europe and America on exchange programmes. The Delhi School hasn’t done this in 55 years!

PN: What would you say about the concept of Critical Regionalism?

ED: Critical Regionalism is really a commonsensical approach to the environment. Kenneth Frampton, the guru of architectural criticism first formulated that phrase in a book of the same name in the early 1980s. He was saying that the International style does not exist because Modernism has to do with the region and how you look at it through your culture and your climate. And what Norman Foster, British architect said – and I completely agree with him – is that in the near future the only thing that will distinguish buildings from one part of the world to another is the geographical climate in which it is built. Everything else will be a common denominator including the culture. But cultural expression in building really comes from responding to the climate.

PN: Tell me something more about BASE.

ED: BASE- it’s not an acronym, it’s more like a foundation or basis – happened in the early 80s when seven or eight of us met by chance. We had all got back from various parts of the country and the world- Nikhil Arni, the Kanade brothers, Sharad Padalkar, Venkatraman, Mohan Bopiah, myself and Sanjay Mohe – it was during the building boom in Bangalore. We had all grown up in the International style and we were looking for connections in the region. So we travelled to the backwaters of Karnataka and Tamilnadu looking at local architectures. All this was put into slide discussions but it took a while for us to realize that it was not the physical foms nd constructional inventiveness that was important but the spirit and essence it contained. We were romantics, once we showed these slides with great arrogance to Henri Ciriani a French architect, who BV Doshi had sent own to Bangalore, to show him what great ’indigenous architecture’ we had. He almost ridiculed our rather naïve and literal reading of tradition. Tradition is everywhere he said, but what do we do with it as contemporary architects ?  One must look at the vernacular within an urbane and civil context

- civil as in people- as versus civic as in establishment. 

PN: But visually, Bangalore looks crazy- it’s as if every individual or builder wants to fulfil a different fantasy.

ED: Because Bangalore is not homogenous like Chennai culturally, that’s allowed for very diverse ideas and architectural design positions. But there is a new maturity in the way people are looking at the city. I think the phase of Windsor Manor type neo-colonial architecture is over, and the phase of glass-fronted buildings! There’s a great feeling of optimism amongst a new generation of architects in their late 20s and 30s, on the one hand quite angry, and on the other hand, quite impatient that architects are not really looking at the city with the kind of inventiveness it deserves. I want the gallery to be a facilitator in actively involving these guys in the way a city can redefine itself.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, February 2001

Saffronart Art Café I Interview with Balan Nambiar I 2000

TRADITIONS AND TENSIONS

Pushpamala N. interviews sculptor and scholar Balan Nambiar.

Balan Nambiar, [born 1937, Kannapuram, Kerala] studied sculpture in the Madras College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai. In 1971 he moved to Bangalore and has been working in the city as an independent artist. Balan Nambiar has intensively researched and documented the ritual art forms of Kerala and Tulunadu in Karnataka, for which he received the Nehru Fellowship.

PN:     Balan, your recent work 'Valampiri Shankha' is a stainless steel image of a conch shell. What connection does the shankha, which is an archaic Hindu religious symbol, have with the state-of-the-art technology produced by Texas Instruments who commissioned the work?

BN:     The first conch sculpture I made was in 1978 in the Portland Cement Factory in Heidelberg in Germany, where someone pointed out to me that it was based on the golden section. The golden section or the golden mean has a proportion of width to height of 1:1.618, which is supposed to be the perfect proportion, and has been used extensively by Greek and Renaissance artists and architects.

While most conches have an anti - clockwise spiral, the Valampiri Shankha [which means 'right turning' in Malayalam] has a clockwise spiral and is considered auspicious and rare. I heard a story that a German collector offered 50,000 DM for one! A properly grown clockwise conch when blown produces a sound which is closest to the 'OM' sound. 

The sculpture is the logo of the Centre of Digital Technology, a laboratory sponsored by Texas Instruments who are the pioneers in introducing digital sound processing [DSP] to India. I was thinking of the inherent mathematical effect of the sound of 'Om' produced by the Valampiri Shankha in terms of digital power. I wanted to make it in stainless steel, using the most sophisticated processes like computer and laser technology. The software AUTOCAD was used to design the sections.

PN:      Visually, the sculpture has a light, shimmering, glassy quality- almost like a mirage. ...Balan, you have used ritual symbols and stories from myths in your work but some motifs like the flame, rice plant, cactus and bird you say are autobiographical. Tell me about your life.

BN:      I come from a land owning family from Kannoor District in Kerala- but members of the family also worked in the fields- I used to plough the fields, plant rice and grow vegetables when I was a boy. There used to be Theyyam performances in my village and I used to watch the make up- they make elaborate ritual costumes from tender coconut leaves ...In high school I was very good in both mathematics and drawing. So after high school I did the Madras Govt. Drawing Examination, got a job in the railways as a draughtsman and moved to Chennai in 1959.

I was painting all the time and sending my work to exhibitions. Fellow artist Akkitham Narayanan introduced me to KCS Paniker in 1962. As the principal of the Madras Art School, Paniker took a personal interest in my work. He gave me the courage to give up my Railways job and I joined the art school as a student at the age of 30!

PN:      When you came to Bangalore in 1971 you must have been the only contemporary sculptor working in Karnataka. What was it like?

BN:      I am like the cactus plant, which survives in the most uncongenial place! When I moved to Bangalore in the 1970s, there was no proper art institute or gallery. The only other freelance artist besides me was the painter Roomale Chennabasaviah. I formed the Bangalore Art Club as soon as I moved here, where I ran evening classes for adults and children's classes at the Max Mueller Bhavan. The Brothers of the Holy Cross had given me their big hall on St. Mark's Road to use- I organized film shows, seminars, poetry readings, dance performances. I lived in an outhouse in the compound and did painting and drawing.

            
In  1973, Shankar Hegde of Hegde and Golay Watches asked me to do a sculpture for them. I made an 8 ft. high welded steel sculpture symbolising time in front of his factory- he was very pleased with the work and offered me a shed and facilities to work. It was a lucky break! Most factories are not keen on artists using their space because they feel it is not profitable. In 1975 I had my first big exhibition of large welded steel sculptures on the lawns of the Hotel Ashoka [there was still no gallery!].

PN:     Your outdoor sculptures 'Monument to the Assassinated' and 'Resurrection of Janaki' which you made in the Art and Nature Workshop in Delhi in 1995 have an unusually sharp political content. Can you talk about that?

BN:     For a long time I have been disturbed by some of the characters in the Puranas. One incident from the Ramayana is the death of Bali. Sugriva is the younger half brother of the forest king Bali, who wants the kingdom of Kishkinda. He makes a treaty with Rama to eliminate Bali in return for his help in searching for Sita. I consider this the first recorded illegal treaty in the history of India! Rama hides behind a tree and kills Bali. In Northern Kerala where I come from there are hundreds of shrines for Bali who is worshipped by the artisan community- blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and carpenters. In Kerala, in the Koodiyattam and Kathakali performances, the most experienced actor always plays the role of Bali, while Rama's role is always given to a junior artist.

There are several versions of the Ramayana- in the Malayalam version; Rama was hiding behind seven sal trees. In 'Monument to the Assassinated', I used seven 2.5 metre high slabs of kota stone placed in a row- a groove was cut at the chest level of all the stones to show the path of the arrow shot from the bow of Rama. Rama was depicted by two footmarks carved on a slab of kota- and at the other end; a split boulder on a raised platform depicts Bali.
Janaki is another name for Sita - the one who was born out of the ploughing of the earth. After her marriage she goes through every kind of suffering and at the end she disappears back into the earth. She is the daughter of the earth. 

In the work 'Resurrection of Janaki' I made a 10 metre long slit in the earth, which was surrounded by a line of boulders in an oval shape to suggest the womb of the earth. A big tree in the location was part of the work. Seven stones were placed on seven slabs at the head of the slit representing the Sapta Matrikas or Seven Mother Goddesses. They are the only witnesses for a possible resurrection... 

Pushpamala N 

Bangalore  2000

Saffronart Art Café I Interview with C S Krishna Setty I 2000

THE MIND OF A PAINTING

Pushpamala N interviews Art critic/ Artist CS Krishna Setty about art criticism in Karnataka.

CS Krishna Setty [born Theerthahalli, Shimoga Dist., Karnataka], studied painting at the Davangere School of Art and then worked in the Garhi Graphics Workshop in Delhi. He is a post -graduate in Kannada literature from Mysore University. After teaching for a few years at the Davangere School of Art, he joined Clarion Advertising and he is now Manager, Public Relations in Bharat Earth Movers Ltd. He has also been the regular art critic for Kannada Prabha, and now Praja Vani, both leading Kannada Dailies.

His publications include monographs on artists, a book on expressionism and the recent publication 'Chitra Chitta' a collection of essays on art. He has edited various Kannada cultural magazines and has been editor of the 'Janapriya Pustaka Male' series of the Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi [KLKA] to popularise art amongst the people. Krishna Setty is an inveterate organizer involved in the Karnataka Kala Melas, travelling art shows and founder of 'Dakahavisa' art organization and a member of the KLKA.

He is the founder president of the 'Drushya Kala Sahitya Parishad', an organization formed to promote art writing in Karnataka.

PN:      Krishna Setty, you have started a forum for art critics working in Karnataka called Drushya Kala Sahitya Parishad. You know, when I was teaching in the art school CAVA in Mysore, one major problem we had was that very few students knew English but there were hardly any art books in Kannada available.

KS:      Yes- there's a lot of art activity in Karnataka- even in the districts, but news about contemporary art is not reaching people there. Unlike in Western countries, there is not enough art literature in our country. And though there are a lot of art writers here there was no concerted effort to publish and reach people.

That was our first agenda. Then we had another agenda of developing art terminology and art writing itself in Kannada - so we formed this organization in May 1999. We have about 30 writers who are members, based all over Karnataka and we try to meet often, maybe once in three or four months usually in Bangalore- 

We bring out a magazine in Kannada called Chitraakshara once in 6 months. We're really concentrating on developing art literature; we're not really interested in publishing reviews or profiles of artists.

PN:      What exactly do you mean by art literature?

KS:      For instance, in each issue we review an art book- at the moment we are concentrating on books written in Kannada. Apart from that, we have an essay on an important art writer like Shivaram Karanth, or PR Thippe Swamy. And in each issue we take up one art term and discuss that in length. In one issue we took up Edward Bullough's theory of Psychical Distance, which has been extensively used in both literature and art, which is about the relationship between the work of art and the spectator. We have discussed in detail the concept of 'Chitra Turaga Nyaya', which is from Indian poetics, introduced by Shankuka in the 9th century. This term literally translates as 'Picture- Horse Law'- where Shankuka says that if we see the picture of a horse in a painting, we know it is not a real horse - but if we don't believe it, we cannot enjoy the picture. Most of the Indian theorists take examples from poetry - very rarely do they take examples from visual art - so we found this interesting.

In October 1999 we organized a two-day State conference of art writers in Udupi and 80 writers from all over Karnataka took part in it. Some of the papers have been published in Chitraakshara.

PN:      In the seminar on 20th Century Art held recently by the Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi in Bangalore, I found that very few of the speakers had done any real research. In fact this is the problem with art critics - they do not have the scholastic rigor of a historian or social scientist.

KS:      It's true we haven't developed a good faculty for art theory and art research. I feel this is because of a lack of scope.
By scope I mean there are very few people writing full time - most of us are part time writers unlike sociologists or historians. While academics teach their own subjects and do research in their own fields - we are all working in different kinds of jobs. I work in a public sector company, KV Subramanyam teaches language in a government primary school, KS Srinivasa Murthy works in a bank, AL Narasimhan works with the State Gazetteer and Anil Kumar teaches in an engineering college. And we all write regular art reviews in various papers and also publish books!

PN:      Tell me about your new book Chitra Chitta.

KS:      Chitra Chitta translates as 'The Mind of a Painting'- it's actually a collection of seminar papers and essays that I've written in the past 15 years. There are 12 articles in the book on a variety of subjects. In one I deal with nudity in painting- it's written around the controversy about Husain's nude Saraswati painting. I've discussed how the nude has been used historically in Indian art. Another essay deals with contemporary artists using miniature-painting traditions. One discusses the relationship between literature and art, there's one about printmaking in Karnataka and one essay which talks about how to see a painting- or what is visual art...I've also discussed Picasso's 'Guernica' in detail.

PN:      I see a lot of regional art critics talking about the local directly in terms of the global or international art scene without contextualizing the work within the national art scene, and our own histories, influences and preoccupations.

KS:      Most of our art writers have not gone to Western countries or even traveled extensively in India. They basically know what's happening in Karnataka. Why we often refer to Western art is just because we get plenty of literature on Western art! Quite a few art books are being published in India now but there are no good libraries in Karnataka which stock them- not even in the KLKA or the art schools.

PN:      Many of our art writers come from a background of literary criticism; I think there are problems with that.

KS:      There's a real problem with critics coming from a literary background- they don't understand the sensitivity of the artwork. I'll give you an example- I'm basically a graphic artist- sometimes the printmaker works with such great sensitivity with the medium, I can see the struggle- but in a review the critic will just talk about the image. I know how difficult it is to get certain effects. A line etched is not the same as a line drawn in pencil- you can't see them in the same way, or enjoy the texture.

PN:      Who publishes art books in Kannada? And how are they distributed?

KS:      Compared to other states KLKA has published a lot of books. Some of them are monographs on well-known artists from the state; some of them are portfolios of pictures, for example of Karnataka murals or of contemporary artists; there are books on art history and a popular series on art for the public. This year we're bringing out a collection of art reviews of important critics from the state. Private publishers have published a few books. Some artists themselves are writing as well as publishing books.

There's a bulk purchase scheme here for the state libraries, but the KLKA is not really making a concerted effort to get all the state libraries to order their books. Each scheme has a last date and formalities to be followed- you have to make an application- But since there are a lot of artists and art institutions here [there are 150 art schools in the state!], they buy them directly. The print run is normally 1000. Many publications of the KLKA have been sold out. 

Pushpamala N 

Bangalore 2000

Saffronart I Art Café I Interview with Clare Arni I 2000

PASSAGES THROUGH INDIA

Pushpamala N interviews photographer Clare Ari

Photographer Clare Arni is a British citizen who has chosen to live and work in India. After a childhood spent in Madurai, Tamilnadu she studied History of Art and Film and Media in Scotland and moved to Bangalore in 1984 to work as an independent architectural, travel and fashion photographer. She has traveled around India extensively photographing historical architectural sites building up a library of slides, which she directly sells to art publishers in the UK.

She is an incorrigible traveler, and with her sense of adventure and terrific sense of humour she has a fund of interesting stories and anecdotes to relate about her various projects. She talks to Pushpamala N. about her work.

PN:    Clare, about the documentation work you have been doing for the new Marg volume on Hampi- the site with its dramatic rocky outcrops and rich history must be really interesting.

CA:    I'm working with George Michell who is an authority on the Vijayanagar Empire for the Hampi project. He's been coming to Hampi for the last 21 years when it was practically an unknown site and there was only one tea stall there- the team used to just sleep under the stars! The book is concentrating on the last twenty years of archeological research that's been done by them.
The shoot involved covering till now unknown sites in Hampi, which involved a lot of trekking through fields and up hills. The whole of the Hampi site had piped water- the canals which are still in use today were built by the Vijayanagar kings. The piped water went into the palaces, you can still see the clay pipes- it was not only for agricultural use. There's going to be a whole chapter on the water system, which was an astounding engineering feat. When they made the canals they made use of the contours of the existing rocky site, so you find sometimes the canal takes a turn and there's a ten foot high menhir in the middle of it- and they also dug deep channels into the rock. It's visually very dramatic.
The book basically concentrates on the archeological facts but there are many myths and legends associated with the place- like about the Zenana enclosure. You know, all the sites have names which have been given arbitrarily by some Englishman, which are irrelevant to their original use! The Lotus Mahal is within the so- called Zenana enclosure but it's proven that it wasn't for women at all. There's a story that the last king was locked up there by his minister...
Hampi is important today as a religious centre because of all the Hanuman legends associated with it. He was supposed to have rested there on the way to Lanka on the Anjaneya Hill... I was documenting all the sites. In one place we found large stone slabs with smooth circular shapes dug out in them. No one knew what they were- they've now realized that they are huge thalis carved out in the rock- people used to directly eat off them!

PN:    You had a lot of adventures doing the earlier Marg book on the Kaveri.

CA:    The Kaveri book involved a four month trip from the source of the river in Coorg all the way to Poompuhar in Tamilnadu, where the river joins the sea. I'd get carried away a bit about taking good shots and not worry about the dangers- but I had a faithful driver who felt it was his duty to protect me. At Hogenakal in Karnataka, the river has just passed through the forests. It's supposed to be full of medicinal herbs and have curative properties so people come to bathe there. I decided to go down to the edge of the waterfall so I could get a view from the bottom where it hits the water. We were in a coracle which is a round wicker boat - and the water was gushing around us, when I heard my faithful driver yelling to the boatman -'I am my mother's only son!' But finally we just got a bit splashed.
We were floating down through a high gorge- one side was Tamilnadu which was a dry state and the other side was Karnataka which was wet. We saw a funny sight - Tamil farmers were getting into coracles and crossing the river to Karnataka, where there were arrack shops lined across the top with plastic bags of hooch hanging over the edge- and then weaving back home on their coracles singing drunken songs. The whole gorge was echoing with the music...

The Kaveri splits into a fan shaped delta where the river meets the sea. There are very interesting little known places there, like Pichavaram, which has mangrove swamps. You go in a boat through the swamp and you see naked men walking all around you, picking shrimps off the roots of the trees and putting them in plastic bags attached to their underwear. Tranquebar is the only Danish settlement ever built outside Denmark- there's a big fort there, huge important buildings, churches, falling to ruin. Then there are holy places of different religions like Velankanni. It's a very powerful place with a big 17th century Portuguese church of Our Lady of Help, where you give offerings of whatever you want, or want mended. So there are legs, organs, little houses, boats, all made of silver being sold outside in the shops. There is a museum there with a collection of all these objects given over the years, some of them specially made: like silver stethoscopes, a silver aeroplane, silver penises...
There's a Muslim Darga, also very powerful, in Nagore- it was full of people dying who had come there to be cured. I was walking through the outer corridors when I saw these cheap frames with broken pieces of glass, bits of hair, rusty nails- I was told they were objects that had been found inside peoples' bodies and removed during exorcism rituals...all carefully framed.
I wanted to document the whole river in its course, including natural sites as well as contemporary life and crafts, but Marg was interested mainly in the historical sites. I may use the rest of the material for a future book.

PN:    You've done a lot of contemporary architectural photography as well.

CA:    I've been lucky to work for leading architects like BV Doshi, Charles Correa and Geoffrey Bawa. One of the interesting projects for Charles Correa was documenting the North Karnataka town of Bagalkot. It's a very old town with monuments, mosques and traditional houses- and because people knew it was going to be submerged by a dam, they hadn't bothered to modernize the buildings. So it was a very good example of traditional architectures of different kinds: weavers' houses, merchants' houses- they had amazing features like secret compartments and secret passages within the walls. When they were invaded they'd be able to throw jewels and money down these passages so that they'd be stored in the underground cellars!

PN:    Tell me about your photography, how do you like to work?

CA:    I use available light as much as possible. I like to shoot natural scenes and portraits rather than orchestrating the pictures- so I shoot long exposures in interiors to capture the ambience of a place, how the builder imagined it, or how it originally functioned in terms of light.
I like to use Fujichrome Provia slide film because of its fine grain and rich colours- and I basically work in colour, I'm not a black and white photographer. 

Pushpamala N 

Bangalore  2000