SPACE UNTITLED: MIDWAY, TURNING.

BENOY P.J

It is a difficult thing to write about an exhibition of considerable fluidity like the present one titled ‘Space untitled’. Obviously, a certain notion of ‘high standards’ has gone into selection of artists and the making of this show. However, the criterion/s that have played a part in this production are not in anyway self evident. While it is a fact that up till late nineties the selection of artists into group shows especially around notions of avant-gardism propounded by the ‘insiders’ have been a space for drawn out fights and contestations, over the last decade or so, especially after the boom in the art market, there was a toning down of the social rhetoric amongst the affluent and influential practitioners of art. Politics had gradually been relegated to the background, and was seen as an impediment that got in the way of good art by many artists. All sorts of collective/ community based art projects were frowned upon and kept out of reckoning. As a cumulative effect of the popular skepticism towards what was regarded as the tenets of high art and its canons expressed from below there was a veritable tension between these multiple realms of artistic practice and the question of judgment became evermore intractable. If the status of the art object was secured by its entry into the art market (this is not to say that those artists who had attempted to depend on the art market for survival were committing some original sin) and the discourse of art was to be confined to a tame art world rhetoric that was intent on effacing traces of the manifold resistances to power, this would have been a totally farcical situation. The Kantian notion of immanence which had been foundational in the securing of the field of Philosophy for itself and through it for the autonomous existence of the Aesthetic, has been brought under scrutiny for its complicity in perpetuating notions of segregation. Contemporary re-imaginings of the political, which were very often tied up with the expressive potentials of the multitude and which had deconstructed the centrality of the avant-gardism of the civilizationally “advanced” to reclaim subject position and authorship for those who were regarded by the discourse of history as ‘voiceless’ and characterized by ‘lack’, seems to have made decisive advances over mono-cultural formulations about the aesthetic. This call of difference, perhaps, maybe something that has had an impact on the organizing of the present exhibition, wherein above twenty artists of varied dispositions are putting together their works and in which a certain fluidity and relativism has replaced the modernistic attempt at coherence. However, these tensions are not necessarily things of the past, as can be witnessed by a cursory look at the works in this exhibition, often couched in pictorial languages that borrow heavily from the legacy of the ‘Radicals’ but at the same time carefully distancing themselves from any social and political implications.

In the sculpture ‘Cart away’, Reghunathan plays with the notion of hidden labour and the contemporary aspect of covered deals in a paradoxical manner, wherein the invisibility of manual labour is shockingly juxtaposed with the clandestine nature of dealings that attempt to cart away public resources, to create an ironic effect. The wheels upon which the cart rest are half exposed and are painted red. One significant aspect of both of Reghunadhan’s works in this show seems to be the number game involved in them: while the two separate entities involved in ‘Cart away’- that of the hidden labour of a considerable section of the population that sustains the polity and the clandestine nature of the other ‘hidden labour’- that of widespread corruption- are made to coalesce in the work. The hidden labour (once again) involved in such a projection of the politics of subalternity is the reason for the populist appeal of this work, by simultaneously posing the question of the  historically accumulated capital as necessarily hiding behind even parts of the politics of the subordinated thereby creating unseen complexities in our  assumptions about the economy and politics and  taking over the untitled space of the subaltern for the interests of the hegemony of that very elite who are out to discredit or destroy them. One innovative strategy to evade the reductions involved in such a formulation of politics will be to assert the existence of a ‘spectre’ that haunts the figure- that of a certain notion of politics that leads to a problematization of hegemony and condemnation of state and social /economic power and which thereby tries to usurp the politics of the worker and dissociate it from brahminical and traditional heirarchic strategies highlighting the predicament of the manual labourer,and pointing out  the two or more that are hidden in this ‘one’.

‘Three strangers’, structured as three figures covered almost fully for the exception of their toes by a blue material somehow calls up the memory of the photograph’s of Muybridge in their suggestion of movement or the works of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm. The figure could well be one single body in motion or three bodies together in an attempt at pulling away from each other and from the rug that covers them. However, the title fixes this somewhat in favour of the assumption about three separate figures.

Through the interplay of text and image T.R. Sreedevi attempts to look at hysteria and gender relations and the plight of a ‘modern’ woman subject in the context of a hostile male and money centered world with empathy and understanding.

The labour of love of a lower class family appears in the form of a small procession in the night, a night populated by a plethora of images in Sudheesh’s painting, chronicling the journey of a working class male, shares many elements with the colouring and ambience explored in the work of Bhagyanathan. Taking off from the traditions of the cityscapes of Grosz or the likes of Argentine Artist Antonio Segui, the works of Bhagyanathan and Sudheesh carve out a niche for narrative painting in a contemporary mode. The somewhat Hogarthian sarcastic parodying of everyday life undertaken in the work of Bhagyanathan is very much in tune with the populist contempt for political articulation (dark man in Bermudas toting a gun and wearing a ‘Che’ t-shirt) that sets the tune for many of the works in the present show. The pathos exhibited by ‘Walking Along With the Light of Heart’ and its take on surrealism however goes against this trend to reinvent a politics of the ‘Subject’.

In his drawing (Sources of Energy-[On Meera Mukherjee]), Alex Mathew brings in a twist in the anatomy of the hand to suggest with it the strong mark of the ‘other’ in her works. As an early pioneer who had set out to explore the art of many ‘minor’ traditions, the particular position of this woman artist is exemplary in many respects and through the ‘sleight of hand’ Alex introduces this unseen presence subtly into the picture frame.

N.N.Mohandas’s paintings ‘The Park’ and ‘Pigeons’ through their subtle application of colour and composition stress on the qualities of painterliness above everything else. ‘Pacha viral’ of Sosa Joseph explores the world of female experiences along a line inspired by works like ‘Alpine grip’(Francesco Clemente).The many layered and subtle painting style of her Baroda years has been replaced here by a plain and direct rendering. Leon’s ‘Morphogenesis’ attempts to combine elements from the works of Francis Bacon with stylistic details inspired by Jyoti Basu and a patient and ornate technique to create a decorous style.

The image of Barack Obama in a veiled mode in Rathidevi’s painting, confirms to the populistic conceptions about minorities, pointing towards Obama’s Muslim ancestry on the one hand and America’s perceived complicity in the promotion of Muslim Politics. However reading complicity between Imperialism and Islam into the body of an African American President is fraught with the obvious problem that the contradictions between these forces are all too obvious that it becomes difficult to sustain such a formulation about global politics.

In his photomontages Upendranath reverses the management motto “I am OK, You are Ok’ as “I am not OK, You are not OK” in the collage with Xeroxes of his photograph with mouth wide open into which a target is fixed or from which fleets of military ships proceed or a hand with machine gun or an empty hand hangs out. The question ‘Are the left really left and are the right really right?’ suggest a tension in Kerala’s public sphere over the legitimacy of contemporary mainstream political moves. Articulation of politics along the straight lines of nationalism/ class has been problematized by the presence of contending multiplicities in the political field and the renegotiations of the traditionally held spaces of the Left and the Right. Upendranath’s work thus attempts to contend with the re-articulation of politics with often repeated images in a popular manner.

Sebastian’s repetitive use of the image of a weed that covers the water tracts in much of Kerala almost confers upon it a metaphorical status, which is seen as having taken up almost all the space in the canvas, and to have gained a certain centrality. In it the all pervading sense of a land laid waste by the excessive growth of weeds takes on a moral overtone, calling forth images of contemporaneity that call for modern day Herculeses who could through their efforts flood and remove the accumulated waste. The presence of this aggressive weed/ waste that has to be brought under control, for the artist, suggests an anthropomorphization of the weed and a generalization of subjective apprehensions that threaten the secluded spaces for art from the outside. The threat then could well be that of mass based politics that is perceived by the artist as hysterical and insensitive to the questions posed by ‘Art’. The work of Sreenivasan.P.K, ‘Travelogue’ also point towards the assimilation of waste. Bahuleyan’s painting reenacting the scene in a famous photograph of a bullock cart in front of an Indian Atomic plant explores a similar area in that the possible melting down of the of social and environmental spaces in the context of a nuclear catastrophe has become evermore real in the context of the developments in Japan. The environmentally sensitive portrayal in these works however does not make the same assumptions about culture that have inspired the works of Sebastian, even though it expresses a concern about the present order of technology.

N.N. Rimzon’s drawings, ‘Devotee at the pond’ and ‘House under the stars’ attempts to articulate elements of the coastal geography of central Kerala and its discreet divisions of space into clearings around the houses (muttom), compound (parambu), paths, ponds and the architecture with slanting tiled roofs etc. The drawings are not landscapes as such in their realistic portrayal of detail etc., but rather attempt through their essentialization and simplification to arrive at spatial concepts about the peculiarities of this geography.

Anto’s quirky retake of religious imagery point to the peculiar ways in which much of what passes as religious thought establish boundaries and imagine outsiders, demons and serpents, and conceive of space through the deployment of such binaries. Sainthood itself is seen as predatory, and played out in a fable- like mode.

In returning to the Magrittean image of a cactus that is a house of sorts for small birds of various kinds, Rajan M.Krishnan continue his exploration of the plant world, while also emphasizing the qualities of protection and preservation even in a thorny environment.

The drawing of Bara Bhaskaran attempts to approach the life of the metropolis through recourse to some form of autoeroticism while Sanam.C.N’s drawing uses a method gleaned out from cartography.

The works of Santhan, Premjee.T.P and O.C.Martin are significant additions to the ambiance of the show.