INVERTED WATER PYRAMID
It has been some sixteen years now since I had first met Mr.
Valsan Koorma Kolleri and our
acquaintance has been etched in my mind with precious detail, some of which I
find it opportune here to recount.
One morning somewhere in 1997-98, while he was
working as a guest faculty in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, Valsan called up some students to the
terrace of the Faculty office building, to see a work that he had done there.
We were a curious lot, having still not come to terms with the eccentricities
of this teacher, and as soon as we had assembled there, on the terrace under
the shade of the tall trees , he pointed out to us a work that he had done in
the morning. Since the terrace was covered by the trees there were fallen
leaves all around. Valsan had brushed aside the leaves from places where the
breeze circulated freely and had let
them remain in places where the walls blocked the wind. This created on the
terrace a complex passageway through the dead and fallen leaves in which the movement o the
winds were traced. This passage, which we could imagine as having already been
there before the artist arrived there, was something to which he drew our
attentions, through an event for which few other records remain, except perhaps
in the minds of the few people who had gathered to view it. To me, this
unannounced event marked a revealing instance of an environmentally sensitive
aesthetic that was with very few parallels in India.
Curio-sit
Valsan has a peculiar way of playing with names, bringing in
an element of irony into otherwise mundane themes. For example, his various
shows are given titles like stone age, bronze age, sculpture age, Drain age and New clear age, eliciting a
playful similarity to categories that periodize
historical epochs , but at the same time diverging from the teleology of
such a project by a personalization of the nomenclature. Thus bronze age may
precede stone age, and ‘New clear age’ has nothing to do with nuclear age
except for a heightened sensitivity towards a micro-politics. The title given to another show which did not happen, ‘NEW SENSE’ also
resonates with this imperative for parody, while in meaning it stands for a ‘new sense’ at the same time it sounds like
‘nuisance’ simultaneously positing one and the other .The fact that a ‘new
sense’ is very often perceived as
‘nuisance’ does not dissuade the artist, who undertakes to forego the
comfort of the old sense by venturing into the uncharted terrains of the new.
Whether he is working on a set of chairs (Curiosit) or
something like a portrait, the work refuses a ‘clean’ minimalism and militates
towards more complicated and fuzzy shapes, something that cannot be reduced to
a purely ‘communicative’ orientation or towards a ‘decorative’ intent. In its
refusal to succumb to the all too familiar picture of the age old binary
notions of beauty and ugliness grappling with each other for a final overthrow of the opponent, Valsan’s
work tend to incorporate elements that move towards structure which are always
already undermined by a subtle infusion of chaos, making them ‘unstable’ as
finished products. It is a ‘perceptual art’ that brings along with it an
allusion towards possible concepts of a different kind, one that mocks at the all too cleanly scrubbed existence of
conceptualism, refusing the absolute tyranny of philosophy by retaining traces
of the making and work with fuzzy areas of the yet un-thought.
An axe thrown into the sea, an act of conquest, a
foundational myth that had established the reign of privilege in Kerala, sees
its subtle reworking, the sea throwing it back at dominance in L’aller retour (1995) when the axe
placed on a weavers shuttle stages its return, relieving the land of its
cumbersome presence. ‘ Axe head’ is also a recurring motif which stands for a
protective power in his work. As an artist who was inspired in his early years
by the anti-caste initiatives of people like Vaghbhadananda, Valsan subtly infuses the insights of that
micro-politics alongside a strong skepticism to the charms of the colonial
project to arrive at a differential position vis-à-vis Art. Another motif that can
be seen in several works is that of a ladder, which weaves its own meanings as
an object meant for passage between levels into many of his works.
Alex Mathew and Valsan Koorma Kolleri
Geometric forms play a significant part in many works, with
cubes, spheres and pyramidal forms occurring frequently in several of the
works, the “inverted water pyramid” that he had created( a pond shaped like an
inverted pyramid which forms a part of a work done in Kochi) being one
prominent example, a pyramid of water at the tip of which the earth itself is held, according to the artist.
The weavi ng and survival of baskets or mats made of cane, a
craft that had mostly been a subaltern preoccupation in the past, is something
that this artist goes back to, linking two cane baskets with a length of rope,
a communication through its fibers, between each other and with earth itself in
A FEATHER (1998). The cane baskets work almost like devices kept to earth’s
heart to listen to its pulsations, and the feather attached to it marks it and
distinguishes it like a feather in the head dress of an aboriginal. In this, somewhere, we can
understand a sensitivity to the dynamism of the traditions of basket and choir
making, something which in recent past was
brilliantly captured in the poetry of a
poet like S.Joseph.
This engagement
continues in the weaving with tempered springs from large grand father clocks something like a vessel (HOW GOES THE ENEMY?) that is made of
time itself, the tension of the spring motioning towards the ordering around a
clock and the various other times that tend to coexist with it. The clock’s
time instituted a utilitarian fixity to the notion of time, so that two trains
moving in opposite directions on a railway track can escape a crash by its
virtue, but at the same time there were other times like that of casting in
bronze or tying a knot, something of which remains in the peripheries. The
other time of what is denigrated as craft flashes for an instant against the
horizon and disappears, the clock springs attempt to regain their original
shape and fail in doing so, giving the weaving itself its peculiar shape.
If it is the quest to
find something of a deeper structure in the transient body that had resulted in the work called Armature which was made of the bones of a bull that
we had carried back from a trip through the Goan coast, by retrieving through
the work the basic structures of the human body it moves on to reactivate the
notion of the foundational, playfully alluding to the process of making in the
construction of a human body, a ‘making of the maker’ revealed with subtle irony.
In ‘Myth’ (1994), the artist tries to move beyond the visual
orientation of art by producing a sculpture that may be approached by standing
upon it, through the sense of touch, something that a person without eye-sight
may also perceive as if it were in Braille. In making bronze, a usually
venerated medium, something on which one can step on, he demystifies its
privileged status in traditional perception and re-inscribes the medium with a
hidden mythology of its own.
As an artist who had done a considerable amount of work in
bronze in his early years, Valsan moves on to practice art that could treat any
material with the same care and veneration that goes into the making of a work
in bronze, exhibiting a flexibility that
puts to shame any notion of sculpting that retains notions of privilege amongst
materials. Palm leaf, bone, cane basket, rope, pulp, copper, flower of a choonda pana, wood, discarded objects
with traces of their ageing, clock springs, granite, marble, dry leaves, clay,
sand, rice and any other material that one can think about can become part of
this repertory to create a unique arrangement.
While other sculptors may deliberately work for a certain
finished quality in their works, Valsan denies that imperative altogether and
works towards forms that retain the marks of labour and process. Denying for
himself the pleasurable accomplishment of recognizable’ beauty’, his works
invite the viewer to engage in a conversation with the working process and the
difficulties inherent in our own notions of beauty. Instead of looking for art
in the finished product, these works prompt us to look at the processes of
intellection and making, which is physically done by the artist himself,
whether it is casting a work in bronze, the tying of a knot or the making of a
complex structure from copper wires, without trying to be ‘clean’ and ‘presentable’.
Portraiture, to most people involve questions of
representation of facial attributes, while in Valsan’s ‘Portrait/sculpture(1994)
the emphasis shifts to a more detailed exposition of individual existence,
details of which together form a non representational image of process, where
the imprint of a hand in clay is as important as the frame within and over
which it makes its appearance. The rope that ties together the work is as
important as the terracotta pieces that hark back to the primordial, elements
that defy meaning to congregate on the verge of the illogical. At another
instant, Portrait 2003(charcoal on paper), depicts the back of a woman’s head
with braided hair which is of as much significance as a face to the sculptor’s
perception of a person.
Panamkula (bunch of palm flowers) is an often used metaphor in Kerala for the thick dark hair of
women. By calling a work made with the flower of a choondapana ‘hair’, and
braiding it, he retraces this trajectory
and thereby renames the palm-flower.
The ancient human ambition to preserve bodies of the
deceased embalmed as mummies, which had given rise to some of the most
magnificent edifices of antiquity is recouped to give birth to a new cult of
the dead, not necessarily of human beings but of plants, and thereby creating a
monument for the very environment in its
proximity to death(Mummified tree,1996). The way an abandoned dead body may be
covered with a coconut leaf, or the shape in which paddy is stacked, the seed
of an arali plant(sayippin kaya) made in clay are all important in this
perception and can vie for aesthetic
significance, without the condescending and hierarchic notions of social structuring obfuscating
their relevance.
Where the remnants of sanskritic pursuits leave their
traces, the particular position of this artist renders them ambiguous and
somewhat innocuous, without the assured sanctity of a tradition to hark back
on. Culture here is not simply something
that is possessed by some to the detriment of others, a form of capital that
can be used to brow beat others, but something which is always in the process
of being made and unmade, over which the people at large have their own
significant claims.
BENOY.P.J.
(Benoy.P.J is an Art
critic and writer based in Kottayam,
Kerala.)
posted by BENOY P.J @ September 10, 2015
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