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.)