So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all
To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience
To set a flame in the high air
To exclaim at the commonplace alone
To cause the unseen eyes to open
To admire only the absurd
To be concerned with every profession save his own
To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty
To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator
To lift the flesh above the suffering
To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit
To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss
To HAPPEN
It is the artist’s duty to be alive
To drag people into glittering occupations
To blush perpetually in gaping innocence
To drift happily through the ruined race-intelligence
To burrow beneath the subconscious
To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason
To obey each outrageous impulse
To commit his company to all enchantments.
THE FINITUDES OF INFINITY: CURATOR'S NOTE
By MUKHERJEE. P
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
These lines penned by Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century are still, I feel, applicable today. As is this extract from Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj
When a man rises from sleep, he twists his limbs and is restless....the comatose condition has not yet disappeared. We are still twisting our limbs and are still restless, and just as the state between sleep and awakening is considered to be necessary, so is the present unrest...be considered a necessary and therefore, a proper state. The knowledge that there is unrest will, it is highly probable, enable us to outgrow it. Rising from sleep, we do not continue in the comatose condition, but according to our abilities, we are soon restored to our senses......
Seen together these extract sum up the march of the progressives in the different corners of the country as we stride towards eight decades of independence. The term
“ progressive” is not just a word but the feeling of an ethos as we delve deep into the works of some artists who belonged to Eight post-Independence art movements/collectives/clusters that contributed to the growth of contemporary visual arts vocabulary of the Indian subcontinent. The exhibition is no indicator of a comprehensive overview of the movements nor is it a documentation of the same. However, the artworks capture the artists’ trajectories situated in a broader framework of movements which they were a part of and therefore left an indelible imprint in their work and consciousness.
History is not just written in barracks, courts or cantonments. It is also scribbled across sketchbooks of an artist with scribbled notes in legible/illegible handwriting all etched in the moth-eaten parchments of our times. The collective churning of different visual art movements serve as a pictorial primer of the socio-politics, dialectics, dilemmas, wounds, utopia and dystopia of our times.
Let me quote a fragment of couplet 402 from Kural by Thiruvalluvar. The great poet tells us to “learn void. ” Because in that emptiness of that “void,” there are the seeds of all past, present and future praxis of articulations.
When you see an artist inside the framework of an art movement, she/he is finding a voice both individually and an individual located in a collective. You do not see just a form, you see how an artists’ mind shape the void to craft his/her take on the world around them.
As inflow of information become more complex, materials and capital move around the globe at ever-increasing rates, and as new regulatory policies and international agreements impact businesses and society, our old assumptions of stability and order are severely challenged and as a result our articulations in visual art has constantly evolved.
For the future to belong to the artist, the individual must learn how to ask the most well-rounded question and not seek the perfect answer. Because we are all bundle of imperfections constantly learning and hopefully evolving. A surface/plane/screen/canvas/material is a platform for that critical curiosity seeking to perfect a question than seeking an answer. Because in that question lies the rubric of the answer (if there is any).
The exhibition delves into different narrative eco-systems of artists who were part of a post-Independence art movement. It is in these areas of resonance and dissonance, that we find the future of art reflecting the necessary but an utopian journey of larger concerns.
About time we preserve some of those narratives in our consciousness. In our minds. In our bodies.
This exhibition is about the texture and brittleness of memory….seen through a collage of visuals that express words, sounds, ruptures and silences..
It is the experience of co-creation by artists that we share and not just a canvas hung in the wall which is suspended in time. This exhibition is all about artists seeking a unique vocabulary and their struggles to achieve that. Single and multiple voices are amplified at the same time.
This exhibition is a juxtaposition of episodic fragments of visual articulations located inside the rubrics of a movement. Through all these fragments that do not join as a whole, we look at some critical movements of confluence and rupture in the artists oeuvre.
As we approach the three historic commemorations of the Centenary and Two Decades of World War 1, Eight and a half Decades of World War 2 and the 76th year of our independence in a world where wars of different textures playing out in Ukraine, conflicts of varying contours tearing up Yemen, Libya, Iran, Nigeria, Palestine and Horn of Africa, it is the subtext and the re-formulations of lost narratives, that holds a mirror of the past to the present and present to the past. The visual art movements are pictorial registers of that past and present.
The intertwined and the entwined
The idea of the exhibition is to record some of the visual syntaxes that forms the inner monologue of the artists inside the cacophony of overlapping conversations. These works unfailingly evokes a sense of evocative and cryptic distillations of the changing nature of the landscapes and mindscapes in all shades of those amalgamations and distortions.
The artworks, I am sure, will keep the flame of thematic experimentation alive and burning in a world that is cold, timid, dusty, sweaty, bloody and at times exasperating. The idea is not only to list those who broke fresh grounds but those who lit the flame and paved the way for others, .
May that flame form the arc of multiple ways of the seeing.
Hopefully,
now, hereafter and always.