‘Is this appealing?' asked my 23-year-old as we walked around and mulled over Valsan Kolleri's deeply introspective mini-retrospective at Anant Art Gallery. At first, I didn't answer and then I said: “Appeal is perhaps one of the most discredited and subjective philosophical notions–so discredited that I could not even find an entry for it in the index of the many books on the philosophy of Art that I consulted.”
“Even if I believe that the seductive grace of a Mapplethorpe photograph, the symmetry of Nusrat Fateh Ali's ragas, the tight construction of a sonnet, even if it is in the most general terms just aesthetic value, appeal, I guess, is subjective,” was how my young economist son responded. In fact, the very question itself was a provocative positioning for Valsan's show.
In an age of loud rudeness, with people screaming into their cell phones in a chatter paraphernalia obsessive world, Valsan Kolleri’s show is the language of silence. It is the whisper of a cantata, of the famed classical `Narayaneeyam' by the virtuoso P Leela who could sing and raise it to the nuances of a vibrant canticle.
Perhaps, appeal is the judgement of aesthetic value itself–the judgment of taste–one that is either an equivocal embarrassment or an eternal echo. Can appeal be either the seductive mask of evil or the attractive face of goodness? Can appeal be the inner recess that responds to outer dichotomies? Can appeal be the fad that has rocked post-auction trends in the nation as well as outside? Is the aesthetic judgement of appeal at all legitimate? Do we express anything more than a purely personal opinion when we judge that something is appealing or is aesthetically valuable? That was the question Kant posed to himself in his ‘Critique of Judgement’, the work to which all modern philosophy of Art is a response.
Kant may have had too simple a picture of aesthetic value in mind, but the title of Valsan's show in itself places the moot modality of irony in an age of kitsch and glitz. While Valsan's show is entitled ‘New Clearage’, a satirical stance on ‘Nuclear', it has more to do with the decadence and the erosion of intrinsic cultural ethics and values,
In many ways, it discusses elements of beat, meter, or color in the most complex combinations of structures, depictions of character, or views of the world, producing in me a feeling, which for lack of a better name, I call ‘erosional’ appeal.
The judgement of Artistic appeal is not the result of a mysterious inference on the basis of features of a work, which we already know. It is a response, a spontaneous awareness that there is more in the work, something more valuable to learn. To find something appealing is to believe that including it in one’s life will only make it that much better.
We love, as Plato noted, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not accomplishment. The judgement of tastes in appeal is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning or the middle, but never the end of criticism. If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. Often, I have seen run of the mill shows in which there is sculpture that has no more surprises left, a work you really feel you know ‘inside and out, with no more claim on you. Other people may still find some appeal in such works, probably because it is giving them that ‘something’, which no longer has any hold on you, or just because it has a signature that has become a marketing phenomenon.
Appeal, however, beckons because of our own personal predicament. In some ways, it reminds me of Rajendra Dhawan, who stood in front of his works at Vadehras in 2000 and said: “Sadness give you moments to think. It creates opportunities.”
“The appeal of Valsan’s works lies in his craving of creating for himself; in his silent dramaticism that celebrates change even as he abhors it; in the soliloquy that in Othellian fashion spurns the very shine that he uses to give us the rigour of resonance that embraces the twinkle of an eye.”
Looking at them, I am reminded of Odysseus tied to his mast, isolated from his deaf comrades, listening to the sirens, the only sounds in that isolated world. Each one of us comes to each work alone, whether it be Art, sculpture, ceramics or film, but we inevitably draw a line between ourselves and the work on one side and the rest of the world on the other. The responses these works trigger become the degree of appeal and we have to decide whether we want to appease the appeal or walk away from it, poorer in experience. |
