“Mimetic mirroring cannot help but establish a certain distance from its object, however empathic the mirroring; the absolute distance called abstraction is implicit in the mirror of art.”
Donald Kuspit
A Critical History of 20th-Century Art1
When Passage Art Gallery asked me to write on the show Ultra Modern Solitude I was surprised a bit. The works of the show as shown to me were non figurative works. Working in an art school and regional centre which is known predominantly as figurative, I kept wondering how I aid the viewer in looking at the images of this show, which I believe is role of the writer of an art exhibition. I remembered a story of an incident which happened maybe two decades ago. This happened in Mumbai in a gallery full of abstract painting. The painter himself was sitting there in the gallery when a man walked in looked at the paintings and told the artists “if you can explain to me what they mean I will buy them all.” The painter looked at the man and said “if the paintings are not reacting to you, or you can not react to the works. You don't deserve them.” Here the dispute was not on the commercial viability of that art but a communication gap between the art and the viewer. The viewer was not open enough to understand the work or he was not trained to look at them. The viewer was probably expecting the painting to talk to him and he would remain a listener. He had not got used to the space provided by the artist for the viewer to ponder on his thoughts: a space of solitude, a juncture of silence.
Kandinsky2 warns thus “The attitude towards the work of art should be different from the attitude toward a horse which one wants to buy: with the horse, one important negative quality covers up all the positive ones and make it worthless; the work of art, the proportion is reversed: one important positive quality covers up all the negative ones and make it valuable.” The relationship between the viewer and picture defines the value of art. The viewer should have the eye as, Paul Klee3 says, “To discover : something of the sublimity, something of pretension, something of bizarre, something of the spiritual, all lying under the lock and key.” Art and especially abstract way of representation many time become a riddle for the viewer who desperately look for the key to the lock. They desperately reach for the catalogue of the show; try to find out from artist. By doing that they forget their prime duty is to look and meditate. Meditate about the images, thoughts, emotions which surfaces in his/her mind. It may not corroborate with original thought process of the artist, rather in pure abstraction it should not. If the pictorial surface is the beginning of the journey for the viewer, it is the culmination of the journey for the artist. Any suggestion of direction will be restraining for the liberated journey the viewer is about to commence, which in turn would undermine the fundamentals of Pure abstraction.
Allow the viewer to listen to the silence. As Raza4 says, “Within the silence of solitude, the inner landscape of human mind moves into another pathway.”
* *
“I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe , ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive.”
Paul Klee5
In Europe in the early 20th century some artists went in search of “art”. From an Enlightenment point of view, this was a search for the “truth” or essence of art, and was carried out using a sort of pictorial reasoning. The first step was to strip away distracting elements such as recognizable objects which tended to conceal or hide the art thing; an example of this approach would be Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky went further from the mere geometricism proposed by the cubist abstraction towards the purer and absolute state of nature and art. When Cubism especially in its analytical phase broke down the forms of natural objects into abstract or semi abstract shapes and reconstructed them into a dynamic arrangement which, however, still had ties to the original objects. Purer Abstraction on the other hand referred to universals rather than to specifics, and it therefore appealed principally to the mind and only secondarily to senses. Through this, Abstraction challenged the notions of the fundamentals of academic art and its perceptional parameters. The child art and the primitive art now appeared more truthful.
Abstraction was dealing with pure sensations, a kind of spiritual/religious experience. Rothko6 would write thus about his viewers' reaction thus, “The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
Objects, figures become obstacles in this chaste journey which had to be removed systematically by the painter. Almost like the sun itself become an obstacle when one experience the sunset. In the pure abstraction “a painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience,” as Rothko7 would put it. This innate experience of creation and appreciation art collapsed the walls of culture finding its nerve line. It called for a global community of artists communicating in the same language.
Some of the artists of the Progressive Group in India like Gade and Raza preferred to move away from the nationalist ideology that dictated sentimental, nostalgic representation of indigenous themes and took up the abstract tradition. As Raza himself would state about this ‘exciting' period where, “the artist were trying to orchestrate like musicians, form and colors on paper or canvas and go beyond the theme and come to pure painting elements.”8 It will be erroneous to state that they took up the Abstract language to communicate internationally, but it appears that they were trying to define a national language as the country had its own concept of abstraction. As Partha Mitter9 noted, “Paradoxically, de-colonisation made Indian artists more rather than less, conscious of their Indian identity as they confronted global modernity. Indeed, the tensions generated by the conflicting demands of global modernity and national specificity became a major preoccupation of third world artists.” It was an open invitation and the opening of the door to many art traditions hitherto considered outside the circle of art.
K.G. Subramanyan10 narrates the story of Ganesh in his book Magic of Making :
Ganesh is a folk singer from Rajasthan. He sings to the villagers and townsmen who reward him for his songs. Knocking around in this way, he comes to an artist friend of mine. Who asks him, “Can you draw?” ‘No' he says, “I have never done so. I do not know how to.” But this friend persists and asks him to try. He gives him pieces of paper and a ballpoint pen. Ganesh is perplexed. He does not even know how to sit and work; he lies flat on the ground, puts paper before him and gets scribbling. And he is surprised, for he can draw. He had done many things to earn living, even dressed stoners for a stone mason, but draw? Never. Now at 27, he has done it for the first time.
What enabled Ganesh to draw: The persistence of the artist friend of K.G. Subramanyan? The thought of the reward he might get after the adventure of drawing? Creative urge would not emerge out of these compulsions. The pre- historic man/woman who painted on his/her cave-house did not expect rewards nor did they have any compulsion. The sole compulsion they had was the irresistible fervor to express. “A way of doing leads us to a way of seeing, a way of seeing to a way of doing. This rolls along; one thing leads to another, from doodling to discovery, from discovery to further doodling11.” Ganesh of KG Subramanyan's story found the hidden powers in him, the primordial urge to create has given him the power to realise his hand where the academic art education had no value, and made an art pedagogue like K.G. Subramanyan to acknowledge the magic of creation.
Swaminathan whose proximity to the Vedas and Upanishads through his upbringing could look at the work of art as a metaphysical exercise akin what Klee12 would see it as “a transmission of phenomena, a projection from the hyper-dimensional, a metaphor for procreation, divination, mystery”. Swaminathan insisted on the experience of an artist to stand in front of the canvas as the early Aryan stood facing morning sun...13 Raza though settled in France never lost his touch with mother country where he addresses the whole as ‘Ma' and creatively link her visual and verbal cultures fusing the diverse elite and little cultures. Swaminathan did a similar act slightly later working with young generation in India through Group 1890 who proclaimed “art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition. We do not sing of man, nor are we his messiahs14” underlining the importance of Abstract language.
Both Raza and Swaminathan accompanied by many artists of Abstract genre of art believed in the pure form of expression which is based on the sensation of emotions. The sensation here would not be hindered/ guided by themes or its signifying images but a purer experience. They are not aping the western avant-gardism but exploring a language for a newly formed sovereign nation, consciously cautious of not getting trapped under the revival of old visual language. They would declare independence to the viewer who now can reflect on to the painting without the torch bearing guides and guidelines of pre conceived path. “It is the sensations in nature to which he [artist/viewer] is now most keenly attuned,” says Geeta Kapoor15, “the dazzllement of sunlight, the exhilaration of high breeze, the heat from a sun-scorched earth. It is these sensations which have to find, in the process of being translated into color and form, a pictorial structure that both preserves and transmits their vibrancy.”
There is no pre-condition that these sensations have to be in parity with that of the artist. In fact it is better if they are away from it. For a viewer the aesthetic experience of pure abstract art would be when the work brings out experiences from their own known and unknown world. For example in case of Ram Kumar's ‘Benaras' if a viewer imbibes the stimuli to paint a picture of Istanbul or Maheshwar in his/her mind based on the emotions and experiences linked to those places, then the viewer transforms from being a viewer to a creator by his own right.
A creator is thus enriched by perception achieved through looking into the mirror of meditation in solitude. Whether it is in the seminal days of modernist discourse, in its heydays or its decline through post modernism the modes of linkage between the creator and the spectator have not been altered. The age we are living in is named in a variety of ways. The ‘Stuckist' call it ‘Remodernism'. Another term is ‘New Old Masterism' as Donald Kuspit calls it where the predominantly figurative of the pre-conceptual art has resurfaced. Perhaps the revival of abstraction can be called as Ultra Modernism where the ideals and fundamentals of pure painting reestablish the freedom of the perceiver through solitude of meditation, an Ultra Modern Solitude.
References
1 Donald Kuspit, A Critical History of 20th-Century Art , artnet.com
2 Wassily Kandinsky, 'On the Problem of Form, 1912, English Translation by Kenneth Lindsay. As quoted by Herschel B Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, A Source Book by Artists and Critics , University of California Press, London, 1968
3 Painter poets: Arp/Schwitters/Klee, Harmondsworth, 1974, As quoted by Geeta Kapur, Contemperary Indian Artists , Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi1978
4 As quoted by Ashok Vajpeyi , A life in Art - RAZA, Art Alive Master Series , Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007
5 artquotes.com
6 artquotes.com
7 artquotes.com
8 As quoted by Ashok Vajpeyi, A life in Art - RAZA, Art Alive Master Series , Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007
9 Partha Mitter, Oxford History of Art Series - Indian Art , Oxford University Press, 2001
10 K.G. Subramanyan, The Magic of Making - Essays on Art and Culture , Seagull Books, Calcutta , 2007
11 K.G. Subramanyan , The Magic of Making - Essays on Art and Culture , Seagull Books, Calcutta , 2007
12 Paul Klee: The thinking eye , London , 1961
13 As quoted by Geeta Kapur, Contemperary Indian Artists , Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi1978
14 As quoted by Geeta Kapur, Contemperary Indian Artists , Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi1978
15 Geeta Kapur, Contemperary Indian Artists , Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi1978
(Courtesy, RamanVerma, Passage Art, New Delhi )
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