Although philosophers and writers have consistently conjured up their views on beauty so that it is possible to reconstruct a history of aesthetic ideas across time, the same did not happen with ugliness because it was mostly conceived as the opposite of beauty. But ugliness can have a separate existence from beauty or may be it has its own 'beauty' and, therefore, it ought to redeem itself from being a fallen angel outside Beauty's paradise.
In Indian art, while beauty gets plenty of attention, ugliness has not got its due. When Indian art was searching for its own identity in the colonial dissemination of art and the young Bengal School was seeking inspiration from the ethos and the canons of beauty found in traditional Indian and Oriental art, it was the old Rabindranath Tagore who stated that his paintings were born from ugliness. Their origin was the scratches in his manuscripts that "cried, like sinners, for salvation and assailed my eyes with the ugliness of their irrelevance." It is indeed in the land of dreams and nightmares that the uncanny critters in his works could only inhabit.
However, despite the many kinds of explorations of contemporary Indian art thereafter, the hegemony of 'official' Beauty still prevails obnoxiously. Like the Hellenistic sculpture 'Laocoön' that portrays highest form of beauty even under the tragic figure's assumed condition of intense physical pain, while his screaming being downplayed to mere sighing, an overarching segment of contemporary Indian art today is still predominantly trammelled, like the state of the confined newly-wed feudal bride, by the ornamental fetters of decorative beauty.
Flashing new shoes or old run-down shoes, a fresh or a wilted flower – all things are beautiful in their own ways although such perceptions are often culture-specific. While in classical Indian poetry, a beautiful woman is compared with the gait of an elephant, the comparison could have been considered ludicrous in the literary imaginations of other cultures. In another way, while tattoos and piercings can be current fashion statements, or 'prickly-heats' on the skin of subversive generational challenge, tattoos are still viewed', like in the past, as tell-tale signs of criminals or the degenerates and the and, significantly, Hieronymus Bosch's persecutors of Christ have their ugly faces pierced with all kinds of rings.
Perhaps it is time for the ugly to garner some of the attention routinely bestowed in Indian art on its more comely cousin, beauty. To face these questions, I have conceived ugliness as a curatorial theme although it was arduous to select Indian artists, specially from Bengal, since few are wont to summon ugliness as their muse. If ugliness can be identified as ugliness in itself, external ugliness and the artistic portrayal of both, then my idea in the 'Pretty Ugly' show is to examine how a repellent theme can have its own beauty, and a blissful theme can appear soi-disant ugly. However, I left it entirely to my invited artists to interpret the above in their own terms – along with their individual written statements. With the 'Pretty Ugly' curatorial theme, my clarion call to these artists is to celebrate ugliness with viable means of conventional aesthetic transgression and redefine the canons of aesthetics. There are few things more beautiful than the sight of procreation of struggling mammals with their slime, blood and innards out of which the beatific baby is born. The same with art.
Courtesy: Bose Pacia Kolkta and Romain Maitra |
