Sometime back one of our resourceful young artists – Bose Krishnamachari - curated around a show called LAVA (to be read Laboratory of Visual Arts) to various art centres in India. He had made an impressive collection of art books, CDs and various audio-visual materials and put them together with such furniture and equipment as would facilitate their use by aspiring artists and art lovers. And why did he do so? I can only speculate. Probably to shame the existing Fine Art institutions (of which there are quite a few today) for their lack of such facilities. Or even go further to hint that given such a well-conceived and plentiful knowledge infrastructure they could dispense with the pompous gallery of pedagogues they are normally loaded with.
Bose Krishnamachari at the venue of LaVa, Mumbai, 2005
Or so I presume. I have some reason to do so. If I remember right a little earlier to this (may be a year or two) this self-same Bose Krishnamachari had put together another show with a portrait gallery of many established artists and their brief statements on their work strategies and intentions. Which appeared to me as a jolly effort on his part to decapitate them and write them off a la the Bollywood convention, where a portrait on the wall implied the person is dead, And here, if he was not already dead, at least fit to be dispensed with. I am inclined to read into these gestures a derogatory comment on the present art educational system by a young and successful art practitioner. Or am I exaggerating and giving these gestures the teeth they were not intended to have?
In any case, you may ask me here, why I am starting my Hebbar Memorial lecture with such a reference. One of the reasons is that Hebbar was, in addition to being an eminent artist, deeply concerned with improving the character of art education in India. I met him in person first in Baroda in the early fifties where I had come as a young teacher in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the M.S. University. He was one of its early mentors. That it was a little different from the other run-of-the-mill institutions had attracted him.
The first difference was that it tried to introduce Fine arts education as a full- fledged stream in a traditional university. The Visva Bharati of Santiniketan had done this earlier but it was, not strictly a traditional university. Annamalai University too had made an attempt but its main focus was on Music and not Visual Arts.
The next difference was that it wanted to give Fine arts education a new orientation in an age or cultural globalization when cross-cultural contacts brought a bewildering variety of cultural information within the reach of each culture worker. Forcing on him the need to construe each unfamiliar cultural form and practice in the right light and in the process, re- construe, and if necessary alter, his traditional notions and practices. I need hardly say that this reconstruing and reformulation is a signal characteristic of one's entry into the modern age and thereafter becomes a continuous process in the face of the increasing volume of intercultural interaction that came with it. So this institution visualized an educational programme where the skill- inputs will be duly balanced by thou thought-inputs, where discursive studies will supplement studio training and thereby endow a student with due critical discernment along with the needed skills. This appealed to Hebbar. In the light of his experience here, he became a mentor to various other art institutions in India in the following years and a passionate supporter of youthful talent and initiative.
This is the reason why I decided to speak on art education on this occasion and discuss its changing horizons. I started with a reference to Bose Krishnamachari's gestures to lay special emphasis on this.
But to begin at the beginning it may be useful for us to go over some of the old horizons. And also state at the outset that the nature of art education or training will perforce follow the nature of existing art practices and their forward objectives.
Our country, being a continent with enormous cultural variety, has many kinds (even hierarchies) of art practice. At one time the educated urbanites felt secure within the practices they were familiar with and did not take much notice of the practices outside these enclosures. Or recognize their value or importance. So that art scene that hit the headlines was the scene that grew out of art school practice or its precincts. Regardless of the fact that there were various pockets of visual creativity in the land around, in small town and village; and they were important parts of the country's cultural heritage, and that their variety and spread were much larger than that of the celebrated urban scene.
However, in the course of the last hundred years, there has been a slow change in perspective. Nearly a century ago, Rabindranath Tagore tried to persuade his artist and writer friends to take serious interest in the country's cultural undergrowth, saying that a ground contact with it will educate their attitudes and save them from preciosity and pedantry. A little earlier Ananda Coomaraswamy had brought out his remarkable book, "Medieval Sinhalese Art' that tried to demonstrate the enriching influence of the inter- webbing of various art practices in a traditional culture. Cultural anthropologists (though mostly foreign) have since made some remarkable attempts to document the forms and techniques of various art practices. More recently a percipient artist like J Swarninathan gave quarter to a whole range of art practices still surviving in town and village in a Museum of Contemporary art he organized; even tried to explain his reasons with great enthusiasm and empathy. There are probably many other efforts that I have passed over. But it will take a lot more effort to bring this gamut of creativity to light and recognize the factors that ensure their persistence and growth, or hasten their decline.
Most of these practices, being essential parts of the life pattern of certain compact social groups, have certain in- social channels for the transfer of skills and work concepts. An understanding of their nature and structure can be instructive to artists working outside these groups, certainly those experts who plan art education with a broad perspective.
Avoiding minor details and classifications, there Are three types of models for the transfer of art knowledge and skills that educational planners generally take notice of. One is through the individual master- student interaction or gurukula . Another is through the family or workshop interaction of master- artisan and novice as exemplified in a gharana, karkhana or kalm . The third is through a network of contacts, often multi- disciplinary, between diverse specialists and students as seen in modern schools and colleges. The working structures of each of these interactions are not similar; nor are their intentions. Our educational planners are not always aware of this. So they talk of guru-sishya parampara and non- conformism in the same breath; or lay emphasis on specialization and multiple exposures at the same time.
Let us try to recognize their differences briefly. A traditional painter, sculptor or artisan matures his vision, sensibilities and skills by making a special kind of thing repeatedly and thereby attaining a level of excellence that marks him out as a master. The excellence is visible in the seemingly spontaneous ease with which he makes an impeccable statement (or object). Through the same kind of repetitive process an apprentice tries to attain this ease and mastery; his reigning ambition is to be rated as good as his guru in the end. Here the form is preset; but the practice is individual. The main objective of the practice is to bring this form to life. In an essay titled Silpe Jignasa Benodebehari Mukherjee refers to this. He says, “if you question a traditional craftsman about his way of work, he will wax eloquent about what is set out in the agamas but hardly say anything about himself: His main purpose is to give a living form to what is set out in the agamas not personal self- expression; though he cannot do what he purports to do without the help of his personal experiences and sensibilities”. He also mentions elsewhere how Kampo Arai, his Japanese artist friend, trained the painting skills and vision of his students by making them copy a scroll painting by Tobo Sojo, with brush and ink, over and over - first over a tracing, then by sight, then memory. And when questioned how this helped the student, he had said that the skill he acquires by this will liberate his vision and eventually help him to function on his own terms, as Tobo Sojo's scroll contained a sumptuous repertory of graphic devices, a veritable visual amerakose .
Family and workshop practices too have similar pre- concepts; they devise an interactive vocabulary of visual terms which, if judiciously used could, on the one hand, bring the practice within the competence of even the moderately endowed and, on another provide a dependable jumping board for the better endowed and the versatile; empowering them to innovate and expand the dimensions of the practice. Through these, the practice gets a decided growth incentive when it answers the demands of a responsive clientele or group of patrons. Their fruitful interaction gives rise to a great variety of personalized and regional innovations in statement, even around an oft- repeated and age- old theme.
The gurukula and the karkhana systems still persist in those areas of art practice that serve an in- social patronage or have a reasonably supportive market outside; partly because of the special advantages of housebound apprenticeship it provides. No isolated technical school can provide this to its level of excellence. Only two months back I was in Orissa for a few days and had a chance to observe the working of some of these apprentice groups. In spite of the weakening of traditional patronage, both in size and sensibility, and the absence of an interactive stimulus as mentioned earlier, their performance levels were remarkably high. This will probably remain so as long as they follow certain established prototypes or canonical models. But they may not be as sure of themselves when they are called to innovate and sub- serve new purposes and functions in a changing environment.
To give. them this confidence and resilience you need a new kind of schooling, which supplements their training in hand- skills with a sound introduction to the underlying concepts and their environmental roots and concomitants , with their adjustability to new demands. In fact when the first government art schools were instituted more than a century ago in some of the major cities of undivided India (Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Lucknow and Lahore), on government initiative or in response to public demand, this was one of their purported objectives. To give the traditional arts of India new feet to walk on. To motivate them to answer new demands and enlarge their repertory. This was part of the demand of JamshedJee Jeejabhoy when he gave a handsome donation of one lack rupees to the British government and asked them to set up what is now JJ School of Art, in Bombay. Dr. Hunter who laboured towards the institution of Madras School of Arts and Crafts too nursed a similar objective; so did E.B. Havell who worked as its Principal for a while. But when Havell became the Principal of the Calcutta School of Arts and Crafts a little later, he went further to suggest that the training should have a predominantly indigenist orientation and take advantage of the great wealth of artistic expertise available in the land.
But the schools could not live upto their intentions. Partly because the planners did not fully understand the growth structure of indigenist art and design; its organic ebullience , its intriguing shifts of imagery, and its sense of visual hide and seek; they wanted to rid of these A excesses/ and make it more rational and precise . So their efforts were counter productive. The students themselves wanted to learn western skills. Some of them suspected that their white- skinned gurus did not want to share with them their trade secrets. In Calcutta a section of the students took to the streets and demonstrated; even set up a parallel institute. As things turned out to be the Government art schools bowed down to their wishes. They gave them lessons in academist-realist art practice in painting, sculpture, engraving, print making, photography and the like,
The tastes of the aristocracy and the moneyed classes had in between come under European influence. In the previous century a large number of European artist professionals had come to this land and worked for various affluent patrons and made a good living, But the wave ebbed off by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is the vacuum they left, that self- motivated practitioners like Raja Ravi Varma and others came to fill and after them the trained talent from the art schools, who had learned to handle the mediums of water- colour and oils as the western professionals did, and painted, portraits, landscapes and thematic compositions in the western realist style for the affluent clientele, in addition to making illustrations and engravings for the newly established printing industry. The sculptors on another side modeled and carved portraits monuments, garden sculpture and architectural reliefs and mouldings, These were the new professionals answering the tastes and demands of a new public, Like the traditional artists and artisans were professionals who answered the demands of another sector of public patronage.
Within the realist concept the art schools gave currency to the new artists were taught to represent the seen object or scene with close verisimilitude; individual differences were confined to the handling of media or the virtuosity of rendering. This invariability irked some. Abanindranath Tagore declared that the art school discipline repressed the young artists' individualities and blinkered their vision. So during the few years he taught at the Calcutta Art School (on Havell's invitation) he tried to encourage another kind of attitude, which freed them from the rigid academist-realist discipline and gave them the freedom to follow alternative modes of practice or devise their own. He was the first person on the Indian art scene to aver that the drive and motivation of the new artist lay in this desire for individual expression, in answer to an inner urge or impulse, not any outside demand. His emphasis on individuality and the inner urge put him in line with the moderns who swore by creative self- expression. Abanindranath thought that art cannot be taught, that it grows out of the inner aptitude (or genius) of the practitioner; you can only assist this growth by providing a conducive environment that closets him with nature or the reality around in a rewarding encounter. Each one's genius was bound to have an individual character or bent, which needed its own kind of assistance, So Abanindranath distrusted the use of uniform methods of training; a method that assists the growth of one person may retard the growth of another. So he did not lay down any rules or outline any methods. He thought that each motivated artist would find out his own way. He explained this with a picturesque analogy. Like a caterpillar gorges on mulberry leaves an artist feasts on the vision of nature. Then he closes himself up and goes into a cocoon and ruminates. Till one fine day he breaks out of it like a resplendent moth or butterfly, to the surprise of everyone; even to his own surprise. Nature and his inner chemistry will provide all the inputs he needs for this transformation.
But his arch disciple Nandalal Bose thought a little differently. He was a keen observer of various kinds of art forms, within the country and without. He had a keen desire to understand their working systems. This brought home to him that each form interprets the artist's vision of nature differently and sought its own resources to express it. Each had its own discipline that made this express ion easy and spontaneous. He explained this with a different analogy. A village potter sits and sets into motion his wheel with a whirling stick; it wobbles for quite a while before it steadies up and is fit to be worked on. It is then that, between its hub and his hands, he draws out from the lump of clay an astounding form. This final phase is spontaneous and easy. But to get there you have to slog and sweat.
Nandalal had a more organized vision and educational strategy. And knew the usefulness of various kinds of disciplines and work methods, pertaining to various levels of art practice. But in the final count, all these were accessory to the artist's effort to reach a freedom of statement, that spotlighted a certain experience with a unique sense of novelty that surprised both the artist and the viewer, be it in different ways,
By lining up various art and craft practices in a connected panorama and explaining to the extent he could their functional parameters or work- circuits, he sought to widen the educational exposure. And in the process widen the coverage of art practices that could, hopefully, aestheticise society as a whole; and heighten the quality of life. In this effort, he found emotional and ideological support in Rabindranath Tagore's educational ideas.
If contact with various categories of global art forms managed to remodel the perspectives of many European artists and led to a whole range of innovations, this widening of exposure that Nandalal initiated should have also had a similar impact on our scene. But there were various factors that frustrated this. The artist community around was still very conservative and stuck to the division of high art and low art. The so- called subaltern forms were below their notice. Jamini Roy was an exception but he too needed the support of a few western admirers to stand his ground. Nandalal's paintings for the Haripura congress, for all their dynamism, were termed posters. Besides, his broad outlook was not shared by many in his vicinity; even the artists in his household. The only ones who responded were Benodebehari and Ramkinker and a few adventurous students in their neighborhood,
But today art practitioners (and other culture workers) are realizing the advantages of these variegated exposures. So Nandalal's ideas have had, be it a delayed and indirect, impact. This has been assisted and made easy by the dismantling of cultural purism and the sanctification of cross- cultural causeways in the post- modern world.
This account has tried, so far, to describe various aspects of Fine arts education and their differences in character and orientation. Some of the fine art institutions mentioned were markedly professional; for instance the Government Schools of Arts and Crafts. They were geared to meet the public demand for trained personnel in the fields of both Art and Design, as their names indicate. This was the case with the traditional workshops too. But when the orientations of the former shifted progressively towards encouraging creative self- expression, there was a need for rethinking. The artists they turned out were not strictly professional in the sense of being trained to serve the standing demands of the public. If they called themselves so it was just to signify that they were full- time practitioners or art, not occasional ones who pursued art as a hobby or pastime.
But the society and its requirements were changing rapidly. A many sided consumer culture was taking root. Only a small part of this was served by traditional artisans or functional craftsmen. A major part of the needed goods were non - traditional. Their planning, fabrication and merchandising needed a whole battery of trained designers. The Art schools were no more in a position to meet this requirement. Only well- organised Design schools could prepare them in the required numbers and to the required level of efficiency. First the designers of the products, then the designers of their delivery to the market through packaging and publicity, then the designers of various categories of communication that appetises the consumer and expands his needs. The new electronic and information revolutions have extended the field of design further, moving into public entertainment, education, indoctrination or even empowerment. And all this together has created around us a palpable secondary world, which we, if we so choose, can live within.
And we do too, We know what is happening in the world through the newspaper, radio and television, (even the theft next door). We know about what kind of weather is in the offing in the same way. On the television we are preached to by all varieties of holymen who sell us a strategy for safe- guarding the body and saving the soul. Then come the titillating scenes and emotional dramas that veil and unveil our psyche. Then the exhilerating vistas of the world where you 'virtually' travel, climbing high mountains or crossing barren deserts. Then the scenes of misery you get ashamed and agitated about. Then those late- night pornos or horror films that make you dream of being rescued from drowning by mermaids, or chased by a host of flying gargoyles. This heavy batter of secondary experience seeks to seal up all your senses. And their churning out needs a whole battalion of designers.
It is now an enormous scene. Design education has gained in size and complexity. It has now spread into many sectors of expertise training people in the use of a multitude of presentational devices which today's artists are tempted to take advantage of. At one time Design education was the tail of Art education. Now the roles have changed, the tail has grown so big that it wags the dog.
So to serve the needs of the time and meet the aspirations of young artists today an, Art school needs studio and workshop facilities of diverse kinds. Which they can get introduced to and make use of, when they feel the need. Especially in the area of audio- visual communication, as professional units are generally too busy or too expensive for the young artists to avail of. In the absence of such a provision, they are generally under- equipped and under- trained. Their efforts to use these media are generally amateurish; in comparison with the ways the commercial agencies use them, with a better understanding of their potential and reach.
The world of secondary exposures that I have mentioned above is inescapably there in front of the artists, and on an overwhelming and seductive scale. Being inherently sensitive they succumb to its attractions - its slow and piecemeal undressing of the human body more conclusively than a strip- tease show; its recourse to delightful visual puns; its iconisation of everyday objects; its clever devices to trap viewer interest by slow- release doses of vulgarity; its shocking candour in depicting human distress and suffering. With all this, this secondary scene becomes a kind of thesaurus for the new artist, with the help of which he can easily fabricate his statements. And many of the new artists follow the system of assembly line, where the idea sketch and the signature are the artists' contribution and the intermediate stages of his collaborators.
Here, we are bound to notice that the designer of the communication packets are more innovative, driven as they are by a keen desire to meet their ends. A large number of artists feed on its fall out. In that sense they are parasitic. It is true that this moves a few of them into their own fields of innovation or individualized narrative. One is however led to think that the future training institutions should serve these two practice streams together, not in separate camps. Whether this is done by gathering all the facilities in one location, or by setting up an easily navigable network of facilities is for the educational planner to visualize.
What happens to the old category, of the Art school? It will probably still train people to make, what a foreign art critic called years ago, a maximized handmade product. It will have its own significance in the scene visualized above, in so far as it encourages primary contacts with the environment, and in the process, reevaluates previous readings, reassesses the value of the current devices they have given birth to or encourage new readings. For this, the artist or the designer has to constantly doodle in front of the actual to discover new readings and equivalents and the various devices they engender. So it will have an important (even seminal) presence in the institution visualized.
This is just to say that the methods of Art education need to be reviewed and replanned from time to time with successive changes in the surrounding circumstances; and, seeing the infrastructure available in many of our institutions, that the dramatic gesture of Bose Krishnamachari was opportune. But generous infrastructure alone cannot solve the question. There has to be inborn initiative. All the books and CDs in the world cannot make up for the lack of it. Reading Kamasutra alone is not enough for people to make love with pleasure.
When we first entered the field of art, creation of beauty was the watchword. People tried in various ways to reorder things, alter their profiles. Till they found that with too much retooling their mermaids had frozen into mannequins. Then they talked about the importance of truth implying that a little imperfection or disorder may bring a thing to life. They started hating things that got pretty to the extent of calling them false. And really speaking the world, as it was, attractive enough to most of them; it was their main incentive, Similarly, at one time, people rated clarity and closeness to the visual image high, at other times laid stress on abstraction and ambiguity. By and large most artists agreed that the seen world with all its oddities and disproportions, its sheer ordinariness was still attractive (At one time while replying to a question about certain works of mine talked about the apotheosis of the ordinary).
There is something in us that tries to objectify this attraction, and here start our affair with the world, our wish, to mould it according to our heart's desire. In the final count all our works whether they are just celebrative or are loaded with critical messages come out of this inborn wish. Any education that has the wherewithal to support it and give it the means to move ahead should be considered good and proper. |
