http://picasaweb.google.com/vasudhathozhur/Untouchable#
The following text collages fragments written over the years, since 2002.
It was compiled in February 2007, and is by no means complete.
February 2002
A Letter
In relationship to the conversation we had, some thoughts on what I am doing now - as a starting point? The best way to begin, as far as I am concerned - sorry about the length, but necessary for precision.
A run through -
My show in March 2001 was entitled Secret Life. The accompanying text in normal circumstances would have been in the form of a catalogue. Instead, I made an audio CD, of readings from my journals over four years, 1997-2001. They are reflections on work, life, anecdotes, bits of poetry, and other excerpts from my own writings; meant to be heard through headphones (in the gallery) so as not to intrude into viewing space. Not quite secret, but as something between two people.
They were also meant to make the vital connection between life and art, easy to forget during times like these when the kind of visibility demanded of the arts exerts a pressure to remain onstage till performance deteriorates into posturing. I was amazed that it was so much cheaper (!!!) than printing a catalogue - the visuals were the paintings themselves - a perfect solution to lack of funds.
My next body of work will be entitled Untouchable. The idea was spontaneous, but in India the term carries with it a heavy semantic load, focusing for the main part on caste taboos. I implicate these connotations but widen the context to include other forms of marginalization/ exclusion/ subordination. My thinking includes the notion of the 'untouchable' as someone who falls outside the hierarchy/convenience/status of classification but is used as an intermediary who provides access to the darker, mysterious forces of life (there are various social practices and interactions which bear out this relationship of the outcaste to society).
I have just completed the first painting in this series - framed within the familiar(in India) act of self-immolation. The context emanates from the self - a personal history which is partially narrated in symbols within the painting, possibly the most inscrutable area. The impulse is not initially an intellectual one, but one of those things which occurs in a flash, a visual flash in the context of painting, a vision to use a more dramatic word? The analysis comes later, but I notice increasingly that if the matrix/structure is strong, there is a convergence of perspectives, and I see it unfold through my practice. A collective reading is also possible through the use of images which in India would be identified across all economic and social hierarchies.
An arc of hands bearing stigmata spreads above the figure in benediction- hands/touch/heal/untouchable/redeem the unredeemable/ - touch - love or defile the sacred? Stigmata carry specific religious associations; there is an overlap with mudras as in classical dance.
Contentious ground, and I wouldn't take such liberties with an image other than my own.
The next painting - the self-image framed within the context of widowhood/sacrifice/loss of sexuality through the shaving of one's hair - part of a group of four, with the peacock as the central motif. The first panel is a piece of text; a letter, to be precise, in vermilion and gold.
The second panel is based on a press photograph, which appeared in the newspapers during the months after the earthquake in Gujarat, of a man whose hair is being shaved off by a barber in preparation for rituals of death and mourning. I have substituted my own image for his in the painting.
As for the fourth - one of the most moving stories that I read early in 2001, during the aftermath of the earthquake, was of a young girl who was crushed under the debris of her own home. As rescuers toiled to pull her out, she scratched a plea on her bare leg, with a piece of the rubble - do not stop one who wishes to go.
The peacock as a national/notional bird is an intended cliché, I recalled later the fact of his being male. There are two broad aspects to this panel - one is personal loss, the other is the nation, or rather the play of forces that seeks to define it in exclusive terms - embodied by the aggressive display of opulent plumage, and the seduction that it intends.
The third painting will be constructed around the fountains of the Brindavan Gardens in Mysore, the city of my birth. And so on.
The clichés are as much ideas as repositories of brilliant colour. The 'catalogue' for this body of work will be a book/books of poems in braille, (it tends to be a lengthy affair, longer than the written word) also with the same title. They would be chronologically ordered, dating from 1995. Braille is written by puncturing the paper to produce an embossed script and can be read with the fingers, by touch, which also brings with it possibilities of healing. I do not seek to set a precedent, merely to materialize something which is intrinsically connected with the concepts that I work with.
I would through the course of my work make things which could possibly initiate a quest, as extensions of a larger, deliberate event such as a show. For me it would be a quest for a different conceptual space than the one created by mainstream practice, which is an assertive act - I exhibit my work and in a way demand its viewing, demand a critique. The objects/books/CDs which I will make will be limited in number and free from compulsion or self-consciousness of any kind. They would exist as authentic, subliminal records of processes related to work, but would in fact be easy to overlook; those wishing to access them might be put to some effort and the giving of time. The impulse which could actually prompt their discovery could be curiosity, or the conviction that it might be worth one's while to attempt to break the code - an open question, to which I have no answer. Of course it becomes possible to present these due to an existent viewership. The objects however are largely autonomous and from the moment of their completion increasingly independent of control - I set them free to go where they will, to remain undiscovered or to be found. Discovery would involve communication, not through confrontation but through compassion and understanding - and journeys into unfamiliar spaces. Like a treasure hunt. The personal property of whomsoever it may concern. They could be duplicated on demand.
I would like to work with recorded text transcribed into morse code. I have not yet decided on the text, the idea is still in formation. Have to see what it sounds like and in what way it would hold the attention, if it needs to be modified, additional inputs, voice? Would like to actually see the machine which produces the sounds, see where that would take me. The idea of working with outmoded technology interests me.
I make work from a routine which clarifies my senses and gives me peace, it is demanding of my life but will not kill it. Regenerative as opposed to degenerative. I would want it to remain that way.
September 2003
Lost Years: A Reconstruction is a portrait of Vishnu, my son - the missing component in Secret Life. It has developed from a complex set of associations - a photograph which Valsan, his father, took of him, and from Vishnu's stay in Mysore, my own birthplace. The fountain is one of the star attractions of the Brindavan Gardens just outside the city: the subject of many postcards, available in digitally enhanced colours, designed to attract tourists. It is also the site of magical memories from childhood: of nights, lights, chill sprays of water carried by the breeze, the sheer scale of the fountains and their landscaped surroundings.
In time, though physically related, it stands outside the earlier body of work, Secret Life. I had hoped to make it the predecessor to a project involving five children, survivors of the massacre at Naroda Patia, now rehabilitated in Vatva.
The project has run into trouble; the current series of paintings, entitled 'Untouchable', begun in 2001, continues. I had envisioned 'Vishnu' as a powerful strand which would strengthen other continuities between two succeeding bodies of work; the precise nature of this relationship will only be revealed in time.
There also arises the question of interpreting a loaded theme - one belonging to a cabaret of national proportions, spectacles of enticement, repeatedly, desperately paraded to gloss over extreme deprivation. How does one therefore paint, or choose to paint a fountain, a peacock? And why? With the many languages now at our disposal, given a particular kind of training, a set of skills which are irrevocably hybrid from a purist point of view, can one dare to look for an original impulse? How can one reclaim that fascination in the face of so much violence, and weave it into a narrative of wonders, intimately related to one's own life ?
January 2006
Of Journeys and Emptiness : A Painting in Thirteen Parts
(From a statement for a catalogue)
2005 - I began the year on a note of emptiness, wondering, for no immediate reason, where I in particular and artists in general fitted into the scheme of things.
My friends Robin and Ranjit were organizing an artists' workshop in Pachmarhi. I did not respond to the invitation initially, due to the demands of a recently initiated project. The time frame offered by most workshop situations does not correspond with my work process, nor with the concept of continuity and interconnectedness that supports this process.
I agreed to go however. I began with thinking in terms of long walks and treks, and of recording, in photographs, the paths that these would take. It seemed closest to the reality that I would experience in Pachmarhi.
I took along two boxes of small canvases measuring 1 foot by 1, in case I felt the need to paint.
My sketchbook began to fill with random images - landscapes, flora, fauna - a groping towards coherence in a situation that was empty of prior meaning. I decided to present them as they were, but rendered in paint, almost like studies.
On one of the walls in the courtyard beside my room was a chalk drawing of a strolling donkey followed by a trail of misaligned strokes, resembling question marks, each assigned a name - representing several unsuccessful attempts at pinning a tail to the donkey's backside, blindfolded. The remnants of a bygone birthday party - it seemed an apt metaphor. I spent an afternoon sketching it exactly the way that it was.
Put together like a set of 'hieroglyphs' as Pushpa put it, a story did indeed emerge.
I was reading a book about pigments at the time, entitled the Story of Colour. It was interesting to collate the text with the rock paintings of the region, and to work this relationship into the narrative.
The main keys are of course the primaries, in three frames, and moving through the others in a series of tonal variations. There are moments of dischord with the introduction of a sharper and more strident pitch - two old posters, digitally reconstructed, that I unearthed in the shops outside the Mahadev caves. The content is correspondingly potent.
On my return to Baroda I examined the photographs that I had taken. I was surprised. A parallel set of equations seemed to emerge, inclusive of the colour relationships - but one read love and the other, death.
September 2006
Four Ways of Reconstructing Pain
As far as the title is concerned - the idea of variations and multiple ways is in keeping with the possibility of accommodating differences, the inclusiveness that is also spelt out in the sequences that I work with.
At the Khoj International Artists'Workshop in 2000, I constructed four pieces collaged from layers of newspaper and nylon sarees from the local market at Modi Nagar on the outskirts of Delhi. They seemed to me like subaltern Tankas, as opposed to the silk/ brocade/material and sacred content of those traditional scrolls. I had intended to embed, in the centre, miniature portraits of the staff who maintained the Modi mansion where we were housed.
The two weeks that we had were insufficient, however, and the work remained incomplete for several years.
By 2005, I had completed four 'self-portraits' (not in the strict sense of the term, rather they were enhanced in order to extend beyond the personal into areas of common relevance) of epic proportions - in terms of physical dimensions as well as the range of experiences that were embedded in the imagery.
I had found the core - the iconography could be transferred from the painting and set in the heart of the scroll, amidst the maze of text and fabric. I wondered if it could be painted directly, or separately and then superimposed onto the surface. Neither would work, considering the state of deterioration the scrolls were in. The sheets were brittle and had begun to crumble, further, they were bulky and gathered dust. I had often thought of throwing them away.
Years ago, while traveling in Germany, I had visited an exhibit of a project documentation by students of one of the universities - I don't quite remember which one. It involved digital reconstructions and light projections of the synagogues that had been destroyed during the Nazi pogroms. To see them rise again in all their beauty, if only in reproduction - it is a memory that has stayed with me; I remember thinking even then that technology could retrace - as opposed to a ceaseless forward motion that never looks back - the path to 'progress' in order to discover value.
I decided to scan the scrolls directly, and restore the damaged areas digitally. The available scanner could not accommodate the size of the scroll; Azra (the technician) and I cut each piece into several sections, scanned them separately, and reassembled them on the computer. Strips of newspaper and fabric were extracted (on photoshop) from the original, in keeping with the manner in which the scrolls were originally made, and used to replace lost bits. The portraits were extracted from photographs of the paintings and superimposed.
A revelation - it was the layering, physical, temporal and in terms of memory as implied by the temporal - that was integral to the work, more that the medium itself, which was merely a means of rediscovering or affirming the concept and the process of its actualization, at a different point in time. Medium as an outward manifestation of inner process, which makes use of whatever is available in historical time; therefore divested of pre-eminence or hierarchy in terms of artistic value, or of the 'new'. The work itself something of a document that bears out the processes of its making - the term 'document', in this case, all the more significant considering the time involved - five years.
The work itself, though materialized digitally, is beyond medium. Through the process of layering strips of newspaper and fabric, pieces of text emerged or survived in a manner that created new meaning; one of them read - 're-casting cybermaps for the old economy'.
Sanctum: An Explanation
Sanctum is the title of a painting that I made as a student in 1979. One panel in the present group is a re-construction of that painting, it had been one of my favourites. Among the memories that it evokes is of hours spent at the Tate in London where I was studying at the time, and of wandering into the room with the Rothkos - and somehow linking it with the theoretical study that I had so recently left behind in India - of temple architecture in the south of the country. The plans had fascinated me, even visually, as plans: they revealed a structure which was somehow obscured in viewing the actual monument, by virtue of the sheer scale, weight, and the ornamentation encrusting the surface. They also revealed a philosophy and a spatial and sculptural organization that transformed movement through those spaces into enactments of passage.
I found a resonance, in the Rothko room, in the colours, the reds and maroons, and in the mysteriousness of the interior spaces from which they seemed to emanate.
The original painting has subsequently been destroyed by time, damp, and termites - and I wanted to bring it back to life.
In 1998, I had conducted a workshop at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, where we had worked around the idea of shadows; my contribution was an installation where I traced out the silhouettes of my hands, spelling out my name in sign language, one among those that are used by the hearing/speech impaired. I drove nails into the hands. Red beads, in the shape of drops, were suspended from the nails by pieces of string.
I had, at the time, recently moved to Baroda from Madras, and had been struck by the profusion of rust-red splashes on the walls of buildings - on staircase landings, convenient corners - caused by the habit of chewing paan and spitting (or rather squirting) out the juice.
I had, for long, wanted to make an artwork around that rather strong visual impression. I splashed red paint on the wall beneath the hands, and then nuanced it with another splash of gold - to create the duality of desecration/ worship, among other things. At that moment, a piece of saffron-coloured paper floated into the room and settled on the floor beneath. I pasted it on the ground, exactly where it lay, and splashed it with red/vermilion. I had taken a photograph of this installation and again, had been wanting to re-create it, as it would eventually be painted over.
The central panel is adapted from a photograph taken by a photographer and film-maker, Gottfried Junker, who spent a morning in my studio. I was seated on a dhurrie with an intricate pattern. Looking at it later, I wasn't quite sure how I would paint it, much of it was not really visible. When it finally worked itself through, it was a combination of attempted rendering, and tracings from the actual carpet which were printed on the canvas and then re-worked. Layers emerged, decorative as well as script-like – cobwebs, bits of tattered lace - like preserved but crumbling body tissues. I was facing a blank canvas in the photograph, which I covered with inscriptions that grew into a tree - a banyan tree with roots of blood.
Looking back, other correspondences emerge. At the time that I started working on the first panel (with the hands) early in 2005, I had completed a series of paintings which saw me through very painful times. I had also begun working on a public project which I saw as a vital responsibility. Unfulfilled, it would render my practice as a painter meaningless, and there still seemed such a long way to go. I needed to see some sort of manifestation of faith within my own studio as well, that forsaken space - a writing on the wall, even if it was nothing more profound than my name, nothing more than a pledge: Vasudha.
The photographer had appeared unexpectedly, leaving me with the beginnings of the second panel.
The sense of ease that I then began to feel enabled me to look back and reclaim other things of significance gathered but not quite resolved in earlier years. It was something of a triumph- with so much destroyed, that one could still regenerate the best from the worst, and watch it grow.
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