Gurus give up
The Indian Express - 30 Sep 2007
Over half-a-decade of teaching at the Pune Art Institute, artist Buwa Shete is about to quit his job. The old, tired syllabus disappoints him and he’s tired of fighting to get computers for his students. “There is less fun left in working as a teacher. I would like to concentrate more on my work,” he says. Shete is not alone. In art schools across the country, many senior artists are giving up on teaching as they either choose to concentrate on tapping the booming art mart or are pushed out because of political reasons. In the last few years, Natraj Sharma and Rini Dhumal have left their teaching positions at MS University, Baroda. And barring Paul Kohli, JJ School of Art has few practising artists in their faculty.
This is a significant shift from the time when masters like Rabindranath Tagore, B.B. Mukherjee, K.C.S. Panicker and Prabhakar Kolte taught and painted at universities and set in motion new movements of thought. But old school idealism is making way for the practicality of a market, driven by globalised and politicised art. Says Gulammohammed Sheikh, who along with K.G. Subramanyan, gave direction to the narrative school of art in MS University, “In our time, we were concerned about having freedom from market forces which is why we earned our living by teaching. Today with prices escalating, many painters no longer have the time or inclination to teach,” says Sheikh.
Market forces are not the only factor discouraging artists from being part of campuses. It appears that universities no longer provide the freedom to experiment that they once did. A rather extreme example is the recent encroachment of right-wing activists on the MSU’s Fine Arts Faculty final examination, where Chandramohan’s evaluation was disrupted. As Shivaji Panikkar, the acting dean who was suspended over the row, puts it, “Indian contemporary art has not been taught at schools and universities the way it has in the West, which is why, what an artists says and does often comes as a shock to the lay audience. The gap needs to be bridged and clamping down on the freedom of artists to express is not the answer,” he says.
Painters like Prabhakar Kolte, erstwhile faculty member at the Sir J J School of Art do believe in the freedom of expression but are also uncomfortable with activism and political posturing in art. “My language and enquiry as an art is informed by pure aesthetics. If I was interested in politics, I would have been a politician. If I wanted to take an activist stand, I would be one. As an artist, my concerns are about the purity of line and colour,” says the reclusive painter who works out of his studio at Kandivili and rarely ventures out.
But it’s not as if the synergy between artists and students has completely dried out. There seems to be, on the other hand, a reorientation of older methods of communication. Many artists like Jitish Kallat, Jehangir Sabavala and even Bose Krishnamachari serve as visiting lecturers at their alma maters besides other institutes. “It is possible that I would have still found time to teach at the J J School of Art, but I fell out with the authorities because of my criticism of a Khoj workshop that was held. After several confrontations on various issues, there was no question of staying on,” explains Bose, whose reasons for leaving were less to do with economics and more with ideology.
Sabavala, who held a few workshops and film screenings at J J, points out that he is not entirely comfortable with the whole guru-shishya parampara, “I enjoy a good stimulating discussion about art with younger painters and those who are still studying, but I think it would be wrong to impose one’s style on an artist. It’s important that they find their own path and we as senior artists can merely facilitate that journey.”
Other spaces like the Mumbai based NGO Majlis and the artists’ collective Open Circle have made endeavours to engage with students from schools and colleges outside the curriculum. While Madhushree Dutta organised a series of workshops with students and art practitioners, filmmakers and writers like Baiju Parthan, Patel, Arun Khoppkar and Urvashi Butalia, Open Circle currently runs workshops with schools like Ecol Mondial in Mumbai. Sharmila Samant of Open Circle believes that workshops may well be the way ahead in the absence of any radical change in curriculum.
Gieve Patel, who recently came out with a poetry book, the result of a 10-year annual workshop with the students of Rishi Valley, agrees that senior artists are still around to inspire the next generation. “One cannot teach poetry or painting, but merely aid the discovery of art or poetry within an individual,” says Patel.
That’s a process that continues—on and off the campuses.
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Father too gets in the game by Uma Nair
Economic Times - 30 Sep 2007
An apt epitaph perhaps or the perfect requiem for Mahatma Gandhi. When Atul Dodiya’s work Father (enamel paint on metal roller shutters, acrylic and marble dust on canvas) fetched $601,000 at the Sotheby’s Contemporary Sale setting a new world record for him, it spoke of the September success of Indian art and the rewards for an artist who has gone beyond merely illustrative sensibilities. Dodiya could be termed as an intellectual aesthete. His ability to fuse western modernist styles to Indian idioms has been his forte.
Known for creating several frames of reference within the canvas, his subjects have been varied. From homage to Piet Mondrian to Gandhi, to a faceless Chinese monk meditating in the woods, Dodiya has used metaphors as his symbolism. At the three-day Asian Art Auctions in New York last week Mumbai-based Dodiya’s place was preserved for posterity in the artistic pantheon.
The top Lot 33 of the Sotheby’s Contemporary sale on September 21 was Atul Dodiya’s Father and was sold to a Chinese private collector. At Christie’s just a day before Atul Dodiya’s Three Painters sold for $541,000 more than tripling its pre-sale estimate, to confirm his position as one of South Asia’s leading artists. Interestingly, at the Sotheby’s Atul’s second work Man From Kabul sold for an appreciable $313,000 from an estimated $100,000-$150,000.
But Atul’s evolution has been shaped by the likes of the galleries he has dealt with in the past — National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, Gallery Chemould in Mumbai and Vadehra in New Delhi. Add to that the residency at Singapore’s Tyler Print Institute where he did a historic show of the famed Ramayana legend of Sabari.
This work Father, executed in 2002, was exhibited at the Walsh Gallery in Chicago in 2002 as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. In this work Dodiya presents us with two forms of ancestry — a personal ancestry, symbolised by an image of his father shown with a paunch, and a more universal ancestry of his art and culture, revealed through the veiled artistic references in the canvas that is hidden beneath the shutter.
His father’s swollen belly is a reference to the pain and discomfort that he experienced towards the end of his life caused by an enlargement of the spleen.
The artist states that “the belly became bloated like a pregnant woman from which extends an umbilical cord that continues onto the painting beneath becoming the umbilical cord of India wrapped around a Brancusi column a symbol for me of time, purity....great art. At the base of the column is Gandhi holding a mason’s trowel trying to repair a crumbling India, with two priests building a wall behind him.”
There is furthermore an intentional play on words in the title of the work — on the shutter, the artist depicts his own father but on the canvas beneath he depicts Gandhi, sometimes endearingly termed ‘Bapu’, the father of the nation.Says Atul: “In recent years I have allowed the world to enter my studio. I have painted as if at a crossroads — where East meets West, the popular and the naive meet the high classical or the very personal autobiographical images overlaps the universal icon.
From these apparently anarchic hybrids I hope to understand the nature of creativity. Creativity earlier meant that I was a link in a long chain of art makers from the ancient to the post modern.
The inclinations and the obsessions have moved. Almost dramatically the earth has moved beneath my feet. As my notions of security and beauty have changed a deluge of images has hit me. Living in a nation seeped in poverty maybe it’s unavoidable. Death, decay, corruption, compromise, struggle are not distant metaphors for the fall of man. These are real right here, lived with, metallic, omnipresent.
Metal is a roller shutter guard to a shop. Opening or closing it is a symbol of daily grind. It evokes a feeling of time passing, cruel industrial sounds, the lonely labourer the glamour and glitz of the city....The city for me is the chief inspiration. The overlapping of contradictory images which I paint is born here. Constant contradiction is truth. Imagine the earth shifting beneath one’s feet perpetually.”
Last year in an interview to Bodhi Buzz Atul said: “The reason an artist chooses/decides to paint a character from history is because he sees a visual potential to create images that will work not only visually but will also say something in a new light to the viewer. I belong to Saurashtra, have been brought up in Mumbai and have been drawn to certain ‘isms’ of Gandhim — his philosophy of ahimsa.
But in our nation all those things have been spoken of yet there is no Gandhi in modern day living. Mumbai had its riots, its divisions that grow day by day. I also thought of his figure that frail lean figure, that figure is so ingrained in our minds, it is a cultural symbol. I felt that the icon was being ignored in modern day life. We have moved miles away from him. The leadership and political climate changes everyday, and when we were celebrating 50 years of Independence, Gandhi was only a hint of an image. I wanted to scrutinise that failing, that fabric of society that never practiced what he spoke about or wrote.”
The second work Man from Kabul was exhibited at Vadehras in 2002. The Sotheby’s sale more than amply proved that non-Indians were bidding for works by Indian artists. “The sight of non-Indians bidding furiously for Indian works is such an exciting experience,” says Dinesh Vazirani who saw it happening at The Saffronart Sale just a week before.
“This places Indian contemporary art on the global frame. Its success must be accrued to the showcasing of Indian art in places like New York, London, Singapore, Dubai and other places,” he adds vouching for the fact that contemporary Indian art is truly gaining global ground.
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How cool is Cool? by Arati Menon Carroll
Business Standard - 30 Sep 2007
Red Earth presents an art show that it hopes will broaden the perspective of the Indian art enthusiast.
At the preview of Cool 5, an art show running in Mumbai, five young artists, quirkily attired, dramatically alight from a Victoria (open horse carriage).
Inside the gallery, cocktails with curious titles are being consumed. Like Bunty aur Babli, the whisky, blue Curacao, vodka blend that playfully pokes fun at big dreaming small town artists. “It’s my idea of a cool event,” says curator Himanshu Verma.
Verma himself is probably used to people thinking he is “cool”. He is just as comfortable in a silk kurta as he is draped in a sari, and seamlessly moves from discussing the semiotics of disco music in eastern popular culture to organising a music festival celebrating the sarangi.
Known in art circles as the spunky young man (he’s 27) who tried to renew interest in the literary pamphlet three years ago starting with a 40-pager on the unexamined aspects of metrosexuality, the director of Red Earth is now fully occupied with organising multi-disciplinary events that celebrate culture through open and occasionally subversive discourse.
Once again, with Cool 5, he is offering the counterpoint to conventional interpretations of cool Indian art. He presents five new artists, mostly in their twenties and specifically painters — Verma’s way of reviving interest in painting, which he believes is today sidelined by the interest in newfangled media art.
“I’m not saying the Bombay Boys and their ilk are not sexy. I’m just offering a different kind of cool,” he explains.
The idea for the show was purely intuitive. “I got to wondering why we are restricted by only a certain kind of cool. Nobody actually knows what constitutes cool and that actually makes for a rather enjoyable confusion.” Cool, Verma believes, should be more about celebrating difference than Western-driven homogeneity.
From Rohini Singh’s gouache on old court fee stamp paper to the suggestive symbolism of Dileep Sharma’s watercolours, pen and ink and paper, and the brazen dramatics of Rajendra Kapse’s self-portraits in oil and acrylic, the show highlights varied personalities and varied styles.
Verma’s curatorial style draws on nonconformity too. The artists were provided with no thematic boundaries, just the instruction to present work that shows them at their coolest.
Instead of individual artist biodatas, there are collages of unabashed photographs and amusing (and largely un-edited) Q&As, which include the artist’s favourite underwear colour, dream date and personal perception of the word “cool”.
The show draws as much attention to the personalities of the artists as to their work. Verma has deliberately chosen small-town artists for their cultural allegiance to a certain quality of Indian-ness, in idiom, technique and story. “The only way Indian art will make a true mark on the international scene is by being Indian,” he says.
There’s more than a hint of a suggestion that Verma believes the Indian art scene needs to cool off for a bit. The artists themselves allude to it. Kapse’s Q&A suggests disillusionment with the arbitrariness of price inflation. Pratul Dash believes there is a lacuna in curatorial direction. “Even galleries have become commercial instead of cultural,” bemoans Verma.
This isn’t his first interaction with art. A Holi art camp (Verma typically organises events around Indian festivals) earlier this year had 40 artists exploring the possibilities that lay in indigenous Indian colours and art materials. Next up, an exhibition in New Delhi using light as the only medium of art, around, you guessed it, Diwali.
“This isn’t easy,” he admits, “there is still a lot of hankering after big names.” But Verma has ambitious plans, big plans to introduce small doses of humour (or coolness) into Indian art. “I’ll be back in December, as Santa Claus,” he signs off ambiguously. Cool.
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NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2007: Tanyth Berkeley, Scott McFarland, Berni Searle, the latest installment of its annual fall showcase of significant recent work in contemporary photography. On view from September 30, 2007, to January 1, 2008, in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery on the third floor, the exhibition features 18 photographs and is organized by Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. The New Photography series is made possible by JGS, Inc.
Hindustan Times - 30 Sep 2007
You still perhaps can’t pluck Monet’s Water Lilies or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for your walls. But you can buy a lot more art being sold abroad than earlier, especially if you are a big, fat Indian family.
The Reserve Bank of India has doubled the cap on individual overseas investment from $100,000 (Rs 39.7 lakh) per person annually to $200,000 (Rs 79.4 lakh). So, if you are a wealthy family of five, that makes it a million dollars to buy with.
Warhol’s Campbell Soup at $130,000 (Rs 52 lakh) for entrée, Dali’s La Montre Molle at $670,000 (Rs 2.68 crore) for the main course? That still leaves $200,000 for desserts.
The central bank’s generosity gives a rapidly globalising and prospering India another reason to go art shopping, with investment in paintings and artefacts increasingly providing marzipan to oven-hot stock market gains. Popularity of art investment made the government consider a painting as capital good and tax dealings on it since the last budget.
“For alternative asset classes like art or real estate, this hike will be very useful,” said Nipun Mehta, CEO of Unitis Tower, a wealth management company for high net-worth individuals. “$1,00,000 was not enough.”
He said mutual funds and equity investments overseas would happen only after a person has invested enough in India, since the Indian equity markets are giving excellent returns. Also, the dollar getting weak is a disincentive to invest abroad.
Now, investors would make a bigger beeline to buy North American art, said Niyatee Shinde, curator of Gallery Articulate, which is run by the Yash Birla group.
“For about a decade, people have started following US aesthetic trends. Earlier, the scene used to be dominated by European art, be it Renaissance or the German Impressionists,” she said.
But Patel said Indian paintings being sold abroad would be a popular choice for Indian investors. “Best Western art can cost $20-50 million. Indian paintings go up to around $1 million. Also, Indian collectors understand Indian art better.”
Several new art-funds for globally traded Indian art are set to launch. Osian is coming up with one by end-2007, while Religare’s fund may take off earlier.
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Museum of Modern Art Presents New Photography 2007
Artdaily.org - 30 Sep 2007
NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2007: Tanyth Berkeley, Scott McFarland, Berni Searle, the latest installment of its annual fall showcase of significant recent work in contemporary photography. On view from September 30, 2007, to January 1, 2008, in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery on the third floor, the exhibition features 18 photographs and is organized by Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. The New Photography series is made possible by JGS, Inc.
Twenty-two years after the first New Photography exhibition, the series continues to highlight the Museum's commitment to the work of less familiar artists and seeks to represent the most interesting accomplishments in contemporary photography. Since its inception in 1985, work by 63 artists from 13 countries has been featured in this forum.
Explains Ms. Respini, "This year's New Photography exhibition includes work by three artists-from the United States, Canada, and South Africa-working in a variety of techniques and across a range of themes. By focusing on outstanding individual achievements and maintaining a regular annual schedule, the New Photography series aims to suggest the diversity and international scope of contemporary photography."
Tanyth Berkeley - The subjects of Tanyth Berkeley's photographs include street performers, transgender women, strangers, and close friends, all captured in striking portraits that often challenge conceptions of feminine beauty. Featured prominently in this exhibition are nearly life-size portraits of individuals with whom the artist has a deep connection, each of whom possesses an idiosyncratic appeal: Linda Leven, an actress and former dancer; Rick Wilder, a rocker with a dandy fashion sense; Ariel, a porcelain-skinned beauty with a cascading mane; Claire, a regal blonde; and Grace, with an intensely furrowed brow. Grace, a frequent sitter and muse whom the artist met on the subway in 2002, appears in multiple photographs; her luminous hair and extraordinary features take on a painterly quality.
The sometimes mannered poses of Berkeley's subjects impart a sense of theatricality to the photographs and also make visible the collaboration between photographer and sitter. In addition to using gesture and pose to highlight certain aspects of her subjects, Berkeley's deft use of color and natural light stresses their uniqueness. With these portraits, the artist offers an alternative to images in consumer culture by celebrating beauty outside the mainstream, favoring the distinctive over the ordinary.
Berkeley was born in 1969 in Hollywood, California, and lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2004 and recently held her second solo exhibition at Bellwether Gallery in New York City (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1/MoMA in Long Island City, New York, and White Out: Lighting into Beauty at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado (2005).
Scott McFarland - Scott McFarland digitally combines multiple negatives to create exquisitely detailed photographs that subtly record the passage of time. For Orchard View with the Effects of the Seasons (Variation #1) (2003-06), McFarland photographed the same view of an overgrown garden in Vancouver throughout the year as different plants bloomed and faded. He combined elements of these exposures to capture all four seasons within a single picture.
McFarland is interested in environments that are artificially constructed to appear natural. In a series of photographs made at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, a large panorama of the nursery contrasts with photographs of the cultivated areas of the gardens. The inconsistent shadows and impossibly uniform sunlight on some plants give clues to the artist's digital interventions. Another artificial display is the subject of a photograph McFarland took at the Berlin Zoo, in which a keeper tends to porcupines as a young family looks on.
The work involved in creating and maintaining such displays is mirrored in McFarland's artmaking. While his photographs maintain a sense of realism, they are composed through artificial means. By manipulating time and space to create a multilayered representation of the world, McFarland reconsiders the conventional notion that a photograph is a depiction of one moment frozen in time.
Scott McFarland was born in 1975 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and lives in Vancouver. He studied at the University of British Columbia, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. Recent exhibitions include The Constructed Image: Photographic Culture, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2007); Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre, Vancouver Art Gallery (2007); and Clickdoubleclick: The Documentary Factor, Haus der Kunst in Munich (2006).
Berni Searle - Berni Searle draws on her personal experiences and memories to realize her visually sumptuous photographs, videos, and installations. For the series About to Forget, Searle began with a handful of her family snapshots, spanning three generations, and cut crepe-paper silhouettes of family groupings. When she submerged the cutouts in warm water and photographed them, the resulting forms lost definition as the red pigment bled into the water, creating an abstract evocation of the uncertainty of memory and the gradual fading of family ties.
Similarly, Approach describes an action that takes place over time. This work was made on mounds of discarded grape skins during the harvest on a vineyard in South Africa. The mounds, with their rich reds, purples, and browns, are made by machinery that crushes the grapes and ejects the skins from an overhead funnel. In the waning sunlight, the artist photographed herself barefoot, ascending and descending the peaks and valleys of this seemingly endless mountain range. Her grape-stained smock indicates the physical exertion of negotiating the rotting skins, which contrasts with the beauty of the landscape. Searle's journey recalls the traditional and laborious winemaking process of crushing grapes with one's feet, while alluding to the winemaking culture established by Dutch and French colonial settlers in South Africa in the 17th century. Her nuanced images reflect on her country's tumultuous history, but they ultimately address ideas that connect to broader human experience.
Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. She studied at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and completed her MFA in 1995. Searle recently had a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006-07). Other recent group exhibitions include Global Feminisms at The Brooklyn Museum in New York (2007), and the 49th and 51st Venice Bienniales (2001 and 2005).
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