One standard reaction I would get from people when I told them about the
Jnanapravaha course was, "I don't get Modern Art. It's just deliberately obscure", or "Modern Art is so elitist!", or "You have to be obscenely wealthy and educated abroad to be able to enjoy that kind of art", or my favourite: "
One line, dot, or square across a large white canvas and that's that. A four year old could do that."
Aside: Now that I think of it, most people said "four year old..". Not five, not six, not two - people didn't even cash in on adolescent angst and presume most 16 year olds could make Modern Art. What is it with universally precocious four year olds?
Seagulls and Sails, by Jehangir Sabavala
The problem with a painting is that it is it's own context. You as a viewer must take the initiative to engage with it, struggle with its apparent obscurity, resist the ease of ignorance and indifference, learn the language, battle your inarticulacy, and most difficultly, consume your ego. The painting may or may not relate to your life or your experiences. It may not agree with your opinions on who should be a celebrated artist, who should not. It may even deeply offend you. But there is no denying the fact that it exists, and its self-sufficiency makes you feel lost and unsettled.
The gallery experience of art is something that troubles me a lot, specially because there is a politics underneath the floors and behind the walls, which is not clear but cannot possibly be unfelt while you are in the space.
My TIFR experience comes to mind. One of the projects I was involved in (it had a hand in changing my life - now that didn't sound too dramatic, did it?) was organising an exhibition of TIFR's incredibly exhaustive and exciting art collection. There were over 250 art works that our curator, Mortimer Chatterjee had to select and exhibit at the NGMA. Everything about this project was an electric experience - learning how restoration artists are actually the acrobats of the art world,
how the right frame can do a three-sixty to the way you experience a painting.
Our interactions with Mr. S, the gallery manager of NGMA were very problematic. It was difficult to communicate with him because there was an incredibly busy subtext underneath whatever he appeared to be saying. Greasy, translucent words would stream silently from his grey-black hair and thinly film our eyes.
Instead of working with our curator on creating the story which would tie the selected works together, or compiling the essays and pictures of the exhibition catalogue (yes, people do read and publish art crit too! god bless y'all), or taking care that the works were packed, transported, unpacked and hung/arranged properly with gentle, loving care, we were now required to fret about who had to be invited to the opening show, who would sit where, who would be invited for the dinner later and who wouldn't, who would get the flowers, who would give the flowers, who would cut the ribbon, how long would the Minister's tour of the show be (we couldn't possibly do the detailed two hour talk-walk with her, could we?). We even had to make sure certain people didn't bump into each other, because they had separately instructed us on who they got along with, and who they didn't.
It was degrading, reductive and humiliating. NGMA flexed its muscles because it knew we had nowhere else to exhibit TIFR's collection. The only other gallery large enough to house such a huge collection was Jehangir, which was booked for the next two years.
I began wondering about the gallerial experience of art. Many professors and students were left stunned by the exhibition. These were paintings and sculptures they had walked among, waited for the lift by, discussed theories, politics and movies next to. Partly due to bad lighting, poor maintenance, a pitiable budget allocation and partly due to the kind of insulation which institutes of higher learning often develop about anything beyond their immediate academic concerns, these beautiful, provocative and insightful pieces of art had become nothing more than show pieces or shadowy, dusty oblongs on corridor walls.
What a difference big, clean walls, considerate, gentle lighting and context can make! Many people came up to us and said that the exhibition had breathed new life into the paintings. It was tempting to believe that, but the truth was that it was a simple case of taking for granted things that are the closest to you, and also how much you cared about something. As long as Dr Bhabha was alive, he fought to keep aside 1% of TIFR's total budget for collecting and maintaining its art collection. He often paid for paintings or sculptures he wanted for TIFR out of his pocket (but then again, he was quite privileged financially), and his successor, Dr MGK Menon collected many *eyebrow-raising works for that time.
Successive directors didn't quite know what to do. Dr Menon had left TIFR in 1975, and it was only two years ago that the previous director decided that the paintings and sculptures needed restoring. To date there's a tiny strong room opposite the Accounts section, which has paintings stacked together in their packings, not being displayed because, well, actually I don't really know. Nobody seemed to have an answer, but I suspect there wasn't a straightforward way to say, we don't care.
The exhibition changed the way many people at TIFR saw the art collection, even after the paintings and sculptures made their way back home from the gallery. There was no denying that the gallery, in its capacity of being a generous space to exhibit those works, had had a role in this change of heart and mind.
But there was a malevolent superficiality to the whole experience which I could not shake off. What the painting was saying to you, what you could see or hear from it mattered lesser than what they cost. The Husains were eagerly sought out, the Baburao Sadwelkars were ignored. Here I speak of the gallery manager and some of their staff. The power politics played by the art world and those who peopled it - in this particular situation - was disturbing. And this then reflected on to the people who came and saw the exhibition.
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, the definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if..., it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer. Increasingly, galleries have a habit of saying when they acquired a painting and how much it cost...
Millions! The viewer does not see the colours on the canvas, she sees the colour of money.
Is the painting famous? Yes! Think of all the people who have carefully spared one minute of their lives to stand in front of it.
Is the painting Authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it is a part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle.
Who painted it? What do we know about his/her sexual practices and have we seen anything about them on the television? If not, the museums will likely have a video full of schoolboy facts and tabloid gossip.
Where is the tea-room/toilet/gift shop?
Where is the painting in any of this?
Experiencing paintings as moving pictures, out of context, disconnected, jostled, over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations, over-crowded, one against the other, room on room, does not make it easy to fall in love. Love takes time.
... the only way into the strange life of pictures is to expose yourself to as much contemporary art as you can until you find something, anything, that you will go back and back to see again...
- Art Objects, by Jeanette Winterson
I did much of what Winterson describes as "over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations" throughout the two months our exhibition was on. Initially it was exciting to know and explain to strangers the what, how and why of a painting. And then it began to pale, because the explanations became larger than the paintings, and slowly made them entirely redundant in my mind. When I had repeated the story behind Husain winning the mural competition twenty times, I stopped looking at the mural. It was a pity, because before assuming the role of a 'tour guide', I would spend time alone, just with the paintings and sculptures, and try to listen to them instead.
Saying that Modern Art is obscure, elitist, or that enjoying it requires you to be wealthy and educated abroad, or that it can be done by a four year old, is like hiding under a tree because everyone in the forest says the sky is about to fall. Let a painting speak to you, sing to you. Touch a sculpture and experience it. Take off your blinkers and know that if you reach out sincerely, you will be met half way.
