Thursday, July 17, 2014

Devajyoti  Ray and Bridget Riley
Contemporary Indian Art often shows iconography that has come down from various phases in India’s long history – a history that had seen the incoming of a people from various parts of the world. Indian art assimilates all these influences into a diffused spectrum which is often difficult to decipher without good knowledge of Indian history.

Amidst the various people that had once inhabited the Indian political and cultural space, the British were perhaps the most recent. The British rule in India had lasted for about 150 years, during which Indians got introduced to European genres of modern art. These influences can be very easily observed in Indian artworks today.

But is it possible to delineate a distinct Indo-British style? Perhaps not. Yet an attempt in this direction has often been made, the latest of which can now be seen in an exhibition titled “Cultural Coalition” to be held first in London this month and then taken to New Delhi by the end of the year.
Dom Elsner's works do
show some Indianness
 but it needs support of
 a curatorial note.
Kate Linforth's works (below)
require even more
explanation in terms
of the context. 
The show includes works of Devajyoti Ray, Angus Pryor and Kate Linforth. At the entrance of the show a banner explains to the unintiated the similarity between Bridget Riley's Op art and Rays's Pseudorealism. Another banner explains older historical connections as between Howard Hodgekin's collection of Mughal art works and the influence such works had on artists of Eton of the time.

Nonethless the curatorial notes remain way too sketchy. They do not mention even a paragraph on how Company School of paintings in India developed and how artists like Jamini Roy acquired recognition in Europe in spite of remaining rooted to Indian iconography. 
   
The works at display also show only recent trends in art in the two countries.

But here too a mention of the contributions of artists like Anish Kapoor and YBA artists would have made the show all the more worthwhile.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Ramkinkar Baij Retrospective And A Book

Ramkinker Baij
Ramkinkar Baij, who died in 1980 aged 70, was one of the most important of India’s early Bengali moderns, both as an experimental sculptor who broke away from the formal celebratory styles of British India and as a painter. Widely recognised by the intellectual class of the time, but hardly much accepted by the patrons of art, he recieved most of his living from government sources. The extrovert and widely travelled artist, always had more visibility and international exposure than the more secluded Indians.  Now almost 32 years later, this year NGMA organised his first ever retrospective. The exhibition which travelled to three cities of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore had over 350 works. 

Ramkinkar's lidfe now evinces a lot of interest and the retrospective organisers came up rightly with some books - high priced coffee table kinds for the discerning readers. But to those more interested in deeper understanding of the man, the best book by far was written by Somendranath Bandhopadhyay in Bengali and later translated into English by Bhashwati Ghosh. The author was a contemporary student of Ramkinkar and had written with great empathy his association that brings forth many cherished memories of the days in Santiniketan, when Ramkinkar was at his prolific and creative best.


This book gives the reader a chance to delve into the mind of this great man and share some special moments of his life. Bhaswati Ghosh had been known for writing on art quite sometime now. She had received the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship for translation. As part of this, she spent two months at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, working on the English translation of this book.



Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Artist Book : Nothing To Read Here, Only to See

.
As Documenta 13 starts now at Kassel, Germany, the art books emerge as something of a form of novo art of our times. DOCUMENTA 13 is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory.


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These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary.

.

This vision is shared aims at engaging with a site and, at the same time, producing a polylogue with other places.
Whilst artists have been involved in the production of art always, Art books are now the newest device employed in the direction.
.

Art Books in Europe since the early medieval period (such as the Book of Kells and the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry), most writers on the subject cite the English visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827) as the earliest direct antecedent.


Books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience were written, illustrated, printed, coloured and bound by Blake and his wife Catherine, and the merging of handwritten texts and images created intensely vivid, hermetic works without any obvious precedents. These works would set the tone for later artists' books, connecting self-publishing and self-distribution with the integration of text, image and form. All of these factors have remained key concepts in artists' books up to the present day.

After the war, a number of leading artists and poets started to explore the functions and forms of the book 'in a serious way. A fine example of this is Isidore Isou's Le Grand Désordre, (1960), a work that challenges the viewer to reassemble the contents of an envelope back into a semblance of narrative. Two other examples of poet-artists whose work provided models for artists' books include Marcel Broodthaers and Ian Hamilton Finlay.



Thursday, May 17, 2012

From Texts in Art to Art in Texts.

Using texts for making two dimensional visual art had come into vogue sometime in the sixties. Then came the use of pixels for the same type artworks. Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman's recent works are however not significant just for the use of texts but the subtexts that underlie the use of these texts.

Her visual images reflect on issues of gender, looking at the victimization of women during war, and the effects of practices such as honor killings and genital mutilation, as well as alienation, marginalization, and displacement. Kahraman addresses these contemporary issues through paintings which have a classical and timeless feel to them, her delicate and elegant work in tension with the complex issues and painful real-world realities which she often takes as her subject. Born in Iraq in 1981, Kahraman moved to Sweden while a child, and later moved to Italy, before returning to Sweden in 2006 to study at the University of Umeå, and later moving to the United States. Having taken up oil painting at twelve, she extends her work beyond drawing and painting to sculpture and design, and the stylistic references her works evoke are wide-ranging. But it is the influence of Persian caligraphy as a form of art that is most easily visible in these art works.

However Kahraman's are not the only known text arts that are nice to look at. the internet is full of such works made by amazying artists. One such work below is by  


But the question is how far are these works fit the definition of visual art, how far do they fall in the category of fine art?

The art world as the world of literature is however increasingly getting enmeshed in the blast of changing technology. Writers and artists are using new tecnologies to create visually apealing works. Perhaps this explains why erstwhile writers are now thinking of seriously writing graphic novels. Artists with computer aids can now quickly help such writers.

Then there are the in-between illustrated novels, with more and less graphics.

One such work which recently caught our attention was the work of Lynda Barry called "Cruddy", with a undertext : An Illustrated Novel. So it does not claim to be a graphic only text and offers more to read and imagine than see and enjoy.



The story is about a psycho-killer's daughter narrating her gory youth. Disguised as a boy she accompanies her father on his murderous jobs, during which she pretends to be a mute so as not to give away her voice. One of the more memorable tasks is disposing of dead mobsters in a slaughterhouse.

On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. 

Roberta Rohbeson, the protagonist rants thereafter against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest.

Amazying to read, it however poses a question: does it mean that in future no writer can independantly be able to write any thing? Is a graphic artist becoming a regular feature in the literary industry?
 

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Some excellent photographs by new emerging Indian photographer Vikas Dutt
http://www.vikasdutt.com/html%20site/FINEART/story7.html




And here is a small feature on the new Indian women who are entering the field of Photography.
http://pib.nic.in/feature/feyr2000/foct2000/f091020001.html

Gandhar Art

Gandhar Art once again
http://subcontinentalart.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/gandhar-art-once-again/