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| The politics of contemporary, folk |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Nov 07, 2009, 00:32 IST |
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Within (but without) a debate about forms, artist Dhaneshwar Shah creates an alternate world.
A hundred-odd years ago must have been an unusual time in artists’ studios and ateliers in the Indian subcontinent as the European eye and brush began to dominate the way art was perceived, or taught, or bought. It resulted in odd mixes, lots of experimentation, a churn, and a rapid turn to works that were painted in the European tradition, even though the context remained Indian. Whatever the result, it led to the unfortunate derailment of the country’s engagement with its own art tradition, something which had been part of its fabric for hundreds and even thousands of years. Now, suddenly, it was “folk” or “traditional” without merit in the new artocracy.
It did not mean that the painting styles themselves dwindled away but that the intellectual debate shifted away. No longer were artists from the miniature schools, for instance, called upon to discuss the merits of art or politics or society. They were pushed to the fringes, their space taken by those looking for a style of their own, later to develop as the first of the country’s modernists.
This banishment of one and replacement by another was so surgical, its cleave is still visible. Attempts to bridge the chasm have proved less than satisfactory, though one might say that it is not for lack of trying. Among the traditionalists — whether Madhubani artists, phad painters or pattachitra and Company School ones — there have been attempts to move beyond their original content, to newer, more contemporary issues such as pollution, or even natural calamities such as the impact of the devastating tsunami on India. Where contemporary artists are concerned, the Kaur sisters of London owe the dynamics of their art to the format of the miniature, the Thukral & Tagra combine owes its relevance to the kitsch that arose from the chaos that followed the early printed images, and those like Alex Kersey owe their success to the Sivakasi-rendered labels and posters.
Because this has been so limited, it is refreshing to come across the young Dhaneshwar Shah’s work, which owes its entire context to the tribal Bastar art tradition on which it is based. Shah’s ongoing show at Art Konsult in New Delhi (it was shown in September in Singapore) moves away from the urban-centric myopia of most contemporary artists, but without losing that gaze. Instead, it engages with animal forms and nature, in “a renewed interest in the anthropocentric and the experiential”, according to its curator, Rahul Bhattacharjee.
It is important to ask if there are different worlds artists inhabit — one obsessively urban, the other regressively rural. Shah’s art rubbishes the argument, its relevance part of the modern construct where climate change, the very future of the planet even, is central to development issues and agendas and governments. His is no nostalgia-enhanced pastiche of life in the hinterlands; Shah knits connections between Bastar art, aboriginal Australian art and Tanzanian tribal art, opening up, observes Bhattacharjee, “an ‘innocent’ fascination about the commonality of motifs and design ideas”.
There is a simultaneousness to his art, the large canvases inhabited by “beasts of the wild”, though they are tame versions, but they burst with life and colour, a caparisoned horse draped with cloth that carries yet another tradition of embroidered textile, harking back to yet more organically linked societal relevance, bulls reminiscent of an ancient civilization, zebras from another continent, elephants and rats and deer and birds and fish, capturing, observes Bhattacharjee, “the ‘natural’ energy flowing in tribal forms”
What’s more interesting even than Shah’s acrylic canvases are his sculptures which are vibrant with “this fantastic world”, even though according to the curator they point to “personalised insights into the violence that undermines the (sometimes) poetic relationship between humans and animals”. There is though a quality of irreverence with which he treats metal, and there is tongue-in-cheek humour, as when he positions animal behinds disappearing into a wall — A Balasubramaniam would have been amused at the cheeky nod in his direction. As long as he remains close to the tribal tradition, the contemporary carry-over is dynamic, but his departure from it is less successful. The mannequin with bells in Dancing Honey Bee and the milk pails forming the audience to a gramophone in Music Class are almost trite in their attempted humour. Shah has found himself a magnificent oeuvre. Now only if he would not dilute that magic...
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