Ways of seeing

But what does it mean?" I hear that question all the time in relation to art. I'm tempted to reply that I don't know, but that would be a conversation-killer in a country where questions around art are few and far in between. So I take great pains to share my perspective about an artist or a work, often going into considerable detail as a way of underlining that there can be no singular way of looking at it. Or that a work of art can communicate totally different things to different people. A colleague and I differ about my reading of an artist's work we both enjoy in vastly different ways, but none of us disses the other because the whole point about art is that there can be multiple ways of viewing, multiple observations, and each perspective can be as valid as the other. I recall a collector admiring a modern master from Kolkata but disagreeing completely with my assessment of a painting about which I had delivered an entire lecture. I found her view refreshing but could not agree with it. We were happy to disagree.

That said, one must still ask, should there be a single way of looking at and understanding a work of art? The artist, after all, does not create a work from a point of view of multiple perspectives. Should our viewing of it have parity with the artist's point of view? This is a complicated dynamic and, while it is important that the artist's point be respected, it cannot dictate how a viewer observes and reacts to a work. Therefore, the artist's view, however defining, cannot be the only way to read the work. 

What is useful is knowing an artist's journey and what led him to work in a particular way, or shaped his ideas. It is a rare artist whose works are not formed by his political or social beliefs. His work is bound to resonate with his own observations and views on a given subject, including his concerns with gender, social injustice or other prejudices. Even familiar subjects from mythology or versions of history will be coloured by how an artist views the episode, whether he thinks it was right or wrong, or requires deeper investigation. In that sense, an artist's works are little different from those of writers or filmmakers who question the status-quo. 

To an extent, I think it important that the sensitive viewer take the trouble to gen up on an artist's career and the catalytic points that have shaped it. Aesthetics has its place in the form of a gut reaction to any work of art, but it is the subject and its telling that must communicate to us. Artists become associated with their way of pointing out dichotomies. Souza's frenzied work addresses an excoriating ruthlessness and misogynous mindset; Bikash Bhattacharjee creates a sense of unease around unfolding elements in a strife-worn Kolkata; M F Husain moves off an artist's high horse (pun intended) to show us the face and life of the common Indian — farmer, dancer, performer — in the same breath as rulers and philosophers, the Buddha and Gandhi. 

If within each work lie anecdotes and incidents from history and the artist's life, the making of each also has its personal stories that can be as delightful. Our viewing pleasure is enhanced by the history of the work itself — who owned it, who bought or sold it, where it was first exhibited, what scholarly journal it might have been published in. The more we know about a work of art, the more we enjoy it. Any wonder art gets more interesting as it ages.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated