CATALOGUES - PAGE 3 WHIMSY

It may be asked when this educating function of the art critic is to cease. It is like asking when schoolmasters are to cease.... [The critic] will have to train the public in those eternal truths which are the beginning of criticism. He and his successors will have to repeat them over and over again so long as civilization shall endure. -- P. G. Hammerton

Uma Nair

Although art criticism does report on new advances and structures in art and has noted that for quite some time, artists have been erecting complex and hypertext-like structures in their work, few traces can be found of these structures in the language criticism expresses itself in. A peculiar case of a number of recent catalogues (without naming them and adding to the list of enemies) has been the sudden emergence of catalogues being written by Page 3 celebrities who would rather fill 2 pages or a few hundred words with gibberish about where the artist went, what he/she liked, what trivia they talked about etc,etc.

Of course, one could say that the language of art writing has changed. What I wrote 20 years ago for Economic Times and Times of India is not what I write for the Asian Age today. Neither do I write the same stuff in catalogues myself. No matter how much that language itself has changed what is a worrying is this new trend of galleries getting an artist's oeuvre to be made of superficial whimsy. In a recent catalogue a writer had described Jayasri Burman's works as `a beautiful cobalt blue'…..what the writer failed to note was that the cobalt blue is a rendition of Jayasri's travels to Morocco and Egypt. The blue is a Byzantine element which got immersed into her inner recesses; and it is so differential to the blue that she used in the past which was a Shekawati element. Is Shakti Burman a mere creator of symbolism? Then can Arpana Caur and Paresh Maity and Yusuf Arakkal all be symbolists? How can all artists of such varied tenors be blanketed under one whole?

That is a pity, because it would be nice if art writing by so called `art lovers' could attune its codes and text treatment to actual art practice by capturing that new manner it has observed of addressing images in a new, a-logical formal text structure that comprehends and complements the web of seemingly arbitrary connections on the basis of the mutation that is at the foundation of many works of art. I do not necessarily mean art criticism should indiscriminately follow art, nor am I saying that only critics should write, there is a dearth of writers, but, as an autonomous, literary practice, it can respond to the network as an artistic principle that has content as well as form-related implications for the work of art and the text alike .It should not be an exercise that wants to fill pages and put up a text for the sake of a catalogue.

In a place like Delhi there are no logical conclusions anymore. Of course a number of galleries would throw up their hands and point fingers at me and say that I have most often refused to write. That is because I believe that I must be honest to my trade-I must write about an artist only if I respond to his/her work. Believe me this is also hyper-sensitive stuff. Recently I had an artist slash 500 words of my text-her view was that she didn't like it! Of course as a first timer in that scenario my only reaction was `never gain!'

A logical conclusion would be that the practice of art has abandoned its age-old discourse. In an era when pieces of text can be up or down loaded by anyone and everyone at will, and the text, just like the work of art, has become changeable, the classical discourse has become redundant. And of course some artists are happy with whimsy, so why not please the golden goose?

In order to be able to evaluate art, art writing will need to have an idea of its day, of the ideas, norms, techniques and artistic modes of its times. It is not good if art writing, as is now often the case, gets bogged down in comparisons with Bollywood or even with travels at art camps- it all revolves, after all, around something more (or something different) than the use of hackneyed materials, or witty institutional criticism.

My all time favourite is John Ruskin. For Ruskin to interpret the meaning of a work of art – it meant that he re-creates the experience he also explains and interprets that experience to us, of course, even in his most apparently pure word painting, his literary allusions, mythological references, and analogies do not permit his descriptions to remain entirely on a visual level; nonetheless, the kind of descriptions at which we have looked, places chief importance upon conveying a visual experience of place and object. With his more explicitly interpretative passages, in contrast, he matches each experience of appearance with an experience of meaning.

If it is not to lose its critical function, it would do well to take these changes in language, art and culture as a whole quite seriously and of course all writers to research before they write. Art writing is a responsibility, and calls for honest implicit duty. If it continues to implore the changeable overt Page 3 aspects, there is the risk that it will soon fail in its role as evaluator and turn into crass hyperbole. Is art criticism about to doze off?

It is time for artists and galleries to wake up, if Indian art has gone global so has Indian art criticism-let no one say that we are far behind.

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