Abhijeet Tamhane

All Fool's show!

Documenta at Kassel, Germany and 'The Harmony Show' in Mumbai, India have something in common this year. No. Harmony will not awake to the more thinking artists even after two years in the second decade of its existence. If Documenta builds theory, Harmony is happy with the illusion it creates, of building the market. The commonality is not qualitative at all. Yet, a schoolchild can figure it out… both, Documenta and Harmony would unfold their 12 th edition this year!

The Harmony show, supported by a big industrial house and characterized by an ex-Bollywood star who is daughter in law of the house, makes news in the hinterlands of Mumbai's art circuit every year. This jamboree of about 300 works of (hmm...) art is by far the biggest in Mumbai. The opening night can turn into a filmstar-spotting spree, and a high turnout of celebrity guests would also reflect in a high turnover for the works. At least 40 to 45 per cent of the show usually bears its red dots on the opening night. The Harmony preview has two parts : one, the evening, and second, the preceding afternoon, where all the unglamorous scribes are invited and served with a press kit, a live brief and lunch.

Like the first day of April when gentlemen and ladies would not mind to be made a fool of sorts, many artists of serious repute would not mind their inclusion in the Harmony show. Spotting a Kallat, Komu or Dodia work among some other works of the shouting types is, at times, fun! And by far, the only such time in Mumbai is the Harmony show!

So, let's talk about the show now, what are you wearing for the opening night?

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Can we put things straight, now?

A traveling show of Georg Baselitz prints might not be as newsworthy as a Picasso paintings show 'coming down to' Mumbai. Baselitz works will not come down here. They would be up the walls of Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, a place tucked in the NCPA   complex, where Anup Panicker's paintings are displayed now! Mumbai might take its time to understand what masala this German painter has in his pictures that look like upside down.

I have great hopes on the show, especially as an academic experience for art students. To be sure, printmaking as a part of the art syllabus in the city art schools is restricted to the craft side of 'making'. Students, with great zeal, explore techniques to make some non-image, or an utterly unimaginative image. Baselitz prints might impress the city students with their aggressive, passionate expressionist strokes. The prints might lead some of them to think of image as a motif and deal with it as a motif. Baselitz demonstrates what many printmaking teachers say: in printmaking, technique is not the end, it's the beginning.

Known for his verbal expression, 'Reality is the picture, it is definitely not IN the picture', Baselitz might offer a lesson in absentia. His prints, many of them from his post-1970s, 'upside down motif' period, would make heads turn and would help put things straight: even as reality IS THE picture, the picture is not a license to avoid life experiences.

Of muses and men…

A. Rajeswara Rao (Sakshi) and Dileep Sharma (Articullate) are the shows in focus. Both refer to popular imagery with the way they dress up the protagonists in the pictures, their love for dramatic actions, their eye for selective detail and at periphery, their interest in repetitive floral designs. Dileep assumes the persona of Kunwarjee, a male erotic character and turns his hand-coloured prints into a narrative of bodily enchantment, lust and petty joys. Rajeswara Rao keeps an observer's distance and recites tales of men and women to evoke the ridicules of human life.

Panda in Mumbai…

Like many artists who had nothing but art by their side, Jagannath Panda had shown with a group of his friends. 'That was many years back' he said, when we had met at the Chemould Prescott Road (CPR) opening party and had just been introduced. Panda has had a show in the smaller, 44-year old Chemould too. The bigger CPR awaits him now, and the opening will perhaps turn in a occasion where Mumbai tells this high-selling Delhi-based artist, 'I was always yours'!