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Plato’s* Badami
JMS Mani, the veteran artist and the retiring principal of Ken School of Art belongs to a tradition of Plato who gave a form and style to Aristotle, says the young art historian H.A.Anil Kumar. Analyzing the styles of the modern masters of Karnataka, Anil Kumar opines that JMS Mani is a master who is yet to be seen, archived and recognized.
It is not a mere coincidence that the decision to bring down the building housing the well known Ken School of Art in Bangalore and the retirement of J.M.Subramani (J.M.S.Mani)—(as) its Principal—is happening in the same year--2007. With his retirement, the ‘Ken School Era’—more of a Bauhaus concept than a physical reality, usually identified with R.M.Hadapad--comes to its logical end.
If Nadoja R.M.Hadapad was the ‘brain’ and ‘heart’ behind the concept of Ken as a ‘school of visual discourse’, Mani happens to be its muscle power. The ‘physical’ inputs to any given cultural construct is never considered to be as relevant as its ‘conceptual’ inputs, in the way we have defined our culture, by and large*1*. It is a given, generalized and simplistic understanding that Mani enacted what Hadapad perceived and dreamed. But there was a difference between these two stages of concept and enactment. This amounts to Mani’s contribution both as an artist and a pedagogue. With him there is no difference in between art as a gallery practice and art as a pedagogic exercise*2*. Arguably this is the unique contribution of Mani, not as much to the art of Karnataka or India, but for the very grammar of artistic practice itself, in a specific time and space. Hence, generalization of art towards its own time-bound practices like ‘demonstrations’ is what is thus challenged by him, through his art.*3*
Mani played a second fiddle in the making of Ken school and he made it in such a way that while everyone remembers him, nobody seems to know ‘how’ to remember him! He lacks the sophistication of most of his ex-classmates and some of his students with international bearing. This perhaps incidentally inspired him to commix art in theory and practice, which the art intelligentia around him have given up and written off as a chapter already concluded.
Let me be very specific about how I am trying to identify Mani’s uniqueness*4*. First of all, I am a bit apologetic about positioning my argument from within the premise of a methodology wherein an artist’s art is understood and experienced (a) from and (b) due to his/her lifestyle. Yet I am confident about stepping out of it for a while, in order to do what Mani himself has done: He did not follow the given construct of the art community around him—either conventional or progressive--in defining what ‘art is’ and how it is being ‘produced’.
Mani laid stress on the act of art-demonstrations, inside and outside art schools in general and Ken school in particular. He metamorphosed the same practice even within his private studio. He can paint with the speed that some of his better known friends’ sketching abilities. He can (and has proven) his ability to imitate master painters, seriously. A sense of ‘mockery’ and ‘pastiche’ is thus incurred into the mainstream argument of the ‘expertise’ for making mostly semi-abstract paintings*5*.
(II)
Observe the multiple-roles that ‘painting’, as an ‘act’ acquires in his case:
(a) Mani used to paint at times in order to (as though) compensate the lack of his ability for a verbal dialogue with his students.
(b) He painted in order to compensate himself with monetary security while not being paid as a teacher, for rather too long (18 years, if what he himself said was right).
(c) He painted with a sense of urgency, thus legitimizing the essential quality of a calligrapher.
(d) He painted instead of sketching, and painted like-sketching, while painting outdoors; and
(e) During study tours he would paint along with his students, thus breaking the hegemonic order evident between a demonstrator-tutor and a student-audience.
Thus for him, the act of painting gains more prominence that what is being painted. And this is the actual content of his paintings! A performative character peeps in, that links the author/artist to his creation much more intimately. Mani is Jackson Pollock-beyond-Greenberg’s-definition of ‘Modern Painting’. His act of painting, the reasons for that act are:
(a) As if to fill up another domestic act of profit, or
(b) The loss of what one rightfully deserved
Both these characters are embedded within his strokes and hence within his works. In all his works, (a) he contests the acts of discipline and contemplation leading to (b) the generally accepted notion of cultural product as the ‘end product’ (a finished painting, for example) and this (c) due to a thorough meditativeness, in front of a canvas. This is his meditativeness in an empirical mode, even while facing and pastiche-ing master painters.
(III)
Thinking about Mani from a regional, immediate mode of cultural perception (call it as Kannada cultural discourse, if required) Mani seems to play the role of a bahuroopi (multiple roles). Despite trying his hand in graphics, glass paintings, murals, sculptures, he is a true painter by art. But not many seem to have noticed this bahoroopa of his painterliness, which, arguably, his teacher Hadapad refuted! The master equated multi-facetedness with variety of objects thus refuting the intensity of oil paint’s sole capability to do so. This is a subjective question which both Mani and Hadapad addressed, but/and found extremely opposite answers! Hadapad reminds you of various media, format, idea and methodology, to such an extent that there is no one image, form or media within which Hadapad can be contained. Mani, on the other hand, reminds you of only painting (both as a verb and noun), that too only/mostly “Badami People” series, despite himself trying out his hand in a variety of media and materials, more than Hadapad. It is like one of them suggesting the student to paint in colour to solve colour problems while the other solves it by instructing to work in black and white! While Hadapad left not much trace of physical evidence for his visual perception, Mani’s visual perception is conceptually embedded within a singular media.
Whenever Mani involved in other forms and modes of expression it was the painter in him that was awake, through and through. This multiple roles he assigns to painting, and hence is so specific to him, has a peculiar function in the historicity of 20th century Karnataka art:
(IV)
Today, the art of demonstration alone seems to re-affirms the ‘hierarchy’ between tutors and students within art institutions; and between the artist-performer and audience in case of a public display. Equipped with a brisk physical movement and crude realism, to paint with several pairs of keen eyes behind the painterly hand, might have a public approval in another form of expression in the same society from within which Mani hails from—the performance of classical music and dance. However, in the absence of the form of criticism and/but the presence of appreciation for music, the same sense of approval but an absence of criticism has come as a haunting in Mani’s works. His works are either revered or ignored but never contemplated! The critical eye seems to be imitating the appreciative attitude of the classical forms of expression, which was one of the several forms that found space for expression and debate within the premise of the art school in which Mani taught. Nowhere else in the other 150 art schools of Karnataka State did such inter-disciplinary format found solace, approval and finally, a visual expression.
Nobody remembers him as much as others are remembered. He was a teacher, is a painter and is going to be a painter forever and possibly never again a teacher. The pun is intended. The big question here is (a) does Mani have an identity, (b) is that identity a self complete identity, (c) is it an independent identity outside his association with and in the making of Ken School? There seems to be two Manis for two different audience. In the market he is a painter, at Ken school he has served as the watch and ward for it. This ‘physically dual identity’, commixed with the ‘multifaceted-ness of his painterly quality’ went against him in not being identified in a typical Mani-style, within the cultural agency that approved and endorsed only and mainly those who were identified with a specific style. And Mani is the product of a stylized time, from 1970s onwards till almost 1990s.
‘Spontaneous’, ‘intuitive’, ‘empirical’, ‘natural’ (but not stylized) are a few adjectives that critics have assigned, rather easily so, to his paintings. Ironically, this ‘ease’ would not have come to him if he were not a teacher. And very few art teachers, (which almost means ‘no’ art teacher), have emerged as a professional painter on the day of his/her retirement except him.
To repeat it once again, over a tenure of four decades, as a student, tutor, educationist and principal of Ken school of Art, he has disproved the fact that art in theory and practice do not gel with each other, which first of all implies that they are different. He used to paint to illustrate the idea of ‘making’ art as more relevant than that of the ‘already made’ art. The same hand and mind of his would endorse the product as artwork, worthy of a place in white cube (meaning what we mean to be ‘a gallery’). It was a tradition endorsed by a teacher’s (Mani’s) teacher R.M.Hadapad, but with a difference, though. While Hadapad’s artworks are, by and large, unarchived, unassessed, (hence) unrecognized, the memory of the origin of Mani’s works—the product of the philosophy of art demonstrations—is forgotten even before it has been identified, remembered and possibly endorsed. Hadapad’s works remain as a ‘verb’ and unseen. Any act of demonstration and Mani’s works, from the same tradition, turn out to be ‘nouns’. He is a visual empiricist which means that he gave up a form of visual expression that was time consuming. But while doing so, it was not a virtuous display of a gymnast’s capacitance, but a break away from a classical definition of meditativeness.
(V)
Lengthy novels have come to their logical end in Karnataka. Short stories are turning into unedited blog writings, to be written and published in a matter of minutes in web sites in Kannada (like www.sampada.net), without the intervention of an editor. The fact that ‘communication has become a cliché’ has itself become a cliché with the newer media of communication taking ‘control’ of even what is being said (mobiles in general and SMS in particular and FM radio-audience interactions). Simultaneously, Mani’s ‘act’ of painting might have fetched him with physical, domestic comforts, but the rush to endorse one type of sensibility in art has sidelined his actual essence. For instance, (i) a vocally discursive, (ii) painterly expressive, (iii) non-repetitive and a compulsive ability to converse in English have occupied the prime domain of critical appraisal around Mani, to which most of his successful friends are subject to. Nothing wrong about it, but what it sidelines and ignores is an area that Mani occupies, by and large, as an art personality. The briskness of the creative and domestic gadgets in the beginning of the paragraph that surrounds Mani, in Bangalore; and the reason why he painted the way he did (and does) can be related thus:
The brush strokes of Mani (say as against those of K.T.Shiva Prasad, his pal) suffer from Norman Bryson’s notion of anorexic quality. The strokes are ‘marks’ of a set of fingers, which are ‘made’ as though to compensate the social act of pressing them against the wall for various physical, cultural and economical discomfort of its creator. (a) Despite this multifaceted-ness and (b) because of the multifaceted-ness and (c) due to the quickness in which it appears--which means not sticking on to one kind of appearance (together termed as ‘style’)--Mani’s oil strokes are culturally and aesthetically anorexic. It means that the strokes accept their subversive role as being secondary and lesser important in the politics of heroic narratives, in the history of Karnataka art which has refused a historicity of groups. The ‘archaism’ and ‘predictability’ of art writing that has construed a historicity for the art of Karnataka, by and large, arrives at a conclusion about art and its creators, even before a discourse! Undoubtedly, Mani has been prey to this.
Even if the history of artistic groups and ideologies are legitimized, Mani’s strokes suffer from a ‘secondary anorexia’, despite some of the rare and unique paths he had treaded even within the premises of a given canvas or formalism, as described elsewhere earlier in this article.
Too many artists and their art as cultural products suffer this anorexic quality in the contemporary post-colonial context. But the way Mani produces a discourse within his anorexic-strokes, is remarkably his own. But to do this, one should stop verbally addressing him in art historical clichés like “being naïve, expressive, emotional” and re-discover him as he is and not as to how he fits into some others’ definition.
Should the dream of a rustic personality be a reality only in someone else’s dream? If Ken, Hadapad and Mani are three points of a triangle, what makes the two points brighter than the third one?
FOOT NOTES:
* Plato, apart from being himself, is also the ‘verbal form’ of Socrates. If the content was Socrates’, the style was Plato’s. What we have in reality is Plato’s version of Socrates. Is there Socrates beyond Plato is a question similar to Ken School, Hadapad and Mani ‘outside’ each other. What transpired within the translation of content into style, from speech to writing is also the story of two celebrated Greek philosophers who were almost contemporaries. Between Hadapad and Mani, something similar seems to have happened but from speech to visual language, in an altogether different contextual mode. Arguably, Mani is the closest trans-locator of Hadapad’s notion of ‘free thinking’, the ‘subaltern’ and that of ‘Badami’. It would be an interesting exercise to place images painted by Hadapad and Mani together, that should include mainly the Badami views. Hadapad hails from there, and, arguably there was more of Badami than Bangalore in Ken school. One contemporary mode of thinking about Mani’s “Badami Series” of paintings, is to visually enquire into his notion of Hadapad through Badami views, his notion of Badami’s through what he means by Hadapad.
This is why I have titled the essay as “Plato’s Badami”. Writing about Mani, for me, is writing about a place, an institution and two visual thinkers of contrasting mode. Both inherited a refusal to learn the ordinary and thus refused to inherit art as pedagogy. And, ironically, that’s how both become remarkable visual pedagogicians!
*1* The Social Art Historian Arnald Hauser gives an interesting account of how sculptors were held to be socially a step lower than painters during the Greek classical times, since because the sculptors touched their creative materials directly with hand and painters did so only with their brush. Fast forward by three millennia, the question of eating habits with hand and fork seem to demand the same virtue held by that Greek hierarchy, in the city and family structure within which Mani grew up. Curiously enough, the portraits by Hadapad that I have seen mostly preferred dark-skinned models as a priority.
(a)The connection between the Periyar Ramaswamy’s Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, (b)Tamil as Mani’s mother tongue,
(c) Ken school of 70s and 80s as one of the safe premise for alternative Shudra, Bandaya and Dalit literary dialogues, serve as the actual background within which Mani’s personality and inspiration can be placed. This is to argue that Mani was not naïve to these happenings nor was he to the politics of imagery that he produced so very influentially.
*2* & *5* His works shown in Sumukha gallery (Bangalore) in 2003 mainly focused on the pastiche and kitschy character of the divinity evident in the contemplative process and seriousness about making semi-abstract art. Mani was pretty serious about this construct of seriousness evident in such practices. A list of artists that did not exclude a clear cut references to painters of the caliber of Ram Kumar, K.M.Adimoolam, Laxman Shreshta were all referred to, without mixing the words, so to say. Interestingly, a typical ‘Mani’ himself was deliberately absent in it. Such a self-referentiality and self-refutation, together, that contests a ‘hierarchy’ and ‘hegemonic order’ of ‘a specific construct of visual arts’ is what he got involved in then as a choice. Naïve painters, that he is so much suggestively mistaken as, can never get into such a dimension of visual thinking.
*3* Art Demonstration is one of those pedagogic practice that was in vogue in the immediate decades after Indian independence and now re-considered and metamorphosed. It would be too much an ambitious project to equate it with the new performances occurring within visual art practice. However, what Clement Greenberg and T.J.Clarke did to Jackson Pollock’s paintings is a traditional revival of that practice, in K.G.Subramanyan’s sense of ‘Living Tradition’. Mani, on an altogether different note, as a teacher and painter, redefined it in our context, like never before. Note that the demonstrations by M.B.Patil and B.K.Srinivasa Varma do not endorse this ambitious range of visual concerns that Mani addresses through this. Instead those two artists tend to use demonstration as a means for addressing the forms of inter-disciplinary.
*4* The history of art in Karnataka is also the history of individuals. This is unlike an overall history of Indian art history which is about groups. Both are ‘constructs’, which means a sort of strategies by post-independent art writers. However, if one attempts to trace the history of art in Karnataka in the context of Ken school Mani’s role would be that of ‘Hanuman in Ramayana’ as told by Valmiki. The monkey’s version of Ramayana is untold (see: Anand Patwardhan’s five minutes film in which the monkeys sing their version of Ramayana, within which the protagonist is pulled a position that he occupies in Valmiki’s heroic narrative. Similarly, writing about Mani as a part of the ideology of Ken school faces the danger of a predetermined construing of his personality. Though this angle need not be discarded, it necessarily needs to be contested. |
