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A Peep into a Pop World
Kolkata based young art critic Oindrilla Maity glances through the Indian contemporary art production in order to find out how the artists make use of the popular and iconic images for visualizing their pet theories and philosophies.
Every era has consciously / unconsciously made its own choice of popular images and themes fundamental to it. Often a set of popular images is handed down to the successive generation with a change in the context in which they have been used previously. Newer images from the popular culture are added to this repository of pop images and most of them find their ways into the production of Indian contemporary art. Despite being fundamentally different from the American/ European Pop, in the form of a movement, (one would probably now likely to conclude that the nuances are only marginal, considering the wide choice of elements that occupy the list) ‘Pop’, in the context of contemporary Indian art, too, is primarily an urban phenomenon, in which popular trends demonstrate an increasingly growing inclination towards themes/subjects such as partition, forced migration, communal violence and terror.
Added to these are popular political icons such as Gandhi, religious icons such as Christ and the Buddha or the icons in the religious Hindu pantheons – Durga, Saraswati, Kali and Ganesha. Consumer products, for instance cellular phones, chocolates, hamburgers, lipsticks, and shoes share a large territory. Also, the use of kitsch; metaphorical and connotative use of creatures such as the horse, the serpent, or other lesser beings such as cockroaches, lizards, grasshoppers, spiders and more than anything else fishes among other things hint at an ever increasing popularity among artists; and yet again objects of everyday use – hooks, chains, scissors, safety-pins, buttons, contraceptives such as condoms, liquor bottles, wine-glasses, seem to hit the graph. When it comes to styles/treatment/formats, the wide use of split-screens, large-scale canvases, billboards, hoardings, glossies, flex prints, diptychs and triptychs crowd the scenario.
The depiction of the goddess Kali in one of the collages of Shakila, against a backdrop of a crematorium, evokes a sense of awe and eeriness, despite her naïve rendition. The icon brandishing a ‘kharga’ up in the air in one of her arms and gripping the head of an ‘asura’by his hair in another comes from the popular kitsch. The dripping blood streaming down the throat of the beheaded demon has a ravenous fox drinking it up thirstily. However, for the veteran artist Tyeb Mehta the same icon serves a different purpose. “I have always been attracted to the mother goddess…it’s a primordial image…at Shantiniketan in Bengal, I could feel the presence of Kali everywhere.” He therefore uses Kali released from her iconic readings and allows her to assume a pervasive presence in a time of violence, which Tyeb feels is a ‘part of his memory and emotions’.
Art historian Gayatri Sinha notices Tyeb’s use of the image of Kali is a recontextualization of contemporary violence in the light of existing icons. Bikash Bhattacharya’s ‘Durga’ series is a depiction of the goddess as a ‘city-woman’ with diversified roles to play. She represents the middle-class Bengali homemaker; the seductress, the wife and sometimes her own self, engrossed in a Narcissistic discovery. Arpita Singh’s use of the same icon carrying modern arms and ammunitions rather than the iconic ‘shankha’, ‘chakra’, ‘gada’ and ‘padma’ in her arms – a reformer of the society, is another parallel example. Singh’s work Anantashayan (2003), painted in the wake of the Godhra riots comprises her most potent images on the associations of the mythic metaphors. It delineates Vishnu in an urban gentleman’s suit, ‘resting with exposed entrails’, a helpless female deity with a smashed ‘dharma chakra’ denoting justice losing the battle.
Other interesting uses of the icons of the Hindu pantheon are as in Hussain’s work including Saraswati, Durga and Ganesh during the 1990s (which starred up a controversy for him painting all of them naked) and Rikesh Budhan’s Kali, which too, is naked. Gayatri Sinha once again observes: “There is interest in Devi which reflects stylistic and formal concerns as seen in the work of Manjit Bawa, Mrinalini Mukherjee, K.G. Subramanyan, Jogen Chowdhury among others.”
The image of Buddha appears as in Calcutta based artist Adip Dutta’s satirical work The Smiling Buddha (c.2000) is a reaction on the nuclear test project in Rajasthan under the same name. Sanatan Dinda’s Yug Purush (2007) and Suhas Roy’s Buddho (2006) are other examples.
Although such themes as ‘horror’/ ‘terror’ invariably appall the lay public, they are gaining popularity more with the artist citizens. A set of works by Atul Dodiya, Vivan Sundaram, B.V. Suresh, M. Sashidharan, Ranbir Kaleka, Navjot Altaf, Bhupen Khakar record the responses of these artists to communal terror. Dodiya’s ghastly, skeletal, famished images of women as in his ‘Woman with Chakki’, ‘Shipwreck’and ‘Woman from Kabul’ – all of which have been created between 2000- 2002 are his troubled engagement with the state and its seething site of violence, while Vivan Sundaram’s series Engine Oil and Charcoal (1991) and Anita Dube’s Halleluja Falleluja (2005) are set on a different locus. With this, one may conclude that a shift in locus has become another characteristic feature of contemporary art practice in India.
B.V. Suresh’s Facilitating the Beast (2006) and Navjot Altaf’s Lacuna In Testimony (2003) deal with the Godhra riots and reactions. Art critic Sandhya Bordewekar observes ‘For some odd reason, images of armed soldiers have been the favoured picks for dozens of young Baroda artists in the past few years’ and have eventually fast becoming a potent, most obviously understood figure representing horror’…
The image of Gandhi is a celebrated one not only for his iconic fame as a politician and a tragic hero, but also for his characteristic feature that adds to formal aspects of deep interest. Ashim Purkayastha’s employing ‘Gandhi’ stamps as advertising logos; Kanu Gandhi’s photographic images of the Mahatma and Chhtrapati Dutta’s images of Bapu are instances. Similarly, the spike –crowned image of Christ as another tragic hero with a common cause shares equal popularity. His image occurs frequently in the portraits by Wasim Kapur, Suman Roy and has remained with many students at the Government College of Art and Crafts, till date. The recent controversy over Chandra Mohan’s interpretation of Christ (which seemingly explains his purgatory role in cleansing the society) has once more proved popularity of iconic images among artists.
Chhatrapati Dutta’s solo show Iconoclash, a little later after the explosion of the World Trade Centre took place featured his unique appropriation of hooks that hang as chains from over the bromides. Images of the Twin Towers, the remote control and other metaphors indicated the uncertainties of existence. Also, one of his paintings comprised of pairs of silhouetted scissors covering his canvases in sections in another of his work titled Scissored Existence. In Kia? No Kia places a copulating couple over whom the sizeable logo of NOKIA is typed. Below it the artist played with the words written partly in Hindi and in English kia?no kia? – Allof which is presumably a reflection of his multicultural experience
Saikat Surai’s work ‘Pink is In’, a traditional lithographic poster , having an exceedingly wide mount covered all over with a flex sticker with the images in pink is more of a reaction to the environs that he lives in. It also perhaps shares if not too remotely, Courbet’s idea: “To be in a position to translate the habits, the ideas, the appearance of my time…in a word, to make a living art, that is my aim.” Needless to say – that artist must deal with the contemporary world and with life as well as with art is also the basis of Pop Art in the West. The Indian engagement with it, however placidly, echoes the same idea, although not in a programmed, formulated way, as was in the West.
Coming back to Saikat’s work, the particular piece mentioned above was displayed at the Faculty of Visual Art, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta, in 2006. The event behind this was Hutch, the satellite network connecting company that changed its brand colour from orange to pink. “The entire city seemed to change its colour from orange to pink – all its hoardings and billboards, it was phenomenal!” says Saikat. Another of his works, Identity - a bigger than life blown up image reproduced from his voter’s identity card with the dots appearing as huge bubbles on it - is again his reaction against the government’s hackneyed ways of identification in the form of voters’ identity cards, in which the individual’s image invariably appears to be distorted, eventually distorting the identity of the citizen.
‘Erostrade’, a group of performing artists from Calcutta aims at voicing out against the out-shadowing of everything else by the consumerist world. They largely make use of the kitsch - image cutouts of the body parts, sandwiched between hamburgers, images of models pasted on table mats, safety pins perforating mammary glands, mannequins and wrapping papers with which to cover up the entire human body. For Mrinal Kanti Roy, on the contrary, it’s a perpetual longing to associate himself with such a colourful world. The stereoscope therefore becomes his key to a world, one in which Sharukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee reigns. In Explode he paints a bikini-clad model reclining on a chair, eyeing the onlooker, while the sky above is thronged with war-planes ready to drop down the explosives. Others such as Rathin Kanji as in his painting Trapped and Kamal Mitra as in Mirror Image use almost similar elements: predominance of red and black, large scale canvases almost the size of hoardings. George Martin P.J.’s Urban Scabies reminds one of a Lichtenstein with its silk screen-like outrageous colour palette. Popular images not only provide the artists with an image lexicon but also make them to take on issues differently.
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