The Rebellious and Sacrilegious Platters
K.G.Subramanyan’s involvement with the different fields of art needs no introduction to the art loving public. As an artist, pedagogue, theoretician, organizer and a great admirer of traditional and folk cultures KGS has contributed immensely to the Indian modern and contemporary art field. “K.G.Subramanyan: Painted Platters” sheds light on to a different facet of the artist. This book deals with KGS’ tryst with the sara or painting in gouache on terracotta plates for two decades from 1980 to the early years of the present century. R.Sivakumar, eminent art historian who had the opportunity to work with KGS closely and document most of his sara paintings gives an excellent analysis of these works, placing them against the socio-economic and cultural context in which they were produced. This analysis also opens windows to see how KGS’ aesthetics consciously collapses traditional/modern binaries and boundaries and collates them into an effective mutuality.
Sara paintings are mainly done by the agricultural communities in West Bengal who during the harvest time make votive figures of Lakshmi and Durga on terracotta platters using decorative motifs and worship them as a part of the harvest rituals. Later these platters are placed on the walls of the houses and left to decay in due course of time. KGS started using sara paintings as a mode of expression when he entered Santiniketan as a teacher and the annual Nandan Melas presented an opportunity for him to experiment with the terracotta platters. Artists of Santiniketan had already been producing saras during Nandan Melas, which provided a location for the local communities to interact with art and artists. The sara paintings were bought by the local people as souvenirs and KGS firmly believed that these works should be functioning outside the ambit of gallery oriented art.
R.Sivakumar, in his analysis defines two kinds of artists; artists who narrow down their focus and work with ‘a consuming passion that leaves no room for critical negotiation’ and the artists who ‘develop a stereoscopic vision as they go along.’ About the latter kind of artist Sivakumar says, “To enter his oeuvre could be to enter a labyrinth or deep forest, but it is always an invitation to meander, to make out peregrinations and discoveries and also to cultivate our thoughts and doubts.” Sivakumar by including KGS into the second category, says that his multifarious interests in different artistic traditions help him to create sara paintings in the same ease with which he does his canvases, sculptures, drawings, murals and writings. The author brings in an interesting analogy of a cheetah and a spider, one cautiously moves forward and pounces on the target and the other dexterously weaves its web and waits for the prey, to explain how KGS approaches and develops his art.
KGS’ indulgence with the saras is the outcome of an ideological disposition, says Sivakumar. Unlike other modernists who wanted to invest all their works with the personal aura and genius, KGS denied the personal aura to certain creative activities and expressed his displeasure for making art dysfunctional. “While art practice became more varied under modernism the art spectrum, he (KGS) realized, was shrinking into a homogenous register of high culture with much formal but little functional diversity,” observes Sivakumar.
While the Pop Artists draw their energy from the immense popular visual culture outside the realm of high culture, though KGS shares this view, he differs considerably in locating the popular visual culture. “To the Pop artists contemporary visual culture is essentially the icons of modern life and their media images, for Subramanyan it includes folk art, the work of professional craftsmen and such popular art as grows from their encounter with the modern,” says Sivakumar.
KGS is not a revivalist. However, as his saras show, he ‘remains committed to keeping various sectors of cultural expressions alive, and if need be by constantly reinventing them in new forms.’ This reinvention is what drives KGS to do his saras and he finds no contradiction while painting the traditional motifs and while painting the contemporary themes like MF Husain painting Madhuri Dixit. KGS wants art to go to the places where it belongs. He does not believe in the low and high brow art, and he maintains this philosophical as well as the ideological stance even while he does art for the elitist gallery circuits. Sivakumar says that the variety of his oeuvre does not mirror each other, on the contrary they allow a thick traffic between them. The centre/periphery binary looks almost inappropriate in the case of KGS, argues Sivakumar.
The author makes a detailed analysis of the images that KGS has done on the saras, ranging from true to traditional images, still lifes, mythological characters, cubistic and secular images and erotic and profane subjects. Tracing the origin of these images within the changes occurred in the aesthetical perception of KGS, Sivakumar finds their affinities with the local histories and the dominant history of art. KGS has a tremendous capacity to make fun of the events happening around him and this fun seen reflected in the images that he makes in the saras keeps them alive and vibrant. He crosses the moral-ethical boundaries created by culture through the demarcation of the sacred and profane, and laughs at the culture itself, while keeping his humanitarian indebtedness to the people who have made this sacrilegious visual culture possible.
This is an eminently readable book (unlike the works of our other mainstream historians who paraphrase the western theoreticians and makes virtual stencils for application and also unlike the poetry, fiction and esoteric philosophies masquerading as art history). The publication of this book coincides with a show of KGS’ new saras (a kind of revisiting to this favorite genre almost after a decade with a change in the surface, instead of terracotta platters he has used platters made of papier mache) at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai, which has taken up the historical responsibility of publishing this book. When KGS entered Santiniketan in 1980 and first time did his saras, he might not have thought that one day they would be shown in the Guild Gallery, Mumbai. KGS cannot be blamed for this gallery presentation of his saras, though history works outside the pale of economic negotiations, production of historical evidence cannot be functioning outside economic considerations. Gallery Guild comes in there and it is a commendable entry as the rebel sells well.
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