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Images of Discontent
Focusing on the sculptures of Somnath Hore, R.Sivakumar delineates the ideological positioning of the artist, in this essay. Violence and suffering, compassion and loneliness are inseparably linked in Somnath Hore’s vision of reality, observes Sivakumar.
Somnath Hore began to do sculptures, of bronzes as he prefers to call them, in 1974. The first few pieces were exploratory. He followed them up with one of his largest and most arresting sculptures- the image of a determined mother nesting her child against her battered chest. For him she symbolized Vietnam, a country that triumphantly resisted an unequal enemy. The struggle between unequals where there is no heroism but only brutality, troubles him deeply; it is constantly echoed in his works (…) To resist such brutality takes the finest in man, yet in this image of the unvanquished there is no ordinary heroism for this is so trident images of the victor but an assertion of man’s natural resistance and dignity. In spite of the scars she has a tenderness that reminds us of Picasso’s ‘Man with Sheep’- a sculpture with echoes of the ‘good shepherd’ just as the ‘Mother with the Child’ is a descendant of the primeval mothers. Though, strangely one has no genitals and the other has no breasts both reaffirm the human spirit after a period of war and suffering, and both evoke simple communities, although slightly different ones. They are both images not meant for the museum but to stand emblematically in a public space (…).
(This) experience of cruelty and suffering fixed the missionary focus of his life and art at the very outset but he did not discover his visual language or artistic sensibility at one stroke. For him this is an ongoing process. This sets him apart from most other committed artists at least on two counts. Firstly, thematic focus comes to most as a mid-career discovery after years of skill-honing; and secondly, the gain in thematic focus blunts formal exploration and soon sets most ideologically committed artists on the road to academicism. Thematic continuity also implies obsessive engagement, internalization of events and its reliving through memory. Such conscious reliving can degenerate into habit, gradually desensitize the artist to the original experiential abrasion and replace it with tired responses. Few artists succeed in staving it off effortlessly. Somnath Hore’s strategy includes the change of medium from time to time. Each medium sets him a new challenge vis-à-vis the visual realization of his experience, and in each medium he discovers himself as an artist all over again; this also helps him to keep the passions alive- blowing the embers into a flare periodically. (…)
Appropriating the medium and the art form as an outsider he (Somnath Hore) did not feel compelled to take cue from other sculptors. His bronzes have their antecedents in his own prints- the 1966 intaglio titled ‘Chile’ for instance, and of course, in his white on white or pulp prints which he began doing in 1969. (…) He initially worked on clay but his later prints were using wax plates which he found more suitable. And it is by tearing, folding and joining similar wax plates his first sculptures were made. Done without armature, physiognomic clarity and structural stability were achieved using the innate amplitude of the material. In the later sculptures, the channels that were necessary for casting them in bronze were incorporated into the images as limbs and bones. Such convergence of the work-process and the visual images is characteristic of his work in other mediums too. Thus his use of mediums and genres go beyond the conventional bounds of each though they do not appear obviously radical at first sight.
Most of Somnath Hore’s sculptures are small. But they have the right scale in relation to his forming and performing hands…. Turning his bronzes in our hands or running our hands over them, we become aware of this innate shaping process…. (His) transformations are engaging but his virtuosity is never demonstrative. He does not use skill like a crafts man, though technique is crucial to his vision it achieves a rare incisiveness in his hands. He puts form-realization above the political overtones of subject matter, and believes that great art outlives its historical moment. In his own words the artistic excellence of art ‘is revealed through its own components, not because of any message or polemic.’ The strength and the radical edge of his work come from the fusion of means and meaning.
However, his relation to technique is not that of a free-explorer, it is conditioned by his social consciousness stemming from the early experience of war and famine. Its unforgotten wounds are the leitmotif in his art. If it is form realization that makes his art significant it is his sustained involvement with these wounds that gives a political and humanistic dimension to his life and art. He carries the stigma of these early wounds; and constantly humbled by them he lives in a state of symbolic poverty and turns away from the glories of the world (…)
Thus, his perception of the social function of art and with it, his visual language changed but not his political position or his subject matter. As an artist who wants what he does to reflect what he is, given the continuity of his political conviction he could not forget the personal experience that initially shaped his political position. Moreover, to do so in his view, would have been a betrayal and therefore immoral. In his determinant experience suffering was more real and visible to him than his violent perpetrators. (….)
Incidentally, there are to elements, both uncommon in his work, to be noticed here. Firstly, the work, composed of three separately cast units, is more episodic than usual, and secondly the patination always used very sensitively by Somnath Hore to bring out the expressive nuances of the form, is given an additional descriptive role (……)
Violence and suffering, compassion and loneliness are inseparably linked in Somnath Hore’s vision of reality. However, this does not mean that he sees despair as the natural state of man. Human suffering in his view is man-made and social, not natural or metaphysical. Therefore, to persistently depict the degradation of man and the social marginality of the victim is for him an act of protest and symbolic assertion of his solidarity with the persecuted. (…)
Somnath Hore’s persistent preoccupation with mans’ inhumanity and suffering suggests that in his experience the world did not change, or at least change fundamentally or for the better during his fifty and odd years of involvement with art; and that there is little hope of hastening us towards a time when man will learn to lead a more human life. And yet all is not bleak. For Somnath Hore to have us experience the world as he experiences it, to constantly hold up to us the evil we have not overcome but we would like to wish away, to protest against the unjust even when victory is not in sight are both a political and a moral responsibility. And even in the darkest labyrinth of hell ‘hope is a dream worth living with.’
(This essay is an edited version of the original (1995) published in the CIMA catalogue of Somnath Hore’s solo exhibition of bronzes. Edited and reproduced here with the author’s permission) |
