Work by Ramkinkar Baij
Through the Eyes of a Cultural Optimist
In this epistolary feature JohnyML talks to Ramkinkar Baij and tells him what happened in his birth centenary seminar at the Department of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi.
Respected Ramkinkar Baij,
A few days back I was in a party and slightly tipsy after a few rounds of drinks, I happened to have a dialogue, rather an aggressive monologue with Shukla Sawant, who is a print maker, pedagogue, writer and a faculty member at the Department of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi. I asked her why the institutions that teach art history and criticism do not these days mould efficient art critics from amongst the students. She told me that I should go to JNU and see how students have curated you from Devi Prasad’s collection. Her argument was that all the students need not be writers, which I agreed, and they do whatever they could do within the available premises. But sir, curating from within an institution and curating outside the limits of an institution are two different things, though the debates that happen around a curatorial project should always be welcomed.
I went to JNU for there was a seminar as a part of your birth centenary and also as part of the show curated by students titled ‘Through the Eyes of Devi Prasad’. As you know, Devi Prasad is a person who documented your works extensively in Santiniketan. Now he is a septuagenarian who has handed over his documentation to the National Gallery of Modern Art, which in turn is going to publish a book out of it. According to Sawant, the publication would save the works from being ‘gobbled up by the vaults of the institution.’ Also it is heard that Mr.Devi Prasad had refused to hand over a set of documentary photographs to your alma mater, Kalabhavana and demanded a ‘price’ if at all he did so. Anyway, that is his personal decision. I don’t have anything to say on that.
‘Through the Eyes of Devi Prasad’ is the title of the show. Perhaps, the title of the seminar also. Aren’t you reminded of Husain’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’? The students under the leadership of another faculty Naman Ahuja however, do not seem to have noticed this. Or I believe, they are too much aware of this connection and wanted to make a kitschy and cheeky connection with Husain’s title. Should I call it an intervention or a going by tradition? Both Ahuja and Sawant said that there were a few good debates came up while the project was mooted. Why do the students need to embark on curating a private collection? And why Ramkinkar Baij? While the faculties could handle the first few questions, they could not do anything with the last question, as Sawant said.
Sir, now I have come to a conclusion that in India too the white cube format of galleries has become obsolete. Why, you may ask. When an academy co-opts what had been deemed as mainstream into its practical fronts (not in discursive fronts, remember), you should know that it has turned into something academic. So JNU’s aesthetic department has a white cube space for gallery; clean walls, even lights, spotless frames etc. Or, it could be a museum, a memorial for galleries. In this mutant white cube-museum space, the curators’ collective has tried to find historical affinities that your works have with other works of art. A dead museum discourse and a sanitized white cube presentation are on. There is a claim of collating the aesthetical and critical trajectories of your works in this show, which I failed to elicit from the curatorial mode. I was excited to hear Grant Watson asking contemporary artists to work around your ‘Mill Call’ or ‘Santhal Family’, when a definitive seminar on your centenary was on in Santiniketan in February this year. ‘Through the eyes…’ fails to impress, though I should be congratulating the students who went for making a clinical research on your works.
Sir, when I attend a seminar, I should be really attentive especially when I plan to write something on it. The session started with Shukla Sawant presenting on ‘Re Positioning the Pedestal.’ Drawing inspiration from Rosalind Krauss, Sawant made three proposals; pedestal as a radical departure of modernist sculpture from the genre’s previous adherence to architecture, pedestal as an ideological positioning of the imperialists and pedestal as a counter strategy and as an organic extension of the sculpture as seen in your works. Somewhere I lost the thread and could not make out whether she was arguing for or against the pedestals in your sculpture. She closed her talk with a tongue in cheek statement that perhaps, you were not cut for commissioned works.
Next came R.Sivakumar whose attempt was to dispute the conventional claims that the historians have built around you that you were the pioneer to introduce modernism in Indian sculptures and also to elucidate how you with your tremendous capacity to adapt and adopt passed through various ‘isms’ of the modern western art and reached a state of ideological and aesthetical confusion/contradiction at some stage of your creative life. By presenting the historical documents from Rabindranath Tagore, Stella Kramrisch, Armory Show, visits of western artists in Santiniketan, availability of brochures, catalogues and other visual documents in Kalabhavana library, Sivakumar argued that it was not quite accidental that you came in contact with modernism. The ambience was already set by Tagore by emphasizing not on ‘an insular local but a cosmopolitan local’.
With visual documentary evidences Sivakumar proved how you had passed through various ‘isms’, showing a fantastic capacity to absorb. He said that you started off by celebrating the local and reached to a point where post- cubism interfaced with surrealism. Then came the ideological crisis; whether to go by the social/socialist/Stalinist Realism or by the egalitarian critical modernism. Hence, you shifted from the celebratory to a kind of valorization of the proletariat through the eclectic mixing of the socialist realism with the post-cubist analytical style. Then in phase of a resolution you went back to your memories with a kind of spontaneity. You were not responding to the societal demand on artist; a demand that makes an artist an activist also. But your works were purely contingent upon contexts, as Sivakumar put it.
The radical departure of Sivakumar from the conventional ways of looking at your works was really interesting. Primitivism that inspired you should be seen differently from those western artists who took to primitivism, almost in the same time frame. You, even in your segregation as an artist from the Santhal community, often sought a self integration with it through lived participation. ‘Life overlaps even in segregated existence,’ said Sivakumar, which was really a novel approach. Fielding a feminist-like intervention from the audience, whether your sexuality played a role in articulating the female models in sculptures or your being an artist gave you license to strip them, Sivakumar said your sexuality, as that of Picasso could be probed into further vis-à-vis your works. And about the license, he said you were the only person to answer that. Now that is not possible, I know. Sivakumar was lucid and made no confusion in placing facts. And he was not here to endorse your ideological and aesthetical crisis but to make a few pointers for further research.
Sanjoy Mallik, a lecturer in art history from Santiniketan presented how you dealt with the Bengal Famine (1943-44). This man made famine did not make you to over react or under react. You kept your aesthetic contradictions within the works and never tried to cover them up with loud protestations. However, your works those were ‘contingent upon context’ clearly showed your affinity for the masses. You did not tread the path chosen by Chittaprosad or Somnath Hore or Zainul Abedin. But your works radically differed from those tried to aestheticize human tragedies. You endowed the women protagonists with a power and a sense of choice. You portrayed hunger and demand as a problem of selection; social, ethical and moral. You stuck to your humanity, which is not divine but tend to flaw. Mallik’s was a quick, erudite and vigorous presentation. You would have enjoyed it with a smile.
K.S.Radhakrishnan, renowned sculptor who is the commissioned curator of your retrospective at NGMA by next year, started his conversation by presenting that cute smile of yours on the screen. You look cute when you smile and frightening when you round your eyes (do you remember Nemai Ghosh’s pictures?). Radhakrishnan, after briefly speaking about his personal affiliation with you, went on to give a visual presentation of your RBI Yaksha and Yakshi sculptures. Through meticulously documented pictures, he vivified how you finally reached the standing figures at the RBI. This part of the session was supposed to happen as an engaged dialogue between the sculptor and the art historian Ella Datta. Somehow she could not come up with the questions that would have made Radhakrishnan to speak on you better, for I know he is a good communicator.
Interestingly, at the buffet, some angry students of JNU were expressing their displeasure with the Devi Prasad connection. They were asking why the JNU department celebrated Devi Prasad’s birthday. I don’t know something like that had happened in JNU. Afternoon there were couple of session with a film screening on you (footages from Rwitik Ghatak presented by his son) and a paper presentation by Geeta Kapur. I could not stay back as the site demanded me back at my work station. But if you meet Parul Dave Mukherjee, who is currently the Dean of the JNU department, in dreams tell her that the doors of the auditorium creak too much. She would then tell someone to oil the hinges so that people would believe that the department has a well oiled machinery.
Waiting for a visit from you in my dreams,
Yours truly
JohnyML |
