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Gazing at the Gaze

Rajkumar’s solo exhibition at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai once again raises the issue of forced binaries. JohnyML says, despite all our postmodern claims we find a pornographic pleasure in excluding an artist like Rajkumar from the realm of contemporary art.  

Rajkumar is a self trained artist from the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh and has been exhibiting his works the mainstream galleries in India and abroad. Again, Rajkumar is a traditional/folk artist who has trained himself to present his works outside his immediate cultural milieu where other artists from his own community also produce works of art for satisfying local needs. Once again, Rajkumar is an artist who is traditional/folk, self trained and contemporary at the same time.

When it comes to an academically trained artist, we either qualify him/her simply as an artist or an artist trained in a particular academy. His place of origin rarely gets highlighted except while interpreting the symbolism that the artist has used. The class and religious background of an academically trained artist are often referred and employed for underlining the development of his socio-political and cultural awareness, which further adds to the biographical myths. While the location of origin, affiliation to certain social class, formal training etc ‘liberate’ the ‘modern/contemporary’ artists, the very same notions limit and bracket the artistic prowess of an artist like Rajkumar.

Recent works of Rajkumar presented by Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai bring forth a question that has been asked several times before: Why do we qualify Rajkumar an artist who uses ‘traditional folk idiom’ and why don’t we call him a contemporary artist? Is it because the contemporary artists travel between various stylistic realms and negotiate their art through eclectic adaptations, and an artist like Rajkumar boils down all his experiences to a single/available/permitted/consciously retained idiom? If so, does this idiom debilitate his presence in the art scene in any manner?

Noted art historian R.Sivakumar while writing about the saras paintings of K.G.Subramanyan cites two kinds of artists; those who work with a singular agenda and those who expand their horizons through various adoptions and adaptations. He finds both sincere and strictly related to the individual temperament. Going by this, I would say Rajkumar (or those artists with no academic training) belongs to the former category of artists, who deliberately would like to enhance the effectiveness of his acquired (self trained) idiom towards expressing his contemporary thoughts. Rajkumar is a contemporary artist who does not need an apologetic qualification of being ‘self trained and traditional’.

Rajkumar works with wood and he carves free standing composite sculptures as well as sculptural assemblages. His artistic language carries the contemporary sheen and power, which are akin to the visual language of Navjot Altaf, Ravinder Reddy or even the early works of Dhruv Mistry. Historically speaking, we all know that these artists owe a lot to the visual idioms of folk and traditional sculptures including those from Bastar (especially in the case of Navjot), which also functions as a cultural backdrop for Rajkumar’s works.

However insular a remote region like Bastar seems, the traffic of people and ideas makes it porous and receptive to the changes that happen in the society. The effect of the received may not be as quick as that in the urban spaces. Rajkumar is a part of the heavy traffic between Bastar and the urban centers all over the world and this participatory role enables him to articulate his concerns through sculptures in wood. While not shunning the traditional carving skills he incorporates and registers the changes happening to the society which is seemingly insular. He enjoys building up narrative structures with expressionist conjoining of animate and inanimate figures and objects. He paints the sculptures with transparent colors that at once establishes the strength of wood as medium and gives a transcended feeling of the material.

Thematically, Rajkumar enjoys portraying a society that is witnessing and being witnessed. His works reveal a body for the public gaze (an informed gaze that penetrates into an exotic, esoteric and erotic body which is distanced by location and imagined time) and in turn they function as a body which is gazing back. Though the works and the acts embodied in them look frozen images from the past (without electricity, transportation facility and other basic needs), I would argue that Rajkumar as an informed artist makes a subversive act through these works and the subversion lies in where he humorously recreates the image of a society, which is imagined in an esoteric fashion. Rajkumar’s works open up the paradoxes of the projected visual imagination of the Art Public, and the subversive representation of the same through quirky interpolations of materials and themes.

Public imagination and critical interpretations are often paradoxical and contradictory because, they use different parameters for measuring the same products coming from apparently similar situations. While we hail Subodh Gupta’s using of steel vessels for making his sculptures and underpin his remote, rural, laid back, middle class origin as reason for selecting steel vessels, cycle, bajaj scooter, milk cans etc and never call him a traditional/folk artist, we itch to call Rajkumar who uses wood, mirror, paper, iron for his composite sculptures, ‘folk/traditional’. Post modernism not only gives us the freedom to be inclusive in critical discourse, but it also gives a pornographic pleasure to be exclusive.