Moving Ship in a Gallery
Hyderabad based artist Om Soorya recently had his major solo at the Guild Gallery, New York. Om Soorya’s paintings are strategies for aesthetically addressing and representing a peculiar historical situation where the mass society that includes the artist himself is condemned to live a life of cultural conformism, says JohnyML in the catalogue essay.
Om Soorya’s landscapes, as he accepts in one of his notes, represent a twilight zone illuminated by lights that could be seen as the lights of transcendence. Though representation of a mood is what he attempts in the paintings, he recognizes the impossibility of it as each step towards representation throws a new aesthetical and philosophical challenge for the artist. However, the conventions of painting ‘tradition’ draw him to the basics of representation.
This apparent contradiction, an urge to do away with the idea of representation and the necessary succumbing to the impossibility of it sets the mood of this painter’s works. He goes to the basics of painting while boldly declaring that a line can say a thousand things to the viewer than a ‘moving ship placed in a gallery’. By this die-hard apology Om Soorya positions himself in the continuum of the painting tradition and at the same time forwards a debate whether an artist should be ashamed of himself if he is not ‘putting a moving ship inside the gallery.’
‘A moving ship inside a gallery’ is an interesting metaphor, which could be employed by a painter to execute a magnificent expressionistic vision. Anselm Kiefer has brought in monumental images of German architecture, aircrafts and so on to his paintings in order to debate the much maligned history of twentieth century Germany. The referential images of landscapes that Om Soorya selectively clicks in from his Hyderabad studio window have a strange resonance with the landscapes painted by Kiefer. However, through certain deliberate interpolations and erasure, Om Soorya creates a mood that would well correspond with the mood of the current history of his location and nation.
My interest in the phrase ‘moving ship in a gallery’ lies in its sudden evocation of movement, monumentality, materiality within the limited space of a gallery and the artist’s negation of the same to underline his painterly approach. Does the artist’s aversion for putting a moving ship in a gallery stem from his repressed desire to generate movement, monumentality and materiality in a limited space using his available resources? The sublime twilight zones that he creates in his paintings in many ways indicate the very qualities that he wants to negate in his statement. Could this deliberate negation be an aesthetic ploy of the artist to critique the parameters that define and demarcate culture and nature?
The landscapes, to be precise the cityscapes and the surreal nature-scapes that Om Soorya conjures up in his paintings are well designed and illuminated. Well pruned gardens, sanitized streets, flights of stairs that lead to some subliminal spaces appear in sprawling horizontal and vertical scenes. The absence of human presence and the frozen state of activities weigh these canvases down in their monumentality. The ghostly appearance of ethereal lights that illuminate each window contours the materiality of the edifices. They look like ‘hung’ cities, a site of exploding activities, a crucible of profit production, a field of contesting ideologies, a program of multi tasking capabilities, but ‘hung’ for a while. Like a ‘hung’ and ‘sleeping’ computer could be reactivated through switching off/on and clicking, these hung and sleeping cities also could be brought back to activity/movement in order to reveal their monumentality and materiality.
There are two things that intrigue the viewer while watching the works of Om Soorya; one, is there an author/authority who has ordered this cities/landscapes to a ‘hung’ or ‘sleeping’ state? Two, what are the inhabitants of these places doing when they are hung or sleeping? To answer these questions one has to look at the spectacular nature of these places that the artist has portrayed. They are a spectacle in themselves. Guy Debord, the unofficial leader of the Situationist International wrote in his path breaking work ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, “The spectacle is capital to such degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.” Hence, the hung places in Om Soorya’s works are the places of capital accumulation and none would dispute the fact that Hyderabad where he lives and works is one of the centers for Information Technology capital accumulation in India.
The observation of Guy Debord in a way gives clues to find answers for the above-mentioned questions. The author/authority that has sanitized this spectacular society is nothing but the global capitalism. The inhabitants of these places are seeing nightmares while they are ‘hung’ or put to ‘sleep’. In these throes of nightmares they demand the caress of sleep that would soothe them. Removed from the essential nature of human beings, shadowed by the monumental presence of global capitalism, the human beings in these spectacular societies are condemned to live in the clutches of ideology that render them alienated and ‘absent.’ Cultural critics Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their widely appreciated book, ‘The Rebel Sell’ say that the spectacle “is a dream that has become necessary.” And Debord says that this necessity is “the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.”
Om Soorya’s desire to negate movement, monumentality and materiality from the spaces of exhibition should be seen as his desire to introduce a critique of the society of the spectacle. And his paintings try to contain the ‘imprisoned modern society’ that expresses its ‘desire to sleep’. The urgency to represent and the impossibility of pure representation guide the artist to embed the loaded notions of culture within his paintings.
Transcendence and the sublime are the two cultural notions that work towards the same goal as seen in these paintings and at the same time make mutual confrontations. Both these notions help the human beings to realize the ‘essential human nature’, which is free and instinctual, hence anti-cultural. However, a fair amount of subjugation of the essential human nature is necessary for the enculturation of the human life that means both these notions intend at going beyond the essential human nature either through repression or total annihilation of the same. While transcendence connotes an upward movement towards the beyond, sublime apparently connotes a merger. One could see Japanese traditional scroll paintings, the landscapes of JMW Turner and those of Caper David Friedrich to understand these notions.
If culturing through transcendence and sublime demands the subjugation of the essential human nature, the very notion of culture itself becomes disputable. But as the progression of the human society has shown it in the history, culture is an ideological process designed for governance and social engineering. Om Soorya in his paintings depicts a society, which is absolutely cultured through the signs of social engineering such as designed cities, gardens and pathways. The terror of culture then becomes palpable as it could do away with the human beings whom it wants to purge of basic instincts. Om Soorya, while hailing the socially engineered cities, in fact visualizes his repressed desire for freedom and instinctual growth.
In one of the paintings, a diminutive human figure is seen walking along a garden path with an unfolded umbrella above his/her head. Who could be this law breaker, daring to walk in the streets when others are hung or having nightmares? Does the artist intend to put a counterculture activist within his apparently non-subversive paintings as an effort to implode the authorial designs? Could this figure be representational of the artist or a society that would perhaps like to break free from the nightmares and finally have some real activity and end of the day have a beautiful sleep? And if this figure has such representative powers, would the all subsuming/consuming global capital power allow it to continue to be countercultural?
During the industrial period, the ideological forces wanted the working class to be desexualized and alienated in the work sites and the gratification was granted to them through excessive consuming of goods. This systematic desexualization rendered the working class impotent so that even in the given circumstances they could not capture power from the ideological forces that harnessed them to the yoke of production lines. For the counterculture revolutionaries, this working class came to represent the anti-revolutionary force, hence an enemy. In our times, the mass society, as it wants to conform always to the authority, has become an enemy to the counterculture. The mass society is fed with dreams and nightmares and unlike during the industrial revolution, it is overtly sexualized and this optimum sexualization within the authoritarian/ideological social parameters could be expressed and satisfied only through repression and vigorous consumption of mainstream cultural codes.
The origin of Om Soorya’s dilemma in representation and the impossibility of it should be seen in the dilemma of identifying and addressing a countercultural activist. In a situation where any countercultural move is subsumed and commodified, representation of the same becomes almost impossible. “Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertising and the mass media,” observe Heath and Potter. Che Guevara becomes a brand as the gangsta rappers need to indulge in gun fight only to prove that they are still gangsta rappers even after their global success.
For me, then Om Soorya’s paintings are strategies for aesthetically addressing and representing a peculiar historical situation where the mass society that includes the artist himself is condemned to live a life of cultural conformism. The desexualized but desirous in their terrific beauty, these landscapes of Om Soorya engage the viewer with the ideas of counterculture that tries to balance itself between aesthetic subversion and ideological co-optation.
(courtesy Guild Gallery, New York)
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