Green Isolations
Anupam Singh |
Mumbai based artist Anupam Singh has been working on the issues of migration and environmentalism for the last few years. Considering location as an important factor in formulating his aesthetic concerns, Anupam calls his works as ‘abstract realism’. Predominantly figurative, these works draw their energy from various sources including the internet. Anupam considers internet as his scrap book. Amrita Gupta Singh speaks to the artist about his art and life. Excerpts from the interview:
Amrita Gupta Singh: You have been born and brought up in West-Bengal, with a social history of conservative Marxist rule. Has its philosophy shaped your ways of thinking?
Anupam Singh: While I have always had an allegiance with the humanist aspects of Marxist philosophy, the way it has been manipulated through the political parties and their intentions in West-Bengal is something that I have never agreed with. Coming from an industrial suburb in Kolkata, I have been a close witness of class struggle, corruption, trade unions, strikes, party-violence. Various strategies were supposedly made to help the struggling classes, but the name of Communism was used to benefit the ruling classes. Strikes/Bandhs have never been able to favour the working classes, decreasing the productivity of the socio-economic cycle, in Kolkata and its suburbs, especially with its history of migrations and the poor infrastructure that was not capable to support the diaspora; in fact, the working classes dependent on static financial structures never got to break out of their class in their whole working life. Poor work ethics, the induction of the youth in a redundant system only made me aware of the negative aspects of Leftist rule in my growing up years.
AGS: You have studied at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata (BVA) and M.S University, Baroda (MFA). Can you trace your experiences as a student in both these institutes? Have there been any mentors/artists/teachers who have been of some influence to you?
AS: I studied Print-making in both these institutes, and shifted to painting after my MFA, especially at Kanoria Centre for Arts. My experience as a student was very enriching for me. In the former University, I received guidance from great teachers like Shome Shankar Roy who pushed the parameters of my art practice, and understood me as an individual, and Partho Pratim Deb for his ideas on art. There was also an exhibition of Sudhir Patwardhan in Gallery Chemould, Kolkata in 1995, and his works were very influential on me, especially in his approach to the human figure and the representation of the labouring masses. In M.S. University, Vasudevan Akkitham and Indropramit Roy are two artist/teachers from whom I have learnt a lot.
AGS: How do you see the routes of migration that you have undertaken due to your artistic commitments, from Calcutta/Baroda/Ahmedabad/Santiniketan and now Bombay. Do you think the location of an artist significant in the process of art practice?
AS: Well, I strongly believe that even in today’s world, where information is just a click away, still a location for an artist is important. For each specific location defines an artist’s individual sensibility in many ways. Take Sudhir Patwardhan, for example, the way he has portrayed his locale, can only happen when you are constantly reacting to it, and reading it in your own way. As for me, I guess I would not have painted the images that I do, had it not been for my location, my specific background, my process of migration and encounters in this process. Ground realities always define an individual, and in this case, an artist’s sensibility is always moulded by his environment and social spaces. As a migrant to Bombay, I am again confronting the local realities of the city; people are constantly moving, constantly changing their spaces and identifying and assimilating themselves, albeit painfully to a consumerist society. I am fascinated by this human need for ‘shelter’.
I am now in New Bombay, the satellite city, in one of its suburbs, and what intrigues me is the manic building activity, the aspects of ‘shelter’ and ‘security’ that these housing societies provide, the land/builder nexus, the erosion of nature and the extent of migration even within Bombay, people coming to New Bombay from the Western and central suburbs, the mindless consuming and the calculation of status/luxury in square-feet of space. The floating migrant population of the labourers who get subsumed in the tertiary sectors of Mumbai’s economy, the native villagers who are selling off land at exorbitant prices and becoming the ‘new-rich’, the encroachments on productive agricultural/tribal land are all current concerns that I deal with in my works, and my current watercolours such as “Contractions” and “Green Isolation” are representations of such concerns. Here my locale is penetrating into my works.
AGS: How does memory/personal history work for you in your work? Is memory a cathartic process for you?
AS: Memory becomes a site for location, where current experiences and events trigger some aspects of the past which coalesce in my works, allegorically. In some larger works in acrylic, I have painted myself in a certain context, of putting myself within a larger situation that reflect our times, the changes that I have gone through as a migrant, the assimilation or rejections of language, food, culture and people. Visiting the past is also about dealing with different selves and its inherent conflicts, I guess.
AGS: Figuration and the anatomy has been a consistent feature in your work. How would you contextualize your approach to the human body?
AS: Yes, the human figure is consistent in my work. It is a site of experience for me, the site to study myself, where marks of the passage of time and our immediate realities interact. To internalize any experience happens through the body. The nuances of the figuration and the stories it can tell has always appealed to me. But you can also see the same approach in the objects/animals that I portray in my work. Like the human figure which carries a particular history, each object also has its own history. If I am representing a body of a particular class, I will go out and look for that kind of a body, take a photograph, draw it in lines that carry its stories. It may take days for the transference from reality to a visual representation, but the expressive dialogue is important for me.
AGS: Your sources of your work have been variable, from photographs, news-paper clippings, television, and art historical images, including the Internet, which are public images.
AS: I would say that the Internet is my sketch-book. I also go out and take photographs, from which I draw, but for me, the act of painting the image is very important. There is the process of selection and rejection, these public images are representations of our times, and the information age brings the world to our homes. So while my immediate context is important, I do make use of these public images to articulate issues that concern me, both as an individual and as an artist.
AGS: You often articulate the issues of space and identity in your works. In what sense do you approach these issues?
AS: Space and Identity become important to me, because of my history as a migrant. The sense the alienation that one feels, in terms of language, life-style, mobility and adjustments is all related to the changes in the self and the body. The themes of my work are not always pre-determined, they emerge out my everyday interactions with events. For example, the recent happenings in Baroda raised the questions of my identity as an artist, and the question of social security, and our sense of belongingness in the larger community. It is not one kind of identity, we carry several identities, I deal with questions of belongingness in various ways in my works, from the personal to the larger social system.
AGS: You have worked on both large-sized canvases in acrylic and intimate watercolours, as you are doing currently. I am especially interested in these small watercolours, for the shift in imagery which articulates your immediate concerns in a surreal way.
AS: The surreal aspect that you notice, I would call it a kind of abstract realism. I am enjoying the accidental possibilities that watercolour as a medium offers, the conversations of water, paper and paint, which may create further possibilities for my works on canvas. Sometimes forms emerge from the paper itself, though I refer from photographs and the Internet, the compositional scheme interacts with the skin/paper, and also the smaller size makes the whole experience very intimate, the impressions that social events leave, whether pleasant or pathetic or imposing becomes part of my process. For example, constantly seeing a cement-mixer in my vicinity, its sounds drowning out the sounds of nature, the intrusive skyscrapers that are an eye-sore, the structural versus the organic gave birth to the work “Contractions”, where the colour green becomes a part of the machine, aspects of horse-power/man-power/machine power are explored along with the sudden insertion of Piet Mondrain’s portrait and his abstract structures, interweaving images that might not have direct links but impact each other in various ways. The watercolour “Skin Evolution” deals with social insecurities, linked to with the happenings in Baroda. The houses on the back of the cow are representative of the community (an extract of Gulammohammed’s painting), brings in communal issues of times. So various concerns are narrated in a surreal way, where the dreams are only metaphors of our realities.
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