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Rebel’s Graffiti and Institutional Manna
Rebel Graffiti, a show curated by JohnyML at the OED Gallery, explores the idea of being rebel in the contemporary times with its farcical nuances. Kavitha Balakrishnan in her review of the show says that in this show, the ‘rebel’ is not a person. It is not a style. It is but any philosophical situation that is daring enough to see itself as it is.
Rebel is simply a scratch on the system? Or thunder bolt in the tea-pot?
Is it only about that prickly irritation evoked by the sight of a damaged surface polish that is simply getting scratched?
One can very well see that ‘Rebel graffiti’ – the spoiling act -does not make much difference in the way these artists use the systemic pitcher to show their conditions. The pot delicately remains unbroken.
Issue is not simply of the effect (in other words the social impact, if one is taking an oft-misguided route from the word ‘rebel’) of a ‘spoilt pitcher’ - the institutional system of art practice - from which artists drink a lot of manna today.
Interestingly, the show was already supposed to be a farce at the very conceptual level that briefed its situation as ‘history and a farce occur in simultaneity’.
If the success of the show was simultaneously framed in its failures, how will one go about it?
One simply needs to come out of the polemical frameworks of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’. It will be misguiding to think that the show posed to propose some artists as ‘rebels’. It is rather more about ‘graffiti’, a language of art that emerges at many corners of the world today. Assuming and exploring a fresh language of art is reflected in the interesting truisms formed by this show like ‘artists write graffiti on canvases with art historical support and personal ideologies’ and ‘artist is a graffiti maker’ etc.
Apparent searches for a language of artistic expression in Indian Art has throughout been fraught by the paradigmatic heaviness that were employed through essentialist theoretical concepts of the ‘traditional’ ‘modern’ ‘avant-guarde’ ‘radical’ etc. The theoretical ideations of ‘identity’ and ‘self’ gave less of a grasp of the situation for the artist till late 90s because all were lopsided and covered in its framing. Theories often did not give proper care for practice. Some of the critical art historical formulations expected to envisage an imagined and biased political coherence (even when critiquing the ideological presuppositions of a coherent subject of a free-willed artist) for the situation in favour of the lesser privileged or marginalised, all these in a situation in which any idea of coherence in life at large was totally at stake in the ‘social environment’, so to say.
The possibility for resistance was sometimes found exclusively in ‘collectivism’ and a search for ‘alternate spaces for viewing and dissemination unalienated from society’. It also envisaged a radical social environment that we can uphold the artistic values of our times(1). But where formed that socialising gadgets through the polemics of ‘self’ and ‘the other’? identities are constantly getting forged newly and criss-crossed through human will that always makes ‘impure’ ‘nonsensical’ and complex web of events ideas and situations. ‘Radical social environment’ is simply an idea. Art movements that craved for an ‘alternative space’ could not naturally bind its people for substantial amount of time. Those who generally posited themselves as ‘other’ in the system (like so called ‘feminists’ or guys or simply ‘radicals’) found themselves either ‘dead’ ‘doing nothing’ or filtered into the very system. (it was even unnecessarily ‘shocking’ for many to see old ‘radicals’ as ‘new age professionals’)
Meanwhile in the beginning of this decade, some corners symbolically declared, ‘ideologies fail’. The ‘critical jargons’ seemed at a point to be thoroughly annihilated by the ‘successful’ mega events of professionalism in galleries. Art in this decade is part of such an ‘affirmative culture’ that seems to easily do away with history or critique but simply supply things in ‘proper shape’ – simply well designed and preferably ‘eventful’ or ‘desirous’ formats – to meet the demands of an imaginary capital. This is a new age ‘success mantra’ for artists that puts them in miserable state of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ decided by a fluid floating of that imaginary capital.
Again here history becomes important. Critique becomes important. Not in the worn out formats of polarised ideas and practices of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’. Collective is a sensibility in time and space. It is not as simple as a member-group of similarly political people who act in a predetermined fashion.
‘Collective’ is individuals, sensations, situations, gestures and references.
As this show got designed, ‘rebel’ is not a person. It is not a style. It is but any philosophical situation that is daring enough to see itself as it is. Hence this show is a positive step towards a new understanding of Contemporary Art practice.
It is a graphic course into the layers of ingredients that forms the ‘artist’ in him/her. It can use its own aesthetic properties. Like Manjunath Kamath uses sinuous lines to simply mark his tools and moments of disturbance.
It can refashion a memory so that it no longer is a memory like Reji Arakkal makes an amusingly young and absurdly romantic ‘old master’. Or as Sujith S.N echoes a ‘Munch-ian’ ‘scream’.
It can be an abject ‘truism’ devised by Sanjive Khandekar that critiques the metro-politan absolutism that pervades all grasps of art today. It can be a vignette-like emaciated and petty act portrayed by Satyanand Mohan.
It can be as simple silly exaggerated and colourful as a bulb’s blow-up? Anilkumar blows it. It is a digitised ‘blue’ as Baiju Parthan’s simply drafts it.
It is also a clear design of encountering one’s essential (male) idealism as done by Mahesh Baliga. It is all about identifying clarities out of a megalomaniac fluidity as in George Martins work. In Pushkin’s work it is a blunt surrealism that verges at the comic.
'Rebel’ can also be an unexpected detail on the systemic tools (of violence as done in Varun Crusetji’s work) that only a victim can see at the right focus at the face of ‘contracting into a bolus of anguish’. It is similar to a strange sensation of ‘hope’ as conveyed by ‘I’ in ‘My Name is Red’ (novel of Orhan Pamuk)
‘I can only compare this contraction to the surprising sense of release i felt during the unequalled moment of my death. Yes, i instantly understood that the wretch wanted to kill me when he unexpectedly struck me with a stone and cracked my skull, but i didn’t believe he’d follow through. I suddenly realised i was a hopeful man, something i hadn’t been aware of while living my life in the shadows between workshop and household. I clung passionately to life with my nails, my fingers and my teeth, which i sank into his skin’
There is nothing ‘simply rebellious’ in this world (and in this show of course) because ‘rebel’ is a multiple of certain paradoxical sensations and situations.
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Note:
- Shivaji K Panikkar Preetha Nair and Anshuman Das Gupta, ‘Art, subjectivity and ideology: colonial and post colonial India’ paper in the seminar ‘Modern India : terms of discourse’ seminar at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, 1994.
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