Single in a Regimented City
Sujith SN |
Chances made him to enrol himself in the army, but Sujith SN was not cut for the regimented life there. It was a long journey for the young art enthusiast and he moved from the army to building construction firms. Regimentation and subjugation that he faced everywhere made him to find his final solace in art. Now Sujith SN is one of the highly recognized artists from the young generation. Fellow artist and critic Kavitha Balakrishnan catches up with Sujith SN who is currently getting ready for his forthcoming solo show at the Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. Excerpts:
Kavitha Balakrishnan: Sujith, i remember meeting you for the first time at govt. College of fine arts Thrissur, when you were a BFA student there. I came to join the college as an art history faculty and you were about to leave the place after graduation. You showed me a combination of cassettes with paintings done on the cover...I could see a genuine excitement that could sprout from a witty and free-minded assembler of little things of personal significance. After three years now, you have really gained a confident space of your own among the emerging generation of much sought-after contemporary artists in India. Now tell me, your struggles to find out a space in contemporary Indian Art...
Sujith SN: I was born in Baroda, but brought up in Hyderabad during early childhood. My father was in army. Then I was in the safe care of my granny for all my student time. It was a sweet time. I was not much under parental control. But when my father died in an accident, it was severe trauma. That anxiety was immense at a tender age. Automatically family expected me to join army as a safe and easily available job option, especially because I was only an average student in school. I did not fit in any of their dreams of becoming an engineer for that same reason.
Nobody cared that I was not that ‘army kind’ of a brave person. I could not withstand the regiments there. My uncle took me to the tests. I passed through the tests but all the time thinking of the ways to come out of it. Somehow I managed to leave the army job. But I needed a job at that point. Only option left was technical drawing. So did a course in draughtsmanship. Then I found myself sketching machineries, working as a draughtsman in different firms. I was producing technical drawings for them.
KB: How did you understand that Art was going to be your way of life?
SSN: It was boring to proceed in the construction companies. Main problem was the very ‘jobless’ state out there. I found myself sitting in a corner of a room, doing on the spot drawings of machines. But I could communicate with Ajith Kadumthuruthy, an artist friend in Palakkad who talked a lot to me regarding western master painters. I heard about the ‘Radical Movement’ from him. I got a general idea of art history from him too. It was enough for me to proceed as a student in college of fine arts. But six years back in Thrissur college, it was yet to produce its first BFA batch. Our seniors were diploma students. They didn’t seem to have larger dreams. But those days gave me time to improve on the skills already acquired from draughtsmanship course. There was only one interesting thing in that curriculum. It was the ‘projection’ acts. You will be given either an areal view or a frontal elevation. You are supposed to work out the rest of that object from the given clues. I had learnt to focus on objects and their dimensions from those technical drawings made for construction companies. I could freely do it. Almost naturally objects and their perspective occurred on to my paper. It was a sort of realising one’s skilled area. I also did a lot of architectural drawings.
KB: You produced a good number of sketchbooks with charcoal drawings during BFA time...........
SSN: Yes. Drawing is my area. I fell in love with miniature paintings for their multiple perspectives. I learnt about Hieronymus Bosch and Brughel during BFA days. Still, I was very rigid in attitude. I couldn’t open up and embrace a large space. When I did those cassette works and many charcoal drawings, anxiety ruled me. Just like I was thinking of means to perform low and get out when attending the test that actually intended to get people recruited into a regiment.
KB: Getting out of BFA, you entered into MFA in Hyderabad. Did things change then?
SSN: In the beginning, I continued my cassette drawings there. It was like facing things bit by bit. It seemed comfortable that way to create a big space, I felt. Actually I could not face a large space. And sculptor Alex Mathew, my teacher in Hyderabad told me that there is no need of coming to another space to proceed with the same old manners. Meantime, a camp organised by Dilip narayanan of ‘Open Eyed Dreams’ in Vythiri resort in Kerala helped me a lot in terms of overcoming hesitations to make use of a larger space. I used big paper. I again found that my area is drawing. But anxiety of regiments persists in me. You know, the army location of Golconda is very near to the Hyderabad university premises.
KB: What in army haunts you? How is this getting translated into drawings?
SSN: Army locations have a character. They will organise each scattered thing always keeping distances strictly. Map shows the things...like canteen here, battalions there.....like that. It is a well structured thing. It affects mind....getting into such organised set up is pretty difficult for me. Have you noticed that the repeated elements in a designed township will create anxiety? You can experience this problem when you enter into the new age high-tech townships getting built these days. They are not naturally developed cities. See, even among our relatively organically developed metros, there are differences. Mumbai is not really planned, so it is more fluid in its structure. But Delhi is different. It makes me anxious. It affects the body too. I painted this experience in works like ‘war between the walls’, ‘anxiety’ etc. That total seclusion of one’s feelings...
KB: Traumatised regiment of life is most often associated with urban contexts. It is your constant area of concern. But somehow you seem to come across a diminutive funny space of personal encounter at the silliest of locations, like a toilet and things like that in those works.
SSN: Yes, it was interesting to face it in a witty manner through small scale works. But I have left that format now. I am currently working on an 8 ft / 5ft format. It is an army parade almost a ‘futuristic’ manner if one can call it so...
KB: Our paradigms of practice have immensely changed. Painting regained what was lost from it in ‘post-modernity’- the painterly labour and its due value. But it is no more a safe couch also. Artists are trying to be quite unpredictable these days. There is no fixity on painting, sculpture or site specificity and sorts. Concept is but ruling the scene. Successful shows are now packages designed and executed, whatever be the material and medium. Don’t you find this a very challenging and open ended situation? How do you face it in your daily dreams and acts as an artist?
SSN: I start from technique and ‘the material’, so to say. I may not be able to give you sociological details of regimentation of human life around. I am an element within it. I feel the very being as an artist, always experiencing the format of things around. And I have serious concerns for medium because it determines our ability to convey the spark. Pencil or charcoal is easy...you can not capture things faster in any other medium. Time taken for preparation of colours and tones will reduce the spark soon. Still after a stage, drawing is also mechanical. Ha!
KB: True. You have a single minded thrust for drawing and its potential to bloat ones mind very effectively...
SSN: I try to inflate the situation to get a grasp of it. Though drawn objects are many and repetitive in their pose, I make an order of them on the paper. They are not simply scattered.
KB: Interesting! Back to order... you behave in drawing just like in an army or what? Look at the paradox then..
SSN: That may be ironical but it is a fact that I am within the system but conscious of it. It is finding myself within the picture. Military objects, march pasts and such ordeals are actually problems bolted within me. All natural eruptions are captured and ordered so that I get to live this life genuinely. Art makes me capable of it.
KB: I know you have learnt a lot from Anselm Kiefer, a master of ambiguous treatments. But Situation is still much different from the times of your favourite master. Time is not broadly polemical for artists to envisage ‘art as a heeling process over a traumatised world’. Trauma is all-pervading just as survival is. Do you think today Art is proceeding towards a much more personalised and individuated equivocations of experience.... what do you think is the possibility of art as a practice of equivocation in our life?
SSN: Ok, let Brice Marden speak for me. I like him not necessarily for his drawings but for the method of his dealing with drawing. He says that ‘looking at a drawing is like listening other peoples conversation. One is never quite sure what is being said’.
KB: You left an inherited space of army job for Art. You left a safe draughtsman job also again for Art...and now there is no immediate and visible battalion to rule you. Of course galleries demand art from you. But isn’t it interesting to be in demand for ones art than to be demanded for obedient drills or ethico-political correctness or simply for some fixed money eked out of some regular labour....
SSN: Actually, when passed out BFA, I was ready to suffer for a minimum of ten years so to say to create a space in art. But somehow things proved pretty smooth. I got many offers from major galleries in India. I took up a few offers. It is simple. It can not put much pressure. My intention is to leave my name and my significant world in this art discourse. Financial security that I started gaining has actually helped me to channelise time and energies. Also, you know it comforted my mother and other family members too. It is like getting awards and scholarships. Interestingly, they are standard means to get accredited in a familial or general public system. These will not solve my ‘problems’. But it helps me to focus on my problem. That is the way it works.....
KB: Let me come back to your drawings, you seem to explore the possibilities of a desolate and fragmented landscape using no particular ‘land’ but objects. It also derives lots of funny situations out of the obsolete junk of objects.....
SSN: We are always getting relocated. Aren’t we? You remember, I had done an ‘acultural vehicle’ last year. It is a military wagon. Ours is a mixed cultural transformation. Geography is less important. So objects are given more importance than locality.
KB: Here you are framing it conceptually. Then one can see that ‘land’ is pertinent in our experience.... Immediate locality has pretty determined many artists in selecting their course of work
SSN: That is also true. My interest in vast area and broad and multiple perspectival system is genuine because right from childhood I see the vast landscapes of Palakkad. Every morning doing my brushing, I used to be caught by the grandeur of an encompassing area. Will you get that kind of an experience in the neighbouring district of Thrissur? No. At one stage I got interested in architecture. But Kerala’s buildings made my exercise boring. So I travelled in Tamilnadu extensively and it was quite useful.
KB: In your works, it is not specificity of a land but the solid ‘landedness’ of objects that create an experience of a ‘land’ that is not there. This happens in the case of language, or in other words, ‘the sense made by the work’ too. In this ‘heterotopic’ world, the traditional role of language is very much desiccated as Foucault’s ‘order of things’ proposed. Then ruling concept is the very ‘non-language’ of communication. Don’t you think it makes the world much more a shared one of innumerable images in a non-space? You can play with and manipulate many objects...making it lesser loaded with meaning or more fraught with meanings.
SSN: It has its danger too. It is easy to get simply imitated. It is difficult to prove one’s genuineness. It makes me restless when I see somebody using my motifs in the similar manner. But I can not simply leave the object or motif because it comes within my very system. Earlier I used to sleeplessly worry about this. But now I know that only when one is insecure we feel bothered of people. One can copy your ten works...not more than that. It is like staying at a friend’s house. From my sketchbooks you will understand it...the way I reach at each object and each composite element. I have no concept outside of me. What I have is a personal space. Space and knowledge gives a confidence. Now I know how to use my draughtsmanship studies. What one does is one’s own doing. It is ‘drawing’. It is not predetermined ideal taught at college. Of course influences will come and go leaving some knowledge of their own. It is a continuation. Ravi Varma, illustrations, Van Gogh, Gauguin, impressionists, Goya, Egon schele, Christian Boltansky, Gulam Sheikh, Brueghel, Sudhir Patwardhan...it goes on criss crossing in time and history. Each leaves a mark of knowledge as I get along with myself.
KB: Your new works show more relaxed manoeuvres on expressive movements possible within the rigors of a systemic practice, like the ‘army parade’ sort of forms...the splashing effect of light etc
SSN: These new works are done after a gap. I am conscious of the expressiveness of light now. The futurists like Giacomo Balla have some import on the way I feel for animated drawings now. And it is simply funny to let you know of the way I reached at the army parade. One day as I was on my sketching rounds at the heart of Thrissur town, I saw a political party meet and the way people were forming a curious band was much similar to a parade. I also find myself responding much to sound and movement. It is a sort of feeling for ‘the animated’. It is the way I recognised it. I reach at some anxious moment.
KB: But you reach at anxiety through technical preoccupations
SSN: A sensitive mind can be felt through insight. People used to ask me without undergoing the actual war, how could I come up with such deep set anguish of violence. But I feel experience need not be so simplistically understood or conveyed. I paint not simply to provoke or irritate people though anxiety has that aspect inherently. It is a thought process that makes an object and leads me in and out of it.
KB: What are you most scared of in life now?
SSN: I am sure I will not at all keep one fellow artist or those in the past for long. Naturally I will move on. But I am scared of repeating myself. I make conscious efforts to move on from myself.
|
