Life that reads in reverse

Gopikrishna lives and paints a ‘problem-life’ in Contemporary art, functioning largely out of sight and in reverse order. Art circles discovered him only a few years back though he has been working laboriously on painting for a long time. Once discovered, he proves to be a ‘dream conservatory’ of much experience still lying undermined and ignored in our attempts to modernise through colonial patchworks. Though he is sometimes graded as one among the new ‘Malayali waves of Art’ mainly located at a ‘Mumbai axis’ early this decade, much part of an Art market boom in India, it will be wrong to ascribe ‘the discovery of Gopikrishna’ wholly to this phenomenon. He is still deeply brewing the problematic of ‘region’ (cultural inheritance) that can not ever be camouflaged into any rhetoric of intellectual or professional identity.

This ‘artist-life’ has all throughout been located in Trivandrum, the south most region of Kerala state and his life is much ‘readable’ in relation to this locale’s history of alienation and losing sense of belongingness. In this world of hyper connectivity he often lives away from even a telephonic reach. May be he is the most difficult and strange contemporary artist to get across, of course for quite introspective reasons.

This ‘up close and personal’ encounter with Gopikrishna’s world demand deciphering of the exact historical code of time in a ‘timeless’ or ‘multi-timed’  man’s claims for an individual world of his own.

The crux of his art practice perhaps is that he refuses to easily and wrongly resolve the tensions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. He makes all our conscious sense of ‘modern’ time problematic right from the earliest available original personal reference point. He locates it in early 20th century ‘Travancore’.  Assimilating the frictions inherent in India’s moments of modernisation to the extreme extents of personal life, he might seem to dismiss large part of our 20th century civilising histories and related practices of public and private domains. Though born in 1965 in post independent India, he ardently choose to fix himself in a pre-independence / colonial / ‘Kingly’ context in which he first started sensing life, primarily through father’s horizons and narrations.

“I am an outsider of taught history. I make my own history nation and beliefs to paint and live. In that way I feel myself as a ‘lonely soldier’ living and fighting in Travancore, for my King!....the inner man is the real me. In this form I really see my country- no Kerala, no India, but Travancore, one of the oldest dynasties in pre-independent India. By caste I am a Nair, who once formed the military of the King. May be in a Quixotian way I assume this duty, I picture my King and discard all other set up.”
(from a dialogue with Gopikrishna, by Mortimer Chatterjee, catalogue for ‘Dream Conservatory’ in ‘ArtMusings’, 2006)
Then one can also unwittingly dismiss Gopikrishna for his apparently unfashionable and exotic thoughts. That might be one of the reasons for this artist to get obscured till around 2005. But now it remains difficult for the Art World to avoid getting haunted by his ‘problematic eye’ that is quite wittingly fixed in a particular time, in the transits of our colonial experiences.
The death knell of a system (rule of Kingly laws and patronage of Art and life in ‘Travancore’) stamped as a ‘territory of balance and natural cohabitation’ in Gopikrishna’s mind, need not necessarily been the beginning of a completely different cultural ‘modern’ on a privileged level as informed by the so called ‘progressive’ ‘patriotic’ ‘democratic’ and ‘revolutionary’ life. Through strong machineries of message-diffusions in the collective mindscapes of early 20th century India, the ‘modern’ models of political and cultural experiences have largely pretended to solve the tensions caused by tradition, decay, loss of harmony and memory reviewing the existing social order, ideas and institutions in sharply critical terms.[1]  So it is difficult for anybody trained in modern life and habits (like ‘rule of the law’) to easily sense the irony and give room for a sweepingly ‘old fashioned’ alternative (like in ‘the rule of the king’) without running the risk of sporting a ‘mere laughable identity’. Gopikrishna, however has sensed it very much. So he explained to Mortimer Chatterjee in their e-mail contacts,

“It is not that I find a laughable idea and elaborate; it comes naturally as a view we see with eyes. Not a joke but truth. But their difference from the views one is trained to see or expect make them laughable”
(catalogue for ‘dreams conservatory’ show, 2006)
One has to rethink life with Gopikrishna even if one doesn’t ascribe to his views in their face. Death of a social system can also be the beginning of inevitably haunting allusions of objects figures and meanings. These do not easily evade from memory and practice of sensitive individuals. Many in the ‘art world’ fashionably seek transcendence in Art. But Gopikrishna can not look for transcendence in his pertaining dark allusions by simply negating their turbulence. Resultant is a strange and deviant version of our ‘modern experiences’ that still appears ‘grotesque’ ‘idiosyncratic’ and the least as ‘bizarre’’ for trained civilizing habits that most of us have.
As we began speaking for ‘up close and personal’, Gopikrishna started by a note of fond and grateful personal attachment with his wilful father.

1

Figuring the father’s domain: Men and beasts

“I belong to the whole spectrum of living organisms. What am I going to do in this world of human beings – should live like a wage-earning worker in an institution? Like my father who knew painting and drawing though for a livelihood did other job through his life with due dislike? This very question haunted me and guided me finally to paint as an artist. I did not draw and paint in childhood though my father was a painter. My interest was in some different kinds of things. It was at a particular moment that I came deciding to learn painting. It was an answer to my question of who I am. It was my father’s one word - ‘you can paint’ - that took me to college of fine arts Trivandrum in 1980s”.

Gopikrishna is extremely attached to the figure of his father and that of his (imagined) land. His father was an ardent follower of a particular vein of Ravi Varma school of painting prevalent in Kerala in the early decades of 20th century.
“My father guided me how to start a painting. First lessons of making a painting were delivered. His master belonged to the school of Ravi Varma. It is difficult for you to trace that master now. Most of them worked in the drama companies of those times. They painted huge stage sets for the time’s best drama performances. They were very powerful artists. There were many artists who belonged to that group. Somebody called Devaraj Iyyer was there, a student of somebody who lived as a set designing artist. He followed this Ravi Varma school. They mostly used tempera.  Though basically artists for drama stage decors, they also did portraits and other court related works. Courts used paintings in their events and ceremonies like ‘pallikkettu’ (marriages). Those occasions used a lot of painted screens. I have heard of all these from my father. During the marriage of Maharaja Karthika Thirunaal - that was the last court marriage staged in Thiruvananthapuram - many important people in Travancore came to participate in that event. Many painters participated in it to decorate it. There was such a period for Thiruvananthapuram. It was in 1930s and 1940s. After independence, that patronage lost. People started their own Art institutions across many places. The whole thing got completely decayed.”
Through 1970s with his father carrying strong marks of a drastically erased system, land and life, Gopikrishna too inevitably as a modern subject, got entitled to the familiar ‘other-ing’ frameworks of life and carry forward his father’s (land’s) wounds. A sense of decay prevailed on the idea of ‘the present’ but a sense of bonding for the finished drama of the near ‘past’ of life strongly made its presence. Right from his art-student years, Gopikrishna started hinging at the ‘tragic ashes’ of a ‘Malayali society’ that was all through out brilliantly ‘man-made’.
                “Father has an important place in my life; I was actually born out of his tragic ashes.”
Says he, in a note that he sent, prepared in a type writer, as answer to my questionnaire. The inheritance of colonial modernity passing through the first two decades of Indian independence demanded its ambitious folk to progressively train themselves, as if habitually, to live in the new (father) domain (of the republic) and to learn to be committed as dutiful civilians who ‘love’ and ‘dream’ of their land. Leaders, supposedly who could dream and communicate symbolically, earned freedom for the nation. They formed the new (Kerala) state based on (Malayalam) language of the people invalidating the prevailed sense of three ‘countries’ (feudal states) based on ‘King-dom’ and its own loyalty relationships. People were suddenly evoked by dreams not simply about a land within one’s eye’s sight (as in the case of kingdoms) but within a larger ‘metaphoric sight’ that were provided by graphic perceptions, like that were given by a map or by an allegorical perception of ‘nature’ and the ‘feminine’. Over the decades of the century, people learnt that both freedom and tension could happen over imaginative borders of village and town/city, borders of ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. On the other hand, that was complacently accepted as the spirit of a modern subject’s life. An archetypal ‘enlightened individual’ was formed who could fight for ideas, for freedom, for imagined territories through a collage of opinions and ideals. It was also a newly gained distinguished vision of the educated individual who was regarded as rising much above the ordinary life and its problems.

Allegorical and ‘the real’ played an altering game in the life of many. Gopikrishna is a true representative of those who could not alter easily. In this uneasiness, he possibly had only one artist-predecessor here, artist K. Madhava menon. [2] Those who could alter easily left the provinces for new urban areas in the country for a ‘life-sake’ search of job and they always expressed their nostalgic pangs for the land that somehow happened to be left behind. Many have used their cultural identity in the new locations for altogether new purposes too, like establishing as artists or other ‘modern subjectivities’. In the case of those who dreamt of practicing Art, many crossed the limits of the nation and attained education from the west. They easily brought in the discourses of modern art by word and image from the west. In the academic art education available here in Fine Art College, Trivandrum during 1982-1987, it had this reverberating tone of modernity by all means. But Gopikrishna was a lonely traveller there. Except Kanayi Kunjiraman, the sculptor-teacher, he avoided touching anybody as influential.
“Kanayi was very inspiring for me. He was a legendary figure at that time. Many articles on art in magazines made it that time. Images like Yakshi, Mukkolaperumaal, etc were unfamiliar till then. They affected my sensibility in one way or the other.........College life from 1982-87 and 1993-95 (College of Art, NewDelhi) has its own contribution. The working environment of these structures along with their occupants, politics and tensions had their own impact. Actually they have not overpowered or shaped my way. As with other situations in life I see them in my own way like Quixote saw the wind mill in his own perception. Like a Quixote I travel this world for my own quests. Once outside the ‘shepherd and sheep method’ of life, immense valleys and mountains vast areas of untouched spectacles show themselves. Great transparency is offered tearing down the hitherto opaque curtains.”

Looking for a new individuality away from the political pressure group models in art education prevalent in Trivandrum college and in the larger society, Gopikrishna lived like a blind man painting ‘those unseen’ for the world. It had its problems. One may feel that in his work for a long time ‘the grotesque’ was simply an expression of this situation rather than an Art language. Fellow students and other people have quite often misinterpreted it in terms of ‘surrealism’ that he simply laughs at saying,
“Living in Kerala who can talk of any ‘ism’ in Art? I never feel justified when my works are spoken as paintings of the dreams, or ‘surrealistic’ or with any such classifications. I see a piece of paper in front of me, hands moving over typewriter keys, at my left side is a window through which i can see distant trees, birds flying, fallen wood decaying, a cow in the rain...but apply time to these details, all will go away when their possible span is completed.”

Still, Gopikrishna appeared too crude to make sense of his effort to apply ‘time’ on images acquired from immediate locale. By around 2000, his solo show in Cochin had pointers of change into a language of certain analytical sharpness. By the ‘cave in the metropolis’ show held in Delhi by 2006, Gopikrishna’s body of work presented some effective introspective twists. In that body of exhibits, a painting called ‘eternal family’ showed himself sitting, a self portrait mounted on the easel by one side, his wife on the other, son slanting himself on the dad and the puppet the kid keeps by his side. Gopikrishna’s gaze is superimposed with that of two sprouting red birds almost in a Magrittian fashion. In the self portrait though, the birds have flown away leaving him blind.

What could have happened first? The blind man got his bird’s eyes when the birds deserted the canvas and sat in his real life? Or the birds in his eyes have deserted him in his mental image (of a portrait) leaving him blind? Modernity made him blind to its wonders? Or he acquired a bird’s eye that made him almost look like a blind man?

Like visual lampoons he portrays ‘Man in deep study losing peacocks one by one’ and ‘the secret book of mind watch, centre pages’. Book becomes a character that metamorphoses into ‘the real’ laandscape while the drama of reptiles and amphibians going on. The ‘bestial’ becomes an allegorical language of a society and its history of dominating verbosity.

2

The missing (mother) nature

Idea of family and kinship also underwent a transit phenomena of ‘as if decaying and emerging as other’ in the modern situation. 
“My family disintegrated in the new world and finally my father, I and younger brother, the three men folk remained as we lost our mother at my age of 13. Relatives diverged completely. My parents located at an area here in Trivandrum where both did not belong to personally. It was not usual quarrel over property and inheritance.  It is all about disintegration of family as a binding nurturing force. It is all about family. Mother, her mother, mother’s sisters their children...in any family there will be cordial or adjusting relationships.  Everything like this was broken at my 13th year of life.”

Gopikrishna lost nurturing forces at a tender age. Mother and family missed out from his life’s scheme, former by fate and latter by collective choices of a political moment in to which he did not necessarily feel belong to or couldn’t communicate an individual choice or deviance by any effective means. ‘A lack of communication skill’ as Gopikrishna himself acknowledges as a personal trait. 

“I have personal difficulties in communicating with people. I can not relate myself to many at a time. I can not love many at a time in the same intensity. It is very volatile. I am interested in deep intense relations that are almost impossible with everybody. I can not comply to all formalities of living in this world. My parents came and bought a house at a place that is unrelated to both. They had no root there. There i was born. But there also i could not have root for myself. Royal rule couldn’t conform to values of ‘modernism’ and my parents went through great wars, famine and other darkness. They didn’t have any financial base too. Father’s efforts made a life for us.  He worked in Transport Corporation to earn a living but it was not at all a choice”.

To this comment from him, my sincere enquiry was this: The whole public domain of kerala brimming with revolutions modernisations social reforms and all kinds of quality life indices being kept high, you did not find a solace, meaning and quality at all in this domain! And I got the most sincere answer :
“I am with birds. Animals. I was not with human beings actually. See, I am talking to you from a land i bought recently and built a studio. All the open lands here are now amassed by land mafia and they r building houses. Many insects, birds and animals living here are fast vanishing. Where are they going? Where will they reach? Who gave right to human beings to affect all these spectrum of diverse life? I am worried in this question.  I am looking at kerala as it is getting dark. Primarily i am looking at Trivandrum. I don’t know about anything else. Trivandum was once a balanced town and there was a surrounding village life. I couldn’t expect huge skyscrapers to come up in this small area of land.  Earlier we had houses. Today we only have flats. Not houses with families. Flats are simply numbered mostly deserted as investment for want of profits.”

‘The balanced town’......when was it? In your childhood?
“In my childhood it started decaying.  I traced history to get more. Also father handed over more. Writers like Raja Rao came and said about this as the most beautiful place on earth. Something vicious is happening here. From this how can ‘an individual’ emerge and conduct a calm ‘search’! Discarding all these and focus on a point is a real yogic act. “
A changing geography and related culture is haunting him so much similar to a loss of mother as a nurturing force. This feeling of loss is created and informed in him basically by father and his stories, from a man’s order that fails any more to give a sense of belonging. An artisan or ‘warrior of the king’ (by caste) who left or surrendered the land turned out to be free as a nobleman but caught in the middle of the nobility and the peasantry hence regarded as plebeian in origin. He did not plaugh the land like a peasant or rule the land like a noble, a ‘Gothic’ situation that Gopikrishna later in painting identified himself through painters, especially through some strange survivors through Italian Renaissance, like Piero de Cosimo. [3]

He summarised his influences like this:
“Pedagogic exercises never attracted me. I was not much attracted by living artists but by many masters of the past, especially Indian miniaturists for their lucidity in representing what were around them, a group of Renaissance painters for their Gothic visions and Raja Ravi Varma for his mastery and philosophy as an artist.”
Formation of a ‘lonely individual’ in this locale’s history definitely has takes on deeply philosophical situations for an uprooted middle class who didn’t know what to do with ‘nature’ or so called ‘tradition’ and their very ‘deviant subjectivities’ were its carriers as heavily visible in Malayalam literature of 1960s.

“I read. But have poor memory. I pass through words and ideas but I can not largely retrieve it for a later moment.  I have no memory. But I had gone very much through Sethu, M.Mukundan, Kakkanadan generation with their works coming in periodicals illustrated by A.S (A Sivaraman, an illustrator who worked in Mathrubhumi weekly for 26 years). Recently I re-read khasakh. [4] We would have got that kind of a society, related to soil animals and plants in an essential manner. Like a cow or dog lives...very satisfactory, resilient   life that has no particular drive. I always want soil and comfort. I have no demand other than this.” 

3

‘Inner enigma’ of Ravi Varma

In the new ‘man’s world’ of twentieth century, both ‘father’ and ‘land’ were regarded abstract ,unclear and symbolic that got communicated mainly through an allegorical perception, primarily considered recognisable through female forms and landscapes. Kerala being a lively laboratory of literacy, newspapers, periodicals and literary men, it constituted a large public domain for instructing the subjects of modernity through metaphors and figures that carry messages of epochal transitions [5]. Ravi varma’s pictorialism was easily diffusible into these ‘man-making’ cultural domains of colonial India. He made a synthetic world of the ‘the divine’ and ‘the real’or ‘the modern’ and ‘traditional’ fused to give illusion of a single scheme. He never disturbed the viewer in this domain but could pamper the eyes into privacies, material culture and the bygone ‘pasts’ refashioned properly for the new situation. There was a curious world of women as rhetorical instruments of ‘a glorious past’ popularised by Ravi Varma, also suggestive of himself, the ‘missing male’ in this man’s subjectivity. His was a world of spectacles, of desires that are beyond the reach of many at that society. He created access to a private world of women in interiors.

Like Gopikrishna’s father, many were attracted by the model created by Ravi Varma in oil painting that received encouragement and gifts from both colonial officers and the Royal clan. But for most of the sentimental imaginations brewing around the time, oil painting was not the only medium. People who were initiated to Art for the first time in their new scheme of life got attracted to drama, photography, humour drawings and film. Far away from academies and art schools of urban areas, here most of them understood about Art either as a ‘moral responsibility’ or as an ‘entertainment’. Most of the periodicals of the time also must have influenced many of them to regard entertainment and ethics as inevitable part of ‘modern life’ that they were gradually entitling to.
“My father was actively involved in this. Ravi varma prints were available a lot that time. His elder brother was an artist. seeing his works, father also got interest and went to Devaraj Iyyer. It was like a gurukula that time. He could not come out as a professional in art in any sense. He could have become.”

Some of them understood that painting and drawing are not skills resting in rarely occurring ‘genius people’ like Ravi varma. For example there was somebody called Artist Cheriyan disciple of Rama Varma Raja (son of Ravi Varma) who learnt oil painting. But he looked at Art more technically. Not getting caught up in ethical / aesthetic issues, he engaged in popular ballets (musical drama) of the time as a backdrop artist. Simultaneously he set up a portrait studio too. A particular kind of audience was getting created through people like him. They could as if in a Victorian society, derive emotiveness and dramatic sentiments of figures through their gestures, dress code and facial expressions. The basic feature this kind of artists had, like Ravi Varma, was that they had also acquired alternative audience for their art in the popular consciousness than in the Kingly clan.    
At the same time, on a national level, Ravi Varma was getting thoroughly sidelined by the very dawn of the century down to the end of it.History of art-thinking and practicing among Indian artists has largely worked in a vein of ‘the privileging other’. The synthetic language of Ravi Varma was then duly denounced for its lenience on western techniques. Bengal revivalists thought to claim an essential Indianness. Since the ‘progressives’ who thought to create an Indian Contemporary Art by themselves for the first time, this ‘other-ing’ discourse has actually camouflaged the issue of historic time in various philosophical rhetoric.

“In Kerala it was a style among new painters of the ‘modern school’ to negate Ravi Varma. I had lot of experiences in my college days. But what I could see in his works, his critics could not seem to see. Now after the re-emergence of Ravi Varma in the Indian art scene things are a bit changed (since early 1990s). But a real understanding of his works is yet far away in his own land. People are admiring him for comparatively insignificant causes and criticising him also for irrelevant factors.“

Interestingly, Gopikrishna’s oeuvre as it is evolved now would be the most striking reverse-use of the same devices shaped in the context of so called ‘Ravi Varma School’. He refuses to see through the typical man’s eye that sees nature (and women) with sufficient aesthetic indifference as reflected through their much popularised objectification. Gopikrishna rather devised a reversely held mirror-eye that sees not nature or woman or even man but ‘the male’, the ‘bestial’ in man that actually causes this ‘aesthetic indifference’ towards nature that is regarded high in the day’s urban class.
In his paintings, ‘Eternal Traveller’ is a man who ties bird to his back and peels off both his mask (culture) and horn (bestial). ‘Man’ is ascending the dawn of pain. ‘Man’ is riding bitch in dream ground.  ‘Men’ are fighting for sugarcane. ‘Man’ scrolls like a baby, mindlessly. One can easily read the contrast made by all these paintings with the ‘lady in the toilet’ or ‘lady playing ball’ or ‘mother feeding the child’ genre of quite soothing gentle sensuous and cordial paintings of Ravi Varma.

“By studying again and again what I see in Ravi varma’s work is a rare vision, a precarious one. It can fall into a very ordinary level if the creator is conscious only of the appearance of what he paints, not of the inner spark. In my view Ravi Varma created figures to express this inner enigma. In his best works i repeatedly see this. His mind was a vast world where atma of Gods and demons were invited to reveal them. Yes, I am a shishya of the Ravi varma school and have no fear to acknowledge that.”

Ravi Varma’s enigma lies much in his very paradoxical Art practice. Shuffling the rarified privileges offered by his time, he simultaneously pleased many levels of cultural tastes that otherwise would have never touched each other. His engagement and flexibility with all available modern machineries was the visible will power behind it. ‘Culture’ might have been a strategy for him to project an individual identity in the context of colonial domination. But for an artist like Gopikrishna located in the post-independent scenario, certain ‘beast language’ as against the decaying edifices of culture was another strategy. So painted here is actually not a man’s or woman’s world.

Gopikrishna envisages a biological metamorphosis in drafting his human forms, devising ‘the androgynous’, considered deviant in modern context. The idea of deviance is caused by an inner human problem created by the values of a ‘cultural moment’ that enforced privileged exclusive artificial schemes of ‘gender’ on human lives. It covered much of human sensuality, not fully communicable in real terms. So ‘distorted’ is the only option. Even when one seems to do the illusionistic schemes of ‘real’ with at most accuracy and wonder, the deviance and failures happening in it ultimately suggests a world that is not fully paintable but transformable. Ravi Varma had left that possibility for posterity and Gopikrishna took it up.  
“I began painting in 1982. An attraction towards the vistas of the inner consciousness was my first, leading step. At a certain point in my adolescence I chose to become a painter. This selection made all the otherwise ‘negative’ circumstances of my life beneficial. My loneliness, introvert nature, scarcity of relations and friendships, stubborn principles all combined well and became the wheels for my travel”

 A ‘beast language’ (beasts coded with counter-cultural meanings) is easily identifiable in him through the very missing of any identifiable ‘other’ in that pictorial scheme, striking contrast to the system (woman or nature coded with cultural meanings) of Ravi Varma school.

4

Persistence of memory: an in-lay of identifiable spaces

“I had an aversion to all human references and timely concerns. Early work is mostly of a different world of different beings.”
Some works in 1986 called ‘benign forest’ and ‘family’ present ancestor trees with ‘animal-esque’ world that communicates ‘human’ sentiments through awkward gestures.

Figuration of man-like forms occurred by early 90s. Man (with striking deviance so that they project sexual ambivalence like in Jingling Bells -1999- where the ‘man’ running has one supple breast) living among animals in jungles is the recurring theme, so to say. The birds are often tied to men or trees. Their beaks are tied as if to keep mum.  There are various kinds of human-like communication, mostly suppressing or piercing gestures, occurring between his man-like people and the bird-beast world. A swan’s beak can act as a spear across a human’s cheeks (‘Swan People’-1990) while immersed in river water inhabited by beautiful swans. There is interesting cross reference of personal ‘totems’ in this world. Big single eyed bird is one like that. Swans, parrots, single mouthed animal and self portraits masquerade in Gopikrishna’s intimate bestial system.
This could have remained still in the idiosyncratic world of expressiveness and nothing more. Over the years, something that might have strongly worked for his ‘success’ (in terms of access to the pedestals of Contemporary Art) is the peculiar ‘eye’ he devised through an in-lay of civiliser’s eyes (like that of ‘company paintings’) and survivor folk’s spirit of directness (like bazaar artists and Kalighat paintings ) merging into this bestial scheme. That is also an informed linguistic route he traced through socio-cultural transits not only in India but in west.

“I am these days trying to revive my father’s works. Looking at the drawings that time, feel like seeing Alberti’s perspective studies...They had that quality. Perspective was in high demand at that time in drama sets. The mastery of those works is wonderful. That mastery had no place in the method of teaching that followed here.”

The perspective space was intended to be real and undisturbed in Ravi Varma paintings, though later in the popular culture that was dispersed into much xeno-real uses [6]. Gopikrishna though expresses an immense reverence to Renaissance perspective, did not seem to incorporate that special scheme as such in his works. His frankness to the problematic of temporal fixity (at an irreversible time) of himself as an entity caught in the middle of civilizing processes of human mind, was so fully explicable  once recently incorporated into a multi-layered pictorial language. It is because he could now come out of the fixed terrains but retain it critically and more effectively.

A revival of ‘backdrop visualising’ happened, not of perspective per se. It reminds those drama stage set designers whom he first saw as ‘artists’. But now the backgrounds of his paintings are transformable from sentimental to artificial to surreal propinquity. He apparently recognised a certain sense of theatricality that was shared in the entire oeuvre of colonial artistic expressions as one can identify through Ravi Varma, Bazaar art, Company paintings or vignette works of many vernacular periodicals in and around him all the time.

Then the whole ‘bestial paraphernalia’ of Gopikrishna could occur on a set stage of landscape, often in garish tones though mellowed in its intonations. The ‘men’ are characterised by their vocations like ‘cloth seller’, driver, ‘frog catcher’- as a mimicry of our anthropological engagements in productive systems from memory, evocations of particular human productive acts and methods no longer in use. Some imaginative situations and vocations are also devised allegorically like ‘conch collecting’ and ‘last flood in Travancore...’  This happened when Gopikrishna acquired a trained ‘eye’ outside of his bestial scheme. It is a frank admittance of painting as an act of ‘seeing’ while ‘expressing’.

This is yet another philosophically charged situation that many Contemporary artists sensitive to the historical shreds in micro-cultures of Art they identify themselves with. Rarely some stand so stubborn like Gopikrishna. Many youngsters work this out as flexible ‘in and out’ game today. Those who are not bothered at all of this historicity of one’s practice simply project their euphoria of ‘success’ depending heavily on Art market functioning. Those who are bothered of the plurality of contexts and meanings, in which one is actually in, definitely reinvent historic times, a very productive aspect of Indian Contemporary Art now.
Lot of references to calendar idioms, medieval manuscripts and street culture of India are visible in this decade’s many leading painters of India. As Gopikrishna’s pictorial language also suggests though in a different way, there is something in common with the mass painter’s consciousness of ‘Fine Art’ and some artists’ revision of it today. They share a common eye that flexibly looks at the other ‘within’, ‘out there’ and ‘around them’, always transformable in nature energising their schemes of both inherited eyes and assumed blindness at once. As Christopher Pinney observes, the experience of India in which certain characteristics of the colonial state engendered a tenacious gulf between the mass of the population and the political elite.
Since Art as a discourse today assertively shun ‘cultural schemes of political elitism’ of any kind, this ‘structural split’ becomes visible through dedicated artist-individuals. In one sense they may look or even declare themselves as ‘timeless’ because they are too sensitive to time factor and can inhabit in many times at once.

Notes:

1. Dr.J. Devika (‘imagining women’s social space in early modern Keralam’, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, working paper 329 in Center for Development Studies. http://www.cds.edu/download_files/329.pdf) speaks about the late 19th century phenomenon of emerging English-educated class of people beginning to review the existing social order, ideas and institutions in sharply critical terms. Though this reading public gives enough scope to stress the increasing circulation of newspapers and magazines in Malayalam, such reevaluation took place also in hitherto lesser noticed spaces like ‘reading clubs’ and ‘debating societies’ as well.    They were mostly groups of modern-educated men gathering to discuss topics of general interest. Vidyavilasini sabha and Bhashaposhini sabha were some amog them. ‘Chalai reading club’ and ‘Puthan chandha reading association’ are mentioned as felicitating V.Nagam Aiyya on his appointment as officiating Diwan of Travancore. Highly verbal society was forming. With his head to think and hand to actualize thoughts, a vision from above the social realities was regarded as a powerful position for the modern educated male ‘reader’, ‘writer’ or ‘entrepreneur’. Woman is an allegory or symbolic figure of knowledge- a goddess represented by a body clad in ‘modern’ attire, like diffused by Ravi Varma.
2. Born in 1907, trained under Nanadalal Bose in shantiniketan and later in Madras college of art and craft and then headed Annamalai University Fine arts department for 20 years, K.Madhava menon had strong convictions about protecting his cultural ethos of 19th century from the ‘ravages’ of so called modernity of 20th century. Believing that modernity is totally alien to oriental spirit, ‘his is a neat well-integrated world of beauty peace and sanity where man is in perfect harmony with Nature’ (as described by art writer A S Raman in a monograph published by Lalit Kala Academi, New Delhi). Disillusioned by the hatreds and hypocrisies of Modern Art World, he had chosen to retreat to an idyllic rural hermitage in picturesque Kerala where he lived with his family untroubled by and contemptuously indifferent to the unseemly goings on in the art world, as informed by A S Raman. He would be a much senior predecessor to Gopikrishna in some sense of estrangements.  Unlike Gopikrishna, he had extremely straight graphic sense of nature. Though a declared anti-modernist, Madhava Menon could not craft the spirit of a critical language as he was in practice engaging in the day’s sentimental affairs with nature, in effect going much in relation with the dominant modern idea of aesthetic pleasures of ‘man viewing nature’. His attitude was ‘aesthetic’ though the extreme graphic techniques of his painting differed from all major artistic practices of the time.
3. In his ‘Social History of Art’ (vol.1) Arnold Hauser describes the ‘Gothic’ situation – “when money economy of the towns threatens the whole feudal economic system with extinction – thus : Living in an age in which a personal relationship to the land was looked on as the only full justification for a man’s existence, he resides upon a plot which does not belong to him, which he does not till, and which he must at any moment be ready to leave. He can share privileges enjoyed by the nobility alone, but he has to buy them with money”. Pp 198-99. It is also observed by Hauser that in the thirteenth century however, the town bourgeoisie is by no means negligible as a social group. From that time on, it stands as the tiers-e’tat in the forefront of modern history and leaves its own characteristic marks on western civilisation.
4. ‘Legend of Khasakh’ a landmark in the history of Malayalam novel by O V Vijayan was made a legend in readership throughout a generation of 1970s, the time Gopikrishna was maturing into his life’s decisions. Ravi, a young man researching astrophysics decides to land up as a teacher in a school in an interior village with primitive landscape people and dialect. He, a carrier of modern education was encountered with doubt from within and outside. The novel is haunted by a beast world of terradoctiles mythic creatures and hurries. Ravi is suspended spiritually in a sinuous system but evoked by timelessness of nature and its inhabitants around him. The novel fills each situation and each word with an alienating primitiveness that estranges the ordinary physical existence of words and the objects they refer to. It was strangely artistic too. Those reader’s visions trying to enter into these estranging emotions evicted through words, will be distracted by the familiar ‘pictorialism’ that can only graft that which is familiar and ordinary. A particular art must have been demanded by this visionary imagination that it makes all ‘ordinary situations’ and bodies sublimate into abstract symbolic communication.
5. Robin Jeffrey, a scholar of matrilineal societies, especially Nairs of Kerala, discusses the ‘light and dark’ sides of the radical changes that print brought into histories across the world in an article ‘The three stages of print – testing ideas of “public sphere”, “print capitalism” and “public action” in Kerala’.2004, peer reviewed article available in internet. Positive reading of this transition has always regarded literacy and reading as liberating slaves, turning subjects into citizens and further creating the conditions possible for a democracy. Literacy and the consumption of print are also often taken as the key indicators of ‘quality of life’ in a society.   But there was also a persistent equation between technological progress and cultural decline. 
6. Christopher Pinney (Photos of Gods, Oxford University press 2004, pp31-34) derived at the term ‘xeno-real’ to mean the form of colonially authorized realism that circulates outside its framework of organization. The idea is that ‘despite great colonial euphoria about the transformative power of observational rigor combined with the inculcation of linear perspective, popular Indian art (re)translated these concerns into new hybrid forms that can be thought of as a kind of Indian ‘magical realism’ as Pinney is arguing on the printed image and political struggle in India.