|
Sculpting Pillar to Post
Valsan Koorma Kolleri’s latest solo show ‘Pillar to Post: Re-valuations’ at Bodhi Space, Mumbai is intended to generate a discourse on the materiality of elements. Taking a quick trip through the early works of the artist JohnyML tries to contain the essence of the new works in this cover story.
Each material that has been put to use in the creation of a work of art, has a myth of its own that quite often we as onlookers tend to overlook or neglect. Brought into the context of art making, materials take part in the formation of a linguistic structure and in due course of time lose their procedural complexities and become a part of the common parlance in and through which a work of art is analyzed, articulated and understood. The embedded histories of a material are over-written by new cultural narratives that for the reasons intrinsic to art discourse prevent the viewer from understanding the very material itself. Valsan Koorma Kolleri, in his new solo exhibition titled ‘Pillar to Post- Re-valuations’, reveals the history of the materials that he employs to build up his sculptural ensemble.
Considering Valsan’s oeuvre so far, one can clearly notice this artist treats his materials and forms with a sense of historical continuity. He extracts the materials that have lost their identities through functional permutations and combinations, from their temporal contexts and brings them together in order to generate organic structures, where the materials and the resultant forms keep referring back to their origins and all those myths related to their genesis. This discourse of materials seen in Valsan’s sculptural journey, complete with the artist’s own peculiar elucidations, though apparently seems to be exotic and devoid of the immediate socio-political references and critique, in fact engages the immediate with the remote and the artist consciously unveils the elective affinities of his choicest materials and forms with the collective mythologies and verifiable histories
Language of myths, language for articulating art and the language of history are strangely and interestingly juxtaposed and unified in Valsan’s works. The oral retelling of myths that renews itself constantly within the logical and illogical cultural constructs, tactile formations in art that give away clues to ‘read’ it as a text and finally, the linguistic structures that are selectively used for building up the historical narratives are at once employed by the artist for revealing the ‘unexpected’ and ‘curious’ that occur during these linguistic juxtapositions. Hence, Valsan’s bronze sculptures are not simply artistic forms made out of the enduring material, bronze. In fact, by calling them ‘Bronze Age’, Valsan excavates the whole history of bronze as a cultural invention and all those changes facilitated by this invention. Identifiable forms in his predominantly abstract works, in a way lead the viewer to a wider understanding of their relative narratives and the very narrative of the material itself.
Unlike the present set of works brought under the general title ‘Pillar to Post’, the works done in the show titled ‘New Clear Age’ (2006-07), Valsan imparted an airy quality to the solidity of Bronze. The intricately meshed up copper/bronze wires, embellished with glass beads together make structures that while accentuating the solidity of the material, bronze, like a surprise introduce the very lightness of it. These works become containers of the natural elements. The myth of eternal mothers, the fierceness of energy producing houses (nuclear reactors) etc are articulated through the negation of the solidity of the material. For the artist, it is not the ‘Nuclear Age’ but it is ‘New Clear Age’ where everyone is aware of everything but fails to turn the awareness into a vision. The new coinage of the familiar (nuclear) into the curious becomes a deliberate artistic ploy.
This longer preamble about the earlier works of Valsan is necessary for understanding ‘Pillar to Post: Re-valuations’. Most often Valsan pleasures himself and also entertain others with ‘re-articulations’ of the familiar. Operating purely from within the commonly understood structures of familiar languages, Valsan makes magical inversions and subversions of the familiarity. As I mentioned elsewhere in this essay, even these subversions look quite familiar to the viewer/listener but the artist’s intention is to make them aware of their inability to realize the knowledge into vision. He calls the artists as ‘artwists’. The words ‘art’ and ‘twist’ are brought into a single subversive articulation and this subversive act imparts a new materiality to the notion of ‘artists’. He facilitates this happy subversion through distancing, distorting, accentuating, displacing and destabilizing the relationship between the word/material and its intonation/meaning. Hence, ‘Pillar to Post’, a familiar phrase loses its connotative meaning of helplessness and posits itself into the new context where it achieves an ironical status. Definitely not meaning ‘helplessness’, one could read out anything from this phrase as it is supplemented by the syncopated word, ‘Re-valuations’. Revaluation is an already existing word and its connotative meaning is quite suitable not only to the artist’s purpose but also to the viewer’s demand for a textual clue. However, it is not the evaluative purpose that becomes important here. On the contrary, what Valsan would like to say is about ‘Revolutions’.
Deleting the word ‘from’ from the common phrase ‘from pillar to post’ and supplementing it with the subversive ‘revolutions’, Valsan establishes a new context for his sculptures, which are made out of latterite blocks culled from the quarries of his native village, Patyam in north Kerala. The subversive reading of the language is again brought into a level of mere literalness, in which the images of pillars, posts and revolution get established. This literalness, with its ironical takes on socio-political and cultural situations from which both the artist and the viewers operate and the very re-evaluation of revolutions, echoes the artist’s intentionality; an urge to impart the ideas of pillar/tradition, post/status and revaluation/revolution through the very materiality of medium, the latterite blocks.
Latterite blocks have always played a pivotal role in Valsan’s sculptural oeuvre. During the last three decades, he has used this material for making site specific works. In ‘Pillar to Post…’, for the first time Valsan brings it into a gallery context. Latterite stones are constituted by sediment soil strengthened by time and elements. The traditional architecture of Kerala heavily depends upon latterite stones as the main building material. From the making of wells to boundary walls this material plays an important role. However, the socio-economic and cultural changes have made people to move away from this organic traditional material to the modern synthetic building materials. A material that once played an indispensable role in the lives of the royals and commoners alike now has been pushed several rungs down in presence and status. Valsan approaches this material for his artistic and architectural purposes with a sense of historical revoking.
These latterite works are not done for raising the lost status of the material, nor do these works carry a missionary approach. On the contrary, Valsan’s engagement with this particular material shows his intentions to open up a history, a thread of events, a chain of significations etc, not through definitely resorting to compulsive narratives. These works are about the very forms that latterite as a material can contain. Shaped and polished blocks of latterite are placed one on the other without using cementing or adhesive materials, depending totally on the material’s heaviness to hold on to each other, and they together form geometrical and curvaceous structures. As seen elsewhere, in these forms, Valsan plays with the familiar and their displaced meanings. A wall with a serpentine movement at once looks like a maze and the boundary wall of a traditional well. However, it is neither a maze nor a well, it is a form that connotes a movement controlled by the material, a space articulated by the shape and an experience imparted by its palpability that beckons the onlooker to follow the movement while allowing the hands to satisfy their urge to touch the shape and movement.
The work that carries the endless spiral on its body, one that contains a passage with a natural wooden arch with a fossilized mushroom on it (Valsan calls it Mash Room), a vertical pillar with a tribhanga twist, two monumental but minimal faces placed on platforms with mirroring surfaces, a set of minimal ‘house blocks’, an outdoor work with a hemispherical space flanked by carved round pillars and independent columns of latterite blocks perched with egg like forms are the major works in this new ensemble. They are like words with displaced meanings and twisted articulations. Simultaneously they connote the material’s historico-mythical usage in architectures and the legacy of it passed on to the successive generations. At the same time, they, from within attempt to erase all these connotations and try to become elemental formations in space and time.
Aptly, Valsan identifies this new set of works as the unified field of five elements. This explanation of the artist is not aimed at making the whole thing look like exotic and distanced. On the contrary, these works being the fusion field of natural elements, unlock the vault of myths and histories connected to material. Patyam being one of the politically volatile places in Kerala with lot of violence and aggression in daily lives, Valsan tries to deal with the micro-history of latterite that has witnessed the raising of several (flag) posts in the name of political parties, preparations for revolutions through killing resolutions. It happens against the backdrop of a macro history of all what is sedimented, strengthened, excavated/quarried, used and finally passed on to the realm of symbols and narratives of myths and history. If at all the artist intends a re-valuation of the past, this re-valuation happens through the revocation of the material and its additive narratives.
The photography series that depicts the close up shots of barks, woods and foliages, and the two works with beaded copper wire mesh provide a symbolic support to the textual narratives generated by the latterite works. They are more like works that crossed over from his previous projects, including the New Clear Age (2006-07) and the ‘Shilpa Padhyam’ Biennale (2007), New Delhi. Valsan’s approach to the world is ‘artwistic’ (art-twist-ic) and through these twits he unveils a world quite near to us, rendered stereotypical by familiarity. Valsan twists the familiarities to give the world a new perspective and meaning. |
