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The Improbability of Styles
Rollie Mukherjee, a Bangalore based young art historian recently exhibited her paintings in a solo show titled ‘The (Other) Self. Noted art historian H.A.Anil Kumar reads against the common stream of criticism that tried to place her works stylistically incoherent. Rollie’s works are not an interaction between two institutionalized streams, but between the one which is institutionalized and the one which is yet to be institutionalized, says Anil Kumar
Rollie Mukherjee’s paintings and drawings contain a single subject: the improbability of styles. It means that there is no more faith existing in ‘painting’ in ‘one style’. And this, she informs us through her deliberately variedly styled paintings and drawings. It is an insider’s critique, to begin with. Both the highlighted words (‘painting’ and ‘one style’) are the actual thematic concerns of the artist, though she claims it to be a lot more different from it and much more to do with gender issues—feminism in particular. In fact, the actual and the presumed ‘theme’ meet in her works. That sums up to the best experience possible in her works, arguably.
The best thing I like in the works of Rollie--an art historian in the making—is the fact that she treats what is learnt/epistemologically imbibed as equivalent to what is a daily, domestic experience. This is relevant in the context of contemporary Indian art’s relation to the episteme of institutionalization. Therein, learning, for a practicing artist and for someone who learns as a part of a compellation (as an art history teacher myself and Rollie are bound to do) is totally different. Rollie’s paintings address these issues. Or, to be more specific, that is what is likeable in her works, in the works of an art history teacher for whom hermeneutics does not constitute the overall essence of an art work. What could probably be an end to a practitioner of art is an issue amongst other, in Rollie’s works and in the history of an art historian’s problematics, while trying to step into the innocent shoes of an artist. For the same reason, art historians’ paintings are loaded with not only images, but also art historical references, a random criss-crossing of the relation between images from unbelievably varying contexts (Brughel, Frida and Indian miniature painters constantly exchange positions in Rollie’s paintings, across the continents, centuries as well as pictorial politics). To support this argument, recall the works of Gulam Mohammad Sheikh, Anita Dubey and Rollie, next to each other.
Getting back to a possible formal reading of her works, the Bangalore-based art journalism predictably read it from the perspective of stylistic (in)coherence, and considered her works as weak. This, a problem with today’s art criticisms and a possibility in Rollie’s works, can be summed up as below. Her works do not have a specific style. She exhibited her works amidst an artistic crowd—that mattered--and in a city (Bangalore) that had long ago deviated from both painting and specific stylization. However, the presumption that the art of painting and stylization are the nearest points that a media and a thematic skill can get, lingers by and large, by those who are away from it as well as by those who drifted away from it. Rollie’s gesture to paint, to paint in more than one style, to paint in such a way as to prove the involvement of multiple style itself as ‘the’ style, that too to address a subject dear to her heart (about femininity)—is what makes this show noteworthy. The limit of stylization is that anything one wants to say beyond his/her stylistic ability is abandoned. Rollie has solved this technical shortcoming and then, she somehow considers such solution itself as a means to address an issue. The umbilical chord between stylization and a thematic addressing have been constantly ruptured.
Diwakar, who has written the catalogue together with Rollie has titled the show as “The (Other) Self”. The woman figure is the protagonist in the seeming absurd pictorial design for a figure to have a coherent behaviour. The definition of a ‘figure’ as an inevitable part of a style has been given a free run, amongst the ruins of stylistic varieties. The easiest way to read her paintings from this point of view is that the female/feminine/woman whose basic form is an image, sheds off her image as an image, and reminds us of a woman but without the depiction of a coherent woman-figure. Though it is difficult to comprehend the previous sentence, what I meant to say is, imagine the smile of a cat in the mid air being registered in our minds somehow, that too long after the cat has reached the ground. Similarly, the feminine as an (a) attitude, a (b) thought and a (c) desire sheds itself from the enclosure of female figures in Rollie’s paintings. Though there are women of various categories in her works, the women to be remembered in her works are the Frida’s women, Brueghel’s women, the rustic woman, the sensuous women in (and due to) watercolours and forbidden sensuality deliberately brought about by the painterly rendering…
Rollie Mukherjee paintings do not appeal at the first instance, like the way a well crafted show does. However, this is a deliberate design—to make the audience forget that the women images are painted in any particular way, so that the onlooker is constantly wondering about why is she not the way she is in the art of Indian painting of any class, creed, style and school. This wonderment probably shifts our attention—in the best of her works, so to say in a clichéd tone—from contemplating upon women as a painted figure to certain aspects of womanhood itself. I would not like to use the words like crude, spontaneous, intuitive, empirical, moody, aggressively feminist etc., apart from the word stylistic coherence, because this is exactly what her works might be attempting to do at the first place. They might be indicating the convention of visual perception. We have two ways to watch a film or a painting show like this. Get involved in it as if there is no world outside. Or observe as to how the audience gets involved in it as if there is no world outside. As an art history teacher first, Rollie’s obvious choice is actually quite obvious. Her very temporary shift from art history to painting, in parts, by days and months, is an attempt to relocate one’s position when one is actually familiar with the grammar of positioning itself. Its been a rare show for the reason that one looses faith in the institutional hierarchy and differentiation between epistemological streams of visuality. Or, it is like how Foucault differentiates between History of Ideas and Archaeology of Knowledge. Interdisciplinarity, in Rollie’s show, is not an interaction between two institutionalized streams, but between the one which is institutionalized and the one which is yet to be institutionalized. |
