• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Probabilities of Occurring

Baroda based artist Arunanshu Chowdhury recently had his solo show at the Sumukha Gallery, Bangalore in collaboration with the Guild Gallery, Mumbai. In the catalogue essay JohnyML says that  the ability to capture the historical sense of probabilities is what goads Arunanshu Chowdhury towards the making of his paintings.

History is a schematic discourse. It uses certain linguistic systems prevailing at the time of its inscription and the shift in temporality demands modifications in these systems of articulations though the historians often resort to the canons that have been set by the preceding historical discourses. It is not the events that the historians generally record but according to Eric Hobsbawm ‘the probability of it occurring’. Falling in the gray areas between the causes and effects of occurrences the probabilities become markers that define history as a discourse. Here the temporal shifts are singled out and articulated vis-à-vis the experiential intensities and urgencies of the historians, that would take the form of analysis and critique. In this sense artists are the historians and makers of a visual culture by their constant engagement with the changes and experiences in and around them. While some artists vouch for the tested and proven language, others indulge in encapsulating the experiential in newer forms through skilful redeployment of the images and symbols.

An ability to capture the historical sense of probabilities is what goads Arunanshu Chowdhury towards the making of his paintings. For Arunanshu, history is repetitive in nature, giving hints to both the rulers and subjects about the tragic designs through which the human ‘progress’ is laid out. Continuity of events, negating the linearity through overlapping and auto-juxtapositions necessitates and forces erasures and blurring of memories. This blurred vision of the immediate as well as of the past helps the human beings to embrace power structures that subjugate them through extreme indoctrinations. Historians resist these erasures, extracting the symbolic out of the quotidian and providing the human race with the pointers to interpret if not the present, at least the past and the future. Cyclical and repetitive nature of history in fact results in qualitative changes through the quantifiable analysis of events. Arunanshu, like a historian passes through the contingent events, looks for the areas of overlapping in order to exemplify the uncanny nature of ‘progress’ and by disputing this imposed systemic progression masquerading as the desirable value of life, he contemplates on the historical probabilities that resist erasures.

Images that Arunanshu uses in his paintings are local and global at the same time. On the one hand they re-present the personal experience of the artist evinced by his innumerable journeys in foreign lands and on the other hand these images spill over to the realm of the symbolic order, transcending their experiential veracity to gain universal appeal. Bombs fitted with target sensing appendages for precise hit, monumental chairs from museums and barbershops, concrete boulders for preventing land erosions, auto rickshaws, graffiti, embroidered clothes, documentary photographs, mirrors, household utensils, religious sculptures, broken toys, moveable knick-knack shops, fire tending machines, ladders, images from the collective art historical memory and so on constitute the image repertoire of Arunanshu.

The images of chairs have always played a key role in Arunanshu’s paintings. A rocking chair that claims a key place in the artist’s domestic space finds its way into his paintings at regular intervals. Flaunting a curious title, ‘Every Chair has His Day’, this ordinary rocking chair at once functions as a stand in imagery for domestic power tussles for occupancy in a frivolous fashion and also transcends its materiality into the symbolic by its ability to represent the generic power structures, whether it be socio-economic or politico-cultural. In the new set of paintings this chair gains a new authority and vigor to articulate not only the symbolism of power but also the subjectivities that are erased by the implementation of power.

The dominant image of a barbershop chair sends out an eerie feeling as it is majestically placed against a grey background, implying an abandoned saloon interior. The erstwhile presence of human beings is implied by the graffiti writing on the wall, which are decipherable and illegible at the same time. Arunanshu makes a surreal intervention by spreading out English alphabets on the floor as if they were the discarded human hairs. A flash of historical memory conspicuously transform this majestic chair into an ‘electric chair’. A thing of beauty turns into an object of horror through this subversive act of finding a historical probability of annihilating the subjectivities through ‘electric beautification’. It could be a memory of the holocaust, torture chambers, Kalapanis and the memories of all those tools that erased the subjects that revolted the power of the chair. Then the jumbled alphabets and the graffiti on the wall become the surrogate presence of those vanquished through historical cleansings.

The graffiti writing in one of the chair paintings screams ‘Fuck the Cool’. Also it shows simulated versions of the graffiti often seen in the subways of Europe and America. Besides, there are some charcoal markings that resemble the attempts of a child towards exercising his right to create an image (in fact Arunanshu’s five year old son Ravin has done some of these graffiti like drawings, which later the artist retained in the completed painting). The recurrence of graffiti and the barbershop chair facilitates an interesting co-optation of the history of the black resistant/liberation movements. Barbershops and the subway walls being the predominant sites of articulation for the Black Americans and Black Brits, through their conscious replications in his paintings Arunanshu accentuates the layered histories of rebellion for social justice and also a resistance against oblivion and forceful erasure of memories.

These two paintings have to be seen/read along and against a diptych that shows the images of two auto rickshaws, one from India and the other from Cambodia. The Cambodian auto rickshaw is a decorated version of Phat-Phat, a diesel driven mutant vehicle that used to ply in Indian metros, especially in Delhi till few years back. And the Indian auto rickshaw is a Bajaj rear engine three wheeler fuelled by the polluting mix of petrol and kerosene. These vehicles drive themselves to the realm of the symbolic as they are painted against images that are symbolic of ‘resistance’. On the left hand panel, a group of concrete boulders dominate the space. These boulders prevent the encroachment of land by the ferocious sea waves. An auto rickshaw is seen on the way side, almost dwarfed by the size and weight of the boulders. On the right panel, a series of portrait photographs of the Cambodian rebel fighters who fell prey to the vicious rule of the dictator Pol Pot. Their hagiographic features are not evident and all of them look submerged under the hazy strokes of time and distance.

The static nature of the boulders and the documentary photographs is however challenged by the movement embodied in the auto rickshaws. Arunanshu, from the vantage point of art, shows how events and images of erosion and erasure are overlapped and juxtaposed in due course of time. While the boulders resist/prevent soil erosion in nature, the documentary photographs, though they are hazy, prevent the erasure of memories. In both the cases the triumph of human resistance is celebrated against the history’s internal dynamics of submerging and overlapping. These are the pictures of the brave hearts that resisted the imperial incursions. Here the auto rickshaws lose their material presence as representative vehicles and become symbolic graffiti that celebrate memories’ perennial struggle against oblivion.

Conceptually, Arunanshu creates a counterpoint to his chairs (invested with all probable and possible historical meanings) by painting an ideal and larger than life chair in ‘Welcome Carpet I’. This chair, embellished by designs that simulate Turkish carpets has figures from western art history for company. Reminding the viewer of Joseph Kosuth’s ‘Chair’, Arunanshu’s Welcome Carpet chair stands for the ideal chair, perhaps the chair of GOD. Could this GOD be Goods Of Desire? At the same time, it is illusionary, attainable only through retribution and redemption. Apart from the recollections of the art historical visual junctures, the artist does not invest it with the meanings of resistance. It is a field of ideal desire perhaps, the artist’s last refuge to preserve memories as the chair in the painting too carries a sense of right to museum and preservation.

Destruction and denial as the constituents of history play an important part in Arunanshu’s creative thinking. It is ironical that the construction of history is quite often based on destruction and denial. Destruction of material and memory, denial of freedom and rights are achieved by the professors of political terror through cunningly devised tools. These tools take the shape of precision bombs in Arunanshu’s works. They curiously look like winged and buzzing balls of the Quidditch game in Harry Potter novels. The artist paints these bombs in their falling trajectories from an aerial angle. In ‘Welcome Carpet II’ (that ironically rings with carpet bombing) and in ‘Falling For and Now’ art historical memory (of the ceiling paintings of Sistine Chapel and abstract expressionist works of K.C.S. Paniker) is collated with the ferocity of the bombs. In the same way, he jokingly paints a series of fighter jets with a Hitler looking figure precariously perched at the nozzle. Juxtaposition of this image with a warrior like equestrian figure (as seen in traditional/folk Persian, Turkish and Indian paintings) instills the poignancy of conquest despite the arrogance of the warlords depicted in the painting.

Arunanshu re-introduces abandoned machineries, toys and dysfunctional objects in his paintings in an attempt to reconstruct a narrative from the stains left by the process of erasure. These abandoned objects are the remnants from past that are immediate and remote at the same time. The immediacy is implied through the images like a hand driven sugarcane juice machine, cycle rickshaw, knick-knack selling shop, broken toys etc. In the same picture plane, at the horizon the artist paints the fortresses that were once the seats of human power and engagement. Bringing the past and present, which remain only as inscriptions, here becomes a pointer towards the human catastrophe caused by war and destruction. However, the artist’s optimism is seen in the depiction of fire tenders that like the concrete boulders prevent things from total erasure. Also, the ladders from these fire tending machines grow like patterns on the pictorial surface indicating the reconstruction of structures and meanings.

Between the depiction of the active agents of history, historical destruction and manipulation, and the images of resistance, Arunanshu makes three paintings that could be called the mute spectators of the historical process. A votive figure of a bull in a crouching posture, mirrors hung from a graying wall and a few utensils hanging from nails constitute this series of mute witnessing. The votive bull, extracted from its religious context looks like a silent sufferer. The framed mirrors that reflect nothing look vacant and sad. Instead of playing surfaces for narcissistic reflection, they become hollowed frames muted by the absences of things and beings. Similarly, the kitchen utensils with distorted reflections on them remain self absorbed and sad. The extrapolated graffiti writings are the only markers that animate the surface. These paintings evoke the feeling of the residential debris after bombing; the only evidences to tell a tale, but rendered mute.

The eclectic adoption of images by Arunanshu from world cultures as they revealed to him while traveling needs to be seen as an aesthetic ploy that helps the artist to universalize his concerns while addressing the issues pertaining to history and its erasures. In a way, he simulates the historical process in the physical construction of the paintings. Surface is created by multiple layers of different materials including cloth and paper and the textures that result in while painting over are retained to exude a feeling of submerging and emerging. The painted images overlap with the textures and graffiti. The final painting seems to be an outcome of the reclamation of images as well as the erasure of the same. Arunanshu Chowdhury does not record events for the sake of recording but he looks for the probabilities of it occurring, as a true historian does.