Classroom Art and Newsroom Art Criticism

Art, to the average Bengali household means Sunday evening activity. Despite the vast changes in the art field cropping out of a globalized market economy, art, away from the institutional practices continues to retain a somewhat ‘local’ (I mean, the art of the lay public) character in the most intriguing and disturbingly contradictory fashion and needless to say, an under current of the parochial art trends – much after the Bengal school genre - continue to exist in Bengal, as a marginalized practice.

One of the many reasons largely responsible for our narrow visions about art is the overtly romanticized Bengal school. Parents still consider it a vice if their children cannot paint sceneries – a mountain range with the rising sun partly visible and a path bridging the background to the foreground. The pristine landscapes, however uncanny continue to cater the utopian realm we have so far fostered about art ever since the Bengal school is engendered. Parents in Bengal (I apologize for my ignorance about the art of the lay public in the other parts of the country) grossly understand two things – that their children should learn to reproduce in the finest skills the pristine village scenes, secondly, they should be able to copy neatly from their life science books.

Drawing skills therefore, are destined only to fetch better grades at school. The crafts, too, fall in the category a kind of vocational activity, termed as ‘Work Education’. That’s their sole purpose. Almost always, when the student is working marginally under pressure, the ‘Work Education’ project goes to an elderly neighbour or an elder brother, who earns a reputation for best copy drawings and takes care of it all. This seems completely disappointing and becomes more so when we take into consideration what, for instance, the Scandinavian government has done to create mass awareness about its own craft – the traditional ceramic potteries – by implementing them in the curricular at the school level. One needs to know about one’s own root. Unlearning about our own roots perhaps does not earn us much.

Children, living in the city, too, consider it a major failure on their part, if they cannot produce green paddy fields and farmers busy doing their chores. Although the pages of their drawing books are quite often filled with recordings of the environment they live in. The immediate surroundings, the hustle and bustle of city life affect them only meagerly. There are now hundreds of clubs available to localities that run art classes, pertaining art lessons to children on Sunday evenings. The slightly better ones also utilize Saturday evenings.

A second reason is the fact that the curriculum at the school level places art activities at a secondary level. Art teachers at the school level do not enjoy a position that can be considered as prestigious. They do not align with the English, Maths, History, Geography or Science teachers. They are lesser beings, with their roles considered as redundant. As a consequence, a general body meeting at any given school, more often than not witness art teachers clubbed up with the physical training and the music teacher occupying a back seat.

 The ‘teachers’ at the ‘clubhouse art classes’ are not among the educated belt of teachers trained in the visual arts or pass-outs from the art colleges. Their imagination lack individuality and are clichéd from over use of the same ungainly subjects and themes for over decades now –a woman carrying a pitcher on waist or head, a cow walking, a boy following them and mud houses lining the horizon in same static-ness is ubiquitous in any of these schools. The most scaring part of the story is that the pedagogic teacher is too inclined to finding faults with his student, who is almost always under fifteen years of age. The teacher would always try and figure out what is/all that is  ‘wrong’ with the child’s painting/drawing and owing to his ignorance would infallibly make the child produce what is ‘right’ measured by his own pedagogic standards. The child’s own potential therefore, remains dormant and undiscovered.

Visiting the museums, too, is redundant. Teachers do not consider it necessary for their students to visit such places. Drawing from life, too, is out of fashion for the mushrooming ‘local’ art schools.

Another significant and persistent problem with our society (I mean in Bengal) is that we have too many art critics here, who do not have a formal education in art history. Despite their fantastically written pieces, they often seem too flowery in their approach, owing to their orientation in literature (by this, I do not mean to underestimate them for all that they are, and I myself am an avid reader of their pieces). What we have in Bengal is newspaper criticism. A true art historian’s point of view remains almost a far cry and I guess adds to the problem of our ignorance about art.