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Beyond the ‘Magic’ of Making

Mumbai based art writer and cultural commentator Abhijeet Tamhane, in a catalogue essay contributed to the solo show of Niyeti Chaddha-Kannal at Art Konsult Gallery, New Delhi, says that Kannal’s works might be seen as a re-discovery as well as a subversion of our understanding of the fractal, a term hitherto used for indirect representations generated by a computerized process.

The personal space in geometry gets explored without a grid as Niyeti Chaddha-kannal 'sits down and works' on another blank sheet of paper. There are no pre-ordained ideas about images that might colonize the paper. Each line and segment is a negotiation for settlement. With the subjective tool, the Memory, a physical, objective world is to be reclaimed. The very impossibilities of the process are the domain of an artist for Niyeti.

The self-image of an artist as one who deals with impossibilities does not fascinate Niyeti, though. The only claim she makes about her work is that, it is 'personal'. It might entail some conceptual innovations (that inform the idea of 'impossibility'), yet the idiom of 'weaving', the value of sincerity and attention to the smallest acts, is what drives Niyeti to continue her work. To quote her :
The friction that you sense between the paper and the nib when you draw a line is exciting, it might be the same white paper that youhave used so many times before but still it is a new surface, a  new
space that you start carving into to build your thoughts.

All this, in the age of computers! Is it a recluse that she celebrates with the Modernist media as she navigates in the postmodern, deconstructed visual situation where 'it is not easy to deny the rhythms of architecture' and 'tensions between spaces' are commonplace? Or is her decision traceable to the politics of computers itself, experienced in India after 1995? In India, computers came as marketable product. There was a miniscule, elite institutional network that enabled its students to explore computers for creativity or research in their chosen field. Most other educational institutions did not use computers as a tool. It was some informed professors/non-institutional facilitators that introduced students to some creative practices that a personal computer can enhance. Niyeti remembers how she, as a post-graduate student of Printmaking (at MSU, Baroda), used the available computer programs to attain precision in composition. The dominance of 'market' and 'availability' makes it almost frustrating for artists from South Asia to use computers. While this might sound an undue duplication of facts, for many, my point is to understand the recourse to ‘the magic of making’, the regeneration of value of hand as an extension of the mind, in the light of this frustration.

I propose to look at Niyeti Kannal’s work as a ‘work of art in the age of hand-made fractal’. While drawing attention to the ‘recursive self-similarity’ of the fractal, I would wonder why recursion is not understood as persistence of artistic activity. To be sure, I am not looking at the ‘occurrence of a fractal design’ in each of Niyeti’s works. A chain of deliberate subversions and negations like the use of paper instead of canvas, black-white or subdued colour tones as against a colourful painting are present in Niyeti’s work.

Further, Niyeti’s statement: my work is not scientific or cerebral but emotion is not a sole driver here… expression on the paper is an amalgamation of emotion and thought might look like a complete disagreement with the talk of the fractal. I still argue that the body of work might be seen as a re-discovery as well as a subversion of our understanding of the fractal, a term hitherto used for indirect representations generated by a computerized process.

To look again at the indirect representations, the abstractions in Niyeti’s work would mean a re-reading, a deconstruction of the ‘magic’ of making.  A fractal can eventually be ‘liked’ for its visual presence but that is not its sole aim. The process and a negotiation with the given data are valued more, where a single geometric pattern would form uneven, irregular shapes and surfaces. We cannot get rid of the work merely by sensing some ‘magic’. This body of linear work, instead, would invite us to read the conversation that the artist might have had with the paper. A single conceivable ‘shape’ here, is the space between two parallel lines! The fluid ‘shape’ defies a constructivist definition of squares or triangles. It is a deconstructed space where emotions and some intellectually decided moves reside.

The ‘representation’ might have been informed by anything like ‘lone windmills along the highway, a cold snow field through an oddly stretched net, a crumpled piece of paper or folds on a piece of fabric .’ The memory of something seen last hour or in childhood, all populate Niyeti’s work. The formal intrigues that she senses in the world around her are re-lived when she works. Her choice of visual data is from within, and the retrieval is selective, based on the consistence with the present form. Modification of the visual data is a function of form as well as memory.

It is not the choice of primary visual data, Memory; but the treatment, the process of retrieval. It is the present moment that is discovered personally that is finally shaped in the works.

There can be straightjacketed modernist ways to look at Niyeti’s work, too. These ways would lead us to think of the formal or conceptual similarity between Agnes Martin and Nasreen Mohammedi vis-à-vis Niyeti. While a modernist critique of Martin and Mohammedi has polemically positioned the two women artists as ‘Classicist’, the same logic cannot be extended to Niyeti. The Ascetic negation and the longing for perennial perfection that was the base for Nasreen’s and Martin’s work may not be the raison d'être for Niyeti’s work. As Niyeti’s work evolves, it might make room for human imperfections. It might accommodate colour, though in subtle hues. The sensibility would remain, but the directions may change. What remains is the ‘fractal’ process that informs our present. We might see beyond the ‘magic’ of making, to sense the negotiations of a deconstructed space.

Notes:

1. all italics are qouotes from Abhijeet Tamhane’s email interview with the artist, circa January 2008
2. The last paragraph has an obvious reference to Geeta Kapur’s essay in the limited edition catalogue, ‘Nasreen in  Restrospect’, 1995.

(Essay courtesy Art Konsult and Abhijeet Tamhane)