Reworking on humanity’s lost and found keys: N S Harsha

Humans marvel ‘Art’ for its rarefying qualities. What if ordinary acts and chronicles of lesser human chores re-orient this marvel-establishment for better reasons? The moment we score high on the ‘activities’ of art / life (rather than ‘objects’ of art/life) we underscore all kind of ripped apart categorical importance of both art and life. Privilege is then getting re-aligned on human dynamics rather than on objects, icons, style, technicality and other institutional fetishes of art and life. ‘acting out’ inventive sequences of looking, reading, portraying and drafting, human beings generally acquire capability to deal with various traces of intimidations involved in everyday life as ‘artist’/ ‘viewer’/ ‘reader’- that quintessential ‘social animal’, otherwise quite suppressed or minimised in the wonder-machineries of nature and culture.
By the end of 1990s, when part of an art world started running behind exhilarated images peppy colours, mediatic chaos and other adrenaline rush, there was an artist N S Harsha labouring on and on, scribbling painting colouring drawing illustrating and showing forms of human beings who eat sleep come and go around him. It is not that he was alone in doing this; perhaps that essential idea of human figuration in Art from the beginning of humanity will be the context in which such a task germinates in an artist’s scheme. Still, one can surely put it here a little historically specific. There was already a ‘place for people’ [ 1 ] in ‘Indian art’ in the art-student ambience of N S Harsha in early 90s but figuration was all the time too much appropriated by certain ideological projects to truly ignite an ‘art world international’ (in the sense, an art world of possibly anywhere). Though one can very well locate Harsha now within the tradition of ‘figuratives’, unlike the predecessors he is not simply ‘figuring’ people, neither their prescribed fact nor their imaginable fiction. He is initiating humanity’s lost acts of doing, looking, gazing, glancing, sensing, feeling, telling, showing, playing, moulding, soliciting and illustrating. All these acts are so well ingrained in the ‘common-man’ traditions of church goers, temple visitors, travellers, school goers, river crossers, grocery shop owners, tea-vendors and so on. They are engaged in activities in their own terms, also ‘believers’ in a sharing of their labour and know-how for collective communal good. ‘Artists’ or ‘scientists’ when placed and coined as high-profile specialists, they are very less acquainted with such ‘believing’ and ‘activating’ capacities in inter-communal practices. But painters, illustrators, sculptors, performers, carpenters, potters and masons were good believers and activators. These communities of different profiles are generally able to cross their borders with humanity’s re-designed (not duplicated in any case) key at any point of time. That is also a potential aspect of life in any ‘lesser milieu’ with respect to geographical /cultural status of a person.
This ‘Up Close and Personal’ is looking at one such major designer of those keys of humanity currently available in Contemporary Indian Art. It is difficult to make a comprehensive document of Harsha’s oeuvre within the scope of this essay, because it has too many layers to do it satisfactorily. He has broad different practices like Studio work, site-specific installation works and workshops or one may call it community projects. I am trying to focus on some representative aspects of Harsha as a contemporary artist and read them my way.

LEARNING art

Born and brought up in Mysore, Harsha in a quite ordinary childhood didn’t know of great ‘Art’. There surrounding were lot of communal and ritualistic celebrations with colours forms pictures and cut-outs; also a fund of illustrated magazines and comics that his father who was working in a tea shop brought to him. Like in the case of anybody reared up in provinces, in his small-town milieu, there was an experience of ‘man in a crowd/community’ with shared values, struggle, skills and mirth, not ‘an individual feeling’ spiralling up by way of claims of intellectualism. Except for Mysore Palace, nothing of high art really became a cultural spectacle in his early life. Machineries (the institutions, objects and community) of modern art were not part of daily life. One doesn’t get large exhibitions coming to one’s vicinity. But the context was very literal and instructional as in the life of a school going child with lopsided interest for pictures telling stories of the world.
I went to art school just because people around and myself believed that I had this ‘skill for making pictures’. And painting was the only popular or even known activity of art in my circles. Even when entering into the art school (Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts –CAVA Mysore) I didn’t know what is print-making or what is graphics or what is photography. Painting was there as a ‘department’ in that college, so I thought to take painting for my course. There was nothing so spectacular about it all. I was very interested in drawing and life study and very much engaged in such usual art student’s regular pleasures.
Like many of the regional art institutions in India, CAVA was at first (started in the first decade of 20th century as) a technical institute and almost by the end of the century, in 80s, remodelled in the lines of a major art institution located in urban ethos, in this case J.J.School of Arts, Mumbai. By early nineties, CAVA got a host of vibrant young generation faculties to teach there, some of them (like Alex Mathew, Asokan Poduval Vijay Bagodi and N N Pushpamala) virtually bringing in the spirit of the Fine Arts faculty of M S University Baroda. There were other people like Ramdas with much of a ‘Kannada orientation, and Ullas Panchgiri trained from J.J.Mumbai. It was ‘a pretty boiling and beautiful time’ as Harsha terms it as many youngsters from major pedagogic centers of the country converged at CAVA for teaching or practicing. Continuing art studies in MSU campus in Baroda after that seemed a natural extension. Meanwhile an influential teacher in print-making department of MSU, P D Dummal energised Harsha and offered him his print-making department to explore. But he left print-making after a stint of a year, again to resume with painting because he could not relate with some technical things associated with print-making. There he found Gita mehra and S G Vasudev offering him support and scholarship.

LOOKING (at) picture

In the history of many cultures, there is a recurring sway of invested intellectual values separately for verbal and visual media of expression. From the acts of reading to acts of picturing, cultural values oscillated with double standard. Reading books is a powerful tradition. Looking at painting (as an essential or inspiring copy of nature) is also a very powerful tradition. Between these two, there lies a host of ambiguous interfaces of verbal and visual expressions always with altering power points. Harsha or any Indian artist from a small-town context for that matter, has to definitely encounter this unless and until he/she doesn’t totally migrate in search of art and assume a fully ‘urban’ profile. In the lesser town ethos, one is exposed to certain complex visual and verbal values that can either put one in trouble or in the broader pathways of creativity that has but no guarantee for equal recognition without exclusive realms of literature or visual arts. And for those small town eyes and minds unexposed to ‘great art’, every picture- from textbooks to calendars to cinema notices – appears nothing other than ‘art’. Such eyes and minds generally act with eyes and hands on pictures seen around. And they may read books ‘foolishly’ too.
In an excellent study of human race’s passion for books and reading Alberto Manguel discusses somebody called ‘the book fool’. One who loves sumptuously illustrated books was regarded as one of the seven ‘book fools’ [2]. Love of painted images was even regarded in renaissance humanism as an insult to wisdom. Reading the book for its pictures and not so excited for its doctrines and other content was in many cultural contexts denoted as the lack of an ‘intellectual’ faculty and of course hinted at simply ‘an eye and skill’ that might be accommodated in an ‘art-context’ but not really in ‘Art’.

For some reasons in school I was not good at technical subjects like science, though at a later point I did pretty good amount of science. In my college books and school books, I always start from the last pages, because last pages will have lot of different drawings and all that picture stuff. Many things happened in the last pages, you know. First pages are normally very subject-kind of things. So they were not my first priority in looking. My father brought me a lot of comics. They gave me the whole idea of imagery figure making. I had a real good collection of children’s comics. But can’t say I read everything for their stories but pictures. That is how I recognised my natural landing up in an art-context. (Harsha in ‘Up Close’ Conversation)

‘Power of looking’ is often instrumental in practicing social hierarchy and private pleasures. Act of looking always had importance in the occupations of common folk while ‘reader’, the essential intellectual climbs up to isolate himself from the crowd. In the course, the reader gets a special ‘cultural vantage point’. So book was an easier post for ‘high’ cultural values to creep on and develop its murky bushes. Even when pictures existed with words and its practices of culture, in a literal-context (in magazines) than an art-context, picture and its making and looking turned ‘secondary activities’.  But one may notice that there forms a difficult interface of these powers –of looking and reading. That inevitably filters into the making of a totally different context where we locate an artist like Harsha emerging from a relatively provincial Indian ethos in the age of globalisation.

STAINING the wall

One sometimes uses mediums and surfaces out of chance and circumstances. Even then, the chance inventions are not always followed seriously by many. Trends and traditions of privilege woo one to so many creativity blues. During his post graduate times in Baroda, Harsha used lot of distemper and stainers for painting, like a wall painter or a muralist. By chance, lot of materials of this sort were left out after a generous mural commission for a local hotel (a decorative project basically) he did in the final year of MFA. On the other hand, he couldn’t at that time paint in oil, for one reason it was costly, for the other reason he was allergic to the thinner, turpentine used as diluting medium. 
So he literally was playing with distempers and strainers, very unconventional medium for an artist. The whole things were chaotic for an artist in his formative years too. But for a well trained student good at life-study and other regimens, Baroda with its spirit in early 90s for assemblages and new media experiments was again a beautiful context for all such experimental chaos. Painting was no dead medium and ‘experiment’ was not an enforced alternative of any ideology or something. Different unexpected kinds of paint on the canvas happened very naturally. It was not a shift from oil painting (‘traditional’ medium) to something else (wall paint a ‘kitsch’ medium?).
“That time though my teachers were accepting my playful expressive takes with such media, they were also quite a bit sceptical. So they suggested me to do some oil paintings too”
Wall and wall paints were not any particular ‘high’ or ‘low’ profile media or surface for painting then for its shape or scale or context. But Harsha perhaps integrated such experience very beautifully at a much later stage in his site-specific projects like ‘Cosmic Orphans’ (Sri Krishna Temple, Singapore).

TELLING story

Every doing has tellingly ingrained paradoxes. So is Harsha’s ‘charming nation’ series. In one of the paintings in the series ‘a museum goer’ is included. For a middle class Indian, museum going is not a habitual tradition but part of an enforced acculturation. Harsha painted ‘On my way to the museum’ in the ‘Charming nation’ series. The whole series projected the discomfort in an ordinary Indian’s day-designs filled with his/her stories of appropriating ‘modern’ situations. In India many colonial buildings were eventually transferred from official’s residential uses to offices for public instructions and transportations. Museum was but conveyed as a building for ‘high act’ approachable for general people only as part of their casual touristry. Objects inside the building evoked the mixed feel of wonder, fear, mystery and benevolance. The roads to the museum were but familiar and free-movable and evoking a feel of natural light and splendour. Both the buildings and idyllic landscapes were photographed and featured in many vernacular periodical magazines as wonders signifying civilisation-habits. But those sleeping idyllic roads were antithesis to any civilising habits of architecture in towns. Yet they were comfort-zones for an average literate-Indian. But there was huge difference between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the building. It was difficult to contest or patch this difference. Interestingly ‘common man’ always existed aligning with strong establishments of spirit (and of materials)- like religion and family. There are scope for unwittingly expressed literal contestations with values of the new and the old, tradition and modernity. There is equal scope for mediations too. A new age artist like N S Harsha also figures in supposedly one of the strongest establishments of spirit today, art. He literally contests ‘the charm of nation’ advertised and going around him (remember our ‘India Shining’ campaigns of the last parliament elections). He literally shows his truth with no restrain of time and space or medium and identity. Artist can write on a painting just as a writer may draw his concept. In the work ‘On my way to museum’, as if from an old sack of memory he takes out images of mother milking cow, figures with musical instrument- typical of aristocratic culture trainings (looking like a version of Ravi Varma’s galaxy of musicians), farmer (a typical father-figure of village life), man in black suit (typical other-figure of village life) accompanied by man in hat and kakhi pants (typical ‘overseer’?)  every body in a red-stained marooned room.
‘Charming nation’ is a marooned series. The colour and figures speak the pun clearly.
‘Smoke goes up and smoke goes down, your search for me is always on’- title of a work takes the tongue of God. Smoke is an important part of religious ritual in India and elsewhere. There are pictures (tapestries) too used as part of rituals. Apparition voices are so important for a religious mind, for artist too. Because he is part of those curious minds who marvel things depicted and projected onto a sky-like screens or white washed walls of a gallery. Smoke may look like clouds when done as if on a Tibetan ‘Tanka’ or a Pichwai curtains or an over head projection of an LCD in a dark room. Everywhere things are taught and demonstrated in a group. It is the shape – square - of a projection of narratives (of religion or knowledge industry) in a group that concerns the painter, it seems. The actual transience and real permeability of knowledge and memory like ‘smoke in a ritualistic community’ is also hinted at. The wry humour part of it.  
After all, shape is a typical painter’s cognitive discovery.
Be it picture or apparition, they are instructional aids in a consistent belief system for a painter or a priest. Some say that N S Harsha is a laborious ‘story teller’ in Contemporary Art. But that explains the minimum of what he does with stories and their telling. His works offers eye-pulling contact, but evokes both ‘the reader’ in you and ‘a look-er’. Wisdom-line is that ‘reading the picture’ is at once a tradition of looking too. That has more engaging and pulling effect than entering a make-belief magic of a painting. That has a tongue in cheek dramatic quality. That shows a farmer hunchbacked by his suit-clad master -‘other man’. That pleads you to ‘come see my mother India’ in a bloated voice / colour.
Bloated colour is a voice. It is nothing but a painter’s typical discovery with water, brush and moving of paper according to the felt reality of a chance.
People holding banners are generally tools for a demonstration to which they may be party or at variance with or at fleets of absolute ignorance. They need not be what they are holding. But in the marooned rooms of manipulations, school children in the paddy fields are tools just as over head projectors, picture books spread sheets and maps are tools for instruction- that ‘They will manage my hunger’ as the title of the work goes. There is a crane so white and cute just flittering or resumes it flights after a short pause.
Flying cranes. That is a painter’s sign of beauty in any dark room of life.
An Indian mother is supposedly a heavy-duty material, if not nut-cracking sort of. She has stories for generations of sons who go out and make a living. N S Harsha the painter, is a son. He is an artist who constantly left his place and returned. He did not do great migrations in search of art or making of a living. Did he feel the great tidal waves or murky darkness or giant elephants or devouring fires of art and he faced like a school boy? School boy goes out to ‘learn good things’ (art). He learns things in metaphors and diagrams out of home. At the end of the day, school boy has home and mother to restart his question and challenge for the next day, ‘What are good things (arts) mama? As the title of a watercolour panel shows.  All because school boy is an artist too?  This is an ‘illustrative’ painting.

Illustration of life? That’s a painter’s duty for the laymen eyes

FANCY situations

Exquisitely graphic and illustrated watercolours of Harsha demonstrate a new way of relating man and society. The charm of this attitude is that it is open to paradoxes. Many of his watercolours are testaments of India’s rural and township lives that very well speak do and engage the urban blues of existence. Each segregated person trapped in regular rows and columns within the picture frame, be it as part of people seated on chairs or on mattresses on floor or queuing up in a rescue operation or crossing of river or anything. However they are involved in really ‘fancy’ situations. Like much endeared clowns in circus (political democratic circus too) they are often featured in slapstick comic situations.
On looking at his painting ‘melting wit’ I felt like singing a kid with no kidding.
Dance n’ run, Fly n’ run,
Bounce  n’ run n’ fall in the pit
Of  a ‘melting wit’.
There is suggestive of a moral paradox we feel on a picture-frame and deep inside as a society that floats with rumours manipulations and exhortations to which it can not really associate.
When an artist is not ready to leave one’s nostalgia for the ‘human’ acts, he paints it with such a daunting humour sense that leaves such paradoxes unexplained and true for anybody to associate with. One can do it like an Indian as N S Harsha does. An artist like Amy Cutler features it as a woman living in feminist era to unwittingly show that ‘women are still in the forests doing their laundry but all of a sudden they have an electrical fan under their skirts to help them’. (interview with Ana Finel Honingman for Artnet magazine 2004)  An artist like Marcel Duzama does it like a character designer who catches animals and humans at the cross roads of stories and international politics. 
Fancy situations are a discomforting interface of fabric and fabrication. They are pretty useful to revisit like a human being on any of our much discussed, settled, and bored ideas of nationality, gender and morality.  

GAZING pictures

Other than CCTV cameras, there are ‘contemporary’ ways to address the issues of visual surveillance of our society. Simple act of looking is a surveillance strategy for any source of power, of King or parent or ‘male gaze’ or police gaze. When a picture is looked for more than needed time, that looks back at you. It is the same with human beings. And when human beings are looked upon as a category of ‘participants’ as in a democracy-event (public demonstrations of speeches) or in a mass marriage or in a communal feast, the participants of your exhortations look back at you with silently conveyed mix of feelings. Harsha amazed the art world by his laborious panels of crowd.  engaged among them while exposed from within the enclosures of seats – chairs / mattresses / pathways - in rows and columns essentially demonstrating their activities like following listening sleeping and eating. I am referring to the works like ‘Come give us a speech’

 That is an experience of anybody who can not pull eyes from pictures and people. Picture and people will look very vulnerable. But that will also point to the onlooker’s vulnerability because any ‘onlooker’ is suddenly made aware that he/she is part of a crowd or community. One is getting engrossed in a ‘renewed unusualness’ of a crowd while watching the canvas, ‘a sight that doesn’t need much of sophisticated preparedness to watch them’.

DOING with people and art

Harsha acts out many ‘doings’ with paints, pencils, paper, materials of sorts, pictures and people. On a common minimum ground, people can associate with whatever he is doing showing and initiating. Harsha has a sustaining interest in doing community projects with school going kids. He associates with science labs experimenting alternative possibilities. It is also collaboration at one stage supported by shifting sensibilities of some alternative artists collectives like Khoj in India. 
My workshops with kids started off with the problems I found ‘to teach’ art to students, as I got some teaching assignments back in Mysore. I simply didn’t know how to teach art, you may teach skill rather. So I started off with an experiment with kids. Actually it all started with my work with a local theatre repertoire known as Rangayana’. It was a fantastic movement where I could design a platform where kids come make and experience art.
Question comes, what is an ‘art project’? Is it a well designed proposal of art objects, materials and management from beginning to end? Is it a bandwagon that travels from one metro to the other? Can it be something that evolves with situations? Can it end with any outcome in qualitative / quantitative measure? Can it end with no outcome? Can it afford to be ‘unproductive’? These are fairly larger questions for discussing in this essay. I just want to say that Harsha figures in some specific situation of Art scene across the world that opened up fairly new vistas of alternative practices that give lot of importance to artistic process as a social being, not simply to artistic goal.
Anupam Poddar the art collector could welcome all kinds of experiments that are generally rejected in the normal art scene and as part of his invitation I along with five other artists worked in Sirpur Paper Mill. It was just to work with the pulp and look at the factory where we can spend some time making something, not necessarily some ‘sculpture’. I made something which was not necessarily spectacular. But Anupam still has it, I think. I accepted invitations to work in all kinds of situations like in a science lab or in a sports ambience or in a religious place. I want to bring art into all kinds of situations. I strongly believe that art can happen anywhere. Even in Baroda I went with a friend to a local jail to spend some time and work with them. All these things collectively works for me.

There are traces of years of this ‘doing with pictures and people’ in our history (just as in this artist’s life) of reading and ways of seeing, looking, delighting, moving around, keeping, placing, possessing, gazing, writing on, adding on, panelling, dreaming with picture on bosom etc. I sense a ‘reader with a private world of people’ through Harsha’s many water colour works on paper. He, the artist (possibly you, me or anybody with some habits with pen, paint, words and make-sense processes for that matter) appears to be that cool ubiquitous fellow, moderately concerned with one’s skills and who apparently doesn’t have plans higher than one’s own height or deeper than one’s own heart or brighter than one’s own midnight’s oil-lamp. He will be a happy reader-respondent-dreamer growing up ideally in a ‘literate-media sensibility’. The materials of popular gatherings (cultural expressions as we used to translate it) where we may locate and follow him might be pretty loud to understand him but. He the artist is somewhere else while being there in the public gatherings, because he articulates people’s / his own silence.  And he, the ‘reader with a private world of people’ is actually a ‘common man’ idea but removed of any heroism cast on it recently in our popular media [3]. He takes care not to let lose the common man into the rhetorical mess of life.
As a contemporary artist, Harsha surfaced with ‘much obscured and much valorised common man’ very frankly at a very apt stage of our cultural and political impasse.

THINKING idea

Art sometimes need afford to be ‘unproductive’, it seems.  There is this holistic attitude in Harsha’s projects that includes everything – people objects and events - for a participating marvel. This attitude doesn’t perhaps heal their inherent problems like supposedly in the case of a sacred icon or Art fetish object. But this attitude doesn’t worsen the situation as it resists conventions of representational structures. The picture is just a frame and not a space for stuff to inhabit. Anything can enter in the frame/system. Anything can leave the frame/system too. Like ‘ common man’, things have no special takes on the frame/system. But each one responds to the other one on an intimate and basic response scheme. Fortunately not a neatly streamlined philosophy.....!
Harsha’s association with  Science labs, Switzerland is an ongoing one. ‘what exactly’ he does is an issue that only future will sort out. It is as exciting as that.
In 1996-97 I started going into this local science lab of a medical college in Mysore where there was a medical exhibition. I went there just amused to draw this babies cut half and other such stuff, a strange moment for me. later in 1998 I worked with my cousine who is a bio-chemist. I made pieces with heart, head etc. But we were not conscious that we were doing art and science collaboration. It was pure fun that i was excited about the media and they were interested in that I can share some ideas with them. Based on all these experiments, I was referred to one of the Artists in Labs programme. They invited me to be part of their experimental milieu. They put an artist in a science lab for six months. There are different kinds of seminars. We have an opportunity to associate with scientists. All are trying to bring two different tendencies into a shared platform. But then there are hundred different elements, are you illustrating science, are you kind of ethically questioning science or are you bringing science to the pool to make social comment? All these different trajectories open up. I was in the Nano-technology lab and I was overwhelmed by the reality there. There were rabbit with an eye on the tongue etc. I lost interest in making anything like a sculpture out of that space or to draw on paper or anything. But I managed to take four hundred and fifty microscope photographs. They are all lying with me. But nothing has happened. I haven’t come out with sculpture or installation art or any such thing. I will design an event based on the knowledge as I gathered, I can say. It is not a closed event. It is still there. An ongoing interest. It is about a thinking system that we bifurcate for our comfort, at the same time we need to bring them back together for our comforts again. It is an exercise as an artist as a thinker”

PAINTING temple-roof

The new insight into the orientalising clichés of the colonial times surfaced clear in Harsha’s  ‘cosmic orphans’ project with Bodhi in Sree Krishna temple in Singapore Biennale 2006. One suddenly felt what an amazing act is to come eat and sleep in this world. They are pretty inlays on temple top of a branded city Singapore, after all! The ‘sleep’ is portrayed but ‘work’ is poignantly suggested as tools metamorphosed into equipments for emotional balance with each human figure. So nothing in that work is loud enough for a cultural value judgement based on some stray civilising / development blues. But there are visible graphic of the invisible, suggesting that there are different kind of human blues in life, not necessarily ‘civilizational’. What he has done is not a direct critique of any scholarly stereotypes of colonialism and Eurocentrism. But this is an artist’s ample claim to life in all its incongruous acts, including sleep! Sleep can become a poignant theme.

Sleepers are mischievous escapers from the street bustle of a brand-city?

“Despite being asleep the figures awaken a dialogue with the luminal spaces of the temple’s most sacred architectural features and the exterior surroundings of the urban landscape. In contrast to the temple’s ornate sculptures, which are all devoted to Lord Shiva, the identity of Harsha’s sleeping figures remains abstract. Resting pilgrims, tired labourers, snoozing guardians or reclining souls, the figures do no more than allude to the world from which they remain blissfully unconscious.” (Sharmini Pereira, curator of Singapore Biennale 2006,  writes in the catalogue)

When new priorities are set forth

As I found great interest in N S Harsha’s hugely crowded works for some years, I also chanced upon a different kind of ‘history book’. It was ‘Intimate history of Humanity’ by Theodor Zeldin. [ 4] .Unlike usual history books, priority of that book was thoroughly shifted to people with varying concerns and stories of intimacy to explain histories that were otherwise supposedly made up solely of ideologies institutions scholars and individuals. For example, it told personal vendetta of misfortunate Juliette or Alicia the girl of ‘daily-life cult’ or Antoinette Fouque ‘whose strength is that she knows what she thinks’ or such many. They deeply contained familiar narratives of many cultures and languages. They appeared not strange to me in spite of their locations of life unfamiliar and unidentifiable for me. You or me can but find our human shades in it. The content of the book varied like ‘how humans have repeatedly lost hope and new pair of spectacles revive them’, or ‘how some people have acquired immunity to loneliness’, or why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex’ or ‘how humans become hospitable to each other’.  Zeldin’s intention of designing such a book was there somewhere through the pages:
‘When in the past, people have not known what they wanted, when they have lost their sense of direction, and everything appeared to be falling apart, they have generally found relief by changing the focus of their vision, switching their attention. What once seemed all-important is suddenly hardly noticed anymore. Political ideals thus collapse abruptly and are replaced by personal concerns, materialism succeeds idealism and from time to time religion returns. I want to show how priorities are changing today...originality of our time is that attention is turning away from conflict to information. the new ambition is to prevent disasters, illnesses and crimes before they occur and to treat the globe as a single whole...more attention is being given to understanding other people’s emotions than to making and unmaking of institutions.’ (page 12)
That was a pointer for me while entering into N S Harsha’s world too. He appeared to be an artist who was kindling a new interest in a quintessentially artistic theme, the human figure. It is regarded the lowest common denominator for emotional communications. In art it is often presented as unexplained visual text but at the verge of evoking ‘explainable acts and beings of the subject’. Paintings of human figures (‘as looking’ and ‘being looked at’) could inscribe feelings of ‘literate reading from pictures’ onto the very pictorial scheme.  Many of the ‘figurative’ artists share an assumed casualty and humility in their delineation, hence contesting the restrained gravity of any ‘upper-class’ code of meaning in art. That also at once hinges at identification of the viewers, an ever-extendable audience for art. It is an ingrained affair with the mass because the figurative artist interested in ‘people’ invariably becomes active as a ‘man among men’.  Yet, figurative artist’s attitude is also an ‘assumed’ humility because these art works are still circulated among a small rarefied group who share the codes of that marvel-machinery called ‘art’.
Further, in the age of globalisation, artist looks more like a designer, re-establishing the long lost contact between art and public. As Bruno Munari characterises,  artist casts off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men, well up in present day techniques materials and working methods. [5] Without losing his innate aesthetic sense he is able to respond with humility and competence to the demands his neighbours may make of him’.  And one can see that centuries back, demand for humility surfaced generally in hermitages or monasteries where ‘the icons of holy saints painted by the hand of a gifted artist’ never gave easier ways into the illiterate faithful’s grasp. There were but picture-books to help them, like ‘Bibles of the Poor’. Those picture books were nothing less than inscriptions of ‘literate reading from pictures’. That was an essential human act for communication that eventually got sunk in the re-birth miracles of illusionism. 
Today, with rigorous lighting, coloured walls, mounted pieces of spectacular achievements, inspirational investment potential, even with scandalous surprises of speculative potential and with artists-people sharing the feel of restrained greatness and mutual admiration for wonderful skills they possess among themselves, art world looks like a permeating hermitage. For many today, art is practically like a religion with a shared community feeling, the rituals of which artists and other members of the art world feel happy to observe. It is of course not a layman’s space but of men who are conscious of their admirable qualities. Meanwhile there are people who try their euphoric best to subsume and cancel all narratives and close encounters of human life found outside of this sort of monastic feeling. Fortunately there are also people hungry for stories and other sense-makings activated in a better manner. In the latter group, the craving for ‘alternative futures’ is pretty well there in the underground of their ‘common-man instincts’ while they are generally practicing as makers and viewers in art galleries. That cross section of people in the art world are much sensitive ‘literates’, (not much of ‘specialists’) all too willing to participate in the political dynamism that contemporary art takes on its extended audience today. So working in loose guilds of artists, an almost religious ‘work force’ of 21st century Contemporary Art at various locations of the world, ‘literate figuration’ has similar political nuances of many contexts of the past and present. Like for example, in all kinds of picture readings with human sagas attempted in early monasteries...in illuminated manuscripts...in printed books...in those diagrams and scribbles found at schools...in public urinals...in streets...in paddy fields with bill boards...in tree-temples...in desolate rockscapes.. in science-laboratories. In short, today there are many extended communities of artistic doings. Of course the whole act of ‘literate figuration’ has today achieved a quite different orientation.
I believe, it is in these trans-disciplinary instincts of both man and his institutions that an artist like N S Harsha figures in. He engages in multiple spaces associating with disparate communities and frameworks. Sometimes it looks unpredictable for him to plan in advance and chart communities for his association, because they are not an outcome of any intentional following of preconceived ideas, but experimenting with and internalising the doings of mind. It can be a group of school students, a science lab, a temple or any such spaces where human beings figure through their essential activities.
As for the artist community, of late, Harsha, winner of ‘Artes Mundi’ prize - 2008 for ‘politically charged works’, has affected a sort of ‘wisdom soothing’ of an ‘Indian artist’ in ‘Contemporary Art’. Our favourite political issues of alienation – like self and the other – are apparently suspended for the time being! We have to stop thinking in clichéd identity-frameworks of global, local, western or Indian. No need to bring in ‘Karma’ or any other ‘philosophy of India’ either. Investing too much of ‘formalism’ on him will also be a task of too much scale.