Version True - Uma Nair

What Ails Abstract Art In India?

`The more limited the means, the more intense the expression.’
- Soulages

Shilpa Gupta’s video photography may reign, Ravindra Reddy’s figurative sculptures may frissonate through art's multiple worlds, but the soul wants answers, and the question is- What has happened to abstract art in India? Both Christies and Sotheby’s Asian Art sales have Chinese abstractionists that soar into millions.

China’s king of abstraction is artist Wang Huaiqing. Mesmerizing are his abstract works that have a purely Eastern leitmotif but a sense of spatial constructs that are truly experiential rather than mere superficial strokes. While his ideas were taken from structured spaces his translation was the division of form and pure space. Huaiqing works only with two shades-two colours black and white. `In my eyes black and white are in fact colour,’ said he.

The highlight of his technique is his application of brown tones that seem somewhat fleshed in. Interestingly he uses Western techniques to portray and Eastern signature. Why is Huaiqing important in the world of abstraction? Because his works seek a depth of intensity-interestingly the Chinese counterpart of Samadhi-San Mei which refers to the reading and understanding of Buddhist scriptures-in a three fold path-focussing, meditation and retaining in the mind.

Let’s come to abstraction in India. In India it’s more a fashionable exercise rather than the essence of poignancy or poise. With no offence to any of the artists in abstraction, the only Indian artists who meet the ground of grasping the `Samadhi’ as it were is Chennai based Palaniappan and the white fleecy canvas creator, Seema Ghurayya.

Abstraction is more than an essentially egalitarian endeavor, accommodating and forgiving but deeply penetrating and probing. At its simplest, it is far from banal functionality and applied art, a concept that has special resonance in a country like ours that boasts of tradition. At its broadest, abstraction is more than mere design-design is a component of public policy, and seeks to bring an esthetic sensibility to the messiness of human industry. At its grandest, the notion of abstraction conjures a utopia of what is truly sublime, uplifting the graphics of gravity and translating it into elegant and elusive elements of experience.

What will be the role of abstract art -- "realized exclusively ... by pure pictorial means," to recall Wassily Kandinsky's definition -- in the future? The only way we can answer the question is by looking at its history and psycho cultural significance of it in the art world.

The emergence of abstract art is supposedly the decisive, innovative event in 20th-century art. As many artists, critics and historians agree, the change from "confrontation with nature" to "abstract creation," demonstrating the artist's "individual attitude" as well as "visual acuity," .

In any case true abstraction involves diminution of complexity, standardization of means, loss of exaltation -- even a kind of expressive sterility or coldness -- and, perhaps most crucially, the replacement of spiritual suffering and aspiration by `intellectualized boredom’. A market driven by prices is far removed from definition of boredom-in fact it is shorn of boredom. At Tate Modern the Rothko show is drawing in people and the silence in the rooms is reverential. `It’s pure, it’s the root of the understanding of gravitas,’ said a banker who needed the mental purge.

In short, pure abstract art involves the perceptual idealization of the unique qualities of the visual world .We seem to be left with grotesque misunderstandings of a unique quality, distorting and degrading it into a trivial sensation. In fact one of the reasons for the Raza fakes is the level and degree of superficiality in colour. Abstraction is more than mere triangles and circles-it is the essence of experience.

Jackson Pollock put it best once, in the New Yorker, "Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. A reviewer wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. That was a fine compliment, although he didn't know it."