|
IN TRANSIT
Sudhir Patwardhan: Paintings and Drawings, 2009-2012
Ranjit Hoskote
“Drawing and
painting have been like two poles, counterpoints of my
activity as an artist. The natural movement of the activity
of drawing for me is towards expressive catharsis. To get
into a state where all mediation melts away. And the natural
movement of my painting is towards clear, rational, absolute
truth. Of course, I can get to neither end, as the other
pole is always pulling. So I try and get more of my drawing
into my painting—which translates as becoming painterly! The
apparent contradiction here may be due to thinking of
drawing as linear and therefore clear, and painting as fluid
and messy. But I am thinking of painting as clear, sharp and
meticulously layered, and drawing as aggressive, neurotic.
There seem to be more contradictions lurking here!”
–
Sudhir Patwardhan, 2008
[1]
1.
The Gifts of Momentum
The element of
blur, as a sign of momentum, has come to play an important
role in Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings of 2009-2012, gathered
together to form an exhibition appropriately titled ‘Route
Maps’. Many of these new works have been constructed, as it
were, in transit: both the viewer and the viewed are in
flux, on a journey. The artist, like his ephemeral subjects
and involuntary sitters, works as he negotiates the
conduits, passages and shifting locales of everyday life in
the early 21st century. We follow him as he
explores the contingency of encounter and the precariousness
of cultural assumptions; as he probes the interwoven
tapestry of quotidian reality and the fictive projections of
hope and fantasy. We are at his side as he confronts the
challenging yet also stimulating geographical and
communicative discontinuities across which many of us must
now conduct our family relationships, our friendships, and
our professional lives. With him, we look into a mirror that
is also a porthole, to discover the interruptions and fugues
that can afflict the lifelong production of the
self-reflexive observing subjectivity: that ‘I’ which can no
longer be taken for granted as a secure vantage-point of
departure and return, for it is often as schismatic,
provisional and unpredictable as the world of evanescent
forms and mutable structures in which it seeks purchase.
Patwardhan has
used documentary photography and drawing as preparatory
practices since the beginning of his career, in the
mid-1970s; these feed into his paintings not only as formal
devices for image research but also as conceptual strategies
for the expansion of a painterly repertory. Part recorder of
the elusive moment, part memoirist of his own impulses, both
secret agent and secret sharer, he shoots and sketches on
trains and in airport lounges, on the streets of
metropolitan India or as he savours a view of the Deccan
hills, whether riding on a train to Munich or driving along
a highway to Chicago, or as he shuttles between Bombay and
Thane. His acts of artistic testimony are staged, equally,
across the small-town Sangli or Poona landscape of family
homes, railway stations and maidans recalled from childhood
memory and the megalopolitan Bombay or Thane scenography of
apartment blocks, shantytowns and the glass-walled citadels
of retail commerce. Each of these topographies is occupied
by its own specific local history of struggle and survival,
its calculus of aspiration and regret, which Patwardhan
evokes through an interlocking pattern of details that vary
from the identifiable and comforting to the enigmatic and
disturbing. We are deeply affected by the melancholia of a
portrait hanging on a wall glimpsed in cut-away section, the
exchange of a hand-grip between father and son, and the
heaped pyramids of turmeric left to warm in the sun; yet we
are put on our guard by what is portended, when we come upon
the apparition of a man hooded by a white cowl, a man wading
through a river at night, and a young woman striding as she
charts her path through a tough, unforgiving city.
In a cinematic
interplay of temporalities, natural or architectural traces
from situations dramatised in earlier paintings from
Patwardhan’s oeuvre return to inflect impressions
that he has registered more recently. We recognise in these
new paintings, for instance, segments from the mise en
scene of such canonical works as ‘The City’ (1979) with
its intercut textures and perspectives of café interior,
street and mezzanine, and ‘Street Play’ (1981) with its
spatial compendium of colonial arcade, street occupied by
protesting theatre activists and gloom-clouded textile mill.
Patwardhan’s luminous peopled landscapes, ‘Town’ (1984) and
‘Nullah’ (1985), inspired by Brueghel and situated at the
margin between the metropolis and the satellite town, are
also invoked in his recent paintings through the use of
details or chromatic references.
Recurrent
figures from the artist’s unfolding theatre of predicaments
are introduced into the currents of the present, where they
surface as intriguing emphases among new experiences of
groups, crowds and assemblies. Or, as when he revisits the
scenes of previous artistic or political engagements, the
precipitates of a once-familiar alchemy of viewing and
imagining are now recorded through the barricade of
estrangement. The features of individuals captured in his
impromptu photographic portraits sometimes smear against the
observer’s glass as they are relayed into the complex
machinery of a painting that fuses memory, desire and
exaltation. At other moments, the heads of Patwardhan’s
subjects in recent works are rendered in Muybridgean
flicker-pause motion or fractured into slices of retinal
experience in homage to Picasso’s process of immortalising
his friends and lovers through a simultaneous violence and
tenderness.
In ‘Route Maps’,
Patwardhan’s brush appears sometimes to move faster than the
image it is meant to render, leaving a swirl or swipe of
paint across the picture surface. In consequence, many of
his figures now emerge at the cusp between photography and
abstraction. They are held before us in the amplitude of
their power to stand for a moment of perception, to embody a
human connection between the artist and what and who he is
about to represent. And yet they also point away from
themselves, to the condition of epiphany in which such an
encounter takes place. Crucially, as images claiming a
measure of significance, they point to the structure of
thought and intuition that they inhabit, which is the
continuously self-updating archive of the artist’s
imagination.
*
2. Continuities
and Conversations
The binary of
intimate proximity and expansive distance has underpinned
Patwardhan’s art for longer than three decades. If the scale
and sublimity of the panoramic landscape have held a strong
attraction for the artist, he has also dwelled reflectively
on the domestic interior, with its promises of ease and
consolation and its undercurrents of tension, unsorted
memories and unarticulated feelings. The home, the studio,
the balcony: these become, for him, thresholds at which he
meets presences from the past and figures from the real or
imagined future. In this liminal space, he addresses them in
ways that he may not have considered adopting in normal
life; and indeed, he sometimes meets earlier or alternative
versions of himself here, chancing upon the angelic or the
demonic aspects that lie dormant in the unconscious mind.
During the last
few years, as he has entered his early 60s, Patwardhan has
begun to be absorbed, visibly and palpably, by the themes of
family, lineage, legacy and continuity. He inaugurated his
career as a member of an avant-garde that heroically
developed new ideological propositions for artistic practice
in the postcolonial India of the 1970s; forty years later,
he must accept that he wears the mantle of the establishment
figure. We may imagine how difficult such a chronological
moment could be for an artist like Patwardhan, who continues
to plough fresh conceptual and formal ground even while he
contributes time and energy to pedagogic and curatorial
projects, entering into productive dialogue with a younger
generation of artists and writers. Of equal if not greater
psychological importance is the fact of the artist having
recently become a grandfather. He now finds himself looking
forward and back along lengthening avenues of perception and
empathy: he looks forward to his grandson, growing up as the
inheritor of diverse cultural and artistic legacies, but he
also looks back to his own father, who stood at the bridge
between a tradition encased in custom and a time of
transition and turbulence, when his son would disavow
inherited pieties and map an unknown, untested trajectory
for himself.
Among the
paintings in ‘Route Maps’, accordingly, we find several
evocations of the artist’s family, including the haunting
‘Transmigrations’, a collage of tenses inhabited by his
parents, brother, nephew, grandson and himself in both a
younger avatar and as he is at the moment of painting. In
these works, the artist plays the roles, variously, of
participant and observer, catalyst and witness. And if
Patwardhan’s painterly eye sees, in the same layered moment,
the events and spaces of his own life as well as the
interiors of Rembrandt and Vermeer, this is because his
faculty of sight has been deepened and strengthened by a
constant meditation on the masters of the guild, a wrestling
with the mysteries encoded into their work, the formal
problems they set themselves.
The artist also
continues an ongoing conversation with the work of his
contemporaries—friends and fellow pilgrims from the 1970s
avant-garde based largely in Bombay and Baroda—through this
recent body of work. In the memorable and moving ‘Father’s
Story’, with the artist and his father presented in the
foreground while the city of Sangli arranges itself in a
semicircle around a vast open space behind them, Patwardhan
encrypts references to the paintings of Gulammohammed Sheikh
and Bhupen Khakhar. These traces are to be found in the
architecture of houses threaded together into a garland, the
choice of raw pinks and blues for the walls, and in the
episodes from everyday life inscribed into the scene. Such
conversations, too, act as forms of continuity; in and
through them, an artist constructs not only his private
world, but a world that may be shared with others, into
which others may be invited and, however temporarily or
precariously, be made at home.
Such artistic
strategies are conceptual tools towards the fashioning of a
kaleidoscopic realism in which abstract conceptions,
sensuous perceptions, and the passionately haptic gestures
of shaping and producing are intimately conjoined. As
neurology reminds us, the activity of seeing takes place not
in the retina but in the brain; as a dialectical reading of
history demonstrates, we do not simply accept what we are
taught to regard as real, but instead, labour to impart
reality to what we most deeply imagine and value. This
should serve as a warning against advocates of the cruder
forms of realism, who forget that an engagement with
materiality is not confined to one’s immediate and physical
environment but extends more capaciously to embrace all that
is vividly material to one’s imagination and lifeworld.
*
3. The Body, Its
Destinies and Destinations
The human body
has always stood at the centre of Patwardhan’s artistic
elaborations. During the 1970s and 1980s, when the artist
was closely aligned with a socialist ideology of economic,
social and cultural transformation, he crafted a proletarian
physique for his figures, which responded to the various
stresses and strains of physical labour through its squat
and amplified musculature. Contextualised within the domains
of industrial work, proletarian uprising or metropolitan
working-class life, Patwardhan’s proletarian iconography
resisted the temptation of degenerating into the
stereotypical idiom of figuration associated with socialist
realism. During the 1990s and 2000s, the artist turned his
attention to the body as yoked to labour or ennui, the body
invaded by disease or clinical intervention, the body as
site of competing impulses and therefore performing itself
as hermaphrodite or cyborg.
More recently,
he has observed closely the dynamics of the human grouping,
the mass mobilisation, and the crowd pitched to the level of
incontinent agitation. He is no longer certain, as he was in
his Leftist phase, of the human impulse towards solidarity;
his convictions were shaken, also, by the cataclysmic riots
and pogroms of Bombay in 1992-1993 and Gujarat in 2002. In
his paintings and drawings of the 2000s and 2010s,
correspondingly, he has traced the manner in which a street
may turn into a war zone, or break up into a fluctuating
tapestry of small aggregates woven from negotiation,
argument, query and gossip. These images convey the
incendiary potential of India’s overtly politicised public
life; they make explicit the endemic capacity for violence
that has been nurtured in the public sphere by generations
of unscrupulous political and economic actors, and which
bursts forth at intervals in the form of riots,
demonstrations, assaults and pogroms.
At the same time, these
recent pictorial and political investigations have been
backed up by Patwardhan’s formal interest in the Buddhist
mural art of the Ajanta cave complex, and the pictorial
strategies deployed by the painters of these meditation
retreats in the 5th century AD to assemble large
groups of figures in relatively dark and undefined spaces,
so that the figure itself became the source of illumination
and spatiality. In this context, Patwardhan has noted, of
himself, that he has passed through three distinct phases of
figuration: first, as a spokesperson for a class to which he
did not belong, the proletariat; secondly, as an observer of
the human condition in subaltern as well as middle-class
social milieux; and thirdly, as a participant in the larger
dramas of everyday life, and an investigator of the
histories that inform and colour these dramas.
[2]
Since his adolescence, too,
when he drew figures from the life while observing people
around Poona’s central train station and the Sassoon
Hospital, he has been fascinated by quirks of physiognomy:
in his drawings across three decades, we encounter figures
with misshapen skulls, elongated jaws, and sunken eyes.
Retrospecting on this preoccupation, the artist observes: “I
was interested in how individuals lived this ‘problem of
being human’. I was not interested in actual physical
deformities [as such]. But yes, expression, posture,
grimace, and also distortions were a sign of this struggle
to be human.”
[3]
In ‘Local
Hero’, Patwardhan’s eye fixes on an ordinary subaltern
figure from the vibrant street life of Bombay, set apart by
the flaming dyed plume of punkish hair that he wears as an
insignia: freakish though the man’s appearance is, he has
certainly achieved a momentary individuation from the herd,
a temporary release from the prison of his marginal
circumstances.
In ‘Sainik’, one
of Patwardhan’s ‘train portraits’, a genre he has relished
since the 1970s, he fastens upon a man seated uncertainly in
a train, with a drape either being pulled dramatically away
to reveal him or flapping down to block him from view,
another of those ‘blur’ moments that Patwardhan relishes in
the present series of paintings. This is a man traversing
the limbo between what George Orwell might have described as
the upper working class and the lower middle class, with his
dreams and his anxieties for baggage. His only guarantee
against social uprootedness and cultural placelessness in
the teeming, sprawling metropolis is the militant right-wing
Hindu ideology that is signified by the orange tilak
mark he wears on his forehead, and enshrined in the title of
the painting, which identifies him as a member of the Shiv
Sena, the fascist-lumpen militia founded by the cartoonist
and activist Bal Thackeray in the 1960s, which had turned
into a majoritarian political party by the 1990s, its
original street-fighting leaders having morphed meanwhile
into real-estate developers and local tycoons. Taken in
close-up, so to speak, the protagonists of ‘Local Hero’ and
‘Sainik’ strike us as denizens of that transitional zone in
Central Bombay, dominated by ruined mills and fluorescent
malls, which Patwardhan so remarkably memorialised in his
large-scale painting of post-industrial modernity, ‘Lower
Parel’ (2001).
To any
distinguished secular painter of the body, there comes the
awareness that it must someday be visited in its
debilitation, as its systems of vitality break down before
the eventual fate of extinction. The religious painter of
the body embarked on his career with this knowledge. With
the crucified Christ at the centre of his vocation,
surrounded by numerous suffering saints, tormented martyrs
and self-mortifying questors, Giotto, Caravaggio, Titian,
Tintoretto, Zurbaran or El Greco had no alternative but to
contemplate mortality, especially in its more shocking and
horrifying forms. His consolation, though, was the promise
of redemption and elevation into transcendence; such a
consolation is not available, at least not in its fully
advanced spiritual form, to the secular painter. Among
Patwardhan’s gallery of small heads and figures, we find
‘Sick Bed’ I and II, images of ageing and frailty, the body
reduced to a sagging skin-bag for collapsed limbs, the once
finely tuned machine for living now dependent on medication
and prostheses for its continued existence, thrown upon the
mercy of relatives and the kindness of strangers. Among his
oil-stick drawings in the present grouping of works, also,
we find other visions of the destiny and destination of the
bodied self: the wracked body that must yet climb, as though
every street were a mountain; and the shrouded figure,
nameless and swaddled in white, at once ominous and
vulnerable, clothed in anonymity at its departure, exactly
as it was on its arrival in the world.
Circling between
the solitude of the studio and the sociality demanded by any
engagement with humankind at large, immuring himself in the
archive yet also launching forward on journeys of
exploration, Sudhir Patwardhan has built for himself (and
for us, his viewers) a mobile observatory of human affairs.
The findings that he arrives at in this observatory can
affect us so closely, as the artist sees through skin and
tissue, that we flinch from what they reveal. And yet his
instruments of vision can also carry us into a space of
expanded awareness, in which histories of loss and
repression are annotated, not as a caveat against action,
but rather, to prompt the renewed expression of the human
spirit to overcome the forces of circumstance and achieve a
sense of communion with its lifeworld.
*
References
1. Sudhir
Patwardhan in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote, in Ranjit
Hoskote, The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan,
Drawings (Bombay: The Guild, 2008), p. 25.
2. Ranjit
Hoskote, The Complicit Observer: Reflections on the Art
of Sudhir Patwardhan (Sakshi Gallery/ Eminence Designs,
2004), p. 12.
3. Sudhir
Patwardhan in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote, in The
Crafting of Reality, p. 16.
*
Ranjit Hoskote
is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He has authored
more than 20 books, including The Complicit Observer:
Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan (Sakshi
Gallery/ Eminence Designs, 2004), The Crafting of
Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings (The Guild, 2008),
Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König, 2010), I, Lalla:
The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011), and
Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (ed., Penguin Modern
Classics, 2012). Hoskote’s essays have appeared in numerous
volumes, including Elena Filipovic et al eds., The
Biennial Reader (Hatje Cantz, 2010), Maria Hlavajova
et al eds., On Horizons: A Critical Reader in
Contemporary Art (BAK, 2011), and Sølveig Øvstebo ed.,
Marianne Heier: Surplus (Bergen Kunsthall/ Sternberg
Press, 2012), as well as in the catalogues of numerous
international exhibitions, most recently, Indian Highway
(Serpentine Gallery, London/ Walther König, 2008) and
India: Art Now (ARKEN Museum, Copenhagen/ Hatje Cantz,
2012). With Nancy Adajania, Hoskote is co-author of The
Dialogues Series (Popular/ foundation b&g, 2010). He
has curated 22 exhibitions, including a mid-career survey of
Atul Dodiya (Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 2001) and a
retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala (National Gallery of
Modern Art, Bombay and New Delhi, 2005-2006). Hoskote co-curated
the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2008) and was
curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the
Venice Biennale (2011). |
