Because Thou Art

Creative Voyage curated by Ranjan Mallik

2011-10-14T21:21:00.001+05:30

You are cordially invited to Inaugural Function of "Creative Voyage", an Exhibition of Paintings at the Lokayata Art Gallery, Mulk Raj Anand Centre, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi on 14th October, 2011 at 5 P.M. I am participating along with eminent and young artists. (See Invitation Card for details.)
Looking forward to your encouragement and appreciation.

Lipsa P. Mohanty S.K. Mohanty
e-mail: lipsapmohanty@gmail.com Cell: 9818236472
www.creativevoyage.com

Creative Voyage curated by Ranjan Mallik

2011-10-13T22:28:00.001+05:30

Sujit Kumar Das & Kishore Roy

2011-10-03T23:06:00.001+05:30

Sankari Mitra & Madhu Dhanuka

2011-10-01T17:14:00.001+05:30

Solo showcase of ceramics and paintings by Adil Writer

2010-10-21T09:37:00.000+05:30

Textured with feeling The Hindu October 20, 2010 SRAVASTI DATTA

Renowned artist Adil Writer uses sand and clay to render a tactile element to his paintings

Meet Adil Writer. He is a renowned Auroville-based artist with an important mission: to bridge the gap between paintings and high temperature ceramics. He knows his stuff and is quick to correct any misconception you might have about art: […]

Sitting on a potter's wheel and throwing clay on it is both a creative and a spiritual experience for Adil. He is loath to categorise art into watertight compartments. “There is no differentiation between art and craft. It's all kalaa. In schools, art and craft are taught separately. We should sensitise young artists that no such distinctions exist,” says Adil.

Adil has had a number of successful exhibitions of his works nationally and internationally.

This month, Bangaloreans can look forward to his solo exhibition “Treasures” which will have on display ceramic works and paintings. An interesting part of the exhibition is that it will feature miniature treasure boxes made of a variety of clays that are “small, intimate objects that want to be held, you can discover hidden secrets within”. You can also “cradle them, turn them around and explore”. His paintings of acrylic on canvas will also be on display. Some of these paintings are categorised as “painted media” that essentially started out as “bad' pixelated pictures on phone cameras, then got edited, later printed on canvas, stretched on wooden frames, and finally painted upon, almost to a point where the original photographic images are past-life memories.

On October 23, a workshop “Fun with clay” will be held. “You don't have to be a potter or an artist to participate. Besides, it's going to be seriously fun,” Adil says with a smile. Prior registration is required. There will be a charge of Rs. 2,200. All material for the workshop will be provided.

“Treasures” will be on display at Gallery Time and Space, 55, Lavelle Road from October 21 to 30 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call: 22124117.

Auroville-based artist - Deccan Chronicle | On The Web October 19 2010 | DC

Treasures, a solo showcase of ceramics and paintings by Auroville-based artist, Adil Writer will be on display at Gallery Time & Space.

How language came into being from the nervous system of the human body

2010-09-24T10:46:00.000+05:30

THEORY NOW by mcb@markcameronboyd.com (Mark Cameron Boyd)

Thank you, Ms. Lipinski, for the invitation to attend the exhibition of Mr. Boyd's work and help panel a discussion related to the show. I would be honored to accept. I am not sure, however, if I would be a voice that would celebrate the kind of approach that this show intends. I look forward to seeing the work myself before I draw any conclusions. In general, though I feel I should admit my own bias: especially when it comes to the topic of Divinity, I find art that is used as a tool of philosophy ends up as limited art and limited philosophy. This begs many questions, I know, like are art and philosophy mutually exclusive, etc. and we could discuss this, but God and art are matters of the heart, for me, and not of the head, and so other faculties of knowing than the intellect are engaged in a primary way. You may know from Nora that I am a sculptor as well as a PhD candidate in Religion and Culture and my work deals in issues of devotion to God, so I feel I could contribute to this discussion from both an academic and artistic perspective. My academic work is based on the thought and legacy of Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), an Indian who was a revolutionary, poet, thinker, yogi and teacher.

Knowing all this (and I am sorry to be so disorganized in my thoughts), if you still would like to have me on your panel, I would be delighted to contribute. Thanks again for the email and give my very best to Nora. Patrick

Dear Mark,

I too am teaching these days, all day on Wednesdays. So, I am glad to get your response and have a chance to reply. It has me thinking more of the connections I see between Derrida, et al. and different understandings of the silence as experienced and addressed in mystical traditions. To deconstruct language is to expose it to that silence that is broken up by words and sounds--by noise. I have more experience in Christian, Sufi and Hindu worldviews of mysticism so I would approach it from these angles. That "there is nothing but the text" is not the experience of those in these traditions, but there is some overlap I think.

The Hindu-based thinker I am writing my dissertation on is Sri Aurobindo Ghose (d. 1950), who has an interesting view of language. He knew Vedic and classical Sanskrit (among about ten other languages, both Western and Eastern) and saw an evolution of how language came into being from the nervous system of the human body such that the meaning and the word used for it were organically connected, where it was not arbitrary but a natural linkage, I suppose totally onomatopoetic. I have been studying Sanskrit myself and one can see there the way it preserves this kind of consciousness in its root words, which can actually feel like they sound and feel like they mean.

Gradually (and this has been the case for most of recorded history in his view) language came to be abstracted such that ideas/meanings had nothing whatsoever to do with the word used and they were linked conventionally. I will leave our conversation for November but I liked very much how you made clear the connection between Heidegger and Derrida. That was not so conscious before for me. I wish you the best of success as you continue to build your show. Cheers, Patrick

A Modern Meditation on The Five Proofs of God: The Art of Mark Cameron Boyd; An exhibition at Salve Regina Gallery, Catholic University of America, November 11-December 17, 2010. POSTED BY MARK CAMERON BOYD AT 4:17 PM

Timeless Deities: An Invocation to the Spirit of the Ancient Mother

2010-06-07T13:14:00.000+05:30

From Joy Roy Choudhury e.aryans@gmail.com to tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 7 June 2010 12:51 subject Timeless Deities: An Invocation to the Spirit of the Ancient Mother

To Shri Tusar N Mohapatra, President, Savitri Era Party & Director,
Savitri Era Learning Forum

Dear Mr Mohapatra,

I am writing this to share a small project titled Timeless Deities: An Invocation to the Spirit of the Ancient Mother- these are paintings albeit symbolical ones that talk about the evolving consciousness in nature and about the cosmic love and the resurrection of it. The series is, of course, inspired by Sri Aurobindo and Divine Mother, it has one central image which is An Invocation to the Spirit that can be checked at:

http://artvantage-uk.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-art-invocation-to-spirits-of.html
The rest includes a. River-Ant b. Zen-Poet c.Grace-Eagle d. Snow-Cow
e. Time-Hen f. Wild-Horse g. Sky-Rat. and can be checked here: http://www.artvantage-uk.blogspot.com/

I thought I should share this with you, hope you like it. Regards

ArtVantage-UK http://www.art-vantage.co.uk Blog: http://artcritique.wordpress.com Blog: http://www.artvantage-uk.blogspot.com/ Twitter @earyans

Pastoral idyll are repeatedly painted or photographed by him

2010-05-16T12:47:00.000+05:30

‘The Making of a Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman – Devi Prasad’: Naman Ahuja from Kafila This is a guest post by Naman Ahuja. Naman Ahuja teaches in the School of Art and Aesthetics, JNU

As we move toward concretising a national policy on culture for a liberalised

India

, we can look upon the period from the 30s to the 60s with historical hindsight. Gandhian, and Tagorean definitions of cultural practice, even in the latter’s cosmopolitanism, was avowedly located in philosophical bases at the grassroots, with roots that stretched via Coomaraswamy and others to the context of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The resulting ideology for artisanship and design was founded in a structure of educational pedagogy which certainly stands buried today, even if its mandate has not been achieved. […]

In her monumental 2005 exhibition at LACMA, Wendy Kaplan argues for a telling of Arts and Crafts history that shows the inexorable link between ‘Design and National Identity’ that arose from the philosophies of ‘Art and Industry’ and ‘Art and Life’.[1] As that exhibition’s catalogue demonstrates, in all countries involved, the idea of ‘the land’ was a potent force; one to be reclaimed as industry and urbanisation were destroying time honoured social modes and relations of production, and destroying also a pastoral (if, as some argue, a ‘medieval’) idyll, and equally, the currency of the Movement gained as the emerging ideas of ‘nationhood’ depended on holding on to some essential place considered the heart of the nation. Tagore and Gandhi both tried to locate that essential ‘place’ in their ideologies and in each of their ashrams – Santiniketan and Sevagram – places with which Devi Prasad was intimately connected. [Art, the basis of education (Creative learning series)]

Abanindranath's art was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community

2010-03-08T20:24:00.000+05:30

The Hindu : Friday Review Delhi - Interview : A legacy lost and found

Friday, Feb 12, 2010

Debashish Banerji seeks to set the record straight about Abanindranath Tagore.

Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), was the founder of a ‘national' school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. His admirers term him as the first modern Indian artist to have successfully inculcated among his illustrious students a sense of belonging and allegiance to the rich tradition of

India

's culture. But then, his legacy of artistic nation building is often debated.

Professor Debashish Banerji, the great-grandson of Abanindranath who teaches at the Pasadena City College and at the Department of Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, has attempted to provide a revisionary critique of the art of pioneering artist in his latest book, “The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore”. Published by Sage, this well researched book, illustrated with many of Abanindranath's creations, has created a debate in the art and history circles. Excerpts from an interview with the author:

Why a book on Abanindranath after such a long gap?

I have been working on it for over five years. I felt that the accusations on Abanindranath that he was precursor of an anti-colonial political revolution and being an elite artist, neglected the underclass or ‘subaltern' cultures, needs to be sorted out now.

How did you do that?

I have argued that the art of Abanindranath which developed as part of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th to 20th centuries, was not merely a normalisation of nationalist or Orientalist principles. Instead, it was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It worked towards the fashioning of an alternate nation which resisted the stereotyping of identity formation of the nation-state. I have established through his various plates that his art which was embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism and storytelling through oral allegories, sought a social identity through dialogues within the inter-subjective contexts of locality, regionality, nationality and trans-nationality.

Are his works in suitable condition still? We don't get to see them anywhere.

That's the saddest part. I had very difficult time in picking his works. There is a private organisation run by a lawyer in Kolkata. It has shut his important works in a trunk in a dingy room which is never opened. These works hence don't get displayed and they have all got damaged inside.

I have also learnt that they extort money from those who come to see these works or take photographs. It is in a state of utter neglect. Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, has some wooden toys he made towards the end of his life which are again inaccessible to commoners. Albert Museum in London has some of his letters that I could see.

Was he overshadowed by Rabindranath Tagore and his charismatic legacy?

I would say that he was well recognised within the country and especially Calcutta (then) but not in the school that developed around him which was marginalised. His making was sophisticated and he was immensely impressed by the style of Rabindranath, who introduced him to Y.B Yeats. What he felt about him is very clear in a ‘theatrical' portrait in which he gags his eyes and ears in 1929. He respected him but the portrait suggests he certainly felt the pinch. RANA SIDDIQUI ZAMAN

Debashish Banerji, great-grandson of the protean genius, Abanindranath Tagore

2010-02-08T14:19:00.001+05:30

Shoe ad on Ram's slippers Calcutta Telegraph - ‎Sunday , January 31 , 2010

The man who wrote Buro Angla and Kshirer Putul, and was an artist, also produced a jatra. It was a retelling of the Ramayana.

Abanindranath Tagore had called his take on our oldest epic Khuddur Jatra. The text, written between 1934 and 1942, draws on a multitude of images from the time, particularly from advertising, cinema and politics. What makes the manuscript special is the way he has added layers to the story by doodling and sketching on subjects as varied as fashion and natural history, and pasting whatever he fancied — emblems, labels, wrappers or advertisements.

The manuscript lay all this while with Abanindranath’s grandson Sumitendranath Tagore and then his wife Shyamashree. It has now surfaced in print courtesy Priyabrata Deb of Pratikshan.

The printed facsimile preserves the feel of the manuscript, including a folded flap. The pictures pasted on the sidelines provide commentary on the text and vice versa. “We can see the period through his work and his criticism of it,” said poet Sankha Ghosh at the launch.

Next to Ravana declaring war is a picture of Hitler. When Bharat carries his brother Ram’s wooden slippers on his head, he has an advertisement of Radu shoes for company. The shoe ads recur where Manthara, the scheming maid, exults over Ram’s expulsion. At the beginning of Lankakando is a picture of a chilli. Beside a page describing Ravana’s room are bathing beauties in a still from the 1926 film A Roman Scandal. Hanuman searches for Sita in Lanka next to a newspaper cutting with the heading “Information wanted”.

As art historian R. Siva Kumar said: “Everything about Abanindranath is happening late not because of weakness but because of the strength of his work. We are trying to match up to his concepts 70 years later.”

But one needs to sample how he has played with the language, giving it a lightness of touch and a flippancy of tone that underlines his irreverence. In one chapter, Sushen, the physician, enquires on the state of soldiers wounded in war and is told by Jamboban how all are cringing at the arrows like caterpillars. Says Jamboban: “Ar khobor, baney baney sobai gutishuti gutipokar baba shuopokar borabor…”

“There is scope for research on the interrelation between picture and text or even what the pictures stand for,” feels Samik Bandyopadhyay, who has provided an English commentary and a shortened translation. There is also a transcript of the hand-written text.

Man who wrote pictures

The school of art that Abanindranath Tagore founded had too many facets to be just labelled “Bengal School”. Debashish Banerji, great-grandson of the protean genius, who described himself as the “man who wrote pictures”, argues in his book, The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, that “the art of Abanindranath, developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th-20th centuries, was not merely a normalisation of national or oriental principle, but conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and post-colonialism,” to quote the press release.

The book, brought out by Sage Publications, was released on Thursday evening at the Oxford Bookstore by Tapati Guha Thakurta, a professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta.

Guha Thakurta said with the recent publication of several new books on him in English, Abanindranath was enjoying a wider audience today, and he was being “relocated” beyond the nationalist framework.

The later Abanindranath of the 1930-51 was a complex figure who was outside the public domain, although the Jorasanko household itself was like a small township. Banerji, who is a professor of Indian Studies and the educational coordinator of the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles, read out a section of the book in which he analysed Abanindranath’s painting of Sindbad. SUDESHNA BANERJEE

Brand Bhadralok

Georgina Maddox IE » Story: Thursday , Feb 04, 2010

Of the three prolific Tagore siblings Rabindranath, Gaganindranath and Abanindranath, the latter’s work is perhaps the least applauded. In fact, art historians like Ananda Coomarayswamy who wrote in the ‘50s and ‘60s slotted Abanindranath’s Bengal Renaissance as quaintly Revivalist. Now a new book titled The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, authored by Debashish Banerji, also his grandson and published by Sage at Rs 995, explores his work again.

“The Colonialist reading of art done in the Pre-Swadeshi period thrust upon us a certain preference for the masculine brand of nationalism: something that was not sentimental about the past,” says Banerji. It is perhaps ironic we are discussing this at Delhi’s Imperial Hotel that celebrates the Raj through its wonderfully nostalgic interiors.

“The style fostered by Abanindranath was marginalised and given a very narrow reading,” says the 53-year-old art professor who teaches in Pasadena City College in Los Angeles. The book is not for the layperson and does not fall in the coffee table category either. It’s for those interested in either history or art. However given that there are fewer books that attempt to reclaim our histories, it is an essential piece of scholarship.

To put it very simply, the book attempts to reclaim Abanindranath’s space on the stage of those who contributed to an emerging Independent India. “Abanindranath may have been sidelined for his miniatures on the Arabian Nights since it reinforced the one nation theory of

India

and

Pakistan

,” contemplates Banerji. “His painting Bharat Mata was first known as Bongo Mata of the Sakti cult. Abanindranath was a Neo Vendantist and a Sufi, not orthodox and believed in the fluidity of religion,” says Banerji.

While Banerji met Manindranath, Tagore’s youngest son and his uncle, and gleaned details of his grandfather’s personality, he also had to keep a distance as a scholar while approaching the artist’s work critically. “Abanindranath was very introverted but he was also observant and took in details of the world around him,” says Banerji.

We wind up with a final glimpse at Tagore’s painting Last Days of Shah Jehan a painting that has often been described as romantic but is layered with a comment on India’s pluralism. “Let us not forget that Shah Jehan had a Mughal father and a Rajput mother,” concludes Banerji.

Spirit of love and family bonding Calcutta Telegraph - ‎BOOK READING

January 28 at Oxford Bookstore, Park Street; 6.30 pm: Oxford Bookstore and Sage Publications host a book-reading session on The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore by Dr Debashish Banerji, to be followed by a panel discussion with Prof. Tapati Guha Thakurta.

Fashion for a cause Calcutta Telegraph - ‎Jan 29, 2010‎

January 30 at Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, 8 Shakespeare Sarani; 6.15 pm: Dr Debashish Banerjee will speak on Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga: Shakti Chatusthaya and The Mother.

As passive spectators we risk consumerist oppression

2010-01-28T09:28:00.000+05:30

The Emancipated Spectator (Hardcover)

~ Jacques Rancière (Author), Gregory Elliot (Translator)

Following up on his acclaimed work The Future of the Image, Rancière explores the meaning of critical art and suggests how we may overcome the potential trap of being a spectator. As passive spectators, he argues, we risk consumerist oppression and an upheaval of social relations. Suggesting a more active part in the process of observation, Rancière reveals how we may affirm the status of spectatorship and build upon it. In our contemporary age of mass visual media, Rancière’s lucid perspective stands alone in a sea of trivializing critiques of spectacle.

The Mother & Sri Aurobindo on Art and Aesthetics

2009-12-20T20:43:00.001+05:30

Sri Aurobindo on Indian Art: Selection from His Writings
The significance of Indian art

The National Value of Art
The dramatic art of Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo, his mind and art
Paintings and Drawings The Mother
About Savitri,: With some paintings

Sri Aurobindo thought Ravi Varma’s use of realistic style was like using the cast off clothes of the west

2009-11-23T08:28:00.002+05:30

pareltank Sunday, November 22, 2009 Of Mallus, Bongs, Van Gogh and Don Mcleans

I remember being very angry with Sri Aurobondo for ridiculing Raja Ravi Varma who was my hero because he, Ravi Varma, was a mallu. Mr. Aurobindo thought Ravi Varma’s use of realistic style was like using the cast off clothes of the west! The western artists had already graduated from the realistic to impressionistic.

I found umpteen numbers of explanations which smacked of ignorance and parochialism and the fire of youth to explain away Mr. Aurobindo’s take. He was a bong, I once argued heatedly with my friend during a seminar, when Mr. Aurobindo’s article came up for discussion. Bongs think that only what they have adopted from the west are worth it, I snapped. They behave as tho the rest of India has no right to appropriate anything of the west, I snarled. And they claim to be the seat of the renaissance in India during India’s miserable colonial days - the ones who lit the lamp of creativity in the Indian soul darkened and skewed by centuries of colonial subjugation. I’d have none of it, no matter what Mr. Aurobindo said.

I argued that Bengal’s creativity smacked of slavishness and slavery, for Calcutta was the seat of the Company and the Empire for long years. I remember the lecturer intervening at that point and asking both of us (my rival, by the way, was not a bong but a tambram who was just trying to needle the usually silent-as-death mallu that was me) to shut up as neither of us knew anything of what we were talking - one more uninformed than the other, she fumed !

Needless to say, I later felt ashamed of my unusually vocal performance, but I justified myself to myself on the grounds that this mallu needling had gone too far this time! Posted by kochuthresiamma p .j at 3:47 PM Labels: My Take, Nostalgia, Personal

Partha Mitter has completed his trilogy on Indian art

2009-10-09T18:24:00.000+05:30

Q&A: ‘The erotic has never been denied in Hindu tradition’-Editorial-Opinion-The Times of India: 7 December 2007

Based in Oxford, noted art historian Partha Mitter has completed the third part of his trilogy on Indian art. He spoke with Romain Maitra about modernist and contemporary Indian art:

What were the main features or tendencies of modernism in Indian art during pre-independent period?

By the modernism, I mean the particular discourse of the avant-garde that arose in the West and then spread globally (in literature, for instance, Eliot, Proust or Joyce; in music, the dissonance of Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Bartok; in art, cubism, surrealism or expressionism), representing rebellion against classical taste. Its nature and inflections changed radically outside the West.

In India, even though Gaganendranath used the syntax of cubism to construct his fairy-tale world, far more significant was the primitivist tendency. It was a form of critical modernity that challenged capitalist urban modernity which lay at the base of colonial empires.

What was avant-garde in the works of India’s artists during that time?

Gaganendranath’s poetic cubism brought a new era of modernism in India. However, from the naive art of Sunayani Devi to Amrita Sher-Gil’s melancholic images of peasants, Rabindranath Tagore’s animals, masks and other compositions, and Jamini Roy’s creation of a new collective art that repudiated the ‘aura’ of a work of art and artistic genius, as well as the art teaching of Nandalal that led to Benodebehari Mukherjee’s moving representations of common folk and Ram Kinkar’s heroic image of the Santhals — all these went against the historical and nationalist allegories of the previous gene-ration and were self-consciously avant-garde and radical.

Does contemporary Indian art have any real appeal in the mainstream artistic appreciation in the West?

Let us not forget that most of the enormously expensive paintings are bought by the NRIs. Even today apart from a few open-minded art critics and historians in the West most are indifferent to what goes on outside New York, Paris and London art markets. This situation can only change from constantly scrutinising the underlying assumptions of western modernism.

Please comment on M F Husain’s paintings which have generated fundamentalist reactions.

Husain is not anti-Hindu. On the contrary, he is one of the few who constantly engages with Hindu mythology with bold imagination and creativity. Hindu deities have been depicted in the nude and semi-nude since at least the 2nd century AD and similarly in the texts their physical descriptions are explicit. This is because in Hindu tradition, there is a constant intermingling of sacred and profane love and the erotic has never been denied.

Unfortunately, during the colonial period we imported Victorian prudery and now seem to be thriving on it. Finally, Husain’s depictions of Hindu goddesses are hardly erotic.

Bratin Khan has embraced Sri Aurobindo's famous speech to be his inspiration

2009-10-01T19:09:00.001+05:30

Finding the soul within - dnaindia.com: "Home > Lifestyle > Report
Sujata Chakrabarti DNA ednesday, September 30, 2009 23:59 IST Mumbai:

Kolkata-based artist Bratin Khan has embraced Sri Aurobindo's famous speech to be his inspiration. This memorable historical event that took place in the pre-independence era was epoch-making.It was one of the most significant speeches in the revolutionary turned spiritual leader's lifetime. The speech -- his first after his release from the Alipore Jail in Kolkata -- announced his exit from the ongoing revolutionary freedom movement.

Khan says, 'Unlike Sri Aurobindo's regular speeches, this one was non-political and announced his adoption of the sanatan dharma that propagated that every object had a soul within.' ... His show In A Silent Way is on view at the Point of View art gallery in Colaba.

Presentation-cum-interactive display on Tribal Art by Lokesh Khetan

2009-09-16T18:29:00.003+05:30

Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
Schedule of Programmes September 2009

1. 3rd September, 2009 (5.30pm) Illustrated talk by Prof. Adam Hardy on “Temples, Templates, Texts : making monuments in medieval India” K.D. Main Exhibition Hall, Ground Floor, 11, Mansingh Road
2. 4th to 13th September, 2009 Veena Navarathri & Viswa Veena Yagna (Shri V. Raghurama Ayyar) K.D. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chennai
3. 8th September, 2009 (6.00pm) Seminar in collaboration with Bharat Soka Gakkai on Dr. Daisaku Ikeda’s 2009 Peace Proposal titled “Toward Humanitarian Competition : A New Current in History” J.S. Main exhibition hall & ground floor Kalakosa building
4. 8th September, 2009 (4.00pm) Lecture by Prof. P.S. Filliozat on “The Heart of the Temple according to Saiva Siddhanta” K.K. NMM Hall, 3rd floor, 11, Mansingh Road
5. 9th September, 2009 (4.00pm) Lecture by Prof. Vasundhara Filliozat on “Musicality and Dance in Kannada epigraphs of 12th & 13th centuries” K.K. NMM Hall, 3rd floor, 11, Mansingh Road
6. 10th September to 15th September, 2009 (10.00am to 8.00pm) Documentation of Bharai Ramakatha J.S. Stage, 3, Dr. R.P. Road
7. 15th September, 2009 Presentation-cum-interactive display on Tribal Art by Shri Lokesh Khetan K.D. Auditorium, Media Centre, No.3, Dr. R.P. Road
8. 24th September-20th October, 2009 11:00AM Exhibition on “Monasteries of Rinchen Zango” in collaboration with Shri Benoy K. Behl K.D. Exhibition Hall, Ground floor 11, Mansingh Road
9. 25th September, 2009 4.00pm Tattvabodha Lecture NMM NMM’s Hall, 3rd Floor, 11, Mansingh Road Schedule subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances: For details contact: 011 - 23388341 [ Home Search Contact Us Index ]

Dharmesh Jadeja, calligraphist and architect lives in Auroville

2009-08-11T12:16:00.002+05:30

Home > Lifestyle > Indian calligraphy makes a mark
Riddhi Doshi DNA Sunday, August 9, 2009 23:59 IST Calligraphist Dharmesh Jadeja who has been exploring his art for the last 20 years has been invited by the University of Sunderland to talk about his subject. Mumbai:

Dharmesh Jadeja, a calligraphist and architect who lives in Auroville is the first artist of his ilk to be invited to be a part of the residency at the University of Sunderland in the United Kingdom. The university's faculty of design, media and culture has an International Centre for Research in Calligraphy where which has been exploring the links between the different cultures and researching deeper insights in to the calligraphy traditions of different cultures. It is mainly run by two Your browser may not support display of this image. well-known calligraphers and researchers in Europe, Ewan Clayton and Manny Ling. [...]

Dharmesh concentrates on the letter forms, their combinations, formation, and structure and explores the ideas behind the forms of ancient Indian letters, in particular, the Devanagari script. He explains, "I have worked on the beauty of these forms for many years, exploring the relation of the phonetic traditions with the written traditions among other things."

Spellbound expressions of Rasa have been truthfully bought out by Sangeeta Dash

2009-06-06T17:28:00.002+05:30

Photo Exhibition of Indian Classical Dance forms
by Dr. Susil Pani, Sri Geetagovinda Pratisthana, Puducherry
7th - 30th March, 2009
at the art gallery of DakshinaChitra
e-mail: raghuclinic@yahoo.com

The photo exhibit on Indian classical dances begins with Shiva and Parvati in Ardhanarieswara in Odissi style, denoting that the manifest (Parvati) and the unmanifest (Shiva) are one and can not be separated. Next to it is Shiva in his supreme Ananda Tandava Murti, again in Odissi, Shiva as Nataraja is the cosmic dancer and is the source of all art forms including all dance, theater, music poetry, painting etc. A brief write-up about Nataraja inspires the viewer at the entrance of the exhibition hall. As soon as one enters inside the rasika is invited by an offering of pushpanjali (flower offering) by Sangeeta Dash to Shakti (Durga) without whom even Shiva can not manifest.

The artist tries to immerse the rasika into the RASA of life with a splendid presentation of Navarasa, the nine rasa with a brief description of each rasa. The spellbound expressions of Rasa have been truthfully bought out by none other than Sangeeta Dash, foremost Odissi dancer. The Odissi section continues with a rare presentation of Bhramari, again by Sangeeta Dash, frozen in eternity by the artist (usually seen and easily captured in Kathak but never yet presented in Odissi) Sangeeta Dash's dedication and personal care to details even for her students are beautifully captured in two photos she is seen doing makeup for a little girl. Sonal Mansingh is seen at the end of the Odissi section in classic sculpturesque posture. At the beginning of each section a very brief description of the style of Indian classical dance is well written for the lay person.

The next series on Bharatanatyam is complete in itself with Shiva in Ananda Tandava, a beautiful child artist in classic posture, Chitra Visweswaran as Sakhi of Radha trying to persuade her to go to Krishna for Rasakrida is also seen.

Radha forms and symbolizes 'Complete Surrender' to her lord, the lord of the universe 'Sri Krishna' which forms the essence of true love, is presented in three pictures of Manipuri Dance. Rani Kannam, the doyen of Kathak dance graces the exhibition by her total devotion to the Lord. Sobhana Narayanan is the leading contemporary Kathak dancer is seen as the "Abhimanaini". There are few more pictures of Kathak showing the essence of the art form both the science and the art of it as movements, Radha and Krishna, Ardhanarieswara etc.

Kuchipudi dance from Andhra Pradesh transports the viewer to different moods of love, happiness etc. The graceful dance of lord Vishnu as MOHINI has been most beautifully presented by none other than Shivaji Bharati in Mohiniattam. The last photo symbolizes that all Indian classical dances may appear to be different in costume; makeup style and presentation etc. but essentially are one, as the source is only The Divine. Three great artists Kiran Segal from Odissi, Shivaji Bharati from Mohiniattam and Shobana Narayanan from Kathak have come together in a classical dance posture at the end of the exhibit. All Indian dances are essentially spiritual in nature trying to represent the divine and its manifestations in its myriad forms. The artist has made a sincere attempt to present his own quest for Moksha in this exhibition. Home 4:36 PM

Auroville is one of the major active fulfillments of 1960s social idealism that was totally planetary-minded

2009-05-08T07:09:00.004+05:30

Art Robert Lawlor with Christopher Bamford and Dorothea Rockburne Brooklyn Rail - New York, NY, USA
After an absence of many years, Robert Lawlor, who began as a sculptor, and whose book Sacred Geometry has had a great influence in reawakening us to the importance of geometrical principles, symmetries, and proportions—not only for art and architecture but also for science and consciousness studies—was recently back in New York for a few days. Dorothea Rockburne, the painter, who had come to know Robert through his work in geometry and had worked with it herself intensely, arranged a reception for him to meet a few old artist friends and others. One of these was Publisher Phong Bui. Dorothea and Phong thought Rail readers would be interested to hear what Robert had been up to. Because I have known Robert for many years, I was asked to come along and help facilitate the conversation. So, one Sunday, Phong picked us up in Manhattan and drove Dorothea, Robert, and I out to the Rail Headquarters to talk.
—Christopher Bamford

Chris Bamford: Robert, you’ve been away from America for many years, so we welcome you back. You began here, in New York, as an artist. Your life journey then took you out of that world into another, the world of ideas and spiritual exploration. You went to India. You fell in love with it, exploring it inwardly and outwardly. Finally, after many adventures, you found your way to Pondicherry, to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where, by a stroke of destiny, you discovered the work of Hermetic Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. These works revealed to you the profound geometric and metaphysical knowledge—the temple wisdom—of Ancient Egypt. You returned to the U.S. where you and your (then) wife Deborah worked tirelessly to transmit that wisdom. You both even learned French from scratch, and translated many of Schwaller’s books, including his massive masterpiece, The Temple of Man. That done, you went to Australia. You explored the indigenous world and cosmology of the aborigines. You wrote Voices of the First Day. My first question is: how do you tie all these elements together?

Robert Lawlor: I was thinking about that this morning after we talked. It made me recall sitting in the south Indian desert in a grass hut as part of an international community that was one of the major active fulfillments of 1960s social idealism. It was called Auroville and the plan was to build an international city where people could divorce themselves from their national identity and become part of a group that was totally planetary-minded. It was led by two spiritual figures: Sri Aurobindo, who had passed away in 1950, and his counterpart, known as “the Mother.” It was a highly idealistic place. By that time I had been in India about six years, and someone said to me one day, “if you stay in India very much longer, India will either absorb you or destroy you” and I didn’t feel I was ready for either one of those options. I had by that time come to know someone who had been friends with Schwaller de Lubicz, and through this contact I became aware of his work. There were only fifty copies of his major work in the world at that time, but one copy was in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Library and I was able to get it out. At the same time I was getting to know a French disciple of Sri Aurobindo and she happened to have another of the only 49 remaining copies. She loaned me that copy and there I was sitting in this avant-garde futuristic community almost compelled to translate this book. Simply to enable me to read it, Deborah and I found ourselves often cycling seven miles a day to take French lessons so we could sit there that night by candlelight trying to translate this work. This enormous cross-fertilization of traditions (such as those of Egypt and India) gave some new shape and meaning to our lives. I realized: No, I cannot live by ideals alone, I have to involve myself in ideas.

Dorothea Rockburne: That’s quite a statement.

Lawlor: Yes, it was a big realization. Until then I hadn’t realized that I was by nature a highly idealistic person, someone who threw all his energy into an enclosure of mind that might be called an idealistic tunnel. But here I was, reading Schwaller’s work—it made me aware of the difference between ideas and ideals. Both of those words, by the way, are derivative from a goddess—Dia, a female deity.

Bamford: Ideals usually come from ideas, but all-too-often those trying to bring the ideals into practice have forgotten the ideas.

Lawlor: And that becomes a big problem in the world, because then you get the evolution of ideologies, which govern religious or socio-political groups. That’s one of the reasons why it’s really important to keep the two—ideals and ideas—in contact so you know what the underlying ideas really are.

Dorothea Rockburne, “Pascal, State of Grace” (1986-87). Oil and gold leaf on gessoed linen, 6´ × 5´. ©Dorothea Rockburne. Image courtesy of the artist and Greenburg Van Doren Gallery.

Bamford: Then there is the question of doing, acting. Previously, in New York, you had been making sculpture, which is about making. Then you pursued ideals, which led you to discover ideas. When you did so, was there still a need to connect ideas to work, to making?

Lawlor: Well, in India what I had found very appealing was making village architecture—how they just cut palm leaves and bamboo shoots with mud foundations to make buildings. I thought it was so beautiful and so remarkable that every man had to make his own home. There was a whole platform of indigenous values under that. So I started making buildings with palm leaves and bamboo. I would start living in one, and then more people would come from another part of the world, and I would build another one. I had to learn how to stabilize the earth, and stabilize the leaves because there were termites. The minute you got a building up you heard munching. The houses would cave in so that people were always re-building their buildings. I worked out a way of using bitumen to make earth adobe permanent. As far as I know it works, because I saw a photograph of a wall I had made. It was still intact twenty years after I built it. The whole thing was totally an experiment, I bought drums of bitumen, I had many village men working with me and they were all covered in black tar. To make the leaves permanent I worked out a way of dipping the leaves. I was really hungry for color, so I dipped leaves in paints of various colors—thinning them with kerosene and using local pigments. Some people thought it was really gross! But in the end, I covered the land with a number of these buildings. I learned how to soak the bamboo to make curved structures.

Bamford: That’s interesting because the Schwaller de Lubicz book you discovered was not only about Egypt and geometry, but also about architecture, and, in a sense, building these little dwellings has to do with space and architecture and structure.

Lawlor: But, unfortunately, I didn’t know about proportion.

Bamford: Proportion is inherent in the creation of space.

Rockburne: Robert, last night you spoke of how you came to write the book Sacred Geometry from an experience you had at the Pondicherry library. You mentioned André Vandenbroeck, who introduced you to Schwaller.

Lawlor: André came to know Schwaller toward the end of Schwaller’s life. Later he went to Pondicherry where I met him. He started teaching me sacred geometry. André wanted to write a book [Philosophical Geometry (Inner Traditions, 1987)] on that subject. I stayed in India for four years then left and came back to the States in 1972. I met up with André again and continued to study geometry with him. It really intrigued me. It was very basic stuff. So I left the ideals to begin chasing ideas.

Bamford: Interestingly enough André too had been a painter.

Lawlor: So had Schwaller.

Bamford: Schwaller had studied with Matisse, so this link between art and number and geometry is very tight. Schwaller was also an alchemist, which is the royal art—as much of an art as a science or spiritual path. This all harks back to ancient times when art, science, and religion were one—a single gesture.

Lawlor: The other person I discovered during that period in India was the distinguished Indologist, Alan Daniélou who was a linguist, like André, and an artist. He painted, he danced, he was a musician, and at one time he was completely involved in the Parisian art world. When he got to translating Indian work, ancient Indian ideas, he also got involved in numbers.

Bamford: In this unity—of science, art, and religion—number and geometry were fundamental. They were the initiatory technology, if you would. But many people still don’t understand what number and geometry are in this initiatory sense. So I have to ask: what in this sense is sacred geometry?

Lawlor: It is an examination of the inherent laws of time and space that are embedded in the symmetry of geometric forms. I should add that as the principles of time and space are embedded in the symmetry of form—so are the principles that underlie consciousness. That is a definition that I have synthesized from the work in general. That was one of the things that Danielou pointed out in his translations of the Puranas: Indian thought is dominated by a sacred trinity—the trinity of consciousness, space, and time—and these three are bonded so that you can never really consider one separately. That idea really stuck with me: that is, in the triangulation of number we observe a genesis. One (as Unity) becomes Two (as Duality), Three (as the principle of Trinity), Four (as Manifest Reality). The triangulation of number holds the passageway of the mysteries that are embedded in form, and which move our level of awareness, our consciousness of time and space.

Bamford: So time and space really have to do with the ontological principles present in consciousness and creation, because consciousness and creation are one.

Lawlor: They are the essentials of being.

Rockburne: But back to the subject of making, what interests me about your book, Robert, as compared to other books on sacred geometry, is that pragmatically it can be used as a possible inherent structure in painting. Since sacred geometry is no longer taught in art schools, I recommend that every artist read your easy and lucid, but profound, book. Using the golden mean, if properly understood, can present an open sesame to successful work. Other books I’ve read on the subject seem only to relate to nature and natural progressions. They don’t explain its use in painting. For me that represented a huge difference. Then, too, the specific quotes you gave, such as that of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), stating that there should be no decoration, only proportion spoke to me in the language of mathematics, a language I was seeking. Some time later I came across a book titled The Plan of St. Gall, which, as I looked into the evolution of medieval monasteries, led me to realize that many of them, especially those designed by St. Bernard, were designed as a series of acoustically resonating rooms, based on sacred geometry. When the monks sang at one end of the Abbey their voices resonated from room to room throughout the whole Abbey. I was so fascinated and moved by their discoveries that I made a work called The Plan of St. Gall based on that study.

Lawlor: It must have been my previous interest in painting. When I discovered geometry, I discovered that all painting in almost every culture, right up until the 17th Century, was involved in a geometric grid that is called a “canevas”—a previous structuring of the space in proportional units before any painting began. All Renaissance painters did this, and that was a real revelation. I had been through the whole education of arts in America and no one ever even said the word “proportion,” nor gave any indication that there was a systematic method underlying the entire history of art. And then in the 17th and 18th Centuries, it was forcibly removed from the arts. Teaching proportion in art academies in France was prohibited at that time, so there was a strange, almost conspiratorial, attack on people who had that kind of knowledge in the visual field. I don’t know who, or what their motivations were, but it’s very interesting.

Bamford: If we go back only to the Middle Ages, to medieval music, for instance, everything was proportion. Proportion was the expression of living relationships and at the same time the harmony of these relationships.

Lawlor: Living in the sense that it connected everything that is a part of man to the creation of nature and to the metaphysical. Life was defined by the connection between those levels. Once we became a material culture of industrialization we lost that knowledge.

Bamford: That, and the reality that a living proportion becomes invisible when it’s alive—it is the spiritual. When you increasingly identify it with the fixed form, the proportion itself ceases to bring life into it. Art becomes dead when it uses proportion mechanically. Proportion is a living thing: a spiritual thing.

Vertical fins on the facades to block the direct sun while enabling cross ventilation

2009-04-14T08:31:00.003+05:30

India Today Story Bricks and mortar Purvi Malhotra January 10, 2008

The hour glass moves at its pace, drifting through civilizations, dynasties, kingdoms and wars, leaving behind eternal symbols like temples, stupas, monasteries, forts and tombs. After Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions came colonial influence and post independence, the legacies of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn prevailed. In the 70s, ethnicity was the call of the hour and the 80s was the era of post modernism. “The contemporary architecture of India is an interaction between a global culture and our rich past,” says Brinda Somaya.

In the last 15 years, Indian architecture has seen a huge change in terms of trends. It has taken great leaps ahead in terms of technology, material and design. Architects have branched out to various realms like Brinda Somaya who restored the St. Thomas Church in Mumbai, Pratima Joshi plans slums in cities and Anupama Kundoo works with low energy building technologies. They are not alone. The ratio of men and women architects has increased to 60 and 40 today. Though still few in number, women architects have tried to be different rather than be typecast as ladies who lunch and occassionally do home interiors.

“India produces quality women architects but very few trend setters,” says Abha Narain Lambha, architect. Iconic architects like Zaha Hadid and Gae Aulenti are hard to find. Being a demanding profession, many women opt out due to family pressure. But these architects have gone against the tide and created a niche for themselves. [...]

ANUPAMA KUNDOO

Her work is slotted as contemporary vernacular, many of her projects built with low energy technologies such as water harvesting and renewable energy sources. But this aspect of Anupama Kundoo’s work emerges more from an attraction to efficiency. “My designs are not driven by the worry that the world will end, but by finding ways to make the most with what one has,” says the 40-year-old, who has been practising for 17 years.

After graduating from Sir J.J College of Architecture, Mumbai, in 1989, she found the creative options, which were to become interior designers or to produce facades of buildings without working on the interiors, either frivolous or boring. She didn’t surrender to either and headed off to travel, landing in Auroville. Some of her projects include Creativity, an attempt at an urban eco-community in 2003 in Auroville and Keystone Foundation in the Nilgiris in 2005. She describes her work as natural, without any make-up. The other area of her expertise is housing, where she recently researched tropical high-rise housing for the urban area. After working in Berlin during the building boom she got a chance to teach at the Technical University, Berlin, and Darmstadt in Hesse, in 2005.

SEEN HERE AT FRENCHMAN PIERRE TRAN’S HOUSE, AUROVILLE
Year 1990-1991
Concept Exploring alternatives to the regular RCC slab, out of environmental and socio-economic concerns.
Challenges There were design innovations that meant having to teach masons things I myself didn’t know, but was determined to learn along the way. Like learning how to prefabricate high quality ferro-cement panels that we had to produce on the site. These are used as vertical fins on the facades to block the direct sun while enabling cross ventilation.
Cost Rs 25 lakh for 450 sq.m

Salingaros supports Alexander’s tying religion to geometry

2009-03-10T15:34:00.005+05:30

Nikos Salingaros
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nikos A. Salingaros (born in Perth, Australia) is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.

Influence [edit] Architecture
Salingaros has had a significant theoretical influence on several major figures in architecture. Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal treatises A Pattern Language and Notes on the Synthesis of Form, describes Salingaros' influence: “In my view, the second person who began to explore the deep connection between science and architecture was Nikos Salingaros, one of the four Katarxis editors. He had been working with me helping me edit material in The Nature of Order, for years, and at some point -- in the mid-nineties I think -- began writing papers looking at architectural problems in a scientific way. Then by the second half of the nineties he began making important contributions to the building of this bridge, and to scientific explorations in architecture which constituted a bridge.” [5]

Prince Charles, an influential critic of contemporary architecture, expressed Salingaros' influence in his own preface to Salingaros’ A Theory of Architecture: “Surely no voice is more thought-provoking than that of this intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker?” [6]

The End of Tall Buildings (2001), co-authored with James Kunstler, [7] argued that the age of skyscrapers is at an end, and that 9/11 marks the beginning of the end of modernist typologies dominating urban form. While the world has not stopped building skyscrapers, this became one of the most cited and controversial essays on the topic. Referring to this essay, Benjamin Forgey of The Washington Post said: “What many are feeling today goes right to the marrow: the fear of being a target. And who today can deny that tall buildings such as the World Trade Center towers make ideal targets?” [8] [edit]

Urbanism
Salingaros contributed to the New Athens Charter of 2003, which is meant to replace the original 1933 Athens Charter written principally by the highly influential modernist architect-planner Le Corbusier. That blueprint segregated urban functions and contributed to generating post-war urban typologies such as monoculture and sprawl. Through this and other writings Salingaros sought to retrofit suburbia, and reconnect US and European cities at the human scale. This work can be seen as allied with the New Urbanism movement to replace sprawling development with compact, walkable cities and towns.

Philosophy
Salingaros has been a harsh critic of deconstructivism in architecture, and its uncritial application of the philosophy of post-structuralism. His essay “The Derrida Virus” [15] argues that the ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, applied in an uncritical way, effectively form an information "virus" that dismantles logical thought and knowledge. Salingaros employs the meme model earlier introduced by Richard Dawkins to explain the transmission of ideas. In so doing he provides a model that validates earlier claims by philosopher Richard Wolin that Derrida’s philosophy is logically nihilistic.

Even though Salingaros uses Dawkins’ ideas, he nevertheless strongly disagrees with Dawkins’ evaluation of religion as just another meme, as expounded in Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Supporting Alexander’s most recent work tying religion to geometry, Salingaros argues for the important historic contribution of religious tradition to human understanding, both in architecture and in philosophy.

Geometry is not merely a technical device; it is the very means by which to infuse inner meaning

2009-02-09T12:19:00.003+05:30

Joy Sen: The Search for Unity: the Goal of Indian Aesthetics - Viewpoints from Architecture Muse India Issue 15, Sep-Oct 2007

“This aesthetic side of a people’s culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which have been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of the art and literature is a conscious expression in significant aesthetic forms.” Sri Aurobindo The Foundations of Indian Culture

Introduction: Study on Built environments show that they have layers of purposes. One, to shelter people and their activities and possessions from the elements, from human and animal enemies, and from supernatural powers; two, to establish place; to create a humanized, safe area in a profane and potentially dangerous world; to stress social identity and indicate status; and so on. Thus the origins of built-environment or architecture are best understood if a wider view of causal factors is taken into consideration. These factors indeed are more important than climate, technology, materials, and economy as they form the inner core of human existence. It is this inner core that gradually evolves surpassing the outer influences of economy, climate, materials and technology and other external factors. In effect, the highest expressions of human mind-interaction and communication skills are only then formed, of which art, literature, music and architecture and even sciences becomes a conscious truthful expression.

In view of above, the purpose of organizing space and time in architecture is to structure communication (human interaction, avoidance, dominance, and so on). Through ritualized behaviors (or habits) and various ways of marking territories explaining these habits, meanings after meanings are given to places (habitations) and behaviors (habits). From lower to higher, complementarities are achieved, one after one, shades after shades till the highest raptures are formed. This takes the search of creative instincts through layers of lower to higher reasons and logic to a crescendo of poetry that is embedded in the fountainhead and heart of an all-embracing creative inspiration.

Habit-Habitation Complementarities: In the case of human beings, when environments are being organized, it is these four elements – space (sparsha-sabda), meaning (artha), communication (bhava-bhasa), and time (kala-parikrama) – that are being organized. That is, the organization of environment as a series of relationships between things and other things, things and people, and between people and other people are established. These relationships are complementary and orderly; they have pattern and structure; and it is finally realized that the human environment is not a random assemblage of things but a conscious expression of a settled and ever-expanding human mind.

The nature of organizations can vary from space to space; from one level of interaction to another level of interaction and it is finally available as a tangible physical expression of domains. In fact, in the scheme-making of built-environmental design at all levels and their variations, from vast regions to furniture arrangements, the structuring and organization of space in effect reflect the needs, values, and desires of the groups of individuals doing the organizing. Complementarities of the two – inner habits and expressed habitations are effected.

Symbolism Embedded in Complementarities: In India for centuries and ages, a deep-set system of tradition has evolved through experiments happening in the inner laboratory of the human mind. That is the Indian way. But the outward was exempted. The experiments of contemplation had held the key to realizations of the powers of human mind that does not deny the world and its material expressions but is the very driver-fashioner of complementarities of the two – between all external sustainable traditional situations and the sustainable minds behind the bearing of these traditions.

This is particularly true when one attempts to penetrate and understand the very origins of Indian system of art-aesthetics and architecture. In effect, an ordering schema has evolved based on the sacred, since the realization termed as ‘religion’ and the externalities as support termed as ‘rituals’ are central to such schemas. In the level of highest complementarities of built environments and the true humanization of these environments, livable places tend to become sacred or sanctified. In Indian traditional set-up of religious built-environments – which encode and manifest ideals – the tangible expression that are formed are also expected to encode the sacred, since that represents the most significant inner meaning. So a journey from the outer to the innermost is established to retrace the ‘trickle-down’ from the inner-most to the outer. In the icon there are contrasts i.e the inner-most, which is a dot (a bindu) is the whole, where as the outermost, which is a large visible schema over space (kshetra) is only a part of that whole. This inversion is the very heart of Indian ethos and the root of the symbolic model.

Symbolism of complementarities: American Architect-anthropologist Amos Rapoport has viewed the traditional system of Indian Art-Architecture as dynamism of space, time and matter. In this dynamism manifestations are that of an all-pervading creative mind and in that mind material space and material things (bhuta-akâsha) make visible the centrality, the pivotal and ideational role of that universal schema (realized as interconnected universal spaces called chida-akâsaha). This is the model of the universe called the Mandala. In his words, the art-architectural environment is a reflection of this model and this has three necessities:

It stresses limits of control: one changes oneself rather than the environment. Thus, building –which is a major modification of the environment – requires rigorous adherence to the appropriate cosmological model and also requires stress on ritual purity. Behavioral change complements evolving environmental situation from chaotic to orderly.

In effect a cosmological model is realized emphasizes the centrality and the peripherals, which are the two classes of akashas or spaces. Centrality is most and this is expressed socially (ritually) and aesthetically (materially).

Ideational space are transformed by symbols (like stupas, mandalas, yupas, skambha) and the various physical-mental rituals (like darshana-âswadana, pradakshinâ, parikramâ, tirtha-yâtrâ, pranâma, dhyâna-chestâ) are embedded in the model that the makes the divine visible in material reality. This is the whole purpose of Indian creative surge encoded in ‘Vâstu Stahaptya Vidyâ’ and ‘Nandan Kalâ Vidyâ’.

To understand this universal science of art-architecture, we must understand this divine cosmological model that underlies the design components like sculpture (bhaskarayam), axis (yupa) and grid (panjarâ) to erection of house-units (nibâsam and prâsâdam), temples (mandirams), landscapes (bithis), villages (purams); and finally to towns (nagaris) and settlement conurbations or regions (mahâjanapadas or mahâkhetras).

Even secular architecture (lokavâstu, grhavâstu) carries in them the implication and strengths of the ancient tradition of India. The parallelism of Sulva and Silpa is constantly demonstrated, as in the case of the Yupa, or sacrificial post, and its anthropomorphic transformation in the image of the Purusha or the universal spirit behind the cosmological model. Again, the common element which justifies the title Vâstusutra (the tread of construction or nirmâna) is the sacred geometry underlying sacrificial altars (Sulva), anthropomorphic images and image-panels (Silpa) and sacred or secular architecture (Vâstu). But here geometry is not merely a technical device; it is the very means by which to infuse inner meaning (bhâva and artha) into the work of art-architecture. This infusion is the spirit of Indian aesthetics.

The Crescendo: It is a psychological fact that sense-impressions through the eyes and ears have a more compelling, a more direct action on the sub-conscious strata of the soul (inner Koshas) than discursive arguments. The subconscious obeys and is directly dependent on universal cosmic laws. When art forms take their being from fundamental cosmic principles, they participate in the essential structure of the universe and contain a natural symbolism to which unsophisticated human beings respond instinctively, unconsciously. Thus in effect one arrives at a transcendental unity of all art-manifest body-forms at the higher level of human mind and spirit. Frijtof Schuon, in his book: ‘The Transcendent Unity of All Religions’ (De l’unite’ Transcendente des Religions, Gallimard, 1948) says that the sensible form is what corresponds most directly to the intellect, by reason of the inverted analogy (by a step-by-step evolutionary ordering of human behavior) which plays between the ‘Principle’ and the manifest (order of things), so that the highest realities (summits of cultural expression) manifest themselves in the most striking manner in their most distant reflection, which is the sensible or ‘material’ order (built-environment).

In India, art and sciences, even the every mundane realities of domestic life, are covered with a mass of poetic conceptions [(marriage of ameliorated rhythms (chhanda-rasa) with refined mental attributes (bhâva-artha)]. This is the very basis (cause) and intent (effect) of a deep-set aesthetics system, which are pressed forward till the material-sensuous (personal) touches the universal-super-sensuous (impersonal) and the real (the small) gets the rose-hue of the unreal (the vast). It is this aesthetic side of a collective people’s culture is of the highest importance and demands very careful appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which have been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of the art and literature is a conscious expression in significant aesthetic forms.

The "naturalistic" or "illusionistic" is no less subjective than the "expressionistic"

2009-02-08T18:34:00.005+05:30

Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs
by Debashish on Thu 16 Oct 2008 09:24 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link the issue of cultural representation is more important and interesting. There seem to be accumulated responses of taste here.

During the period of the Indian nationalist struggle, this in fact became one of the major stakes for distinction of identity. The Greco-Roman Gandhara Buddha was preferred by the western critics for its naturalism. Coomaraswamy would argue that the less naturalistic, more "ideal" Mathura images were more authentic to the Indian consciousness. Sri Aurobindo's response to Archer is also keyed along similar lines. In fact, this becomes in some ways the cornerstone of his argument for national freedom from colonial rule - the right to express its own subjective tastes free from the standards and constraints of alien subjection. [...]

It's interesting though, that in the genre of portrait painting, I have yet to come across a "subjective" interpretation of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. It seems here that the closer to reality the painting, the truer to the "divine image." But then, if this "reality" betrays any "physiological blemishes", it is not considered satisfying. If there is anything to these cultural histories of taste, then we have to ask the question as to whether these are unchanging essences and "never the twain shall meet" or whether they can be related or even synthesized? And if the second is possible, is there only one way to relate and synthesize them or many?

Contemporary western art practice also grapples with issues of this kind. The mid-19th c. saw a wholesale rejection of "naturalism" in art in favor of "subjectivism." But contemporary practice has come to assert that the "naturalistic" or "illusionistic" is no less subjective than the "expressionistic." The photographic signifier hides and discloses the subjective signified. Our practices of reading have tuned to an objective-subjective taste as a result. This indeed is one kind of synthesis... Perhaps our friends with the so-called "Indian look" can try to do the same in their own way, instead of this sad rejection and aggressive hostility? DB Reply 7:32 PM

With its chastity we can certainly live in our own worlds

2008-12-31T20:57:00.004+05:30

Santosh Verma
Friday, November 28, 2008
Inflections of Delight

An artist like Santosh discards the outward appearances of nature, not as material for observation but as an idiom of expression. He needs nature and cannot divorce himself from it. But he can pierce the outward in search of the inward life. At its base are still the varied patterns of unfolding life, in flowers, plants, grasses; the texture of the stones, shells, bark; the sound and movement of water and of bird and insect life; the subtle inflection of cloud and mist and the changing sky are still the sources of his delight.

Many in these days of abstraction believe they have transformed nature to a still more elevated articulation. Unfortunately, quite a bit of what is described as abstraction is random and inchoate. These artists do not seem to have felt the charm of root reality, that is, of nature on their pulse. I believe Santosh is one of those who has so felt it. What he has succeeded in doing is to give nature a fresh incarnation. He draws out its essence. Here, in his work, it is this we invariably taste with our eager eyes.

He has evolved new ways of suggesting the interwoven rhythms by which the visible word is permeated. Thus he does something far more ‘deeply interfused' as binds together the patterns of shell, the thrust and the swell of the sea, the slant of light upon a leaf, the flight of a bird and a feather fall upon a mossy stone. But none of all this is literally so, purely imaginatively.

This is well groomed art, which can do more than delight. It can also enlighten. Experiencing works of this chaste order we as if stand at the mid point of a pendulum's swing--a pendulum of experience that swings outward into both the light as the life around us, and inward into ourselves. Resultantly, thanks to it we seek to penetrate and inform ourselves about the reality that lives deep within us. With its chastity we can certainly live in our own worlds; look upon it and sense it, for it is the stuff of experience that the artist in the viewer, also, seizes upon, and invests with fresh meanings.

I do think Santosh's 'abstraction' enriches our vision. It is not a mere escape or sedative. The overly jangled big city nerves will surely calm themselves with the decorum that there is in his compositions Keshav Malik Posted by Santosh at 7:43 AM Santosh Verma, Residence SRB-94B, SHIPRA RIVIERA, INDIRAPURAM, GHAZIABAD-201 010 E-Mail – santoshverma1956@hotmail.com Studio B-403, NEELPADM-1, VAISHALI, GHAZIABAD-201 010 View my complete profile Thursday, November 27, 2008 Paintings
65X65cm Acrylic On Canvas, 65X65cm Acrylic On Canvas, 90X120 cm Acrylic On Canvas, 60X75cm Acrylic On Canvas, 90X120 cm Acrylic On Canvas
7:13 AM Sunday, November 23, 2008 Water Colour 8:12 AM

A stunning modern-day architectural conception

2008-12-23T11:49:00.001+05:30

Matrimandir Meditation Centre
Posted under Religion by gems78 on Monday 22 December 2008 at 5:58 pm

Auroville, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, is an independent settlement inspired by the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo. Intended to be an ideal city for spiritual seekers, it is steadily evolving according to the master plan drawn up by Mirra Alfassa, known for Aurovilians as the Mother, the Paris-born spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo.
A stunning modern-day architectural conception, situated in an expansive landscaped area referred to as Peace, the meditation centre takes the form of a golden globe appearing to rise out of the earth as a symbol of spiritual consciousness. The centre takes its golden hue from cladding formed of stainless-steel discs coated with gold leaf.
There are no organized rites or symbols within this space to distract visitors from their thoughts or direct them toward a specific religion. The Matrimandir Meditation Centre was conceived simply as an embodiment of peace. In its remarkable meditation chamber, one can rethink one’s self – an experience truly worth having. Design and Culture Dance floor of design and culture

Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics is Politics

2008-09-26T12:09:00.002+05:30

Everything you wanted to know about Jacques Rancière but were afraid to ask…..
Sophie Berrebi

The essays by Jonathan Dronsfield and Steven Wright included in this issue were first presented at the conference Aesthetics and Politics: With and Around Jacques Rancière co-organised by myself and Marie-Aude Baronian at the University of Amsterdam on 20 and 21 June 2006.
One of the elements that triggered the organisation of the conference was a passage of his then recent book Malaise dans l’esthétique (2004). In it, Rancière discussed several exhibitions of contemporary art that had taken place around the year 2000.[1] The way he approached these group shows was particularly refreshing in a context marked by heavy discussions about curatorial practice et al.: Rancière responded to exhibition concept, presentation and individual works without dissociating the one from the other. In other terms, and while his writings were already proving to be influential to the contemporary art milieu, he wove these exhibitions into his text, reacting to them more as a random albeit attentive visitor than as an expert. This attitude inevitably provoked the desire on the part of the reader to stroll alongside him and ask him everything we ever wanted to know about his views (but were afraid to ask).

The format of the conference developed out of that desire for a conversation, and Jacques Rancière proved to be extremely generous in his response, agreeing to a two-day visit to Amsterdam to give a lecture and respond to a series of papers discussing aspects of his work.
The plenary lecture Rancière delivered on the evening of 20 June, entitled ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art’ was attended by an audience of more than 150 people ranging from students to artists and academics. The following day, during an intense day-long conference, academics of different backgrounds presented papers derived from their encounter with Rancière’s work. Sessions on literature and politics, on performing and contemporary arts succeeded one another, separated by panel discussions in which Rancière gave informal replies to questions raised by the speakers. More than once these replies triggered animated discussions, although, predictably perhaps, a climax was reached in the discussion which ensued from third panel dedicated to contemporary art. A substantial part of that panel is reprinted here, with papers given by Jonathan Dronsfield and Steven Wright and the exchange that followed, which was kindly recorded by a member of the audience.

In addition to the elements of the conference that are reprinted here is ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity’ an interview conducted with Jacques Rancière by Marie-Aude Baronian and our colleague from the University of Amsterdam and ASCA, Mireille Rosello. A version of this extensive interview, which took place several months after the conference, was published in Dutch by Valiz (NL), in a volume of studies on Jacques Rancière that appeared in the Netherlands in late 2007. In this exchange, Ranciere discusses his position with regard to democracy, politics, film, literature, art and research.
Finally, my short article ‘Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics is Politics’, also reprinted here, was prompted by a visit to the pavilion of Central Asia at the Venice Biennale in 2005. It was originally commissioned and published by the Dutch art magazine Metropolis M No. 4 (2005), pp. 64-71.

[1] Notably, Bruit de Fond, (Centre National de la Photographie, Paris), Let’s Entertain, (Walker art Centre, Minneapolis, and Centre Pompidou, Paris) and Voilà, le Monde dans la tête (Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris), all three organised in 2000. Volume 2. No. 1. Summer 2008 ISSN 1752-6388

Educating the synthesizing power of imaginal (thinking in images) thinking

2008-09-01T07:18:00.001+05:30

Seeing Meaning Looking at Images and Understanding Sunday, August 31, 2008
Visual Philosophy
“A consciousness that proceeds by sight…is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker.” Sri Aurobindo, A Greater Psychology

When I first used the term “visual philosophy” a student in the class said, “Wait a minute, are you talking about aesthetics?” It was natural to think I was referring to philosophy about art and beauty because we don’t generally think of art and images in their capacity to express ideas, to evoke a philosophical stance through a visual depiction. Beyond simply communicating information, an image shows how to see the information. We equate seeing with understanding.

We are drowning in information and need the wisdom to know how to filter it. Insight sees the significance within the whole. Wisdom depends on perception. The metaphors of seeing attest to our underlying trust in what we ”see with our own eyes.” We “believe what we see”. As we enlarge our picture of reality, our understanding grows.

Observation lies beneath the methods of art and science. As science separates the world into smaller and smaller parts, art should be equally important in pulling the whole back together, to see the forest as well as the trees. Ideas expressed visually can include the multiple variables that we live with in actual experience, the influences from every direction that controlled experiments leave out. Artists enlarge the range of what we are able to see. By sensitizing people to significant pattern, capacity for insight is developed. Understanding how feeling represents the meaning of what we see tunes our intuition and our trust in its guidance.

Educating the synthesizing power of imaginal (thinking in images) thinking may allow us to evolve a new level of intelligence. Arguing for the superiority of visual communication, Barbara Stafford writes “Perceptually combined information… avoids the intellectual limitations of linearity.” She believes that in the graphic world of the internet, artists will be more important in explaining reality, understanding the display of knowledge, allowing an immediate apprehension of connections.

Art reveals consciousness. It offers multiple windows on the deepest and broadest aspects of being human. This is a physical improvement in the most evolved parts of our brain. Like any other activity, the parts of the brain that are used are strengthened. More benefit comes from the self-understanding arising from what you choose to see. Perception is not passive. It’s always scanning for what will be useful to us. Joseph Campbell said, ”The eyes are the scouts of the heart.” We are drawn to what resonates with our own inner state, often mirroring it, sometimes compensating for it. Given that neuroscience has shown that feelings precede and direct thought, letting the eye make choices from the world of art could likely take us deeper into understanding our feelings than talking about them.

The mission of visual philosophy is to see more, to become aware of the complex web of relationships that visual intelligence deals with best, and to express meaning visually. Knowledge of all kinds can be communicated with images. Even in regard to invisible realms and deep level patterns, artists can help us understand consciousness more fully by what they reveal of it. Posted by Susan Waters-Eller at 3:35 PM

Santosh Verma at Jehangir from August 26

2008-08-09T08:01:00.007+05:30

An Exhibition of Paintings By
Santosh Verma

26th August To 1st September
At
Jehangir Art Gallery
161-MG Road, Mumbai

Please oblige us with your benign presence.
Santosh Verma: 09891398249 7:13 PM
Location: SRB-94 B, Shipra Riviera, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad, UP - 201012

De-privileging the masculine spectatorial gaze in context-less galleries

2008-08-08T19:32:00.007+05:30

A Chronology of Modern Indian Art and Thematic Considerations By Debashish Banerji
by Debashish on November 18, 2005 10:25PM (PST)

An Introduction to the history of modern Indian art along with an approach to its categorization, as expressed in the curatorial practice of the exhibition "Contours of Modernity" held at the SOKA University, Irvine from February-April, 2005 and curated by Debashish Banerji and Nalini Rao. more » 1 Attachment Leave Comment Permanent Link

In concluding this section, I would like to draw attention to the powerful body of art produced by contemporary Indian artists focusing on gender issues. The homoerotic fantasies of Bhupen Khakkar or the feminist polemics of Nalini Malani, Arpana Caur, Arpita Singh, Gogi Saroj Pal, Nilima Sheikh and others constitute a prominent direction of contemporary Indian art. It is unfortunate that the present exhibition has not been able to adequately represent this stream. This omission has been entirely logistical and the curators of the exhibition hope to remedy this lacuna in future presentations.

Moreover, with the exception of photography, logistical reasons have also been responsible for the omission of work in contemporary media other than painting, such as printmaking, video, computer, installation or performance art. The attempt to de-privilege the masculine spectatorial gaze from its vantage as viewer in context-less galleries or possessor of collections, has led increasingly to the movement of art from the pictorial space of walls to more intimate and participatory social contexts. This may be seen as a movement from the modern to the postmodern in art, and, since the late 1980s, increasing numbers of Indian artists are presenting their ideas, interpretations and social questions in these forms.

Artists like Vivian Sundaram, Ranbir Kaleka, Subodh Gupta and Ajay Sinha have been at the vanguard of Indian installation arts and producing some of the most exciting contemporary artworks of our time. It is regretted that we could not present any of this work at this exhibition, but we are hopeful that the quality of the works that we have been able to present will generate enough interest and support in the community to enable us to offer a more thorough representation of modern Indian art and its diverse tendencies in the near future. Keywords: Art Attachments: ContoursHistoryandGrouping.doc (58KB)

V5: Group Show by Puducherry Artists at Auroville

2008-08-05T10:52:00.003+05:30

V5: Group Show by Pondicherry Artists
Kala Kendra, Bharat Nivas, Pavilion of India ::: 11:00 AM
KALA KENDRA
BHARAT NIVAS
THE PAVILION OF INDIA
PRESENTS
V5
an exhibition of paintings by artists from pondicherry
danasegar s.
ezhilarasan e.
sridar k.
vengadesh b.
tirounavacarassou g.
August 10 - August 24
Open Daily 11 am till 7 pm
inauguration: 5 pm, Sunday, August 10, 2008
All are welcome
posted by dharmesh

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Exhibition "Miniatures" by Firooza

Exhibition of paintings on silk by Firooza
15th July to 13th August at Pitanga
Daily 8-12.30 & 2-7pm
posted by Pitanga

Tushar Nair captures the playful and frolicsome aspect of Puducherry

2008-06-21T12:40:00.001+05:30

Of hues varied and wonderful The Hindu Friday Review Delhi Friday, Jun 20, 2008
A group exhibition by SAIMC students is proof of their talent.
We are like that only A photo from the exhibition.

It might have been their first exhibition, but it wouldn't be their last. Students of the Creative Photography department, Sri Aurobindo Institute of Mass Communication (SAIMC), recently held their first annual photography exhibition at the Alliance Francaise. Guided by Raghu Rai, the works of the seven students have an honest freshness to them. While the quality varied from excellent to average, each student certainly has a signature style.

The locations are common, but the photographers highlight different aspects of each, be it Anandpur Sahib, Puducherry or Delhi. Some students concentrate on the location, others on the people. Some use candidness to their advantage, while others use posturing skilfully. While Siddharth Kumar brings out the sheer scale of the festival ground, Nilay Jyoti Talukdar brings out the power and ferocity of the Hola Mohalla festival. Tushar Nair captures the playful and frolicsome aspect of Puducherry. His subjects even seem to pose and smile for the camera. Bharat Choudhary, on the other hand, evokes the serenity of Auroville in Puducherry. His camera frames people lost in solitude under the shade of the banyan tree. Sagar Heerani's photo of the Mitra guesthouse removes the specificities of the location and creates instead a moment rather than a scene. The only pure black and white collection is by Kiranjit Baruah, who uses foreground and background interestingly.

Uniquely Indian
Some of the most memorable photos include Tanul Trivedy's Bike Rickshaw. The front of a motorbike is attached to a cart. It's the kind of photo that makes you smile and say, "We are like this only!" India is colour, and this photo shines with greens and reds. Bharat Choudhary's photo at Nizamuddin Dargah is magical in its over-layering. It's the kind of photo that reveals itself slowly to the viewer - the longer you stare - the more layers appear. It makes phantasms of people and creates illusions of reality.

At the end of their course at SAIMC each student has ambitions. Some want to pursue fashion photography while others have aspirations of "activist photography". While they do agree that photography can't be learnt, they admit that it can be better understood. And this exhibition was proof that they've certainly understood the art and are en route to mastering it.
NANDINI NAIR

Rare portraits by S M Pandit at Chaitanyamayi Art Gallery, Gulbarga

2008-04-26T11:20:00.004+05:30

Visual treat in store for art enthusiasts Gulbarga, April 25:

Art lovers are in for a visual treat at the Chaitanyamayi Art Gallery in Gulbarga city for a week from April 24. On show will be true-to-life rare portraits by renowned painter the late S M Pandit.

The exhibition has been arranged to mark the fifth anniversary celebrations of the gallery that was established in memory of the Mother of Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. It was on April 24 that the Mother came to Puducherry and made it her home.

The rare paintings, which are part of a private collection, are being put up for public viewing for the first time. The works will include the true-to-life portrait of S M Pandit’s teacher B G Sathe. It also happens to be the artist’s first painting which he sketched when he was a student at the J J Art School in Mumbai. The other paintings include those of Sir M Visvesvaraya, the Mother, Sri Aurobindo, the former legislator Gangadhar Namoshi, the former chairman of the erstwhile Gulbarga City Municipal Council Neelkantrao Patil. There will be also 35 other paintings of leading businessmen and industrialists of Gulbarga district. These were sketched between 1976 and 1982.

The gallery’s founder chairman and painter A S Patil told presspersons that it was for the first time that these paintings were being exhibited. These paintings would go a long way in perfecting the art of mixing the right kind of colour and bringing the right ambience in portraits, he said. Dr Patil said that besides the breathtaking portraits of world leaders such as Saddam Hussain, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher there were also landscape and realistic paintings and those highlighting important episodes in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Bhagvad Gita and Shakuntalam.

S M Pandit had won several awards and the Royal Arts Academy of London has conferred a fellowship on him. Some of his rare paintings are put up at a private art gallery owned by his family members in Gulbarga city.

Artist Mohan Panchal, who has done a PhD thesis on the works of S M Pandit, will deliver a special lecture on the inaugural day and portrait painters Vijay Sindhu and M C Chetty will make on-the-spot portrait paintings on April 25 and 28. Dr Patil said that the exhibition would be open from 9 am to noon and from 5 pm to 8 pm every day from April 24 to 30.

When I discovered the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother it changed my life and work fundamentally

2008-04-25T10:12:00.003+05:30

Home After Hrs Drawing artistic inspiration
Ismat Tahseen Thursday, April 24, 2008 23:59 IST

The splash of colours brightens the face of Buddha on an otherwise darkened canvas followed by another with a frenetic burst of dots.
Ask artist Hufreesh Dumasia about the titles of the paintings and he will say that it’s a mere formality. “It’s for the audience to take inspiration from my paintings. The title is a mere formality,” said Hufreesh.
The canvasses are part of the group of artists from Auroville that are on show at the Indusvista Art gallery at Fort. Back in Mumbai for their second art exhibition, the artists are happy to be in the city that offers them a different pace of life. “Back in Auroville, the pace of things is slower,” smiled Hufreesh.
“We have more than 128 nationalities in one place, yet everyone is so friendly to each other, more than life it’s an experiment in human unity,” she added.
That feeling has certainly spilled onto their canvases. Like Nele Martens’ work that employs structural modelling with rhythmic brush strokes.
“It seems chaotic but aims to create a harmony straight from my heart, which comes from the serenity one feels in Auroville,” she explains.
Amsterdam-born sculptor Henk van Putten admitted had been using a limited scale of forms since 35 years and says he was inspired too.
“When I discovered the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother it changed my life and work fundamentally,” he said. “For two years I did nothing there and then I think as my life underwent a change in terms of thought, I felt inspired to paint too.” Among the interesting artworks, there’re steel boxes which Agnus had put aside for months until, Agnus said, “nature gave them a rusted robe. I just painted on them to symbolise important human emotions.”
i_ismat@dnaindia.net Home After Hrs The man on a mission

The Significance of Indian Art by Sri Aurobindo

2008-04-03T11:13:00.000+05:30

Books › "Sri Aurobindo"
97. Psychic Being: Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and A. S. Dalal (Paperback - Jun 1, 1999)
7 Used & new from $6.63
98. On Nationalism (First Series) by Sri Aurobindo (Paperback - 1965)
1 Used & new from $29.95
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2 Used & new from $23.00
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Lalit Bhati, Adil Writer, and Auroson Bystrom

2008-04-02T12:12:00.004+05:30

Adil Writer is a ceramic artist based out of Auroville, Pondicherry. Adil’s works exemplify a fearlessness to explore. Some of his pieces feature written text on textured clay bearing poetry, ruminations, lyrics & mantras in Sanskrit. Posted by MASALA CHAI at 10:10 PM Labels: Ceramics

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Auroville is an under-construction town from south India that plans to create a harmonious way of life for all its inhabitants. Lalit Bhati is an urban planner, an architect and resident of Auroville, and will be presenting the project at the Ecocity World Summit. The Auroville site states that the ultimate purpose of this city is “to realise human unity”, and to be a town where “men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities”. (ecofuss.com) dátum: 12:30 Címkék: architecture, future

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Auroson Bystrom- furniture design
Dear Shaded Viewers,
Designer Auroson Bystrom is an anomaly. The Indian Born 37 year old of Swedish descent integrates not only his complex surroundings of India but melds them with his sense of minimalism which comes from his Northern European routes.

Bystrom was raised in Auroville, India. For Bystrom opposites play a role constantly pushing against one another to create an integrated baseline– his work is an ordering of chaos, an emission, a message and ultimately manifest aesthetic. “There is an elemental language in the stone, wood and metals. The process is the transformation into a new language of form.” states Bystrom.

His first piece was a commissioned series of stone and wood. This quickly led to international attention in key magazines such as Elle Décor and i-D as well as sold out gallery shows in his native country and abroad. Press: Peoples Revolution Later, Diane Posted by Diane Pernet at 02:00 PM Permalink

Eco-friendly building materials, alternative technology, and an architecture that is energy-efficient and climate-responsive

2008-03-30T08:57:00.002+05:30

Building the Indian way DESIGN Gargi Gupta New Delhi Business Standard March 29, 2008

Is there an architectural style that you can identify as “contemporary Indian”? Jagan Shah, architect and historian, feels there is and picks on 20 mid-career architects — he calls them the “new moderns” — for an exposition of the “contemporary Indian” (Contemporary Indian Architecture, Roli).

So what is the “contemporary Indian”? No, it’s not an architectural style that merely tacks on “Indian” motifs or symbols to the structure, or mimics vernacular architecture. No, in a globalised world, an architect can’t simply get by on national identity.

What ties together the architects Shah picks on are “multidisciplinary insights” and a widening of respective agendas to include concerns about climate, ecology and gender. It is through the description of structures by them that he comes to a definition of the “contemporary Indian”.

Shah refers to two other vital issues which have had an impact on “creative” expression — the diminishing role of the state in commissioning public buildings, and the fact that with globalisation, architects are concentrating on delivery schedules, quality, detailing, engineering and programming skill. Here’s a look at some of the architects whose works he holds up

Walls have eyes

Auroville-based Anupama Kundoo is first on the list and it is her own residence that Shah holds up as an example of the “contemporary Indian”, identifying it in her attention to three areas: “Eco-friendly building materials, alternative technology, and an architecture that is energy-efficient and climate-responsive”.

Called “The Wall House”, Kundoo’s house is only 2.2 metres wide, made of exposed brick that’s scaled down to the smaller proportions of the local achakal brick.

It’s most distinctive feature is a two-storey-high vaulted verandah at the entrance, made of interlocking clay tubes, which is not just cheap, it is also great for insulation. Energy and costs have been further lowered by the use of solid stone and recycled wood.

Aurodhan Gallery has the city’s finest collection of contemporary Indian art

2008-03-30T08:41:00.003+05:30

Pondicherry’s French Connection By MATT GROSS NYT: March 30, 2008

Farther north lay the Aurodhan Gallery, perhaps the city’s finest collection of contemporary Indian art. After browsing three floors of brilliant Ganesh portraits and somber neo-Expressionist scenes of old men drinking and playing checkers, I asked the gallery owner’s wife, Shernaz Verma, what to do next. She suggested I visit the French Institute and Auroville — a utopian community founded by the Sri Aurobindo Society, whose followers were, for many years, Pondy’s main tourists — but warned I shouldn’t expect a vacation crammed with activities.
In Pondicherry, she said, “there’s not much to see, but a lot to feel.”

Auroville, just over the border in Tamil Nadu state, was founded by a society devoted to the guru Sri Aurobindo in the 1960s and is now home to more than 1,700 people from more than 40 countries. At the center of this “ideal township” is the Matrimandir, a dimpled golden globe where the late guru’s followers meditate. Auroville also has the closest beaches to Pondicherry.

For Deleuze, art is to be thought on the side of production, but without a centralized designer be it God or man

2008-03-13T07:28:00.001+05:30

larvalsubjects Says: March 12, 2008 at 8:44 pm

Both Deleuze and Whitehead see being in aesthetic or artistic terms as creations or inventions. This is one of the key claims of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which proposes to united the two sundered halves of the aesthetic. Whitehead sees beauty as a central principle in the production of beings. Shaviro has done truly outstanding (and humbling) work on the intersection of Deleuze and Whitehead which you can find over at The Pinocchio Theory. You might find his article entitled “The Wrenching Duality of the Aesthetic” especially interesting in this connection. These can be found here: http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/articles.html
Remember, one of the key issues at work in these questions is that of immanence. That is, how are we able to think the emergence of order without presupposing design or a maker. This is why I hesitate in response to your remarks about aesthetics (Kant famously argued that Beauty is a trace of design in nature in the Critique of Judgment).

For Deleuze, art is to be thought on the side of production, but without a centralized designer be it God or man. Deleuze is thoroughly Darwinian, in this sense, not because he accepts natural selection as the central mechanism, but because like Darwin he thinks the emergence of forms and order without any form or design preceding these forms and organization. The forms of life, existence, society, art, etc., are thus creations in a quasi-artistic or aesthetic sense. I’ve discussed this quite a bit on the blog in relation to Deleuze.

An Exhibition of Ceramics by Anna and Saraswati

2008-03-09T09:04:00.002+05:30

Pottery Poetry
Pavilion of Tibetan Culture until 10 March) ::: 10:00 AM
The Russian Pavilion Group presents POTTERY POETRY
An Exhibition of Ceramics by Anna and Saraswati
Opening Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. until the 10th of March, 2008 at The Pavilion of Tibetan Culture International Zone, Auroville posted by jill

The dawn of spirituality, human unity and goodwill

2008-03-02T11:41:00.002+05:30

Other States - Puducherry Images that capture the spirit of Auroville on display
Serena Josephine. M The Hindu Saturday, Mar 01, 2008
Aurodhan’s Lalit Verma has showcased rare photographs at Bharat Nivas
— Photo: T. Singaravelou Speaking volumes: President of Aurodhan Lalit Verma takes exponent of classical dance Mallika Sarabhai on a tour of an exhibition of his rare photographs at Bharat Nivas on Thursday. PUDUCHERRY:

Transcending barriers of language and culture, a photography exhibition here attempts to convey the values that Auroville stands for.
Words apart, the pictures at the photography exhibition display some of the golden moments in time.
As part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of Auroville, president of Aurodhan Lalit Verma has put up some of his rare collections of photographs at Bharat Nivas.
The exhibition was inaugurated on February 28 and will be on till March 31.
Mr. Verma established Aurodhan nearly 10 years ago in Puducherry “to try and raise the art consciousness” here. He created the statue of Sri Aurobindo that was installed at Savithri Bhavan on the 40th birth anniversary of Auroville.
Titled ‘les moments d`ores’ (golden moments), the photography exhibition has Auroville as its central theme. This is Mr. Lalit Verma’s first exhibition at Auroville.

Highlights
“One of the highlights of the exhibition is a photograph which was taken on the last birthday of Auroville. It shows a gap in the cloud and sunlight passes through the banyan tree at Matrimandir. There are 12 rays of the sun representing The Mother’s symbol. It was like a gift to me,” Mr. Verma said.
While the eye searched for inner meanings in the photographs, Mr. Verma explains, “It shows all the values that represent Auroville, including the dawn of spirituality, human unity and goodwill.”
Going a step further, he stressed the need for people to act always with the highest aspirations to bring harmony in the world.
“I have displayed a photograph of a tsunami girl who lost her family in Puducherry. Her smile is simply unbelievable,” he said of one picture.
Thirty-three photographs have been displayed at the exhibition. The photography exhibition will be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day till it closes.

To switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities

2008-02-23T09:46:00.003+05:30

Design Review 'Design and the Elastic Mind' The Soul in the New Machines By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF The New York Times: February 22, 2008 Bioengineered crossbreeds. Temperamental robots. Spermatozoa imprinted with secret texts. Although the fascination with organic form has been around since the Renaissance, we have now entered an age in which designers and architects are drawing their inspiration from hidden patterns in nature rather than from pretty leaves or snowflakes. The results can be scary, but they may also hold the key to paradise.

“Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhilarating new show opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, makes the case that through the mechanism of design, scientific advances of the last decade have at least opened the way to unexpected visual pleasures.
As revolutionary in its own way as MoMA’s “Machine Art” exhibition of 1934, which introduced Modern design to a generation of Americans, the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty. Like that earlier show, it is shaped by an unwavering faith in the transformative powers of technology.
Yet the exhibition’s overarching theme, the ability to switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities, may sound a death knell for the tired ideological divides of the last century, between modernity and history, technology and man, individual and collective. It should be required viewing for anyone who believes that our civilization is heading back toward the Dark Ages.
Organized by Paola Antonelli, the show opens with an act of high-tech graffiti. A can of spray paint is suspended from a system of cables and pulleys in front of a wall. A small motor guided by computer software winds and unwinds the cables, moving the spray can methodically across the white surface to spell out the show’s title.
It is a nice, mischievous touch. And the precision of the script, in contrast to the paint’s fuzzy edges or the occasional drip, reinforces the show’s point that the old Manichaean duality between the artist and artificial intelligence, nature and machine, no longer holds.
To create “The Honeycomb Vase,” for instance, Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny designed a temporary frame in the shape of a squat vase with a slender neck. A colony of nearly 40,000 bees then went to work for a week constructing a hive over it in what the designer calls “slow prototyping” — a pointed reference to the methodical repetition of the old assembly line.
The resulting voluptuous, translucent form reflects a close collaboration between man and nature in which the artist serves as a gentle guide before allowing the bees to take over.
Similarly, Joris Laarman’s “Bone Chair” was created with computer software that mimics the creation of human bones. The weight and stresses on a typical chair are programmed into the computer, which then works out an appropriate “bone” structure, churning out a series of increasingly refined prototypes. (The final computer version has a raw, undigested quality, but Mr. Laarman couldn’t resist adding a final dash of aesthetic refinement by smoothing over the rough edges, a nice little example of how reluctant some designers are to yield control.)
Other designers are more concerned with developing strategies that allow the machine to adapt to individual tastes rather than with creating the perfect prototype. Using rapid manufacturing systems, the Swedish team known as Front Design have developed a process in which a person sketches a piece of furniture in the air, which is then recorded with motion-capture video technology and transformed into a digital file. The file can then be used to generate a laser-cut piece of real furniture. Individual desire takes precedence over mass consumer tastes.
In all of these cases the computer’s grasp of complex underlying patterns allows the designer to create objects that are not only superefficient but also remarkably adaptable.
But the show is about more than gorgeous, environmentally sensitive design. The human body is repositioned as part of a fluid, elastic chain that extends from minuscule atomic particles to global communication networks.
The best example of this approach is Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch’s “Rules of Six,” which uses algorithms to fashion an organically based architecture. Mimicking the growth patterns of microscopic nanostructures, they envisioned an unpredictable, self-generating landscape that can multiply indefinitely without sacrificing stability. Their design is indifferent to scale: the sprawling matrix of three-dimensional interlocking hexagons could represent rooms, buildings or entire urban neighborhoods.
In another fascinating if fanciful application of nanotechnology, the typeface designer Oded Ezer proposes using it to imprint incantatory typed messages on spermatozoa, the high-tech equivalent of a primitive fertility ritual.
The ease with which human designers can shift from the atomic to the global is driven home by the show’s layout, designed by Lana Hum. Visitors pass between two walls that converge slightly, to create a forced perspective — an architectural trick that extends all the way back to Palladio in the 16th century but here makes you feel like Alice tumbling through the looking glass.
Suddenly you are in a space packed with unfamiliar objects, like a trade fair. The scales shift once again; dystopian visions seep into the picture. “New City,” a projected three-dimensional display of a virtual world by Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn and Alex McDowell, is a model of an idealized society where buildings, cities and entire geographic regions all flow seamlessly together. It suggests how the Internet could be used as a testing ground for an emerging utopia.
Perhaps the most unnerving project here is “Architecture and Justice” from the Million Dollar Blocks Project, a graphic study by Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab. Using the computer to filter through masses of data on prison populations, the group studied several American cities and identified the blocks where the highest concentration of prison inmates lived when they were arrested. That more than $1 million a year is spent on incarcerating people from each one of these blocks is shocking misuse of resources.
The graphic display on a blood-red grid is a bold expression of how the computer can be a powerful analytical tool for dislodging received wisdom and enabling us to examine entrenched social problems through a new lens.
If the show has a weakness, it’s when it introduces artsy expressions of futuristic societies that tend to be technologically crude: images of heavy plastic tubes that potential sexual mates can use to sniff each other, for example, or robots that refuse to respond until they are lavished with affection.
The almost unwieldy scope of the exhibition, however, is a virtue: it sends our imaginations spinning in endless directions. The technological optimism and trade-show ambience, for example, may conjure Charles and Ray Eames’s gigantic slide displays from the 1959 Moscow Trade Fair, which flaunted the peacetime technology of cold-war America. I left MoMA already dreaming of a followup show that would map out the link between today’s new design technologies and the wartime military research that generated them.
Or how about a show that looks at the relationships between technology, modernity and fundamentalism?
But I don’t want to detract from the mood. “Design and the Elastic mind” is the most uplifting show MoMA’s architecture and design department has presented since the museum reopened in 2004. Thanks to its imaginative breadth, we can begin to dream again.
“Design and the Elastic Mind” opens on Sunday and continues through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org. Richard Perry/The New York Times “New City” by Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn and Alex McDowell in a show opening Sunday at MoMA. More Photos >

Meditative play of light...searching for silence

2008-02-23T07:05:00.003+05:30

Aura of Auroville Ruchika Talwar Expressindia: Saturday , February 23, 2008

A Franco-Swiss family and an Italian, who have left Europe to make Auroville their home, are in the Capital with paintings, which have an almost meditative play of light; gigantic installations embellished with mantras and the red sand of Aurobindo’s ashram; and haiku-like photographs with the aura of Auroville.
The Hymn of Silence, an enormous installation by Veronique Nicolet (above, in picture), a 51-year-old who has been an art teacher at Auroville for the past 11 years, consists of three sheets of glass, painted in blue and engraved with the mantra Om Namo Bhagawataya. But the photographs of the Italian Ireno Guerci, who is enamoured with “the visual paradise that India is”, are simple. “They are an invitation to contemplate the little ideas that we tend to ignore in the lust for big ones,” he says.
Then there is 55-year-old Michel Nicolet, with his installation Prakriti and Purusha, and 36-year-old Karine Applanat Nicolet, who is an interior decorator at the quaint township in Pondicherry. Her paintings probably have the softest colours one has ever seen on canvas, as though they are searching for silence.
The exhibition at the India International Centre comes with a probing title: “Why Art?” Rajan Ghosh, who has written a book on the relationship between art and Aurobindo, explains, “The title is interrogative, but the answer lies in the search within. Aurobindo believed that art doesn’t give what nature does; it gives much more.” The exhibition at the India International Centre Annexe is on till February 29

Surreal-metaphysical imageries and mystical symbolism

2008-02-22T13:04:00.001+05:30

Exhibition: ‘South Calcutta Artists’ Academy’
Aurelec Cafeteria & Art Gallery (until 16 March) ::: 8:00 AM 17 February to 16 March 2008
Exhibition by members of the South Calcutta Artists’ Academy
Aurelec Cafeteria & Art Gallery
The ‘South Calcutta Artists’ Academy’ is an artists’ organization, consisting of painters, sculptors, graphic and ceramic artists, and so on. It is the quest for empathy, for togetherness, that led us to establish the Academy in 2001.
Our Academy aims to provide a broad platform for artists to overcome their personal and commercial handicaps, without compromising their individual identities. Just as parallel lines can progress together, similarly different ambitions and thought-processes are sought to be accommodated under the umbrella of our Academy.
Representation at ‘Aurelec’ Exhibition :
The members of the South Calcutta Artists’ Academy aspire to represent the Eastern Region, especially Calcutta, at the Pondicherry Artists’ Workshop. All the members of the Academy are upcoming contemporary artists, experimenting with the various genres of both contemporary and traditional Indian art.
Calcutta as we all know is known as the cultural capital of our country. It amalgamates the traditions of Indian classical and folk art forms along with the influence of colonialism.
The artists of the Academy seek a forum to bring international exposure to the artistic traditions of Eastern India, as well as to exchange knowledge of existent and emergent art forms and techniques.
Ten painters will exhibit their work in the forthcoming exhibition in ‘Aurelec’:
Sujit Karmakar seamlessly blends Indian traditional art symbols and monochromatic colour schemes with contemporary themes and concerns.
Pinaki Acharyya’s surreal-metaphysical imageries are juxtaposed with Indian spiritual and mystical symbolism.
Sharmistha Acharjee likes to experiment with lines and form. She focuses on inanimate objects, which she then invests with a new dimension.
Ashok Kumar Dey draws inspiration from folk art forms. His lines are cleanly and firmly etched, giving his figures a certain fixity of purpose.
Sujit Saha uses primitive art forms and animal motifs to highlight his contemporary concerns.
Tapan Biswas likes to place spiritual art forms against contemporary images.
Pradip Laha goes back to Bengal folk art and figurative style for inspiration. The female images in his paintings create a new niche to highlight feminine forms and feelings.
Mahua Roy mixes her fantasies and innocence to express herself.
Amitava Banerjee amalgamates bold brushwork with his simplified folk forms.
Rajib Deyashi works with naturalistic forms and realistic colours.
Lal Malsawma is from Mizoram (North-East ). His paintings portray with honesty the environment to which he belongs.
Aurelec Cafeteria, Auroville, is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
posted by Franz

Paintings, silk screens and drawings by Monique Patenaude

2008-02-22T13:00:00.002+05:30

Exhibition: "The Blue Invasion"
Pitanga (until 12 March) ::: 8:00 AM
The Blue Invasion and other unseen art works
Paintings, silk screens and drawings
by Monique Patenaude
21 February to 12 March 2008 at Pitanga
Daily open: 8 – 12:30 & 2 – 7 pm Sundays closed
The English version of the book “Made in Auroville, India”,
translated by L’aura Joy, will be launched at the same time.
posted by Pitanga

Still can the vision come, the joy arrive

2008-02-18T15:48:00.003+05:30

Archetypal matter-spirit mysteries set for debate again
S. Dorairaj Other States - The Hindu - Puducherry
Three-day meet organised by Sri Aurobindo World Centre for Human Unity
— Photo: T. Singaravelou The brochure of the three-day meet, ‘Sri Aurobindo…The New Dynamism of the Material and the Spiritual’ that will be held in Puducherry from Friday.
PUDUCHERRY:

“When the circle will be completed, when the two extremities will touch, when the highest will manifest in the most material that the experience will be truly decisive.” – This is how The Mother throws light on the dynamism of the material and the spiritual.
Fathoming out the mysteries of the relationship between matter and spirit, Sri Aurobindo says:
“There Matter is the Spirit’s firm density
Where sense can build a world of pure delight.”

But an attempt to find answers to questions such as “Are these poetic images?,” “Or, do they reflect the nature of changes taking place in our world?” and “Can we discover links to them? And weave them together to form a rich tapestry of our lives?” has been made by the Sri Aurobindo World Centre for Human Unity by organising a three-day meet, “Sri Aurobindo…The New Dynamism of the Material and the Spiritual.”
The meet to be held at Bharat Nivas in Auroville will commence its deliberations on February 15.
The first day will be devoted to the broad topic, “Our Frontiers of Scientific Research.” It will have presentations by experts on the irreversible discoveries in physics, the new findings in biology, economics taking a new look, in search of new organisational structures, how technology impacts the human psyche, how globalisation affects individuals and societies and climatic change and its far reaching imperatives.
Topics such as art as expression of the spirit, the multi-dimensionality of the literary canvas, architecture as form and consciousness, design and its changing contours, education seeking new methods and goals, search for a greater psychology of man and society and the meaning of ‘embodiment’ and evolutionary purpose would be discussed on the second day under the broad subject, “As Life recreates itself.”
The third day would have the session on “Spiritual Experience and the goal of Transformation.” Issues such as “A new sense of the ‘spiritual’ in life-in-matter, its many forms and practices, the supra-mental consciousness and the substance, the supra-mental manifestation, its moment of evolutionary presence and the path of internal yoga” would be discussed.

24 speakers
A total of 24 speakers will make their presentations. Each session will also have collective interaction.
The deliberations on the first day will start with recitation from ‘Savitri’ and conclude with the chanting of “OM” with Narad at Sri Aurobindo Auditorium. The second day’s session will begin with recitation from ‘Isha Upanishad’. Exhibition
An exhibition on “Infinite Matter” would be inaugurated at Kala Kendra.
On the third day, the session would commence with meditation with music of ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Centenary 1972’.
It would culminate in a power-point presentation titled, “A Presence of Roger Anger.”
A power-point presentation on “How the Body’s Development Supports Higher States of Consciousness” in the forenoon at the audio-visual room of Kala Kendra and contemporary dance and live music programme “An Infinite Matter” by Grace and Nadaka at the Sri Aurobindo Auditorium in the evening are slated for February 18.

Nishikanta-Dilip Kumar combination that resulted in memorable compositions

2008-02-09T11:09:00.000+05:30

ALL THE BEST: Tale of two legends

It is not often that one encounters so many legends in a single week. Art lovers speak of Ramkinkar Baij with the same reverence that connoisseurs of music refer to Dilip Kumar Roy. At the same time came a living legend in the world of dance from Germany, Pina Bausch who had taken Kolkata by storm more than 12 years ago with a production called Carnations. Her performance has been discussed elsewhere and hence we can concentrate on the two who have their roots n Bengal but whose legacy is cherished all over.

Dilip Kumar Roy was born in the same year as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and while the latter spend the better part of his life striving for the freedom that came when he was not around, the former strived for freedom of music compositions that stood apart in an era dominated by Tagore. The point was stressed in an absorbing lecture by Sudhir Chakraborty which was the highlight of Sura Kavya Trust’s 111th birth anniversary programme on Dilip Kumar Roy at the GD Birla Sabhagar. The idea was to emphasise the “parampara’’ that made Dilip Kumar what he was ~ a scholar with a universal outlook but whose creative genius distinguished him from Tagore and who found his métier in several thousand songs which have not yet been comprehensively compiled.

It is left to organisations like Sura Kavya Trust to preserve the heritage through publications, music albums and, most important, getting the new generation to imbibe the power and passion of Dilip Kumar’s music. The programme revealed exciting new talents. One of them was Sujata Majumdar who accompanied Sudhir Chakraborty as an illustrator of the musical legacy handed down to Dilip Kumar from his father Dwijendralal. The raga-based compositions were illustrated with Sujata’s rendering of Barasha elo which was followed up with the Nishikanta-Dilip Kumar combination that resulted in memorable compositions like Tomar andhar nishaye and tunes adapted from the Scotch, Irish and English compositions. The speaker, an acclaimed musicologist, covered different phases of the musical careers of father and son with such depth and perspicacity that the audience consisting mainly of admirers of Sri Aurobindo’s ardent disciple must have returned with a clearer understanding of the musical genius.

The second half was also devoted to the musical spirit handed down by father to son, this time resulting in a visual delight. Alokananda Roy made a stunning presence with movements that were wonderfully in tune with the songs rendered by Shikha Basu and Prabuddha Raha reinforced by Debraj Roy’s commentary written by Biswajit Ganguly. The DL Roy selections were in the patriotic mould but there were images of sheer joy reflected in songs like Ami eshechhi. There were also beautifully nuanced compositions that Shikha Basu used her experience and competence to give the audience a taste of the spiritual strength that went into all of Dilip Kumar’s work.

An equally comprehensive view of Ramkinkar Baij is presented by Anant Art Gallery. This is the most well curated show one has seen in recent times. The highlight is a series of photographs taken by Devi Prasad when he was a student of Ramkinkar at Santiniketan. Most of the photographs of the sculptures were said to have been taken at night with controlled lighting and they produce an ambience that is just right for appreciation of Ramkinkar’s memorable sculptures ~ the Yaksha and Yamini statues, studies of the human form, a study of Rabindranath that has been discussed again and again and images of mother and child, love and innocence.

Along with the sculptures come original paintings in water colour and oil. Most of these have a spontaneous flourish ~ village scenes and quick sketches that carry the energy and universal humanism that he brought to all his work. The credit for all this must go Naman Ahuja of the School of Arts and Aesthetic, JNU, who first presented the show in Delhi to an overwhelming response. In Kolkata there is an audio-visual section that includes an unfinished film on Ramkinkar by Ritwik Ghatak. It adds up to the most intimate portrait of the man who revealed so many shades to a colourful life.

POSTSCRIPT: Perhaps the least talked about side of Satyajit Ray’s creative genius was his contribution to the visual arts. If the show mounted by Ray Society at the Academy was any guide, there is no doubt that the energy and inventiveness Ray displayed elsewhere is reinforced by the plethora of illustrations, book covers, posters, typefaces, set and costume designs, advertisement art works and much more. The question is, where do all these get preserved? Swapan Mullick the statesman.net Saturday, 9 February 2008

Money Museum

2008-02-03T10:25:00.000+05:30

Where the Capitalism Is (Always on Display) By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Museum Review NYT: February 2, 2008

At a time of uncertainty — as the market quavers, the dollar sinks, sub-prime lenders go belly up, and the Federal Reserve Bank rapidly twists its dials — money becomes more puzzling and more unpredictable, demanding closer scrutiny. So while opening the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street last month might at first have seemed like bad timing — like buying a stock at its top, or selling at its bottom — there was actually no better moment to mount this tribute to the “forces that have made New York City the financial capital of the world” (as one of the museum’s displays puts it). And if our city’s status and the currency that backs it are more contested than they once were, that only makes the enterprise more urgently intriguing.

In fact, the museum was founded just after the 1987 market crash, because John Herzog, chairman of a trading firm that has since become part of Merrill Lynch, said he felt that there was no “institutional memory” on Wall Street. Moments of crisis require that expanded perspective, and, as the museum’s founding shows, they also inspire it...

One display reminds us that Willie Sutton famously explained that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” But we come to this former bank to see exactly what money is — and what America has made of it. That doesn’t really happen. But enough is seen so that money starts to seem less like a material object than like something more ethereal, affected by sea winds and psychology, faith and risk. And at this uncertain moment its mysterious powers seem all the more uncanny: it’s a perfect time to see it in action. This museum is not a bad place to start. The Museum of American Finance is open Tuesdays through Saturdays at 48 Wall Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 908-4110 or www.financialhistory.org More Articles in Arts »

Art is also a supreme comfort because it gives credence, by its very attention, to the various moods and modes of being

2008-01-24T09:38:00.000+05:30

The Practice of Appreciation Posted on December 28th McFawn

In the New York Times the other day, Roberta Smith wrote an article titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Art about the obtuse and pretentious language in art criticism today. Smith takes issue with three words: privilege, reference (both used as verbs) and the term practice used to describe what artists do. Smith seems particularly uncomfortable with the word “practice,” claiming that it characterizes art-making as a white-color activity, that it implies that artists need license to practice (of which she disagrees) and, most interestingly, that “practice” indicates that art is ultimately a problem-solving activity. Here’s how Smith puts it:
Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem… Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own subjective needs.
Smith’s issue with the word practice is less interesting than the bold claim it leads her to about the purpose of art. She seems to believe that art is most successful when it doesn’t try to tackle any problem outside the artist’s psyche or aesthetic aims.

Sunil Gangadharan at Art and Perception wrote an insightful response that makes the point that art often draws attention to global problems, perhaps encouraging “the viewer to think about (and in the ideal case, acting to alleviate) a problem hitherto unknown or underrepresented”–thereby tackling an “outside” problem. Certainly this would be the goal of most political art.
I have never thought of art as a problem-solving activity, outside of the inherent problem-solving in bringing an intention to realization. Art may gesture towards problems in the world, but I agree that the best art does not aim to “fix” anything. The purpose of art will always be debated, but my natural response is that art, rather than solving problems, is a means to a greater valuing of the world, problems and all. The best art is a sophisticated and distinctive appreciation of the world, and the best art criticism is a sophisticated and distinctive appreciation of art.
Without art, what we would appreciate in the world would be limited. We would no doubt appreciate food, water, shelter, family, and any personal relationships that benefited us. But our pleasures would likely be restricted to only what contributed to our survival and immediate happiness, and our way of ordering the world would probably consist of a simple dichotomy: good and bad. Good things help us survive or feel good, and bad things impede our survival and hurt. Art, however, gives us the ability–and the permission–to appreciate the unclassifiable details of the world. For instance, without art, we might find the natural world beautiful, or we might be drawn to a hard-to-read feature in someone else, like a sardonic yet shy smile. The appreciation of such things perhaps existed before art, but it is art that encourages us to dwell in and value these perceptions.

Art is also a supreme comfort because it gives credence, by its very attention, to the various moods and modes of being. Joy, triumph, contentment all seem real to us because these are the things we want to feel as real, and suffering is real because of the vividness of pain. But the more subtle states of being–bittersweet melancholy, self-amusement, mischievousness–these states and every other, art argues, are just as real and just as capable of being valued.
When I find art or literature moving, I feel as if the art is elaborating on something I once felt briefly. For instance, Hawthorne’s “My Visit to Niagara” explores the numbness and intimidation and loss of self we sometimes feel in the presence of natural phenomena. I felt, when reading “Niagara” that I also had this experience in the presence of nature (my visit to the Andes in Peru was one example). But like so many sensations throughout the course of life, I let myself be swept along to the next experience without pausing on the significance and singularity of that moment. Good art slows the world down and shows us the dimensionality in even the most transient of experiences. Art is perpendicular to life: if a lifetime is a horizontal and forward-moving, art is vertical–showing us the heights and depths in moments from which we are compelled to move on. Art may not fix the problems of the world, but it shows us the fullness of what’s at stake. Trackback URL Some Responses to “The Practice of Appreciation” :

Art certainly is “perpendicular to life”. It is a time out from life as we usually live it, and when it is good enough, the “supreme comfort” McFawn talks about is there to enjoy. Roberta Smith makes quite a few good points too, until her last paragraph, where she blows it by conceding that she, like many many others since Leo Casteli exhibited a fake Fountain in the 50s, no longer demands to see art. It is as if the very lack of discipline Smith “refers to” ultimately consumed her own experience of art. Commented catfish on December 29th, 2007.
About Hawthorne’s visit to Niagra, I think it would be very hard to make outdoor scullpture if I lived in the Rocky mountains, say around Gunnison. Not because of “numbness” but because it would feel like what’s the use when you can see a landscape like that everyday. Commented catfish on December 29th, 2007.
And finally, one the web site for the school of art at the University of Illinois, it says that the studio curriculum prepares students for careers in social activism. (! ?) They forgot to note whether or not jobs in social activism come with fringe benefits, but the way it was presented could lead one to expect they do. Theirs is a good example of the enlightened, 21st century art department doing what it does best - putting an academic wrapper around the multi-thousand year old instinctual activity we label art. Commented catfish on December 29th, 2007.
“Art is perpendicular to life” is brilliant! It’s going down in my quotes to remember. Commented Steve Durbin on January 5th, 2008.

Great art often comes from an artist thinking – and wanting to solve something – beyond their subjective selfhood

2008-01-24T09:25:00.000+05:30

Art & Perception authors drawing painting photography being an artist a multidisciplinary dialog
Art - self healing or big picture? Posted by Sunil Gangadharan December 27, 2007 8:38 pm

Roberta Smith wrote a lively piece in the Sunday Times last week titled ‘What we talk about when we talk about Art’ (link here). She weighed in on the use of commonly used clichés used by the artworld that inherently reflects and harbors intellectual insecurities. As an example, she talks about the oft over-used ‘Referencing‘ (as in the statement “this work referencing male chauvinism uses…”), ‘Privilege’ (as in “privileging the leftist agenda”) and ‘Practice’ (as in “my studio practice”). I have seen these used and sometimes abused in many artist biographies, statements and exhibition descriptions. While Referencing really means ‘referring to’ and Privilege means ‘favoring’, it is the term Practice that has the biggest potential for being misconstrued…
She makes three assertions:
#1. First off, there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice. Many artists already feel the need for a license: It’s called a master of fine arts. But artists don’t need licenses or certificates or permission to do their work. Their job description, if they have one, is to operate outside accepted limits.
#2. Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own, subjective needs.
#3. Practice sanitizes a very messy process. It suggests that art making is a kind of white-collar activity whose practitioners don’t get their hands dirty, either physically or emotionally. It converts art into a hygienic desk job and signals a basic discomfort with the physical mess as well as the unknowable, irrational side of art making. It suggests that materials are not the point of art at all — when they are, on some level, the only point.

While I completely agree with #1 (that a formal degree while definitely useful is not essential to the development of an art mindset in an individual) and #3 (the subversion of materials around an artist constitutes an important part of artistic expression), I do have questions about #2 (the assertion that artists have a self-help, therapy based relationship with their art and it serves to solve personal, subjective problems rather than focus on larger global issues)…
I would say that in a large number of cases, the output produced by an artist may be directed to induce the viewer to think about (and in the ideal case, acting to alleviate) a problem hitherto unknown or underrepresented (sewer cleaners in India or a film about plantation workers in Dominica are two cases that come to mind). I might also add that artistic expressions such as the above stems from strong sincerity that the artist must have for the problem rather than being an accidental by-product while the artist indulged in self therapy…
Feedback appreciated. 5 Comments

Comment by Steve Durbin — December 28, 2007 2:26 am
Sunil,
Thanks for calling this one to our attention; it’s quite apropos for a site that’s so full (too full?) of talk about art.
As a language fan, I don’t believe in synonyms, though I certainly see plenty of poor word choice. “Referencing” may have roughly the same denotation as “referring to,” but it is used in quite different contexts and suggests a whole postmodern theoretical framework. It’s a much better word (because it conveys so much more) IF one wants all that, and IF one has understood correctly the audience’s reaction. If used only to impress, without awareness of how pretentious it sounds to most, it will probably have the opposite effect.
Smith seems most bothered by “practice.” I never took this in the sense of a professional practice, but rather as meaning one’s habitual way of working, which I think most artists have, despite the unpredictabilities of it. Perhaps the New York usage is different. If I trust her ear on this, then I conclude there are different language communities even within the art world. Not necessarily a bad thing if we just remember it.

Comment by Birgit — December 28, 2007 8:16 am
Ms. Smith’s verbal perception is only ‘So so!
ALLEN VEANER’s letter to the NYTimes editor
Ms. Smith, referring to a work by the German painter Martin Kippenberger, writes that it is ‘’labeled with ‘preis,’ the German word for price.'’ While it is true that preis means price, the word has many meanings, one of which is prize or award. I suspect that the title ‘’2. Preis.'’ is an expression of irony referring to ‘’second prize.'’
Allen Veaner is correct!

http://kunstverein-bs.de/jahresgaben_2001/martin_kippenberger_2_preis.jpg

Comment by McFawn — December 29, 2007 8:39 pm
Sunil-
Good response. I started to write a longer reply here but it became so long & ramble-y that I posted it at my site, http://www.litandart.com with the appropriate citing/shout out to your post.
I thought it was strange that Smith was so bothered by the word practice…and I thought you made a good point about how great art often comes from an artist thinking–and wanting to solve something–beyond their subjective selfhood.

Comment by June — December 30, 2007 11:57 am
Hi Sunil and all,
I am only bothered by the use of “practice” when it is clearly referencing the licensed utilization of artistic skills priveliging those with academic credentials.[add snort here]
And I am thoroughly frustrated by “referencing” since I don’t think the referral to deconstruction and high-tone theories is meaningful, except to those who have already imbibed the dregs of the vinegarish wine of Derrida (sorry, Steve). It’s very like the business use of “utilization” where it has become the word of obfuscating choice (see above”) We may be stuck with it, but I don’t have to like it.
“Privileging” I think is better — it has a very specific kind of connotation and is shorthand for what would be a mouthful to explain. I think it is useful even if it does reference an academic sort of techno-speak.
But back to the main question that Sunil broaches: what is the aim of art? I have to bow to McFawn’s emendation of Smith’s concepts:
“Good art slows the world down and shows us the dimensionality in even the most transient of experiences. Art is perpendicular to life: if a lifetime is a horizontal and forward-moving, art is vertical–showing us the heights and depths in moments from which we are compelled to move on. Art may not fix the problems of the world, but it shows us the fullness of what’s at stake.” http://www.litandart.com/
I like McFawn’s concept because it sidesteps questions of self-examination or political statement, both of which can exist in given works of art but are essentially beside the point. I don’t think Sunil’s portraits will change anybody’s mind or actions vis-a-vis tragic lives. But they do arrest us, stop us in our tracks and make us consider — consider what? well,possibly his technical prowess, or the plight of the human condition, or the nature of “progress,” or the irony of digitized portraiture in a hungry world, or the disgusting state of our own braggadocio or whether we can send more money to the local food bank.
The stopped state that art provokes can go in many directions — the important thing is that we get stopped.
And this may be why we all resent the 15 seconds or so of viewing that most art gets from viewers. But that’s a different subject altogether.

Comment by Martha — January 3, 2008 2:30 pm
I think the word “practice” has also come to have the positive implication borrowed from meditation, zen or otherwise. In the literature about that, one’s meditation work is often called one’s practice.
R.S. is privileging a tempest in a teapot, as far as I can see.
But isn’t it also funny how, if you read an artist statement before seeing the work, 99% of the time the words would not anticipate what the visual reality is…

Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own, subjective needs

2008-01-24T09:16:00.000+05:30

Is self therapy a reason for taking to the arts?
Roberta Smith in a short essay in the back page of the Sunday Times art review made some assertions as regards art as a 'practice'.The assertions are as follows:

#1. First off, there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice. Many artists already feel the need for a license: It’s called a master of fine arts. But artists don’t need licenses or certificates or permission to do their work. Their job description, if they have one, is to operate outside accepted limits.

#2. Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own, subjective needs.

#3. Practice sanitizes a very messy process. It suggests that art making is a kind of white-collar activity whose practitioners don’t get their hands dirty, either physically or emotionally. It converts art into a hygienic desk job and signals a basic discomfort with the physical mess as well as the unknowable, irrational side of art making. It suggests that materials are not the point of art at all — when they are, on some level, the only point.

While #1 and #3 are very much agreeable, I questioned #2 over at Art and Perception in a post yesterday. Link to the post here. Posted by Sunil at 11:39 PM 0 comments Labels: Art as a driver for change

They often don't know what to say about their art

2008-01-23T09:23:00.000+05:30

WHY WRITE? Kris Tiner

This is where the well-informed critic or historian usually steps in to correct the balance of information, and thank goodness for them. But at some point we have to let the artists speak for themselves.

Historically we are at a point where information is so rapidly and easily exchanged that artists can no longer afford not to speak for themselves, and students, educators, and critics of the music can't afford not to listen. The field is so exceedingly diverse and the technology is so exceedingly simple to make the kind of idea-sharing and community building that's only been dreamed of in the past a definite and immediate reality. Imagine if Rothko or Charlie Parker had a blog, if Anthony Braxton had posted his Tri-Axium writings on a website instead of printing them in a prohibitively limited (and costly) edition, if Charles Ives hadn't had to wait patiently for the publication of his music - what if he could have recorded it himself and distributed it freely over the internet?
There are so many ideas whose importance has been overshadowed only by their obscurity. Posted by Kris Tiner at 2:57 PM Labels: commentary, writing on writing 4 comments:

James Sproul said...
wow, brilliantly put as always. Sifting through the many ideas one strikes me as interesting. The artist that owns up to the responsibility of sharing their ideas about their art, do they also have a responsibility to share their ideas about their art form in general (this may or may not include talking about other artists). I think you are on that road, and I think it is a fantastic path to take. especially given, like you say, the speed at which we are able to communicate and even discuss (blog) about our ideas, and perhaps even argue our differing points of view. I have often heard people (mostly composers) say they don't want to explain their work in program notes or talking, they want the music to speak for itself.

I think this is just an excuse because they often don't know what to say about their art. Which is a little silly in my mind. I don't talk much about my work, but that is just because I don't like talking in front of people. so I write weird program notes. And often times I feel bad because I often can't express myself adequately enough to feel like I did it right, but that only comes with practice. I feel like it shouldn't be that difficult to explain your art-form (assuming one thinks about their art-form). I really dig your ideas on the difference between self-interpretation and self-representation. Someone doesn't have to explain their piece to where someone will listen to it and say "oh yes, that IS what I hear".

I don't think that is necessary, and many composers go to great lengths to explain to people who great their piece is, but I think there does need to be some expression (or to use your idea, representation) about what you believe and how that belief has been integrated into this particular piece. Which i think still allows an audience member to have a totally original experience for themselves with the music that is happening. I think this is more difficult in music that has no improvisation as it is a much more static situation and people tend to want to hear the story behind the piece (or often just the title). Anyhow, fantastic paper/blog, I truly enjoyed reading it. I think you are on to some really interesting ideas about how artists should, or can, express themselves.oh, if Ives only had a blog!!!! January 21, 2008 5:23 PM

Kris Tiner said...
Thanks! And I should clarify, in terms of the interpretation v. representation issue, I am talking about the artist's expression of "ideas about art", worldviews, systems, methods, things like that and not programs, or the kind of thing where you might say "this sound represents a waterfall here" or whatever. That, to me, is going a bit too far and we could just as easily get into a discussion of when does the composer cross the line and start trying to do the job of interpreting for the listener. Maybe we will.

When it comes to program music as such, I tend (once again) to side with Ives, asking (in the Prologue to Essays Before A Sonata):“How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music…the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than music?”

In fact, this is as good a reason as any to write (and likely a self-justification of Ives' own writings) -- to say in words all that the music can't express or isn't saying on its own. When we try to explain what the music is saying that's where we cross the line and get into self-interpretation. January 21, 2008 8:33 PM

James Sproul said...
ah, thanks for clarifying, that is what I was thinking about. I think it is also of a certain responsibility, or maybe just an unwritten "hey, you should do this" but in expressing their views it should be more inclusive than just "composition is this" or what have you. I hold a firm belief in allowing all art-forms to converge in ones life, and allow those things to influence your decisions about your specific art-form, allow that poet to affect your art, or that painter, or even a specific painting or even philosopher (as I believe you have done to great extent with say, Ken Wilbur). They are going to influence it anyway just by having the experience, you might as well embrace it and allow it be as rich of an influence as possible. I believe, at least for myself, that is the only way to gain a richness in your personal art. I really like Ives' ideas on interpretation. Program notes, to me, and this is how I write mine, should express what the music won't. Often this constitutes technical things for most people, I try to leave as much of that stuff out as possible, unless there is just something that I used that they really should have at least basic knowledge of.

But often times I use program notes to express things that perhaps surrounded the piece during its conception and writing, that didn't necessarily go into the piece specifically, but did have influence, perhaps on my mood, or what-not, during. I find it interesting to understand what was going on during a writing of a particular piece in that persons life (or painting, or novel etc...). I find it often lends itself to an interesting point of view for me to experience and interpret what I am hearing. That can have a tendency to leak into crossing that line. so often people write six paragraph program notes about the piece and it's minutest details that are so unnecessary to the experience, but are there to show how "clever" the composer was. I don't like that. And it is interesting when the audience wants that interpretation done for them, they want the ENTIRE story of what is happening, mostly because they are perhaps lazy and don't want to do the work, or perhaps just uneducated about what you are doing (not implying stupidity, just not acquainted with that particular brand of whatever it is you are doing). What do we do as artists when they want that explanation?

I often refer them to the program notes, but that doesn't satisfy them, and if you say something aloof you sound like a pretentious jerk. it is a fine line. But I agree that the expression is not the expression of this piece or that one. It is the expression of the artist as a whole (their artist self, religious self perhaps, maybe even father-self) and through this self-expression have that original experience and interpretation instead of asking for it outright, which is much more satisfying. I had a lot of that experience in grad school, of people wanting to know what this meant or that etc... I honestly didn't know what to tell them. I just explained what I think about, perhaps a technique or something, but as far as interpretation, I had no idea what to say, because what the piece really means is something that is quite inexpressible for me. I could never explain what that piece means, nor do I try or hope to be able to. January 21, 2008 10:05 PM

James Sproul said...
one more thought. So if all this is sort of justifying writing about writing, doesn't this lead into a comparison of why we create in the first place. To express... something? Doesn't the representation of ones self through the music also carry over into the representation by the written word? Although simply expressing the same entity through different means, or perhaps different views of the same rock that sort of thing? Surely we get as much out of Ives from his music as his writing. Should we not examine both and examine him as an artist with all of it in mind? Are they not all artistic expressions? So in answer to the initial question "Why Write?" perhaps we write because we "compose" (because the phrase "we write because we write" seemed a little... ), they are essentially fulfilling similar needs within ourselves. the expression, or representation and we do it in whatever way we can. January 21, 2008 10:53 PM

Why has the artist, so skilled in deploying the Khajuraho motifs, never used them for icons of Islam?

2007-12-29T05:38:00.000+05:30

Home > Op-Ed > SPECIAL TO THE EXPRESS Hindutva and radical Islam: Where the twain do meet

Arun Shourie Indian Express: Friday, December 28, 2007

M.F. Husain. He is a kindly man, and a prodigiously productive artist. There is no warrant at all for disrupting all his exhibitions. I am on the point of sensibilities. His depictions of Hindu goddesses have been in the news: he has painted them in less than skimpy attire. I particularly remember one in which Sita is riding Hanuman’s stiffened tail — of course, she is scarcely clad, but that is the least of it: you need no imagination at all to see what she is rubbing up against that stiffened tail.

Well, in the case of an artist, that is just inspiration, say the secularists. OK. The question that arises then is: How come in the seventy-five years Husain has been painting, he has not once felt inspired, not once, to paint the face of the Prophet? It doesn’t have to be in the style in which he has painted the Hindu goddesses. Why not the most beautiful, the most radiant and luminous face that he can imagine? How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?

‘In painting the goddesses, he was just honouring them,’ a secular intellectual remarked at a discussion the other day. ‘It was his way of honouring them.’ Fine. It is indeed the case that one of the best ways we can honour someone is to put the one skill we have at the service of the person or deity. But how come that Husain never but never thought of honouring the Prophet by using the same priceless skill, that one ‘talent which is death to hide’?

‘Has Mr Shourie ever visited Khajuraho?,’ a member of the audience asked, the implication being that, as Hindu sculptors had depicted personages naked, what was wrong with Husain depicting the goddesses in the same style. Fine again. But surely, it is no one’s case that the ‘Khajuraho style’ must be confined to Hindu icons. Why has the artist, so skilled in deploying the Khajuraho motifs, never used them for icons of Islam? The reason why an artist desists from depicting the Prophet’s face is none of these convoluted disquisitions on style. The reason is simplicity itself: he knows he will be thrashed, and his hands smashed. 5:17 AM

Heaven and earth, round above square

2007-12-24T19:20:00.000+05:30

Chinese Unveil Mammoth Arts Center By JOSEPH KAHN nytimes.com: December 24, 2007
The new National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing is meant to establish a cultural core next to Tiananmen Square, a political center.

BEIJING — Compared variously to a floating pearl and a duck egg, the titanium-and-glass half-dome of the National Center for the Performing Arts formally opened its underwater entryway to Chinese officials and dignitaries here over the weekend.
The $400 million complex, a concert hall, opera house and theater under one space age span, is designed to be the center of Chinese culture, just as Tiananmen Square next door was designated this country’s political center.
The complex’s lush, dazzling interior, sophisticated acoustics and mechanical wizardry rival any hall in Europe or the United States, its promoters say. Chen Ping, the center’s director, proclaimed it “a concrete example of China’s rising soft power and comprehensive national strength” during the opening ceremony on Saturday night.
Yet the center, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, has attracted at least as much attention for its cost overruns, safety concerns and provocative aesthetics.
And the hall’s artistic directors, appointed after prolonged bureaucratic squabbling, had to scramble to line up a credible schedule of performances for the premier season, which runs from late December until April, organizers said.
The opening event was an eclectic sampler of Chinese and Western musical classics, with two conductors, two orchestras, four choral groups and a half-dozen soloists, a mélange that showed off the building’s acoustics but underscored its continuing search for an artistic mission.
Li Changchun, a senior Communist Party leader, was the guest of honor at the event, broadcast on national television. At each interlude in the program camera operators hustled to the row in front of Mr. Li to record him clapping.
The center joins a list of monoliths designed by foreign architects — the bird’s-nest Olympic stadium and the cantilevered towers of China Central Television’s new headquarters among them — that have remade the Beijing skyline and projected the soaring ambitions and bulging coffers of the Communist Party leadership.
Mr. Andreu’s creation joins the Shanghai Grand Theater, designed by another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Charpentier, as one of the top performance halls in China.
That field will grow crowded, however, as other cities pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their own cultural showcases. Zaha Hadid, the London architect, is building an opera house for Guangzhou, a provincial capital. The architect Carlos Ott, a Canadian born in Uruguay, has four contracts for performance halls in smaller cities.
Whether this adds up to a cultural renaissance or an edifice contest remains unclear. China has produced first-rate classical musicians, including the pianists Yundi Li, who performed a solo on Saturday night, and Lang Lang. Yet its musical groups, ballets and symphony orchestras have received far less attention than the concert halls. They face financial constraints, political censorship and public indifference.
“China needs a top national performance hall of this kind,” Wu Zuqiang, who heads the center’s arts committee, said in an interview before it opened. “But promoting national culture will take extended efforts, and will require some adjustments in our approach.”
Officials call the complex the largest performing arts center in the world, twice as big as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It was designed to be conspicuous.
Mr. Andreu said that he envisioned the hall as a tribute to the traditional Chinese image of heaven and earth, round above square. His bubblelike soaring glass dome encloses several performance spaces and is suspended above a shallow pool. Viewed at night, illuminated from within, the dome resembles a spaceship hovering over a calm lake. But on dim days when the haze and dust of Beijing cover the silvery titanium shell, the hall can look no more distinguished than an airport service hangar.
A few years ago a group of Chinese architects organized a vocal petition campaign to protest the design. They said it blended poorly with the Stalinist Great Hall of the People next door and high vermilion walls of the imperial Forbidden City across the street.

Global symbol for the promotion of utilizing rainwater

2007-12-24T18:56:00.000+05:30

21_21
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT SCHEDULE PROGRAM NEXT PROGRAM INFORMATION COMMUNICATION MEMBERSHIP 21_21 Q FOOD & GOODS
Exhibition 2Directed by Taku Satoh “water” 2007.10.5 (FRI) – 2008.1.14 (MON)
Exhibition 2 Directed by Taku Satoh “water”
2007.10.5 (FRI) – 2008.1.14 (MON)
“THIS PLAY!” (Display) 2007.9.11 (TUE) – 9.24 (MON)

Current Program
How can we use design to respond to and address issues related to our natural or social environments? 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT is dedicated to addressing themes that are rooted in everyday life. In keeping with this, we are pleased to announce the title of our second major exhibition, water.
“water” image : Tamotsu Fujii 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT director and graphic designer Taku Satoh will “curate” the exhibition. Mr. Satoh has put together a team of experts from a wide variety of fields including anthropology, photography, lighting design, and design engineering. The water project is a result of extensive research and is comprised not only by an exhibition, but is also an attempt to engage the five senses by creating different points of reference between design and water. The latter will be in the form of publications, websites, talk shows, and workshops. Our hope is that the exhibition will not just be a display of new design, but rather will be an experiment in ways to "expressing water through design."
“water” image visual (Mauritania) PHOTO : Tamotsu Fujii
Director's Statement Taku Satoh
Statement by exhibition concept supervisor Shinichi Takemura
DATE: 2007.10.5 (FRI) – 2008.1.14 (MON)
TIME: 11:00~20:00（Entrance until 19:30）
CLOSED: Tuesdays (Except Oct. 30th) and Dec 30th through Jan 3rd
ADMISSION: General ¥1,000/ University student ¥800/ High and Junior high school student ¥500/Ages 12 and under may enter for free*¥200 discount for a group of over 15 people
Organizers: 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT,THE MIYAKE ISSEY FOUNDATION
In Association with: Agency for Cultural Affairs/ Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry/ Ministry of the Environment (scheduled)
Special Cooperation: Taku Satoh Design Office Inc.
Creative Directors: Miyake Issey, Taku Satoh, Naoto Fukasawa
Noriko Associate Director: Noriko Kawakami

[Creative team]
Taku Satoh Graphic designer, Exhibition Director
Shinichi Takemura Cultural anthropologist, Concept Supervisor
Kazutoshi Amano Graphic designer
Arakawakensuke Interactive Media Designer
Tamotsu Fujii Photographer
Hiroaki Ide Sound Space Composer
Haruki Kaito Lighting designer
takram Design engineers
[Special Participants]
Kenya Hara Graphic designer
Yasuhiro Ishimoto Photographer
Yoshihiro Kawasaki Sound artist/designer
METAPHOR Design engineers
Nozomu Miura Programmer
Makoto Murase (“Dr. Rainwater”) & the NPO People for Rainwater
Taikan Oki Hydrologist ＊Alphabetical order back to page top

About the exhibition logo – by Taku Satoh
“water” Logo The silhouette of a man holding an upside-down umbrella.This symbol, the logo for the water exhibition, was also designed in the hopes that it will become a global symbol for the promotion of utilizing rainwater as a means of conserving and enhancing our natural resources.
One of the biggest issues facing us all today is how to effectively harness and benefit from rainwater. True, rain, when it falls torrentially and leads to disasters can threaten our livelihoods. But if we can find ways to use it we will not be forced to rely solely on groundwater or water from polluted waterways or water that's pumped horizontally from faraway dams that uses precious energy. Rather, we will be able to use "vertical" water that flows freely from the sky above. Thinking about how we can make the best use of water means thinking about design in the 21st century. The silhouette of a person holding a common umbrella upside down signifies the relationship between water and human ingenuity, but also symbolizes a drastic change that must take place in our way of thinking about the manner in which we treat the environment.

Terms of use for the water exhibition mark back to page top
Related Events
In conjunction with this show, the Aoyama Book Center will hold a water-related book fair and talk series. Details to be announced. Details back to page top Publications
Exhibition catalogue
Planned release: early November 2007 Text in Japanese and English
Related publication: water (provisional title) Planned release: October 5, 2007 Publisher: World Photo Press Co., Ltd. back to page top
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT 9-7-6 tel:03-3475-2121 info@2121designsight.jp © Copyright 2007　THE MIYAKE ISSEY FOUNDATION, 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Inc. 6:34 PM

By now everyone knows that art is business, the art world a public relations machine

2007-12-24T08:03:00.000+05:30

Art Celebrating the Intangibles Money Can’t Buy

By HOLLAND COTTER nytimes.com: December 23, 2007

With Wall Street shaky but art prices sky-high, even the art world’s professional boosters started sounding moral about art and money in 2007, as if opportunistically positioning themselves for a fall. Too late. By now everyone knows that art is business, the art world a public relations machine. The sheer bulk of hyped product made the past season look not eclectic and textured but sleek and flat. What did give it texture and color in memory were the intangibles: individual acts, gestures or encounters...

Audio Slide Show The Year in Arts Reviews: Dave McKenzie Paul Chan David Hammons Terrence Koh Mark Wallinger (tate.org.uk) " Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" Detroit Institute of the Arts: Review Slide Show The Met's new Greek and Roman Galleries: Review Video Interactive Graphic Times Topic Documenta 12: Review

Fifty-four paintings

2007-12-22T16:51:00.000+05:30

When Huta first exhibited the paintings she has now collected in her new book Pictures of Sri Aurobindo's Poems the Mother had written: "Those who appreciated the illustrations of Savitri will surely like to see these paintings." After the New Publications section, we offer a brief glimpse into the book and a look at a few of Huta's paintings inspired by lines from Sri Aurobindo's poems.

Pictures of Sri Aurobindo's Poems
— Paintings by Huta with verses from Sri Aurobindo's poems and relevant quotations from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo ISBN: 978-81-87372-17-2 Publisher: The Havyavahana Trust, Pondicherry Binding: Soft CoverPages: 118Price: Rs 400

In March 1967 Huta began the work of expressing some of Sri Aurobindo’s poems through paintings. Under the Mother’s inspiration and guidance she selected certain passages from the poems and completed fifty-four paintings, which were all shown to the Mother in September of that year. This new book presents these paintings along with the lines which inspired them from some of Sri Aurobindo’s most well-known poems, such as “Invitation”, “Who”, “Thought the Paraclete”, and “A God’s Labour”. Appropriate quotations from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, some comments on the paintings by the Mother, and background information and photographs accompany the plates. The entire book is printed on art paper.

SABDA SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 605 002 INDIA

Tel.: +91 413 2223328, 2233656 Fax: +91 413 2223328 Email: mail@sabda.in

Web: http://www.sabda.in New releases: http://www.sabda.in/new.php

Masonic stamp is visible throughout the city of Washington, DC

2007-12-22T08:25:00.000+05:30

The Initiated Eye in 2005!

What do the international best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, the hit movie National Treasure, starring Nicholas Cage, and the upcoming Octagon exhibition The Initiated Eye have in common? All three reveal the little known contribution of Freemasonry to American culture and history. In an unprecedented collaboration with the Grand Lodge of Free And Accepted Masons of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC, and artist Peter Waddell, The Octagon, the Museum of The American Architectural Foundation is organizing an original exhibition focusing specifically on the interesting and significant contributions of Freemasons to the design and architecture of Washington, DC.

The tradition of Masonic architecture in the United States is grounded in a history far older than the establishment of this country. Many of this nation’s founding fathers were themselves Freemasons and the Masonic stamp is visible throughout the city of Washington, DC, the surrounding metropolitan area, and the entire country.
Featuring 20 original paintings by history painter Peter Waddell complemented by original Masonic artifacts, the exhibition will tell the story of the city’s design from a new perspective and shed light on the Masonic connections of many historic buildings in the nation’s capital. These paintings and objects will explain some of the secret symbols of Freemasonry and provide an understanding of how Masonic symbols were and are used as powerful symbols of this nation.
Original artifacts from the rich collections of the metropolitan area’s many lodges, many never seen before by the public, will accompany the paintings. George Washington’s leather coffin strap decorated with Masonic symbols will be paired with a painting of a 19th-century funeral cortege depicted outside one of DC’s oldest lodges. An exquisite Klismos-inspired chair designed by architect John Russell Pope for his architectural masterpiece, the House of the Temple on 16th street will be shown with a painting depicting the interior of this magnificent structure. The intention of the exhibition is to demystify the role that Freemasons have played in this nation’s architectural history and to provide a new perspective on various historic events.

The exhibition remains on view through December 31, 2005. Extensive educational programming is planned to accompany the exhibition, including walking tours of area Lodges and Temples, musical performances, lectures, and workshops.
Peter Waddell, well-known for his work as a history painter, has created several series of paintings that have served as the foundation of popular exhibitions at The Octagon, including most recently, Inside the Temple of Liberty: 19th-Century Interiors of the U.S. Capitol Building (2002). A group of masons is working closely with Mr. Waddell to identify topics for the paintings and assist in the research necessary to ensure the accuracy of the work.
Freemasonry is one of the world’s oldest and largest secular fraternal organizations, whose members are concerned with moral and spiritual values. Freemasonry dates to the Middle Ages as an organization for stone masons, very similar to other craft guilds. Implements of architectural craftsmen are used symbolically in the organization’s system of instruction. Many American architects and builders have been and are Freemasons and the ceremonies of Freemasonry are still used at the dedication of the cornerstones of important buildings.
The Octagon, the museum of the American Architectural Foundation (AAF), is a nationally recognized museum of architecture and design located two blocks from the White House. One of Washington, DC’s earliest residences, the building is a National Registered Landmark (1960) and is accredited by the American Association of Museum (1973). The Octagon’s mission is to educate the public about architecture, design, historic preservation, and stewardship of our architectural heritage. These goals are accomplished through on-site exhibitions, traveling exhibitions, collections and a wide variety of creative public programs. 7:39 AM Also The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital : The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C. by David Ovason

Most contemporary art, critic Robert Hughes once observed, is clumsy, narcissistic and obscure

2007-12-09T09:16:00.000+05:30

A humanist philosophy for art Posted by D.K. Row

The Oregonian December 06, 2007 08:22AM Categories: Seminal NW Artists, Visual Arts Top Stories

Most contemporary art, critic Robert Hughes once observed, is clumsy, narcissistic and obscure. Which is why the sure-handed, unequivocal work of Portland artist Debra Beers is so refreshing and important. From her well-known images of downtown life to her newest works of gnarled, barren trees and natural life near her home in Southeast Portland, Beers paints and draws with an uncommon authority and a feeling, clarity and commitment that are also increasingly rare.
In her latest show of drawings at the Mark Woolley Gallery opening tonight during First Thursday, Beers has moved away from her unofficial documentation of downtown life to the natural world that has inspired countless Oregon artists. Despite the shift from urban to rural subject matter, the new work still powerfully showcases Beers' artistry and affirms her standing as one of this city's more accomplished, if under-recognized, artists.
Since arriving from Washington roughly 20 years ago, Beers has charted a career path that's been both praised and elusive. On one hand, each show has marked a deepening exploration of subject matter and technique. On the other, wide public recognition and sales have eluded her.
There are reasons for this paradox. When she started showing her paintings and drawings in Portland, Beers' subject matter, in the most general terms, was the socially and politically oppressed: homeless people, at-risk youth and other inhabitants of a pre-gentrified downtown where Beers lived for 17 years. Often made on slate, tin and other salvaged materials that symbolized the discarded nature of her subjects, the portraits refused to objectify. They were deeply felt, poignant interpretations that reflected influences as far-ranging as Asian art, the British graphic artist Sue Coe, mid-century expressionist Mark Rothko and the socially minded artists of the Ashcan School.
Beers' subject matter gradually enlarged to include portraits and scenes of those with little connection to the world of social services. These lively street scenes, images of war protesters and portraits of downtown denizens extended the scope of her art, which has never been driven by the art-world dialogue of the moment but has instead aspired to something more enduring and personal: to penetrate people's souls.

"It's the rare person and collector who wants to put up a painting of a homeless man in their home," says Linda Tesner, a friend of Beers' and director of the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College, where Beers teaches part time in the art department.
That humanistic philosophy isn't surprising if you know something about Beers. Born in San Diego and raised in Phoenix and the Tri-Cities area in Washington, Beers, 53, is like her work: dignified, free of irony and sarcasm. A protestor of the Vietnam War, painfully shy and a vegan who doesn't use leather, she has also worked and volunteered at the soup kitchens and shelters that have influenced much of her art.
Her newest work is inspired by the foliage and nature surrounding Johnson Creek, the urban watershed immediately behind her house. Instead of street kids, Old Town shopkeepers and homeless people, she has drawn majestic, looming cedars, muscular branches and rugged vines, tree-cutters in the midst of dangerous business and assorted hanging roots. Beautiful without flirting with prettiness, these drawings in one respect remind us of the fine tradition of drawers that exists in Portland, one that includes George Johanson, Bob Hanson and Lucinda Parker, among others.
In another respect, the drawings reveal an essential characteristic of Beers' work, no matter the subject matter she's addressing: She's always been rooted formally in an exploration of the human figure. The writhing, sinuous trees and branches, for example, outline a bodily presence. They're human, alive.

In Beers' paintings made on found detritus, there had always been a tension between the materials used and the finished image, one that often left viewers too focused on her choice of unusual surfaces.
But in these drawings, the drama between materials and image has been eliminated. Drawing, which is art's version of poetry, has allowed Beers to work directly, to follow without distraction the line from her head to her hand. In the show's several drawings of an immense Port Orford cedar suffering from root disease, Beers also shows us why some fellow artists compare her to Albrecht Durer, the Northern Renaissance master of prodigious skill.
Drawn from several fundamental points of view inside the tree, the drawings crescendo brilliantly from whiteness to darkness and then back, while capturing, piece by piece, the evolution of a death.
Beers chose to make these new drawings about nature partially because of circumstance. About three years ago, she left her downtown studio because of rising rent. Then, she and her boyfriend bought the house near Johnson Creek. Those events, as it turned out, also coincided with an internal shift in her thinking.
"I was becoming less engaged," Beers says about living and making art in downtown Portland. "I was tired of living in a world of concrete. I found myself spending more time in Washington Park."
Now, she lives away from downtown and has a studio next to her home. The garret-like studio is pure Beers: It has few of the creature comforts or idiosyncratic flourishes that animate many art studios.
In January, Beers will be part of a faculty show at Lewis & Clark, where she'll exhibit a single series of drawings that collectively are about 70 feet long. The frieze of drawings documents the recent death of Beers' father from multiple myeloma.
Beers says viewers might be compelled to make a connection between those drawings of her father at Lewis & Clark and these pieces of nature at Woolley's gallery, especially the drawings of the diseased Port Orford cedar. They would be right, she says. Both bodies of work are about reverence.

Which returns us to the existential core of Beers' work. From protesters and street kids hanging out downtown to proud, dying trees, the artist is reminding viewers of something that's easily forgotten in a world in which self-examination has evolved into a form of New Age mumbo-jumbo and plain old narcissism: Life is fleeting and fragile. And she's reminding us that art, while not a religion or an official school of spirituality, can connect us to a feeling, a recognition, in which, even for a moment, the limits of the physical world hardly matter. Permalink (Learn More)

Rebellion, transformation, re-evaluation, and renewal

2007-12-08T05:51:00.000+05:30

The Cult of the Difficult Terry Teachout commentarymagazine.com December 2007

The history of Western art in the 20th century is a tempestuous chronicle of rebellion, transformation, re-evaluation, and renewal. For those of us who lived through its latter half, it hardly seems possible that the story is now over—that modernism, to put it another way, is a thing of the past. Though a few major protagonists remain alive and active, the mainstream of artistic endeavor has moved on, leaving to critics and historians the retrospective tasks of narrative and stock-taking.
As yet, no real attempt has been made to supply a comprehensive chronicle of modernism, one that would cut across media and genres to explain how a movement whose original hallmark was the deliberate repudiation of easy accessibility came to dominate the world of art. The reason for this is that few writers, if any, are competent to discuss with equal assurance the works of architects, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, novelists, painters, and poets. Yet how else can one produce a full-scale account of the modern movement in art? The only alternative, to focus on bits and pieces, elides the very idea of modernism, whose significance lay in the fact that it exerted its transformative power on art and artists of all kinds.

For this reason, Peter Gay, the author of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, deserves much credit for having taken on the daunting task of making sense out of the whole phenomenon and for doing so with some success.1 This success arises in part from the fact that Gay, who is a historian rather than a critic, has chosen to emphasize description over evaluation, mostly accepting the common estimates of the relative importance of key figures. In addition, he has been extremely selective in his choice of these figures, thus making it possible to compress and simplify the story in the interest of greater intelligibility. As he explains in the book’s preface, his aim was
not to compile an expansive catalog of all the strands and leading figures in modernism, but to examine their presence in culture and to discover, if possible, whether they coalesce to define a single cultural entity.
The problem with this approach, however, is that it runs the risk of becoming over-obvious and even tautological. “To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has ever tried to map all the manifestations of modernism as making up a single historical epoch,” Gay claims. This may be literally true, but, from the privileged vantage point of late 2007, the fact that modernism constitutes a “single historical epoch” is surely all but self-evident. Moreover, Gay’s account of its rise and fall, though it has the great virtue of conceptual clarity, is far less successful at telling us which of modernism’s best-known practitioners are most deserving of our attention today, or why some of them now seem so much more compelling than others.

The most impressive thing about Modernism is the apparent ease with which Gay discusses so wide a range of artistic activity. “To appreciate two of the arts in a discerning manner is not unusual,” the novelist Anthony Powell once remarked. “Where three are claimed, more often than not, grasp of the third shows signs of strain.” The author of Modernism would seem to be an exception to this rule. Not only is Gay absolutely secure when talking about literature and the visual arts, but he writes almost as fluently about music and dance (which he treats, not altogether convincingly, as a single topic).
Similarly admirable is the frequent good sense that Gay brings to his description of the modernist project. He is quick, for instance, to note that the “bourgeoisophobia” (as Gustave Flaubert called it) that was so prominent a part of the modern artist’s self-image was inconsistent both with the complex reality of middle-class life and with the receptivity to modern art shown by the hated bourgeoisie itself:
The infuriated balletgoers who in 1911 noisily disrupted the premiere of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring were followed by audiences that found this potent amalgam of radical score and radical choreography far from indigestible and really quite enjoyable. It is an apparent self-contradiction but a historical fact that modernist works, produced to provide an aura of heresy, should end up being called classics.
Conversely, as Gay also points out, modern artists were themselves quick to embrace the middle- and upper-middle-class style of life made possible by the bourgeoisie’s lucrative embrace of their art. In similar fashion, their pose of radical individualism was contradicted by the “desire for companionship and reassurance” that led them to form schools and factions and to hammer out new aesthetic orthodoxies that were in many cases at least as rigid as the old-fashioned ones they had previously sought to overthrow.
In describing the emergence of these orthodoxies, Gay proves willing to describe modernism as it really was instead of taking the claims of its proponents at face value. But when it comes to judging the modernists, he is far less fresh in his thinking. Thus, Arnold Schoenberg is for him “the undisputed leader of the 20th-century upheaval in music”; Virginia Woolf is the peer of Henry James, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust; and D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, and Orson Welles stand at “the summit of modernist moviemaking.” Each of these individual claims is defensible—but taken together, they suggest a straight-faced artistic equivalent of Flaubert’s satirical “dictionary of received ideas.”
Nor does Gay have anything especially original to say about the actual output of the artists he discusses in Modernism, though the urbane patina of his prose helps to mask the commonplace quality of his observations. (“Debussy’s work,” he writes in one example that can stand for many, “was a delicate search, perfectly fitting into the world that modernist painters and poets were pursuing in their own way—the inner life and its felicitous portrayal.”) Even when he moves beyond the realm of the certified masters to the contemporary scene, his assessments prove equally predictable: we are invited to accept Frank Gehry and Gabriel García Márquez as direct successors to the giants of modernism past.
To repeat, Modernism is a work of history, not criticism. But because art is his subject matter, Gay cannot shirk the making of critical judgments; they are implicit on every page. And it is difficult not to question the taste of an art historian who can, among other things, call the second-rate English choreographer John Cranko an “interesting competitor” to George Balanchine, declare with a straight face that Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum is “a historic masterpiece” and marked “the most sensational debut of a novelist since Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,” or put forward Casablanca, Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, La Femme du Boulanger, and The Third Man as his personal list of the great films of the 20th century.

No less questionable—especially when viewed from the perspective of 2007—is the omnipresence of Sigmund Freud in Gay’s narrative.
That Freud should figure prominently in a study of the idea of modernism is, of course, entirely appropriate, since his ideas were powerfully influential on many modern artists—though by no means all. Vladimir Nabokov, the quintessential modern novelist (and one who, perhaps not coincidentally, goes unmentioned in Modernism), curtly dismissed Freud as a “Viennese witch-doctor” who reduced the fruits of the human imagination to a set of “standardized symbols,” of interest only to “the credulous and the vulgar.” But the thinking of numerous other modernists was strongly shaped by Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind and its effects on human behavior. Thomas Mann went so far as to call psychoanalysis “the greatest contribution to the art of the novel” to be made in modern times.
It stands to reason that Peter Gay, Freud’s biographer and the author of many other books about the man and his times, should have chosen to emphasize the role of psychoanalysis in the development of modernism. What is more revealing is the near-obsessiveness with which he does so. Time and again, Freud is gratuitously dragged in, usually in order to bolster a cliché:
All in all, Cézanne’s artistic reactions to his inner turmoil shore up Freud’s assertion that try as they will, humans cannot keep their secrets. . . . Freud seems not to have commented on the Expressionist dramatists of his time, but if he had, he could have used their work as persuasive evidence for the existence, indeed the virulence, of the Oedipus complex.
It is as if Gay thought that the imprimatur of the master were needed to legitimize even the most banal of his own opinions.
One would never suspect from reading Modernism that Freud’s theories are now regarded as obsolete by the vast majority of medical practitioners and scientists, or that their erstwhile popularity is widely thought to have slowed the emergence of what the psychiatrist Paul McHugh has termed “evidence-based psychiatry,” a discipline rooted not in theoretical speculation but in empirical research. In a telling metaphor, McHugh argues that modern-day psychiatry “can no more return to the old [Freudian] orthodoxy than Russia can revive the Soviet Union.2
Yet Gay stubbornly persists in presenting Freud not as a figure of historical significance but as a thinker of continuing contemporary relevance, in much the same way that aging Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm write about the 20th century as though the events they describe had not themselves demonstrated beyond the possibility of contradiction the nonsensicality of the Marxian theories they use to explain them. The gentlest thing to be said about Gay’s passionate belief in Freud’s relevance is that it lends to Modernism an air of quaintness—one that sits oddly alongside its author’s equally passionate belief in the permanent immediacy of modern art.

What of the “big picture” of modernism painted by Gay? It is, at best, a partial portrait. For him, modernism consists of radical technical innovation placed in the service of “insubordination against ruling authority.” This is a standard to which he hews so rigidly that even Anton Chekhov, an unambiguously modern writer, is said to have “worked at the margins of modernism” because he “did not modify the traditional theater” (a claim that will come as a surprise to anyone who has sat through one of the “well-made,” plot-driven 19th-century plays that Chekhov helped to render as obsolete as Freud’s theories).
Nor is Gay comfortable with those tradition-conscious modernists, like T.S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky, who used the sharp-angled language of modern art to express their deep and paradoxical longing for a supra-rational authority with which to oppose the chaos of modern life. “It does not follow,” Gay writes strenuously but unbelievably, “that Stravinsky abandoned originality while he searched, as he put it, for order. . . .[T]he religious meanings of [his] Symphony of Psalms, if any, must remain indeterminate.” No less strikingly, Gay devotes just one paragraph to Eliot’s Four Quartets, the religious-themed masterpiece of his middle age, while spending two pages on After Strange Gods, the 1933 lectures in which Eliot allowed free rein to his anti-Semitic views.
Just as Gay ignores or misinterprets the quest for order, so does he appear willfully to overlook the possibility that some branches of modernism were more successful than others. Why did the art-loving public embrace Stravinsky’s neoclassicism but not Schoenberg’s serialism? Why did experimental novels like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake fail to exert the same enduring appeal as the paintings of the abstract expressionists—or, for that matter, the distinctively modern jazz and popular music about which Gay has nothing at all to say in Modernism? Could it be that, as I have previously argued, there were “in fact two modernisms, one deeply conservative and tradition-based, the other profoundly radical and antinomian,” and that the first of these modernisms, not the second, is the one that has prevailed? 3

Such a possibility seems not to have occurred to Gay. Though he acknowledges the attraction exercised by modernism on the middle class, he persists in dividing the art-consuming public into three distinct groups:
The cultured elite that alone nourishes modernism, the philistine bourgeoisie that professes not to understand the movement, the benighted masses that have no use for it, still exist. But their boundaries have been scrambled. With steady advances in the modern technology of leisure and its apparatuses, the artistic choices of the masses reaching deep into the middle classes have become more pronounced as they are increasingly subjected to advance testing and manipulation.
It is, in short, the old, old story: difficulty per se is a meaningful index of the validity of modern art, while those modernists who opted instead for what Aaron Copland called an “imposed simplicity” are by definition unserious panderers to the philistines. Having made the fatal mistake of supposing that art need not be rebarbatively complex in order to be truly modern, such benighted figures are accordingly excluded from Gay’s pantheon. Small wonder, then, that the word “postmodern” is nowhere to be found in Modernism. Instead, the book ends with a modest hope: even though we now live in a recessive “age of musical comedies,” it could yet be that “a revival of massive modernism” will someday bring about the welcome return of “concerts of difficult composers, exhibitions of difficult painters, printing of difficult poets and novelists, clients for difficult architects, even consumers for difficult movies.”
To be sure, the author of Modernism is pessimistic about the prospects for such a renaissance of difficulty married to the spirit of “insubordination against ruling authority.” Yet no other kind of art, it seems, would be sufficiently demanding for him or satisfy his taste for the arcane delights of “heresy.” In the end, this says more about Peter Gay than it does about modernism. Respond to this Article (page 1 of 1 - view all) Footnotes

1 Norton, 640 pp., $35.00. 2 McHugh’s journalistic writings on the subject of Freud and his influence have been collected in The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry (2006). 3 “Jazz as Modern Art” (Commentary, January 2003).
About the Author
Terry Teachout, COMMENTARY’s regular music critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com © 2007 Commentary Inc.

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