NIHILISM The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose Modern art has had a similar appeal, and its similar reaction against lifeless academic "realism" has likewise led into strange fields. New and exotic sources and influences have been found in the art of Africa, the Orient, the South Seas, of prehistoric man, children, and madmen, in spiritism and occultism. Continual "experimentation" has been the rule, a constant search for "new" forms and techniques; inspiration has been found above all in the "savage," the "primitive," and the "spontaneous." Like the Futurists in their manifesto (though Futurism itself can hardly be taken seriously as art), the most typical modern artists have exalted in their works "every kind of originality, boldness, extreme violence," and they have likewise believed that "our hands are free and pure, to start everything afresh." The artist, according to the Vitalist myth, is a "creator," a "genius," he is "inspired." In his art Realism is transformed by "vision"; it is a sign and a prophecy of a "spiritual awakening." The artist, in short, is a "magician" in his own realm in precisely the same way Hitler was in politics; and in both it is not truth, but subjective feeling, that reigns. In religion--or, to speak more precisely, pseudo-religion--the restless experimentation characteristic of Vitalism has manifested itself in even more varied forms than it has in the schools of modern art. There are, for example, the sects whose deity is a vague, immanent "force"; these are the varieties of "new thought" and "positive thinking," whose concern is to harness and utilize this "force," as if it were a kind of electricity. Closely related to these are occultism and spiritism, as well as certain spurious forms of "Eastern wisdom," which abandon all pretense of concern with "God" explicitly to invoke more immediate "powers" and "presences."
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Art in Auroville
Current issue Archive copies Auroville Adventure June - July 01 Art in Auroville - by the AVToday editors "It is in the service of spirituality that art reaches its highest expression" (Sri Aurobindo)
Art has played a role in community life from the very beginning. Auroville, for many old timers, was not just a desert to be afforested, but also a play of light and space and austere beauty, a place of magic and creativity, a cradle, in Mother's words, for the creation of a new world. Ever since, many Aurovilians have been inspired to evoke this new world and to explore themselves through the medium of art. Efforts to promote the arts, however, were for a long time retarded by the need to first deal with the rudimentary requirements of subsistence. As late as 1988, Auroville was still regarded by some as a cultural desert.
Auroville has come a long way since. At present, many Aurovilians are involved in one or more art forms. A multitude of expressions in dance, visual arts, poetry, music, theatre, and sculpture, enhanced by the rich interaction of eastern and western cultures, have become a normal part of the daily life. More than sixty Aurovilians are pursuing the arts either on a full-time or part-time basis. Kalamitra (Friends of the Arts) formed by a group of Aurovilians to stimulate cultural life in Auroville by promoting a wide range of events and workshops has brought many top artists over the years to perform in Auroville. More recently there have been two initiatives - Khala Koj and the Visiting Artists Residency project - which aim to bring artists from all over the world to Auroville for brief or extended periods of time and to promote artist exchange programmes. To this purpose Kala Khoj has become affiliate member of the international 'Res Artis' network which is represented in over one hundred and twenty countries .These positive developments notwithstanding, resident artists often complain about the almost complete lack of community support. The Maintenance Fund, struggling as it does to provide a minimum maintenance to those working for community services, has hardly any artists on its maintenance lists. Neither is there a support system to help artists to sell their works.
What, then, attracts many artists to Auroville, or, as is often the case, turns Aurovilians into artists? For the majority, the vision of Sri Aurobindo and Mother is the most powerful inspiration - the vision of a new world based upon a new consciousness. In fact, many Auroville artists view their work of artistic creation as a vehicle of their yoga. Mother spoke of an ideal place where the exigencies of existence would be removed in order to allow the individual the freedom to discover him or herself, and this is another important factor. As one artist puts it, "One of the greatest things that happened to me was finding this place and environment where I can spend time and space to search for the inner self, in my case through the arts." Another attraction is the sheer diversity of cultures and individuals represented here which, through the cross-fertilization of ideas and perspectives, creates a ferment of creativity. And Auroville also offers the possibility of continually reinventing oneself, of taking up new ideas and activities without having to conform to social or 'professional' norms.
On a more prosaic level, for a community of 1500 people there are a surprising number of venues at which artists can perform or present their work. Visual artists can exhibit at the Savitri Bhavan, the Centre for Indian Culture, at Pitanga Hall, the Information Centre, or at the Solar Kitchen. Musicians and other performers can use the open-air stage at the Visitors' Center, the large auditorium at Bharat Nivas, the dance room in Pitanga Hall, or the recently opened music salon Salle Auropax.On the flipside, Auroville artists have to deal with a number of discouraging factors. There are, of course, climatic factors which play havoc with musical instruments and other sophisticated or sensitive equipment and materials. Then again exhibitions, while frequent, are not always well-attended. Additionally, few Aurovilians have the means to act as patrons or supporters of the arts through purchasing or commissioning new work, although a few commercial units have commissioned public art. Consequently, full-time artists have to market their work outside Auroville in order to survive, a job for which most artists are badly equipped. Some Auroville artists also resent the fact that their work only gains public recognition when it is used to promote Auroville at a public relations event or for fund-raising efforts.Another problem is the fact that only a small number of outstanding artists or aficionados of the arts reside here - after all, artistically we are still a very young and undeveloped culture. For artists like musicians, it is hard to achieve greater perfection or explore new territory without regularly playing with other musicians of high calibre. For visual artists it may be difficult to see things in new ways if one is not able to challenge one's own thinking through seeing the works and conversing with numerous others.One possibility is for them to draw upon the experience of the many visiting artists who come to Auroville for brief or extended periods of time. They often regard Auroville as a kind of paradise and are eager to share with other artists and to impart specialised skills.
It would be wrong to blame all the disincentives to artistic creation on the community at large: the artists themselves must also take some responsibility. Indian art in all its forms has wonderful potential for expanding one's artistic horizons, yet this source remains largely unexplored by Auroville artists. Again, it is quite common in artist communities and centres of the arts elsewhere for artists to come together frequently to discuss and critique each other's work in a spirit of artistic collaboration. Yet here such forums hardly exist. Another criticism of the arts produced in Auroville is that many artists are reproducing Western definitions of "high art". In this concept art is seen as separate from the mundane world, to be viewed in galleries, or heard in auditoria. The commitment to this orientation explains why so few artists have experimented, for example, with the use of everyday materials or performances that break with the tradition of the proscenium stage.
An Auroville culture?
Is a distinct Aurovilian culture or form of artistic expression emerging, something different from what is happening elsewhere? The majority of Auroville artists are cautious about making any such statement, pointing out that a specific culture may take many years to evolve. However, there are at least two indications that something specifically 'Aurovilian' in artistic expression may be in the first stages of birth. Firstly, Auroville artists who exhibit or perform together outside Auroville are often seen by outsiders to be expressing something 'different' from the norm. Secondly, there is increasing evidence, particularly in the realm of music, that Auroville artists are no longer merely drawing upon existing material or trends but are increasingly experimenting with new forms.This raises the question of what Aurovilians expect from the community's artists. A few years ago when Beckett's play Waiting for Godot was staged, some members of the theatre going audience expressed disapproval, stating that the play was inherently irrelevant to life here. A similar verdict was pronounced on a performance of Japanese butoh dance a few years later. The suggestion is that only certain subjects are appropriate to be worked on and viewed in Auroville - presumably those which can somehow be described as 'spiritual' art. But how do you define 'spiritual' art? The more one thinks about it, the more impossible it becomes, for almost any form of expression can be a means of evoking or exploring the subtler realms in the hands of an inspired artist.
Though there are many concrete and mental stumbling blocks to artistic creation in Auroville, there is a definite sense of the tremendous potential this place has for the creative process, and there is little question that the overall quality of artistic work is steadily improving. With the diverse population and beautiful environment, one may expect that Auroville will not only attract many fine artists, but produce more and more of them itself so that, together, they will make of the city and its greenbelt one gigantic work of art.
Editors Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > Art in Auroville Current issue Archive copies Auroville Adventure
Auroville has come a long way since. At present, many Aurovilians are involved in one or more art forms. A multitude of expressions in dance, visual arts, poetry, music, theatre, and sculpture, enhanced by the rich interaction of eastern and western cultures, have become a normal part of the daily life. More than sixty Aurovilians are pursuing the arts either on a full-time or part-time basis. Kalamitra (Friends of the Arts) formed by a group of Aurovilians to stimulate cultural life in Auroville by promoting a wide range of events and workshops has brought many top artists over the years to perform in Auroville. More recently there have been two initiatives - Khala Koj and the Visiting Artists Residency project - which aim to bring artists from all over the world to Auroville for brief or extended periods of time and to promote artist exchange programmes. To this purpose Kala Khoj has become affiliate member of the international 'Res Artis' network which is represented in over one hundred and twenty countries .These positive developments notwithstanding, resident artists often complain about the almost complete lack of community support. The Maintenance Fund, struggling as it does to provide a minimum maintenance to those working for community services, has hardly any artists on its maintenance lists. Neither is there a support system to help artists to sell their works.
What, then, attracts many artists to Auroville, or, as is often the case, turns Aurovilians into artists? For the majority, the vision of Sri Aurobindo and Mother is the most powerful inspiration - the vision of a new world based upon a new consciousness. In fact, many Auroville artists view their work of artistic creation as a vehicle of their yoga. Mother spoke of an ideal place where the exigencies of existence would be removed in order to allow the individual the freedom to discover him or herself, and this is another important factor. As one artist puts it, "One of the greatest things that happened to me was finding this place and environment where I can spend time and space to search for the inner self, in my case through the arts." Another attraction is the sheer diversity of cultures and individuals represented here which, through the cross-fertilization of ideas and perspectives, creates a ferment of creativity. And Auroville also offers the possibility of continually reinventing oneself, of taking up new ideas and activities without having to conform to social or 'professional' norms.
On a more prosaic level, for a community of 1500 people there are a surprising number of venues at which artists can perform or present their work. Visual artists can exhibit at the Savitri Bhavan, the Centre for Indian Culture, at Pitanga Hall, the Information Centre, or at the Solar Kitchen. Musicians and other performers can use the open-air stage at the Visitors' Center, the large auditorium at Bharat Nivas, the dance room in Pitanga Hall, or the recently opened music salon Salle Auropax.On the flipside, Auroville artists have to deal with a number of discouraging factors. There are, of course, climatic factors which play havoc with musical instruments and other sophisticated or sensitive equipment and materials. Then again exhibitions, while frequent, are not always well-attended. Additionally, few Aurovilians have the means to act as patrons or supporters of the arts through purchasing or commissioning new work, although a few commercial units have commissioned public art. Consequently, full-time artists have to market their work outside Auroville in order to survive, a job for which most artists are badly equipped. Some Auroville artists also resent the fact that their work only gains public recognition when it is used to promote Auroville at a public relations event or for fund-raising efforts.Another problem is the fact that only a small number of outstanding artists or aficionados of the arts reside here - after all, artistically we are still a very young and undeveloped culture. For artists like musicians, it is hard to achieve greater perfection or explore new territory without regularly playing with other musicians of high calibre. For visual artists it may be difficult to see things in new ways if one is not able to challenge one's own thinking through seeing the works and conversing with numerous others.One possibility is for them to draw upon the experience of the many visiting artists who come to Auroville for brief or extended periods of time. They often regard Auroville as a kind of paradise and are eager to share with other artists and to impart specialised skills.
It would be wrong to blame all the disincentives to artistic creation on the community at large: the artists themselves must also take some responsibility. Indian art in all its forms has wonderful potential for expanding one's artistic horizons, yet this source remains largely unexplored by Auroville artists. Again, it is quite common in artist communities and centres of the arts elsewhere for artists to come together frequently to discuss and critique each other's work in a spirit of artistic collaboration. Yet here such forums hardly exist. Another criticism of the arts produced in Auroville is that many artists are reproducing Western definitions of "high art". In this concept art is seen as separate from the mundane world, to be viewed in galleries, or heard in auditoria. The commitment to this orientation explains why so few artists have experimented, for example, with the use of everyday materials or performances that break with the tradition of the proscenium stage.
An Auroville culture?
Is a distinct Aurovilian culture or form of artistic expression emerging, something different from what is happening elsewhere? The majority of Auroville artists are cautious about making any such statement, pointing out that a specific culture may take many years to evolve. However, there are at least two indications that something specifically 'Aurovilian' in artistic expression may be in the first stages of birth. Firstly, Auroville artists who exhibit or perform together outside Auroville are often seen by outsiders to be expressing something 'different' from the norm. Secondly, there is increasing evidence, particularly in the realm of music, that Auroville artists are no longer merely drawing upon existing material or trends but are increasingly experimenting with new forms.This raises the question of what Aurovilians expect from the community's artists. A few years ago when Beckett's play Waiting for Godot was staged, some members of the theatre going audience expressed disapproval, stating that the play was inherently irrelevant to life here. A similar verdict was pronounced on a performance of Japanese butoh dance a few years later. The suggestion is that only certain subjects are appropriate to be worked on and viewed in Auroville - presumably those which can somehow be described as 'spiritual' art. But how do you define 'spiritual' art? The more one thinks about it, the more impossible it becomes, for almost any form of expression can be a means of evoking or exploring the subtler realms in the hands of an inspired artist.
Though there are many concrete and mental stumbling blocks to artistic creation in Auroville, there is a definite sense of the tremendous potential this place has for the creative process, and there is little question that the overall quality of artistic work is steadily improving. With the diverse population and beautiful environment, one may expect that Auroville will not only attract many fine artists, but produce more and more of them itself so that, together, they will make of the city and its greenbelt one gigantic work of art.
Editors Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > Art in Auroville Current issue Archive copies Auroville Adventure
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Surrounding and Being
Volume 23 - Issue 19 :: Sep. 23-Oct. 06, 2006 INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINEfrom the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents HERITAGE Timber classics RAMU KATAKAM PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOGINDER SINGH The extraordinarily beautiful wooden temples spread across Kerala reflect a great simplicity of form.
THE INTERIOR OF the Sri Vallabhaswami temple at Thiruvalla lit up with oil lamps.
THE architecture of Kerala is unique not only in India but in the world. The extraordinary wooden temples spread across the State reflect a great simplicity of form and materials. Glimpses of Architecture in Kerala is a book that attempts to bring out their special quality of design through images. It portrays a number of major temples that represent Kerala architecture at its finest. The delight with which designers of a different era were able to build and create space in harmony with their surroundings is worth experiencing.
Kerala's waterways, greenery and architecture are experiences that are now becoming scarce in other parts of the country. I had this experience for the first time in the early 1980s, while designing a house for a friend. We were visiting the backwaters when a fisherman offered us his catch. We liked the idea and negotiated a purchase. Before we knew it, a local gardener quickly cleaned the fish, plucked a couple of raw mangoes from a tree close by, and made a chutney with fresh chillies and salt. She fried the fish over a fire built from broken twigs and produced a delicious dish; its taste is still fresh in my memory. This small gesture has always symbolised to me the abundance and self-sufficiency of Kerala.
THE TEMPLE AT Peruvanam.
Many of Kerala's magnificent temples are hidden in the countryside, along its rivers or high up in the hills. In every instance, the location is chosen carefully and the setting is invariably beautiful. Temples in this land are the focus of the lives of people who follow the Hindu faith. Unlike the grand edifices of the more famous Indian temples, these places of worship are low in profile and offer a tranquility and space for prayer that is rare in today's world of intense activity.
THE RAMA TEMPLE at Thripprayar.
Older temples usually have streets leading to them on four sides, each becoming an axis of settlements surrounding the temple. At Peruvanam, one of the streets leads to a temple tank, which in this instance is situated at a distance and the houses on both sides become an extension of the vista. A temple becomes a meeting point where philosophy and politics are discussed. It is also the centre for theatre and traditional dance performances and the main venue to celebrate major festivals.
The temple's roof.
In a town or city, a temple can play a pivotal role in the manner in which the Vadakkunnatha temple in the middle of Thrissur town does. The temple at Mannar, a small town near Kottayam that specialises in making brass lamps, is extraordinarily simple, its sand-covered outer court typifying the style of a Kerala temple.
A PANEL AT the Kaviyur temple depicting Krishna's encounter with demons.
The Kaviyur temple at Kaviyur near Thiruvalla and the Sri Vallabhaswami temple at Thiruvalla are my personal favourites. In scale and detail, they are representative of Kerala temples. These two are masterpieces of their workmanship in timber and the intricate sculpture is a joy to experience. Oil lamps light up the woodwork at the entrance to the Sri Vallabhaswami temple and illuminate the beautiful interior.
A bird's eye view of the temple.
The theatres attached to a temple are known as Koothambalams and provide a space for other activities related to the temple. These are magnificent timber structures with high roofs and give the designer and the builder a chance to work on a larger scale than is available to them when making temple shrines. Decorative elements within the Koothambalams are areas where the sculptor and the painter are given more opportunities to use their skills. The temple tank is another major feature of the complex. Used for bathing before entering the temple, these water bodies are able to give a balance to the architecture.
THE KOOTHAMBALAM AT the Vadakkunnatha temple in Thrissur.
In northern Kerala, there is a kind of austerity to both the landscape and the design of temples. The Rama temple at Thripprayar has very few frills, but it blends in with the natural landscape. The Ananthapadmanabhaswami temple near Kumbla in Kannur district is surrounded by water. Close to it are the ruins of a once prosperous settlement, a lone oak tree conveying the desolation of the place.
Light filtering in through the trellis work in a wall of the Koothambalam.
Designers of these extraordinary structures were able to soften the sunlight; yet there is enough natural light to illumine and enhance the interiors, the play of light and shade adding a special quality to the way the architecture is experienced. The murals and wooden sculptures, portraying events in the lives of gods, complete the design. Episodes from the life of Krishna are depicted in the elaborately carved panels surrounding the Srikovil (main shrine). The panels also tell stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The dark confines of the garbha griha (sanctum santorum), which houses the deity, is lit up with oil lamps.
Inside the Koothambalam.
The basic form of the temples has remained unchanged for centuries, yet each temple is unique. Inside the temple, one is either alone with oneself or one with the gathering of devotees. It is a space that allows the individual to become aware of his/her being. Sri Aurobindo observes that Indian architecture is built in relation to its surroundings and the sky.
KRISHNAPURAM PALACE IN Kayamkulam near Kollam.
He also says that "the buildings should be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life". Kerala temples, as the images illustrate, are reflections of this kind of architecture and bring balance back to one's life. Ramu Katakam can be contacted at ramu@katakam.com , Joginder Singh at jogisingh@gmail.com
THE architecture of Kerala is unique not only in India but in the world. The extraordinary wooden temples spread across the State reflect a great simplicity of form and materials. Glimpses of Architecture in Kerala is a book that attempts to bring out their special quality of design through images. It portrays a number of major temples that represent Kerala architecture at its finest. The delight with which designers of a different era were able to build and create space in harmony with their surroundings is worth experiencing.
Kerala's waterways, greenery and architecture are experiences that are now becoming scarce in other parts of the country. I had this experience for the first time in the early 1980s, while designing a house for a friend. We were visiting the backwaters when a fisherman offered us his catch. We liked the idea and negotiated a purchase. Before we knew it, a local gardener quickly cleaned the fish, plucked a couple of raw mangoes from a tree close by, and made a chutney with fresh chillies and salt. She fried the fish over a fire built from broken twigs and produced a delicious dish; its taste is still fresh in my memory. This small gesture has always symbolised to me the abundance and self-sufficiency of Kerala.
THE TEMPLE AT Peruvanam.
Many of Kerala's magnificent temples are hidden in the countryside, along its rivers or high up in the hills. In every instance, the location is chosen carefully and the setting is invariably beautiful. Temples in this land are the focus of the lives of people who follow the Hindu faith. Unlike the grand edifices of the more famous Indian temples, these places of worship are low in profile and offer a tranquility and space for prayer that is rare in today's world of intense activity.
THE RAMA TEMPLE at Thripprayar.
Older temples usually have streets leading to them on four sides, each becoming an axis of settlements surrounding the temple. At Peruvanam, one of the streets leads to a temple tank, which in this instance is situated at a distance and the houses on both sides become an extension of the vista. A temple becomes a meeting point where philosophy and politics are discussed. It is also the centre for theatre and traditional dance performances and the main venue to celebrate major festivals.
The temple's roof.
In a town or city, a temple can play a pivotal role in the manner in which the Vadakkunnatha temple in the middle of Thrissur town does. The temple at Mannar, a small town near Kottayam that specialises in making brass lamps, is extraordinarily simple, its sand-covered outer court typifying the style of a Kerala temple.
A PANEL AT the Kaviyur temple depicting Krishna's encounter with demons.
The Kaviyur temple at Kaviyur near Thiruvalla and the Sri Vallabhaswami temple at Thiruvalla are my personal favourites. In scale and detail, they are representative of Kerala temples. These two are masterpieces of their workmanship in timber and the intricate sculpture is a joy to experience. Oil lamps light up the woodwork at the entrance to the Sri Vallabhaswami temple and illuminate the beautiful interior.
A bird's eye view of the temple.
The theatres attached to a temple are known as Koothambalams and provide a space for other activities related to the temple. These are magnificent timber structures with high roofs and give the designer and the builder a chance to work on a larger scale than is available to them when making temple shrines. Decorative elements within the Koothambalams are areas where the sculptor and the painter are given more opportunities to use their skills. The temple tank is another major feature of the complex. Used for bathing before entering the temple, these water bodies are able to give a balance to the architecture.
THE KOOTHAMBALAM AT the Vadakkunnatha temple in Thrissur.
In northern Kerala, there is a kind of austerity to both the landscape and the design of temples. The Rama temple at Thripprayar has very few frills, but it blends in with the natural landscape. The Ananthapadmanabhaswami temple near Kumbla in Kannur district is surrounded by water. Close to it are the ruins of a once prosperous settlement, a lone oak tree conveying the desolation of the place.
Light filtering in through the trellis work in a wall of the Koothambalam.
Designers of these extraordinary structures were able to soften the sunlight; yet there is enough natural light to illumine and enhance the interiors, the play of light and shade adding a special quality to the way the architecture is experienced. The murals and wooden sculptures, portraying events in the lives of gods, complete the design. Episodes from the life of Krishna are depicted in the elaborately carved panels surrounding the Srikovil (main shrine). The panels also tell stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The dark confines of the garbha griha (sanctum santorum), which houses the deity, is lit up with oil lamps.
Inside the Koothambalam.
The basic form of the temples has remained unchanged for centuries, yet each temple is unique. Inside the temple, one is either alone with oneself or one with the gathering of devotees. It is a space that allows the individual to become aware of his/her being. Sri Aurobindo observes that Indian architecture is built in relation to its surroundings and the sky.
KRISHNAPURAM PALACE IN Kayamkulam near Kollam.
He also says that "the buildings should be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life". Kerala temples, as the images illustrate, are reflections of this kind of architecture and bring balance back to one's life. Ramu Katakam can be contacted at ramu@katakam.com , Joginder Singh at jogisingh@gmail.com
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
People and the architecture
A Roman holiday in Mumbai Georgina Maddox
SO you couldn't make it to Italy this summer. Live vicariously is what we say, through images from the land of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and classic sculptures. Three Italian artists: Photographer Mino La Franca, who has trained his lens on Rome; Pino Marchese who gives you India through Italian eyes and painter Lucia Pescador, who presents her inner vision on canvas—a symposium of both the countries, will be showcasing their work at the Italia Art Fest at Masterpieces Galerie De Designe.
This celebration of Italian art will be on from September 22 to October 7 at the gallery, which is located at Jony Castle, off Wodehouse Road in Colaba.
‘‘The show is intended to give viewers a slice of Italy. I’ve always felt that Italy and India have so many things in common. This show is an attempt to exchange as much of our beautiful ancient cultures as we can,’’ says La Franca, a well known fashion photographer, known for the D’damas campaign.
While Pino Marchese and Lucia Pescador will unfortunately not be able to make it for the opening night, their works will speak for them. Marchese is ‘an architect by education and photographer by passion’, who now lives in Auroville, Pondichery and his photographs of India delve into the vibrant relationship between the people and the architecture surrounding them.
Franca has worked with Pescador in Milan and is of the opinion that she is one of the ‘best Italian painters, who lives in a world of dreams, inspired by her home and her immediate surroundings.’ She is well known in Italy for her vibrant colours and her works are collected by many. This is not the first time that Pescador is showing in India, she had an exhibition here last year, too. The photographs are for sale and priced between Rs 5,000 to Rs One lakh.
The inaugural night will wind up with Italian elan, with opera singer Claudine rendering Le Figaro. The evening is organised by COHO, and is open to all.
This celebration of Italian art will be on from September 22 to October 7 at the gallery, which is located at Jony Castle, off Wodehouse Road in Colaba.
‘‘The show is intended to give viewers a slice of Italy. I’ve always felt that Italy and India have so many things in common. This show is an attempt to exchange as much of our beautiful ancient cultures as we can,’’ says La Franca, a well known fashion photographer, known for the D’damas campaign.
While Pino Marchese and Lucia Pescador will unfortunately not be able to make it for the opening night, their works will speak for them. Marchese is ‘an architect by education and photographer by passion’, who now lives in Auroville, Pondichery and his photographs of India delve into the vibrant relationship between the people and the architecture surrounding them.
Franca has worked with Pescador in Milan and is of the opinion that she is one of the ‘best Italian painters, who lives in a world of dreams, inspired by her home and her immediate surroundings.’ She is well known in Italy for her vibrant colours and her works are collected by many. This is not the first time that Pescador is showing in India, she had an exhibition here last year, too. The photographs are for sale and priced between Rs 5,000 to Rs One lakh.
The inaugural night will wind up with Italian elan, with opera singer Claudine rendering Le Figaro. The evening is organised by COHO, and is open to all.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Increased aesthetic sensitivity, true followers of Nietzsche
Postmodern spirituality A dialogue in five parts Part V: Can Only A God Save Us? Postmodern Proto-Spirituality And The Current Global Turn To Religion Roland Benedikter integralworld.net
The space beyond that “heightened attention” or “increased aesthetic sensitivity” (Loytard) is seen, by most of the academic research and teaching professionals of today, not only as radically ambivalent - which it is, actually, as we know, by its very nature, because there is no simple “good” and “evil” in that space anymore. But it is seen by them also as profoundly dangerous, and, third, as useless for the further concrete emancipation of society. That is what most traditional universities try to teach us in the “spirit” of the first generation of postmodernity.
They lead young people to the borderline point of spatial self- and world-observation we described; but nobody teaches those people then how to go beyond and how to confront the realm beyond that point in an appropriate way. By “appropriate” I mean a way which could turn into something philosophically sustainable, into something that could truly balance subjectivity and spiritual objectivity as a rational system of practical experience and thinking. Nobody teaches you how to move in the realm beyond the borderline. We could call that the “blind spot” of postmodernity regarding empirical phaenomenological research.
Cf. Wendelin Kuepers: Phenomenology of Embodied Implicit and Narrative Knowing, In: Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 9, No 6, 113-133; Wendelin Kuepers: The Relevance of Advanced Phenomenology for Integral Research - or why Phenomenology is more and different than an “upper left” or “Zone1” Affair. In: Integral Review. An Integral, Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Research and Practice, Issue 3, 2006, forthcoming)...
In some of the oldest Eastern traditions, many things are related to Tantra, or to a very strong physical human encounter. Or, if you put in Lyotard's terms, to a very physical “erotization of the will”. The origins of the Veda, the whole Indian culture show us that what origins in Tantra is a certain basic psycho-sexual experience that is part of a spiritual dimension. This psycho-sexual experience is related to pleasure and “more value of intensity”, too. But if you observe how helplessly we poor postmodern subjects, including me and maybe also you, try to experience pleasure, I sometimes doubt if our children will ever find something spiritual in our concept of “inner more value” or pleasure...
Postmodern pleasure seems to be more like an escape into an intensity that never gives you what it promises. And with that, we are closing the circle of our reflections. We are returning at the point were we started in the first dialogue. Remember? We talked of postmodern proto-spirituality as a kind of unfulfilled – and maybe structurally unfullfillable – desire which may be characteristic for our times...
You know, maybe we have to wait for some younger people, for some people of a possible “second generation” of postmodern philosophy, which may try to create systemically that integrative thinking we talked of as a core necessity for the coming years? And in fact, there seem to be some young academics which, step by step, increasingly seem to lose their fears to try it at least.
Cf., for example, Markus Molz, Hilde Weckmann, Wendelin Kuepers, Antonella Verdiani and others: Founding European Integral Academy. A Project Outline. Strasbourg 2006, still unpublished; cf. Mark Edwards, Graduate School of Management, University of Western Australia: On the interpretation of sacred writings from an integral theory perspective, forthcoming; and cf. the contributors in Roland Benedikter: Postmaterialism. A Book Series In 7 Volumes. Volume 1: Introduction Into Postmaterialist Thinking Of The Second Generation; Volume 2: Men In Post-Capitalist Culture; Volume 3: Labour; Volume 4: Nature; Volume 5: Capital; Volume 6: Globalization; Volume 7: Perspectives Of Postmaterialist Thinking Of The Second Generation. Vienna 2001-2005. www.passagen.at/autoren/benedikter.html .
Unfortunately, most of those young new thinkers remain single combatants against their times – like, for the rest, Nietzsche was a “combatant against its time” in his epoch (cf. Rudolf Steiner, who wrote the very first book about Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the fathers of Postmodernity: Rudolf Steiner: Friedrich Nietzsche – A Combatant Against His Times, 1895. In: Collected Works No. 5, Dornach 1999). For me, those young thinkers are the true followers of Nietzsche – because they are trying to go one step farther than postmodern Zeitgeist.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Integral artists
Integral art can be defined as art that reaches across multiple quadrants and levels, or simply as art that was created by someone who thinks or acts in an integral way.
Alex Grey is a psychedelic visual artist whose works have been admired by Wilber and others.
Stuart Davis is an eclectic musician whose works include the concept album Bright Apocalypse. Mystical and integral themes feature large in his lyrics.
Saul Williams is a hip-hop artist who is associated with the Integral Institute.
Wilber is a big fan of the Wachowski brothers. He considers the Matrix series to convey important philosophical truths, and has done a DVD commentary track on them with philosopher Cornel West. Art Integral Blog - Matthew Dallman
Alex Grey is a psychedelic visual artist whose works have been admired by Wilber and others.
Stuart Davis is an eclectic musician whose works include the concept album Bright Apocalypse. Mystical and integral themes feature large in his lyrics.
Saul Williams is a hip-hop artist who is associated with the Integral Institute.
Wilber is a big fan of the Wachowski brothers. He considers the Matrix series to convey important philosophical truths, and has done a DVD commentary track on them with philosopher Cornel West. Art Integral Blog - Matthew Dallman
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Unbound Verdant Cover
From: "barin chaki" barin_chaki@yahoo.co.in To: "Tusar N. Mohapatra" tusarnmohapatra@mail.com Subject: Re: Fw: New comment on Life and Yoga By Sri Aurobindo Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:13:19 +0100 (BST)
Dear Tusar,
I should have replied you earlier, but I was a bit disturbed and busy otherwise for the last one week, as a result of which I could not proceed ahead with my Blogs and I could not also reply you. But anyhow, finding you back, in a far greater perspective, is indeed a matter of great joy!
I should have replied you earlier, but I was a bit disturbed and busy otherwise for the last one week, as a result of which I could not proceed ahead with my Blogs and I could not also reply you. But anyhow, finding you back, in a far greater perspective, is indeed a matter of great joy!
I have gone through your blogs and also the blog of your daughters. I liked the painting Unbound of your daughter Rimina in Panorama, one of her Blogs. The painting Verdant Cover by Silika is also beautiful.
Regarding the comment by gnat, I will post a comment later in your Blog. Thanking your for remembering me. I have began another Blog in Blogspot : The New Vision. With the best wishes, for you and for your family-members, Barin 28-07-2006 From Barindranath Chaki The New Horizon - http://www.freewebs.com/barinchaki/ , http://barin.zaadz.com
Regarding the comment by gnat, I will post a comment later in your Blog. Thanking your for remembering me. I have began another Blog in Blogspot : The New Vision. With the best wishes, for you and for your family-members, Barin 28-07-2006 From Barindranath Chaki The New Horizon - http://www.freewebs.com/barinchaki/ , http://barin.zaadz.com
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Emphasis on abstracts is nothing but copying of European painters
In the lap of nature: Finally, there are two veteran painters who speak against the ever rising, unreasonable price tag on the paintings. Just read on as Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma take stock of the art scenario today VETERANS SPEAK Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma paint for passion. Everything else comes later The Hindu Metro Plus DelhiSaturday, Jul 29, 2006
They are both mesmerised by nature in its moment of perfection - a distilled, pristine purity that is fleeting as it is permanent. It beckons to them to reveal its myriad moods in a dance only they can perceive and better still, capture. It then becomes a part of their mind's eye to gush forward in a burst of joyous abandon that takes on an energy that almost spiritual in its manifestation. And yet in this abstraction is a narrative that unfolds in layers of silences.
Alka Raghuvanshi brings together artists Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma whose landscapes bring the outdoors inside in an amazing interplay of light, textures and shadows. Their creative instincts have led both of them to explore the medium of film as well. Serbjeet's charming wit has us in splits as he has a million anecdotes to tell - pity he refuses to write them - of people and their quirks. Affable Vinod's frequent smile lights up his face as he talks about the restlessness that impels him to explore new vistas and traverse the extra mile.
Vinod: When people ask me as to why my focus was on landscapes for nearly four decades, I tell them it is only in India where we have some of the most stunning landscapes that we tend to take for granted - because they are there! Besides, for my love affair with nature to have lasted this long, there must be something in it!
Serbjeet: Exactly! Only in India the genre of doing landscapes is taking a backseat. This contemporary emphasis on abstracts is nothing but copying of European painters of 80 years ago! Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne have all been adopted by the various top Indian painters whose work has not grown beyond these adopted maibaaps! I remember Sanjay Gandhi got very upset with M.F. Husain for portraying his mother Indira negatively dressed!
Vinod: To me, my work is abstraction. When I see your work, I find it totally abstract. I'm not painting a tree like a photograph or even trying to reproduce it. It is a matter of perspective.
Serbjeet: True, it is a bit like Rashomon! It is a matter of your own perspective. There are times when I do white, transparent skies. Because I have trekked 25000 miles myself through the upper reaches of the Himalayas I am able to play with perspectives. I have house in Dalhousie and I would wander off in the mountains in the old British tradition of adventure for yourself - not for setting any records. Vinod: Same here. I don't photograph landscapes, but try to experience them and then create the textures that my mind saw and my heart remembers. For textures are very important for me - having been a student of printmaking in my initial years. I find the feeling of painting on location totally different from doing it later in the studio. The immediacy has its own context.Serbjeet: When I was making Himalaya Darshan series of films, it was such an experience to capture on camera what was part of my own mental sketchbook. You know I have made nearly 400 short films! And I will have you know that I got the Edinburgh award five years before Satyajit Ray! Vinod: I too find film filmmaking very exciting. It is my passion. I once did the art direction of a horror film and loved it! When I am doing a film I want to be in every department - including attending the shooting! Serbjeet: What is rather heartbreaking is that young artists are not allowed to grow. There is a waiting period of gallery booking for two years! Vinod: I think there is a stranglehold of a few painters and the monopoly of a few is having a very negative impact on a few painters. Serbjeet: Just as this current trend of artificially hiked rates of paintings is nothing but money laundering. When the business is of multi-crores, then it is financially unsustainable. Rich men's bored housewives throwing page 3 parties is not how a gallery is run. There are too many layers within it. In the last 10 years or so, painting has become a matter of speculation like stocks and shares. Even if you were to take it at face value, who in India will spend 10 million on a painting? It has to stabilise and then the real prices will emerge. Vinod: It is nothing but natak baazi. Price rise of 10 to 15 per cent is sustainable. And the current trend of going overboard and raising it 200 per cent is just not sustainable. Even if I were to do it for my work, I'll feel guilty myself! Besides art must be within the reach of the middle classes as it was meant to be. In the long run, it is bad for the art if it is bought for mere investment.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
The beauties
‘…Others finished with reincarnations and of a different over all nature, may begin the long journey leading towards the vocation of a creator. On a much different plane this could be compared to geniuses in creative fields within your physical reality. Instead of paints words, musical notes, the creators begin to experiment with dimensions of actuality; imparting knowledge in as many forms as possible-and I do not mean physical forms. What you would call time is manipulated as an artist would manipulate pigment. What you would call space is gathered together in different ways. Art is created, then, using time for example, as a structure. In your terms time and space might be mixed. The beauties of various ages, the natural beauties, the paintings and buildings are all recreated as learning methods for these beginners. One of their main preoccupations is to create beauty that impinges itself in as many various dimensions of reality as possible..’ Session 547 by Jane Roberts
posted by Augustina at 1:03 PM Reflections on practise Sunday, July 23, 2006 sethart.blogspot.com Augustina Location: London, England, United Kingdom ( Sumari/Sumari-Intermediate ) Translations of intensities and primary cordella/archetypal complexes into Art forms. Integral art practise. Depth intimacies within relationships. Focuses further complicated by issues of beauty, sensuality, eros, ritualised sex and pathways of pleasure, beyond to other sensualities including pain but all encoded as Love expressing desire for the masculine. Aesthetics. Mythologies. Psychic structures. Symbolism. Lingistics and word origins.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Geologically made mannequins, a frontier of the Marvelous
Rocks have the incredible ability of being perceived as things they are not. In the inspired mind a simple outcome of erosion can, by chance, match the human figure, creating a fault-line in our patterned, predictable view of the world. Almost a mile south from the city of Bandon, in a remote location off the Oregon coast, is a rock formation that can easily be identified as a woman’s face in profile. Prosaically christened Face Rock by early European settlers, this mimetolith has a richer, more luminous history with the indigenous population. A Coquille Indian tale recounts the fate of Ewauna, the daughter of Chief Siskiyou, who was abducted by the evil spirit of the ocean while out for a midnight swim. Knowing the spirit’s power rest in its gaze, Ewauna defiantly refused to look in its eyes, and was tragically transformed―by the spirit or some other supernatural means it is not clear―into stone. For evident reasons, the human face and figure are the most frequent images seen in rock formations, and to catalog such convergences of stone and shape would be a perpetual errand. However, the commonality of these apparitions does not spoil their participation in the enchantment of the everyday. Bulging with contradictions, these formations, as geologically made mannequins, obscure the line between the living and the lifeless, and redefine the limits between the hidden and the frankly obvious. If the human imagination has a connection to the natural world it is one we are forced to forget by our rational precepts. But when the repressed reaches out it forges that connection anew, making the earth with its many rocks a frontier of the Marvelous. Brandon Freels Friday, January 20, 2006 Ewuana and Her Kind 4:44 PM Permalink Flying Stone The online bulletin of the Portland Surrealist Group
Surreality in geography
Map reading as a form of interpretive delirium brings us closer to the surreality in geography. Where the Willamette and Columbia rivers meet there becomes visible the tip of a canine nose that eventually gives way to the silhouette of a coyote framed by the two rivers. This image shadows the region, stretching its chest as far south as Oregon City and flattening its ears eastward in the form of the poorly named Government Island. Known for his various adventures along these two rivers it isn’t too far-fetched to see this visual play as a likeness of the mythic Coyote, a mischievous and resourceful personage in the indigenous social fabric. And yet, given that a Colville Indian tale attributes the creation of the Columbia, in an attempt to bring salmon into the region, to Coyote himself, perhaps this image can be seen as an unconscious slip, a kind of fortuitous self-portrait by the territory’s most prolific pleasure seeker. MK Shibek and Brandon Freels The Paranoiac-Critical Coyote Flying Stone Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:10 PM Permalink
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Saturday, July 22, 2006
Sexier shows that stir excitement and draw crowds
Art Rearranged: The Shock of the New and the Comfort of the Old By ALAN RIDING NYTimes.com Homepage: July 22, 2006
PARIS, July 21 — Pity the curator in the age of the blockbuster. While art museums are usually rated by the quality of their permanent collections, it is all too often their temporary shows that stir excitement and draw crowds. Not infrequently, a work of art that is barely noticed while on permanent display is suddenly lionized in a short-term exhibition. One answer is to make the permanent collection seem, well, sexier. And to this end, some leading museums of modern and contemporary art are testing a fresh approach: if collections are frequently rearranged, either by bringing works out of storage or by changing the focus of installations, they can acquire something of the buzz of temporary shows.
“It’s something we talk about a great deal,” said John Elderfield, chief curator of paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “How does one try to engage people with the collection as much as people seem to be willing to be engaged with temporary exhibitions?” At MoMA, Tate Modern in London and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which boast the best 20th-century collections, curators have even given conceptual names to some displays to suggest they are pursuing an innovative intellectual theme rather than simply offering a lesson in art history.
“We have become more like temporary exhibitions,” said Frances Morris, who is in charge of displays at Tate Modern, which has just reinstalled its collection only six years after opening. “Temporary shows have driven the agenda for the last 30 years. It was always in these shows that new ground was being broken. I’d like to think that we are also now being experimental with permanent collections.”“Collections are not static, so why present them statically?” asked Vicente Todoli, Tate Modern’s director. “When works are always in the same place, people say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it already.’ You have to encourage visitors to come more than once because, with each visit, the work is viewed differently. You have to surprise and confront the visitor.”
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Forgotten awareness of a place felt to be Home
Daniel Brian Holeman Born 8:41 PM Oct. 9, 1952, San Jose, California
Artistic talent combined with life-long exploration of consciousness and devotion to self-realization has given Daniel B. Holeman an ability to depict uplifting and profound sacred imagery. His inspirational paintings have a strong impact and an uncanny affect on people. Many are deeply touched emotionally – sometimes brought to tears - and describe his paintings as the most beautiful pictures they have ever seen.
Daniel feels it is not so much the beauty as the place it stirs in people that they are responding to. He invites the viewer to dive into a deeper dimension of consciousness while viewing his paintings. The imagery stirs forgotten awareness of a place felt to be HOME – a warm, familiar and heartfelt state of mind – a welcome contrast to the day-to-day world we live in. His work has been used on TV and videos, book and CD covers, magazines, prints, posters, cards and the internet. See some samples of published works here.
Self-taught techniques include oil on canvas with airbrush touchup. The mandala works are pen and ink on paper, and then colored on computer. Rather than appealing to select markets, such as "New Age" and "Spiritual", his work appeals to a good percentage of people in all categories - perhaps anyone who appreciates or longs for that heartfelt place - thus crossing race, social, gender, religious and ethnic boundaries.
His paintings and reproductions can be seen and purchased at the InnerSpace Gallery at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. His Web Site, AwakenVisions.com, is a special world to explore and enjoy - a Domain of Beauty, Insight, Transformation and Awakening. In addition to the artwork, Awaken Visions is a haven for truth seekers, consciousness explorers and all who know, don't know, or want to know what it's all about. For more information visit Spiritual Awakening. Born and raised in San Jose, Daniel currently resides in San Rafael, California and is working on a new series of inspiring abstract oil paintings.
Also see Awaken Truth Foundation Also see Daniel's Philosophy The intent of Daniel B. Holeman's artwork is to inspire people to find truth and self-realization.Daniel is also available to give talks, teachings and presentations about Awakening,Liberation as well as the artwork and what it is about. Inquire by email.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
They nevertheless deserved to be admired
Pilgrimage to an art temple in Amsterdam Sudheendra Kulkarni Indian Express : Sunday, June 04, 2006
During my school years in a small town in Karnataka, I worked as a volunteer in a public library after school hours. It was my earliest introduction to the world of books. Kannada being my mother tongue, and also the medium of study, most of the books I read were from the rich treasure of Kannada literature. And nobody had so much of a mind-expanding influence on me as Shivram Karanth, a multi-faceted literary personality and later a Jnanpith laureate. As I write these lines from Amsterdam, after spending a whole day at the Van Gogh Museum, one book of Karanth that I recall is his travelogue titled Apoorva Paschim (The Unique West). I have been revisiting it in my mind repeatedly after visiting the Vatican Museum in Rome, the Louvre, Versailles and Rodin Museum in Paris and countless manifestations of art in the monuments and buildings during my extended stay in Europe. In this book, Karanth describes the artistic and cultural heritage of Europe with unrestrained admiration. He was especially impressed by how European countries tried to preserve their heritage during the two catastrophic World Wars. Apart from kindling my imagination about the beauty of distant Europe, what Karanth did was make me understand an important truth: even though one may dislike the West’s colonial powers for what they did to countries like India, they nevertheless deserved to be admired for all that was good and noble in them.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is one of Europe’s many noble gifts to mankind. His name had left no impression on me in my school days. But he was to be a major discovery in my rebellious growing-up years in college—and the discovery has not ended yet. I never tried my hand at art, but like most young people radicalised by socialist ideals, I was gripped by questions—and answers—about art’s place in life, and its impact on society and politics. And Van Gogh, though he never advocated any ideology, became an inspiration to raise these questions and find answers.
What drew me to him was the book Lust for Life, based on hundreds of letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, who was both his benefactor and his unsuccessful art dealer. In my solitary hours, I experienced an indescribable connectedness with his paintings. This befriending of the Dutch artist created an intense desire to see the famous Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the largest collection of his paintings (over 200), drawings and his letters. Hence, last week’s visit was in some ways a pilgrimage to a temple of art.
The use of the word ‘temple’ is deliberate. Van Gogh’s art is spiritual. If prayer or worship means a way of reverential reaching out to the Higher Power that has created this universe, and whose inter-connected attributes have been described by Indian rishis as ‘‘Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’’ (Truth, Divnity, Beauty), then Van Gogh’s paintings have the power to draw the viewer into a spiritual journey. (He writes in a letter to Theo, ‘‘A feeling, even a keen one, for the beauties of nature is not the same thing as a religious feeling, though I think these stand in close relation to one another.’’)
Maybe the beauty of his paintings lies in the power of his colours, or in his almost disorderly brushstroke which has got uniquely identified with him. But the more you watch, the more you realise that it is not any external aspect that has drawn you in. Rather, it is the purity and sublime nature of his art. It is his love for life, but also his agonies in life. It is his paintings’ ability to make us aware of how our own existence and the society we live in have lost the self-elevating harmony with nature, and how this could be at the root of much of our sorrow, our unhappiness with ourselves, our conflicts and our dehumanisation.
For an artist who posthumously became almost a cult figure in the art world, Van Gogh lived a life of poverty, neglect and, in his later years, ill-health. This partly explains his compassion for and solidarity with the poor. He found that honesty and true religious values were more deeply rooted in peasants and workers than in ‘‘the civilised people in cities’’. One of his famous paintings is Potato Eaters, about which he writes to his brother, ‘‘...I have tried to emphasise that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food.’’
The Peasants’ Churchyard, another prized work in the museum, shows a rural church in ruins (perhaps Van Gogh’s way of bemoaning the decline of Christianity in Europe) surrounded by a graveyard bearing crosses. ‘‘I wanted to express,’’ he writes in another letter to his brother, ‘‘how these ruins show that for ages peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive. I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is, just as simple as the falling of autumn leaf—just a bit of earth dug up, a wooden cross...And now these ruins tell me how a faith and a religion mouldered away—strongly founded though they were—but how the life and death of the peasants forever remain the same...Religions pass away, God remains.’’Sorrow and death are recurring themes in Van Gogh, just as serene tranquillity and springtime renewal of life are. The blue sky he painted has the soothing effect of a mother’s or a lover’s hand. At other times, it is transformed into the tempestuous swirling of clouds and stars. In each case, it mirrors infinity, and the artist’s search for the mystery of transient human existence.
Institutionalised religion troubled Van Gogh. But the life of Christ remained his ideal. To a fellow painter he writes: ‘‘Christ alone—of all the philosphers—has affirmed, as a principled certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and raison d’etre of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh.’’
Institutionalised religion troubled Van Gogh. But the life of Christ remained his ideal. To a fellow painter he writes: ‘‘Christ alone—of all the philosphers—has affirmed, as a principled certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and raison d’etre of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh.’’
In the world of art today, the meaning and magic of art are often obscured by constant money talk. The legacy that Van Gogh has left, however, cannot be measured by the tens of millions of dollars that each of his paintings fetch—and there are very few that get sold at all. Rather it is to be measured by the love and popular acclaim that he has won all over the world, by the good feelings and good thoughts that he sows among generation after generation of art lovers. No wonder, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam attracts more than a million visitors each year. ‘‘My need to serve the people, arising from a religious calling, has now become a strong desire to leave a certain souvenir to humankind in the form of drawings and paintings,’’ he wrote in one of his letters, two years before he shot himself.
As I came out of the beautifully designed museum, with a bagful of Van Gogh souvenirs purchased at the gift shop, my eyes were drawn to a line, engraved in large letters in dozens of different languages, at the entrance. It read: ‘‘Go to the museum as often as you can—Van Gogh, 1883.’’ To me it meant, ‘‘Go to Temples of Art as often as you can.’’ write to sudheen.kulkarni@expressindia.com editor@expressindia.com
Originality plus technique
When we talk of the market, we are merely talking of signposts that give one an inkling of the art of the future, Today’s signposts are the Rs 1 crore-plus artists like MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee. I have chosen this sequence of names primarily because they belong to the same trend and were members of the Bombay Group as well as of the Progressive Artists Group. The essence of their success was that they were “progressives.” That means they were committed to creating an art that represented a break with that of our colonial past or with revivalist art. They saw themselves as the path-breakers of the future and made common cause with other artists who were like-minded. But the Bombay Group based in Mumbai was not the only such group. There were progressive artists in Kolkata like Somnath Hore, Paritosh Sen, Nirode Majumdar and Rathin Moitra. In Tamil Nadu one had artists like KCS Panicker and Haridasan. In Srinagar too, SH Raza founded a group out of which the artist GR Santosh emerged. Not all of these artists command the market as the luminaries of the Bombay group do. Nor do all artists of the Bombay group command the same high prices. Both Ara and Bakre are examples of this. So, while being a “progressive” artist has its plus points, there is more to successful art than that. Artists who are original fare better than those who are not. So when a collector chooses a work of a particular artist, he or she must see if the work marks a break from the artist’s general body of work and not merely representative of it. It is this originality of approach that marks out artists like VS Gaitonde and Akbar Padamsee, especially the non-figurative works of both of them. In the same way, both Raza and Santosh evolved a break from our traditional “tantric” art and brought its symbolism forward in a modernist frame. Artists like Tyeb Mehta and FN Souza, apart from their progressive and original credentials, were also masters of technique. And this shows in their work. That is why their art survived the past and is likely to go into the future. When we look at younger artists today. We have to evaluate their capacity to come to terms with the changing world and look beyond it. We must look at their capacity to handle technique and their success in breaking away from the past without resorting to copying Western avant-garde, contemporary or post modernist art. Their tryist with the future must be theirs and no one else’s. I am purposely not naming names here. I expect art lovers to internlise the rules of thumb outlined above and do the exercise for themselves. The experience ought to be rewarding.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract art is an experimentation deconstructing the realty as often termed realism. At times it starts with reality and by simplifying or exaggerating it moves on to acquire its own identity totally independent of the original inspiration. It may not also draw inspiration from any real form or subject and reflect an artist’s realisations at a given space and time. The major schools of abstract art have been, Cubism(Picasso, Braque), Neoplasticism(Mondriane) and Abstract Expressionism(Thomas Rothko, Jackson Pollock). The paintings of Deb Sanjoy Dutta are experimentations in Abstract Expressionism.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
soiled, senile, rank, sordid
Keeping it surreal The Back Half Ned Denny Monday 15th May 2006
In the 1920s Georges Bataille's art magazine Documents embraced all that was "soiled, senile, rank, sordid" in western civilisation. Its radical message is as fresh as ever, writes Ned Denny
What place does surrealism, once the most insurrectionary of modernist art movements, have in our brave new world of laptops, "passionate" sandwiches and CCTV? In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the group's self-appointed leader, André Breton, called for the liberation of desire and asserted the magical power of dreams. He argued that if we all unshackled the vital energies of the subconscious, not just in art but in our lives, the grim spectre of 19th-century humanism would be banished for good. According to some, you have only to look around at our virtual, prodigious and ever-transforming landscape to see the ubiquity and triumph of the surrealists. Conversely, a recent article in the Observer contained the peculiar, dry-as-dust statement that "the relevance of surrealism . . . is generally agreed to be at an all-time low" (but relevant to what, and agreed by whom?). In fact, these seemingly opposed positions both contain an element of truth. One cannot deny the dazzling bizarreness of contemporary life, yet this represents not freedom, but the manner in which industrial society turns the imagination to its own conformist ends. Far from having been liberated, the "rational" but pathologically destructive culture that the surrealists opposed with their calls to poetry and love has become more neurotic and impervious to change. In this regard, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse's analysis of advanced societies, was prescient. Like all subversive currents, the surreal has become window dressing, in a world characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for administering such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets". If surrealism can safely be dismissed as irrelevant today, that is because its defeat has been almost total. Absorbed into a way of living whose end is a bland narcosis, André Breton's "convulsive beauty" has become an advertiser's gimmick. In this somewhat dispiriting light, the Hayward Gallery's latest show on the surrealists is nothing if not timely. First conceived after the gallery's "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed" exhibition of almost 30 years ago, "Undercover Surrealism" pays homage to the movement's most uncompromising provocateur: Georges Bataille (prudently, Microsoft Word advises that I change his name to "Bastille"). Bataille was temperamentally opposed to the dreamier aspects of orthodox surrealism, despising what he saw as the latent idealism of Breton's project. He despised everything, in fact, that gave it an obscure kinship with the progressive civilisation it claimed to reject. Bataille thus stayed closer to the surrealists' roots in Dada, that primal howl which rose out of Zurich in the depths of the First World War. The black soil to surrealism's wildly exotic flower, Dada prescribed strange chants and the ancestral throb of drums as remedies for a culture engaged in ritual self-slaughter. Enlightenment and the march of reason having led to a mass grave (both literally and psychologically), Dadaism sought a solution in the healing powers of so-called darkness. In many respects, Bataille's Documents magazine - the central focus of "Undercover Surrealism" - was a continuation of the Dadaist onslaught against cultural somnambulism. In it, he wrote that "horror alone is brutal enough to break what is stifling", a statement that communicates the essence of his aesthetic. If the European mind had indeed become a "whited sepulchre" (as Marlow describes the unnamed city in Conrad's Heart of Darkness), cracking it open would require formidable tools. This is why, for example, Documents carried a gruesome series of photographs taken in the abattoirs at La Villette. Bataille saw the modern abattoir as a direct descendant of the sacrificial temple, albeit one bereft of any sacred dimension. With the killing of animals not only secularised but carried out behind closed doors, people now occupied "an amorphous world where there is nothing horrible any longer". The result? A numbed and abstracted consciousness which, paradoxically, ushers in the industrial-scale sacrifice of technological warfare. The "nature" photography that Documents reproduced had the same function: to shock the mind into a clear-headed (or perhaps simply fearful) perception of reality. An oddly angled close-up of a lobster's claw seems at first glance to be a portrait of a monstrous, evil-eyed parrot. Similarly, Karl Blossfeldt's images of alien-like plants militated against a sentimental view of the natural world. As Bataille wryly notes, "Even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centre by hairy sexual organs." Such intuitions of a fundamentally vile and rapacious nature linked closely with the art of the Gauls, another of Bataille's fascinations. In his essay "The Academic Horse", published in the first issue of Documents, he examined how the noble steeds of classical currency were transformed on Gaulish coins into frenzied, ravening, insect-like beasts. The Gauls had "calculated nothing, conceiving of no progress and giving free rein to immediate expressions and violent sentiment". They were thus part of that same anarchic lineage that had more recently found expression in the formal shatterings of cubism, a style of painting he described elsewhere as being "maximally incompatible with social stability". Botanical photographs, ancient coins, modern art - all mingled in Documents with reviews of the latest jazz, the un-expected juxtapositions blowing away the stale air of conventional scholarship. Bataille's love for the rhythms of black music is another link with the Dada poets, who "would have liked to drum literature into the ground". Even more than the comparatively jaunty Duke Ellington, the sparse pulse of the Ethiopian earth-drum was a key to the mysteries of African art. Here Bataille shows his kinship with the savage pessimism of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, a holy text for the surrealists. Identifying not only with his pagan Gaulish ancestors but with the downtrodden "nigger" of the colonies, Rimbaud had commanded: "No more words . . . Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance!" And then, abruptly: "The white men are landing. Cannons! Now we must be baptised, get dressed, go to work." Just like the frantic horses on Gaulish coins, tribal masks had long been regarded by European art historians as "degenerate" attempts at classical serenity. Bataille, however, perceived that they bore witness to an overwhelming Dionysian force, one that might reconnect modern man with the long-neglected gods. There has been a tendency to paint Bataille as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, an unassuming librarian who, by night, turned into the "excremental philosopher" of popular notoriety. This is true up to a point, but misleading when it does not recognise that the antithesis is not personal, but cultural. If we spend our days in the hushed, book-lined chamber of conceptual thought, the energies we suppress are bound to resurface in frightening or destructive forms. What distinguishes Bataille is not his perversity, but his recognition of the tough measures needed to cure a perverse situation. Shunned by mainstream surrealism for his attraction to all that is "soiled, senile, rank, sordid", Bataille saw that we can no more be healthy without embracing darkness than a tree be loath to dirty its roots by placing them in the ground. In a world moving further away from the shadowy yet nourishing earth, this insight is more urgent than ever. "Undercover Surrealism" is at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 (0870 380 4300) until 30 July. [http://www.hayward.org.uk] This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Role of Indian aesthetics in contemporary art
Most galleries in New York and London are filled with art that is quite neurotic
It almost seems that fine art has been appropriated by the socially disaffected
These are times when cultural boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. The movement of goods, information, people and ideas has reached a level that suggests that the global village imagined and predicted in the last century is rapidly forming, though what we are getting is more a global shopping mall with an attached cineplex than a village. In this global culture, though people may live as far apart as New York and New Delhi, their cultural predilections are becoming similar. They watch the same films and television programmes, wear similar clothes, fantasise about the same cars, and think art should be made in the same way and for the same reasons as by the avant-garde artists in London and New York.
In today’s art world, critics and opinion-makers usually look down on anything that is pleasing, beautiful, and not ‘concept’ art. In fact the word ‘aesthetic’ has become a negative, and in the West, contemporary Indian art has been considered less evolved because it is seen as being stuck in trying to be beautiful and pleasing. This raises some questions. Should we accept what art has been made into in the West, and change our art and make it less beautiful? Is it true that all art that is beautiful is underdeveloped?
Most galleries in New York and London are filled with art that is quite neurotic. It almost seems that fine art has been appropriated by the socially disaffected. Surely there is more to life, and, therefore, for art to express than only rejection, anger and neurosis. What about pleasure, love, kindness, joy, peace, balance, and qualities of compassion and transcendence? In the world of art there seems to be a tension, even a schism, between those who believe art must focus on social transformation and those who believe art has a vital role to help people make contact with inner realities — to even momentarily experience the transformation of deeper consciousness. The latter was the central purpose of art in Indian aesthetics. Both these voices in art are valid and each has its place as a ‘transformer’. Through art we need consciousness-raising on social issues, and we also need the consciousnessraising that leads to a realisation of our inner potentiality for ananda. We need both the art of protest and the art of joy. It is becoming apparent that the emerging global culture and its art is the product, not of the intertwining and melding of the best of different cultures, but of the domination of a particular culture that has its roots in the history of a few European countries and the US. The dominant forms of art in the West are the result of a set of ideas, concepts, values and beliefs that are neither rooted nor always relevant in India. Art in India was never underdeveloped. It has strong roots that stretch back into the Stone Age that are still alive. Rich traditions formed in all the visual arts. In sculpture there was an immense outpouring across India that started in Mathura and Gandhara schools between 3rd century BC and 2nd century AD. In painting, there were the frescoes of Ajanta and paintings of the western and eastern schools of illumination, and later, Rajput and Mughal miniatures. In all these arts there was a continuity and also graceful change caused by earlier forms of globalisation that occurred through trade, explorers and settlers until British colonisation, when Indian art suffered a major discontinuity in its purpose and practice and a diminishment of respect of its ethos. Attempts to shed the colonial burden and re-establish continuity found expression in the Bengal School and during the early post-Independence years. Energetic artists consciously made art that was neither revivalist nor purely western, though often influenced by western art movements. Now, with the increasing pulls and pressures of globalisation, there is concern for the shape that Indian art will take. The choice we must make is to develop our own art by reconnecting with, and seeking nourishment from, our aesthetic philosophy and not imitate current western art and aesthetics for three reasons.
- First, all is not well with the arts in the West. They have largely become an elite specialisation. These societies have been emptied of art in daily living and the art being made is largely narrow and conceptual.
- Second, the need to bring beauty and the aesthetic values of balance, rhythm, harmony and proportionality into art and all aspects of everyday life such as economics, education, city planning, architecture and product design.
- Third, India’s aesthetic traditions offer an important transformational vision and purpose for art, something we can bring to the emerging global cultural banquet.
In this, there is an exciting possibility for a new integrative art movement which drops the dualistic paradigms of tradition versus modernity, East versus West, mind versus body. This would be a contemporary art that is neither leaping blindly towards the new, nor lazily leaning back towards the old, but is centred in the eternal. It would be a radical departure from the current art ideologies, and equally relevant in New Delhi and New York, London and Lagos, Tokyo and Tehran, Moscow and Mombassa, Beijing and Baghdad, and everywhere in between. The writer is an artist and author of a book on aesthetics.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
At Berlin Biennial, Art Fits Anywhere
By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF NYTimes.com: April 11, 2006
BERLIN — During the opening weekend of the city's fourth biennial, some 7,500 international art patrons milled up and down Auguststrasse, a storied street in the former East Berlin that starts poetically at one end with St. Johannes Evangelist Church and terminates at the other with the Old Garrison Cemetery. But visitors were not simply making their way to and from a museum or some smartly retrofitted warehouse, the usual location for a big contemporary art survey. They were waiting in the cold spring air to enter private apartments, an office, a ballroom, a shuttered school, a former horse stable, the church, the cemetery and the white-walled galleries of the Berlin Biennial's organizer, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
Inside this unusual array of sites, on peeling walls in several cases, or in someone else's living room, they viewed works that ranged from ominous — Mircea Cantor's chilling video of a deer watched by wolves inside a stark white gallery; Robert Kusmirowski's reproduction of a boxcar headed for the concentration camps — to droll, like Aneta Grzeszykowska's deadpan family photo album, from which she digitally removed every single image of herself. The biennial, which runs through May 28, was a focus of intense art-world curiosity in the months before its opening in late March — not least because this year's curators, Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, are art stars in their own right.
Apart from his renowned and darkly ironic artworks, Mr. Cattelan is internationally known for his curatorial partnership with Mr. Gioni and Ms. Subotnick, which famously spawned The Wrong Gallery, a sardonically named tiny exhibition space that closed last July in Chelsea. (It moved on to the Tate Modern in London for a three-year run.) Together, the three publish books and articles, give lectures, open their nomadic galleries and organize exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Apart from his renowned and darkly ironic artworks, Mr. Cattelan is internationally known for his curatorial partnership with Mr. Gioni and Ms. Subotnick, which famously spawned The Wrong Gallery, a sardonically named tiny exhibition space that closed last July in Chelsea. (It moved on to the Tate Modern in London for a three-year run.) Together, the three publish books and articles, give lectures, open their nomadic galleries and organize exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
The question in the art world was, What would they do? Something clever and subversive? There was every reason to believe they would when, six months before the biennial, they opened a gallery at 50A Auguststrasse with a suspiciously familiar name: the Gagosian Gallery.
"We thought the real Gagosian might close us down," Ms. Subotnick said, laughing as she sat with Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Gioni at the KW Institute the night after the biennial opened. "But he never contacted us."
By using the Gagosian Gallery's international brand name in a humble space and highly local context, Mr. Gioni said, the curators sought to "create a kind of tension between the global and the local."
This was all part of their questioning of "what a biennial can be," he said.
By rough estimate, there are now some 200 biennials around the world. With so many similar festivals filling interchangeable white galleries, their usefulness is a subject for colloquiums and dinner conversations from Venice to Istanbul to São Paolo. Are they here to capture trends or to advance artists' voices in a larger social dialogue? Do they promote international understanding or local interests? Are they bully pulpits for curators turned ideologues, or are they simply there to tap the art market's stopwatch till the next survey of hot new things draws the attention of an ever expanding universe of collectors?
"We thought the real Gagosian might close us down," Ms. Subotnick said, laughing as she sat with Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Gioni at the KW Institute the night after the biennial opened. "But he never contacted us."
By using the Gagosian Gallery's international brand name in a humble space and highly local context, Mr. Gioni said, the curators sought to "create a kind of tension between the global and the local."
This was all part of their questioning of "what a biennial can be," he said.
By rough estimate, there are now some 200 biennials around the world. With so many similar festivals filling interchangeable white galleries, their usefulness is a subject for colloquiums and dinner conversations from Venice to Istanbul to São Paolo. Are they here to capture trends or to advance artists' voices in a larger social dialogue? Do they promote international understanding or local interests? Are they bully pulpits for curators turned ideologues, or are they simply there to tap the art market's stopwatch till the next survey of hot new things draws the attention of an ever expanding universe of collectors?
With a budget of about $3 million from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and nearly two years to prepare, the curators had ample resources to come up with an answer of their own. Typically, they broke the standard biennial rules, focusing neither on new trends nor on the latest crop of artists.
"You know, we say art doesn't go bad, it doesn't rot like food," Mr. Gioni said. "Art used to be about making something eternal. Now it's about a product with programmed obsolescence, almost with an expiration date."
"But what we came to understand in Berlin were the incredible layers of history and all the different ways that artists work and show here — not just in institutions, but in temporary spaces, apartments," he said.
"You know, we say art doesn't go bad, it doesn't rot like food," Mr. Gioni said. "Art used to be about making something eternal. Now it's about a product with programmed obsolescence, almost with an expiration date."
"But what we came to understand in Berlin were the incredible layers of history and all the different ways that artists work and show here — not just in institutions, but in temporary spaces, apartments," he said.
"We realized that we could build a show out of the whole street, with artists from many generations, a show whose spaces capture 250 years of life, not just the vacuum of a gallery's white cube, as if nothing came before."
For months the curators traveled, mostly within Germany, building up dossiers of 720 artists they had visited or had heard about before narrowing the list of participants to 84. They chose artists whose works seemed to speak in some way to the curators' emotional touchstone: a single building on Auguststrasse, at Nos. 11-13, the former Jewish School for Girls, with its history of hope and tragedy. Opened in 1930, when the neighborhood was alive with Jewish culture, it was closed by the Nazis in 1942.
Once they had negotiated the use of the building, which had become a technical high school but was closed a decade ago, the exhibition's narrative became clear, and they gave the show a literary title, "Of Mice and Men," borrowed from John Steinbeck's 1937 novel. In an interview in the exhibition's catalog, Ms. Subotnick linked the book to the mood of the show, saying: "There is definitely a certain sadness in the show, a sense of darkness, and, of course, loneliness. And Steinbeck's novel was also bittersweet, mixing the sentimental relationship with a tragic, seemingly inevitable end."The street's varied character became the loose organizing principle for the exhibition, which is strung along Auguststrasse like a collection of tales. Though the street bursts with local histories, for the curators it also represents an overarching sense of life, from birth to death, from innocence to the burdens of experience.
If anything, the art on view is about "an atmosphere of anxiety," as Ms. Subotnick put it, both past and present. In the terrifying video "Burn," by Reynold Reynolds with Patrick Jolley, viewers watch a domestic world turned into incendiary hell. Other works have an air of ethnography and loss, of precariousness and richness, like Michael Schmidt's atlas of photographs of German life since the 1940's and Tacita Dean's "Presentation Sisters," about the fading days of a convent in Cork, Ireland.
The curators' approach was greeted largely with approval by the art crowd in Berlin.
"The sad history of the street adds enormously to the art," said Jeffrey Deitch, the New York dealer. "And unlike all of these biennials in city after city, where the curator flies in for three days, chooses 25 local artists and flies on to the next place, the curators here did their homework."
"They clearly meditated on the power of the place as a microcosm for a larger understanding," he continued, "and there's a deep sense of place here, a deep sense of the way that different environments affect the way we look at art."
Mr. Deitch added, "It should be a model for a lot of biennials to come."
For months the curators traveled, mostly within Germany, building up dossiers of 720 artists they had visited or had heard about before narrowing the list of participants to 84. They chose artists whose works seemed to speak in some way to the curators' emotional touchstone: a single building on Auguststrasse, at Nos. 11-13, the former Jewish School for Girls, with its history of hope and tragedy. Opened in 1930, when the neighborhood was alive with Jewish culture, it was closed by the Nazis in 1942.
Once they had negotiated the use of the building, which had become a technical high school but was closed a decade ago, the exhibition's narrative became clear, and they gave the show a literary title, "Of Mice and Men," borrowed from John Steinbeck's 1937 novel. In an interview in the exhibition's catalog, Ms. Subotnick linked the book to the mood of the show, saying: "There is definitely a certain sadness in the show, a sense of darkness, and, of course, loneliness. And Steinbeck's novel was also bittersweet, mixing the sentimental relationship with a tragic, seemingly inevitable end."The street's varied character became the loose organizing principle for the exhibition, which is strung along Auguststrasse like a collection of tales. Though the street bursts with local histories, for the curators it also represents an overarching sense of life, from birth to death, from innocence to the burdens of experience.
If anything, the art on view is about "an atmosphere of anxiety," as Ms. Subotnick put it, both past and present. In the terrifying video "Burn," by Reynold Reynolds with Patrick Jolley, viewers watch a domestic world turned into incendiary hell. Other works have an air of ethnography and loss, of precariousness and richness, like Michael Schmidt's atlas of photographs of German life since the 1940's and Tacita Dean's "Presentation Sisters," about the fading days of a convent in Cork, Ireland.
The curators' approach was greeted largely with approval by the art crowd in Berlin.
"The sad history of the street adds enormously to the art," said Jeffrey Deitch, the New York dealer. "And unlike all of these biennials in city after city, where the curator flies in for three days, chooses 25 local artists and flies on to the next place, the curators here did their homework."
"They clearly meditated on the power of the place as a microcosm for a larger understanding," he continued, "and there's a deep sense of place here, a deep sense of the way that different environments affect the way we look at art."
Mr. Deitch added, "It should be a model for a lot of biennials to come."
"Of Mice and Men," the Berlin Biennial, continues through May 28. Information: www.berlinbiennale.de.More Articles in Arts
Monday, April 10, 2006
Step Right Up to the Anatomy Lesson
By FRANCIS X. CLINES NYTimes.com: April 10, 2006
So, what did the show's artfully skinned, well-posed human cadavers ever do for a living? And how much pure P. T. Barnum gawking underlies the sober tones of education as crowds of paying customers at "Bodies the Exhibition" move wide-eyed and close-up past the anonymous fellow posed like Rodin's "Thinker"? His skin has been peeled off to display the gorgeous complexity of muscles, vessels, organs and gray matter underlying humanity — all vividly preserved in a special plasticizing process.Actual corpses are theatrically lighted in living color, some partitioned like puzzle pieces, others sectioned as giant slide displays. All are beyond animation and the knowledge of what has become of their own remains.
"Guy was alive, a whole person," said a wary teenager as classmates checked out the thinker. "It's not my place to stare."
But the lad did. The cadavers — 22 of them — pretty much stared back.It's like that at the Manhattan exhibition and at a growing number of shows in cities around the globe as rival companies tap for profit ($24.50 per adult visitor) into startling new dissection techniques. Bodies become virtual performers in balletic still lifes revealing their intricate parts in living color. Filigrees of complete blood and neural systems hang like mobiles. The muscle sheaths of one posed sprinter are teased out from his back like the wings of Mercury fleeing some abattoir.
Critics fear that the scores of beguilingly tweaked bodies dispatched like vaudevillians may come from black marketeers. But purveyors insist each body comes with firm legal documentation of natural death, unclaimed and available for purchase, just as anatomy professors have obtained cadavers for years.
"Guy was alive, a whole person," said a wary teenager as classmates checked out the thinker. "It's not my place to stare."
But the lad did. The cadavers — 22 of them — pretty much stared back.It's like that at the Manhattan exhibition and at a growing number of shows in cities around the globe as rival companies tap for profit ($24.50 per adult visitor) into startling new dissection techniques. Bodies become virtual performers in balletic still lifes revealing their intricate parts in living color. Filigrees of complete blood and neural systems hang like mobiles. The muscle sheaths of one posed sprinter are teased out from his back like the wings of Mercury fleeing some abattoir.
Critics fear that the scores of beguilingly tweaked bodies dispatched like vaudevillians may come from black marketeers. But purveyors insist each body comes with firm legal documentation of natural death, unclaimed and available for purchase, just as anatomy professors have obtained cadavers for years.
Public reaction is as varied and visceral as the body displays. A doctor exults at such firsthand education for the public; another thinks forensic evidence of foul play is discernible.
Living voyeurs trump the corpses as the attraction. A teacher happily lectures a class mesmerized at the palpable truth of a halved heart. At the lung display, a young smoker named Jen is gleefully summoned by her classmates to see the shiny black lungs of a dead smoker. Some pause at the message at one undone body: "It's never too late to start that workout."
But wait: that fellow extended athletically with a baseball in his flayed right hand (split-finger fastball, it seems) was allowed to keep his eyebrows for human emphasis. This invites pathos to blur the science: what's the witless man's history? Who was he really?
Living voyeurs trump the corpses as the attraction. A teacher happily lectures a class mesmerized at the palpable truth of a halved heart. At the lung display, a young smoker named Jen is gleefully summoned by her classmates to see the shiny black lungs of a dead smoker. Some pause at the message at one undone body: "It's never too late to start that workout."
But wait: that fellow extended athletically with a baseball in his flayed right hand (split-finger fastball, it seems) was allowed to keep his eyebrows for human emphasis. This invites pathos to blur the science: what's the witless man's history? Who was he really?
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Exploring the mystique of light
Santosh Verma As Art is the exploration of the visual medium, light is the primary element for exploitation, Distinct colours, forms, negetive spaces, compositions are realised by us due to the different ways light responds to a creation i.e. the way light reflects off the creation.
Through the ages, artists have used light consciously or otherwise in their creation. Be it the glow on the face of Ajanta frescoes, the stained glass panels of the 12th century churches or even later in the works of the impressionists.Light has always fascinated me and has been my main inspiration. Light refracting from a crystal or jewel, light creating highlights and shadows and the intertwined mid-ranges on laid satin or sand dunes, light glimmering through the bunch of leaves captivate me. For nearly a decade and a half, I’ve been studying the dimensions of light on various surface, texture and objects, and have been experimenting and interpreting its play on canvas. Sunday, July 03, 2005 ¶ 7:44 AM SRB-94 B, Shipra Riviera, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad, U.P. - 201012, Ph: 0120-2606484, India
Friday, March 17, 2006
Environmental sensitivity for the design process
Golconde is also "a dormitory for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India...designed by architects George Nakashima and Antonin Raymond," completed in 1945 and named for nearby diamond mines. This building is the subject of an exhibition (by Pankaj Vir Gupta and Christine Mueller) on display at the Graham Foundation until May 25, as well as a gallery talk on March 28 by Andy Tinucci.The building is notable for being "the first reinforced, cast-in-place concrete building in India," though Gupta and Mueller view it as "one of the earliest works of sustainable modern architecture in the world, [espousing] the virtue of radical economy and uncompromising construction standards". posted by John @ 1:00 PM
Exhibition Opening and Lecture Golconde: The Introduction of Modernism in India Tuesday, February 21, 6pmGraham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, Chicago Extended through Thursday, May 25, 2006. Monday through Thursday from 10am to 4pm.
Sited on the coastal edge of the Bay of Bengal, Golconde, a dormitory for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, was designed by architects George Nakashima and Antonin Raymond. Golconde is a remarkable architectural edifice, seamlessly negotiating between the tenets of early modernist architecture while addressing the pragmatic impositions of a tropical context. Espousing radical economy and uncompromising construction standards, it proposes environmental sensitivity as a foundation for the design process. Completed in 1942, Golconde was the first reinforced, cast-in-place concrete building in India and clearly celebrates the modernist credo: architecture as the manifest union of aesthetics, technology, and social reform. This exhibition assembles construction drawings, architects' letters and journals, and extensive photographs of this extraordinary building.
Pankaj Vir Gupta and Christine Mueller are founders of the office of vir. mueller architects, which combines architectural research, education, and practice. Gupta and Mueller currently teach at the University of Texas at Austin. With Cyrus Samii, they traveled to India in 2003 to conduct research on the architecture of Golconde. Gupta has taught design studios at the Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico and is founder of Reading India , a study-abroad program that explores the architecture of ancient and contemporary India. He received his M.Arch. from Yale University. Mueller, who has lived in Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S., has taught design studios at the Boston Architectural Center and the Career Discovery program at Harvard University. She received her M.Arch. from Harvard. Copies of Nature, Form, and Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima by Mira Nakashima are available for purchase. Back to program listing 2006 Graham Foundation
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Shiva Vangara
Shiva's basic foundation was realism and portraits. Then in 1983 when he started his quest for Truth in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India - his perception of art changed entirely and entered into spiritual dimension. He had his frist solo exhibition in Bombay at Gateway of India in 1993. Then in Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville in 1995. His inspiration was "The highest art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit." -The Mother. At present he is mostly busy with his ambitious Hollywood project entitled Fourth Dimension. posted by Shiva Vangara Friday, January 27, 2006 at 7:42 AM
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