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.

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.

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

Best Of Both Worlds By SHAKTI MAIRA timesofindia.com 13 May 2006

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.

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.

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?

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.

"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."

"Of Mice and Men," the Berlin Biennial, continues through May 28. Information: www.berlinbiennale.de.More Articles in Arts

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.

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?

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

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

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

Dali, Munch and Picasso

I have always thought that one need not be formally trained or schooled in art appreciation to appreciate art. Dali's work, for instance, have always had a haunting feel about them and made me think for a long time after I had looked at one...frankly speaking, I can't pretend that I understand Dali, most of the while I don't, but the very fact that he makes me reflect over an unseemly agglomeration of distorted shapes, forms and objects is I think tribute to his originality of thought and of skill....I've felt the same with Munch's "The Scream", some Picassos and several African masks, dolls and idols, Yakshagana and Kathakali masks, Bali puppets, Easter island figurines...

I'm not a great fan of modern art, most of which are not within the reach of my mind; this is perhaps because each art work represents a peculiar private point of view of the artist of something or someone, an abstract viewpoint of several billion theoretical possibilities, considering one per every living person on earth and to gauge some meaning related to the artist's perspective would be a task of considerable ingenuity and insight - not, I'm afraid, everyone's cup of tea! (I’ve always felt that there are too many who pretend to understand the modern artist.)

A modern artist can only be appreciated widely if he has an original, arresting perspective which should also embody a freedom to interpretation while always being able to convey the artist's idea...its a rather tall order for asking, but I think that is why many people are captivated by Dali, Munch and Picasso rather than innumerable others (I have overlooked some practical aspects of media exposure, art circle intrigues and so on, although they may play a role, they are probably not as relevant in the current discussion...)….

Art criticism, like literary criticism, is a thoroughly individualistic perspective cloaked in apparent universality. A person puts forth an idea or feeling about an art or a literary work that might well involve a lot of insight, but would necessarily restrict a reader's outlook to the work of art or literature. In that manner, I think critics, most of whom are subjective in criticism, are dangerous in tending to curtail imagination. A successful critic would probably be more objective in his remarks and would allow for, rather, invite individual reactions and remarks from his audience. A critic of this mould is probably a rare find today...

I think Aurobindo's "Future Poetry" represents a rather good example, in riveting language and style, of an atypical Indian view of literary criticism of English poetry. Thejaswi Shivanand Location: Bangalore, India posted by Dumaketu Saturday, October 29, 2005 @ 11:43 AM 14 comments

Perennialist Art: Psychic Upheaval and Epiphany

The distinguishing feature of Perennialist art is its power to produce psychic upheaval in a prepared mind and transport that mind to a higher dimension. I am using the term "Perennialist art" to include the conscious production or arrangement of words, sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that enables a person to understand truth and beauty.

Within the term "Perennialist art," then, I include those specially created instances of literature (prose and poetry), drama (including screenplays), painting, sculpture, music, dance, or illustration (including illustrated books and Web sites) which possesses the distinguishing quality of empowering a reader or viewer to gain a higher state of consciousness. The person must have carried out specific preparation to be able to conceive of new possibilities, understand new concepts, and participate in transformative experiences. To an unprepared psyche, Perennialist art appears lackluster or bizarre.

Transformative art leads the readied psyche to dimensions higher than previously experienced, to epiphanies. These epiphanies involve inspiration, a fusing with the universe, transcending time-space-ego, infusion with knowledge and awareness, and gaining a sense of endowment. Psychic upheaval and transport to higher awareness can occur in any area of human life at a multiplicity of levels. Illuminating art has been with humankind since its beginning, leading humans in their evolutionary ascent.

Upheaval is required to displace the psyche--mind and personality--from its entrenched intellectual and emotional routines. This is not some vague feeling of uplift or emotion; it is an eruption within the soul...Perennialist art leads to human liberation in all areas of life. We understand social liberation to include some means of control of rulers by the ruled, protection of the individual against government by legal rights and civil liberties. In a broader context, liberation means the ability to make decisions and carry out purposes, free from internal and external coercion, using the powers of the psyche to develop human potentialities, some of which may be unknown until revealed by illuminating art. hermes-press.com

Integral Artist

Original Gravity by ebuddha on Wed 17 Aug 2005 04:44 PM PDT Permanent Link

It's now near the end of my workday, I was playing around with a couple of other new Yahoo beta tools - and I came across this site called Original Gravity. It's pretty interesting - dating from the 1980's, a collection of writing, thoughts on art, on design, photography, all based around a type of integral philosophy. Funny enough, it reminded me a bit of our intrepid budding integral artist Dan Allison's site - although this may just be the open mouth visual thing. Still, a fascinating site, really.

Almost like the "O.G" Integral Artist - a little respect y'all! Who WOULD be the O.G. integral artist? With a consciously aware philosophy of art that includes mind-body-spirit? I mean, you could go back to DaVinci, of course - that monster of mind, art and philosophy. But that would be too far back, and doesn't consciously include an integral perspective. You would have to start from after Aurobindo or Teilhard de Chardin. Any thoughts?

Fractal Art

By Raj Mathur Life Positive, April 1996

Pack up your easel, palette and paintbrushes. Turn, instead, to the mouse and the PC. Just a few clicks away, lies pixel art that arises from fractals or geometric figures. Fragmented, irregular and magical, it takes you to a whole new world. A world where there is beauty in form, rhythm in color, order in chaosFractal geometry was accidentally discovered about two decades ago by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who was born in Warsaw, and later shifted to the US, where he worked at IBM. While plotting the imaginary values of the square root of minus one, Mandelbrot found beautiful patterns and shapes that repeated themselves in different scales-like the shape of a tree is mimicked by the branch, the branch by the twig, the twig by the leaf.

The art of fractals is both simple and complicated. Simple, because, given the right mix of software, hardware and imagination, even the guy next door can easily work at producing them. Complex, simply because if you take a fractal, zoom into a small part, and then blow it up, you find the new picture is at least as complicated as its original. The basic pattern of the fractal is repeated, but, with each repetition, the pattern differs slightly. The beauty of the whole process is that this continues however deep you zoom into the fractal. This form of art is used by musicians. It is also used by economists, geologists, filmmakers and, of course, by computer enthusiasts such as Raj Mathur who has generated the images that you are seeing here.

Compact discs of readymade fractals are readily available on the market. But Mathur works from a fractal program and a set of formulae to evoke these beautiful images. So, in a sense, he has technically generated them. He is, however, quick to give credit to the original authors of the formulae-Michael Coddington, Ian Adma, Richard Hughes, Pieter Branderhorst, Scott Taylor and Ethan Nagel. Says cyber junkie Mathur whose social life seems to be restricted to the computer: "Fractals are absolutely fascinating. If my math were better, I would have learnt more about them. But, even without math, I am quite happy to generate and view them." To view Raj Mathur's fractal art, click here.

Where art is part of integral yoga

Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram Natalia Kravtchenko, Vladimir Zaitsev

From ancient, miraculous stones build the steps of the future. Nicholas Roerich

CULTURE OF PEACE Edited by BAIDYANATH SARASWATI 1999, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

Not only are the names of Rubens, Velazquez, Griboedov and many others immortalized in art, but also for their unforgettable advice in the field of statesmanship. Objects of art themselves very often were the best ambassadors, introducing peace and friendship. It is known that the exchange of art treasures prevented misunderstandings and was ahead of verbal agreements.

The remarkable results of art in education were proved by the experiments of Tagore in his university, Visva Bharati. All the programmes of this institution were based on unity and harmonious relationship with nature and development of the sense of beauty. A great deal of art and creativity is involved in the educational process of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where it is considered the foundation for the intellectual and spiritual development of man. Here art is part of integral yoga and creativity is the active power in the evolution of man.

Considering the ‘culture of peace’ one should not forget the original experiments in the field of culture conducted by the great peace-builder Nicholas Roerich. At the end of the 1920s he established in the United States an international institute of art named Corona Mundi and a museum which were prototypes of contemporary academies of fine arts. Musicians, painters, poets, writers, architects, scientists were united in these creative communities under Roerich’s slogan ‘peace through culture’. Later this idea was extended in artistic activity in the preservation of cultural monuments and treasures of art. It finally materialized in the international memorandum, the ‘Roerich Pact’, signed by 54 countries in Gaag after World War II. For the first time cultural heritage was recognised not as a luxury, but as a necessary foundation for the spiritual being of mankind. For its humanism contemporaries named this project the ‘Red Cross of Culture’.

In the service of peace and spiritual principles, art and creativeness reach their highest self-expression. For the spiritually alive human being the value of art lies in its beautiful existence, in its great mystery, in its mighty transforming and purifying power (catharsis). Through art one discovers the whole universe of the human spirit, limitless spaces of human thoughts and feelings. At one moment through the charming sounds of music or rhythm of ancient chants one may be united with events going back to thousands and thousands of years ago. Art in its sublime forms and expressions gives us an opportunity of unforgettable experience, it reminds us of a different kind of reality, the origin of existence.

The process of creativity is comparable with the spiritual path (sadhana). In all fields of art meditative disciplines are a normal part of human experience and have a profound effect on artists. The insight born of these disciplines inspires a sense of participation, of identification with all life. In Russia there exists a system of inner discipline of the artist formed during the centuries. Most powerfully it was expressed in the art of icon painting.

Long before starting a painting, artist practises prayer and silence and maintains mental and emotional purity. These helped him to achieve the resonance, like a musical instrument, to be one with the subject of his painting.

There is a certain duty and responsibility of the artist towards his invisible ideal. In icon painting the main stress is on the expression of inner beauty, spiritual power, where they are considered limitless love and compassion. In the instructions to the artist we read: ‘Maintain the unity of your will. Do not listen with your ears but with the mind. Do not listen with the mind, but with the spirit. The spirit is an emptiness ready to receive all things.’

By stilling his heart, that is, shedding thoughts and emotions of his personal life, an individual can reflect on his heart-mind the power of High Consciousness (the holy spirit, tao, atman, etc.). The sense of another reality within allows the artist to find out new artistic and technical solutions. So in some old Chinese paintings one may discover that what seemed to be empty was never vacant. Obviously the artist was able to suggest aliveness in unfilled surfaces and employ empty space in ways which are extremely daring. Poetically it can be illustrated in the following lines:

Stillness — a transparent mirror for celestial reflections.
Stillness — a morning song forgotten by mankind.
Stillness — the sound of eternity amidst the cries of the earth.
Stillness — the invisible door to the silence.

Because it does not aim at being artistic

Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram Natalia Kravtchenko, Vladimir Zaitsev

From ancient, miraculous stones build the steps of the future Nicholas Roerich

CULTURE OF PEACE Edited by BAIDYANATH SARASWATI 1999, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

One would be able to reach it when the difference between mechanical civilization and the coming culture of the spirit is realized. ‘For man intellectually developed,’ writes Sri Aurobindo, ‘mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of asura (demon), using the power of a demigod to satisfy animal nature.’ Observing the historical panorama one may find that civilization is created during a few decades, while culture is based upon achievements of thousands years.

In art of this subtlety there are qualities that go farther than naturalness or realism. The process of communication between artist and object creates specific relationships between them; the artist is much more attracted to the inner content of the subject than to its external attractiveness.

There is always difference between likeness and truth. ‘Likeness could be obtained by shapes without spirit, but when Truth is reached, spirit and substance are both fully expressed.’ Evidently, beauty does not necessarily spell perfection of form. This has been one of the favourite tricks of artists in Japan and in some Scandinavian countries — to embody beauty in the form of imperfection or even ugliness, or asymmetry. All these methods of creativity served one main desire of the artist — to reveal another nature of the subject, to express its inner cosmos.

Thus in the art of icon painting we are moved first of all by the unspeakable beauty of the artistic image, which is transformed from the personal into universal. We completely agree with the opinion of Nalini Kanta Gupta who wrote on the Upanishads: ‘Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest art, precisely because it does not aim at being artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a deeper strand of consciousness.’ Indeed, at its highest, art does not tolerate any conventionality, nor violence. In the very foundations of being lives the concept of beauty, and where there is beauty, there is peace.

In Beauty we are united!
Through Beauty we pray!
With Beauty we conquer!

On being an Art Critic

“The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty,” – Sri Aurobindo (Gems from Sri Aurobindo V1. by M.P. Pendit) posted by Mary Lee Pappas at 10:29 PM

A First Person on Being an Art Critic - Does Indianapolis want arts criticism?

By Mary Lee Pappas NUVO art critic spring 2005

• Should an art critic write about artists whose work they collect?
• Should an art critic fraternize with artists they write about?
• Should they accept gifts from artists they’ve written about, be an exhibition consultant, sit on boards of visual arts organizations, or exhibit their own artworks?

According to “The Visual Art Critic: A Survey of Art Critics at General-Interest News Publications in America” by Columbia University’s Journalism Program in 2002, there was no consensus among the 169 art critics surveyed (myself the only Indianapolis representative) regarding blanket ethical conduct within the American art world.

This perhaps resulting from the public’s equally as uneven expectations of what art criticism ought and ought not to be. An opinionated bunch to begin with, participating art critics had to have written at least twelve ”evaluative” pieces the previous year to qualify for the survey. Those are reviews that make judgments regarding quality, purport, and context based on the work, the artist, the venue, the curatorial competence, and sometimes funding. It’s gauging art instead of strictly spouting anthems of advocacy, subjective explanations, and taking strict emotions into account.

Critics, predominantly employed as part-timers or freelance at both daily and alternative weekly papers, were actually found to be “intimately connected” to their local arts communities. Is this conflict of interest, or fundamental for the role? 24% of us had worked in museums, 18% in commercial galleries, while nearly half of us were artists – 70% of whom exhibit or have exhibited their works. 14% were employed in art-related industries. Four out of five newspaper critics and three out of four alternative weekly critics collect art. Though 90% of the critics were curiously Caucasian when multiculturalism in visual art is ever present, well preparedness for their work varied greatly.

The majority of practicing art critics had on average 13 years of journalism/art writing experience. 20% of art critics had no formal training in art or art history, while only 26% of us actually had a B.A., M.A. or Ph.D. in art history. But, apparently it doesn’t really matter who’s writing about art anymore. Some artists should, “Park their paints,” and let go of ego, pride and fickleness local painter, art historian, and gallery owner Doris Vlasek Hails said to me once. But there has been an increasing trend for artists and arts organizations across the country to steer clear of uncompromising critics and seek-out positive press thereby creating their own undeserving derivative art stars. Some buy it. As our local visual arts community flourishes so too do the proliferating and, more often than not, only moderately talented artists who Indianapolis audiences so anxiously and sometimes bafflingly accept.

• Can anyone who can afford rent at a trendy studio be an artist?
• Are gallery owners and proprietors actually qualified to choose quality art to present to the public just because they can fund their venues?
• Who is drawing the line between hobby and excellence?
• Should critics simply relinquish themselves to this laissez-fare intellect regarding the fine art process and art history thereby giving artists and venues the praise they ultimately fancy?
• Where does criticism fit in and who really wants it anymore?

Indianapolis appears to be succeeding at placing novelty (or propaganda at times) above discrimination. The survey makes an example of our city by stating, “Citizens of significant urban agglomerations, including Indianapolis and Las Vegas…do not have the benefit of hearing from an art critic who might qualify for inclusion in this survey,” from a daily paper. This perhaps in part because formal criticism doesn’t serve the city’s desires to make Indianapolis a cultural destination overnight. However, celebrating the mundane won’t make it happen either. Though art critics across the board thought they were writing for a “lukewarm audience that is not too well steeped in the arts,” nearly two-thirds unfortunately write strictly positive reviews, with “rendering a personal judgement” about the artwork being “the least important factor in reviewing art.” It’s a sorry commentary that’s ultimately destructive of the arts evolution (like Indianapolis’ visual art growth spurt), and the art itself. So are gallery openings where the art plays second fiddle to the party.

• Are arts writers accepting expenses on press junkets?
• Are papers merely supposed to conform, jump on the promotional bandwagon, and be another form of advertising?

Perhaps this is an indication that some “critics” should park their pens or thicken their skin. Perhaps local media should give more space and credence to the visual arts cultures of their communities, and artists should challenge themselves to create more than attractive formula paintings accompanied by contrived statements of purpose. Local eagerness to be exceptional in the visual arts has created levels of administrative and artistic inferiority that can be remedied by demanding quality and education from those that serve the arts community, critics alike. Inferring that arts audiences and potential arts audiences are un or under educated (as is the rhetoric from artists and arts orgs.) only serves to insult and estrange audiences…as does substandard art. Friday, November 11, 2005 posted by Mary Lee Pappas at 7:31 AM

The Divided Line in Art

Rimina Mohapatra Vista

"Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös thus articulated his view on the sheer aesthetic of mathematics. Theories of art centrally rely on the idea of beauty which is usually characterized as the 'perception of balance and proportion of stimulus, harmony of form, rhythm or colour, fineness of artistic quality, candour, and originality'. It is the conception of such a symmetric, perfect, consistent harmonious world that the Pythagoreans conceived of through numbers.

For Plato, art is unreal appearance, because it lies in the realm of perception, changing, disintegrating in the world, almost like illusions. He says all this because he already has a framework of reality in mind, that is, ultimately reality is that which is invariant, spaceless, timeless, consisting of absolute essences. The unreality of art comes from the fact of its change, and further, from Plato’s view that what is seen is ultimately unreal. In contrast, mathematical truths are ever real because they are unperceived, pure and sublime, not vitiated by errors.

The object of art, like numbers, is abstract. In The Imaginary, Sartre speaks of the aesthetic object as the irreal. He points out that it is a mistake to think that the artist “realizes” a pre-conceived mental image onto the canvas. Rather, Sartre claims:

“What is real…are the results of the brush strokes, the impasting of the canvas, its grain, the varnish spread over the colours. But precisely, all this is not the object of aesthetic appreciation. What is ‘beautiful’, on the contrary, is a being that cannot be given to perception and that, in its very nature, is isolated from the universe.”

Further he says that the painting is simply an analogue for one to be able to construe the object of beauty, that is, the irreal whole. Clearly then Sartre has turned the talk around. He seems to be claiming that the real is in fact the physical painting. But certainly, it is not that we are engaged with when enjoying a work of art. That which is the object of our aesthetic muse is simply never the ‘real’ paint, strokes, grain of canvas, i.e. nothing of the physically perceived senses as colors, textures, etc. It consists in an entirely abstract, irreal object that is pointed towards by the actual painting. There may be nothing specific that can be pointed at to define a common notion of art. And yet, it does not follow that there is no notion of beauty or art that we can work with, which makes that what art is. This is exactly because some things do show up as works of art as against others.

What then is the criterion of art? In what way would be art accessible to us? How should we view art? If it is an abstraction, is it even worth nurturing? The question of the use value of art has been grappled with a phenomenal concern. In lashing out against such pragmatic anxieties, Oscar Wilde, long since engaged in decadent movements, famously quipped "All art is quite useless". He was, of course, a strong champion of "Art for art's sake" (l’art pour l’art) in defiance of those who felt that the value of art lay in serving some moral or didactic purpose, as social utility, etc. The view of art for art's sake reinforced that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were self justified, and that art did not need moral justification — and in fact, was free even to be morally subversive.

Now, when does something turn into a work of art? Marcel Duchamp, perhaps one of the most important influences the post-war art scene, co-founder of a Dada group, was one of the first artists to use commonplace objects, readymades, as the basis for his artworks. His controversial work Fountain is a clear case that interrogates the conventional notions of art. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can is another stunning break from convention, in constructing the idiom of the pop where his works profusely used dollar bills, soup cans, posters, soft-drink bottles, and garish nylon fibres. Art now seemed to have even lost the accompanying mark of artistic methods, tools and skill, employing techniques of commercial art and advertising, and thus giving a blow to the accentuated pretence of a high-culture versus low-culture chasm.

In a self styled remark he said, "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." The “superficiality” is the point of Warhol’s works. He brings forth a certain anti essentialist position on what art means to him, in his emphasis on rejecting the narrative of the concealed reality of art, the work of art and the artist. No attempt is made at analysing the subjective pathos, the intention or emotion of the artist.

By the last account it seems that nothing apart from the surface and the objects was art. In a way, we come full circle, for art for Plato too is in the realm of the sensible, i.e. in the world of change. Yet in another sense this is perhaps the total antithesis of a Plato’s dream to separate the invisible/intelligible and the visible/sensible, to separate the world of abstract forms [such as Beauty] and particular objects that may be beautiful, to separate the mind and the body, to separate the original and the copy, and so on. Whether or not there are essences to art, as the form of Beauty [cf. Plato’s Phaedo] or some archetype of symmetry, harmony, etc., are questions that would simply be irrelevant on the pop account of art.

Extending this line, Jean Baudrillard brings in the imaginative notion of hyperreality to explain how things are, in his Simulacra and Simulation. The idea of simulacrum would roughly be ‘a copy of a copy which has been so dissipated in its relation to the original that it can no longer be said to be a copy’. The simulacrum referred to are signs of culture technology and media that create the reality that we perceive, surviving on its own as a copy without a model. The 1999 movie The Matrix was based on this view of Baudrillard’s simulated world as being more real than the ‘real’ world.

In The Transparency of Evil (1993), Baudrillard speaks of a situation called ‘transaesthetics’ in which the so-called independent and isolated spheres of economy, art, politics, and culture, inter-penetrate each other. He claims that art has entered all facets of existence. Thus, the expectation of the avant-garde for art to inform life [cf. Oscar Wilde’s quip ‘Life imitates Art’] has been, in many ways, already fulfilled. Yet, this precisely means that in the incorporation and proliferation of art in everyday life, art itself as an independent and transcendent phenomenon has vanished. ‘Reality is therefore just another TV channel’.

Interestingly, Baudrillard makes use of Borges’ ironic fable of an empire whose cartographers create a map so minutely detailed that it covers the very things it was intended to represent. That is, the map turns out to be as large as the kingdom itself, to the scale! Now, when the empire declines, the map recedes into the landscape and there is neither the simulated copy or representation, nor is it the originally real that remains – but just the hyperreal. posted by Rimina @ 9:40 PM

Culture as capital

RANJIT HOSKOTE The Hindu Magazine Sunday, Jan 01, 2006

If historical ignorance obscures the true nature of a literary achievement, an obsession with commercial value — which has dominated reportage on the realm of contemporary Indian art during 2005 — can destroy the possibility of viewing the real accomplishments of visual art. The torrent of words wasted to express rage and outrage at the phenomenal price-linked developments in the market for postcolonial Indian art, for instance, eclipses all serious discussion of works of art as invitations to the senses, provocations to the intelligence, gestures staged against several contexts of feeling and viewing.

The fact that art works are not only objects carrying monetary value, but that they are also discursive and communicative objects — that they reveal their meanings most fully when they are talked about with sensitivity, attention and insightfulness — is being eclipsed by the shallow, ill-informed, often factually incorrect and painfully naïve reportage that passes for cultural journalism today. Unlike Ghalib, contemporary Indian artists do not even have to wait for the gates of the final passage to open; the truth of their art is already being buried by trashy coverage that misses the point of an artistic project, accompanied by the tunes of a publicity apparatus that plays up the man (or woman) and not the work.

The epoch that opens up before us will be one in which transitive selves and their nomadic creative impulses will have to confront, not only official structures, but also the more destructive fixed-frame approach of the mass media.

• How, as we go along, is India's creative capital to be rescued from the oblivion of excessive visibility?
• How shall we evolve forms of attention that enhance aesthetic experience, rather than killing it?
• How will creative individuals find communities that sustain them, rather than relying on fan clubs that cannibalise them, or remaining trapped in ghettoes where familiarity has long ago bred an aesthetic complacency that is far worse than contempt?
• How are writers to win the space of retreat, and artists to secure the repose so necessary for them to tap the deep springs of their art, to maintain contact with the operative rhythms of their work?

The Message of the East

The Past and the Future SRI AUROBINDO
KARMAYOGIN : Vol.I. No.14 SATURDAY 25th SEPTEMBER 1909

OUR CONTEMPORARY, the Statesman, notices in an unusually self-restrained article the recent brochure republished by Dr. A. K. Coomaraswamy from the Modern Review under the title, "The Message of the East". We have not the work before us but, from our memory of the articles and our knowledge of our distinguished countryman's views, we do not think the Statesman has quite caught the spirit of the writer. Dr. Coomaraswamy is above all a lover of art and beauty and the ancient thought and greatness of India, but he is also, and as a result of this deep love and appreciation, an ardent Nationalist. Writing as an artist, he calls attention to the debased aesthetic ideas and tastes which the ugly and sordid commercialism of the West has introduced into the mind of a nation once distinguished for its superior beauty and grandeur of conception and for the extent to which it suffused the whole of life with the forces of the intellect and the spirit. He laments the persistence of a servile imitation of English ideas, English methods, English machinery and production even in the new Nationalism. And he reminds his readers that nations cannot be made by politics and economics alone, but that art also has a great and still unrecognised claim. The main drift of his writing is to censure the low imitative un-Indian and bourgeois ideals of our national activity in the nineteenth century and to recall our minds to the cardinal fact that, if India is to arise and be great as a nation, it is not by imitating the methods and institutions of English politics and commerce, but by carrying her own civilisation, purified of the weaknesses that have overtaken it, to a much higher and mightier fulfilment than any that it has reached in the past. Our mission is to outdistance, lead and instruct Europe, not merely to imitate and learn from her.

Dr. Coomaraswamy speaks of art, but it is certain that a man of his wide culture would not exclude, and we know he does not exclude, thought, literature and religion from the forces that must uplift our nation and are necessary to its future. To recover Indian thought, Indian character, Indian perceptions, Indian energy, Indian greatness, and to solve the problems that perplex the world in an Indian spirit and from the Indian standpoint, this, in our view, is the mission of Nationalism. We agree with Dr. Coomaraswamy that an exclusive preoccupation with politics and economics is likely to dwarf our growth and prevent the flowering of originality and energy. We have to return to the fountainheads of our ancient religion, philosophy, art and literature and pour the revivifying influences of our immemorial Aryan spirit and ideals into our political and economic development. This is the ideal the Karmayogin holds before it, and our outlook and Dr. Coomaraswamy's do not substantially differ. But in judging our present activities we cannot look, as he does, from a purely artistic and idealistic standpoint, but must act and write in the spirit of a practical idealism.

The debasement of our mind, character and tastes by a grossly commercial, materialistic and insufficient European education is a fact on which the young Nationalism has always insisted. The practical destruction of our artistic perceptions and the plastic skill and fineness of eye and hand which once gave our productions pre-eminence, distinction and mastery of the European markets, is also a thing accomplished. Most vital of all, the spiritual and intellectual divorce from the past which the present schools and universities have effected, has beggared the nation of the originality, high aspiration and forceful energy which can alone make a nation free and great. To reverse the process and recover what we have lost, is undoubtedly the first object to which we ought to devote ourselves. And as the loss of originality, aspiration and energy was the most vital of all these losses, so their recovery should be our first and most important objective. The primary aim of the prophets of Nationalism was to rid the nation of the idea that the future was limited by the circumstances of the present, that because temporary causes had brought us low and made us weak, low therefore must be our aims and weak our methods. They pointed the mind of the people to a great and splendid destiny, not in some distant millennium but in the comparatively near future, and fired the hearts of the young men with a burning desire to realise the apocalyptic vision. As a justification of what might otherwise have seemed a dream and as an inexhaustible source of energy and inspiration, they pointed persistently to the great achievements and grandiose civilisation of our forefathers and called on the rising generation to recover their lost spiritual and intellectual heritage.

It cannot be denied that this double effort to realise the past and the future has been the distinguishing temperament and the chief uplifting force in the movement, and it cannot be denied that it is bringing back to our young men originality, aspiration and energy. By this force the character, temper and action of the Bengali has been altered beyond recognition in a few years. To raise the mind, character and tastes of the people, to recover the ancient nobility of temper, the strong Aryan character and the high Aryan outlook, the perceptions which made earthly life beautiful and wonderful, and the magnificent spiritual experiences, realisations and aspirations which made us the deepest-hearted, deepest-thoughted and most delicately profound in life of all the peoples of the earth, is the task next in importance and urgency. We had hoped by means of National Education to effect this great object as well as to restore to our youth the intellectual heritage of the nation and build up on that basis a yet greater culture in the future. We must admit that the instrument which we cherished and for which such sacrifices were made, has proved insufficient and threatens, in unfit hands, to lose its promise of fulfilment and be diverted to lower ends. But the movement is greater than its instruments. We must strive to prevent the destruction of that which we have created and, in the meanwhile, build up a centre of culture, freer and more perfect, which will either permeate the other with itself or replace it if destroyed. Finally, the artistic awakening has been commenced by that young, living and energetic school which has gathered round the Master and originator, Sj. Abanindranath Tagore. The impulse which this school is giving, its inspired artistic recovery of the past, its intuitive anticipations of the future, have to be popularised and made a national possession.

Dr. Coomaraswamy complains of the survivals of the past in the preparations for the future. But no movement, however vigorous, can throw off in a few years the effects of a whole century. We must remember also why the degradation and denationalisation, "the mighty evil in our souls" of which the writer complains, came into being. A painful but necessary work had to be done, and because the English nation were the fittest instrument for His purpose, God led them all over those thousands of miles of alien Ocean, gave strength to their hearts and subtlety to their brains, and set them up in India to do His work, which they have been doing faithfully, if blindly, ever since and are doing at the present moment. The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould which, however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that happens, the mould has to be broken and even the ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint and limitation. We have to recover the Aryan spirit and ideal and keep it intact but enshrined in new forms and more expansive institutions. We have to treasure jealously everything in our social structure, manners, institutions, which is of permanent value, essential to our spirit or helpful to the future; but we must not cabin the expanding and aggressive spirit of India in temporary forms which are the creation of the last few hundred years. That would be a vain and disastrous endeavour. The mould is broken; we must remould in larger outlines and with a richer content. For the work of destruction England was best fitted by her stubborn individuality and by that very commercialism and materialism which made her the antitype in temper and culture of the race she governed. She was chosen too for the unrivalled efficiency and skill with which she has organised an individualistic and materialistic democracy. We had to come to close quarters with that democratic organisation, draw it into ourselves and absorb the democratic spirit and methods so that we might rise beyond them. Our half-aristocratic half-theocratic feudalism had to be broken, in order that the democratic spirit of the Vedanta might be released and, by absorbing all that is needed of the aristocratic and theocratic culture, create for the Indian race a new and powerful political and social organisation. We have to learn and use the democratic principle and methods of Europe, in order that hereafter we may build up something more suited to our past and to the future of humanity.

We have to throw away the individualism and materialism and keep the democracy. We have to solve for the human race the problem of harmonising and spiritualising its impulses towards liberty, equality and fraternity. In order that we may fulfil our mission we must be masters in our own home. It is out of no hostility to the English people, no race hatred that we seek absolute autonomy, but because it is the first condition of our developing our national self and realising our destiny. It is for this reason that the engrossing political preoccupation came upon us; and we cannot give up or tone down our political movement until the lesson of democratic self-government is learned and the first condition of national self-fulfilment realised. For another reason also England was chosen, because she had organised the competitive system of commerce, with its bitter and murderous struggle for existence, in the most skilful, discreet and successful fashion. We had to feel the full weight of that system and learn the literal meaning of this industrial realisation of Darwinism. It has been written large for us in ghastly letters of famine, chronic starvation and misery and a decreasing population. We have risen at last, entered into the battle and with the Boycott for a weapon, are striking at the throat of British commerce even as it struck at ours, first by protection and then by free trade. Again it is not out of hatred that we strike, but out of self-preservation. We must conquer in that battle if we are to live. We cannot arrest our development of industry and commerce while waiting for a new commercial system to develop or for beauty and art to reconquer the world. As in politics so in commerce, we must learn and master the European methods in order that we may eventually rise above them.

The crude commercial Swadeshi, which Dr. Coomaraswamy finds so distasteful and disappointing, is as integral a part of the national awakening as the movement towards Swaraj or as the new School of Art. If this crude Swadeshi were to collapse and the national movement towards autonomy come to nothing, the artistic renascence he has praised so highly, would wither and sink with the drying up of the soil in which it was planted. A nation need not be luxuriously wealthy in order to be profoundly artistic, but it must have a certain amount of well-being, a national culture and, above all, hope and ardour, if it is to maintain a national art based on a widespread development of artistic perception and faculty. Moreover, aesthetic arts and crafts cannot live against the onrush of cheap and vulgar manufactures under the conditions of the modern social structure. Industry can only become again beautiful if poverty and the struggle for life are eliminated from society and the co-operative State and commune organised as the fruit of a great moral and spiritual uplifting of humanity.

We hold such an uplifting and reorganisation as part of India's mission. But to do her work she must live. Therefore the economical preoccupation has been added to the political. We perceive the salvation of the country not in parting with either of these, but in adding to them a religious and moral preoccupation. On the basis of that religious and moral awakening the preoccupation of art and fine culture will be added and firmly based. There are many who perceive the necessity of the religious and moral regeneration, who are inclined to turn from the prosaic details of politics and commerce and regret that any guide and teacher of the nation should stoop to mingle in them. That is a grievous error. The men who would lead India must be catholic and many-sided. When the Avatar comes, we like to believe that he will be not only the religious guide, but the political leader, the great educationist, the regenerator of society, the captain of cooperative industry, with the soul of the poet, scholar and artist. He will be in short the summary and grand type of the future Indian nation which is rising to reshape and lead the world.

Nature is not always tranquil, it is violent too

Karuna Mahindra’s Landscapes at LTG Gallery
Review by Alokparna Das
The Observer of Business and Politics June 15, 1996

Beautiful but too sweet!!! What about the bitter taste? The paintings are pleasant, but unfortunately do not justify the title. A concern for environment cannot be depicted by painting the beautiful natural scenery alone, it has to include the environmental abuse and degradation. In reality, man is very much part of the landscape. Also, nature is not always tranquil, it is violent too. Perhaps, had there been no label of environment attached to the exhibition, the paintings could have been termed perfect in depicting the harmonious element of nature. As of now, the paintings can be best described as a utopian view from a distance.

What is Art?

Silika Mohapatra VISTA

Leo Tolstoy in his essay ‘What is Art’ discards all aesthetic theories that identify art with the ideas of good, truth and beauty. For him art is solely a condition of human life and a means of experiencing the emotion that led the artist to produce his work. To him good art is what infects the viewer, and the more it does so the better. What Tolstoy seems to be emphasizing is the perceiver’s outlook in art, but he appears to be failing in looking at it from the point of view of the artist herself. He talks of art as a relationship but does not realize that art may also be seen as an individual’s enterprise. For the artist, art is an expression of freedom. An artist’s canvas is a place that gives her unbounded liberty to play with myriad colours and forms.

Art may be seen as so personal and unique a venture that the emotion that led the artist to produce his work may be completely different from the one that the perceiver receives. So what do we call such an art? Is it to be categorized as bad art? Art might infect the viewer with some feeling, but it is not at all necessary that it is the same as the one that the artist felt while producing it. Michael Reddy’s speaks of the conduit metaphor as involving a model of communication in which the first person puts his ideas into symbols/words, sends those symbols/words to the second person, who then extracts the ideas out of these symbols/words, as though describing a successful transmission of thoughts, ideas or emotions through a conduit or pipe. Tolstoy seems to be working in this sort of framework in relating art, artist and the observer.

Rather than seeing art as the successful transmission of the artist’s emotion to the perceiver, as Tolstoy did, it may be regarded as either the perceiver’s interpretation, or the artist’s construal, in which case there will be no single defined sentiment that is conveyed. The question of where art resides, whether in the artist’s creativity or the perceiver’s imagination, is a difficult one to answer. Oscar Wilde remarks in his essay, “The Decay of Lying” that the beauty of the sunset is a product of a painter’s imagination. For him art was a beautiful lie. The work of art is thus not merely to emulate an object, as it was perhaps for Plato, but also to enhance and alter it.

While a painting may depict, for instance, the pain of hunger and lead the viewer to feel a similar pain, there is firstly, the possibility of a qualitative difference in the sentiment from that of the artist and secondly, there is a beauty inextricably linked to it, the beautiful depiction of such an emotion. Even if art is to be viewed as a social interaction of sentiments, the idea of beauty cannot be detached from it completely. Beauty might not necessarily be seen as some mysterious idea of metaphysicians. If Tolstoy’s aim is to demolish a notion of absolute beauty in art, that may still be acceptable, for what may appear beautiful to me, might not appear so to somebody else. Aesthetic values may not reside in objects as properties independent of the observer. This is because art is an extremely subjective phenomenon. But to say that it is absolutely detached from beauty appears a little exaggerated and undesirable.

To connect art with delight is not a shallow attempt either. The Indian concept of Ānanda, which is the notion of joy or bliss, emphasizes this very character of art and art forms. In trying to answer the question, “What is Art”, what are we seeking? Is it a definition that we want? But no one perspective will be sufficient enough to elucidate the extensive nature of art, art by its very nature being beyond all confines, all limits.

Why the arts matter

John Tusa The Hindu Wednesday, Dec 14, 2005

Six years ago, I published a volume of essays about my first five years in the arts world, Art Matters. So much has changed in the past six years that it is time to take a fresh look at the assumptions that prevailed then. Six years ago, the theoretical questions circling the arts were much as they are today. I described them as amounting to a "great existential doubt" as to whether anyone at all cared about the arts. I tried to express that existential doubt in some detail: "The arts stand naked and without defence in a world where what cannot be measured is not valued; where what cannot be predicted will not be risked; ... where whatever cannot deliver a forecast outcome is not undertaken."

Given such doubts — and they can be voiced in identical terms today — it seemed only right to attempt a positive statement of why art was worth fighting for. "The arts matter," I wrote then, "because they are universal; because they are non-material; because they deal with daily experience in a transforming way; because they question the way we look at the world; because they offer different explanations of that world ... A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and lacked curiosity about the future."

Six years on, I stand by all of that. Soon after, I tried a further definition of the special nature of arts activity. It was slightly different and went like this: "Art is about searching and sometimes finding; it defines pain and sorrow and sometimes softens them; it is about exploring confusion and defining disorder; ... it is universal though it may be attacked as exclusive; it is diverse and not homogenised; it resists categories and makes connections across them." Well, that was then and now is now. Different times, different needs, different assumptions, different prescriptions.

Here is my new, revised version of Why Art Matters, couched more in terms that I hope the local politician can relate to. The arts matter because they are local and relevant to the needs and wishes of local people. They help citizens to express their needs and to clothe them in memorable forms. They offer a way of expressing ideas and wishes that ordinary politics do not allow. The arts regenerate the rundown and rehabilitate the neglected. Arts buildings lift the spirits, create symbols that people identify with, and give identity to places that may not have one. Where the arts start, jobs follow. Anywhere that neglects the arts shortchanges its people.

Now all of that is true. The arts have acted as a pole of economic and social regeneration in many places. At the same time, it is worth insisting that while the arts may be a necessary condition of post-industrial regeneration, they are not a sufficient condition. The so-called Bilbao effect was not achieved primarily by building Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum. That building followed a period of sustained local-government investment in infrastructure, including a new underground system.

The arts do stimulate the growth of a creative sector in the economy. They do play a part in the vigour of the ideas economy. Yet, true as this is, it still seems to me to miss the point. The value of the arts is not to be defined as if they were just another economic lever to be pulled. That would place them on a level of activity where measurement of results, predictability of outcome and direction of activity are rated as conditions of success and therefore as grounds for investment in the first place. It puts us back in the bind of instrumentality.

The real question, then, is this: if art cannot repay the public subsidy; if it represents an investment on which there is no return; if it cannot guarantee audiences; if it cannot demonstrate immediate social relevance — if all of this is the case, why does art matter? Real art can fail every measurable objective set by economists and politicians. Yet it will still be art, sometimes great art. So is it possible to produce a newer definition of why art matters, one combining the fundamental importance of values while acknowledging that instrumental considerations do form part of the case for arts funding?

This is the definition I would suggest: the final value of the arts cannot be predicted or quantified; to curtail them on these grounds is to deny the possibility of an unpredictable benefit. The risk of funding the arts offers benefits far greater than the immediate gains of not funding them. The arts link society to its past, a people to its inherited store of ideas, images and words; yet the arts challenge those links in order to find ways of exploring new paths and ventures.

The arts are evolutionary and revolutionary; they listen, recall and lead. They resist the homogeneous, strengthen the individual and are independent in the face of the pressures of the mass, the bland, the undifferentiated. In a post-modern world, in which individual creativity has never mattered more, the arts provide the opportunity for developing this characteristic. The investment in the arts is so small, the actual return so large, that it represents value as research into ideas.

Is there a conclusive argument? Unfortunately, there isn't. What matters far more is that the arts world in all its forms presents the arguments for the arts on any and every occasion; that it insists on the acknowledgment of arguments about the intrinsic importance of values as the key justification for the arts. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Hyper-Architecture

O L E B O U M A N

1. The moving surface.
What does the future hold for architecture when any of its buildings can be animated and
transformed by projections and electronic displays? What is left of architecture if our architectural
‘sign’ language is no longer etched in stone? Facades and walls could be brought
to life by designers and provided with a new, dynamic iconography. When stationary objects
are visually animated they lose their ‘objectness’, their fixity. However sturdy their construction
may be, they appear to be moving. That really is ‘lite’ architecture. In addition to
striving after ever-lighter structures, transparent and translucent walls, and gravity defying
curvilinear forms, architecture can now, via film, become truly immaterial. Contours fade,
forms become fluid. The relationship between human beings and architecture is no longer
polar or dialectical, but ‘immersive’. You can quite literally be swallowed up in it... Who will
be the first architect to win the Oscar for best director?
2. The interactive surface.
How to overcome the passivity of the viewer? If the building is going to become a kind of
terminal anyway, you might as well go ahead and make it an interactive medium. The introduction
of sensor technology heralds a new age in which architecture can be programmed
to respond to highly specific actions. Connected by an efficient interface to the display
possibilities I just described, recording cameras, scanners, electronic eyes, sound and heat
detectors, infrared systems and the like, architecture can generate a dynamism that finally
eclipses the significance of the static object altogether. The architectural design encompasses
not just the object, but also the reaction of that object to the subject. Architecture
becomes intimately involved with experience. The building or urban environment does not
move because it has been turned into an animation but because you, the actor, animate it.
3. Architecture online.
Once the building is interactive, the next step is to connect the architecture to digital networks
and make it ‘online’. What possibilities would be opened up if not only people but
whole environments could be linked together in networks? Architecture online! Now that
digitisation processes are making headway in both the creation and experiencing of environments,
it is possible to link physically separate environments to one another. Once architecture
has been redefined as ‘information’ this can be rendered compatible by means of a
protocol-juggling interface. This in turn can be linked to other environments, analogue as
well as digital. The first variant of this approach is to link up with other physical environments.
A building is crossed with another location. Interestingly, the aesthetic experience
can be collective as well as individual. By adopting a multimedia approach – which involves
linking digital recording equipment such as video cameras, webcams, microphones, scanners
and sensors, to reproduction media such as displays, loudspeakers, or ‘invisible’ integrated
architecture electronics – and designing an interesting interface that makes the
option of exchange worthwhile and selective, it is possible to devise a new type of spatial
extensibility. Places and people in those places communicate with one another. Architecture
becomes a matter of moving situations.
This way, architecture travels, multiplies, becomes a migrant. Rather than creating a
place, designers stage-manage moving situations. The relation between individual and
object becomes the relation between dynamic places and (sometimes manipulated) states
of mind. This architecture belongs to neither the physical nor the virtual domain; it is a
hybrid. Space becomes genuinely fluid; it forms the link by which the digital space can flow
into the real space of daily life. And vice versa...
4. And, finally, full-blown Internetted architecture
This brings us to the second option for online architecture. In addition to virtually connecting
two or more physically remote environments, it is also possible, to link these physical
environments to virtual environments of online networks. This application will only really
become interesting when the design itself utilises the information from the Net as a fundamental
component of form: animation as creation. Should an architect or an artist devise a
special interface between physical environment and the Net, this application could become
an essential element of the architecture. Linked to networks, the meaning of architecture
actually becomes reprogrammable. Reprogrammability means that a building can fulfill an
important cultural role for a much greater part of its life. Updatability is no longer a question
of adaptation to new functions but has become an essential component of the architectonic
character of a static, constructed object.