The British Council building on New Delhi's Kasturba Ghandi Marg is
a potent symbol of Anglo-Indian cultural relations, for India is the
jewel in the crown of the British Council (its largest of 80 missions)
just as it once was of the Empire. A mural by Howard Hodgkin, untypically
for him employing overt symbolism, depicts a banyan tree in white makrana
marble and slate, and fills the complex internal spaces - receding patios
visible through an opened-out facade - at the front of the building.
The tree changes dramatically from different perspectives, and is described
by Charles Correa, the building's architect, as "a metaphorical
image as pluralistic as India herself." "Mantra", a mammoth
granite carving by Stephen Cox, presides over the inner courtyard.
A British love affair with India, which reflects in the film and television
industry's frequent return to Raj subjects, trickles down to a host
of artists. Besides Hodgkin, who has formed an impressive collection
of Mogul miniatures which influence his work, painters who should be
mentioned include Timothy Hyman (Hodgkin's one-time travelling companion
in India) and Gillian Ayres, who won the prize at the last Indian Triennale.
The sculptors discussed in this essay - Stephen Cox, the younger Englishman
Marcus Cornish, and two Indian-born artists who enjoy high popularity,
Anish Kapoor and Dhruva Mistry - all in their way draw genuine inspiration
from the Hindu aesthetic. With the painters, the interest in India is
formal and sensual; with the sculptors, it goes rather to the heart
of their aesthetic purpose. True, the mystico-erotic appeal of Indian
carving is certainly a strong factor, so too the dialectic of sensuality
and the transcendental, but in each of the men's work there are genuine
claims to spiritual exercise.
The terms of reference of this relationship, however, are more ideologically
complex than might be suggested by a celebratory description of the
new British Council building. Indeed, both aspects of the British Council's
work in India, cultural exchange and English-language instruction, have
been subject to vehement criticism from no less an authority than the
BBC's veteran Delhi correspondent. Mark Tully, in his controversial.
best-selling book, No Full Stops in India, argues that cultural exchange
is a latter-day, subtle version of cultural imperialism, for these exchanges
"create the impression that we respect Indian culture, while at
the same time giving us the opportunity to exhibit our own superiority,
or what we believe is our superiority."
Stephen Cox's introduction to India came courtesy of the British Council
when he represented his country at the Sixth Indian Triennale in 1986.
A scholarship enabled him to work and study for three months in Mahabalipuram,
the coastal town thirty miles south of Madras famed for its temple-carving
workshops since the Sixth Century AD. With the town echoing to constant
hammering at new objects of veneration for the whole Hindu world, Mahabalipuram
is a sort of Indian Forte dei Marmi. Cox was so enamoured with what
he found there, and the effectiveness with which he could work with
local craftsmen, that he has maintained his links with the town. Mark
Tully's "scoop" was the radical antipathy towards Cox he encountered
from the very shilpi (Hindu master mason) at whose feet the British
artist had sat at Mahabalipuram. Ganapathi Stapati is principal of the
College of Architecture and Sculpture and author of a detailed "grammar"
of traditional temple carving. He told Tully that as far as he was concerned,
Cox "did zero here". Stapati had told a farewell party after
Cox's first stay at Mahabalipuram: "He is carrying nothing from
Mahabalipuram except a few pieces of stone."
There was no personal motivation to Stapati's animus, as he revealed
when asked his view of modern art: "In the name of modern art you
have dispensed with the spiritual element of art. The whole world is
carried away by these trends. We don't vibrate to modern art...Those
who look at modern works and say 'How Beautiful!' are hypocrites."
Stapati then put the traditionalist case for a Hindu aesthetic: "When
we create through the discipline of our tradition, we create forms which
mirror the vibrations within us. The poet becomes the poem; the sculptor
becomes the sculpture." Hindu carving is not realist, he argues,
"but in our sculpture we can give expression to the eternal spirit
and, through symbols, to even the most subtle aspects of Hindu philosophy.
Of course it takes years to master the grammar, the discipline, of our
tradition."
The "few pieces of stone" Cox took away from his first visit
to Mahabilipuram included "Tanmantras", his first Hindu-inspired
images. Oval head-shapes Brancusi-like in their simplicity symbolise
the five senses, depicting each ideographically - eyes for sight, nose
for scent et cetera. Stapati alleges that Cox lacks the skill to work
granite himself, and that is why he relies on native carvers. Cox insists
that he can get anything he likes out of a piece of stone, and advances
more pragmatic reasons for employing temple carvers. This in turn prompts
Tully to make his charge that Cox is "neo-colonialist" in
exploiting the Indians' skills but taking all artistic credit himself.
Such an attitude reveals naivity concerning the status of the originating
hand in contemporary sculpture. However, putting the argument to an
understandably offended Cox, Tully elicited a view which confirmed his
worst suspicions: Cox insisted that the revivalist carving undertaken
by Stapati and his disciples is craft, not art.
My reason for introducing an artist I admire greatly through this unfriendly
critique is that in his journalistic way Mark Tully inadvertently highlights
the problematics surrounding the interchange between Indian aesthetics
and modern art. The by no means original thesis of Tully's book is that
India offers a "third way" between communism and capitalism
but its unique contribution is threatened by western commercial strategies.
In his scramble to find the agrieved Indian perspective at the interface
of cultures and ideologies, Tully has given a platform to a traditionalist,
anti-modernist aesthetic. But far from being uniquely Indian and as
old as the hills, Ganapathi Stapati's arguments have a relatively recent
provenance. As will be be shown, his rhetoric directly recalls the philosophy
of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Ironically, Cox's infatuation with India and
the lack of reciprocation suggested by Tully's soundings at Mahabalipuram
have common roots in the history of the appreciation of Indian art.
THE WEST HAS HAD A PROFOUND DIFFICULTY WITH HINDU ART. Travellers in
the early modern period, bewildered by the array of images, brought
back reports of the worship of monsters, laying the foundations of a
recurring prejudice. The discovery of Sanskrit literature enabled Europeans
to begin to sort out the perplexing iconography. Yet, despite the profound
Indian influence upon nineteenth century European spiritual thought
in the advent of (especially German) romanticism - the start of a line
that runs through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to C.G.Jung and Hermann
Hesse in this century - there was no corresponding accommodation of
the visual tradition. Hegel diagnosed it as an expression of what he
took to be the Indian mentality of "dreaming consciousness".
"The Hindu... lived as if in a dream in that he could not distinguish
between himself and the origins of his knowledge. Since he was unconscious
of his own individuality he identified himself with everything, including
even the divine." * Because the principle of non-being so dominates
Indian culture, according to Hegel, it is incapable of progress.
British attitudes were further complicated by their sense of imperial
destiny in India. On the one hand, agents of the East India Company,
empowered to represent British interests until the Mutiny (or first
war of independence) of 1857 sought wherever possible to cooperate with
existing rulers (or to play one off against the other). For sometimes
pragamatic sometimes altruistic reasons systematic research took place
into all aspects of Indian civilization. To give one example, Edward
Moore's account of Hinduism, published in 1810, stimulated new respect
for Indian religion, and served as a text book for trainees of the Company.
But the simultaneous development of evangelism and imperialism at home
changed the British outlook. Ruskin fulminated against the "unchristian"
sensuality and polytheism of Hindu art. The "noble grotesque"
at the heart of his admiration of the gothic is contrasted with the
"mere savageness" of Indian art, where similar qualities are
apparent. Despite his generally leftist orientation (he is known as
the father of British socialism) Ruskin believed in Britain's mission
to save India from the religion of fear. His own religious doubts only
intesified this imperialist conviction. The Mutiny pursuaded him of
the Indian's fundemental immorality.
It is ironic therefore that the artists and critics who later discovered
and championed the spirituality of Hindu art were inspired to do so
by Ruskin's creed. Contemporaneous with Ruskin's dismissal of Indian
art, leading exponents of Industrial design like Henry Cole were presenting
Indian textiles to the public, although they insisted on the primacy
of classical ideals. Ruskin's medievalism was rooted in his antipathy
towards industry and the alienation of labour. It was left to others
to make the connection with Indian village life as an equally valid
model of an alternative pre-industrial society. William Morris lauded
the textiles exhibited by Cole as "an art at once beautiful, orderly,
living in our own day, and above all, popular". And [name] Birdwood
upheld a romantic primitivism in his advocacy of a return to the cohesion
and self-sufficiency of Indian village life. But the same Birdwood so
passionately advocating Indian craft - indeed, as an early ecologist,
pointing out how Indian artisans do not pollute rivers, in contrast
to the industrial west - nonetheless asserted that sculpture and painting
were unknown as fine arts in India. In front of a Javanese Buddha he
asserted that "A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as
a symbol of passionate purity and serenity of soul".
This was in 1910. The angry response that took the form of a letter
to the Times indicates a radical sea-change among a new generation.
"We the undersigned artists, critics, and students of art find
in the best art of India a lofty and adequate expression of the religious
emotion of the people and of their deepest thoughts on the subject of
the divine... We hold that the existence of a distinct, a potent, and
a living tradition of art is a possession of priceless value to the
Indian people, and one which they, and all who admire and respect their
achievements in this field, ought to regard with the utmost reverence
and love." Sculptor George Frampton and William Rothenstein, the
painter, were among the signatories.
IT WAS WITHIN THIS MILIEU THAT THE REMARKABLE FIGURE Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy emerged. The son of a distinguished Shri Lankan lawyer
and an English mother, Coomaraswamy has been hailed by ardent admirers
as nothing less than the interpreter of Indian civilization to the west.
He was responsible for collecting the superlative Indian holdings of
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and his extensive bibliography includes
The History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) and The Transformation
of Nature in Art (1934). In 1910, in a lecture entitled "Aims of
Indian Art", Coomaraswamy was able to declare that "The conscious
aim of Indian Art is the portrayal of Divinity". His profound and
systematic explorations in metaphysics, aesthetics, psychology and anthropology
all return to this central claim. In the year of this lecture - which,
significantly, was hand printed on the very letter presses once owned
by William Morris - Coomaraswamy joined forces with signatories of the
Times letter, the critic Roger Fry and several Indologists to form the
India Society.
It was through Rothenstein that Coomaraswamy was introduced to Eric
Gill, one of the most significant if enigmatic figures in modern British
sculpture. Although Gill is still best known for his type-face designs
(Gill Sans, Perpetua, Joanna etc) he played a crucial role in the development
of direct carving at the time of his short-lived friendship with Jacob
Epstein. In his lifestyle, art and polemics Gill combined fervent Catholicism
(of a neo-Thomist variety), guild socialism and free-love. Coomaraswamy's
philosophy provided the crucial gelling agent for these seemingly conflicting
interests.
Partha Mitter has written pursuasively that "in many ways Coomaraswamy
was the last of the Neoplatonists and the image of Indian art he fashioned
was essentially Idealistic". This has particular bearings on eroticism
which is justified in cosmic terms that by-pass mere sensual gratification
for the viewer or maker. Indeed, Coomaraswamy believed that "To
speak of art exclusively in terms of sensation is doing violence to
the inner man". Gill went on enthusiastically to combine the erotic
and the sacred in Christian images which take their cue from Hindu art.
The strident foreword Gill contributed to Coomaraswamy's collection
of 100 examples of Indian sculpture, Visvakarma, reveals several important
aspects of the rapport between the two men, as well as the wider historical
concerns they each represent. Gill debunks the notion of Greece as the
sole yardstick of classicism, arguing that what is referred to as "primitive"
can be more truly classical. "It needs a 'primitive' type of mind
to be unsophisticated enough to imagine God and gods, to disregard mere
beauty." Partha Mitter has observed that the notion of Indian art
promoted by Coomarswamy fitted perfectly with the widespread discontent
with naturalism and the whole edifice of classical-renaissance art among
the advanced taste of the time. Gill goes on to argue for India as the
ideal archaic period to prompt a "genuine reaction against the
irreligious gentility and banality of modern European art", better
even than the Gothic period because of its associations with asceticism.
It would be especially invigorating "for us" because "in
India - 'a British possession' - our irreligious commercialism and mechanical
good-government and the remains of the former religious civilization
confront one another so closely that the contrast is, more than elsewhere,
conspicuous". A sympathy for Indian aspirations towards Home Rule
animates this argument just as Coomaraswamy's scholarship is believed
to have contributed towards Indian national identity.
What also accorded so deeply with Gill's outlook was the equation of
Indian and medieval European art, a Ruskinian view despite the anti-Indian
prejudices of Ruskin. There was a deep affection for the collective,
workshop tradition of making art in both Gill, who often lived in religious
communities, and Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy demonstrated how the "pious
artisans" in each period had not engaged in self-expression or
in "objective discussion of aesthetic problems", but rather
the making of public, shared symbols according to an hieratic canon.
The whole notion of "taste" which gives rise to individualisation,
idiosyncratic subject-matter and rapid fluctuations in style are related
to the alienations of modern labour. It was Ananda Coomaraswamy, incidentally,
who coined the term "post-industrial". In his view, modernity
encourages restlessness, which is "essentially uncultured",
whereas tradition cultivates stillness, "recollectedness or detachment".
The "mere pleasure of the sense" implied by the modern aesthetics
was, from the point of view of Coomaraswamy's metaphysics, "madness".
Whether or not we accept Donald Kuspit's view that Coomaraswamy's fanatical
advocacy of tradition and hatred of modernity was rooted in his turbulent
erotic life, it remains that the greatest modern explicator of the idea
of Indian art was profoundly antipathetic towards modernism. To Clement
Greenberg's statement that "the modern painter derives his inspiration
from the very physical materials he works with", Coomaraswamy replied
that this "actually means that the modern artist may be excited,
but is not inspired. Modernism is about freedom for oneself; Indian
(and medieval) art freedom from oneself." **
CLEARLY, THERE IS AN AFFINITY BETWEEN THE CONSERVATIVE reservations
of Ganapathi Stapati, the Mahabalipuram shilpi, and Coomaraswamy, but
equally the dilemmas and aspirations of this formidable critic find
echoes - and repudiations - in the sculptural efforts of the men now
to be discussed. For Stephen Cox, the appeal of India lies to a considerable
extent in the potent spell of an unbroken tradition. The notion of classicism
is central to his project as an artist. Coomaraswamy and Gill did not
seek to dispel classicism so much as reform it to encompass archaic
traditions such as India and Egypt. But it is precisely because of his
attachment to direct carving - in respect of which he is a direct descendent
of Gill - that Cox is an artist who takes inspiration "from the
very physical materials". His first sculptural ventures were influenced
by minimalism, although even these were imbued with a classical sensibility,
and soon gave way to a resolutely postmodern idiom, fragmentary wall-pieces
that reflected his profound affinity with early renaissance art and
architecture. Cox adopted as his bible the English critic Adrian Stokes,
whose quirky, highly pictorial style of writing explores all the ramifications
of geology and tradition upon the collective consciousness that produces
a great period in art. At one point in his seminal The Quattro Cento
(1932) Stokes confesses that "to arrive at the conception Quattro
Cento, I had often to visit the Amavarati sculptures on the staircase
of the British Museum". It was from Stokes more that Greenberg
that Cox's sense of wonderment at the qualities of a given stone and
means of carving it derives.
Cox worked for several years in Italy, revelling in a new found freedom
from the modernist hothouse from which he emerged (he was involved on
the fringe of the Art and Language conceptual group) and deliberatly
breaking the rules. He introduced narrative pictorialism (oxidising
the stone with pigments), took pleasure in fine, resonant materials,
and made a virtue out of traditional techniques. And there was more
than a hint of nostalgia for the lost symbiosis of art and faith.
He had been fascinated with India since childhood, hearing his father
recount his experience of having been stationed there as a serviceman.
He chose The Art of India by Stella Kramrisch as a school book prize,
and the voluptuous carved figures he had marvelled at in his adolescence
came back to him when, in Viterbo, he was studying Etruscan art. Stokes,
observing how the Etruscans left marble alone and carved in grainless
volcanic and sandstones, compares their "rough yet cohesive surface,
the spongy, charged heaviness of which suggests a momentum" to
Indian sculpture. The British Council invitation to show at the Triennale
came, then, at a time when India had resurfaced in his sculptural consciousness,
so there is a radical contrast between Cox's road to Mahabalipuram and
that of, say, Francesco Clemente, who has made a base for himself in
Madras. Clemente's first visit in 1973 was prompted by the "flower-power"
counterculture fascination with India, and he later studied with a Delhi
guru in his ashram. "I was really attracted to India by the fact
that I didn't understand it. It was my own incomprehension that was
alluring", he has said, signalling a certain affinity between postmodern
"otherness" and old-fashioned Orientalism.
Fragmentation uniquely suited the postmodernism implicit in Cox's Italian
pieces, redolent as they were with metaphors of archaeology. Although
the format persisted in some of his early Indian works, such as "Rock
Cut: Holy Family" (1986) and "Thousand Pillared Hall"
(1986) Cox soon deduced that fragmentation was irrelevant to the Hindu
outlook with which he felt increasingly in tune. As fragmantation gave
way to an emphatic centredness, so the subtle, discretely oxidised colours
of the Italian period led into the virulent coloured cloths with which
he draped his temple guardians and Apsarases such as "Kani"
(1988), a practice actually borrowed from Hindu worship. The ultimate
sign of his sacral conception of sculpture is the way he finishes a
carving by performing a ritual libation of the granite, even with works
destined for industrial parks and office complexes in the west. This
inevitably adds a performative aspect, inscribing a rhetoric into his
work. By so presenting himself at once as Brahmin and Shilpi, Cox makes
redundant the caste differences crucial to Hindu aesthetics.
For all that Cox is attracted to the "classicism" of India,
what he finally takes away from the Hindu heritage is not the subtlety
of a highly codified symbolism in all its philosophical sophistication,
but a raw "primitive" energy. It is no wonder therefore that
he is at such odds with Stapati, whose aesthetic recalls the flights
of scholasticism of Coomaraswamy. As Cox explained to Mark Tully, "The
obsessiveness in the craft of Stapati's work sterilizes it. I find the
deification of simple objects - sometimes just a pile of bricks in a
wayside shrine - more spiritual. They have been worshipped for years
and are the by-products of devotion."
MARCUS CORNISH, A RECENT GRADUATE OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART, takes
his inspiration from a cult that dates back beyond the advent of Hinduism
venerated in a way typical of rural devotions and close in spirit to
the primitive worship exalted by Stephen Cox. Aiyanar, the god of an
ancient forest sect, has been absorbed into the main pantheon of Hindu
gods. Twice a year his devotees in the Pudokottia area of Tamil Nadu
make offerings of beautifully crafted terracotta horses for him to travel
around the villages he is implored to protect. These can vary in size
from six inches to twenty-five feet. They are left in rows, and with
time, getting knocked around and weathered, they disintegrate, literally
returning to the earth. It is this process of transformation that excites
Cornish, although on a practical level he was attracted to the phenomenon
when, in his own work, he was confronting problems of large scale clay
sculpture. His medium is brick clay. The immense difficulty of working
this intractable material is part of its appeal: he wants to create
a sense of flux, to try and give plastic form to unrepresentable sensations
- inhalation, exhalation, the most basic bodily action symbolising and
actualising life. He likes the fact that his recalcitrant images, so
fiercely pummelled, are in some ways a dim echoe of the frenzy of effort
that went into their making. This, of course, is quite typical of much
process-orientated contemporary art, but significantly, he relates it
to his Indian inspiration. "The substance is the detritus of the
event. In the same way, Indian wayside shrines are often only animated
when in use."
From certain Indian texts he has discerned a perspective on time which
differs radically from the western conception. "Rather than taking
the average value of all that has happened to be the solid truth, one
should remain unifluenced and turn to see the shifting wash of events
as they happen disconnected with what has passed." He hopes his
sculpture embody this principle by demonstrating "a constant state
of becoming".
The Indian inspiration runs deep here, and the artist has studied his
subject with admirable thoroughness (Aiyanar shrines are the subject
of his doctoral thesis at the Royal College, and he studied with traditional
potters who make the larger horses). He claims that his work, which
has not sought the iconography of Indian art, has been influenced broadly
by the spirit of its intentions, and the work has no Indian "look"
comparable to the colour of Cox and Kapoor or the traditional forms
of Mistry. Through a very close observation of one cult at work, though,
and thoughtful consideration of certain aspects of Hindu philosophy
he is sincere in making his claim. That he is associated with the Royal
College has one small irony to it: the RCA was formed, like the South
Kensington (Victoria and Albert) Museum, in the middle of the last century,
to service the design needs of the British Empire. Works from the colonies,
especially India, were assembled by men like Henry Cole as part of this
educational process; India, above all other possessions, is celebrated
in the Albert Memorial near the college. Marcus Cornish is a late, untypical,
unexpected pursuer of this Indian aesthetic.
THE DILEMMAS OF WORKING AS A MODERN ARTIST IN RELATION TO THE Hindu
tradition are hardly so different for Indian-born sculptors as for their
western counterparts, especially if they live and make their careers
in the west. It goes without saying that they will not be accused of
"neocolonialism", but they have an equivalent problem to face.
As artists of any minority status are encouraged to forefront issues
relating to their identity, advocates of multiculturalism will view
the treatment of Hindu material as politically motivated, while sceptics
will detect a new "exoticism" both in the artworld's reception
of the artist, and in his or her own intentions.
Anish Kapoor decided to become an artist having already moved to the
west, and has described his short visit home in 1979, when he looked
at his native culture with mature eyes, as "an astonishing kind
of re-vitalisation, an affirmation that all the things I thought might
be true were true." In particular, he had formed a preoccupation
with "fundemental polarities", for instance between the masculine
and the feminine, which he was able to relate to Hindu metaphysics.
These he began to study, apparently for the first time. (Born in Bombay,
Kapoor's father is Hindu, but his mother - who is from Iraq - is Jewish).
Overtly Hindu subjects became central to his work, starting with an
ongoing series called "1000 Names", referring to the list
of Shiva's names to be found in canonical writings, the extensive number
taken to mean that God is all things. Kapoor's stark and persistent
iconography is manifestly rooted in Hinduism: the mountain (Mount Meru),
the lingam and yoni, the void. The use of powdered pigment to gives
his sculpture an exotic, glowing, resonant quality was a formal idea
suggested by the heaps of pigment and spice at Indian markets.
Coomaraswamy and Hegel are the authorities quoted by Thomas McEvilley
as epigraphs in his essay on Anish Kapoor for the Venice Biennale catalogue
in 1990, when the artist represented Britain, and McEvilley's conclusion
posits a spiritual role for the artist highly conducive to Kapoor's
view of himself and his art. "The concept of the spirit in art,
articulated by both Hegel and Coomaraswamy, is the mediating membrane
which joins the diverse elements and smooths out the contradictions
among them... Both emphasized the idea of a universal spirit which the
artist was trying to establish a channel of communication with, through
the art object or the yoga of making it. Underlying this dramatic image
is the premise, understood in both ancient and modern contexts, that
the soul has fallen from on high, and its incarnation as an artist is
one of its better chances of finding the way back."
There is the suggestion that Coomaraswamy licences such a statement
through his own efforts at an east-west synthesis of metaphysics. Furthermore,
his maxim that "an artist is not a special kind of man, but every
man is a special kind of artist", which Gill quoted so often it
was sometimes ascribed to him, could equally well have been said by
Joseph Beuys. Kapoor owes his sense of the artist as shaman to the German,
and has spoken of being surrounded by Beuys-like figures in his childhood
India. Notwithstanding that ultramarine pigment could not be less like
grey felt, there is a formal similarity between, for example, Kapoor's
"Void Field" 1989, his room of punctured sandstone boulders,
and Beuys's "The End of the Twentieth Century" 1983-85 (Tate
Gallery). But is it legitimate to cite Coomaraswamy in support of Anish
Kapoor? Kapoor's lofty intellectualism may compare with Coomaraswamy,
but that is not the same as being sanctioned by him. Making metaphysical
statements to fill huge museum spaces would hardly appeal to the man
who defined art as "man's handiwork done finely" and questioned
the value of exhibiting art.
Last year, I wrote about Kapoor at some length in this journal. The
burden of my argument concerned the "archetypal" status of
his imagery, for both Kapoor and his supporters, well versed in the
theories of the Jungian school, seek to explain his preoccupation with
the feminine and the spiritual in psychological terms. My reservation
centred around the issue of form; that archetypes were arrived at intentionally,
not discovered in the process of formal exploration. Kapoor's objects
and installations, skilfully put together by English technicians - what
would Mark Tully say to that? - seamlessly present themselves as fêtes
accomplis. This divorce of final product from the process of making
is in sharp contrast with the overtly carved quality of Cox and its
alligned notion of "truth to materials". But just as Cox's
aspirations to the timeless and archaic rely on a certain rhetoric that
attends to this modernist ethic, so Kapoor's evocations of the ethereal
have a postmodern theatricality about them.
SINCE A BRITISH COUNCIL SCHOLARSHIP BROUGHT DHRUVA MISTRY TO London
to do an MA at the Royal College in 1981 he has become a highly prominent
British sculptor. The youngest person to be elected a royal academician
since Turner, he has landed prestigious public commissions, most notably
in the redesign of Victoria Square in the centre of Birmingham, the
country's second city. He is an artist who has succeeded in bridging
the gap between avant gardists and conservatives in the British artworld,
although compared with Anish Kapoor, his constituency lies more with
the conservative camp. His appeal undoubtedly has much to do with technical
accomplishments that reflect his seven years of rigorous discipline
at the University of Baroda, where the sort of regime that would have
once prevailed in British art schools is preserved.
In trying to characterize Mistry's sculpture it is tempting to borrow
a slogan of early modern India, "unity in diversity", even
if this is to risk implying that an individual can represent his nation
in microcosm. His style is unquestionably diverse: some pieces fuse
elements from different epochs and civilizations; other groups recall
aspects of Picasso; yet another strand involves quite literal borrowings
from traditional temple carving. His language ranges from constructivism
to deconstruction to assured wholeness to a flirtation with kitsch.
But each series or mode bears his unmistakable imprint.
Mistry rejects the easy labels of "outsider" or "emigre".
"The issue of exile is a non-issue", he insists, "What
matters is to have a consciousness of the multiplicity of nature, and
that is bound to affect anybody virtually anywhere on earth." Early
works which employed bright, even gharish colour, were perceived inaccurately
by critics as typically Indian. Rather touchingly, Mistry has said that
he only began pigmenting work when he got to England to compensate for
the grey, overcaste light. Reclining female figures owe as much to Maillol
as to the Apsarases in the resigned voluptuousness of their pose. What
does give them an Indian feel is the absence of concavities - the form
always coming out towards the viewer - and the joyous engagement of
their facial expression. His series of "Reguarding Guardians"
(the punning title is typical) were over-hastily related by critics
to the guardians found in Hindu temples. In fact, these chimeras have
component parts from Indian mythology, Picasso's minotauromachy, Egyptian
statuary and romanesque architecture. A sense of intercultural exchange
equally lies at the heart of his "Dialectical Image" series,
in which tribal masks and Picassoid liberties with form combine to explore
ambiguities of internal and external, body and face. Again, the title
is double-edged, connoting "dialect", a raw, ungrammatical
language, and dialectics, a mode of philosophical enquiry. But Mistry
does not trade in any postmodern eclecticism for its own sake: part
of his popularity must rest with the genuine level of shared symbolic
order he tries to work with, the duty, it could be argued, of any good
Hindu shilpi.
Mistry is more willing to acknowledge the influence of his Indian roots
in the synthesising tendency in his work than in such superficial aspects
as subject or colour. "I think my way of looking at things is intrinsically
and basically Indian", he has said. "The history of Indian
art is extremely open, it has imbibed over the years a variety of things
from all over. Whatever comes to the shores of India is picked up and
used for the qualities which make sense or which add to the flavour
of life. In that respect, for me to choose and pick is entirely normal."
The combined close attendance to problems of form and multiplicity of
expression in Mistry entails a Hindu-Platonic view of reality. He believes
that "things in nature only exist in their presences. There is
the idea of creating such a presence that is so tantalizing and so palpable
and yet one which you cannot get near to despite being able to touch
it, feel it, and see that it is there." His practice involves meticulous
facture without an attendant fetishizing of materials, so although he
has some formal kinship with pioneer modernists, he is fond of quipping
that "truth to materials is an untruth". His subject is the
spirit or idea that envelops form, or animates the relationship between
forms, but to evoke that numinous quality entails more not less involvement
with the raw physical stuff that art deals with, namely form.
SOME DEGREE OF ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS IS essential
if an artist is to claim kinship with the aspirations of Hindu art.
The traditional way, codified in the shilpa-shastras and insisted upon
by Ganapathi Stapati, is hardly feasible for an artist in the west.
Kapoor professes an "anti-hero", shamanistic status for himself
- "I don't believe I have anything to say: I don't think of the
artist as an expresser or teller of tales... but as a receiver and transmitter
of collective information" - but this is not matched by the reality
of his carefully contrived art. Cox tries to sublimate his individuality
in the traditional workshop, connecting his practice historically and
geographically with a notion of the classical to compensate for the
fragmentation of the modern, but he is still involved in the machismo
of "direct carving" and the assertion of authorship through
the theatre of "anointing" his work. Cornish leaves the indelible
trace of his ego in the expressive subjectivism of his enigmatic creations.
Only Dhruva Mistry seems to offer the viewer a stake in his bodying
forth of "Oneness through the contemplation of the many."
read David Cohen's most recent essay on Stephen Cox, "At
Once-ness", the exhibition catalogue for the artist's New York
debut