MELTING POT W

FINE ART
By Asim Butt
MELTING POT
W
e are like this only.
We know how to
spice our curry but
our art splutters before it
sizzles. Showcasing the work
of South Asian living masters
and the younger voices who
will be replacing them, Old
Masters – Young Voices opened
at the Lahore’s Alhamra in late
November. The brilliant here
were peppered by the banal
and genius seasoned the justokay. A fistful of maestros,
including Indians M.F.
“Seed of Life”, H.A. Karunarathne
Hussain and Krishen Khanna,
Bangladeshi Mohammad Kibria, Sri Lankan H.A. Karunaratne, Nepalese
Shashi Shah and our own Shahid Sajjad and Ismail Gulgee, were briefly
brought together by curator Salima Hashmi under the lid of a South Asian
melting pot along with their younger counterparts.
These, then, are the greats who define the direction of art in South Asia.
Consummate formalist Khanna, sublime abstractionist Kibria and Sajjad,
whose work straddles many categories, stood in contrast to
Karunaratne, Hussain and Gulgee’s less emphatic entries. Perhaps
the camera flashes that the latter court have replaced their gusto
with glitz. Or perhaps they have been elevated by their
success, their images becoming so universal in their
canonisation that they now appear trite. Perhaps.
True to his performative impulse, Hussain did not
send in anything to the exhibition but painted his
sole entry on arrival in Lahore. Full points for
showmanship. But like his mass-produced
collection of paintings on display in
Bombay in January this year,
Hussain’s singular submission
seems to have come off an
assembly line. The colour is not
arrived at: it comes straight
from the tube. And the
line, though vigorous
and self-assured,
delineates a stock
image: running horses.
This time they are
dragging a
cannon
with a gun and a figure loaded in
the back. Line and colour thus come
together to produce a posterised
rather than painterly image that
could easily be confused for a largescale cartoon illustration, albeit
executed with panache.
Compare Hussain to Khanna or a
master such as Tyeb Mehta, notably
absent from the selection, and the
conundrum becomes more
apparent. While all three were part
of the Progressive Painters’
Movement in India, two of them
remained committed to the
resolution of paintings over their
“Seated Figure II”, Shahid Sajjad
116
The Herald, December 2004
production and thus, to this day,
continue to paint masterpieces.
Hussain, however, has stymied his
own progress for allowing himself
the habit of completing a painting
within hours. No struggle, no soul.
Is this the malaise that afflicts
Gulgee as well? Fortunately,
Gulgee’s kitsch calligraphy is offset
by his earlier masterful drawings
and work in lapis lazuli. Viewed
together, these works not only
evidence Gulgee’s own rise and fall
but also serve as an allegory of
Pakistani art during the 1980s.
Induced by the iron fist of the Zia
era, a peninsular-Arab aesthetic
True to his performative
impulse, M.F. Hussain did
not send in anything to
the exhibition but painted
his sole entry on arrival in
Lahore. Full points for
showmanship. But like
his mass-produced
collection of paintings on
display in Bombay in
January this year,
Hussain’s singular
submission seems to
have come off an
assembly line.
came to embody the Islamicallypermissible art endorsed by the
establishment. Human and animal
forms were sidelined and Pakistani
painting came to be characterised
by a lack of form.
A similar fate appears to have
befallen Muslim Bangladesh. Here
too, the greats responded to an antifigurative impulse that emanated
from a dynamic apparently
programmed into their polity
before 1971. As Manzoorul Islam
notes in Contemporary Art in
Bangladesh, “the fifties’ painters
took to abstraction for two reasons.
First, it was an inner compulsion, an urge to express themselves through a
language, through metaphors, images, sensibilities and symbolism that they
thought most clearly represented their artistic, emotional and intellectual
understanding of their art. The second reason can be ascribed to a social
compulsion. The establishment disapproved of any human or figurative
representation as it supposedly contravened religious strictures.”
But clearly the impulse to abstract was not merely reactionary. Western
abstract expressionism and minimalism also percolated down to South Asia
to influence the flavour of its art. Hence the traces of Rothkho and Reinhardt
in Kibria. His canvasses, though unassuming in size and murky in colour,
still exert a hypnotic pull similar to the effect of the crisper, more
resplendent paintings of his American counterparts. Another critic has
called his work “pure sensation” – hyperbolic praise that should be
tempered with the acknowledgment of his borrowed sensibility. Of course,
the figure continued to be painted in Bangladesh, even by Kibria himself.
But why has this genre been denied canonical status here?
The evolution of Sri Lankan maestro Karunaratne is instructive in this
Untitled, Ismail Gulgee
regard. Moving from figurative cubism to abstract expressionism, it shows
the importance of western influence over conservative Islamist compulsions
in marginalising figurative painting. Needless to point out, Islam is
irrelevant to Karunaratne. Sallow canvases, which have been drawn on with
paint so thin it may as well have been done with a fading marker, carry
figures that aspire to Sadequain-like, rhythmic and frenzied mark-making.
These are replaced by works that have been punctured, glued and strung up
with entangled cords representing rebirth. Clever, even profound. Exactly
the kind of ‘pure abstraction’ that a younger Indian painter Atul Dhodhiya,
also represented at the show, seeks to emulate.
But the Indian art generation preceding Dhodhiya seems to have selfconsciously missed the boat. Khanna, Mehta and the late Sudhir Khakhar
and F.N. Souza, all painted the human figure, stretching it this way and that
to connote their social, philosophic or sexual intentions. Khanna’s selection
at the show included paintings from the ‘Bandwalas’ series and a drawing
from his ‘Truck’ series. This painter stands out even in such exalted
SON OF THE SOIL
trucks under which they are shown
sleeping in a drawing. The colonial
hangover embodied in the pompous
uniforms of bandwallahs is
Showing in Pakistan for the second time in his illustrious
conveyed with equal power.
career, Krishen Khanna speaks with the Herald
Unlike Khanna who strikes a neat
balance between mode and
message, Shahid Sajjad’s is an
ust because 10 people start doing the same thing, should it become the
oeuvre completely subservient to
truth?” asks Krishen Khanna. A self-taught artist born in Faisalabad in
the imperatives of form and
1925, Khanna’s insight into art is as sharp as his soul is gentle. The painter
relatively devoid of the political.
moved to Lahore when he was barely one. Here, he attended the Cathedral
Although he cast Zulfiqar Ali
School until his father’s job in the education bureaucracy took Khanna to
Bhutto’s bust in bronze to express
Multan when he was 11 years old. After a stint at the Multan Government
his recalcitrance
High School, a 13-year-old Khanna won the All-India Kipling
against the Zia
Scholarship which took him to Windsor in 1938. When World
regime, such
War II broke out, Khanna found himself taking extracurricular
pieces do not
evening drawing classes “given only to those who wanted to
form the
learn.” On his return to Lahore in 1942, Khanna continued with
backbone of his
evening classes at the Mayo College of Arts but never enrolled
work and are
full-time. Instead, he read English Literature at the
therefore not on
Government College.
display at the
Shortly after Partition, Khanna joined Grindlay’s Bank where
Alhamra.
he, like Paul Gaugin before him, worked in a job ill-suited to
Interlocking
his temperament. “I needed a job then so I took it. I don’t know
figures – at once
why people make so much of it,” he says. But being with the
splayed by
bank took Khanna to Bombay, where he was inducted into the
gravity and
Progressive Painters’ Movement by M.F. Hussain. Khanna
spliced by
recalls that the movement gave him a sounding board of likedesign –
minded artists to work with: “There was a lot of to-ing and froHome-coming: Krishen Khanna
comprise his two
ing in those days,” he recollects. “We had a grounded
largest pieces on
philosophy of which formalism was an important principle.
exhibit. Primitivist in their
But it was not the only thing.”
simplified shapes, these towering
Responding to the dispersion of artists since the short but powerful age of
figures fit into each other snugly,
modern Indian painting, Khanna says that since the advent of postmimicking the interaction of
modernism, artists have sought to edge out on their own. Yet he is not caught
futuristic functional objects.
in memories of an age gone by. “Atul Dhodhiya has said what he had to say
But unlike his cleaving figures,
beautifully,” he notes. “I know the word beautiful is thrown around a lot and
Sajjad’s own person as sculptor
has lost its significance but we know what we mean when we say beautiful,”
stands alone in Pakistan. Amin
he chuckles.
Gulgee, for one, can clearly not
Khanna is also a generous and sympathetic man. When his contemporary
replace him. Where Sajjad can make
and close friend Tyeb Mehta was in England and wished to return, it was
wood dance, Gulgee junior cannot
Khanna who urged him to follow his heart. “Tyeb is a self-respecting man
even set a sphere rolling. His
and did not want to live in England as a second-class citizen. I understood
sculpture is static, or more bluntly
this and urged him to return to Nizamuddin in Delhi where I got him his
put, stillborn.
first contract with Kumar Galleries.” Khanna is also uniquely self-critical
On the other hand, Naiza Khan,
and full of praise for his fellows. “Tyeb sometimes tells me I am not enough
Anwar Saeed and Rashid Rana,
of a formalist,” he admits. “It is he who is a ‘consummate formalist’. That is
comprising the remainder of the
why he was a hard painter to sell for the longest time.” As relations thaw
young-Pakistani-voice contingent,
further between India and Pakistan, one hopes that Lahore will once again
all delivered vivid and powerful
welcome Khanna, this noble son of its soil with his rare generosity. ■ — A.B.
images. The very walls on which
Saeed’s work hangs vibrate with the
energy unleashed by his use of
colour. Moreover, these aren’t shots
company for he and Mehta have together refused to opt for abstraction.
in the dark. As Salima Hashmi’s
Instead, they ask formalist questions. How can colour be used to convey
curatorial choice indicates, their
mood? Or to demarcate space? What compositional logic can be applied to
resemblance to Bangladeshi Shashir
divide a canvas? It is the revelry with which these questions are answered
Bhattacharya’s paintings attests to
by Khanna that make his art glorious.
the art-historical moment that they
Concerns with form, light, colour and space make Khanna’s political agenda
both reflect: form has been reborn
secondary. “Painting is not pamphleteering,” he quips. “Nor is it posterand is being asked to narrate.
making.” Thus his paintings carry his message rather than the more common
Ironically, this revolution has taken
reverse formulation whereby the grit of the message carries a painting. Yet a
place in the two wings of the
cry for the dispossessed labourer is packed into the screeching lines of the
“J
The Herald, December 2004
117
The Herald, December 2004
118
Subcontinent where the
human figure had been
squeezed out.
It is not until one arrives
at Naiza Khan and Anolie
Perera’s exhibits that the
absence of women from
the preceding generation
of painters becomes
poignant. Where, indeed,
are the women? A curator
– and that too, one as
decidedly ‘feminist’ as
Hashmi – cannot singlehandedly privilege her sex
out of oblivion. Instead,
she shows that women
occupy the avant-garde of
art quite unlike men.
Naiza Khan’s entry of
large-scale photographs of
her foray into the public
sphere turns art-viewing
on its head, twice over.
Silhouettes of women,
now cowering, now
standing erect, are taken
on an excursion outside
the gallery. Printed on to
the walls of Karachi’s
“The End”, Krishen Khanna
Cantonment area using
henna and stencils that are traditionally used to decorate women’s hands,
these figures test the very limits of the public eye. Her audience shows Khan
the extensive challenge her sexuality can mount against the public sphere
prowled by the dominant male gaze. They scratch off their buttocks and
breasts. And this is the evidence Khan brings back into the gallery: art made
for the public is re-made by the public for the gallery.
Although Khan’s entry is by no means out of whack with global art
trends, Perera’s appear more subservient to them. This, it should be noted, is
not unlike her compatriot and predecessor H.A. Karunaratne who paid heed
to the vicissitudes of western art-historical fashions more readily than the
other masters of his region. The only harm in this is the lag between the
West, which generates impulses of change, and the East, which all too
eagerly internalises them. Perera’s feminist mini-installations are executed
in the genre and fall prey to this trend.
Similarly, Rashid Rana, also progressive for his region, is speaking in
the derivative discourse of the digital print. But at least he is not as
ineffective as his Nepalese counterpart Sujan Chitrakar whose video and
sculptural installation is as trite as it is contrived. Referencing Hollywood
and Bollywood in one fell swoop and speaking the language of pop art,
the more interesting aspect of Rana’s work is his concern with the
creation of illusions. As form returns to global art after the long twentieth
century dominated by the mark, the effectiveness of illusions will become
the yardstick by which art will come to be measured. In a print of a
landscape that recalls Rembrandt’s use of the painted frame as a trompe
l’oeil as well as in “National Day Parade” – a mirrored image of a patriotic
Pakistani crowd constructed out of Indian film stills – Rana points us in
this direction.
Ultimately, the exhibition of masters, old and emerging, shows that South
Asian art is by no means a monolith. Like any other regional scene, it has its
glitterati, its gatekeepers, its heralds and hounds. If the stew thereby cooked
is stale in parts, it still has a certain sting in others. Dialogue such as this
show can only give regional art direction and set the pot to boil. ■
ARTSCAPE
CANVAS
A
midst the festivities that the
season brings, Naheed Raza
displays her latest series of
paintings titled Natural Virtue at
Karachi’s Canvas Gallery on
December 7. Figures in bold red,
orange and yellow hues cavort with
birds on sparse canvasses, evoking
bygone eras and warmer climes.
CHAWKANDI ART
ike a Hamlet of Pakistan’s art
L
world, Shakira Masood exhibits a
series of drawings and paintings that
aim to hold a mirror up to reality at
Karachi’s Chawkandi Art Gallery on
December 3. With an artistic sincerity,
Masood captures the beauty and
ugliness of her environs to take a
stand against common injustices.
V. M.
C
anvas diplomacy takes one step
forward as a group of Pakistani
and Indian art students exhibit their
work at Karachi’s V.M. Gallery on
December 20. Titled Pakistan and
India: Changing Mindsets, the
exhibition aims to encourage art as a
medium of expression in both
countries while promoting ideas of
tolerance and cooperation. The show
will travel to Lahore and Islamabad
early next year and eventually go on
display in Delhi in July 2005.
INDUS
O
n December 13, Karachi’s
Indus Gallery will play host to
the chromatic versatility of Aziz
Hasan. Recognised for his abstract
paintings that use a rainbow-like
spectrum to capture the nuance of
emotion and spirituality, Hasan
imbues his latest work with touches
of gold and hints at emerging forms
to create a dream-like aura.
CROWEATERS
O
n December 21, Lahoris will be
treated to the engaging forms
and accessible craftsmanship of
Sonya Bajwa at the Croweaters
Gallery in an exhibition titled Modern
and Traditional Designs in Crafts.