BackEYE SPY | Sacred games
An exhibition of contemporary Indian art playfully interrogates notions of holiness
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In 1970, artist Tyeb Mehta, one of modern India’s finest and most expensive painters, directed a short film called Koodal (a Tamil word which means “meeting point" or “union"). Produced by the National Films Division Corporation, it won the Filmfare Critics Award that year. The 15-minute masterpiece is part of an ongoing exhibition of contemporary Indian art at Latitude 28 gallery in New Delhi, and a compelling reason to visit it.
Sacred/Scared, as the name of the show suggests, is a playful interrogation of the ways in which religion, and especially notions of holiness, have been reinterpreted in the visual arts. In her note, curator Nancy Adajania attributes the provenance of the title to “a moment of typographical uncertainty". “If you were to type the word ‘sacred’, the computer often auto-corrects it to ‘scared’," she writes. “Is this merely an accident or is it symptomatic of a deep anxiety and debilitating ambivalence of our times?"
The question, needless to say, is rhetorical.
It took half a dozen people recently to ensure that a book, offering an allegedly offensive reading of Hinduism, would not be freely available to a nation of a billion others. A few years ago, another handful decided to vandalize the work of an Indian artist for portraying Hindu deities in a ‘disrespectful’ manner. Eventually they successfully drove him out of the country. In a different corner of the world, a cartoon printed in a newspaper unleashed a domino effect of violence and hatred. Encounters with the sacred are expected to be fraught with live-altering possibilities—but these days the consequences are more likely to put one in harm’s way.
Sadly, very often the real casualty of such creative adventures is critical evaluation. Once a work of art or a book of a controversial nature is out in the public domain, moral custodians waste no time to bay for the blood of the alleged iconoclasts, leaving no room for a rational debate on the merit of the sources of their indignation. There may be several convincing arguments to dismiss an artist’s work on aesthetic grounds, or the scholarly premise of a writer’s thesis, but most attempts at voicing these views usually get drowned by a chorus of thoughtless outrage.
At the conceptual level, Sacred/Scared works as a fascinating visual exercise. It forces the eye to reckon with new ways of looking at symbols and icons we tend to take for granted. The March edition of TAKE on Art magazine, published by Bhavna Kakar, director of Latitude 28 gallery, provides a comprehensive intellectual and art-historical context to the show. But as an aesthetic experiment, the exhibition is less sure of its standing. Not only does it bring together a range of artists from across different generations, but it also features work of uneven quality. A number of the paintings are, disappointingly, prints of the original. There is also far too much going on, given the modest scale of the gallery.
Veer Munshi’s Hamara Hanuman, for instance, depicts the monkey-god, bearing the face of artist M.F. Husain, flying over a cityscape with a paint-brush and a lantern. As a work of art it is gimmicky—though that, precisely, is the reason it may inspire wrath among a section of the society. Angelo da Fonseca’s water-colours, which add a distinctly indigenous touch to Biblical scenes, are remarkable if only for their historical value. The now obscure painter from Goa reinvented figurative painting in the 1950s and 60s by creating an idiom that captured the synergy between Western and Eastern modernisms with a gentle harmony. The thematic associations may often appear a bit tenuous but that doesn’t really matter if the work is good enough. Gigi Scaria’s photographs of landscapes with fallen poles, like totemic objects, are haunting even though you may fail to find spiritual resonances in them.
But if there is one reason why you should visit this show, it ought be for a chance to watch Koodal on a biggish screen. A meditation on life, death and brutality, Mehta’s film opens with a close-up of a pair of bovine eyes, staring at the camera with a liquid gaze. Partly shot in a slaughterhouse in Bandra, Mumbai, and in several other locations in the city, the movie reeks of blood but is also redeemed by promises of regeneration. In spite of the stark black-and-white medium, it is also singularly sensual, evoking the verdant odour of grass, the salty breeze of the sea, or the heady rush that is inspired by pigeons taking flight all of a sudden.
The human and the animal worlds are also gently, and intuitively, interlocked into a vision of the pity of things: a scene of men making and consuming bread segues into one of cattle huddled together, mating and eating, before being turned into chunks of flesh left hanging from hooks. The mystical place of the cow in India, as a creature that nurtures both with its milk and meat, is the pivot on which Mehta builds his narrative. The result is richly layered and as endlessly intriguing as any surrealist classic from Europe. If for nothing else, the piercing bovine stare at the beginning of Mehta’s tour de force reminded me of the frame in Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which has the famous scene of an eye (said to belong to a cow) being sliced by a razor.
The beauty of Mehta’s genius is enhanced manifold by the riveting vocals by K.V. Narayanaswamy that takes the place of a voiceover. Koodal is a work of art which can easily and effortlessly become a part of your imagination, whether you are able to decode its inner meanings or analyze what exactly it seeks to do. There can be few better ways of experiencing the spiritual.
Sacred/Scared is on at Latitude 28, F 208, Ground Floor, Lado Sarai, New Delhi (Phone: 46791111), from 11am-7pm on all days. Sundays by appointment.
A fortnightly look at the world of art from close and afar.
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