This recent set of paintings by Madhu.V. has had a long gestation and bears the markings of the passage of that perhaps ascetic time in its somber palette and its patiently layered surfaces. Into a rather minimal, unvaried setting of interiors that evoke a nearly monastic gravitas in their stillness and symmetry, he introduces an almost self-contained object-world comprised of an assortment of tools, implements and organic matter that suggest another, now mostly forgotten sense of time where the laboring body might still have had some sense of continuity with the cycles of the natural world and its seasons, and where the social habitat was likewise attuned. The objects themselves are diverse, and draw upon a limited but varied inventory of images that the artist has acquired and put together over the years; they range from the tools and implements used for various manual tasks to medicinal herbs and the fruits of the earth and evoke, by the accompanying insistence on their rich tactile and visual qualities, their history of human association that is further reflected in the patina of use that seem to envelop them. These objects are hung from hooks or upon railings from the ceiling in a manner that recalls, at least to those brought up in Kerala from where the artist hails, an ‘uri’, - a suspended larder (consisting of a set of pots that were stacked one upon another) that invariably graced one of the soot-stained corners of the traditional kitchen, where such a device was employed in the days before refrigeration to keep food from spoiling. The suspension is also a visual device to isolate the object, much like a specimen under scientific observation in order to define its particular qualities more clearly as well as to reflect upon it in the manner of an altar or icon that reveals its mysteries slowly and over a period of time; the artist makes this aspect of his work clearer when he writes that, “A laboratory is a space for detached observation; this observation demands a kind of objectivity. This detached viewing can be made possible when we place the object in a specific location; I see an analogy in the way that the tools and objects I find in everyday life are often suspended on bamboo sticks. I am rearranging these objects in my ‘mental interiors’ in order to observe the relationship between them and my own four walls.” This evocation of an almost numinous object-universe animated by some mysterious, underlying life-force has resonances with spiritual traditions such as Shinto; it also serves to underline the accretions of memory that are embodied in humble household objects as well as to eulogize the heroic nobility of physical labour.
One of the significant aspects of this body of work is the way in which Madhu foregrounds the issue of time that is here mediated through the twin, interlinked concepts of nature and labour. Philosophers like Paul Virilio have drawn attention to the ways in which the increasing speed of technologies of transmission such as communication and transport have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural landscape; he also underlines a paradoxical aspect of this situation, - the pervasive inertia that marks day to day life as a consequence of automation becoming more widespread and creating a population more engaged in sedentary tasks than ever before. There is also a long tradition of Marxist thinking on the subject of ‘industrial time’, put forward by historians such as Eric Hobsbawm in order to explain a particularly Modern notion of temporality that makes the rhythms of nature/ the body subservient to that of the machine, - in the way that, for instance, the arrival of the railroad into the countryside disrupted not just an existing structure of social relations that had been until then based on the rites of agricultural labour which in turn depended upon the changing of the seasons, but by introducing the brute fact of accelerated change into their cognitive universe, precipitated a rupture in deep-rooted habits of perception as well. Capitalism (which largely structures the contemporary world/experience), in order to survive must innovate continually and constantly; its Utopias are founded on a vision of the triumphal march of technology that is reflected in its real-world corollaries, intensive industrialization and mechanization and the unregulated exploitation of natural resources. What Madhu proposes in this body of work through the strong association that these objects have with the pastoral is the rediscovery of another kind of temporality that has largely been repressed in contemporary urban life, and by extension, the possibility of a different mode of Being that implies other ways of relating, not just to Nature, but also to other human beings and to the social totality. His oeuvre thereby comprises a refusal, or a repudiation that can be observed in the fact of the total absence, within this hermetic universe, of the articles of Modern technology or of any trace of the technological imaginary (unless of a very primitive kind) as such; on the other hand it posits a psychological and spiritual space that is grounded in a more organic and fruitful relationship to ones tools, the emphasis on their handmade qualities here functioning as a kind of doubling wherein the tools themselves are a product of human labour, and where labour itself becomes a form of pleasure. One should also perhaps add that the artist is not blind to the ironies of his current situation, - a chronicler of agrarian/pastoral pleasures who has been displaced to the metropolis and its alienations, he marks this discomfiting fact in his paintings through the ways in which he refuses any organic and simplistic notions of community, or the sentimentality of tradition recalled as nostalgia by the many subtle disjunctures that he works into these assemblages through their setting, or through their juxtapositions, wherein their ‘primitivism’ is undercut by its proximity to the ‘modern’. His interiors are alternatively cloister-like and prison-like, suggestive simultaneously of both a space of reflection and one of confinement, and these objects could also be read as constituting an inventory of loss.
The emphasis on ‘vernacular’ experience as an organizing rubric politicizes what could otherwise have taken the form of a romantic celebration of an uncomplicated pastoral mode, which is in itself an ideological fiction; it is deployed here on the other hand in the service of a tenuous remembrance, and as a reminder of a forgotten half of contemporary life, functioning as a testimonial from the peripheries of the subcontinent, its villages and small towns, to the struggles for survival and livelihood among the wretched of the earth. Their iconicity thereby engenders a double significance that is articulated in opposite directions, being on the one hand a paean to an existence more in harmony with ones work and respectful of the natural order, but at the same time commemorating the humble labourer and his world whose fate under the dictates of global capitalism remain uncertain. They also allude indirectly, by virtue of an almost obsessive return to a site of imagined innocence, to the insurmountable difficulties, - now compounded under the new economic regime - that the rural artisan and labourer has always been faced with, and which manifests itself in our own time in the periodic convulsions of militant violence and/or suicide that mark the interior of the subcontinent. The organic matter that he has chosen for display that makes up the other part of his oeuvre, which include common garden plants highly regarded for their curative properties, - aloe, khus, etc, - signify the long lineages of communal and traditional lore in the villages and evoke an eco-political conception of the relationship between labour and nature that gestures towards a former self-sufficiency and symbiosis that is now increasingly under threat due to sweeping changes in the mode of existence in the countryside, but also in light of the ongoing efforts by corporations to privatize vast areas of our natural wealth. Madhu’s oeuvre attempts to map out in their complexity themes of labour and its relationship to landscape and memory by meticulously working through the fractures and divisions that exist in the discourses around the idea of the rural, and by holding it in his works in its tension while at the same time resisting the pull towards closure or premature resolutions. In doing so he provides us with yet another reminder of what the village stands for in our collective life and what it could signify, and stands as a silent admonition to the amnesia that we are all too often culpable of.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Madhu's works can be seen at http://madhuvenugopalan.blogspot.in/
One of the significant aspects of this body of work is the way in which Madhu foregrounds the issue of time that is here mediated through the twin, interlinked concepts of nature and labour. Philosophers like Paul Virilio have drawn attention to the ways in which the increasing speed of technologies of transmission such as communication and transport have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural landscape; he also underlines a paradoxical aspect of this situation, - the pervasive inertia that marks day to day life as a consequence of automation becoming more widespread and creating a population more engaged in sedentary tasks than ever before. There is also a long tradition of Marxist thinking on the subject of ‘industrial time’, put forward by historians such as Eric Hobsbawm in order to explain a particularly Modern notion of temporality that makes the rhythms of nature/ the body subservient to that of the machine, - in the way that, for instance, the arrival of the railroad into the countryside disrupted not just an existing structure of social relations that had been until then based on the rites of agricultural labour which in turn depended upon the changing of the seasons, but by introducing the brute fact of accelerated change into their cognitive universe, precipitated a rupture in deep-rooted habits of perception as well. Capitalism (which largely structures the contemporary world/experience), in order to survive must innovate continually and constantly; its Utopias are founded on a vision of the triumphal march of technology that is reflected in its real-world corollaries, intensive industrialization and mechanization and the unregulated exploitation of natural resources. What Madhu proposes in this body of work through the strong association that these objects have with the pastoral is the rediscovery of another kind of temporality that has largely been repressed in contemporary urban life, and by extension, the possibility of a different mode of Being that implies other ways of relating, not just to Nature, but also to other human beings and to the social totality. His oeuvre thereby comprises a refusal, or a repudiation that can be observed in the fact of the total absence, within this hermetic universe, of the articles of Modern technology or of any trace of the technological imaginary (unless of a very primitive kind) as such; on the other hand it posits a psychological and spiritual space that is grounded in a more organic and fruitful relationship to ones tools, the emphasis on their handmade qualities here functioning as a kind of doubling wherein the tools themselves are a product of human labour, and where labour itself becomes a form of pleasure. One should also perhaps add that the artist is not blind to the ironies of his current situation, - a chronicler of agrarian/pastoral pleasures who has been displaced to the metropolis and its alienations, he marks this discomfiting fact in his paintings through the ways in which he refuses any organic and simplistic notions of community, or the sentimentality of tradition recalled as nostalgia by the many subtle disjunctures that he works into these assemblages through their setting, or through their juxtapositions, wherein their ‘primitivism’ is undercut by its proximity to the ‘modern’. His interiors are alternatively cloister-like and prison-like, suggestive simultaneously of both a space of reflection and one of confinement, and these objects could also be read as constituting an inventory of loss.
The emphasis on ‘vernacular’ experience as an organizing rubric politicizes what could otherwise have taken the form of a romantic celebration of an uncomplicated pastoral mode, which is in itself an ideological fiction; it is deployed here on the other hand in the service of a tenuous remembrance, and as a reminder of a forgotten half of contemporary life, functioning as a testimonial from the peripheries of the subcontinent, its villages and small towns, to the struggles for survival and livelihood among the wretched of the earth. Their iconicity thereby engenders a double significance that is articulated in opposite directions, being on the one hand a paean to an existence more in harmony with ones work and respectful of the natural order, but at the same time commemorating the humble labourer and his world whose fate under the dictates of global capitalism remain uncertain. They also allude indirectly, by virtue of an almost obsessive return to a site of imagined innocence, to the insurmountable difficulties, - now compounded under the new economic regime - that the rural artisan and labourer has always been faced with, and which manifests itself in our own time in the periodic convulsions of militant violence and/or suicide that mark the interior of the subcontinent. The organic matter that he has chosen for display that makes up the other part of his oeuvre, which include common garden plants highly regarded for their curative properties, - aloe, khus, etc, - signify the long lineages of communal and traditional lore in the villages and evoke an eco-political conception of the relationship between labour and nature that gestures towards a former self-sufficiency and symbiosis that is now increasingly under threat due to sweeping changes in the mode of existence in the countryside, but also in light of the ongoing efforts by corporations to privatize vast areas of our natural wealth. Madhu’s oeuvre attempts to map out in their complexity themes of labour and its relationship to landscape and memory by meticulously working through the fractures and divisions that exist in the discourses around the idea of the rural, and by holding it in his works in its tension while at the same time resisting the pull towards closure or premature resolutions. In doing so he provides us with yet another reminder of what the village stands for in our collective life and what it could signify, and stands as a silent admonition to the amnesia that we are all too often culpable of.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Madhu's works can be seen at http://madhuvenugopalan.blogspot.in/
No comments:
Post a Comment