the daily grind

SM: Just to break the ice, why don’t we talk a little about your earlier work, as well as about the continuities and ruptures in your practice over the last six or seven years?

AKS: I think in terms of continuity... I was essentially working with the human figure.. I was also interested in trying to bring in local elements, - for example in the soda bottles in my early paintings, - and trying to tie it into the 'larger' social concerns that engaged me then. I was trying to use images and objects that I encountered in my backyard and surroundings (both physical and cultural), for example, the rooster, the ladder that they use to harvest pepper, and so on. These works seem to me now to be the representations of a certain state of anxiety.

I can't really say that I fully understood what I was doing at the beginning of the phase of my work which has culminated in this show, which started around my final year in my M.A. I wasn't thinking in terms of process or anything else. It was a time, that, in hindsight, marked an important turning point for me. My work became more philosophical, although I didn’t really know it then...I was struggling towards something; it mainly expressed itself as an obsessive need to work with large spaces, to conquer it (artistically) and of course, the confidence and satisfaction that it provides...

SM: Of course as artists we cant always articulate (in words) what we want. It is only after a considerable period of work that we can even start to understand what we were trying to accomplish...

One of the things that struck me when I saw your works at the preview was the deep religious conviction. They seemed to me to be the descendants of the great Christian altarpieces. It was a tremendously moving experience for me...

One recurring element in this body of work are these representations of crowds. Even if your paintings look like abstractions from a distance, from up close you can see that there is a rudimentary figuration at work, - almost cartoon-like, faceless ciphers rather than fully fleshed out individuals..... as if to suggest a loss of self-hood, or the melding of individuality within the collectivity of a community or a gathering.

AKS: There is no doubt that most of my works are related to religion (in an expanded sense), since the starting point of many of the paintings I did at this time was derived from this one scene of the Holy Communion; - I think you know what that is, its an initiation into the Christian universe, its rituals and practices. It takes place usually when you are around 12; there is a month long function where you have to wear white, and where there is a lot of prayer, bible study classes and so on. You are taught about the Eucharist. Its only after this that you are given the holy bread, and you are taught not to bite into it, since it is the body of Christ and so on.... so these are the kinds of things that you are taught.

Then of course, once a week you had to go for confession; the priest would give you a few prayers; if you repeated it, all you sins would be taken care of, a little like medicine! I don’t think people realize how strong this institution of the confession is for a believer. Every week you had to confess; to confess you had to have sinned. For the confessional to exist, one could say that (the concept of) sin has to be invented. There is a certain joy in the process, which is why most devout Christians follow this religiously even though it is, strictly speaking, not a compulsory thing.

But the paintings were also a way of coming to terms with my doubts and misgivings regarding this world. I started the paintings after acknowledging (within myself) the fact that Christianity has a number of limitations. I grew up in a very orthodox Christian family. Most of them were directly or indirectly employed by the Church, thus, even if any of them had any disagreements with the Church, they could not express it since they were dependent on it for their survival, for their livelihood. My own childhood and youth were marked by the proximity of the church. Even if you stay away from it, even if you say that you don’t believe in it, you are still a part of it, because your mother was a part of it and her mother was a part of it. So there is a sense where I cannot get away from it; even today, I cannot say that I am not a Christian, because that is how I was brought up. I didn’t learn about it from the Church; I learnt about it from my mother, and in that sense I cannot escape it .You are marked by it, and even if you reject it, you cannot fully escape it, because it is a continuous living tradition, and it is bound up with the deepest regions of your self.. But there were figures who encouraged me to question this world of which I was a part. My father for instance, never used to go to Church. He was deeply interested in Indian philosophy, and he would often tell me to not accept things at face value, and to question the basis of the Faith.. He influenced me a great deal. He would often get into ideological quarrels with the priests and other officials of the Church.

The pages of the Bible that I have collaged onto the surface of my paintings comes from my home. They were probably read and reflected upon by my mother (and other family members). To take this object from them, - an object of great veneration, - and to use it in my work (in the way that I do) is itself a great challenge, and a tremendous responsibility. I had to learn a new language to convince them to let me use these elements in my work; I see it as a challenge because I also want them to participate (even if indirectly) in the making of the work. Its a way of trying to engage them in the process of my work.

SM: I think that what is really intriguing about your work is also that it contains a 'politics', - if we could put it that way, - or rather the fact that through a deeply spiritual or religious metaphysic, you have also tried to touch upon (whether intentionally or not) questions that also have an ethical or political import, without taking recourse to the illustrative and often overwrought, didactic symbolism of many Malayalee artists (and most figurative artists in general).This ethical dimension can come from Christianity, or from Communism itself which has a strongly Christian subtext, for instance, in a shared concern for the oppressed and the downtrodden. There has been a 'theological turn' in Marxism in recent times, - to take one example, the French philosopher Alain Badiou sees St. Paul as the exemplary militant, the model revolutionary.

In the preview (at the Faculty) you had used some fragments from Derrida,Wittgenstein and others... I found it very interesting because Jacques Derrida has written extensively about this continuing recurrence of Christianity (or Christian themes) within Communism, - its voluntarism, its Utopian aspirations as well as in a strain of millenarianism that seems to be common to both traditions, - about the relationship between self and the other, or the individual and the social collectivity. One could perhaps posit that there is, in your work, an effacement of the atomized, individual self in a collective, shared dimension of experience, - which is performatively staged at the level of the object-material structure of the paintings themselves, by, for example, the 'deconstruction' of the imposing size and presence of the works through the diffidence, the hesitancy and doubt of the actual mark making itself. The community that is suggested in your paintings is thereby one that is not fully formed or already existent, but one that is struggling to be born and take shape, a 'coming community', in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, and thus filled with a kind of 'messianic' promise. So there seems to be both a religious as well as an ethical-political dimension in your work .....

AKS: I think this relationship has preoccupied me a long time; but for me it is at a very basic level also a question of how my work relates to the social totality, and it more or less crippled me in my first year here (Baroda). I hardly did any work because I was having a difficult time understanding it. Today I think I am a lot clearer; I know now that what we call the social is not something that is apart from what we are as individuals, that we are, in fact, this world, and it is this “I” of our individual subjectivities that creates the illusion that these are two separate domains. It was only after I began to understand this that my work started moving again. I spent a lot of time then reading Indian philosophy but even there I found a number of limitations regarding time, - if you see, for example, in the Gita. I felt that they never tried to destroy the cycle of becoming, since Time here is again always a time of anticipation, of a 'future perfect'. Even spiritual exercises like meditation are geared towards (a future) enlightenment. Without destroying this sense of time, there will be no end to this tyranny of waiting. It is only then that there will be an opening, and it is only with thinkers like (Jiddu) Krishnamurti that we finally get a sense that this time of becoming has been finally overcome.

For me what one calls 'process' is simply a way of destroying this cycle of becoming, this eternal return and repetition, in order to fully occupy the moment. I would say that, in its purity, the function of every such process is to interrupt this sense of anticipatory time.

SM: What about the actual process of the works themselves? Could you elaborate on some of the technical aspects of the paintings?

AKS: At the beginning of my second year I went to assist Gulam Sheikh on his 'City' project. My use of paper pulp to create facture comes out of this workshop, although what I am attempting to do is in many ways quite removed from what Sheikh was doing. He would sometimes ask us to erase (remove) certain parts of his paintings, but it had to be painted over in his very precise style. What I found fascinating through the workshop were these erased patches where one could see a ghostly afterimage of what had been done before. It seemed to echo what I was trying to do at the time, both artistically and philosophically.

SM: Your take on time is interesting from a Marxian point of view as well. Perhaps one could say that Marxist critiques implicitly address the question of time, for example, in the concept of alienation, - as the submission of the body's expanded (and elastic) sense of duration (of sleeping, dreaming, work or boredom, each of which has its own distinct temporality) to the regimentation of clock-time, of industrial time, which is a completely arbitrary (but has become the conventional) measure.

From what you say I gather that it is a little like what we see in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. In his films time is often deliberately slowed down; there is almost a kind of inertia, but it is also ruptured, often violently, by specific events that fill it with a kind of plenitude or fullness, - which usually have catastrophic but essentially transformative effects on the characters.

AKS: Although I understand the Marxist critique, I was more interested, for example, in the idea of the Christian heaven, and the ways in which it moulds time to a form of waiting, a waiting (or a time of becoming, if one wants to put it that way) where it is not the present that matters but some future moment which never arrives. Thus human beings are continually being thwarted in their promise of fulfillment by this unfulfilled promise of future happiness (or wholeness or whatever).

SM: Could one extrapolate from what you said about time and read into your work a little bit? Is it related to a rejection of narrative? As you know, both Malayalee artists and what one could call the 'Baroda School' are heavily invested in a narrative idiom, and every narrative implies a direction to the flow of time, the promise of some kind of finality or an ending (in the near or distant future); in that sense one could see your work as both anti-narrative and atemporal, it is not just that it is process based rather than image based, but there seems to be a continuous attempt at erasing any kind of image whatsoever, so that they merge back with the ground.

AKS: If I were to explain my understanding of time simply, let me put it this way: we are always living in two worlds, or two times. The first is very clearly the time of this world; the other is the time that we create, mentally, psychologically. It is about the latter that I am trying to talk about; when someone says that my work is meditative, I have to disagree with that person, because meditation (and other such spiritual exercises) are simply a way of cultivating time, to 'become something'. I think that this was what I had in mind with regard to the 'analyzer' and the 'analyzed' in the title of the show. When we start analyzing something, we divide the world into two, - that of the self and the other (object which is analyzed), - between which exists this time, which eventually comes out of fear. It is only when you break this that you fully live in the present. I think that what I was essentially trying to say through this show is that this time doesn’t really exist; it is a mental construction; it is born from fear, primarily the fear of our own mortality, and it is something we create to endure this abyss of uncertainty. I think that it is this that is really the 'politics' of my process.

SM: Just as a little aside, and in closing, I wanted to ask you about the future direction that your work could take. I am especially concerned about the aspect of repetition in your paintings. Won't it become mechanical and predictable after a while? Secondly, - and this is not just about your work, but about any kind of art that has some kind of genuine intellectual or philosophical engagement, - when you exhibit your work in a place like Mumbai, have you thought about the politics of reception? I feel a slight twinge of anxiety when I think about the fate of work such as yours, because as you know the Mumbai art world is really just a glorified version of Bollywood. You are only as good as your last sale, and it doesn’t matter what trials you have had to endure or overcome in your work, finally everything there is just another product for consumption, exchangeable with everything else, and the only measure of your worth are your box-office ratings (and earnings). It gets very tiresome after a point; these days I am more inclined to think that the only authentic act is to drop out of it altogether...

AKS: Yes of course I am aware of the problem, of repetitiveness, of a certain kind of mechanical facility creeping into my work; these are issues that I will have to deal with as I continue on my journey. I know that these are big challenges ahead. But I also know that I will find the artistic and spiritual resources to overcome them. I am not unduly worried about it; that would again make me a victim of the instrumental time that I have been continuously critiquing, since then I am trying to become something, to make my work into something. Failure is part of the whole process. What is there to fear in it? It is also an opportunity to understand something about yourself.

About the other things, this is my first show, and I will cross those bridges when I get to them....

Some images from the show can be seen here: http://www.galeriems.com/artist-exhibitions.php?e=63