Kiran Subbaiah/ Texts about KS/Marta Jakimowicz: Heavy Wings Kiran Subbaiah's recent "Antiwork" show at the Chitrakala Parishath was one of the most interesting events that happened here in a long time. Two halls strewn with often small, shabby looking objects gradually revealed a whole simple-complex worldview utterly relevant to what our life is. Using crude, ready objects and contraptions. but shaping them and partly subverting their original form and purpose, the artist conjures from those literal as well as lyrical metaphors of human effort, emotions and condition. There is resourceful and intelligent playfulness in his sculptural assemblage-installations and biting, open sarcasm, including self-irony. And yet, empathy and gravity can be felt too. Although Subbaiah admits the impossibility of attaining our aspirations, he finds aspiring itself precious. At this point he relates simultaneously to Leonardo da Vinci's utopian ideas, his own school-time attempts and to rough realities and inventiveness on the basic level, locally. His concern stays as much with the nature of art as with the contradictions inherent to ordinary existence. Whereas the onlooker has to do some thinking, the wonder of these images is that their very raw physicality, aided by the invitation to the spectator to handle them, to a large measure contains both concept and expression visually. While growing from the Indian ethos, they participate in the mechanisms of current international art in a highly individual and genuine manner. The completeness of the impact is admirable in particular to someone as young as Subbaiah. A central motif belongs to the lofty but doomed wish to fly. Starting from the grand lineage, the artist places a pair of angelic white wings made of inert, weighty ceramic. At the other end are his coat hangers on strike. Their wires twisted bird-like or turned into heavy vegetable silhouettes, they seem to be almost taking off or falling down. Sympathy for deprived and incapable people intuited there becomes declared in the piece "His Dog's Voice", where a loudspeaker tube is silenced by Ekalavyan arrows. Throughout there runs a thread of disbelief in the apparent or stated character of reality, which covers manipulated facts. The situation's political aspect is hinted in the locked money collection box inside which a "Truth" key can be seen. Daily hardships, denatured environment and elemental shortages have inspired the works about water. There is a crushed "Full Belly" plastic bottle and a crude bucket connected to a taps pipe in a relationship of ineffectual dependence. A photographic cloud yields rain markings to an actual glass measure, and a funnily ominous mushroom of dry substance emerges from "Thirst". The conceptual stress on those works gives into more palpable sensations when the artist focuses on desires and striving of various kinds. An immense pink tongue of rubber lies on a sugar pillow, set in a coarse material suggestive of greedy lips in ecstasy. "Lazy Objects" - a feeble axe or a pen resting on plump cushions -- disproportionately tiny to the massive handles prove their powerlessness, yet are shot in glorified erect poses. The theoretically self-perpetuating balance between a shoe and a banana evokes the never consummate "Quest". Mischievously functioning gadgets, designed for eternal self-sufficiency but bound to fail is another fascination here. Their intrinsically contradictory state serves to betray pseudo heroism, as in the wooden "Lion Food" trap which ejects a rubber mouse from inside on pulling a knob. If one tries to concretize the meaning of Subbaiah's works, it tends
to limit them, since their strength relies on a roughly lyrical expressiveness
together with wide associations. Indeed, one might agree with what his
"Articulation" implies in an entanglement of brain ropes passing limp through
the mouth spools.
30 December 2002 © Deccan Herald .
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