Kiran Subbaiah/ Texts about KS/

Shankar Natarajan: Art Utopia and the Allegorical Impulse

Index: Texts about KS

  In formal terms, the sculptural field that he inherited was the result of a series of deconstructions in Baroda in the 80's and 90's, a transitional period which saw profound changes and expansions in the sculptural field, blurring many boundaries drawn in the previous decade of modernist art practice. With "sculpture" opened up to the possibilities of a plurality of forms there, Kiran was able to make certain choices that resulted in an extremely flexible language. His works were fashioned out of an amalgam of found objects, sculpted pieces and material such as paper and rubber. While some were placed on the floor, others hung on the walls and many stood on the pedestals. Movement, light and the viewer himself became part of some of the "interactive" work that was on display.

  Kiran in this, his first mature body of work, engaged with the basic questions of art, its relations to the world, the self and future and the result was an infectious combination of skepticism and play that also revealed a rare conceptual clarity. For Kiran, utopia is an impossible dream, and its beauty lies precisely in its deferment. The objects on display were called "quasi-functional"; they were functional (and also ironically, salvationary) devices whose 'usefulness' had been playfully subverted. These were mechanical allegories for an impossible utopia.

  " The question of emancipation is directed as much upon it (the object's self) as on anything else. Their uselessness can be extended even to they being art objects. I see the whole advantage of making art in the fact that it need not serve any purpose". Says the artist.

  The total autonomy that Kiran seems to afford his work is not the knee-jerk reaction into an absolute aestheticism rather it offers the only glimmer of a utopia by way of a tacit critique of a total exchange society in which everything is for another. Further, his use of allegory in its post-modern variant scrambles and complicates the aesthetic code replacing the passive contemplation of symbols with an active reading of the allegorical text. The 1997 assemblage "Information repository" best exemplifies this, and also allegory's propensity to displace older and existing meanings of the sign. The allegorist, according to Craig Owens "does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured... rather he adds another meaning to the image... (Which) supplants an antecedent one." (The allegorical impulse: Toward a theory of post-modernism in Art after modernism: rethinking representation. Eds. Brian Wallis, The new museum of contemporary art, New York and David R. Godine, Publisher Inc, Boston, 1990, p.205).

  The work consists of certain often-used motifs in art and culture; a loud speaker and a bunch of arrows stuck into it and the words H.D.V (his dog's voice) printed on its surface. By a clever combination the work is set on a journey traversing time and genre referring allegorically to instances of class difference in history and myth, in particular to a story of caste politics from the Mahabharatha, the Eklavaya story. The contraption's movement however is circular-when wound by the viewer it rotates a few times and stops. . Placed in the gallery this movement is perpetual as interacting viewers come and go winding the device repeatedly. At these moments it seems to evoke the Indian epic, and the world itself, where great men rise and fall and life, transient and ephemeral moves on in circular time and events recur to eternity. And the nostalgia induced by that quintessential image of faithfulness- the H.M.V logo of the faithful dog peering into the loudspeaker in black silhouette becomes, through an inversion a palimpsest on which a less innocent meaning now becomes inscribed.

  Generally Kiran's work succeeds in creating a dialogue with the viewer through wit and subversion and by encouraging the act of reading, formulates an alternate criticality that lays bare the limitations of the aesthetic object, reforming it in post-formalist terms. These objects stress a particular truth about art- that its promises of otherworldly experiences and other salvations are paradoxically grounded in its palpable materiality and its autonomy. The understated pessimism towards forms of absolute salvation evident here, however, is the flip side of a joyful art. It is an art that mediates between an unyielding (other) world and the disaffected self; serving as antidote in its playful realization. One is reminded here of K.G.Subramanyam and his absolute commitment to and delight in the process of making art. As Kiran says:

  "Humour... has been an integral part of what I make. Every work is also a celebration of what is realized through it. The apparent resignation (in the work) is also a means to liberation, just as a perpetual state of unfulfillment does not extinguish the quest. These are essential contradictions."

  Allegory as a primary critical attitude appeared in the Baroda scene in the late eighties parallel to and gaining ground after the radical moment. It was evident in the work of N.N.Rimzon, Alex Matthew, Surendran Nair and also Shibu Natesan sometime later. It was for many artists at that time a way of functioning within an already existing discourse of art that valorized its object hood and yet be able to react to events of social and political significance. Kiran shares with them their skepticism towards the heroic avant-garde and their theoretical anti-aestheticism; He re-evaluates the aesthetic and carefully avoids slipping into positions of reaction and eschews that familiar "slick look". The question of collective emancipation is mediated, inevitably by the complexities of difference; it will always intrude in any attempted realization of a social utopia. Kiran's work is at times a celebration of that difference. Monkeys, dogs, etc all signifiers of the marginal keep stubbornly appearing in his work. "A petition for a hanger strike" made in his stay in London is a number of "found" coat hangers articulating their resistance by being shaped as pictographic signs-a marginalized group as it were demanding their rights.

  Almost a decade earlier, in Baroda sculpture of the late seventies the male figure came to acquire different meanings, it became the artist's ego and the viewer's identificatory trope instead of its previous use as a site of formalist experiments. The humanist figure in Kiran's work is mostly absent and when it does appear it is as the body of the viewer in an interactive work or that of the artist in the form of a reproducible image. Take the photograph "Lazy object #5", It shows the artist lying down with a pair of ceramic wings playing an unflown angel, displaying an unrealized potential for flight. With the photograph's desire to capture the transient and its affinity to 'death' it is as if the subject, in its contemporary fragmentation is sought to be captured in its wholeness and is only ever "present" in this photograph.

  In his more recent assemblage pieces this concern was explored employing ephemeral material such as fire and ice but more significantly, the video image. A series of short video films in which the protagonist was the artist himself playing upon the absence and presence of the self as image. Kiran pushes the figure to extremes of ambiguity frustrating the viewer's desires for identification.

  The point is that the materiality of language and our use of "device" will always mediate any experience we might have of this world and perhaps making completely impossible the fulfillment of a purely spiritual one. One is reminded of the futility in Durer's famous etching "melancholia" where instruments of progress and reason too lie useless. Kiran's work also consists of dysfunctional objects- bells that cannot toll, pens that cannot write, wings that do not fly and an inversely functioning mousetrap inhabiting a world of other equally absurd objects.

  The dynamo and motor conceived in his old school notebook (and 'reproduced' in his catalogue), too are dysfunctional. They aspires to function ideally "as a pair of mutual companions, each keeping the other in motion". It is theoretically sound but it is in its practical application that it fails. Benjamin had written "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably". Kiran's gesture of rescuing from his personal history a fragment of innocence, a dream for utopia and representing it for the present is a profoundly redeeming act.
 
  Shankar Natarajan
  Chennai 12-3-2001
 
 
 
 

Index: Texts about KS