Where the Flowers Still Grow

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19574&date=2017-05-28&pageid=1

                                

   Postcards from Kashmir

I went to see ‘Where the Flowers Still Grow’ - a visually vocal landscape of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, at Sunaparanta Centre for Arts. You see, I was born in Kashmir, and though i didn’t want to go, dreading what I would see, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes, I found flowers in a couple of photographic templates but they were minute, on spiked stems, or had fallen  - discoloured, shrivelled and torn, carpeting the earth enmeshed with stones.

The exhibition is inspired by Mirza Waheed’s novel ‘The Collaborator’ which tells the story of a Kashmiri man struggling to understand the past and present, and the sense of self in the ensuing context.  Bharat Sikka visited Srinagar in 2013, and came upon the novel.  Thereafter, he went 3-4 times in the following years, observing, listening and recording a story in his camera.

The exhibition has an eerie feel with no cataloguing essay. Untitled frames hang silently, as if robbed of expression. There is nothing left to say.  In this situation, Bharat’s photographic canvases capture existential Kashmir, exposing remnants of the enveloping violence in the region. It’s an ode to autumn, definitely, but  devoid of any colour.

The first frame at the entrance itself introduces the visitor to the inherent inversion of Bharat’s sublime statement on the state of affairs. The eye comes to rest on the silhouette of a man attired in customary Kashmiri dress with a shawl draped around his upper frame, against a grey mist, his back turned to the viewer. Others show men silently mounted on horse backs, staring fixedly with deadpan expressions. In another, a man stands rooted in a field of spiked tree trunks, hemmed in by the pointed stalks, immovable and imprisoned. An ash-marked bloodied hand subverts portraiture, occupying centre stage in the line.  A Rembrandt shot focuses on a man’s face surrounded by darkness. He is asleep or has he shut his eyes against the light, feeling hopeless?

A deafening silence clothes the entire landscape. Besides the inhabitants, nature too stands a mute witness to the continuing carnage - tree trunks seems eaten away from inside, hollow and disintegrating - their piercing branches sans the green foliage. Conifers stand like sentinels marking the horizon. Sometimes when the grey and black uninterrupted terrain is punctured by a green hill and a waterfall, it appears more an aberration, alienated from the rot everywhere else.

A complete absence of women and children from the frames is marked and forceful, an intentional choice by the photographer. The omission drives the point hard that this is now a ruthless man’s territory - cruel and colourless, where noise of cannon roars loud with no space for sensitivity, nurturing, compassion, innocence, or any other relevant feminine construct.

The gallery space is further haunted by a melancholic musical strain which stems from an installation at the further end of the corridor. It has a Steve Reich quality to it, a persistent beating pulse superimposed by electronic music that takes the story forward. But the impetus doesn’t change anything much on the lighted screen, where thick black clouds loom, moving in pace with the music. Standing in the empty room looking at the screen, the feeling imperceptibly seeps in - the grinding noise of cannon fire in the background and darkness are here to stay. They have become parts of the landscape.

If you pause to meditate within this deprivation, the juxtapositions built by Bharat and further enhanced by curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi become voluble. A torn and overused yellow and red  packet of 32” S&W revolver cartridges graces a wall,  a bloodied head of a goat on curled spikes symbolically completes that picture . A dark alcove from a dilapidated house with a zero watt bulb glowing on its wall ,  looks out to frames of bright light.  These and many more pictures are contrasted with the following  - sari hanging on a clothes line in a room, a miniature heart with very hard to read minute lettering – ‘be my valentine’, a postage stamp in the corner of a blank page  with the lettering ‘27^th Pacific Area Travel Association Conference’. The larger than life size of war objects against diminishing motifs of the softer frames is self-explanatory. 

Bharat uses visual metaphors and metonymy to express his personal sightings in the valley of death. He amplifies the war rhetoric with symbols - a wooden cross with a white sack tied to it embeds   the carnage in a much larger historical context. A polished walnut Trojan Horse packs in a punch of conspiracy and betrayal. A double rainbow outlines the mouth of a devouring shark. An empty inverted maroon velvet-lined chest box, becomes a vociferous statement about looted treasure. Ubiquitous chalk-white boulders lining rivers and pathways have acquired a mosaic pattern that on a closer look reveals itself to be dried blood and excreta. A loud speaker mounted on a tripod spews out words which no one seems to hear.

The entire bricolage gives the landscape a museum-like quality, on which we gaze for hours, drawn by muted rage, its ugliness and dismembered power. The greys and blues, indicate a mood of suffering that’s intensified by the red and yellow of the raging forest fire in the background, or is it a burning pyre? Predatory birds appear and contradict the non-existent livestock.

Bharat conveys the final blow with the showcasing of postcards from Kashmir in a customary glass-cased window. Nostalgia hits hard, for instead of pictures of colourful ‘shikaras’  on Dal lake, brightly clad women in ‘phirens’, tall handsome men adorning Kashmiri topee, gardens full of gorgeous Chrysanthemums and Dahlia’s  – the postcards are a muted grey with silhouettes of grey scrawny trees lining the breath of the page. Every postcard is a replica of the one before it and they together complete the exhibit in the show window. The irony is further exacerbated by a set of colourful ribbons worn on a soldier’s uniform, with medals encoding – ‘Satyamave Jayate’ and the ‘25^th Independence Anniversary Celebration’.

That finally nails the story tier in the storyboard permanently. I can feel a heaviness pervade my senses, which isn’t going away anywhere, I know. I will be back to meditate again!

   

The Matisse Stories by AS Byatt

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18172&date=2017-04-23&pageid=1

Did Matisse Paint Stories ?

Art is a take from life or does life take from art - is a question Byatt deliberates and then answers copiously through her work of art ‘The Matisse Stories’. She draws upon her strengths of storytelling and art to paint evocative canvases of three women, caught at a certain juncture in their lives. Henry Matisse paintings superimpose the entire frame of the book nourishing the narrative with colour, texture and form. Each story begins with a vignette of a Matisse painting, linked to the essence of the story in a subtle and yet profound way. 

Byatt’s paintbrush etches beautiful verbal sketches of her characters and situates them in a milieu of their own making. Just as in her Booker Prize winning novel ‘Possession: A Romance’, duality pulls at the heartstrings of men and women caught between values, comfort zones and situations. Should Lucian go with his girlfriend to the Greek isles or stay with his wife?  Do the two professors let anorexics, namely self-loathing Peggi Nollett obtain her doctorate on Matisse or stay the course of events? 

The veneer sparkles and shines with suffused colour and artistic word-play but the core of each story is the corrugated grey colour of pain, white emptiness of loss and shards of splintered glass.  Humdrum sequences and inconsequential happenings acquire darker tones, climaxing to an undoing, exposure or a confrontation of hidden secrets in vitrines of human souls. The conclusive note is hopeful and liberating, like the light in Matisse paintings, visiting and dispersing the darkness, that idea of comfort in an armchair.

Byatt writes that Matisse shocked people by saying that art was like an armchair. “ What I dream of,  is an art of balance, of purity, of quietness, without any disturbing subjects, without worry, which maybe, something soothing, something to calm the brain, something analogous to a good armchair which relaxes him from his bodily weariness....”

 She continues the dialogue between the two characters expounding Matisse’s quote, unravelling it through words, giving it a lucid silvery silhouette - 


“Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr. Himmelblau?  Old men like me who can just understand their bones not hurting, who remember walking up a hill with a spring in their step like the red of the Red Studio. Pleasure is life, Dr. Himmelblau, and most of us don’t have it, or not much, or mess it up, and when we see it in those blues, those roses , those oranges, that vermilion, we should fall down and worship - for it is the thing itself. Who knows a good armchair? A man who has bone cancer, or a man who has been tortured, he can recognize a good armchair....”

Susannah, a middle-aged woman, in the first story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, had come to trust Lucian (a hairstylist) with her disintegration. She had lost the desire to be seen and to be looked at. She had been awarded as a linguist and had to appear on television.

 “The cameras searched jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and cracks in shadow and gloss. So interesting are their revelations that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists”. 

She wanted Lucian to make her look young and glowing (Suzie of the past). Lucian‘s soothing and softening touch parodies Matisse’s brushwork – the hairdresser induces relaxation and reverie. But Lucian tells her that he has finally decided to leave his wife (who has let herself go, with fat swollen ankles) as he wanted beauty, a must in life. Susannah, a mature composed woman aware of her own fat ankles and loss of flush rosy skin, comes undone and smashes his saloon to pieces.  

Here Byatt paints a sensuous portrait of the battle hoarded saloon “...puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, scissors dancing on a hook its frenzy diminishing, uneven spasmodic falls of glass, a susurration of hairpins on paper, and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper”.  The destruction of the old transforms and creates room for the new in life.

‘Art Work’ is about the Dennisons’, an artistic family and their potential housekeeper Mrs Brown.  A generous designer artist wife and a self-absorbed neoclassical artist husband with two children, pave way for the growing artistic sensibilities of Mrs Brown. Her instincts for shocking effects and juxtapositions of colour get fine-tuned to a different artistic creation and she surprises the family with an exhibition of her work at a gallery.  This ‘untoward event’ for the artistic family unleashes the savage energy of the husband-wife artistic pair to newer realms in their own exploits of art.

The last story is the study of the self-loathing of an anorexic woman student Peggi consumed by bodily horrors with Matisse’s nude women, the play of colour and light in his works. The visiting professor Perry Diss, who holds Matisse sacred, has been accused of sexual assault by the student. In conversation with the dean of Women’s Studies, Dr Gerda Himmelblau, the professors while trying to decide about the outcome of the charge, experiences the cathartic planes of Matisse’s art.  Tiny unbalances in their own make-up trip into place and they part on a note wishfully hoping that journeying with art, Peggy too would find a release.

Juxtaposition of art and human life is what makes this triptych of fascinating short stories a must read.