The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Stress on solidarity among artists

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Tuesday, Jan 01, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Stress on solidarity among artists

Priscilla Jebaraj

Chandralekha’s friends discuss the need to respond to happenings around them

“Art and art activism seem to have lost its agency”
“Many artists don’t feel the need for a common space today”

CHENNAI: A year after dancer Chandralekha’s death, a group of her friends, colleagues and admirers—a cross-section of India’s artistic community — gathered at her home off Elliott’s beach here to foster the sense of solidarity and community among Indian artists that she would have supported.

Scattered across the steps of the three-foot-deep sunken pit that forms the newly-inaugurated space for kalaripayattu at her home, artists and activists tossed around ideas on what role such an inter-disciplinary network could play in modern Indian society.

“Art and art activism seems to have lost its agency,” said Chandralekha’s colleague and companion Sadanand Menon. “The quest is to recover that agency…so that our art is not just representative, but transformative.”

“We as artists need to come together to respond to happenings around us,” said Tamil theatre artist Mangai, echoing K. Haridasan, one of the founders of Cholamandal Artists Village, who spoke of the need to influence general sensibilities rather than just talking within the same ‘arty’ world.

From political activism in Gujarat to community events in Chennai, from local civic concerns to national incidents that cried for social justice, the artists discussed ways through which creative communities could make and have made a difference.

Such a community today would be different from the one which artist Dashrath Patel remembered sharing with M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee at Soli Bhatliwala’s studios in Mumbai of the 1960s, or that created at Cholamandal on the outskirts of Chennai around the same time.

While they reminisced about the good old days of sharing joys and struggles with penniless colleagues who are the biggest names in the Indian art scene today, one of Cholamandal’s founders V. Vishwanathan bemoaned the fact that many artists did not feel that need for a common space today: they focussed on their own work and spoke to their own critics and sold their own pieces without feeling any need for the support of a community.

Kamala Ganesh, a close friend of Chandralekha’s who teaches sociology at Bombay University, felt the individualistic nature of art need not preclude the need for a community. Sharing anecdotes from Chandralekha’s life, she said that even while focussing on one’s own work, artists could show solidarity with others and make interventions in other spheres.

Any community formed today would not offer any uniformity of views, but rather reflect the diversity of opinions among Indian artists.

At Monday’s discussion, artists argued about myriad issues, from commercialisation (“we are no longer painters, we are a property”) to the artistic sensibilities of the younger generation (“there is less depth, perhaps, but greater breadth”). Film maker Soudamini wrapped up the general sentiment: “What we can do together becomes more important than all our differences.”

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