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Abstract art: Exploring new images.

However, as I clutched my gladioli and squinted out at the audience beyond the stage, there was no doubt that I could sense a certain lack of enthusiasm. I hope you’ll forgive me if I discount the possibility that this was a reflection of the quality of ‘The Absent Lover.’ It is a great show. There are exciting lighting effects, music, costumes and of course, some spectacular movement, including a violent East-versus-West dance-duel between a Paris-trained ballerina (Céline Pradeu) and India’s own Preeti Vasudevan in the Bharatanatyam corner. (If you want to know who wins, you’ll have to come to see the show when it returns on tour next year).

But it’s a difficult piece. It is not designed to be easy to understand (although neither is it, I hope, deliberately obscure). It’s not for me to say whether it succeeds as art, but it naturally aims to do what art, at its best, can do. That is, offer our audience a path to the Sublime.

It was the poet Shelley who coined the word Sublime to mean the plane beyond, to which art lovers should aspire to go, and art should aim to take them. To this end, Shelley urges us to reject easy pleasures in favour of more difficult ones. This exhortation is based on a powerfully simple philosophy: some pleasures are better than others, and difficult pleasures are the best. And most people would have no trouble agreeing that the pleasure gained from unlocking a difficult line of poetry — whether a Shakespeare sonnet or a sloka from the Gita — hits us in a deeper spot than a Bollywood item number.

That’s why I was surprised when, at a reception event after the show, I was approached by a number of Chennai’s most sophisticated rasikas and asked (always with exquisite politeness): ‘So what was it about?’ After the third or fourth time, I began to respond with a question of my own: Why such a hunger for literal meaning? It seemed strange to me, since I consider an understanding of the abstract to be deep in the Indian psyche.

Here in Chennai the complex kolam patterns to be found on every doorstep are abstract renderings of nature, harmony, energy fields. The dance-theatre form of Bharatanatyam presents long sequences of Nritta movement – abstract motion, with no narrative attached. And yet a skilled performer still manages to express profound emotion through Aangika abhinaya, the use of the body alone. So here, I reflected, is a paradox: India embraces and celebrates abstraction — indeed worships it (think lingam) — and yet many educated Indians come away somewhat puzzled when confronted by what might be loosely termed more Western expressions of abstraction.

Indeed, a rasika who had attended our dress rehearsal, and had left (I presume) somewhat mystified, suggested that a few words before the show about the plot and symbolism might help to open up the more obscure aspects of the drama.

I scribbled down some ideas and ventured backstage to Preeti as she was putting on her make-up. “No way,” I was told, forcefully. This kind of spoon-feeding would be against all the principles of art that have evolved over the last 100 years.

So what exactly are these principles? It was Vassily Kandinsky who first did away entirely with representational subject matter in his exquisite ‘Improvisations and Compositions of 1910.’ After this, the change was swift.

Painters stopped trying to do the job of representing other things (after all, the new science of photography was more than equal to this task) and began a different quest: to create things in themselves. Paintings quickly came to be about the process of painting, or the nature of paint. Music was about the notes. Sculpture, in turn, was about the stone, or the bronze.

E.H.Gombrich describes the sculptor Henry Moore as letting things appear trying to find out what the stone wanted. The artist is a now a liberator and a cultivator, nurturing and allowing a thing — the work itself — to come into being.

Any work produced in this manner cannot have meaning without active participation from the viewer.

The viewer (or reader or listener, since these principles apply to art in any form) is drawn into the process of creation. If you don’t want to participate, you can always leave (and indeed, a number of people chose to do just this during our performance, rather rudely allowing the doors to bang behind them as they went). It’s not easy. We are groping here for what it means to be a human being.

Human life, much of it, is played out beyond the surface, beyond the reach of purposeful thought. It is on these planes, unseen by us and unknown, that we are defined as human beings.

Images that are too easily recognisable create mental barriers to the magical process of accessing this Sublime mode (to re-use Shelley’s word). With too much literal meaning in the way, we can become caught up in the superficial, insignificant signifiers. These are the small meanings that belong to the everyday plane, not the exalted one. Art, if it’s good enough, can get you there. It’s certainly not for me to judge whether ‘The Absent Lover’ has this alchemical power or not. But art appreciation is a two-way deal. If you don’t want to participate, then I suggest you reconsider. And if you really don’t want to then please don’t let the door bang shut behind you as you leave.

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