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Magazine
ART
`You can't please all'
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In the past few weeks, the media does not seem to have generated any significant amount of column space to mark the passing away of Bhupen Khakhar, the `enfant terrible of Indian art'. In striking contrast has been the attitude of fellow artists who idolised him, says SADANAND MENON.
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"Janata Watch Repairing", 1972 ... the life-world of small-time professionals.
ONE could, perhaps, construct a memorial narrative around Bhupen Khakhar following his own derivative method of quoting the episodic, sequential, segmented pictorial format of multiple stories arranged around a central subject (like, for example, the "Life of Gandhi" or "Shaheed Bhagat Singh"), as we see in popular calendar and street art.
It is a kind of treatment that would bring a glimmer to Bhupen's eye, considering he revelled in the extravaganza of objects and images carefully distilled from the chaos, vulgarity and tawdriness of the world around him.
As noted Indian art historian and critic Geeta Kapur, who has written extensively on Khakhar, has said: "He painted the man without subjectivity, without face, without the privilege of revolutionary intent". And he would address this in a manner akin to the Bollywood slapstick with innocent insertions of the blasphemous, which would also double as surgical rip-offs on the airy pretensions of "high art" and its pedantic pundits.
Yet, one needs to pause to repair a damage. In the past few weeks, the whole of the Indian media put together does not seem to have generated even 10 columns of space to mark the passing away (on August 8) of Bhupen Khakhar, 69, for long considered the enfant terrible of Indian art. On hindsight, his works remain the clearest indicators of the emotional reasons behind the recent political mobilisations around religion and their — not spiritual — but sexual and violent underbelly.
"Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers", 1976.
The reason for the coyness of the mainstream media is not difficult to surmise. Besides consistently marginalising him as a "gay painter", the Indian media found it singularly difficult to engage with the sheer honesty with which he exposed middle and low middle class hypocrisy; specifically sexual hypocrisy.
Khakhar had provoked the ire of conservative sections in society when his autobiographical and self-confessional canvases, beginning with "You Can't Please All" (1981), celebrated homoerotic themes in extremely touching and, often, sardonic ways. His works were quickly dubbed "gay" and frequently proscribed by starchy officialdom (most notoriously at the National Gallery of Modern Art itself), though the paintings essentially dealt with the tenderness, the evanescence and the vulnerability of human sexuality.
It is interesting how Bhupen subverted/inverted the centuries of legitimised discourse around the nude female with its voyeuristic fetishising of elements of female anatomy by counter-posing the male body — usually elderly men, misshapen, decrepit, wrinkled, drooping at the shoulders and with flaccid organs. But this immediately humanised his subjects with a plausibility of frailness and pathos making Bhupen, in Geeta Kapur's words, "... the major dissenting figure of the postcolonial world, especially with regard to the problem of representation." Yet, we need to know why the media bypassed him.
The following true story might provide a clue. The chief editor's cabin in the New Delhi offices of The Economic Times has had the privilege of having a Khakhar canvas on the wall. Till a couple of months ago (when it was reportedly sold for a whopping price), at least four prominent editors of the paper have sat squeamishly, with their backs to "In a Boat" (1988), which depicts a group of men engaged in something akin to an excess of sexual narcissism and same-sex promiscuity against an ethereal backdrop of land, water and sky, a panoramic view of lurid beauty.
When I got on board as the arts editor of the paper, I suggested the editor sit facing this masterpiece for his inspiration. He virtually chewed my ears off and wanted me to device a way of getting the "damn thing" removed from the cabin. After several tries at making succeeding editors confront the painting (if not actually denounce it), I had to resort to commercial subterfuge. I quietly spread the word that in the international market, the painting was valued at around $75,000. Even an Economic Times editor can't sneeze at the idea of sharing space with an object worth some Rs. 25 lakhs (this was in the early 1990s). The only fall-out of this episode was that the management, also having got wind of the rumour, quickly embedded the canvas in an ugly plastic case.
In striking contrast to the media's fighting shy of Bhupen Khakhar has been the attitude of fellow artists who idolised him. Bhupen is easily the one Indian artist most painted and represented by other artists. The first in line is perhaps British painter Timothy Hyman's 1981 work "Bhupen Khakhar and Mister Vallabhbhai" and Vivan Sundaram's "People Come and Go" (also 1981), in both of which Bhupen occupies iconic space. The same year also saw Gulammohammed Sheikh's "Revolving Routes", celebrating Bhupen along with a cluster of other artists. Through the 1990s, it has been Atul Dodiya who has painted and quoted Bhupen in at least three of his works, including "Bollywood Buccaneer" (1994) and "Three Painters" (1996). In 2002, Amit Ambalal's "Brahma's Brahmand" comments laconically on Bhupen's "anatomical" paintings subsequent to his ill health. Seldom has a contemporary artist figured so prolifically in the canvases of his colleagues. The only other reference that comes to mind is the way beautiful Gala was adored in the works of the surrealists — Breton, Ernst, Eluard and Dali.
Basically it indicates the kind of influence Bhupen has wielded the past 25 years in the realms of modern Indian art. Indian artists have been radical. Some have been irreverent, some subversive and some confrontationist. But before Bhupen Khakhar arrived on the scene in mid-1960s and achieved acclaim for works like "Janata Watch Repairing" (1972) or "Man Eating Jalebee" (1974) or "Man With Bouquet of Plastic Flowers" (1975), there was virtually no artist who could make such effective use of narrative humour laced with critical irony and self-mocking satire.
At another level, Khakhar has been lauded for being among those rare artists who could successfully blend the canons of high art with the abandon, irreverence and fluidity of popular expression in calendar art or even the small-town romance represented in billboards, shop-signs and street side graffiti. His representations of the repressed, non-heroic individual at the heart of social life reflected for us the emotional crisis (or should one say canker?) in the middle classes who sublimate their sexual repression within the anonymous "mass-body" of the religious discourse, the satsang, the bhajan-mandali which, as we have witnessed the past decade-and-a-half, has been the precursor to a libidinal release of religion-inspired violence.
It is axiomatic that the more the media fails to read artists of the calibre of Bhupen Khakhar, the more they will miss an anticipatory reading of social and political trends. No artist has illustrated more clearly the proposition of Wilhelm Reich that the bedrock of rightwing ideology and fascism is sexual suppression culminating in organised mysticism, what he calls "the mystical contagion". Khakhar's canvases, teeming with the play of "devotion as perversion" and the concomitant ambiguity between "sin and salvation", have been sharp barometers of the highly disturbed mind of middle-class India that has the highest stakes in the Hindutva project.
Through 1999-2002, Bhupen Khakhar's battle with cancer, in the form of prolonged radiation therapy, and his own premonitions of death were to produce a series of "dark", phlegmatic paintings — of canvases with mutilated human faces with titles like "Beauty is Skin Deep Only" or "Bullet Shot in Head" or "Is It Flower?".
However, his last solo exhibition held at the Sarjan Gallery, near his home in Vadodara, in April this year, revealed a more philosophical, meditative and tranquil vision, inspired by a two-week workshop with other artist friends at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Buddhist motifs of inward-looking "avalokiteswaras" or a quiet "flight of the soul" populate these canvases, resplendent in luminous red and gold, marking a dramatic shift from his almost 40 years of quizzical interrogation of human frailties, while challenging the demands of sexual austerity.
Considerable interest was generated in 1995 when author Salman Rushdie gave him sittings for a portrait titled "The Moor". Rushdie was to celebrate Khakhar in The Moor's Last Sigh as "the Accountant" and hail him as "the present-day inheritor of Aurora's fallen mantle". The only other major sit-down portrait Khakhar wished to paint in the months before he passed away was of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa. Alas, his canvas was already overstretched.
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