ART
`Schizophreniart'
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Photography simulates painting, cinema uses still photography, painting permeates film, e-mail messages turn visual, and Beethoven is seen (in collage and sculpture) and not heard. APARNA RAMAN revisits the multiple personality syndrome in art.
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IT'S a film where the very first scene opens in a riot of colour. Within a few minutes, a dramatic use of time lapse photography takes you back a few decades. You sit up, with sensibilities on high alert. You're thinking: the art direction is brilliant, the screen is like a painter's canvas and no, this can't be a movie — it must be a still life painting or mural. Are you hallucinating? You're watching "Frida": a film about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (Mrs. Diego Rivera). "Frida" is surreal and hypnotic precisely for this ambiguity.
In those three odd hours, I alternated between quiet introspection (the feeling one has in an art gallery) and dramatic participation (the vicarious experience of watching cinema). And that's not all. Elsewhere in the film, when we actually see Kahlo's paintings, live people mutate into the canvas and blood and teardrops trickle down the painted faces. It was incredible. The animate and the inanimate, human and objects and finally cinema and painting had been exquisitely juxtaposed for superb equivocal effect. I searched the titles for Visual Styling. The credits mentioned a Julie Taymor.
But why the nagging sense of déjà vu? What made the art direction seem so familiar? The link wasn't to another film, but interestingly an opera — Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. I remembered the exquisitely created sets of manors and romantic landscapes at the Dorothy Chandler pavilion in Los Angeles. But even as the drama unfolded through full-throated altos and sopranos, the total illusionary effect was that of a painting. And after seeing "Frida", when I learned that Taymor had also been an art director on stage with Broadway's Lion King, the association between the film, the opera and painting, that seemed random at first, now made sense. In fact, it was uncanny.
Last week however, while watching a Japanese film "After Life", I learned that director Kore-ega had called upon another art form for effect: Still Photography. This was going to be interesting. "After Life" is a film about the need to preserve memories. In the film, a number of dead people of varying ages are asked to recollect a favourite memory from their lifetime. Here, Kore-ega employs a remarkable device. He hired still-life photographer Sukita Masayoshi to shoot the sequences where people recall their memories, telling us in a rather imaginative way (albeit in a film) that preserving memories is something photographs do best.
A schizophrenic feature in art that I find riveting, is the way each artiste inter-plays fact with fiction in his or her own inimitable way. In "After Life", Kore-ega used real people remembering actual events and observed how even as people reminisced, they fictionalised their recollections, because time had since changed their emotions and the way they now understood and related to their experiences. I read an interview where the director described it as a collision of "truths" (the experiences of characters) and "fiction" (the recreation of those experiences).
They were prophetic words, I'd heard over a year ago from American photographer George Woodman in his exhibit titled "Truths and Fiction" (at Amethyst, Chennai). Nothing thrills quite as much as deviance and sure enough, Woodman's work was a terrific instance of photographic license. In conversation with him at The Asian College of Journalism, he explained his attempt to "write fiction in photography". His first manipulation of truth was in not treating a photograph merely as a replica of what stood in front of a camera. Instead, he placed the photograph in the context of a setting along with other objects, elements of nature, people, sculpture, thereby elevating the photograph to the status of a subject of art. In juxtaposing a photograph with other elements, Woodman brought together different time spans, historical and spatial contexts and art forms for a totally surreal effect. This fragmented picture was then photographed as one entity (a photograph of a photograph). So by a clever photographic manipulation, (unlike the case of a painting), Woodman ensured, "the seams didn't show".
In this journey of multiple layers, the next stop is Louise Bourgeois's sculpture at the Tate Modern, London. Catching my attention on entering the gallery, was the sculpture of a formidable giant spider with the incongruous title "Maman". Under the belly of the Spider were eggs of marble. It was a poignant co-existence of vulnerability and venom. The Spider could be a protective mother to some, yet a dangerous adversary to others. I proceeded to climb three steel towers ominously named, "I do", "I undo" and "I redo". At the top of each tower were giant swivel mirrors to reflect the encounters between the participant and the architecture, the viewing public and the towers. There was perception pitted against reality, object vis-a-vis reflection and again, fact versus fiction.
The paradoxes didn't end there. Fascinating, if somewhat Kafkaesque, was the sculpture of cooking aids. It was Maman in reverse: a sinister persona of domesticity.
Much has been said of Bourgeois' childhood anxieties influencing her art.
Did she discover that home and hell could co-exist? After all, must the name Maman necessarily conjure imagery of love and care? Just the way a kitchen needn't always be inviting. There is no one definition for anything. And reality is itself subject to interpretation. Which brings me next to Kishore Chatterjee.
If a photograph needn't be true to the original, and kitchens aren't always nurturing, then an exhibit on Beethoven needn't be about the composer and far less his music. Western classical music enthusiast, Kishore Chatterjee's "Beethoven: Faces and Facets" seemed an expression so intensely personal that the exhibit (Calcutta's Gallery la Mere) was more Kishore than Beethoven. That the portraits of Beethoven did not bear much likeness to the composer could be deemed a deliberate transgression. Instead, we saw the composer through Kishore Chatterjee's metaphors, represented in sculpture, collage, paintings and drawings. Chatterjee's creations were inspired by Beethoven's compositions.
Kishore Chatterjee hadn't only juxtaposed visual expressions and auditory stimuli, but defied all boundaries of time, period, race, culture, language and art forms. Kishore's inspiration, Beethoven, co-existed with Beethoven's inspiration, Napoleon. Bengali poetry held its own with western classical compositions of the masters. Even history turned anachronistic: there were postcards written to the composers. And finally, Kishore's inclusion of his grandmother in his Beethoven exhibit was by no means a delusion of grandeur. It was a touching testimony to how personal and true his experiences with Beethoven were to himself, however fictionalised they may seem to a viewer.
Thematically, existential dilemmas have long been a favourite with artists.
While many have traditionally gone back to the drawing board, pondering over "to be or not to be", I recall graphic designer Rathna Ramanathan going online with Virtual Faces (a British Council, Chennai, presentation). Local art enthusiasts will remember her series of typographic portraits interpreting the subconscious working of the mind of the e-mail writer, based on his/her e-mail message. A lyrically inclined writer was graphically projected as a sheet of music with her message running across like notes.
While a guy who believed he was cool while actually being old fashioned was turned into a decadent old floppy. Other hapless souls had been brushed-stroked into dictionaries, a postage stamp, graffiti on a wall, a crossword puzzle, a newspaper, etc. It was a common platform for electronic media, painting and typography and the effect of this mind-altering media mix was transcendental.
E-mails provide instant communication and yet distance the sender because they're so impersonal. Seeking to create identity where there's anonymity, Rathna's portraits attempted to penetrate that impersonal defence, where people hide behind words, believing they're not a give-away. I would say that Virtual Faces was sublimely effective at peeling away the masks that people wear online.
We live in times where nothing is what it seems. Thanks to the deep dark world of the Internet, even reality has to be qualified — Virtual or otherwise. The Space is a frightening black hole that breeds faceless, nameless entities. Men masquerade as women. The middle-aged assume the persona of teenagers. Bored housewives enact their own charades. The result: crimes that aren't really crimes, deceit that isn't really deceit. What is real in that case? It's an equivocal world and as long as art imitates life, viewers will relive this ambiguity on canvas. There, it will be celebrated as artistic truths and fiction, and like Bourgeois' Spider, will both repel and endear. As Macbeth's witches once said, "Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair".
And that's a final paradox — of Life and therefore, Art.
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