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Exhibition

Expressions of the life-urge: The Magician.

Umi’s works are curious: they are neither created in accordance with formal considerations of production and presentation, nor bound by these considerations; they render formal critical categories inadequate, and possibly force the critic to resort to a language of simplistic binaries such as good/ bad, art/ non-art or feminist art/ feminine art etc. On the other hand, one could re-order these categories and find, with just a little juggling and rearrangement, a framework and a vocabulary for the peculiarities of the works in “Boundless Spirit”.

As I write this, I am reminded of “Last Wave”, that little-known Peter Weir film (not the most esoteric of his films), which struggles heroically to craft a verbal and visual language to tool viewers to deal with the complex system of meaning-making within an urban aboriginal group. Interactions between the aborigines — in particular their shaman — and the white lawyer show viewers how the white man, and they, must bend, rearrange and reorder their system of assigning meaning in order to understand the aborigines’. Bedi’s works, similarly, are in a language that can only “speak” to a viewer willing, and able, to enter into a world where meanings come from sources that have to be tracked down.

Even if one did not learn of Ms. Bedi’s four-year long struggle with a life-threatening illness, it would not be difficult to guess at the ritual-cathartic nature of the works in “Boundless Spirit”; there are several hints for the re-viewer.

Take the nudity — all the men and women in Umi’s canvasses are naked, but not one conforms to the familiar functions of the nude: they do not, in old-world, western mode flaunt femaleness or assert maleness; they do not attempt a pious direction to transcend the “impure” body, nor do they, in feminist mode, try to prompt female viewers to claim their own gazes rather than gaze as men do. Instead, these bodies suggest that the witnessing gaze needs to recognise that the nakedness of the bodies is incidental and that the picture’s focus is on the gathering of the bodies, their participation in a ceremony of sharing, in what appears to be a rite that understands and ritually passes over from suffering. Umi’s (personal) gloss on the works in “Boundless Spirit”, almost all done during the four years of her ailment, makes it clear that this body of work (pun incidental!) has the nature of a (secular?) ritual of catharsis. Umi spoke of how illness made it impossible to “live on the surface” and of how the physical act of painting took on the nature of a ritual to entice her own spirit out from the freeze of malady.

The watercolour titled “Magician” — which, Umi explained, she fought herself to begin at a time when almost submerged by a dreadful lack of meaning — is almost an annotation of this very thought. “Magician” — perhaps the show’s best piece — depicts a woman, into whose naked, colourless, reclining, apathetic, almost comatose body, colour begins to rise from the touch of a magician whose transparent body in turn mirrors the colours of the objects around him. “Magician” is remarkable conceptually as well as technically; the distinctive colours of the objects in the room contrast with the body’s absence of colour and function as a perfect objective correlative for what the body needs in order to be alive; the colours throb with secret significance and have been brushed on with the utmost delicacy to show the transforming, healing illusion of the magic.

Unlike “Magician”, which is one of a handful of smaller water colours, most of the works in “Boundless Spirit” are either pastels or oils and much larger; the artist spoke of choosing large canvasses/paper for these works because they were made during periods of breakthrough, with the indomitable life-urge fountaining out of the shell of sickness and lethargy. Umi said that while doing these works, she was “bonding into” the painting as well as experiencing a strong prompting to make the work communicate the upward surge of the spirit freeing itself from the horizontal’s axis of personal cares and loss of colour, to soar through the vertical trajectory out into a communion of human variety and colour. “I feel that with this communicating, what I am trying to make the viewer see is my assertion of the connectedness of human experience and the connectedness of human experiencing with cosmic life”.

It is impossible to appreciate/ appraise Umi Bedi’s works with the traditional critical tools for formal art criticism because she pays little or no heed to the schools, styles, conventions or taboos of art, doing instead what is necessary to tell the story she wants told. And the stories of her works are personal stories; stories that must be voiced — and, witnessed — in order that the artist may herself complete the ritual catharsis and move on; move forward, ahead and upwards.

An exhibition such as “Boundless Spirit”, which is about so much more than art, without which the art itself remains unqualified, makes one want to re-evaluate many things: the parameters by which a definition of art becomes “acceptable”; the “value” of artworks; the venues where artworks take on added signification in order to gain that value; the role of draughtsmanship and much more.

Today’s art world demands that the intelligent viewer resist being told how to view art, as well as what art to view where; for, as artist and (art) writer Mira Schor pointed out many years ago “… the art world is increasingly involved with emulating the celebrity structure of the broader cultural world, including popular mass media entertainment, and this only further encourages the notion of the ‘great artist’, whether it is a woman or a man”.

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