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Dialogues on representation
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A recent exhibition of wood and bell-metal sculptures by craftspersons from Kondagaon, Bastar — and facilitated by Navjot, the installation artist — was boldly presented as contemporary art at Mumbai's Sakshi art gallery. NANCY ADAJANIA looks at what `Self-Exploration' was all about.
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'Self as an Artist'. Shakila Baghel, bell-metal, 2001.
A CONDESCENDING viewer swept her gaze over a recent exhibition of wood and bell-metal sculptures by craftspersons from Kondagaon, Bastar, boldly presented as contemporary art rather than as traditional craft at Mumbai's Sakshi art gallery. She turned to Navjot (the noted installation artist who facilitated this show and has been collaborating with her Kondagaon colleagues as part of an ongoing project) and said: "They're copying your work!"
Navjot replied, "But my own work takes from adivasi, Mayan and African sources." In the silence that followed, the viewer made a hasty exit.
Titled `Self-Exploration', this exhibition marks the current stage of a process of dialogue and collaboration during which Navjot has worked with Anita Baghel, Punivati, Shabnam, Lata Baghel, Gangadevi, Shantibai, Shakila Baghel and Shanti Nag. The group also includes two male artists, Ghessuram and Rajkumar, who have earlier exhibited with Shantibai and Navjot.
Some metropolitan Indian artists use craftspersons to fabricate their works, but evade the concomitant issues of `cooperation' and `collaboration'. Navjot, in sharp contrast, thinks it her duty to articulate the sociology of collaborative art-making and its public reception. Her concerns stem from a lifelong preoccupation with art as political intervention. In considering Navjot's public art projects over the past 30 years, we find both the minefields and the oases produced by the crossing of art history and art practice.
Navjot's perspective was shaped by her Marxist commitment. Orthodox Marxism may not have perceived art and activism as equal sisters-in-arms, but it set a premium on accountability to public causes. In the 1970s, against the backdrop of students', workers' and peasants' struggles, Navjot became active in a leftist youth organisation, the Progressive Youth Movement (PROYOM), together with many writers, journalists and activists. Through PROYOM, she and her husband, the artist Altaf, sought "alternative public spaces" where art could be made "available to wider audiences". To this end, she painted posters and organised exhibitions at schools and in labour camps.
On further probing, Navjot concedes that such solidarities were "event-based" and that a "gap" existed between the artists and the activists. Moreover, the workers could not afford even reasonably priced prints by socially conscious artists, which were bought, instead, by academics or fellow artists. Artists of Navjot's orientation were too caught up with the problem of the representation of the working class by the privileged. This theoretical debate on class overshadowed the pragmatics of formulating new artistic strategies of protest, which would transcend the formulaic option of the poster. It strikes me as sad that Left-wing artists of that time could not conceive of non-monetary forms of exchange. Unwittingly, they fell into the same trap of commodity-fetishism they had opposed. After all, a painting or print sold to a worker still remains a commodity.
Navjot's next theatre of engagement was her interaction with women activists in the 1980s. Feminism had been viewed as a distraction by the orthodox Marxism in which Navjot had been politicised, but her reading of feminist theory and dialogue with the proletariat of gender enriched her practice. The 1990s were a turning point: the nascent practice of Indian installation art gave her the freedom to explore issues of artistic collaboration and alter the conventional relationship between art-work and viewer. Installation art carried the potential for collaboration and democratisation, but our artists were hampered by their artist-as-genius baggage. They did not acknowledge the co-creators of their works adequately, and subscribed to a curious caste system: craftspersons were left virtually unnamed, technicians were mentioned in the fine print; only vocalists and film-makers were treated as equal participants. Recalling the projects in which she had worked with computer technicians, carpenters or electricians, in the early 1990s, Navjot says: "The collective outcome of these projects was credited to `us' artists alone."
By the late 1990s, the various strands of Navjot's life, as artist and activist, began to interweave. The urban bias of her early Marxism slowly gave away to an empathy with rural realities. She imbibed the politics of the arts/crafts debate initiated by the artist and pioneering ideologue J. Swaminathan and the scholar Jyotindra Jain. And though the city has been her locus for three decades, she had also been taking an interest in the Bastar craftspersons who made their annual exhibition-and-sale pilgrimage to Mumbai. She was especially impressed by the work of Jaidev Baghel, the tribal artist who envisioned and built Shilpi Gram in the 1980s, an institute where local artists could interact with Indian and overseas artists. A grant, given by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) in 1997, allowed Navjot to work with the craftspersons at Shilpi Gram; of course, she was concerned with "problematising" the idea of collaboration, not celebrating it. In fact, the project began by "redefining the terminology of art/craft and artist/craftsperson in the context of Art History, questioning the misconception that adivasi art is created by groups rather than by individuals ... ."
Pilla Gudi at Kusma... of wood, mirrors, mud and terracotta tiles, 2000, designed by Rajkumar and built collectively.
While on a tour in Bastar, Navjot and her colleagues conducted an art workshop for local schoolchildren. Affected by the recent drought, the children made an installation, `Chawal ki Kahani (Story of Rice'), stitching gunny-bags into a tent. Using leftover wool and sequins, the students embroidered their own trademarks over the ones printed on the sacks, superscribing the logos of "Kohinoor" and "Lakshmi Mills" with farm implements. This intervention demonstrates that art can be made of humble, inexpensive materials; that it can serve other purposes than the ritualistic or commercial; that it can become a political tool to decode the pedagogic systems of State-sponsored education, which robs tribal children of their local histories and locks them out of their own environment.
Such encounters strengthened the studio practice of Navjot's colleagues, who were slowly introducing local realities into their sculptures and drawings, not just repeating the stock-in-trade of `tribal' art. For instance, Shantibai made wooden pillars depicting her life-story. While such pillars traditionally serve as authorised biographies, testimony of wealth and honour, she subverts their function by giving them a proletarian ancestry of class and gender. Such experiments allow Navjot to assert confidently that collaboration "is a matter of choice and strategy, when each one is able to question one's own practice and when the process does not lead one to abandon independent thinking".
Navjot's colleagues have also designed and made delightful life-size toy sculptures for balwadis (play centres), which urban schools would envy. These toys led to another idea: the creation, not of objects, but of spaces. The Pilla Gudis, temples for children designed by Shantibai, Rajkumar, Gessuram and Navjot, became extra-curricular spaces where children could interact with one other, and with visiting musicians and artists. Rajkumar designed one at Kusma in 2000: a structure based on the wooden temple form, without the omnipresent divinities, it has mirrors placed between the rafters. The children have only to look up, to amuse themselves with their own multiple reflections. Apart from the sheer pleasure it provides, this structure is, metaphorically, a way of opening oneself to unexpected stimuli while retaining one's cultural balance.
Under a two-year International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) grant, Navjot has facilitated site-oriented projects and bell-metal sculpture workshops for women artists. With the help of her colleagues, she has redesigned existing public utility spaces. Addressing the unhygienic conditions of hand-pump sites in an economical, elegant and organic manner, she has created the parapet of a well around each pump to shield it from garbage and an outflow for excess water to drain into a nearby field. The design takes special note of women's needs, including a step where the pot can be placed before being hauled head-high.
Inspired by Shantibai's work, many of the women artists, who had been assisting male artists, began to explore the representation of their bodies in a manner autonomous of the `shaadi-shringar' formula. They are coming to terms with a new selfhood that arises from understanding their place in relation to family and society. Visiting the exhibition, I was happy to experience the consistent struggle of these women artists, who had gradually stripped the represented female body of its ornaments and rendered inscrutable lesions upon it, an undeniable mark of the rural contemporary.
`Self-Exploration' conducts several, simultaneous dialogues on representation. These artists have travelled to Ajanta and Ellora, seen reproductions of works by metropolitan artists like Mrinalini Mukherjee and Nalini Malani. Shakila Baghel's archetypal mother figure nursing a child is a response to Navjot's powerful sculptures, but her reclining couple is lyrically composed, its everyday intimacy quite unlike Navjot's stoic figuration. Lata Baghel's box sculpture, although closer to Jaidev in its decorative intent, is innovative in theme; it carries images of the gurumayis, traditional women storytellers. Shanti Nag's evocative `Biser Chinna' takes the subject of men and women walking in two queues towards a post-funeral purification at the river, but escapes ethnography to assume the gravitas of ritual theatre.
We kneel to view these sculptures, which are placed well below the eye level demanded by gallery convention. Although these women do not wish to make pedestals for their works, their free-standing figures invite the viewer to genuflect before them. A good way to break down hierarchies - but how free can they stand, given the inconstancy of progressive funding and radical intervention? They have our best wishes, these women artists who have struggled to stand free and burnt into themselves the virtue of poise.
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