The Collage of Confusion, The Travelogue of Trivialities, The Montage of Murk
if we knew the point-Amitava-exhibition review
One day, a child scribbled something on the back page of his notebook with a dark pencil. Maybe just banal lines. Or some tottered triangles. The other day, bored in class, he doodled a figure on it. Possibly human-like. Or dented circles. On the third day, while he was crossing over the same paper, a classmate of his teased him and intensely plastered some random color, supposedly red, all over it. Quite stifled as he must be, his hand discharged all the black colors in the bucket over there on the paper. One, two, or perhaps three pieces of paper have been wasted. It must be torn apart from the notebook now. It must be crumpled up and put down beneath the table now. It must be shunned away from the sight.
But consider. Assume. For a moment. What if his parents hang it over the wall, glass frame installed? Leave it. But what if one spotted it—that very plastered paper, encased in an excessively transparent glass, irresistibly clung over the quiet, unadorned wall in an art exhibition? Pondering? Well, I have been. Since then, I have seen it in Kiran Nadar Museum Art, New Delhi, this month.
In a fleeting glance over many of these exhibited artworks, I smell someone playing with my senses by placing them in a museum. The agenda in my mind was quite cliché while visiting here. I am going to observe art, simply. But what I hear is the sound of pencils doodling over the paper. What I see is Roobina Karode, curator of the exhibition and director of the museum has framed and plunged these doodlings sunk in black all over the wall.
Extremely abstract these artworks seem as I gorge them. More gorging pops up the highly geometrical quality of these. They are messed up with points and lines; lines hang at different angles, and then triangles and then circles and then colors—black and white—scattered on canvas, having a tango in various instilled frames activating architecture of its own—a deranged creation. Other forms carry images of nature—shade yellow, gray, violet, brown, blue—as the very artist wishes to, not as we so used to see—shade green—in retrospect.
The exhibition stretches itself and spurs us towards another form of artwork—various collages we observe, collections of trivial objects—postcards, plane tickets, safety pins, quotes, palm leaves, tissue paper, metro tickets, museum passes, etc.—stitched in one frame erecting ambiguous images; sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes nothing relegates us into the realm of chaos. It hardly intends to be meaningful for which it is there, for which we are here. It spins confusion. It screeches stress. It recalls and reconciles later then, though. Simply, “If We Knew the Point"—the exhibition invites us to never know the point.
The very exhibition, If We Knew the Point, drizzled in existential unease is the complete oeuvre of Amitava Das, Shimla, born in 1947, a mix-media visual artist. The artwork show was launched this July and is going to end at the end of September. It seems that just to make the viewers “know the point,” the exhibition extends itself longer than usual. Jokes apart, If We Knew the Point, the very phrase, an eponymous title of a poem is lifted from Roberto Juarróz’s work, an Argentine poet whom Amitava is quite fond of. Many verses of the poem inspired him to create his own work, as we find these verses planted there on the wall. With a collection of words enjoined together. Just to instruct the visual makeup of the gazer. One wanders from catalog to catalog. Chasing the verses of poems.
The name of the exhibition informs the viewing experiences, “if” having a marked effect here. If one has a cursory look over his work, it doesn’t make sense, as any existential work—whether art or literature—doesn't. It's indifferent. It eludes our taste. It scuttles away. If one observes them closely, color loses its significance. It’s too vague, inducing nothing but an extreme alienation for the observer. At times, if one observes a collage, it appears as taking a form, having a movement, and other times it stagnates, having just one impetus to urge the viewer to look away, far from where it positions itself.
It seems he leaves his work in between, has a coffee, and forgets altogether that he is on the verge of making something he insists on calling art. But later, as mood instructs, he calls it art, in its weakling stage. He terms it art because he thinks; he thinks it repetitively because others made him think so. After all, the curator thinks too—he is an artist. No matter how hard existentialists attempt to have faith in their creation, their mind dupes them to think of it as a mirage dispatched over the paper. Though quite deliberately, they tend to be there.
Consider this example.[1] He made a drawing. Then he hid them with tissue paper. Again, he uses some ink or color. He pasted a layer there upon it. Layer by layer, he builds an image. The real thing is now hidden. One has no idea what it is. “You shall remain hidden" is his motto. He proceeds on the path of the Greek philosopher, Epicurean. Neither of his works is fully formed—it’s still unresolved, unfinished, still in process, eagerly waiting for the viewer to complete it. Simply put, he expects its completion from us, and in reverse, we are puzzled about whether he is an artist.
As his drawing dances in dots, one may reckon him as a flagbearer of pointillism. As his creation so casually castrates the metanarrative of having a point or making a point, one might catcall him a post-modernist. Whatever one labels him, it mustn’t matter much. He is here to muddle us deliberately, that’s for sure. He is here to mortify us unintentionally, that must be realized. His work mucked us into a mood where we wish to rename the exhibition. And we renamed it—The Collage of Confusion, The Travelogue of Trivialities, The Montage of Murk.
[1]Amitava's interview [29:22-30:03]
Artworks of Amitava in Google Drive. Pardon me for bad photography. It was not intended to be uploaded.