Director Madhusudhnan delves deep into his ideologies for Granite Lamp and Mirror. By Uma Nair
In the summer of 2009 when his film Bioscope released award-winning film director and artist KM Madhusudhnan said, “Paintings have an eye to cinema.” Nine years hence his Granite Lamp and Mirror at Vadehra’s in Delhi stuns art aficionados. With a practice that revolves around India’s film history, colonial period and contemporary war politics the rooms at the gallery morph into multiple narratives. The director uses cinema as an archive and its space as a repository of memory.
Colonial narratives
He weaves narrative and non-linear storytelling to probe India’s multiple histories. With Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, Goya’s ghouls, Kerala’s darkened tableaus of Marxist and Maoist legacies, this show is the stuff of cinematic allegories and in the hands of this artist, history refuses to die. The canvasses run like cinematic essays, replete with elements and surreal strands.
Marx Archive deals with temporal ruins, an incremental build up of schisms, the Lenin headgear is worn by a dhoti-clad bulbous bellied individual who poses in front of the camera. “Identities don’t matter, only one’s affiliation to Communist manifestoes mattered in those days,” says he. “It is the aftermath of what happens to society amidst the beliefs of idealogues,” he adds The stealth of death writ large, Lenin becomes a recurring symbol.
Mediatic symbols
In Emotion Pictures it is the medium of communication that is so integral it becomes the message of iconoclastic imagery replete with objects and loud speakers. “Everything I create is born of history, but it is also a statement against practices, against the many accepted norms in society’s social structures,” says he. “Granite Stone and Mirror is an engagement with questions of image-making and identity. I look at it through the lens of politics,” affirms the artist. “My title is born from Sri Narayana Guru’s revolutionary socio-religious interventions in the public realm. My works are a conversation with and mirroring of Narayana Guru’s Atmopadesa Satakam or One Hundred Verses on Self-Instruction,” he adds.
Two dramatic series come to the fore, the first is The Archaeology of Cinema and the second the Hunters in the Desert series. “When I create my series its about the dialectics of philosophies,” says Madhusudhnan. “I create images that point to the reality that lies within certain cultures (in this case Kerala), socio cultural practices and so my art develops from systems of meaning analogous to language.”
In the Archaeology of Cinema series there is one triptych that has three female faces, striking portraits with an aura of romance and beauty, evoking Ravi Varma. But it is Hunters in the Desert series created as three light boxes that becomes compelling for its flavour of colonial legacies and the inimitable entry of Vasco da Gama to Kerala. The ship, the crown and the image of Vasco da Gama form a compelling series of compositional characters that are born out of the artist’s voracious reading habits. His elements are not conventionally beautiful, but they are stirring to a point of contemplative articulation, as they enhance artistic communication by the contrasts they provide.
Materials
“Materials are a natural part of my evolution,” says the artist. In the Hunters in the Desert series his use of charcoal, ink, and sepia wash all coalesce to form a spectral moment against the goat skin that is tied with threads to the light box frame. “You could think of lamb slaughter, you could think of the shadows of the past in the smudged shadings, everything is about the chapter of history in Kerala that was shaped because of the odysseys,” says the artist. “There was a lighthouse near my home on the beach in Alleppey and it always created imagery for the imagination, from hoary to ghoul-like images I was always preoccupied with the fantasies that it bore out in my recesses. In the past, I have always used charcoal to enhance the narrative that I want to present. Darkness of charcoal has multiple purposes because it offers so many meanings,” he says.
“For me art is an engagement with age-old traditions and cultural identities, so I used the art of Tholpavakoothu or shadow puppetry in Kerala, adapting the technique to create perforated goat-skin canvases with charcoal and ink to create the Lightbox series. I used light as a medium because it has become a touchstone in philosophy for me. Starkness and darkness both become allies in my narrative because I am constantly searching for metaphors that run through time. So the ephemeral and the ethereal both become my allies,” he adds.
His piece de resistance is Archaeology of Cinema, a large charcoal on paper that fashions a corpse with a single wing. He restrains charcoal, plays with its nuances to create a macabre world in which the organs spill out but they are translated into objects and the eagle’s wing on top of the corpse with two nails, a metaphor for freedom in the darkness of the night. Techniques surface as articulations of antithetical discourse, intriguing how he mutes the scratching and stroking to create corollaries that are skeletal and tactile but shorn of flesh. And the drapes of the corpse have that Renaissance period air of theatrics.
Satires of circumstance
When asked if he was actually dealing with satires of circumstance he smiles and says, “My works become a summation of experiences and fantasies and my reading habits, it’s more about delving into the ‘state of things’ as I like to question the ‘appearance of things’, even as it presents paradigm shifts from the enunciation of the voice to the visual and physical manifestations between artworks and the people who belong to the pages of history.”
His direct reference to Spanish artist Francisco Goya in the show points to his deeper understanding of the old masters. “Goya was an astute observer of the world and his art responded directly to the tumultuous events of his day, from liberations to the suppressions, to the horrors of war. I have been impressed by his inventiveness and political engagement and that is what I try to reflect in my works but in a modernist canon,” states Madhusudhnan as he gets ready to go back to Kerala, to film a cinematic narrative on the recent floods. The show at Vadehra’s is a testimony to the truth that art has to carry a message of canonical sublimity and literary fecundity; inspire and echo life’s profundities in untold ways.