Not all bad, some worse than bad

Her Suburban Dream (2009) by Huma
Mulji, at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features.

by Adrian Searle
The Guardian
2 February 2010

The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.

This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T ­Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier ­Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian ­superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.

A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition (read the review here). There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.

Heart-breaking, heart-lifting

An amazing self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, in words and pictures.

from The Economist

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Thames and Hudson; 2,500 pages; $600 and £325.

The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core. The first letter was written when Vincent, aged 19, was a trainee at The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, a firm of international art dealers. Like most of the letters, it was sent to his brother, Theo, then 15. The two remained close. Theo became an art dealer and Vincent’s main source of financial and emotional support.

Van Gogh is irascible, engaging, intelligent, touchy, high-minded, well read, rebellious and pigheaded. When he started dressing like a tramp he claimed it was, in part, to advertise his refusal to join polite, ie, hypocritical society. (Equally, it may have been because polite society was refusing to accept him.) He was often miserable, occasionally love-struck, almost always fiercely committed to something or other and sometimes mad.

Art and literature were his constant companions. He wrote often about what he was reading and seeing. His concern was never a book’s place in the canon or a painting’s in art history. He judged a work on what it communicated, and how. From Antwerp he wrote that the religious paintings of Rubens are “theatrical…But what he can do is paint a queen, a statesman, well analysed, just as they are.” He wrote beautifully about landscapes and peasants. In time, he gave a vivid, perhaps unequalled, account of an artist making art.

He set off at 16, a seemingly conventional young man, to make his way as a dealer first in The Hague and then, via Paris, in London. There, a prickly instability, characteristic of his childhood, re-emerged, perhaps brought on by a rebuff from his landlady’s daughter. He lost the job he had had for seven years. Other failures followed, as a preacher and a teacher.

His religious fanaticism grew. Indeed, the letters offer a rare look at obsession from the inside. His pursuit of a young widow was so unrelenting he would be called a stalker today. But to him, her repetition of “No, nay, never!” was “a piece of ice that I press to my heart to thaw.”

When he was 26 his fixation became art. By then he was a penniless, eccentric loner. This coincides with a year-long break in the correspondence. He had fallen out with Theo following a “discussion” about his future. When the letters resume, Vincent refers to himself as a prisoner, a caged bird. “I know I could be quite a different man!” he writes. “There’s something within me, so what is it!” Two months later he bent himself to the study of drawing and painting as others would bend to the plough. It was as if he had to labour, and metaphorically sweat, before his genius could, or was allowed to, emerge. Five years later, in the spring of 1885, came “The Potato Eaters”. Movingly, triumphantly, van Gogh had broken through.

After two years in Paris, living with Theo (only nine letters; no images), Vincent moved to Arles in 1888. Colour now floods the pages. This was the beginning of the legendary period of prodigious, radiant creativity. Yes, he cut off his ear. He also painted nearly 200 pictures, among them “The Night Café” and “The Yellow House”.

In 1889, after a series of crack-ups (in reaction to Theo’s marriage or perhaps just too much absinthe?), he spent a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The work continued to pour out (about 150 paintings). Sunflowers and irises but also “Starry Night”, in which viewer and artist are pulled up over the rooftops, and tumble round and round across the dark sky.

The very last letter reproduced, addressed to Theo but unfinished, was written on July 23rd 1890. He was staying in Auvers-sur-Oise, not far from Paris where Theo lived with his wife and child. The note was found in Vincent’s pocket after he shot himself. He died, aged 37, on July 27th.

Fifteen years were devoted to this publication. The Dutch, English and French editions are the joint project of the Huygens Institute and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Letters and illustrations fill five books; the sixth has commentaries, maps and indexes. It is all accessible, free, at www.vangoghletters.org (the site provides a valuable concordance). There is also a free iPod app, “Yours, Vincent”.

This is not the first attempt to publish the complete letters but it is the best. There were editions in 1914; an expanded version appeared in English in 1958; 20 newly discovered letters were added for the 1990 Dutch centenary edition. Now the letters have been retranslated, comprehensively annotated and there are 20 new items.

But what really sets this edition apart from, and above, all others are the illustrations. Sketches are embedded in many of van Gogh’s letters; the drawings and “scratches” he sometimes tucked into envelopes before posting are reproduced. So are thumbnail illustrations of every work the artist mentions (whether by himself or by others) plus larger reproductions of paintings based on these letter sketches.

The Van Gogh Museum is marking the publication of the letters by rehanging its permanent collection and displaying 100 letters. (“Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” closes on January 3rd.) On January 23rd a different exhibition opens at London’s Royal Academy: “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters”. More than 60 paintings and 35 drawings will come from across the world, closely related to the 40 letters that will be shown.

The publication of the six volumes is cause for celebration. To have all the artist’s words together with all those images is like being given a pair of super-special 3D spectacles. The resulting self-portrait has a depth that would not exist were this a collection only of images or only of words. This could be the best autobiography of an artist yet to appear anywhere.

Beauty and beast in the drawing room

The Economist

His monumental public sculptures have been seen by tens of millions of people from Chicago to Tel Aviv. In London alone, the 4m or so who visited Tate Modern in 2002 could not have missed his dark red, 500-foot-long (152-metre) PVC-covered “Marsyas” which soared across the Turbine Hall. That piece worked so well, the space might have been created especially for it, rather than the other way around. “I like the idea a lot that you go somewhere to see something that has a particular relevance to a particular place,” said Anish Kapoor. But he quickly added: “A good work of art should be able to stand on its own.”

In the exhibition that has just opened at London’s Royal Academy, and runs until December 11th, about half the works, many of them huge, were created with its gracefully proportioned rooms in mind. Are they, in the event, relevant to their setting? Not often. But some, such as the fine mirror sculptures, are certainly enhanced by it: seeing the gallery’s gilding and skylight reflected upside-down in these pieces adds to their enjoyment. Others are splendidly positioned—and one of them, “Hive”, is so powerful that it would be worth the price of admission even if the rest of the gallery were bare.

The first sculpture on view, “Tall Tree and the Eye”, stands in the academy’s courtyard. As our picture shows, this tower, made of 76 highly polished, stainless-steel balls, each a metre across, is like a cloud of silver bubbles racing towards bubble heaven. Walking inside the sculpture at its base, the viewer looks up to see an endless multiplication of reflections—of himself, the handsome buildings framing the courtyard, the bubble-balls and the sky. This fine work of art, or giant-sized perceptual toy, lights up, and lightens up, its venerable surroundings. One small quibble: bigger would have been even better. In December it may be mistaken for an artsy Christmas tree. Of course, the sculptor might not mind.

The glass doors of the academy’s entrance hall allow a sneak preview of “Hive”, a huge rusted-steel sculpture on public view for the first time and actually the last work in the exhibition. Looking through the doors, one sees two colossal shapes like open thighs exposing a dark oval. Even innocents will see a vagina. Approached from the interior, however, “Hive” looks more like a magical tuber. The sculpture, taller than every entrance to the room, elicits the anxious feeling that it will grow even bigger, pushing through walls and ceiling. It is exciting and beautiful. The show couldn’t end on a higher note.

“Snail”, another exhibit, has a fat, coiling fibreglass body which opens out into a lusciously vermilion mouth. It is terrific.

But other installations were considerably less appealing to this reviewer. A cannon blasts gobs of lurid red wax-plus-Vaseline; a wagon-sized contraption made up of similar stuff deposits bits of itself on floors and doors as it slowly trundles through four rooms. Both these works seem unfortunate departures from Mr Kapoor’s admired elegance and refinement (though with talk of “ejaculation”, “war” and “penetration”, appreciation of these sculptures may divide along gender lines).

This is not a retrospective. Most of the sculpture is recent. However, the first room displays work from 1979, six years after Mr Kapoor, who was born in India, arrived in London. These pieces include “1000 Names”, a series of small objects of various shapes—geometric, flowerlike, imaginary—coated with intensely coloured pigments. Whether perceived as religious or as evocations of spice markets, their freshness appealed even to people allergic to conceptual art, and his reputation was launched. Honours followed, including representing Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Now 55, Mr Kapoor is the first living artist to be offered the entire main floor of the Royal Academy, another landmark in an ever more successful career.

His record price at auction is $3.8m; some private sales are rumoured to be far higher. He employs more than 20 skilled staff and can afford to create immense, costly works just for the adventure of it. One of these, “Grayman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked”, is on view. This single work, made up of 53 low-lying pieces, was fashioned by a computer-directed machine extruding coils of cement. Its earlier working title, “Shit and Architecture”, gives an idea of the overall effect. It is one of the pieces in this uneven but enthralling exhibition that seems out of place with its elegant surroundings.

Anish Kapoor talks about his show in this online audio slide show,

Photo: Getty Images

Come and see

Thina Lucy Manebaneba with her son Samuel
Mabolabola and brother Enos Manebaneba

Through the links to the work of various artists and photographers, as well as to museums, organisations, galleries, journals and blogs, we have tried to share the awesome resources the internet offers. We visualise artistic people spending hours exploring these links, and being delighted and uplifted thereby!

The photograph shown above is by photographer Pieter Hugo, whose name features on our list of links. His work can be seen here.

A menacing edge to a rarefied elegance

by Somak Ghoshal
The Telegraph

Around this time last year, the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre had organized an exhibition of Somnath Hore’s prints, which brought together some of his earliest studies from the 1940s and ’50s along with his later pen-and-ink drawings. While that show chronicled the evolution of the young poster-painter for the Communist Party into a sublime genius, this year, Seagull has selected a handful of bronzes, drawings and watercolours that bear the unmistakable mark of the master’s middle-to-late style. Showing till May 20, this beautifully put together exhibition looks beyond the popular perception of Hore as the archivist of hunger and pain. Instead it revives a somewhat less evident aspect of his versatile brilliance: his lifelong absorption in the little dramas of everyday existence.

Since the drawings and watercolours have been chosen from a set of Hore’s sketchbooks of the 1990s, they often look like pages from a visual diary of someone who is probably confined indoors, but soaks his eyes in the fleeting beauty of daily life. From the feel of the twilight air to the chromatic rhythms of each season, nothing escapes his ever-alert senses and eternally curious mind. We invariably think of Amal in Tagore’s Daakghar, looking out all day on the life that unfolds just outside his window, ever within his reach but forever unreachable. The men, women and animals that fill up Hore’s sketchbooks are similarly touched by a graceful innocence. It is evident that these figures have been brought to life by hands which once keenly felt the ripples of each unremarkable day, and that aching memory of a deeply sensual past remains still alive in every line that these hands have traced on paper.

From being just another daily record, the sketchbooks start looking like a journal of the mind, a history of inwardness, an internalized document of the vestiges of time. The limpid reds and blues become chaotically interspersed with black and brown, the brushwork becomes frenetic, and the luminous stillness of the mother-and-child series is broken. Hore’s obsession with the twinned oneness of the mother and her child is remarkable. In a series of delicate drawings, he depicts a mother holding her child, each inseparable from the other, fused to resemble an all new creature of love (picture: below, left). Pale shades of orange liven up their faces, while a waning grey hovers like the harbinger of imminent decay.

This paradoxical co-existence of burgeoning life-force and ebbing vitality is most eloquently captured in the bronzes. Hore’s sculptures have shed the trappings of flesh as they stand erect in their rarefied, bony elegance. These hollow men, women and children — drinking thirstily (picture: below, right), lying at ease, seated pensively, at play with one another, or standing shockingly lean in their visceral emptiness — bring to mind Giacometti’s stick people. Yet, if the Italian master’s greatness comes from making what is abstract intensely expressive, Hore’s characters remain unforgettable for the shimmering clarity of their structures. In Hore’s aesthetics, Giacometti’s mystery meets Brancusi’s lucidity to create a mystically ambivalent form.

At times, one feels baffled, even disturbed, by the utterly unpredictable effects of Hore’s art. The charged figures in metal sway the viewer from one emotion to the other, often merging different layers of feelings. Looking at the powerful scene of Shakuni disrobing Draupadi, one is initially startled by the literalism of the composition in which a vulture tears away a haggard woman’s sari (picture: above). Yet even as we take in the ruthless hunger of this carrion-eater, the wasted contours of the woman’s body, and the signs of affliction written all over her face, we also gaze on her parted lips and closed eyes, and are reminded, momentarily, of Bernini’s St Teresa.

As violence gets riddled by eroticism and physical decline becomes intertwined with sensuous longing, moments of pain and pleasure are darkly conflated. The figures, sleeping their troubled sleep, or caught in the throes of a wet dream, take on a menacing edge. Sleep suddenly begins to look like death’s brother.

Kandinsky: A Bright Future, Once

TRUE COLORS: Works such as Blue Mountain
(1908-09) show the influence of folk art.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

by Lucy Fisher
Time

Wassily Kandinsky could have ended up a law professor. Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky studied law and at the age of 30 was offered a professorship at what is now Tartu University in Estonia. Luckily for us, he had been inspired by an exhibition of French Impressionists the year before. He turned down the university job and moved to Germany to study painting full time. "Kandinsky," a major retrospective at Paris' Pompidou Center until Aug. 10 and then at the Guggenheim in New York City from Sept. 18, tracks his journey over the ensuing decades, both geographically and stylistically. Drawn to centers of the avant-garde and occasionally swept off course by the grim events of the early 1900s, we see Kandinsky progress from traditional naturalistic scenes to the stunning abstract canvases that made him one of the great pioneers of 20th century art.

Much of Kandinsky's early work drew on the folk art he encountered in Germany and in Russia. The works depict an ideal premodern Russia full of riders, onion domes and walled towns. But even in these first paintings, bright colors were used for effect, not naturalism — trees could be red, hills and horses blue. Pure color would become the central focus of his best works, a focus he pondered in his 1911 manifesto of abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Art, he wrote in the book, comes from within, from "inner necessity," and colors and shapes speak to people just as musical sounds do: "Color is a power which directly influences the soul." Contemporary Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky had preached that a new, spiritual age was about to dawn, and Kandinsky was convinced. He saw the artist at the apex of a triangle moving into the future, the base representing the mass of humanity who are slower to see the light. The paintings he produced at the time are full of joy and liberation, made with rapid, free gestures. In Improvisation 20 (Two Horses) (1911), animals are sketched with a few black lines, like a half-obliterated prehistoric cave drawing. Elsewhere mountains and buildings are indicated by sooty lines driving through patches of pure rainbow shades. (See pictures from a Cézanne exhibition.)

Kandinsky didn't paint much during the war years, but in 1921 he was asked to join the staff of the forward-looking Bauhaus art school in Germany, and the chance to teach turned his creative light up full again. His theories about pure form and color became student exercises; this was when he started painting his signature hard-edged abstracts: bright, lighthearted, with their own internal logic. Black lines, now severely clear-cut, are a skeleton for vividly colored shapes on a pale background. New motifs appear: jagged saw teeth, rainbows, triangles, circles. Though none of these canvases have subjects, pictograms float through them — sometimes recognizable boats, creating structure with their masts and spars.

After the Bauhaus school closed in 1933, Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, went to France, settling in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Instead of being surrounded by like-minded colleagues, he was now somewhat isolated. He had been experimenting in new directions before he left the Bauhaus, but his isolation, and freedom from the need to be didactic, may explain the playfulness that breaks out in his work. He carefully mixed colors — sage, sky blue, maroon — and experimented with texture, using controlled paint splatter for a sandy effect. Nothing is still: in Colorful Ensemble (1938) the splatters are a background of dots on which swim strange biomorphs; in Sky Blue (1940) stripy plankton flutter multiple legs while Reciprocal Accord (1942) fizzes and explodes.

By this time, Kandinsky was on his own, artistically. The train of followers that he predicted in his book failed to materialise. And that new age he had been so sure of never did dawn. But after his death in 1944, his spirit lived on in the postwar design explosion that sprayed color onto a grey and battered world. And today, his work perfectly illustrates progress toward an ideal — a rarity in a world consumed with art for art's sake.

Salima Hashmi

Poem for Zainab, 1994, Salima Hashmi

by Laila Kazmi

Jazbah Magazine: Women of Pakistan

“The objective of art is to give life a shape and though artists cannot change the world they can, through their work, give flight to imagination; they can give you the direction”

Salima Hashmi

Pakistan has been blessed with her fair share of talented artists in many different fields including the art of painting. The works of painters like the legendary A. R. Chugtai and Sadequain are among the most respected and recognized around the world. However, historically, as has been the case in the West, there are few women painters who have acquired high acclaim. In the 1996 edition of his book, Painting in Pakistan, Ijaz-ul-Hassan beautifully presents the history of painting in Pakistan starting from the Mughal era and introduces the works of close to 100 painters from the region. Of the 59 artists whose works are discussed in detail dating pre-1980s, only seven are women. In contrast, among the 38 artists each of whom are introduced briefly in the last chapter as emerging artists of the late 70s-80s, there are 12 women. One of these women is Salima Hashmi whom, in the late 80s, Hassan considered a new-comer to the world of serious art.

Today, some fifteen years after Ijaz-ul-Hassan first wrote about her, Salima Hashmi is one of the most well-known artists of Pakistan. Besides being an accomplished painter, she taught at Pakistan's prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) for about thirty years and served as the Principle of NCA for four years. In 1999, Salima Hashmi received Pakistan's Pride of Performance award. Today she is the Dean of School of Visual Arts at the newly established Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and she also runs her own art gallery featuring works of young artists.

Salima Hashmi comes from a socially and politically active family. Her father was the legendary Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and her mother, the British-born Alys Faiz was a respected journalist and peace activist in Pakistan. One of two daughters, Salima was always active in the arts, performing in plays before taking on painting professionally.

Salima was about eight years old when Faiz Ahmed Faiz was imprisoned for his political views. She remembers visiting him in jail. Later, during the repressive years of General Zia-ul-Haq rule, Salima's father had to go into self-exile as a result of the harassment he faced by Zia's government. Therefore, Salima grew up in a politically charged atmosphere. Painting became her outlet.

The Zia period is considered one of Pakistan's most repressive era especially for women, implications of which are still prevalent in society today. Salima's work focuses on the suffering of women in a highly patriarchal society especially under Zia-ul-Haq's. Her paintings usually include abstract figures of women depicting their struggles. They are a reflection of Salima's thoughts and feelings regarding the political and social uncertainties under which people of Pakistan have lived.



Salima deplored the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998. In an interview with Humsafar magazine she talked about her series People Wept at Dawn which she says is in response to the nuclear tests. Salima expressed her frustration at the India and Pakistan nuclear test by saying, "It would be so much more fruitful if these energies could be used in producing food to eat, providing shelter, freedom from disease and education for all."

In 2007, Salima Hashmi published a book titled Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. The book examines the lives and works of about 50 of Pakistan's women painters since independence. As Murataza Rizvi wrote in his review of Salima's book in Dawn, 09/2202, "She took to writing (the book) only because our writers had failed to document the history of Pakistan's women artists." Salima Hashmi spent a number of years doing research for the book and interviewing women artists.

Salima Hashmi has also been active in the human rights movement since the early 80s when she was one of the founding members Women's Action Forum, an organization dedicated to promoting women's rights though it has been criticized for being limited to the elite class of Pakistan.

These days Salima Hashmi is focused on mentoring and promoting the works of younger artists. She has curated art exhibitions showcasing works of Pakistani artists both in Pakistan and abroad. She has also been traveling internationally to promote the new art school Beaconhouse National University which has already attracted students from abroad.

This article is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

Read Salima Hashmi's essay on the contribution of women artists to modern art in Pakistan here.

School of art & aesthetics

One of the gates of Frognerparken, Oslo.

In 1997, while working on an environmental planning project for Calcutta, a post-graduate student who was working as an assistant suddenly took off when I was talking about something, and had referred to art.. She said that was just pseudo-intellectual hogwash, modern art is not art at all. Just like Jung's moment of synchronicity with a scarab, right there next to me were envelopes of photos, taken by project assistants, and some by a visiting professional photographer from UK. I kept taking out one of each and compared them for the benefit of the group around me. The latter, while not being of great merit were nonetheless consistently tellingly different in each case, bringing out for instance the eye for light and shade. So I said, now you see, there is something called art, and it is different. She was shamed to silence, and later apologised to me for her imprudence and arrogance.. This blog is also a response to this hateful anti-intellectual and anti-art tendency in many "educated" people.

During that same planning project, I had shown a senior colleague, a govt engineer, a photo-essay in a journal, with pictures by documentary photographer Achinto and accompanying text selected by me. He looked at it. He pointed to a picture and asked how that image illustatrated the accompanying text. I looked blankly at him, in inner disbelief, and then tried to tell him smilingly and patiently that there was no one-is-to-one, uni-directional correspondence between image and text; image was something, text was something else, the image rich and pregnant in so many resonances, the text too possessing deep meaning; and for me there was a kind of link between the two and hence that composition. This artifice was an invitation to engage in that immersion and personal resonance. There may be completely other inferences and associations in the minds of other readers, or none. But this also gave me a direct, insight into the make-up of the person, and of wider social attitudes. All very dismaying and enervating.

Later that year, I developed a photo-text-speech-song presentation, "The Child in the City". This was an hour and a half long meditation on cities and childhood, drawing upon diverse references. There too, the link between image and narrative was only an imagined one. But it worked, with audiences across India and also abroad. Recently, while reading about the exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of phtographer Robert Frank's The Americans at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, I learnt: "...also ground-breaking was the way he tightly sequenced his photographs in The Americans, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically to present a haunting picture of mid-century America." That was similar to what I had done, purely intuitively, in "The Child in the City". I savoured a sense of gladness about some merit in my madness.

Some five years ago, I had gone to see a painting exhibition. Just before that I had picked up a younger associate, a factory engineer, who was visiting Calcutta, to go for dinner with a common friend. We had met in front of the art gallery and I asked him to excuse me and give me a few minutes to quickly take a look at the exhibition. Before he went and waited outside the display area, he too did a quick tour of the exhibition. He looked at a particular painting, stood there a while and stared at it, and then came to me and asked me how that painting was its title. I can't recall what I said to him, I think I said something to the effect that art appreciation was about a personal relationship with the art-work, where one talks to the other, where both respond to one another.

I call this un-comprehending, assumed mechanical notion of art the "this is an ass" school of art and aesthetics. Meaning - people will look at a painting and the title and ask how does this mean that? Or ask, what does this painting mean, or say? I say, why ask me, you figure it out, if you want. It is assumed art means that there should be a picture of a gaping ass, and a title saying "this is an ass", and that will keep teveryone happy and the world going round and round.

But it is also quite insidious. A couple of months ago, at a public event in Bangalore, a minister in the state of Karnataka in the course of his speech said, “modern art has become a medium for pseudo intellectuals to insult ancient Indian culture.” Thankfully a group of artists from Karnataka raised their voices in protest against the comment. “Mr Gowda, you have no right to speak about modern art, you know nothing about it. We object to your remarks,” said M S Murthy, an artist and director of ‘Bhoomi - the centre for artists’ in Bangalore. He was joined by other local artists. When the group of artists continued to object to the remarks, the minister asked the police to throw them out. The artists were then forced out and some sections of the crowd too left the venue, saying, “we are with the artists, there is no need to be fascists.”

You can see, hear and feel all kinds of things and resonances in a painting, if you are are sensitive and discerning and imaginative, like a child. You can make yourself open to a state where you are immersed in the image, nothing else matters, it becomes a powerful means of awareness and consciousness.

Something like that happened to me during an exhibition in December 1997, part of the Calcutta Metropolitan Festival of Art organised by artists from the state of West Bengal to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. I had been involved in conceptualising and organising that festival, at a time when an outpouring of sensitivity, to music, song, mythology, poetry, fine art, performative art and culture was taking place inside me. The "Bengal school of art" and subsequent Modern painters were brought to the public, meticulously and lovingly curated by a senior painter. Perhaps the first time when I was stunningly stirred by art was at the New York Met, where, sadly, I had something like 30 minutes or less to have a quick look during a short visit to that amazing city. But I think the exhibitions at the art festival were when for the first time in my life, images caught hold of me, shook me and a powerful relationship was made with a painting, and meanings, profound wisdom were sensed and a rich train of thought-feeling-imagination flowed. You are a transformed person after that, and see art and artists in a completely different light. The reality, however, is that the domain of art, and the much of the community of "artists" may themselves be very far away from that "different light" in which art and artists were seen following the inner experience of art and aesthetics, value and meaning.

In the spring of 2002, I happened to be in Oslo. My host suggested I visit the Vigeland sculpture park (Frognerparken), and so I went there one morning, taking a bus. I did not know anything about what was there, and before and after entry, I saw a whole collection of statues and sculpture. It can feel quite overwhelming, but I was in no hurry, I had as much time as I wanted. I began looking at and taking in each item, beginning at the beginning and working my way through the arrangement. Something started happening to me, I became immersed in another world where the display was telling an ancient, grave tale... A coach brought in a large group of visitors, from India as it turned out. Must be one of those ten-cities in ten-days tours of Europe offered by tour operators, I thought. I observed a couple, they spoke Bengali. Cameras were out, click click all around. They were gone in 15 minutes. Astonishment! Here was I, exulting in timeless immersion, and there they were, coming from the same place, India, Calcutta, that supposedly artistic land, and how different our individual experiences were in the Vigeland park. I spent almost half a day there, finally I was all alone in the place. It had been an awesome personal trip. I had felt that the sculpture park had been waiting for my arrival, I was a key, which unlocked the secret of the display put together by Vigeland! I sat and soaked myself in that mood and feeling. A lovely gentle breeze played, a tree rained tiny red leaves. I wept, in joy, incredulity and humility. How privileged the people of Oslo were, to have this treasure in their city. I did learn from talking to people there that the park was seen as a witness to the life of the city, and its various seasons, in each of which the park assumed a different appearance. Oslo's gift is also a gift to the whole of humanity, and Oslo is its custodian.

Over the years, just like I have been seized and shaken by specific compositions of music, or songs by particular singers, or dance performances and choreography, or films, so have I had intensive personal experiences, around particular art-works or exhibitions or sites or places. Artists, like Abanindranath Tagore, Gagendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, Murillo, Arthur Tress, Rodin, Henry Moore, Kandinsky... Places, like Tawang, Panihati, Belur, Elephanta, Golcunda, Sarnath, Calcutta's Victoria Memorial, Thodupuzha, Nizamuddin, Gomteswara, Guruvayur, Sanchi ... Neighbourhoods in Calcutta, like in Chetla, Wellington, Alimuddin Street, Bow Barracks, north Calcutta... Cities, like Jerusalem and Nablus... Topographies, like the course of the Adi Ganga in Calcutta, the Sundarbans, the path of the river Ganga, Palestine... Countries, like Japan...

One is made larger, enriched and uplifted by art, which is the key to life. It is therefore the supreme duty of governments to ensure that its people have access to the best of art and works and feats of human imagination and highness. Art education, through schooling, is a must. That is nourishment. It is vital for cities to have public museums of art. Thus will refined citizens be made.