Thursday 15 December 2016

Why we write : artists & art writing (seminar paper for Critical Writing Ensemble 1 - 2015)


I started my career in 1984 at the age of 26. I understood early on the importance for art practices and theoretical enquiries to find their interconnection within discourses. However as a young artist I began to observe how many art schools were beginning to debunk the rigours of their aesthetics and art history programs, thereby creating a situation of even greater paucity for producing art critics and art historians of caliber. I am on most occasions a die-hard optimist, preferring to look at all things in a manner that focuses on the best within every given situation. But even I had difficulty in holding on to my optimism in regards the quality and standard of writing on art that was generated by my peers during my early years as a painter.

I recall the urgent need I had to locate a writer who could articulate the territory of my concerns in the eighties on my return from London, and finding myself hitting a blank wall. Unlike my predecessors who had created discourses that formulated collective concerns around pictorial language and cultural identities, and who charted these new histories through their writings in publications brought out often by their own endeavors, my generation on the other hand perhaps became the money-boom babies; and so the road map of the individual became more accentuated, more far removed from the ideas of contributing consciously to and within a collective frame work of cultural historicizing.

My personal premise of engagement with gender politics did not fit too comfortably into the prevailing Marxist concerns of my friends in those early days of my career, despite other areas of compatibility that held our artistic friendships together - and I often felt hemmed in and in search of another space of discourse that would allow me to feel my sense of ideological belonging. It was around this time that I first read Alice Walker. I found in the simple ease of her writing a compelling self-articulation that suggested that I too could rely on being the interlocutor with myself.

Reading critical and theoretical writing has taught me so much as a student and as an artist, yet for me the intervention of writing emerged from another need. I was also acutely aware that the scholarship required to be an accomplished writer demanded a time investment of reading and research that I as a practicing artist did not have. Coming from a background of multiple ethnicities within my family from which the cauldron of stories ran aplenty - the oral histories of these ancestries saw me holding its peculiarities often like awkward trophies. As a student at the faculty of fine arts I found no real empathy for personal histories of feminist intent within the prevailing concerns of that era, which brought my attention to the bias with which histories are compiled. I was exposed to the works of Ganga Devi the madhubani artist whose paintings are diaristic in the personal narratives that she visually recounts, and I was also privy to the living traditions of women’s folk practices through the photo documentation of my teacher Jyoti Bhatt, making me acutely aware of how necessary it is that these histories of women need to be celebrated and recorded as valuable legacies.  

In the early 80’s I began to write to tell my own story, and the beginning of this engagement starts as the last chapter of my M.A thesis at the Royal College of art. My writings on my self have been about my journey as an artist and the different areas of my life that speak of my feminist rootedness and which illuminates the concerns that formulate my art.  Till date I continue to write about my work from the territory of the ideas it encompasses. In the early years my attempt was for my writing to create an understanding of the imagery I was using to ensure the right interpretations were made of the metaphors of violence and sexual explicitness I was employing as methods of confrontation to focus on the issues of power and patriarchy I was addressing. In more recent years my strategy of writing employs devices that shift the focus away from the explanatory and instead search for abstracted ways that allude to my territory of ideas. Sometimes the writing may be a story or a letter or a conversation with myself - always with the desire that it offers a simple comprehensible communication that may open up for more dialogue, to an audience and with myself. 

Does the artist as writer have something special to offer? I believe so. I believe that there is something different (not qualitatively) but that the rigors of study that artists undergo do patina them with an innate understanding for material and visual aesthetics, perhaps because it is a lived experience played out constantly, if not everyday, therefore giving them more of an insightfulness. The artist when taking on the avatar of the writer of personal recounting and pedagogic enquiry, positions their arguments from analytical methodologies of perception that come from the familiar. These writing sometimes serve to bridge the gaps that are left unaddressed by more specialized critical writings that may hold agendas within which such territories cannot always be accommodated.

I encourage artists to write - to shed their fear of committing themselves to the permanence of the written word. I believe that for an artist writing about ones own work and other issues related to art also serves to sharpen the critical space by which an art practitioner needs to stay alert and concurrent with their time. It prompts for artists to also remain more engaged with their contemporaries and to search for connectives and understand discourse of polemic nature.

Friendships in the art world can produce fecund discourses that when collated into archival material make for testaments of historical relevance often far more accurate than the enquiries made by historians who investigate time via the prism of their own agendas and requirements. I have felt the inadequacy of accurate research when reading the written material available on The Radical Painters & Sculptors association after they disbanded; in particular the writings about sculptor K.P. Krishnakumaran. His work and his ideas have been sometimes written about more to fit the need of the author and to conform to the topic of essays it has been designated to. What was seminal and which has yet to be spoken of was the motivation (right or wrong) of what propelled his dream of a utopia that questioned the prevailing art establishment of that time, and why he was seeking the module of a commune within which schematized ideation was what was permitted by the self appointed leadership of this movement. If letters to his friends and in-depth interviews had been sought with more thoroughness then perhaps a better overview to  his life and art would exist as archived material.  In stark contrast I recall reading a catalogue text many years ago written by Nilima Sheikh on her friend Arpita Singh’s work that offered an exquisite intimacy of understanding that perhaps only an insider could avail of. I remember introspecting about this writing and recognizing how close friendships feed such histories, and how important such texts become over time, and the value of an artist engaging in such pursuits.

When I had my solo exhibition titled Once upon a time, in the place of a catalogue I wrote a book of autobiographical essays titled ….and they lived happily ever after, in which I had selected black and white photographs from my life and family. I deliberately chose not to go through a publisher, as my desire was to have it unedited thereby preserving the authenticity of my voice and all the flaws that may exist within the craft of my writing.  The essays hold narratives that are like keyholes that allow selected facts of whom I am to be revealed.  It is a space where the private and the public overlap. As a woman I am insistent on being in charge of my representation, often irked and tired of the fallacies that prevail within traditional societies to stereotype women who cannot be comfortably labeled. The commitment to the written word endorses through it, in my opinion, the politics that governs ones art and life. If well done, it allows greater scope of histories to be more real and more palpable. 

Every generation has its own pulse that decides and pronounces how it contains its representations. Imaginative inventiveness is often the key to finding ways to reinvent for oneself as an artist, and within this, one seeks equally to find new approaches within writing which can also reflect these shifts in paradigms.  Shared experiences in today’s generation are often via a text message/whatsapp culture. Twitter accounts, face book pages, websites and blogs are also available democratized spaces that could be far better utilized by artists and art writers as venues for sustained and sensible exchange of ideas that could later be transposed as texts in catalogues or seminar spaces. What we write about and where we write holds endless possibilities. What becomes perhaps the pertinent question is whether we hold the desire to believe we need to be proactive and deliver not just via invitation alone, but by our own choice to imprint and contribute to our cultural history because we see it relevant to do so.

Connectivity today comes from the powerful tool of technology that opens up the world of access in an instance. Its potential and reach should be utilized to its fullest to expose classroom education to multiple areas of influences in art schools so that we create a climate that is challenging and charged with ideation. Writing also requires a political awareness if one is to have a definitive position or point of view within any discourse. All critical writings of a contemporary nature have to be plugged into existing realities, and contextualized so that the prevailing argument presents a perspective that is not just mere information alone, but which must reflect the writers awareness of a world view. The practice of writing undertaken must engage with genuine interests. Too often the burden of pedagogic posturing makes for terrible writing. I urge people who desire to write on art to open up their world of reading to include social sciences and liberal arts so that their study of art history has a foundational base. Today educational institutions are having their autonomy overtaken by state dictates on what becomes permissible as free speech. It is therefore imperative that each of us comprehends what our politics is so that we understand the responsibility we have to resist these pressures to conform. But does the writing of young art students hold much political awareness today? I am sometimes in serious doubt of that.

Writing must always reflect the conviction of belief it has been invested with. I have found that writing offers to me a space of invaluable contemplation and reflection vastly different from what I receive from my love of painting. It has led me to the world of some of the most eloquent writers like Maya Angelou, Kamala Das and Toni Morrison. I write as a discipline where in the search to express an instinct I am met with the challenge of finding how to transpose meanings within other worlds outside of my normal comfort zone. I would suggest to those who desire to write on art to write in a language that one is most fluent in. The comfort of ones mother tongue (if that is the language of proficiency) is that it provides a greater freedom for expression and allows one to connect to ones ancestries in ways that are deeply personal, and where colloquial vernaculars infuse their influences into contemporary writing. At the end of the day however the ultimate acid test of good writing is that it must hold credibility and provoke responses that open up more enquiries. The attempt to find our articulation through writing is so that we learn to know ourselves with more clarity by engaging with a wider world of influences. I write because it brings a certain type of honesty to my life that I revel in. How impactful the contribution of my writing maybe, I leave for time to tell.

Rekha Rodwittiya
(seminar paper for CWE -2015)
Hosted by TAKE on art & Latitude 28









Lettered, literate or finger-tapping happy…?

Whenever I have to be interviewed regarding my work I go through withdrawal symptoms….and wish I could be the proverbial turtle that can pull back my head into my shell and let the world not see me. The reason  is because I can close my eyes and know (on most occasions, the questions that will come my way. Feminism as a politics of choice isn't always understood and so besides the more superficial enquiries regarding the obvious, I am left to find insightful ways by which to negotiate how to share the territory that defines my ideas and produces my art despite  questions that are repetitive and pretty inconsequential. 

In recent times I can recall very few conversations where I felt I was being engaged in a discourse on my art where I personally could establish a connect for myself, and more importantly, where the parameters of discourse were not narrow or predictable but originated from  informed curiosities of the interviewer. One such conversation was with Prajit Dutta of Aicon Gallery in New York at whose gallery my exhibition The Rituals of Memory:Personal Folklores & Other Tales was presented early this year. The conversation was over two occasions - one in my drawing room in Baroda and the other the day before the opening of my show in New York. Perhaps because his childhood was in India within an environment of art influences and then later that he steeped himself in a learning process of European and Western art, literature and music by choice, that he is able therefore to come into a conversation with empathy. This factor alone offers a bridge that bypasses the tedious tendencies of pegging conversations with artists on their bio-data information alone.  

Diwan Manna an artist himself, who was in charge of the Chandigarh Lalit Kala did a magnificent job of getting very substantial interviews of artists recorded. He would assign people he trusted to conduct the interview and would personally be present to oversee that the interview was conducted with intellectual integrity. In the interview that was conducted with me Ms. Parul kept her questions simple and brief which allowed me a space within which I could include and articulate areas of information that could build up a coherent overview of my art  as well as my personal journey as a woman.

Bhavana Kakar of Gallery Latitude 28 who also brings out the magazine TAKE on art has been conducting seminars and workshops on writing. She has conceived and curated The Book Ensemble which will be a two-part program - a workshop for young writers and a seminar on the 18th and 19th of December at Sanskriti Kendre in Delhi, that focuses on (and I quote) …the endurance and material legacy of the book, including the ways in which it continues to influence contemporary processes of knowledge, community and history. I am personally delighted that Bhavana has so consistently constructed forums of discourse  that are multidisciplinary in nature,  and which cater to factors of communication being addressed. 

Today the press-of-the-button culture of the internet as the means of information leaves many believing that facts can substitute knowledge. The subtle difference isn’t perceivable and we have a vast section of society today whose brains function only by the click of their index finger, and not from the journey of discoveries through serious research. Am I being too harsh? No I don’t think so at all. The time needed to be spent in acquiring knowledge isn’t what many desire to invest in, and so the short cut to merely gaining facts for immediate consumption only to then purge it from their mental system once it has served its instantaneous need, is what we have as the general practice in the blueprint of learning these days.

Writing is a practice I encourage all to pursue. Not for any other reason except that it allows us to learn more about ourselves through the areas of concerns we address. I write because it teaches me to “hear” myself. I grew up with many oral traditions of learning. To hear a well researched lecture or to sit in the company of  people who are erudite is an experience of imbibing that is precious. Listening at night to the stories recounted by the women in my mothers family as I dozed off to sleep still bears its imprint in my psyche. 

When my adopted granddaughter Aditi was very young, I would make her write stories, essays and letters. This simple exercise of the play with imagination brings forth a sifting of real life experiences that translate either into factual anecdotes or fictionalized narratives derived from reality, and forms a mirror to the world we live in for us to look at. At 18 today Aditi still holds value to those months of bring her writing to me and for the discussions that we had about why knowledge empowers us, even when one is at the tender age of 6,7,8 or 9.


It takes very little to make the effort to empower oneself with knowledge that stays with us for a life time. What it requires however is for us to have the humility to recognize that we have so much more to learn than we have already imbibed.

*Photograph of my granddaughter Aditi Kim Karolil in conversation with me at Sakshi Gallery Mumbai

Saturday 3 December 2016

Miss Lily….don't be silly!

Miss Lily is our newest member of the Sauparnika clan. Don't get me wrong, Begum our cat still rules supreme, however with a little segregation laws imposed! Well the story as always centres around me not being able to turn off the switch on my emotions and look the other way when anyone is the underdog (excuse the pun!). So as one thing led to another with me getting into spaying and neutering my street dogs, this one heart throb Miss Lily with her silly ways always seemed to get the raw end from her male gully friends - and in particular was rather bullied by her ever so swishy brother, Coffee. 

So after watching many raucous sessions over scraps thrown at them by well meaning neighbours that ended up into snarling battles as there was never ever enough food to satisfy their growling tummies, I started feeding them pet food each night. I thought now I would rest easy and that they would let by-gones be by-gones and wag a tail  in peace and harmony.

However on my return from a short trip away from home I discovered Miss Lily badly injured and unable to stand up. Either hit by a vehicle or beaten by some irate neighbour because they dig holes in peoples gardens, she was not in a good shape at all. Now being so vulnerable the male dogs were even more hostile and intent on playing the bully boys to the hilt, loosing no opportunity to attack her, almost as a time-pass activity amongst themselves. So I bundled her off in the animal ambulance and sent her to my veterinarian friend Dr. Angela Lobo to be kept in her hospital till she recovered. After a full checkup and complete grooming the doctor suggested I temporarily board her in my garage and see her through her dose of antibiotics. So plan of action all set into place, I put her into the garage. Now truth be told I hate confinements that appear like prison time and seeing this poor frightened soul  in a corner of our garage  looking rather bemused, turned my heart upside down and made me feel like a wicked witch minus a pointy hat and broom.

So I frantically started calling up friends to see if anyone would like a dog as a pet…..and of course the answers were many polite refusals! Then I thought of asking my friend Mini Buddiraj who is a friend of all the street dogs she ever encounters, and who has a farm house purely designated to housing her stray friends. She immediately agreed and so off we went with all of Miss Lily's paraphernalia - bed, food, bowls, blanket etc and handed her over to Mini. This was at around 11 am that day.

At 7 pm the same day, just when I was about to step into a CCD cafe for a quick cup of my favourite Hazelnut cappuccino,  my phone rang. Mini was on the other end and told me that Miss Lily was completely traumatised, was refusing to eat, and was not allowing anyone anywhere near her. So immediately we abandoned our coffee session and set off to meet with Mini at a designated location from where we then drove with her to her dog shelter, to pick up Miss Lily!

Of course as all guilty mothers do I told Miss Lily a huge white lie. I told  her I had merely left her for a picnic date with friends!!! She was just so relieved to see us that I think she would have bought any darned excuse to get rescued from her own misery. We then bundled her off home and the story has a happy ending! She now reigns supreme on the ground floor of Sauparnika, whilst Begum sits like the true matriarch that she is up in our private quarters on the first floor. They both are given turns equally to be in my studio which is on the second floor,   so peace and harmony regions for the moment with no border violations occurring.

Surendran looks on rather nervously as he enters home these days from his studio, because he doesn't quite know whether some other four legged friend from the outside world has found sanctuary at Sauparnika. I must admit I am rather tempted, as I do believe a pink Beatrice Potter pig and a Picasso-esq goat may well and truly add a touch of class to the existing menagerie we are at The Collective Studio Baroda at Sauparnika …so lets just wait and watch….Noah's arc may well and truly return! 

Sunday 27 November 2016

Hello …I'm back.

It has been a long while since I have written my blog. When my mother passed away in January of 2014 I think I was so completely devastated by the suddenness of her death that I buried myself  into my work  so that I could cope with my loss. My studio hours grew longer and my sleep-time became even more reduced, leaving me vulnerable to falling ill and worn down by sheer exhaustion on one too many occasion. I have come to realise that for myself I don't believe I will ever grow to miss her less over time. That's a myth propagated by those who don't know what loss is really all about.  However I  also knew that my mother would be rather mortified by the teary soul that I had become, and so I thought long and hard and knew that I had to find a strategy by which I could negotiate my own peace settlement with my anguish. Travel has always been the map that helps me to formulate my ideational territories and trigger introspection that is soul searching. And so I did just that. I  walked away from my disciplined studio routine chose to steep my mind into art history and the contemporary practices of other artists - to look and immerse myself in re-tracings and new discoveries of art and traditional cultural practices. 

I set my compass from my personal desire. I visited South Korea for two weeks in September to see the Gwangju biennale and visit Seoul. I spent most of my time with Kim Seola  and Lee Hayan in both these cities. Both artists had been with us as art students and resident artists at The Collective Studio Baroda for a protracted period of time. This destination was chosen because Seola was being presented in the Gwangju Biennale and Hayan was getting married shortly, so for me it was a visit of great preciousness. The time spent with them unfolded discourses and reverie amidst late nights of fun and a studio visit with Seola way past midnight  above  a karaoke bar, with us sipping green tea and talking about her work.  

On the eve of my departure from Seoul I made a sudden plan to break journey in Bangkok for a week. Their traditional art is exquisite and they have a national museum of seven buildings which houses some magnificent art of the past to view. Thailand has a vibrant street culture. I love the street food of this country and so each night I would pick up large quantities of mouth watering delicacies  and finger wipe my plate  to the last crumb! With my own history interlaced with this country and great memories of my teenage years growing up with Thai friends who frequented our home regularly in Baroda; my visit to Bangkok provided me the space to reconnect with memories of my mother that were cherished and deeply personal. 

With a short stint home and a commission work to execute, I had a brief period of intense work that was really very stimulating. This provided for me the appropriate link for my next travel to commence. Spain was the country I had chosen to travel to, and so   the 2nd of October to the 5th of November got marked up on my calendar - making up a month and a few days of wanderlust and time unfettered by the demands of work and other daily commitments of management to attend to . An exacting itinerary of twelve cities were detailed and researched under my supervision by Divya  who is at The Collective Studio Baroda (TCSB). I was accompanied by Ankush Safaya,  one of the resident artists of TCSB, and so the evenings each day in Spain became a time to explore and decipher Spanish food from menus's that were often without English translations'  and which therefore made an interesting area of discoveries -  with a few mishaps that make for great anecdotes!

I spent my birthday in the Prado museum and saw the Guernica by Pablo Picasso once again after many years.  Spain gave to me so much art  to view. It was as though this warm and hospitable  country  knew my need and set out to comfort me with an embrace of art  that engulfed my sensibilities and rebooted me just as I required. The trail of museums were many and the list of artists too long to share, but suffice to say I met up with old friends from the annals of art history who spoke back to me with the same intensity and once again demanded my accountability through the perceptions I formulated.

I came back to India and within the next fortnight (and on the spur of the moment) decided to visit Kangra, Chandighar, Hoshiyarpur, Dharamshala and Mclouedganj. Driving with Divya and Ankush in these hilly regions brought alive the miniature paintings that I love so much from these regions.

Family took me back into a plane again within days. I went for a family wedding to Bangalore. There, memories of my mother were almost 360 degrees and more. Meeting up with her relatives, I found the echo of her past in so many places. My mother was  much loved and so many stories about her youth and childhood were unknowingly gifted to me.

I'm back in my studio again…

My mother looks back at me quizzically from her photograph that I have on my work desk. Perhaps she knows too well the dilemmas of love and loss herself and understands how much I miss her. But I can now look back at her without my vision being too blurred. I think she is rather pleased about that because weepy children were never her cup of tea.

Thursday 4 February 2016

The Rituals of Memory-Personal folklores & other tales

The exhibition The Rituals of Memory : Personal folklore & other tales that opens at Aicon Gallery in New York has a selection of work from the last nine years  which deals with my interest in creating personal mythologies as the stage for larger narratives to be explored.

The best part of a show is the day the works get displayed. The shift from having lived with the works in my studio during their making to their existence in the white cube space brings a critical distance to my relationship with them.

I usually spend time seated in the gallery as the gallery team works to mount the show in the space. Surrounded by the  energies that are invested to present the exhibition I am able to view my work away from the emotional space of ownership and this process of detachment is one that allows me a discourse of value with the work.

I had an interesting conversation over lunch with Prajit Dutta the director of Aicon Gallery where we spoke about how geographical boundaries should no longer trap art into being ghettoised; and where contextualised meanings should be open to interpretations by the experiences that individuals bring to their understanding of what they view.

Cultural differences will always exist and art and other creative practises will be born from the womb of where it is fed and nurtured in its inception. However where the final product is then placed to be viewed does not depend on whether these cultural factors are known to an audience. What becomes important is that the curiosities of people are awakened which will then lead to meanings and comprehension  to be established.

It will be interesting at the opening tomorrow because I will be having a formal conversation about my work with Danial Herwitz, a philosopher and an old friend who I haven't met up with in many years. He is the son of  Chester & Davida Herwitz who were collectors of Contemporary Indian art. This exhibition also has a selection of works from the Herwitz collection that was purchased by Aicon gallery.

As the texts go up on the walls and the paintings sit well arranged in their designated places, I have slowly become a viewer of sorts within the space. In a few days I will be back in Baroda working on a new set of works. I don't know when I will sit surrounded by these works again, especially placed as they are in this configuration. They will exist away from me - separated and independent of me. 





My solo show opens at Aicon Gallery in New York 
4th February 2016
6 to 9 pm
If you are in New York
Please Do Come.

Aicon Gallery
35 great Jones Street
New York
Ny-10012

For enquires regarding the show
please contact  newyork@aicongallery.com