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
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