Premises of a ‘Degree Show’

New International geographies are mapping contemporary art practices in different terms today. Indian art scene also needs to be accounted by art activities in many so called ‘peripheral’ locations. People with different orientations increasingly participate in variously thrusting exhibition practices. So there is pressing need for new forms of acknowledging creative labours of various sorts. Now as it is a major shift towards asserting experimenting researching and documenting all possible art-frameworks, art practice hopefully gains a steady wealth creating value.
Academic institutions like fine arts colleges from the peripheral locations in the country are playing significant role in this development. The graduate and post-graduate courses that these colleges offer virtually induce young art student population soon into an array of exhibition practices in an interesting fashion.
Govt. College of Fine Art, Thrissur in Kerala poses one such a case. It offers graduate courses in Painting Sculpture and Applied Arts. In the last couple of years this college gained a peculiar attention from the art world in the country for their splendid final year degree shows.
The noticeable fact is that as of now these are completely student initiatives with some moral support of teachers but with no funding from the government or considerable assistance from the art galleries in the region. These degree shows are also not yet part of their curriculum. But the self-motivated batches of students one after another have now started seeing to it that they can really turn everyday classrooms into temporary white cubes. Everyday class work at one stage can do a sort of magic in the generic white cubes that they temporarily create out of their own classrooms at the end of an academic tenure. Moreover, very important artists in the country do take pains to come down to them in spite of busy schedules. They do slide shows and watch the student works with some visible gusto.
‘36 Degree C’ is the latest held degree show here in May by the batch passing out in 2010. Atul Dodiya inaugurated the show and artists like Riyaz Komu, Jyothibasu and Bose Krishnamachari were present through the days of slide shows and interactions.
Sharing the spirit with these students as a fellow traveller teaching art history in some of their expressions and dilemmas, let me note down some observations regarding this new kind of art student generation - their reasons, processes, works on and off this show.
Familiarising the white cube: lessons from history
Like any magic, the white cube affects one as a spectacle for self expression and equipment for transcendence. It needs some elements of illusive spaces situated in real events.
The everyday syllabus of art in a degree level college of fine art offers very limited exercises of spot-lighted objects and people apart from compositions that perch on borders of supposed creativity. It is a life with no considerable magic but much regulated study of a situation that is lit up by a sign language of the light. It is exercise prescribed just for some changes in one’s capabilities, ‘the skill to drawing painting and designing’ so to say. This prescriptive state of art learning usually has no big claims. At its best it can figure out an employment for sustenance.
Learning art needs the magic of spaces as that alone puts one in ‘more real’ grasp of life. Prescriptive pedagogy often lacks this thrust. An experience of transforming one into the life of an artist is constantly kept in wait unless and until the art institution is situated in a bustling multi-cultural urban context with developed gallery practices.
The restless art students of almost two decades back from this region had channelized their energies into revolt against the state, striking and closing down their college (in Trivandrum) for a long time. In early 1980s, an exposure to art institutions in Baroda and Shanthiniketan helped many art students from Kerala to develop an ideological aesthetic of art works that they yet envisaged against ‘the cultural tastes’ of the dominant practices. The very white cube remained an ambivalent context for them. In Kerala many painters and sculptors of ‘the radical’ moments and those inspired by them remained among other things with a peculiar poetics of cultural practices rooted in much localised and romanticised contexts. All through out, the white cube seemed to remain as potential instrument that could transform one into the full life of an artist liberating ‘local contexts’ into magical sources of artistic expression. The globalising era has passed with an affirmation of this feeling.
So familiarising the white cube in spite of all odds becomes almost like an unconscious agenda for art students in a regional institution that wants to liberate its local context into a magical source of artist expression.
Lessons of the present:
There is but a different generation working around today. They know that there are many ways to liberate ‘local contexts’. They also seem not to begin from an obscure desire for the radical magic. They are rather trying to gain expertise in emoting with the documents of their own reality that may change into anything at anytime. It is interesting to watch them and mix with them in casual groups everyday. Each of them must have had brought in a crude romance-world in the first couple of years here. Gradually mixing it up with pressures from peers, group living in rented rooms in a small town, thereby mixing up with immediate seniors who travel and get shows and assistance form major galleries in India, some of them feel unknowable and inevitable gulf and gaps in their resources. Some of them individually nourish it up positively. some remain engulfed forever by strange demands that art put forward in such ripe transits of youth, the demands for the new, successful, famous, shocking, genuine, skilful, painterly, professional, participatory, critical etc. A life subservient to adjectives perhaps has its own dangers. But art offers very attractive adjectives.
On a critical note, one can see that many of the works presented in ‘36 degree C’ emulate some celebrated nuances of contemporary Indian painting, especially the use of water colour as a favoured medium and the imagery that glares at some absurd edges. Yet there is the base of worked- up ‘artist life’ for at least some of them. It is filled with routine sketching, experimenting with materials and the use of self-generated references like photos and videos. They generate new contexts and attentions to issues in personal ways. In this process, sometimes they may fail to transform a bulb into a light, an object into an installation. But often they generate questions quite rooted in their own authentic location.
One day the lecture hall turned a ‘death room’. It was Abul Hisham doing installation. It was a personal statement on the event of a social protest that burnt bundles of rice in a corporate supermarket store in his locality. Scribing his familiar religious prayer of the occasion of death on to the arrangement of a charred rice bag treated as dead body with fragrances to accompany, Hisham vested it with personal and political dimensions.
Another day one finds the college compound scattered by plastic covers and waste materials. It was Sanal working around his daily experience of ‘trash’ in that small town ambience where the waste-management is a head ache to the corporation and one encounters waste-fields shifting from one side of the road to the other. However, there was a felt need for Sanal to move from ‘painting trash’ to ‘shaping trash’ to make a better sense. We produce so much of creative exercises everyday. Some are assignments, some are experiments. On the close of the tenure as student here, we mostly leave the life-study stuff here. Over the years, the batches of people handle the problem of this routine ‘creative exercises’. It also turns a (waste) management issue for the authorities. We relocate some. We misplace some. Sometimes our objects turn into beautiful metaphors of a bonding and fraternity feeling with those who have come and gone. We place their paintings and sculptures under trees or in the corridors or we accommodate them in our classroom walls. All the time we shape them in the present as much as we destroy them to ‘clean’ the (institutional) college premises.
An ASK project:
For an art student, the very compound and surroundings of the fine arts college lie there for experiment. Mohan padre is sensitive to this. Coming from a relatively slumbering village in north Kerala, he observes the loud political demonstrations, protests and other public expressions in Thrissur town. One day his project was to cover the mouth of almost all abandoned portrait studies in black cloth.
Tying black around the mouth denotes protest against autocratic behaviour, the silenced and victimised situation and hence supposed to have an ethical aura around the act. It is also an act in defence of allergic surroundings, contagious diseases etc. Nobody does this highly moralised act without any reason. If done so, it looks ridiculous. People turn uncomfortable and search for reasons. . As far as no legible political reason found, the act of tying black around the mouth remains a mockery of polity. Mohan suddenly places the leftover art works of his seniors in a curious situation. They are pretty ‘life-like’ studies. So tying black cloth around their mouth pushes them into another life irrespective of their different facial expressions. There is no reason, no provocation at the moment. Mohan did these works in peaceful regular working hours of the college.
People started ASKing why. So Mohan named his project ASK. The curiosity triggered numerous issues. These classroom life studies placed on the front steps and in the corridors of college of fine arts, Thrissur are much photographed by local media whenever they report and make stories of the lack of support from the authorities for fine arts education in the state. The college has a decade long student strikes history. But the college currently has peaceful academic process. Yet unsettled are many problems. So the local journalistic consciousness gets awakened on and often in the form of stories where these life-study busts make a marked photo- entity along with the signature building in colonial fashion.
So the magic of thinking and doing art quite often spills over the whole compound and escapes the white-cube mania in a very genuine fashion.
A regional fine arts college by its very ‘local’ presence offers its students challenges of both magical and real scale. And their ‘degree show’ presumably, is a spectacle of otherwise obscured processes in the life of a future generation.