aesthetic for who?

As I read just a little about the background to these images, questions arise. Who was this exquisite aesthetic really for? Images like this one - and this is true of many of the Chola bronzes - were designed to be carried through the streets in processions. Not only would they have been held high above people's heads, the images would also have been decorated with jewellery and flower garlands. So ordinary people wouldn't have seen their beautiful adornments and serene faces hardly at all.

Similarly, the larger bronze images, which look so extraordinary in their dark, backlit display in a museum in the States somewhere, would have been installed in the centre of the temple, and also festooned with clothing and jewellery and flowers. The only people who would have seen the perfect proportions, the beautiful inscribed jewellery, the subtle suggestions of fine clothing, would have been the image-maker and the priest.

I don't know what recent academic studies have to say about this, but these fairly unequivocal facts about the use of these images have got me thinking. This aesthetic seems not to have been, ultimately, about pleasing the onlooker.  And it also was probably not about individual 'artistic expression' as we might understand it. Although there are times when sculptors did leave their names on inscriptions, and some images that show an aesthetic vision and technical skill that might distinguish one image, or set of images, from another, critics from outside the culture have pointed out that this aesthetic is in some ways formulaic, precisely not individual and 'free'.

So who was it for?

current work: Indian dance sculpture

I'm just at the start of a project which focusses on the intersection of ritual, philosophy, story, and aesthetics in 10th Century India. I have no clear ideas at the moment about what will happen. I just know that I love the fact that art in India, historically, at least, was completely interwoven with everyday routine, intellectual thought, and 'religious' observances (there's a big question mark over the idea of what we think of as 'religion' in India, both then and now). 

In the classic texts relating to art, the different art forms were themselves all seen as connected with each other:

The knowledge of iconography depends upon the correct understanding of the rules of both sculpture and painting; a true mastery in the latter is unattainable without a knowledge of the art of dancing, which is again supplementary to one's full acquaintance with the science of music...

For now, I'm focussing on dance. I've started by beginning to study my photographs of carved stone reliefs at the temples at Tanjavur and Chidambaram in South India, and cast bronzes created around the same time as these temples under rule of the Chola kings. This period is often seen as a high point of Indian art, although this is likely to be an aesthetic judgement strongly influenced by European values. Nonetheless, the forms, particularly of the Chola bronzes, are quite extraordinary.

I'm fascinated simply by the process of exploring these forms with paint or pencil. I've only done a few so far (here). Each dancer seems to have a different personality, which seems to partly be due to how I manage to render the face. This, in turn, at least for the stone reliefs, depends upon how the stone has weathered on that part of the image.

Today I saw, for the second time, how easily the form becomes static. The original, carved in stone, has such life (there is a specific intention here, if I remember rightly, about the figure being rendered in such a way to show the prana, or life force, which animates the body).   I'm trying to be quite loose and impressionistic, but at the moment many of my images are missing this sense of life, the animation of the originals.