two strands

Slate image by George Garson; catalogue prints, repeated

There seem two be two strands to my interests at the moment. In my head, they join up. In the painting, they don't quite, not yet, if they're ever going to....

The emergence of Indian art and the sculptures of the gods is discussed in some of the posts below, and is ongoing. It's intense and difficult, and I find I can only take so much of it at a time. It's very conceptual, albeit much of it conceptual about a particular approach to aesthetics (two terms that are often assumed to be contradictory in contemporary discussions about art...). The whole thing hinges on loosely and widely-conceived links between ideas of  'gods, God, man, and nature', in a way that I can't put into words. I perhaps should say, though, that God for me is an idea, not a personal reality.

The other strand of work eddies around a fascination for natural forms; fractals, repetition and novelty. I've just written a post on this on the Exploring Creativity blog. In terms of the images, there perhaps doesn't seem to be much link between these two areas. But in terms of the ideas and the feeling, somehow there is.

Let's see if I can unravel those links through time and working.


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the body adorned

I have an instinct towards this project that comes out of deep memory and association. It's a project that brings together, unasked, but quite perfectly, a number of different strands of interest and experience. A relationship with the colours, art, people, and land of India, which goes back thirty three years. An interest in ideas and in the philosophical, but the long-standing impossibility of finding a home in 'Western' politics, philosophy or art. A delight in writing and words as a means of exploring ideas. A surfeit of academic words relating to the social sciences, and an exhaustion with the disembodied theoretical. A craving for the aesthetic; for the felt and experienced rather than than the conceptual. An interest in movement and the body as an antidote to these things.

After over two years of struggling to return to my painting roots, the unexpected appearance of the Indian dancing human/godly form in my work was a big surprise. For the last couple of months I've been trying to follow this without asking too many questions. I've always been aware, though, that this dancing Indian image (as understood both within Indian textual traditions and within the lives and practices of living, earthly people) was some kind of still point which in brought together many things which are traditionally seen as separate in my own culture. The conceptual versus the aesthetic, for example, or bodily sensuality versus rarified philosophies. Most interestingly of all, for me, was an apparent stress on the primacy of nature - the vastness of the universe, human beings, the smallest flower - which sometimes involved a concept of God or gods, and sometimes did not.

It may seem strange to suggest that images of God/gods may not always be much to do with the idea of God/gods at all (at least as these concepts are understood in European and American cultures), especially in the context of traditions that seem to use images of gods and God in their every nook and cranny. But that's part of the intention of this project; to try to open up a space, physically and aesthetically, which questions or reframes what might be understood by  words like 'gods', 'God', man, nature - and the separations so often assumed to between such ideas.

In this wonderful book I've just received through the post, Dehejia talks about ''the extraordinary body-centred literary imagination' found in Indian art and literature.

'A stone inscription of thirty Sanskrit verses composed in the the late twelfth century speaks of the earth, the sky, and the temple in terms of human erotic love...:


First gratified...with the close embrace of the thighs of the earth, enjoyed by many princes, the surrounding sky, like a clever lover, accompanying his action with a smile of extreme love, eagerly, within sight of the damsels of heaven, kisses...the face of Fortune, this (temple) desirous of receiving on all sides the heavy embrace of bodies, trembling with pangs of love, of the women of the regions.' 

2009:6'

And this description from a 12th century Prakrit text associated with Jainism, of the river Jamuna:

Her upper garment was the globules of foam and her glorious breasts the sporting rahanga birds. Her romavali, effective in distracting the  minds of learned men, was the network of algae. Her beautiful ringlets of braided hair were the rows of bees, and her lengthy eyes, the petals of the blossomed lotus. Her navel, dispelling the heat of those with fever, was the whirlpool churned by the wind... Her buttocks were the wide, glistening sand banks.


romavali: fine line of hair running upwards from the navel and considered a mark of beauty

2009:8

My oh my.

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what a project

This is a complicated project I've embarked upon. It's a form of art, but not only 'my' art; because it seeks to bring a particular ancient aesthetic into a world that usually doesn't look at these kinds of images.

It's unashamedly 'aesthetic', which is unfashionable in the contemporary art world (see the second of Jim Hamlyn's list of  'threshold concepts' in art teaching). But it's also very conceptual, because aesthetics in Indian art (I need to think about the term 'Indian Art' because it covers so many possibilities), at least in many strands of the ancient traditions, was often a highly conceptual business.

What I'm doing appears to be about 'Indian Gods', with all their associations of image worship, multiplicity, strange forms, and brilliant colour. And yet actually these gods, and this project, are, for me, both philosophically and personally, a way of thinking about what it means to be human.

The multiplicity of gods appear to be separate and non-human with their multiple arms, sometimes multiple faces, occasionally two genders. And yet many strands of the tradition will tell you that this kind of aesthetic form is in fact intended as a way of helping humans relate to the immanence of a single God, conceived to be permeating every atom of the natural and physical world (and thus humans as well).

The Indian idea of a single God, however,  is at odds with European and American cultural assumptions. Leaving aside the mystical traditions, many Christian-based ideas about God implicitly assume a separation between God and man. A God who is watching you, watching over you, perhaps guiding you; or judging you, holding you to account. There's no such separation, however, in, for example, the Indian philosophical idea of Brahman/Atman, which sees the conscious speck that is the human (atman) as an integral part of Brahman, which permeates everything.

I'd better put in a  health warning here. Firstly, I'm not currently reading any scholarly works on this subject, but attempting to articulate what sense remains of three years formal study and two field-work-based research projects which were part of my degree, quite some time ago. Secondly, any statement that is ever made about 'Indian thought', or religion, or art, can always be refuted - not just by scholars holding different views, but by the tradition itself, which is a composite of multiple different religious, practical and philosophical strands that were never meant to be united into a single coherent thing.

I'm not trying to represent Indian Art. I'm immersing myself in it; in its forms, in its various traditions; in its ideas and texts. What comes out of this immersion will be a 21st century art form of some kind, rather than an account of something that is either accurate or inaccurate.....

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