Indian Art

The beginning of my stealing.... (3rd August, 2012).


In response to Mark's question, this is the kind of temple that I found this sculpture on in my trip to Karnataka in 2014.

I had been told in my Indian Art History degree that Hoysala sculpture wasn't very refined. I wasn't expecting much, so I got  a big surprise.

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content v subject matter

Anish Kapoor, in conversation with John Tusa.

'Kapoor himself insists, I've nothing to say, which is where, here in his Camberwell studio, we begin.

JT Why do you say you have nothing to say?

AK One of the currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it points to the experience of the author. That is to say it dwells in the author. It seems to me that there's another route in which the artist looks for content, which is different from  meaning. It may be abstract, but at a deeper level symbolic content is necessarily philosophical and often religious. I think I am attempting to dig away at - without wanting to sound too pompous - the great mystery of being. And that, while it has its route through my psychobiography, isn't based in it.

JT So at least you are walking away from the romantic idea of the artist, that it is the life of the artist, the view of the artist, the experience of the artist which is absolutely central to the art, and you take the artist with the art bag and baggage.

AK I am. I think I'm saying that there is another position. Maybe its my Indian roots that prompt me in that direction. Of course, I also see a connection thereby with the minimal art of the sixties and seventies. The idea that the object in a sense has a language unto itself, and that its primary purpose in the world isn't interpretative, it is there as if sitting within its own world of meaning.

JT You make the distinction between subject matter - and one can certainly see that your pieces are not about subject matter - and content. Your sculptures are full of content. But just fill out that antithesis.

AK Putting aside subject matter is saying that a content can arise. It does this seemingly out of formal language, considerations about form, about material, about context. When subject matter is sufficiently out of the way, something else occurs; maybe it is the role of the artist then, as I see it, to pursue this something that one might call content.'


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'do something small every day'

Today I found a box full of paintings from about two years ago. In the present I always feel that I have no idea what I'm doing, or where to go next. But if I look back at the traces of past days that felt like that, from enough distance, I see that things were happening.

Sometimes I think that everything that I want to work on has already come. I'm so quick to put it into a box and pack it away, or turn the page. Other times I think, no, this is how it goes. Something comes, and then you turn the page and don't look back. Then I find things again, and look at them beside new things.

Complexity theory (which I worked with for many years as an educational researcher) suggests that interactions through time - i.e. history - are essential for emergence to take place. Emergence itself is mysterious, in that whatever appears (ie. the song, the painting, the poem, the dance, if you work in the way that I do) can't be directly tracked back to any specific event or idea. But interactions through time have to occur if there is to be any hope of emergence; for the unexpected arrival of something unplanned. 

Anish Kapoor talks about 'the arising of content', as opposed to the conscious creation of 'subject matter'.

If I want things to arrive, albeit from a process that I can't fully see or control, I need to make sure that I keep the interactions going. The complexity perspective helps me to see why I can't necessarily make new paintings every day. Things can't keep appearing endlessly, without periods of food or rest. 

'Do something small, every day' 

Austin Kleon

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grounds

Yesterday I made grounds. Grounds are amazing. When I first started making them, I thought I was putting something off. Or waiting for something. Or preparing something.

Now I know better. A ground is a thing. It's full, pregnant. It's itself. It's everything in the world.

There are some little-known Indian miniature paintings that, in contrast to the general Indian thing of being fecund and teeming and full, are mainly ground. Pure space.

This is a triptych, three separate canvases. The first canvas is simply a golden field.


You can find everything in the Indian tradition. You want gods? You can have gods. You want no gods? You can have no gods. You want literal gods? Plenty of them. You want gods that are symbolic of universal forces? No problem. You want yourself as a separate worshipper? Sure. You want yourself as an integral part of all that is? Easy. You want to separate yourself out from daily life and go on an internal journey? Loads of different pathways for you right here. You want to be in the thick of it, with colour and perfume and sensuality and money and music and dance and joy? Welcome.

Also, you don't have to choose between these binaries. You can have the whole damn lot if your psyche can handle it....

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the feeling of life

I'm looking at these two images. At first I didn't have any particular thoughts about them. They were a response to pairs of people moving in space.

But as time has gone on I've begun to see them as a development, a move towards something that I've been interested for a long time. This something is the visual plane of Indian mural art from various periods; starting with the earliest known paintings from Ajanta, which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 or 650 CE, and including the Mattancheri mural paintings, painted in the 16th century, which I visited in Karnataka in 2014.

Here are some early paintings from Ajanta:

And some murals from Mattacheri:

It's hard to mention these without saying something about Indian aesthetics. The opposite of our plain Greek aesthetic which appreciates unadorned walls and simplicity, Indian art celebrates fecundity, teeming life... curling in the form of creepers and blossoms, humans and animals together, everything crammed into a packed two dimensional space which has no interest in accurately representing three dimensional reality.

Indian aesthetics is concerned with feeling. Raw emotion - plays and poems and miniature paintings were designed to not only 'portray' emotions such as loss and love and longing, but to actively evoke these feelings in the audience (the theory of rasa). The crowded murals of the ancient caves and more recent palaces create the feeling of the teeming, interconnected nature of a world jammed full of interrelated life forms...

None of this was in my mind when I made these paintings. But that Indian aesthetic is my aesthetic, is what I'm interested in. I've been thinking for so long about how to approach it. But any kind of direct approach seems to be quite hopeless for me. Instead, I have to wait, and see. Today, this is what I see.

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'An artist has to be able to sit in a room and wait for something to happen'

'An artist has to be able to sit in a room and wait for something to happen'

Anish Kapoor

I usually have no idea what's going to happen in my morning of work. I've spent years gradually letting go of the idea that I need to go into my studio in a disciplined way and get started on a project, with a clear intention or goal in mind. I've learnt that this usually kills the possibility of any kind of creative emergence for me.

As I have no idea where to start, I start with the body. I'm committed to a 'daily practice', in line with my years of work with my teachers and mentors, Kath Burlinson and Paul Oertel. Paul talks about work coming out of the body, finding information in the cells...

The daily practice is not 'practising', in the sense of doing your scales, or your voice exercises, or a discipline such as 'make a drawing every day'. I think of it more as a space-making, connecting-up kind of event. I make space to find out what's happening on a particular day; emotionally, physically, musically, verbally, mentally. It's a bit like Julia Cameron's Daily Pages, except that you don't sit and write freeform, you crouch inside your body and you let it freefrom from the inside out....

I wait. Eventually, something starts to happen. An arm wants to move, or my spine wants to twist around to face me in the opposite direction. Then an idea comes, an association, or perhaps an impulse to move towards a particular image, or a need to put on music and follow the movement for longer. At some point I might move towards some images, looking, or choosing, or arranging. Sometimes I pick my pen, and I follow. There's no plan.

Then I look. There are recognitions. I could do a whole conceptual overview of what interests me in art, what my influences are, what my philosophy is. These things will come out eventually. But when I work, none of these things are consciously in my mind.

There's a lot of looking. So much looking.

I didn't think it would happen like this. I thought  I would make and make and make, letting the working (aka 'doing') make the work. The working does make the work. But a big part of the working is simply looking at what's come.

Today I'm looking at these four paintings, which were made a week ago on the island of Lismore in response to people working in the shared space of the Sounding Authentic workshop (with Mairi Campbell and Kath Burlinson.)

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'Please show your working in the margin of your exam paper'

At the moment I'm doing a lot of packing and throwing away in preparation for moving house, which is giving me some distance from the work process that I've been doggedly pursuing since 2009. My main strategy has been to ignore what everyone else is doing and focus.

Along the way I wrote a blog called Exploring Creativity (exploring-creativity-tamsin.blogspot.co.uk) for about five years. Its purpose was to document myself as guinea pig for a study of how a lifelong desire to play music and make art could result in so many years of not doing, and so many blocks to doing even after I started again.

After some years I felt that the time had come to move on from thinking and talking about the nature of blocks to creativity, and decided to shift my blog focus to writing about the intentions of and influences on the actual work that I was now doing. This was part of my previous website (tamsinhaggis.blogspot.co.uk). It wasn't very systematic, and dropped away over time.

So...at this time of change and renewal, I'm currently considering starting up a more regular blog writing practice, the intention of which would be to record, in a scrappy and non-linear way, the various practices, influences, and events that feed in to the images that appear.

I've tended not to want to talk about what's behind my images, because it feels important to me that they're there, naked, as it were, for different people's imaginations to respond to and possibly feed off.

But I'm currently reading 'Show Your Work' by Austin Kleon, and he suggests that in fact people who are interested in your work are also often interested in the processes that lie behind the 'products' that appear. I don't know if this is true, but perhaps it's time to give it a go.

http://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/

Tomorrow I will watch what happens and consider a first attempt at documenting my working.

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