American avatars, part 2: Walton Ford’s birds
02/25/2010 · Alexander Keefe
"Avatars- The Birds of India" 1996 Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 59 3/4 x 40 inches
Next stop on the desultory voyage a l’avatar Americain is this huge watercolor by Walton Ford. I was flipping through his recently published super-deluxe Taschen coffeetable raisonné the other day at the public library and was especially struck by Ford’s Indophillic early 90s series “Avatars — The Birds of India.” The style of the series is the same as what you see elsewhere — retro Audubon-esque, done large on paper, with lots of ersatz marginalia scrawled across it in various scripts and media — and the theme is one he apparently returned to a lot in that decade, a theme I will loosely term: the scourge of Westernization in India. I may be oversimplifying but basically, in this bestiary of his, the allegory runs something like this: the nasty identical-looking starlings who arrive in hordes and fuck, eat, peck at and otherwise exploit beautiful, unique-looking native South Asian birds? Those are either lame tourists or even lamer old Orientalists. The beautiful ones getting ravaged? Well, those would be the natives. (It should be noted that NRIs don’t exactly get a free pass — they tend to hang out with starlings, let’s put it that way, as do parrot-collaborators.) Where he really nails the theme, however, is in the words: on one side you get the straight native dope (in this one I see some tantric symbols, some Sanskrit, and some earnest-looking all-caps wisdom: what pros in the Indophilia biz simply call “the classic”) and on the other, a bit of reductive western claptrap (here a nasty-looking blue jay — allegorically speaking, this is a tour-guide from Minnesota — squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society). The vulture and the stork? Don’t worry: both authentic natives. Both abound in ancient Sanskrit stories. But that little pink piece of flesh they are fighting over? That’s on you, West! Stay home!
Addendum: I almost forgot to add that I came across another Walton Ford recently, not at the library this time, but as the infographic to this Financial Times piece on the Indian art market called “Indians in Trouble.” Is this not a weird choice?