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this is a tour-guide from Minnesota–squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society).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?
American avatars: the devil and Mr. Lyman
02/18/2010 · Alexander Keefe
VOL. 1 - NO. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67 BOSTON, MASS. 25¢/35¢ OUT OF BOSTON
I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone
There were so many American avatars before Cameron’s. Among them: the biweekly underground zine/mouthpiece of the banjo-playing acid-folk pioneer and charismatic hippie cult leader Mel Lyman, self-published between 1967 and 1969 in Boston.
back cover of Vol. 1, No. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67
I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to turn ideals to shit
The “shadow-Dylan” Lyman was many things, but he was no Indophile: his notion of the avatar comes via many layers of mediation, as part of our shared inheritance that is the Great American Weird, a sepulchral gift from Emerson perhaps. Ultimately, for Lyman and his followers the wisdom of the East was the “Eastern cop-out,” no better than the other “false resolutions,” no different from what they called the Christian cop-out, the African cop-out, the Humanist cop-out… Lyman’s revelations were meant to be as American as acid and Frankie Valli and Benjamin Franklin. It all reminds me of Nietzche, in his final, lunatic days, signing his letters alternately “Dionysus” and “the Crucified One,” no longer able to keep them apart. Lyman wanted to be the Avatar of a Bacchic Christ, not of a Krishna.
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is
Echt post-Orientalist psychedelia from a megalomaniacal, hipster madman and his maenads:
NO. 9 EASTCOAST UNITED FREE PRESS SEPT 29 OCT 12 WESTCOAST 30 CENTS 25¢
VOL. 1 - NO. 4 July 21 - Aug 4 BOSTON 25¢ EVERYWHERE 1967
Eqbal Mehdi’s Charcoal Drawings
01/23/2010 · Mansi Shah
“It all started at the age of eight when he drew a picture on a wall with a piece of charcoal, stolen from his mother’s stove.”
Babu Eshwar Prasad
01/10/2010 · Mansi Shah
Untitled, 36 x 48 in., Acrylic on canvas
Untitled, 48 x 65.5 in., Acrylic on canvas
Anish Kapoor
01/08/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Confession: I’ve walked by Anish Kapoor’s Chicago “bean” (ok, ok: Cloud Gate) one too many times, and if familiarity has not, in this case, bred any real contempt, it has bred something akin to disinterest. It is an expensive-looking, starchitectural funhouse mirror cloaked with the same solemn air of profundity that the art directors of BMW web-ads achieve with a far greater economy of means, and far less self-importance. In a sense, it is perfectly emblematic of the corporatized busy funness and funny business of the Millenium Park vibe in general, and of the AT&T Plaza in particular, where the orecchiette-shaped behemoth sits demanding attention, looking a bit like a random freeze frame snatched from a sci-fi film: the part where a giant malevolent metallic demonoid robot shape-shifts into a fast-moving blob of all-devouring, extraterrestrial mercury.
Stilled in the midst of this collosal machinic alchemy, however, it evokes neither awe nor terror. A far better aesthetic journey can be had perusing the many amateur youtube videos featuring the object in question. And maybe, in the end, this simple technique could stand as a useful measure of the efficacy of any art object these days—and provide a telling spectrogram of its aura: ask yourself which is more interesting, the work itself or the youtube videos made of it by tourists goofing around? The Cloud Gate as it were, or the beloved “Bean”? Either way, it is most accurately categorized as an art-ertainment mega-bauble, one short step away from the Wynn Las Vegas. Watch out, Chicago: the Great Whore of our contemporary and cosmopolitan (remember, this is Anish Kapoor we are talking about!) Babylon has lost an earring on the way back to her suite, stoned and speeding, after a long and weird night at the Cirque de Soleil afterparty.
Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2004)
Anish Kapoor has made a career out of this sort of midbrow accessibility, engaging and cleverly surprising, producing gentle aha-moments and a sense of having thought something big and ennobling. This American Life, Wes Anderson, The English Patient and Malcolm Gladwell are all staring at me right now saying: “what the hell’s your problem?”
My strong feelings on the matter notwithstanding, when I was in New York last month I stopped by the Guggenheim to see his Memory. It is a corseted and ruddy corten-steel zeppelin, somewhat deflated looking although still plenty bulging and tumescent, belted and bolted and stuffed into a room seemingly too small to contain its swelling immensity. And that right there tells you that Anish Kapoor’s preferred brand of heavy-handed populism is about to nail you with a David Copperfield-style ship-in-a-bottle effect. Don’t fall for it. It’s the sort of thing that appears to have worked some magic over cosmopolitan sensibilities in this decaying late-capitalist moment of ours but the imagineer’s spell, after all, isn’t that powerful. There is a whiff of Andrew Carnegie’s megalomania about Kapoor’s work, an atavistic steel-baron gesturalism that imparts an old-fashioned appeal (this one is patinated with powdery-looking rust, an au courant steampunkish touch), and there is the inescapable stench of rampant Jindalism as well, the icy and soulless stainless-steel rot of maximalized modernist minitude.
Anish Kapoor, Memory (2008)
Memory wants so badly to be interpreted that it practically coerces it out of you. Jammed in to its undersized quarters, and forcing curious visitors to navigate uncertainly through the early-period Kandinskys and lavatory waiting-areas of the Guggenheim to take it all in, it is all about Memory, which also grows really big as time goes on, and also takes on a kind of slippery steel skin. The seams are visible, but they are tight. Nothing could escape from there… or could it? If you could open a window into it—but you can!—you would see a black square of absolute darkness—but I think I see a little light in there!—an unenterable black hole of memory and time past. I’m feeling like memory is empty and yet it is full. It is the past, but it is also endlessly protean and capable of creative change and refashioning! That black square sometimes looks flat and two-dimensional, like a painting, and sometimes looks three-dimensional, like a cosmic door. (I am at heart your guide on otherworldly journeys in time and space, says Kapoor with this, really working as a painter, but doing so surreptitiously by actually working as a sculptor). Much as in the David Bromberg joke about the original leather-bound edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet with all the significant passages underlined, here too every stinking word is underlined.
But you know I actually enjoyed myself standing there digging the op-art special effects emanating from this dead-black yolk of a hundred-year egg, this unplayable ocarina of the titans. It was much better than Cats, which is also about memories. I felt a yawning sort of gravity in front of that window-door, a dicey pull into the enclosed and yet bottomless black. It even felt safely dangerous for a moment. That and the fact that it doesn’t feature dildos (Chelsea’s galleries right now, wow, dildo-central)… it may be just enough. But if challenging and dark post-Minimalist beauty is what you’re after, go upstairs and see what Kitty Kraus did with a light bulb full of black paint and two panes of glass. Mr. Kapoor, if you insist on plying me with quasi-mystical promises, then offer me hard, maddening wine, not some sweet watery spritzer!
Chitra Ganesh
01/03/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Chitra Ganesh’s Lady Mollusk (2009) sits stonily, with the aura of a prophetess demonstrating an old and meaningful wound that is unlikely to cicatrice itself closed any time soon. To the contrary, it looks cosmically alight, spilling ectoplasmic fairy-dust like a mystical inkjet womb. Bubblegum shoelaces stream from her eyes sideways at a distant, dispersed set of heavens, and although this is one war that never seems won, what’s under attack here are clearly the poofy-sleeved perspectivalisms and vanishing points of the Western hegemon’s scopic regimes: instead of concentrating our gaze on the lady herself, these florescent laser beams shoot off at invisible horizons, pulling us wonderfully toward inscrutable objects that float, weightless, beyond the edges of the image. Newton be damned: chrome plastic bubbles form and dissolve in the air around her according to some hidden and unfamiliar physics, blinded and dully reflective. If I look closely I can see myself standing there tiny, entrapped and multiplied by fourteen, with no head, upside down.
Lady Mollusk (2009)
There is a deep mock-Orientalist archival riff at work behind this piece, a bass note sample one hears looping away a lot in “Indian” (post-Saatchi, I can only use that in quotes because I don’t know what it means) art these days… often overplayed frankly. Here, happily, it actually advances the cause, giving its otherwise pixellated, digitally flattened, deliberately low-fi painted lady a set of ghostly black shadows, tiny points of unknowable nullity impervious to any kind of analog light. For more empirical thrills, we have to reckon with the coarse, black, sloppy, tangled braids turned loose from beneath her shawl—refugee tresses quickly tied and spilling forth onto the floor, coming at the viewer with an uncertain, possibly dangerous set of motives.
She’s obviously some kind of shamaness, a sorceress busy at a spell. The monstrous, many-eyed, tongue-pink nudibranch that she cradles like a Spanish guitar, backlit with a chemical phosphorescence and draped gently over her shoulder like a friend pulled from a house fire? That must be her familiar.
Thanks to Nitin Mukul for the photo!
Abdul Ghani Khan – Pashto Artist/Poet
11/28/2009 · Mansi Shah
Translation of When Man Sits Down In Dust:
Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness;
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!
A manjila resting on riches becomes a serpent.
Don’t shower houris and gilman over me. Enough!
God, I swear, I’m not concerned with anyone save you;
Abdul Ghani Khan and his wife, Roshan
Where today, I walk oblivious and proud,
God knows, to this garden, who will be the heir.
I am a Pukthun and am not afraid of death;
I am angered at an empty life and a desolate end.
The river of doubt runs deep through my heart,
Wondering when the brilliant waterfall of hope will flow.
My heart gazes at your indifferent eye and so,
At times the great string breaks into tears.
Is music lament or rapture — I cannot decide;
Every tone now moves us, now becomes shrill.
Khan's sculptures
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!
A manjila resting on riches becomes a serpent.
Don’t shower houris and gilman over me. Enough!
God, I swear, I’m not concerned with anyone save you;
Princess Durru Shehvar, Khan’s drawing of the Princess
Where today, I walk oblivious and proud,
God knows, to this garden, who will be the heir.
I am a Pukthun and am not afraid of death;
I am angered at an empty life and a desolate end.
The river of doubt runs deep through my heart,
Wondering when the brilliant waterfall of hope will flow.
My heart gazes at your indifferent eye and so,
At times the great string breaks into tears.
Is music lament or rapture — I cannot decide;
Every tone now moves us, now becomes shrill.
_____________________________________________
Read about Khan here/here and the Pashto language here.
Ghani Khan’s poems sung by Sardar Ali Takkar:
Sonia Khurana
11/17/2009 · Mansi Shah
Still from Bird, 1999
Trust the medium, control the message
07/03/2009 · Mansi Shah
Galerie Christian Hosp presents Settlement, the first European solo exhibition of Gigi Scaria, which assembles his sculptural and photographic work. Scaria, an emerging New Delhi-based artist, is a cartographer of human habitats, his mundane urban objects that constitute our everyday environments are vital to understanding his artistic concerns. They occupy a central role in his sculptures and photographs, which through local specifities are able to transcend the local incidents of his Delhi residence.
GIGI SCARIA, SETTLEMENT
The exhibition curated by Jamila Adeli consists of nine large-scale photographs and Scaria’s latest monumental sculpture “Settlement”. A same titled catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition. Currently showing. May 2nd — July 11th, 2009
Settlement, 2009
Photograph, digital print on archival paper
43 x 64.5 inches / 109 x 164 cm
Highlight, 2008
Photograph, digital print on archival paper
43 x 64.5 inches / 109 x 164 cm
Someone left a horse on the shore, 2007
Photograph, digital print on archival paper
43 x 64.5 inches / 109 x 164 cm
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Galerie Christian Hosp
Halle Am Wasser
Invaliden Straße 50-51
D-10557, Berlin
Freddy Birdy
04/11/2009 · Mansi Shah
SMS Shakespeare, 2009
Oil on Canvas
47″ x 47″
Chain painting , 2008
Oil on Canvas
84″ x 60″
“Highly idiosyncratic within the context of contemporary Indian art, [Freddy] Birdy’s works participate in a long history of language-based paintings and art works that characterize Western Modernism: from the word/image puzzles of the Surrealist Rene Magritte, the studies of meaning by American Conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, the Pop Icons of Los Angeles painter Ed Ruscha, to the linguistic experiments of Feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Yet Mr. Birdy does not recreate an academic’s dry rhetoric. Rather, his works are humorous and highly entertaining, self-deprecating and tongue-in-cheek, placing him in the context of his own generation of artists such as Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan and Martin Kippenberger, who poke fun at the conventions of art so as to take it forward. Mr. Birdy posits painting as a type of stand-up comedy.” – Nature Morte