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this is a tour-guide from Minnesota–squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society).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?
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
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
Mansur Salim
04/11/2009 · Mansi Shah
Miniature, 1985
Industrialist’s Resort
Madhubani Paintings From Bihar
02/25/2009 · Mansi Shah
Paintings colored by henna leaves, bougainvillea and
neem made by the women of Madhubani.
Suresh Dharbe – Mandla Paintings
02/20/2009 · Mansi Shah
Kali (Goddess of Time & Change)
Nagas (Cobra Snakes)
Suresh Dharbe with his family in the Madhya Pradesh town of Mandla.
Sandeep Mukherjee
02/17/2009 · Mansi Shah
Pune born, Sandeep Mukherjee creates beautiful Duralene paintings often referred to as “kaleidoscopic, cosmic abstractions.”
“…Mukherjee speaks as avidly about the principles of physics and cosmology as he does about Hindu mythological paintings and the Buddhist cave temples of India…
.[His] commitment to these sorts of existential questions — the relationship of presence to absence, the archetypal to the ineffable, energy to matter — and perhaps his Indian ethnicity have led many to attribute a spiritual dimension to the work.”
.– From LA Weekly
Read the entire article here.
http://www.sisterla.com