“Looking is not Seeing” – a critical note
Responding to the socio-political and cultural realities of the
time is one of the modes in which artists engage thematically
through work. Within this engagement there are several
trajectories of expressions that had emerged corroborating the
subjective experiences of the artist in relation to the objective
existence in society. Balaji’s pictorial expressions and the kind
of rhetoric that he constructs on the surface of the picture is
one of these responses but the language through which this
response is articulated involves certain syntactic complexity. At
the same time these responses are not some politically neutral and
visually “interesting” objects of aesthetic desire but implied
with a sharp political consciousness that is critical to the
established cultural and social imaginations/ambiguities in the
society.
Balaji’s works comprise a crucial relation between the painted
text-phrases and the images. In fact this text,
composed in two phrases, frames the meanings and the subtext of
the visual images. Written in a simple typography, this text does
not intervene in the picture format but stays on the surface, by
virtue of its flat, two-dimensional nature. In one sense this text
is equal to the status of parergon, as theorised by Derrida
– Parergon is “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work, neither
inside or outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any
opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to
the work” (Truth in Painting, 1978). The textual phrase
belongs to the work (painting) as well as stays unrelated
pictorially to the painting. When a viewer approaches these
paintings, the sight is drawn towards deftly manoeuvred images,
but quickly,
the verbal text catches the eye, as if intervening between the
pictorial image and the sight of the onlooker. This moment of
rupture is also the moment of introduction of specific meanings to
the work. The phenomenological and aesthetic experience of the
viewer, in this context, is guided by the text-phrase, written in
English. And in this moment of quick shifts between the textual
phrase and the image, signification gets complicated and acquires
a double signification which correlates each other – the text and
the image. At one level the text-phrase puts forward a literal or
direct meaning of it. When the signified or the meaning interacts
with the image, this signified becomes empty and acquires a second
level signification, whose signified belongs to the social and
political realms.
One can say that two tendencies of pictorial representations –
modern and postmodern – interweave into a syntactic network that
produces an easy communication of the meaning of the work at the
first level. But at another level this communicated meaning gets
re-projected onto the image that is developed by rendering certain
pictorial density which engages the experiential realms of the
viewer by virtue of its deferment of the signification. So the
interesting dimension to the structure and the process of Balaji’s
work is this apparent oscillation of the meaning/signification
between its straightforward communication through text/words, and
its deferment through pictorial rendering. The pictorial surface
of these works follows the procedure of image making and
abstraction of the form that develops the visual density and opens
a space for aesthetic engagement in time at length, which works
with the logic of deferment. Most of the times,
Balaji’s image sources and references belong to the mundane and
popular categories like posters, photographs – old and new,
illustrations, popular prints etc. And he consciously maintains
their discursive/visual character as if quoting from the popular
visual culture and juxtaposes these, with an arbitrarily rendered
picture surface. These visual quotes become pronounced through
their easy recognisability and draw the eye of the viewer to
navigate the entire surface of the painting that correlates and
rearticulates the idea represented. Balaji formulates his own
phrases sometimes; or he picks up some popular phrases that are
re-structured in a sarcastic form or in an incomplete form. These
text-phrases introduce a chiastic reversal of their primary or
first level meaning when they interact with the painted image. For
example “the favourite drink of our farmers” when the viewer
relates with the image, and the history of farmers committing
suicides in the recent past in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh,
India, the primary meaning of the phrase gets reversed and certain
moral contradictions get interjected. Sometimes Balaji uses
double or two parallel phrases that involve this chiastic relation
in between them as well as with the image.
Apart from painting Balaji also experiments with sculptural
language. The choice of material and the corresponding form that
he evolves through, follows the same tendency of chiastic relation
between the form and material that is popularly used and, the idea
that is represented. For example in the work “New designs for our
country’s pavements” he modelled the upper surface of the tiles
used for pavements with human figures. These figures are
represented in sleeping gestures and postures along with a bag or
a small property, a site that we witness on the pavements in
Indian cities; migrant people, labourers or the citizens of the
“unplanned city” dwell on these pavements. Balaji chose the tiles
that are presently used at large for the pavements and sculpted
these figures in relief on them. Suggesting that these tiles to be
used for pavements involve a parody, he in fact pointed out a
double reality about the status of Indian pavements – as elements
of modern city plan as well as its haunting underside that is
attached so close to it, the alienated and unaccounted poor at the
heart of the city. In another work “...is weaver weaving for
himself” Balaji reflects at the contemporary reality attached with
the weavers in rural India. Here too the irony is framed sharply
by using the real looking loom that weaves a hanging rope, a
signifier immediately invokes suicide. It is this reversal of the
logic and purpose of the form articulates the contradictions that
exist prominently and sometimes inherently in the society.
His works at the outset look simple and straightforward comments
on the contemporary events and realities that are popularly known
and are circulated through various means of media in general. They
display the irony that persists within the forms of human
relations and conditions of socio-economic existence. For example,
those works that deal with the images of construction labour,
farmer suicides, and certain established notions and expressions
of patriotism etc. There is nothing pedagogical and serious about
the way Balaji constructs the narrative of these acute political
expressions. In fact, as the artist himself believes that the
humoristic mode of expression develops a sharp impact, a shock to
the viewer that shakes and destabilises the metaphysics of moral
and ethical codes. But in retrospect Balaji’s works do not involve
an effort to subvert those moral and ethical codes; rather they
are in consonance with certain popular consciousness and the
relative subtexts that are specific to the artist’s observations.
Now, when Balaji says “looking is not Seeing” the emphasis is not
just on what is seen through eyes but to engage at different
discursive levels with the social, political, cultural and
economic issues of the present time.
Santhosh Kumar Sakhinala, 2011
Santhosh Kumar Sakhinala is an art historian, critic based in
Hyderabad, India. He is presently associated with department of
Fine Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication,
University of Hyderabad, as a guest faculty. Sakhinala completed M
Phil from EFL University, Hyderabad; MVA from Fine Arts Faculty,
MSU Baroda; BFA from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. Apart from the
mainstream Art, his interests include popular visual culture. His
M Phil thesis is related to the public statues and the politics of
representation. |