The gallery-culture and the various marketing strategies being followed as promotional stunts to make the art work salable have just become undeniable in the present context. But if we turn the pages of history not much, we get to see the reverse picture when a M. F. Husain painting did not sell even at one hundred and fifty rupees at the Annual Show of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. This is just one among the thousand such examples that lays the truth bare for us to assess and analyze the market game where art articulation has now become a means of asset making for a particular class.
For the sustenance of good art, proper patronage was always needed. History has given repeated such evidences where major brilliant works of art could be created just because of pertinent support from the patron and many works could not be done or remained incomplete due to lack of right patronage. On the other hand, many a time the artists suffer from their creative freedom being challenged while they execute commissioned works. Here the hegemony of the patron has been more dominantly exercised rather than the spontaneous creative flow and the intellectual elements the artist wish to play with.
Now why am I attempting to put together art, patron, art market, creative freedom, intellectual practice, etc together particularly here while criticizing the works of Barun Chowdhury whose show The Season of Discontent was recently held at the Aakriti Art Gallery , Kolkata from April 12-27, 2008? Barun is a young professional in the art field who did his graduation in Painting from Government College of Arts & Crafts, Kolkata and MFA in Graphics from MS University, Baroda , in 1999. For nearly a decade he has been engaged in searching a language of his own to execute his expressions on canvas. Though this span of time is really too short to make any judgmental comment on the works of an artist because the artist actually strives hard to develop an individual mode of expression during this phase, yet one cannot stop being critical if even after this length of time an artist is found to be playing fowl at his/her own expression. This is exactly what has happened to Barun's works predominantly in acrylic on canvas where he completely lacks any focus and in fact ‘the season of discontent' has built up a severe discontentment among the viewers regarding the originality of his perception.
Barun imitates the language of posters and calendars and has that skill to copy them exactly found in print. First of all Barun is confused what statement he wants to make. Why should he go for a half zebra-half horse combination on a scenic greenery backdrop with the roots of the trees on foreground? Is he critically commenting on the hybrid culture where an individual undergoes identity crisis somewhat relevant to Girish Karnad's play Hayavadana that became a critique on the process of de-culturization? But I am sorry to say Barun is not aware of all this and he sometimes feels he can go surreal and be allegorical in this way. Creating an allegory or reinterpreting myth is not a kid's play that Barun must first of all get clear about. Dealing with 48” x 48” or 48” x 72” sized canvas just on the basis of creating illusionary world and allegorical space without any substantiation with theoretical inputs can be seriously vulnerable and in no way should be taken granted for being accidental. Moreover the titles he has given like “The Myth of Jatayu” and created a bird with plastic quality on a realistic backdrop carries no significance in the context of the image and thus in most of his works the titles become intangible at par the work. This becomes another strong ground in support of his state of confusion regarding his very own ideas where he has exerted a coercion to link the image with the statement it carries.
Barun was an exponent of Graphics at the M.S. University , Baroda , but his present works carry no such graphical quality and also defy the entire genre this particular university has cultivated over the years. Well, there is no point criticizing an artist on the basis of this parameter but if someone is found entirely disillusioned by the tempo of the salability of his product (not work of art), then he/she must be pointed out that how much he/she has deferred from the roots.
The tug-of-war between the artist and his patron is not new and at different historical conjectures, there have been attempts to overcome these barriers that have given birth to several art movements but at the same time the concept of patronage for art to flourish could not be abolished. In the present context the galleries have taken the broader shape of patronization and to a great extent they control the art market where entry of an individual artist is rather becoming implausible without their support. The galleries have become the mediator to allow an art work to reach out not only to the mass but also to be fetched by a collector whose actual perception of the piece of art is much more regulated by the marketable profitability aspect. Thus the art work is more a lucrative asset than an aesthetical discourse for the collector who is best categorized as a part of the bourgeois class and plays a crucial role in shaping the market economy. And the poor artist gets entrapped in this vicious circle and enslaved to the market trend.
Now Barun must decide where does he stand and exercise his creative freedom to re-think about the clarity of his standpoints. And for the gallery to curate such shows can fall back on the image and reputation as a whole.
The Season of Discontent
Artist:Barun Chowdhury
April 12-27, 2008
Aakriti Art Gallery , Kolkata |
