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John Ruskin would be horrified, the old fuddy-duddy, if he could peek through my eyes at Aditya Pande at work in his brightly lit studio in South Delhi: he sits there in a comfortable office chair with a large computer monitor in front of him, his left hand flitting about purposefully on a keyboard while his right manipulates a mouse shaped like a pen, blindly drawing invisible lines on a pad next to his coffee cup. Onscreen, an image takes shape out of a sprawling knot of tangled black lines–it is at once primitive and ultra high-tech, like the product of some futuristic spirograph set free from mindless repetitions and symmetries, materializing a bug-eyed dog in motion, or a man made of buzzing, nervous lines staring out from the monitor. Pande, who was trained as a graphic artist, moves his hands with an easy intuition that is impressive to witness. With a flick of a button on his keyboard, one of the thousands of lines on the screen sprouts a magical little "handle" and the artist pulls at it, tweaking the curve of the line this way and that while my brow furrows in an unconscious, idiotic act of mimesis. I do not understand computers well. When I ask him what program he uses, he smiles and tells me that it is "a vector-based graphics program called Freehand", never guessing that the word "program" demarcates the limits of my technical vocabulary when it comes to things digital. Or at least politely never letting on.
On a table he unrolls one of his recent prints and the digital image leaps from the page with an energy and presence that is as remarkable to see as it is difficult to contain within the traditional vocabulary of an art critic.
The degree to which India's best known younger artists depend on digital technology to create their painted works is something usually discussed in daylight whispers and winks, or indiscreet nighttime confessions. There is a tension there that is hard to escape--between the hidden machinery of mediated production and the romantic notion of the artist creating ex nihilo , unbounded by the materiality of his (always "his" in this particular mythology) medium, transmitting to the viewer his innermost thoughts and feelings, thereby, as though through the crystalline, empty air. Technique, following these age-old fancies, is something that should be noted by the viewer only in passing, neatly effacing itself, bowing subordinately on its way out of the communicative space of the imagined artistic exchange like a well-behaved peon exiting a bank manager's office. At best, it should be forgotten entirely. A true artist, at least in this delightfully retrograde storybook vision, hovers over his media like a puppet master over his mannequins, like the spirit of a respectable person over his or her flesh; a transgression of this discipline is vulgar at best, outrageous at worst, at once morally suspect and artistically bankrupt. No wonder it isn't a topic that comes up all that often in polite interviews with artists: the "market" (that wonderful, composite alien being formed from the individual whims and prejudices of a million nervous calculations) moves according to these outmoded hierarchies all too often for them to be safely dismissed.
The increasing digitization of the Indian art market complicates things even further, of course: the web provides the space for commercial transactions between artists and dealers and buyers, for criticism and display of works, increasingly for art itself. Some artists dive headlong into digital media, leaving behind the safe embrace of the conservative buyers, for whom paintings have a special metonymic value as irreproducible, individual and unique icons of a fragile, high-brow notion of art and artist. Others conceal their dependence on software, hardware and human assistants, producing hand-signed, commercially valuable paintings from the black box of their studio imbued with that old-fashioned aura, no matter how contrived and fraudulent, Walter Benjamin be damned. And then there are those few brave souls who are neither fish nor fowl but something hybrid and different, feeding on the friction between the possibilities opened up by new technologies and the constraints imposed by the "market's" aesthetic inertia, by the buying "public's" strange, impossible assumptions.
Aditya Pande isn't afraid to talk about the digital technology behind his drawings. When I point out the taboo nature of the subject for many artists, he shrugs and says "I admire craftsmanship." His works can be delivered, at least theoretically, in any way you want them: on a hard drive, on a disk, on your ipod, in an email, on a small or big or huge piece of paper. If you asked him nicely he could transform them, with a push of a button or two, into a string of zeroes and ones, or a graph, or a series of sounds. The images can be scaled up or down, zoomed into or out from infinitely without losing or gaining resolution, and they can be reproduced, at least in theory, an infinite number of times without being diminished in any way. All of the drawings he releases into the market are single edition prints, he tells me, but if you misplace yours, there's a perfect backup available, a clone on his hard drive.
All of this is possible because, as he tells me, his works are "native digital", drawn from what the artist describes as a kind of "gene pool of vector-based objects". Vector-based technology differs from pixel-based programs in that, unlike the latter, which consists of a grid of tiny blocks of data ("pixels"), the former depends instead on a mathematical relationship, visually realized as a line or path, between invisible points. It is all based around something apparently called "quadratic geometry", which I view with the same suspicion and horror that a crusty, antediluvian fossil must evoke in an inarticulate creationist. Whatever the truth behind these claims, to my layman's eye the obsessive line-drawing that animates Pande's best work finds its natural, digital ally in the vectored pathway. The dense lines in Pande's drawings curl around each other, across the flat backdrops like smoke rising through the still sunset air or ink dropped in water gently stirred.
When I ask him if he considers himself a "digital artist" he says no. "I use it as a tool," he tells me, one among many. There is, indeed, something refreshingly low-tech about Aditya Pande's high-tech productions. Eschewing slick surfaces for messy knots and jointed, swirling lines, the artist also avoids the safe ambiguities of "pure" abstraction and instead creates works that stand poised at the edge of representation. Perhaps even braver is his adamant rejection of the "digital" as his theme–Pande's art is not "about" digital art, computers or the combination of the two. Rather, he draws human and animal figures, often in interaction, exploring resolutely old-fashioned and humanistic themes like the relationship between man and nature, love and desire, beauty and ugliness, Snowy and Tintin.
In the end, Pande's techniques are radical, but the ideas that animate his works are not. He is, at heart, an artist of the pen, with a body of manually drawn ink-based works as proof. He shows me a notebook of early sketches where his predilection for the drawn line is immediately evident. Even his new works, on display recently at Delhi's Nature Morte gallery, are explicitly hybrid, incorporating enamel painting and ink drawing into the digital prints, creating from them something irreplaceable, unique and individual, after all. |
