Subjectivity as a philosophical category marks the voyage from the personal to the impersonal in the state of Being. Art tries to make sense of this transition in ways specific to it. To be engaged with the intimations of one's subjectivity in the pre-linguistic zone of consciousness that is beyond good and evil (in the Nietzschean sense) and at the same be rooted in one's reality perceptions is not something that comes easy to every artist. In the imagistic world of E. H. Pushkin fiction and vision collide with each other and mesh in the umbra of overtonal resonance that is drawn between the surreal and the conceptual. The fecundity of his imagery has to do with a streak of the surreal that informs a world of evanescent sensations and their fugitive shades at the threshold of consciousness before emerging as emotions in interaction with the content that the mind invests them with, which is to say, thought. In the painterly poetics of Pushkin, imagery is the material correlative of this world of experience in which thought and feeling share borders. Incidentally, a collection of his poems in Malayalam published recently which has the same title as one of his paintings, The Space of Invisible Days throws some light on this particular aspect of his creativity.
Writing on Pushkin a few years ago I made this observation:
If we accept with John Roberts that the making of meaning for art historian or critic is the social remaking of authorship, then the works of Pushkin are an interesting case in point, considering the way he has travelled and the course he has taken from his early student days onwards. One could see an over-wrought upsurge of high-strung emotionality of his early works subsiding into a detached intellection as he works his way through from painting to painting over the years. If this is to be understood as marking the way he chose to grapple with an ego-driven and self-directed world of affective ambivalence and its history-rupturing rhetoric of sublimity vis-à-vis the artist-subject, Pushkin's journey is informed by the radical urgency of conviction and concern about the place of art in the scheme of things of a complex world.
In this context, it is interesting to compare a significant body of his early work – the series of mixed media works he has done in 1998 titled Memories using widely-seen tell-tale images of photo-journalism depicting war monuments, exodus of refugees, victims of famine, remnants of the Auschwitz, ethnic massacres and so on which narrate the ghastly atrocities that man had done to man and the ensuing human suffering. Here enlarged Xerox copies of these press photographs made on translucent paper are placed over a painted surface with only scanty lines and marks of the brush and sparingly drawn images like that of an eye. In a significant gesture of working against privileging the authorial voice of his ‘created' graphic images he offers them to be seen through the impersonal reprographic images of vernacular photography which are given precedence over the former. His minimally drawn images when over-layered with these stark images of cruelty that deface and obscure those beneath them become unequivocal and epigrammatic testaments to human suffering and compassion. In a sense, formally they have their antecedents in Francis Picabia's series of Transparencies and Superimpositions while conceptually aligning themselves with Goya's great series Disasters of War . But while Picabia's initial images are overlaid with his simplified drawings in brush, Pushkin's drawn images are over-layered with accessed media images, resulting in a collision and collapsing of different media that erase the personal.
Keeping in mind these early works it can be seen how Pushkin has come a long way since and his recent works have to be seen in the context of his changes in style and outlook over the years while his overarching concerns remain steadfastly consistent. Now the paintings tend to become more reticent and subjective in their expression but not the least equivocal or ambiguous. At the same time, the imagery becomes more minimal, stark and in a way, direct. So much so that some canvases in their insistent directness which bears testimony to his convictions, appear to come close to overt prosaic statements. But as paintings they transcend this immediacy to enter a world of mediated meanings. As for example, the work Towards a Cinema of Aesthetic Adventure which has a reference to Godard's 1969 film Wind from the East where Glauber Rocha appears in person and is asked by a pregnant woman film-maker as to which way to take towards political cinema and Rocha points to two paths: one to his left, the path of adventurous aesthetics and intellectual exploration and the other to his front, that of the Third World cinema. The woman hesitantly starts to move along the latter path, kicking away a red ball only to see that the ball is on her trail. She leaves that path and takes to the other. Though the reference to the (filmic) narrative is explicit what is to be noted is that the painting does not narrativise its content through this reference in any manner. More than anything, its allusiveness serves as a kind of testament to his artistic convictions. Contrast this with a painting like Beyond the Window (not in the present show) where the reductive imagery in spite of its being stark and emphatic is at the same time compelling in its undertones. It acts on the senses as though seeing and by extension, seeing the work itself, is forbidden from making sense of what is seen. The semiotics of visuality is thus turned in upon itself. This ambivalence of the meaning-generating process between seeing and knowing, between the narrative and the connotative, between the sensory and the sensations of thought is inherent to the context of Pushkin's work. In works like The Motion of Rethinking , there is an unstated narrative that stops short of unfolding in time, but nonetheless one that does not hold back its expressive content. The person of a human figure seen in the image of a tiny lap-top computer beside which is a pole sticking out from an unfinished structure, is set against the background of another planet with its orb looming large behind. This duality between image and the image of an image (which could also be seen in a painting like Printmaking during the Revolution which is discussed elsewhere) also points to the ambivalence in the experience of reality between the discursive and the perceptual. That is why the tone of the painting is not overwhelmingly apocalyptic which at the explicit thematic level it could well have been.
Most of the objects depicted, commonplace and of everyday familiarity as they are, have emotional associations of a very personal kind; but as imagery they are divested of this aspect to assume an iconic dimension within the pictorial space. They are, as mentioned earlier, the material correlatives of a trans-visual world of nascent sensory emanations before being concretized as emotional experiences that we are conscious of. As for example, the shoe in Interlacing of Causes or the compact cassette in Swan Lake . The well-worn shoe that is still endearing in some personal way becomes the subject matter in its own right, with or without evoking associations of Van Gogh. The simple everyday object as a cassette can at times be of unbounded personal meaning and associations. It can be a kind of emotional stand-in emblematic of the strains of great music and can call to mind a series of emotional responses. Pushkin, as he disclosed, thought of invoking a reference to Ustad Bismillah Khan, obviously as a posthumous tribute to the maestro, then on second thought realised that because of its directness and immediacy of appeal, could be excessively emotionally over-wrought. This conscious avoidance of the emotionally charged for the sake of an almost impersonal dissociation with the object of experience invests the personal about the works with the experience of a distilled and quintessential subjectivity. In a sense, it is this tension and the strain thereof that riddles the manner in which he comes to terms with his own perceptual experience that sears through the apparent placidity of the imagery in many of his works. It appears that the work Printmaking during the Revolution is in fact a confession of artistic creation rooted in the insubstantiality of the sensory construct that the mind perceives as emotional states. Here a print-maker is examining his print. The image of the graphic impression is a three dimensional one of a cube projecting from the paper surface as if an object and it is disintegrating into the shreds of brush strokes that formed the image even as the artist looks on. This disjunction between image and representation echoes as it were that between reality and truth and Pushkin's work seems to be addressing the philosophical dilemmas that are built around this duality. He can be further seen to be thematising the concerns around the act of seeing and the visual experience in a painting like Your Eyes should be where he addresses it full frontally. The railings below the eye suggest that one is actually moving along as if in a gallery space and looking at the image of an “eye” which in turn looks back. The spiky eye-lashes virtually makes of it an act of “looking daggers at” and the twin pupils suggest that one has to see more and perhaps, see more intently. As also that when you see, you are also being seen. The theme of sight appears again but this time in a rather indirect way as in An eye, like a bizarre yesterday which is a tribute to Odilon Redon (who in turn, it may be remembered, meant his painting as a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe). To have a reference to Redon on the tag of a teabag in a glass is indeed a strange idea; but, however, that being tucked away to an inconspicuous place, is the only indulgence of an understatement that Pushkin allows himself. Issues of environmental concerns are close to Pushkin's heart and many of his works have latent and submerged allusions to such matters. But even so they don't illustrate some fact of environmental importance in any didactic manner but become testaments of artistic faith. In Colour of History , an image of the endangered species of birds, the hornbill, in silhouette is pieced together as if a lost pattern is hypothetically recreated from the shreds or potsherds of some ancient relic to show what it once was. The sardonic humour instead of the D-day scare-mongering by environmentalists is what informs a work like this. Much the same concern underlies Documenting an Indian rhino where in spite of the strange setting and its rather plain incongruity, it has nothing about it that is weird or eerie. The tiny figure of the mighty, wild pachyderm atop a raised platform, posing with a ‘human' self-consciousness to be photographed, fully aware of its endangered status, has more than a touch of rueful humour to it.
It is not too long ago that we have been witness to the horrendous incident of how a head of state was hounded down in his own country by alien mercenaries, taken captive and put through a mock trial in vindication of a pre-announced verdict and his expected execution – all of which were “flashed” spectacularly before the idle gaze of consumption. Whether through satellite surveillance that can spot out the exact position of your house and your neighbourhood on the globe or through being exposed to the unseen gaze in the public domain, the privacy of the individual is being impinged upon by some form or the other of communication networks. Pushkin gives expression to his concerns about this particular human condition in Somebody is talking about your Life , through a minimal representation of forms of familiar objects in a ground of lyrical hues of subdued olive green, typical of Pushkin's artistry.
The fish for Pushkin is a recurring motif and has appeared in several of his earlier works endowed with a personal meaning. In A Few Steps towards a Sleeping Fish , the fish with its innards still having a touch of the ocean which it carries in miniature, is a metaphor of the passage to an experience which is always close at hand but we are hardly aware of. This aspect of proximity and immediacy in their almost subliminal interrelation with experiential reality that is always at one remove until we stumble on it is a strand that runs through the surreal world of Pushkin. The same holds true of a painting like A postmodern artist's Studio with its play of colours, a wide vista of suffused green as an engulfing ambience; it is obviously the world at large which is the studio.
Pushkin has done a group of assemblages in wooden cases against a painted background to be displayed on the wall. Though done apparently in a lighter vein with a touch of playfulness, they are an extension of his painterly sensibility in that they have a bearing on his concern for objects of everyday use. Ranging from mechanical tools, shoe, handles of suitcases to the spiky tongue of a coconut grater, they retain their object identities even as they are painted over and showcased as on a display. Many of them are unrelated to each other as for example, a mechanical tool like pipe wrench and the tangle of tape reeled out from a cassette; however, they all come from within reach of the same domestic experiential context. It is not so much in an attempt to elevate them to the status of art ‘objects' as to acknowledge their mundane functional ‘role' that is always close at hand, with a loving care for their material presence.
(Courtesy: The author and Gallery Espace, New Delhi ) |
