Brian McAvera, 'Slate Works'
In: Avtarjeet Dhanjal. Edited by Peter Cross and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1997, pp. 74-75.
The slate works avoid the overt amalgam of South Asian and Western aesthetics which the West derides as 'derivative' and opt for a kind of visual poetry in which the value lies beyond the physical reality of the piece. They represent a journey, one part of which is the artist's journey to synthesise Western abstraction (or perhaps more properly reinvent Eastern abstraction) to an Eastern spirituality, the other part of which is the journey of the displacement of cultures. What Rasheed Araeen terms 'otherness' is not revealed in 'clear depictions of sub-continent scenes from a remembered homeland' or in the 'use of styles derived from Indian art such as Mughal miniatures or Tantric art'. [99] Rather it is revealed in works which seem to belong to neither East nor West.
Dhanjal first started to work with slate at Margam in 1983, followed by Stoke in 1986, with the independent slate works beginning to emerge in 1984 and 1985. Five of these were shown in The Other Story. [100] Another five have been developed since then, one of which was commissiond for Cartwright Hall in Bradford by the institute of International Visual Arts and Bradford Arts, Museums and Libraries. [101] He started using slate in Margam because "I always like to use something that belongs to the area. They said slate. I went to the quarry and saw millions of tons of the stuff, mountains of it, on a hillside. In the village where I lived, there was no electricity. Dark nights become pitch black. Darkness becomes solid. We don't see this in England as the big towns reflect light into the sky, even ten miles away. In the village, any light burning becomes magical. So I started using slate as symbol of darkness, and drilled holes into it for the candles".
As a child, Dhanjal wrote on slate. In his autobiographical fragments he notes that 'there were few households in the village that would have more than one lamp; the dense darkness was very frightening. Most parts of the house were dark too... the streets were dark except for the few days of a full moon.' [102] On another occasion he refers to sleeping on the roof terrace at home on summer nights 'under the dark blue sky full of stars... We watched stars changing positions at different times of the night and different times of the year. We watched and talked about the moon almost every night.' [103]
It is not difficult to see the slate works as a distillation of these memories. Essentially they are blocks of slate, fractured, ridged and weathered, found objects from the quarry-like miniature hillsides which bear the imprint of geological time. Dhanjal makes minimal modifications to these objects. He drills small holes in them into which night lights made out of black wax are fitted, ready to be lit and to illuminate the blocks into flickering life. You could say that they are abstracted constellations in the night sky but they are equally mandalas, pictograms or maps of the universe of the gods. The slate acts as an interface between the natural and the industrial, its functionality being transformed into art.
The minimal modifications to the slate extend to other markings: a pictogram of the rays of the sun; and various sequences of tiny steps - tiny steps at the side of huge blocks of slate. [104] In Western thought, a journey has typically been seen as an A-Z whereas in Eastern terms it is usually thought of as circular. One does not know where it will conclude. [105] As the journey or the search becomes more intense, it funnels or narrows. If one imagines the steps to be larger, their magic and the mystery would be lost. Their very minimalism is the point: a journey or a human life, dwarfed by the immensities of the cosmos. The steps themselves just stop, which is in itself a kind of metaphor. It is akin to Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith' in that one has to trust to faith if one wishes to believe and to survive.
[99] See Meeting Point, op. cit. p. 4 Araeen, amongst others, notes that such works are usually produced by artists who break into the establishment - at least initially. It is worth noting that Dhanjal researched and co-selected the Indian element of the Meeting Point show in which second generation of British Asian artists were placed side by side with the Indian generation of the same age.
[100] Needle (1894-5), Valley of Lights (1984-5), Open Circle (1984-5), Upper Level 1 (1984-5) and Upper Level 2 (1987).
[101] The work for Cartwright Hall was co-commissioned in 1996. This marked a new development in the slate pieces with the introduction of a water element as opposed to the candles. The other four works were untitled at the time of writing, except for The Candle which was exhibited in Freedom, the Amnesty touring show curated by Angela Kingston in 1996.
[102] Avtarjeet Dhanjal, autobiographical writings (unpublished). In their current state the writings consists of four short chapters headed The Village, Village 2, Village 3 and The Town.
[103] Ibid. This passage almost exactly mirrors the idea for the Cartwright Hall piece in Bradford which uses a tapestry embroidered with small mirrors which reflect in water like a starry night.
[104] The stonemason Stefan Giggs remarked to me that when he first heard about the steps he 'thought it was naff, about little people and the like, but when you see it, it's breathtaking. It works!'.
[105] One may think of W.B. Yeats and his gyres, the Hindu parallel of the wheel (Chakara) or of Tantra, unwinding outwards into the middle.