Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, 'The Linking Road',
In: Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings; Sheela Gowda, N.S. Harsha, Nasreen Mohamedi. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2000, pp. 6-11.
The Linking Road does precisely that; it is an arterial route connecting the downtown of Mumbai with the midtown suburb of Bandra. Every day, sometimes twice a day, we found ourselves travelling up and down this road in a taxi cab, hurtling along, bouncing over holes in the road or stuck in monumental congestion, the pollution building up and hawkers tapping insistently on the glass, selling newspapers and strings of flowers.
We were in Mumbai working on the exhibition Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawing. Our research began in London with the two of us looking at slides and books, trying to conï¬gure something that we both wanted to achieve but felt unable to do alone. Our solution was to collaborate, and in so doing establish the ï¬rst link in a chain of collaborations that proliferated outwards, from the two of us to the three artists - Sheela Gowda, N.S. Harsha and Nasreen Mohamedi - to the three partners - inIVA, Beaconsï¬eld and the Victoria & Albert Museum. At the beginning, our connections were speculative, without a master plan. Then, the hypothetical links that we had envisaged started to become real possibilities and the linking process became more of a pragmatic one - writing e-mails, phoning people, organising for work to be loaned and shipped, devising budgets. As well as extending outwards, the connections also jumped back in time, linking the present to the past and tracing a tangled British Indian history in the work of the Company painters.
Our interest in Company painting began with a conversation that we had in London with the Indian critic Hans Mathews. Hans was talking about the work of Nasreen Mohamedi and, in a single sentence, mentioned a whole chain of references and ideas: utopian abstraction, constructivism, the romance of the machine, industrialisation and the National Project. He also talked about the Company paintings, which in their own, odd way cross reference two diverse cultures and synthesise different realities. Seeing the Company paintings in the Indian Department of the V&A conï¬rmed their strangeness: a topography of colonial India, produced by local artists, delivered in a cool European palette and employing the imported techniques of perspective and chiaroscuro.
The Company paintings also introduce a complex web of problematical issues. Many Indian artists have disparaged their makers as mere copyists, whose work is tainted with the stamp of colonial logic. They can also be read as an itinerary of British possession, which, through repetition, underwrite the imperial order. At the same time they are, perhaps, saved by their uniqueness. Regional dialects bubble beneath the surface; the depiction of space becomes holographic in the hands of Indian artists and what emerges is an essentially hybrid form. Our decision to juxtapose this work with that of three contemporary artists did not intend to draw parallels between two unrelated bodies of work, but instead aimed to open up a series of questions. These concern the exchange of visual language between different cultures and traditions - how these languages become displaced and take on new meanings. Of course, artists working in the context of contemporary India have a completely different relationship to the process compared to their historical counterparts, and it is these differences that we wanted to explore.
The drawings of Nasreen Mohamedi were the starting point for our selection. Seeing them in reproduction, you are struck ï¬rst by their sheer beauty and then surprised because they defy your expectations of contemporary Indian art. Her drawings contain no overt references to Indian culture or traditions, instead they have been pared to an abstraction and emptied of all imagery. On closer reflection, their speciï¬city emerges and it becomes clear that these lines intersect at a particular moment, are made possible by a unique set of circumstances - personal, cultural, social, historical. Her practice is constructed from within the language of modernism but with a subtly altered vocabulary; she speaks a familiar tongue in a strange dialect. In between the minimal lines are desert landscapes, urban streets, the buzz of machines. Our search for Mohamedi's work began with her family, her brother Altaf and niece Sasha. They had a small collection of drawings and photographs, and also her scrapbooks and diaries. Altaf explained that, after Mohamedi's death, the family divided up the work and most of it was sold to collectors. Sasha brought out the diaries for us - slim, black volumes, each page worked over in pen and ink. The lines indicating the day and date had been transformed into modulating abstract compositions, erased or partially concealed in washes of grey, black and brown. Occasionally, neat lines of text would replace the stripes of colour. Finding and securing the drawings involved persistent detective work, telephone calls, persuasion and endless journeys up and down the Linking Road, visiting relatives and collectors. Some of the drawings were pulled out of trunks, wrapped in newspaper, sandwiched between clothes and books; two were trapped between the plates of a glass door; and the most important discovery were forty drawings in a portfolio in someone's office.
Our experience with Sheela Gowda was more straightforward. We visited her in Bangalore where she lives on the edge of the city, at the point where the road becomes patchy and the buildings begin to jumble together with empty land. Bangalore is the fastest growing city in Asia, booming with hi-tech computer industries, constantly expanding and impacting on the surrounding countryside. Gowda's practice occupies a similar territory, placed as it is between the urban and the rural. She takes us down a mud path to her studio, which is under construction - a chaos of wooden scaffolding, half-laid floors and artworks stored in boxes. Beneath the pile of studio clutter is the work that we have come to see, the rope-like structures that she coats in vermilion pigment and arranges like drawn lines across the floor and walls of the gallery. We help to carry a section into the light. Seen in this context, it is as if the work has been assembled directly from its environment; it is bone dry, terracotta red in colour, with a claylike surface, and brittle to the touch. In reproduction, the work becomes flattened on the page, distorted into something abstract, a series of red lines looping across the white ground of the gallery wall like a drip painting. Gowda plays with art-historical references, manipulating the language of modernist painting into something theatrical and unstable, opening it out into an arena of participation. Like Mohamedi, she deterritorialises modernism by divorcing it from a Western setting and allowing more subtle politics to emerge. The lines which link her work to modernist practice are ruptured in places; they become flight lines that connect different levels of experience - social, political, sensory, vegetal. The cords contain, within their physical structure and assembly, materials that reference village life and both artisan and craft traditions.
Harsha, in some ways, is the odd one out. Where Mohamedi and Gowda employ an aesthetic focus, fusing together disparate sources within single lines, Harsha uses drawing to scramble ideas. He extends shoots in all directions, jumping from place to place, the here and now melting into the hypothetical and the hallucinatory. It is as if, by pressing a button, he is able to be everywhere at the same time. In some ways, his work is grounded, rooted to the area around Mysore where he lives, dependent on local materials and economies. In others, it is an unstable practice, responsive to its surroundings; it enters the ï¬eld undercover, camouflaged. We visited Harsha in Mysore and he took us to his studio. As he showed us one of his sketchbooks, he explained that each day he felt like working in a different style. Consequently, each page has a new time/space frame: UFO-like forms hover in the upper atmosphere on one page, while, on another, a ï¬gure sits cross-legged and eats, a series of animal masks emerging out of his head.
Signs are redeployed and put to strange new uses or readopt old ones that have since been lost. During a residency in Sydney, Harsha discovered a botanical garden containing plants collected by the British from their colonies. Harsha identiï¬ed the ones that had been brought from India - plants used in Ayurvedic medicine - and painted them as botanical drawings on to the gallery wall. With this gesture, Harsha references the tradition of botanical drawing found in the Company paintings and also reappropriates an earlier tradition. One morning Harsha took us to the old section of Mysore to see the rangolis, which are freshly drawn on the pavement each day; they comprise circuits of interlinking lines, which resemble little cosmic maps. They seem to suggest the interweaving of reference points in Harsha's work, but also an extended Indian family network spreading out more in the shape of a web than a tree.
This image of the rangoli drawn in chalk on the street could also provide a useful motif for this exhibition. As a model, they are light and can be easily erased and reproduced elsewhere. They are flexible and mobile, but at the same time provide a framework, in which all the parts intersect but none predominates; they resonate together, ï¬nding points of both commonality and dispersion. The rangoli is a democratic form, located at ground level, available for public viewing. They remind us of other street drawings, scribbled notes left by engineers or children chalking out a hypothetical space for hopscotch or cricket. Drawing Space hopes to be such an exhibition, the opportunity to deï¬ne a temporary space for experiment and exchange, but also simply to show work which is compelling in its own right and deserves to be exhibited.
Finally, our intention is not to draw conclusions or to establish ï¬nite links, but instead to leave things open and vulnerable to the possibility of change.