Drawing Room London (24 November 2016-19 February 2017)
In the debate at the opening of this show someone asked the crucial question: “Why here and why now? How comes this ‘recovery’ of Tantric imagery?” The someone turned out to be a university professor and artist who had studied at the RCA under Philip Rawson, curator of the celebrated Tantra exhibition at the Hayward in 1971. This was the show that launched a thousand texts, including mine [1], partly inspired by the luminous pictures in the books by Ajit Mookerjee [2]. That was 45 years ago and there have been comparatively few exhibitions linked to this theme, two or three in the U.S. and Europe, but none with the spectacular vision and scale of Rawson’s show. The curator of Thinking Tantra, Rebecca Heald, has been preparing it for many years before its earlier opening in Mumbai. [3]
There are 78 pieces in the show that stretch across a wide range of interpretations, a germane illustration of the term’s etymological derivation from Sanskrit roots whereby ‘tan’ means to expand and ‘tra’ means tool,translating as ‘that which extends knowledge’. Unfolding from ‘original’ anonymous Tantric images, the exhibition expands through examples of the Indian Neo-Tantric movement to recent ‘anomalous authored’ works before focussing on contemporary works by ten international artists, ‘ to speak to the impulse Tantric drawings inspire in many artists to explore multiple dimensions’.
Fusing the ‘traditional’ and the ‘post-modern’ is a challenge favoured by curators with a curiosity-cabinet complex, but here it is handled with care by offering the exquisite ‘original’ pieces their own wall space which they occupy with self-contained humility, inviting prolonged contemplation on their aesthetic forms. They are all forms of yantras or diagrams to aid meditation on the void. If we take this as a criteria for defining a tantric image, do the other works in the show share its title Thinking Tantra?
The Neo-Tantric artists in the show include Prabhakar Barwe, Prafulla Mohanti, Sohan Qadri and G.R Santosh. Neo-Tantra has a complex history that still needs elucidating, the term originated with a show in 1985 [4] co-curated by L.P. Sihare, Edith Tonelli and Lee Mullican, that set out to reveal that Indian abstraction had its own modernism with roots in ancient practices such as Tantra, a perspective promoted by the Kumar gallery in New Delhi. The handful of works by the four artists shown here offer intriguing samples such as the two pieces in acid colors exquisitely painted on silk by Prabhakar Barwe. These apparently rare works were made whilst he was working as an artist alongside weavers at the Weavers Service Centre developing textile designs. Having discovered tantric forms whilst living in Varanasi between 1962 and 1965, it is clear that the geometric precision of yantras inspired his motifs within textile design. The result is a subtle linearity that is at once spiritual and playful, of the kind that inspired Bauhaus experimentation. Alongside are two works on paper by G.R Santosh who had studied at the MSU art school in Baroda under N.S Bendre. His earlier writings in the Neo-Tantra exhibition catalogue reveal a strong belief in the transcendental nature of an art practice influenced by Tantric philosophy. Two meticulous drawings in pale pencil on paper echo the mathematical bent of theosophical explorations that influenced early modernists such as Malevich, Mondrian or Kandinsky. Having spent time in retreat in the Himalayas, where his work was inspired by Tantric symbols, the third neo-Tantric artist, Sohan Qadri, shows two small works from the eighties in ink and dye and silver paint on handmade paper: delicate witty pieces where a minimal aesthetic seems to hint at pop. The main artist in this group taken is Prafulla Mohanti. At eighty years of age, he is still highly active, working between his London studio and his native village in Orissa, where he grew up imbued with the local Tantric culture through making drawings for ceremonies from a very young age. Creation(1980) is a bold brahmanoid cosmic egg floating on a sphere of intense watercolour and gouache on handmade paper. Diffusing an iconic aura, it calls out for sister pieces, if only to highlight the compulsion of repetitive forms in Tantra.
The wall of early ‘original’ Tantric pieces comes from the extraordinary collection of the gallerist Joost van den Bergh who also selected the works by Acharya Ram Charan Sharam or ‘Vyakul’ and Badrinath Pandit, classed as ‘anomalous’ since they are ‘authored’. Flourishing signatures by Vyakul seem to sign his image as ‘atypical’ or unrepresentative (but then so are all the works in this show other than the anonymous). After showing in Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989) as a tantric practitioner, Vyakul became an artist who evidently traded on the ‘tantric connection’ by way of shows in smart Parisian galleries such as Agnes B, but more seriously perhaps by founding the Museum of Indology. As a kind of passeur or ‘trickster’, he seems to play knowingly with chance. Three raw works offer a clue to his improvised method of image making, apparently through impulsion rather than regular practice, whereas the fine piece here by his teacher, the Sanskrit scholar Badrinath Pandit, suggests prolonged meditation.
Moving on to contemporary works shifts the show’s paradigm into tricky terrains of hypothetical affinities. Apparently abstract to the modernist’s eye, yantras are diagrams of fields of energy, to be read in terms of micro-macro cosmological correspondences by the sadhaka or tantrika. Deceptively reductive, they are tools with complex instructions to be followed in ritual practice of yoga and meditation.
The curator’s approach is frank in her rejection of any claim to expertise and her desire to ‘accept them for what they are in the most immediate moment’. Her medium is through dialogue with the artists who are inspired by, or collect, Tantric Mystical Diagrams [5] in order: “...to bring to the fore connections between images and artworks from different cultures, that viewers might contemplate different truths.”
The ten artists come from India, France, Germany, U.S and U.K. Inspiration for this show arose with Richard Tuttle’s exhibition at the Drawing Centre in New York in 2004. As a collector of tantric drawings for some time, he proposes that a tantric image can only be negative “unless shown along with a valid, contemporary art practice about the positive in our culture”, a statement that raises a heavenly host of questions. Certainly Tuttle’s work often wears a lightness of being that touches on wise things, but here the five wood and styrofoam pieces: Separation 2015 and Source of Imagery (1995-2010) appear ludic yet without any particular resonance of tantric practice.
Inmanywaysthis comment applies to all the work in different degrees. Where some contemporary pieces offer a pertinent affinity with tantric imagery, others seem almost impertinent. Those that provoke positive reflection on a dialogical link are works by Nicola Durvasula, Tom Chamberlain, Claudia Wieser, Alexander Gorlizki, Shezad Dawood and Goutam Ghosh, each for different reasons.
Curiously Ghosh’s drawing: While dancing stay in the Circle (2015) in gouache and newsprint on cloth, bears no direct visual connection with the formalised tantric diagrams as it is comically expressionist in its laxity. A lotus petalled plant form on legs surveys three cartoon creatures whizzing around, all hastily sketched in earthy colours, even so, there is a cosmic space that hints at his interest in Tantric speculation: “By “counting” consciousness and “measuring” the spirit in the process of making my drawings, I use art as a medium to challenge what scientific methods cannot reach, namely the essence of matters, pulse, spirit and consciousness.” [6]
Nicola Durvasula shows several small drawings that are accompanied by fragments of text. Her play with language functions through eclectic citations from Wittgenstein to Baudrillard via Monty Python and Vedic texts, having lived and worked for over ten years years in Hyderabad. Her interest in Tantric imagery was fired by seeing Field of Colour in New York. [7] Appropriating the images as homage rather than theft (mindful of Lucy Lippard’s advice), she isolates geometric forms and patterns in watercolour, ink and gouache on paper. Untitled (copy tantra) 2010 has a black triangle moving up to a red circle, reductive yantras that spell Malevich, Untitled (78) 2009 has two blocks of black and white stripes that resemble the checker board motifs of Jain calculation systems while hinting at pop art. Likewise with Untitled (two pink stripes) 2014 and Untitled (241) 2009 whose black circle makes a mandala from a pizza base (note the nifty number!). Another ink drawing has a black cone shaped lingam whilst two pale painted stones pose as cosmic eggs, punctuated by tiny dots: bindus, the male seed. All is flux and reflux in her series of Graphic Notations 2015 where arabesque lines conjure up seed mantras as sonic vibrations to interact with musicians in performance (to be played in the Kochi Biennale).
Shezad Dawood’s piece YTR 1 2010 is a ‘found’ vintage textile, woven and embroidered in Kantha style, onto which he paints acrylic geometric forms. A large green circle slides over a smaller red one, hinting at a partial eclipse and echoing the segmented circles sewn across the cloth. References to yantras and cosmological diagrams are at once solemn and droll, spiritual and domestic, underpinning the mundane aspect of such sacred motifs, here woven into a bedspread.
Alexander Gorlizki’s collage of 16 miniature paintings on paper evokes a designer’s portfolio. Having developed a collaborative practice with a master miniaturist in Jaipur, Riyaz Uddin, for over 20 years, Gorlizki uses found drawings and also makes basic designs with which the miniaturists interact. The results are stunning to the point of being disturbing. This is partly due to the zany designs by Gorlizki but mainly because of the superb technical prowess of the miniaturists. As with any artist who employs assistants, be he (not often she) Michel Angelo or Damian Hirst, Boetti or Clemente, such atelier procedures is both common practice and commonly accused of appropriation if not exploitation. Questions of agency and authorship are delicate issues a terrain worthy of anthropological investigation. Gorlizki confirms that he shares the authorship with the head of the workshop and that the miniaturists are fairly paid. He states: “The relationsip between art, spirituality and commerce is very fluid and to me very interesting, particularly in the context of Rajasthan ateliers”
Chamberlain’s pure white works on paper insist on close observation, an intense gaze reveals the microscopic dots left by pin pricks. Such a ceremonial act of making leads ways of seeing into the practice of meditation. His abstract works function like yantras, in the same way as paintings by Ad Rheinhart and Agnes Martin or music by Morton Feldman and John Cage, where invisibility and silence invite contemplation. Finely crafted pieces by Claudia Wieser offer further fascinating parallels to yantras through their precision of design. Patterns from textile production are either drawn on coloured paper with coloured pencils and gold leaf or inscribed with artisanal care in acrylic and ink onto wood. Their ceramic-like surfaces and ornamental motifs suggest inspiration from the Bauhaus, a bond reinforced by her austere, architectonic structures. For her, a connection was triggered between tantric drawing and Bauhaus exercises also from seeing the Field of Colour publication. Wieser is the only artist with a site-specific work in which exquisitely fine lines of gold leaf fan out from a corner as if exhaling a deep breath, no wonder her work has been described as ‘mystical modernism’.
In contrast to such persuasive examples of Thinking Tantra, the works by Anthony Pearson seem to bare scarce visual relationship. His series Solarization shows solarized silver gelatin photographs that are usually exhibited alongside his sculptures, surely provoking a curious contrast that this setting does not provide. A leap of faith is needed by the viewer to understand that his interest in Tantra lies through its possible relationship to arcane languages. Similarly obtuse is the work by Prem Sahib. Behind his simple gouaches lurks a link with a vital aspect of Tantra: the erotic. Here lay the initial attraction for so many hipsters in the ‘swinging sixties’, yet the extreme ‘left-hand’ or unorthodox school of practice has been strangely occulted. This is partly intentional, due to belief in the necessity of secrecy around initiation, but mainly due to ‘Tantrism’ as a construct of neo-colonialist scholarship evolving a murky mix of academic, religious and political correctness, coupled with commercial hype. Prem Sahib’s work draws on this last aspect through his poster-like profiles of athletic sportswear, complete with subtle bulges. This may well illustrate how Tantric practice involves experience with the mundane but it hardly touches on the supramundane. Similarly the 3D model of a multi-coloured tantra drawing: Big Bifur (2010) made in epoxy resin by Jean-Luc Moulene, challenges the viewer’s wishful thinking. Maybe ‘Thinking Tantra’ is about all anyone can do without initiation as a sadhaka/tantrika practitioner?
Virginia Whiles. London December 12 2016.
Notes:
[1] Whiles, V. Tantric Imagery:affinities with 20th century abstractart.StudioInternational March 1971.
[2] Mookerjee,A. Tantra Art. Ravi Kumar, 1966. Tantra Asana, Ravi Kumar, New Delhi, 1971.
[3] Thinking Tantra. Jhaveri Contemporary. Mumbai 24 January-19 March 2016.
[4] Neo-Tantra: Contemporary Indian Art inspired by Tradition. Berkeley UCLA 1985.
[5] Fifty Tantric Mystical Diagrams. L.A County Museum of Art 1969 (exh.cat. text by Pratapaditya Pal)
[6] Ghosh, G, (2015) ‘The autonomy of objecthood’ in Goutam Ghosh, Ascribing to them birth, animation, sense and accident, (exh. cat) with text by Kaustubh Das. Oslo: Standard Books Oslo,
[7] Field of Colour. Tantric Drawings from India The Drawing Center N.Y. (Nov 2004-Jan 2005)