Narrative One
A Question of Faith
The Cleft in the Sepulchre
“Myth is a type a speech…………. myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea: it is a mode of signification, a form.” Roland Barthes. [1]
In the present exhibition Chittrovanu Mazumdar introduces four large paintings that set up a dialogic interchange between themselves. These are massive works that mimic calligraphic writings on walls, ritual sites or billboards, bearing inscription and erasure, of layers of expressivity. Perhaps these bear marks of passage, protest or faith, or even more appropriately, of the erosion of time. In their size these paintings challenge the very space that contains them, as if human presence is engorged and ready to spill out of the frame. A kind of epic proportion, in which the painting is not this or that object, but a near fabular presence.
As the introductory elements of a large installation that spreads over several rooms, these paintings set the tone of an abstract engagement. Chittrovanu achieves a particular state through his energetic use of the material of paint and the vigorous act of painting itself that clearly contains gestures of violence, speed, deliberation and excess. The essential exchange however is in the palette. Red, white, gold and black form the dominant colour field, in which the thick turgid strokes reconfigure. These are primal colours of energy, desire and sustainability, of pure being and pure will. In his paintings Chittrovanu uses colours that evoke cross cultural signification. In the Catholic faith, it is this combination of colours that herald passion, blood sacrifice, martyrdom and authority. In the liturgical order, red heralds authority, papal black mourning, white is the colour approved as signifying light and purity, and gold the colour of joy.
Given his mixed Bengali and French parentage, how does the artist compare and elide these readings with colour symbolism in the Indian tradition? Growing up in the vicinity of the Kali temple in Kalighat, a primary Shakti peeth dedicated to the goddess Kali in Kolkata, in the 1960’s, Chittrovanu would have been familiar with goddess ritual associations. A primary aspect of devi is mutability. Even as an abstract principle, this is demonstrable. In the Kalika Purana, [2] the goddess is ascribed with three mounts: the white preta or spirit that represents Shiva, the red lotus that represents Brahma and the gold of the lion, representing Hari. The combination of red, white, black and gold varies in degrees, and indicates the nature of different energies. Again, the nature of the offerings made to the goddess - honey, milk, red saffron or sindhoor, incense or kaajal, are signifiers of her form and nature. The association of the ruling gunas or states of black or tamas ruled by Kali, the red rajas of Durga and the white sattva of Sarasvati renders colour a signifier within a larger symbology of emotion and temperament.
Even in the primary form of Kali, there are other accretions and refinements. Kali as the first among the ten Mahavidyas leads to other forms, notably that of the beautiful and powerful Tripurasundari. “Tripura in her first form resembles a heap of vermillion”. [3] In Shakta belief, the immanence of goddess worship ensures not only the continuous mutation of form but also of colour symbology that alters with every lightening quick change. From the enraged darkened brow of Durga emerged the dark Kali, “the moment the goddess who had come forth out from the cells of Matangi as the white one (Gauri) tuned into a dark one resembling the spread collyrium, and came to be known as Kalika (the black one) who used to reside in the Himalayas”. [4]
There is in Chittrovanu’s oeuvre an inescapable cojoining of an aesthetic with a symbolic undertow, which like the potent black masses in his paintings heave and shift in the waters of uncertainty, never committing themselves to a single shore. When there is a commitment, to grace and celebration, it is like a moment of epiphany. One may argue that Chittrovanu is an artist of the night. In his paintings as in his installations, images rise and fade, as if through the gift of sudden illumination.
Such references in the case of Chittrovanu gain momentum in the light of his artistic legacy. Nirode Mazumdar (1916-1982) his father is well known for have painted numerous images of the goddess Tripurasundari, the golden effulgent one, “she who is beautiful in the three worlds”. At the heart of the Tripurasundari yantra is the Kamakala, consisting of three bindus. One is red, one is white, the third mixed - the red bindu representing ova, the white, semen.
Equally he is familiar with his father’s illustrations of Devi for Ram Proshad’s Song for Kali, translated into English by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak. Containing goddess morphology in the language of modernism, Nirode Mazumdar made active yantras that signify Devi, imaged as the descending triangle that animate all life. While referring to a specific yantra drawn by Nirode Mazumdar Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak writes “The line between the erotic bhavas in bhakti and tantra is shifting and unclear……A yantra is a calculus, a diagrammatic representation of the goddess and the god, to help access the human body as itself a diagrammatic representation of the universe, not as a container of affects”. (pg 26-27, Moving Devi). She adds, as she analyzes the work of Mazumdar “Tantra attempts to arrest or capture by going through the descended flesh. Perhaps tantra longs to turn invagination inside out by literalizing it”.
In this installation Chittrovanu has paid particular attention to the passage as both an act and a site. Most traditional cultures and religions view the act of traversing the passage as indicative of the journey itself. I refer here to the metaphor of the narrow passage that leads to the garbagriha or the womb of the temple, that which leads to the crypt, even the entombed darkness of the sarcophagus, that rolls away to reveal the risen Christ. In every instance the traversing of the narrow passage is a movement to the site of rebirth, renewed awakening. That Chittrovanu creates a narrow red passage lined with small works redolent of the red hibiscus, symbol of the female sex, makes this journey a carnal act. At the same time, it’s an act of what Ananda Commaraswamy describes as central to the Indian artistic experience, of becoming rather than being.
Does Chittrovanu occlude this dominating, even resplendent legacy within a contemporary modernism? Chittrovanu may be seen as a figure of artistic transition, who moves beyond the codification of myth to create a suggestive abstraction. In the process, he bunks mythology and its narratives to draw instead upon abstract attributes, of a definite and dark eros. The references tothegoddessinhisworkoccasionallyrecurwithastartlingdirectness.There may be a printed image of Kali, no bigger than a postcard positioned as a fragment within a large installation, competing for attention in a crowded visual field. Devi here is robbed of her effulgence, reduced to a quick print, yet nagging in her persistent presence. His manner of engagement however is conspicuously closer to what Gayatri Spivak describes as a “‘poetic faith’ a faith in the worship of the imagination”. There is also what Chittrovanu speaks of as the yearning of sadhana, the point of unfulfilment from which poetry emanates. As an artist his intention appears to be to expose the vulnerability and the terror of this longing: a fork in the road at which you find yourself completely alone.
Narrative Two
The Image as Counterpath
The present large installation profers a counterpath.
These works gain in immediacy because Chittrovanu chooses to show them in the arid flatlands of a Dubai warehouse. His chosen site is a large cavernous space usually used to store movable goods, now transformed to resemble a domestic interior perhaps, of interconnected rooms and passages. Outside there is brick factory, mounds of muddy dirt that contrast with the fecund fullness of the Jharkhand landscape within. The point of entry into the installation is the large abstract paintings, and then through the medians of sound and light, the beckoning, the dredging up of the image. But first, there is the journey itself.
Chittrovanu returns continually to the passage, the idea of the passage, the experience of the passage or the contemplation of the passage. The affective state that the artist aspires to is of heightened realization, which inverts the white cube as an exhibitionary space into a sensory zone of breath, rhythmic beat, sound, coloured light. In an earlier exhibition at Jehangir art gallery Chittrovanu had created a black tar shrine like work. A narrow passage allowed the viewer to crawl in and see at its end a small image of a copulating couple.
If the passage is an invitation to enter, it is also a symbol of satiation and death. I refer here to the journey that the viewer undertakes, with the sculptural installations in sound and light, as evocations that may be biblical or ritualized (but which speak again, of encounter as epiphany). In the present work we are led from the paintings to a blood red passage with separate rooms. The passage contains images such as the votive flower objects, shrines with grills that resemble the roadside shrines of Varanasi. Leading from the passage are independent rooms; here we have the possible evocations of an altar, a memory box, the simulation of hospital lights at surgery, images redolent with nostalgia, longing and fear. In the final work we came to photos/ images each framed in a black metal box that have a personal inflection. These are fragments of the artists’ memory, carefully preserved photographs or prints or magazine scraps, partly erased, part dream, often domestic and personal. But because they are in the nature of the printed image, they carry the impress of the real.
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Confronting the sculptural installation of Chittrovanu Mazumdar compels us to examine our own hoard of sensory and imagistic associations. The artist speaks of darkness as both oblivion and expansion: “it is the most important component, to make the other visible”. Thus the movement and progress of each work is intuitive, it draws in the city of Calcutta, the human condition and the sub conscious self. Chittrovanu’s inspirations in art run from Braque, de stael, and Yves Klein to Egyptian art; in each case it is the principles rather than the methods that he is drawn to. The Egyptian principle of entombment recurs even in oblique ways. Thus the sculptural work titled The Book appears like a relic from the Gutenberg period, its heavy metallic text inscribed on either side. The book to be complete must be closed but in that case, the text will be obscured. I would see this work as the antithesis of wholeness that dominates Chittrovanu’s approach. The notion of rupture/fracture appears in the way images are framed, each of the multiples never completely adding up to a whole.
The single element that the artist controls with great deliberation is light. Light is used to both reveal and conceal, to illuminate through the median of colour, to block out the busy, unruly, interfering presence of the day. What we see is through pools of dark illumination, suggestive of blood or else the illumination of the street neon. In this way, by making light a filter for the image, the artist positions the objects to reveal themselves only after careful enquiry. A large sculptural metal work titled Remembrance as Prayer underscores collision of sensory experience. The soft muted copper coloured light of electric bulbs illuminates a dark tall sculpture. The sculptural metal work reveals itself slowly, its massive metal walls rear out of the darkness. Before it scores of copper lit bulbs reveal the cleft in the sepulchre, creating an altogether enigmatic entity.
Chittrovanu invites a participation which is a journey through elliptical passages. The passage also serves as a metaphor for waiting on the margins of doubt. The work Silence lit and light made Silent demonstrates a cross-over of the senses. The artist in his own writing suggests that he uses sound to sculpt the work, light to illuminate memory, and found or made images as imperfect pictograms of the past.
The insistence on the passage implies that the nature of the journey can be profound. In Counterpath Travelling with Jacques Derrida, Catharine Malabou writes “a voyage ordinarily implies that one leaves a familiar shore to confront the unknown...The event that abducts the traveler’s identity and allows an opening to altereity to become experience of the world in general must occur by surprise and remain incalculable.” [5] Nevertheless, even the journey without movement can be profound. Chittrovanu quotes the instance of an ancient temple in Devgarh, in which a string is tied from the Shiva shrine and then connected to a Shakti temple some distance away. As the temple bells for Shiva are struck and the string reverberates the connection between the two is made, leading always to a state of transformation.
Born in Paris in 1956 to an Indian father and a French mother Chittrovanu trained as an artist at the Government College of Art, Calcutta. Through his mixed patrimony, location can become a place en route to other journeys. Chittrovanu thrives on the metaphor of displacement, on images that are replete with immanent arrival, the promised route to satisfaction, or one that may inflect the repossession of the past. In the Untitled work comprising numerous memory boxes, the referents to fruit in his garden in Jharkhand, images of Kali,personalvotiveobjects,theredhibiscus,thememoryofsmell, andsight and touch, thesound intervention, like the climatic of pleasure or temple bells in prayer pushes for the recognition of the remembered experience. And yet when one seeks the complete picture, it is elusive and ruptures again and again into a hundred fragments. The range of literary references that he draws on in this progression of works is enormous. The fact that he uses French partial or incomplete text heightens the sense of the fragments pushing for movement from the narrative or the book towards hypertext.
Narrative Three
A Bridge of Continuities
One may convincingly argue that as migrant/outsider Chittrovanu remains uncommitted to either cultural identity or geographical location. But in the spirit of dualism that penetrates his work, the obverse is also true.
With his parents, Chittrovanu spent a period of his childhood in France, followed by his schooling in Calcutta. He received French literary and Catholic culture, as well as the literary and artistic legacy of his father, his painter aunt Shanno Lahiri, and his father’s brother, the eminent writer, Kamal Kumar Mazumdar. What he appears to sustain here is an affective dualism, the position of the migrant, or the flaneur.
Chittrovanu’s concerns are not post colonial as much as cultural hybridity and the quest for an authentic voice. The position that he arrives at is in no way predictable. As described by Homi Bhabha, hybridity subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. In Chittrovanu’s case the subset of inherited values is complicated. The patriarchal line through his artist father leads him to a realization of the powerful feminine, and the apparently ‘passive’ state of art making, while his mother, represents the more active principle, where she is foreign but not colonial. In this context Chittrovanu subverts our expectation of the artist as a post-colonial conscience. The position he represents is what Homi Bhabha describes as the “Third Space of Enunciation” one “not based on exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity”. Then again, “Bhabha hopes that it is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of ourselves and others. And by exploring this “Third Space” we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves”. [6]
The definition of this location will always be complex and fragmented. Here the artist quotes the Algerian writer Helene Cixous, who like himself argues for a position both outside and within dominant cultures and ways of being. Like Helene Cixous, Chittrovanu speaks of his location as “the heart which does not have a sex”. In the same way, he wants for his work “not spectatorship but transformation”. Each work that he sets up refuses to commit to a beginning or an end. To enter the work site is to surrender to the will of the artist. Art is an act, rich in the potential of theatre. The artist determines what and how we move, what we see and hear, making the (art) objects indistinguishable from the experience. In a sense, our passage through the work is both open and choreographed, the white cube has made way for a space that resembles theatre, or else a ritual participation, in an event inscribed with the affective states of awe, fear and realization. In one work, Untitled, mild steel and tube lights with filters on dimmers, Acrylic on paper lit by ultra violet lights, soundtrack) we encounter a series of lights that hang suspended like sharp icicles. We experience them against a backdrop of large patches of paint on a raw canvas, which in ultraviolet light look uncannily like blood in the snow. The sound that accompanies this work brings back a sense of tortured and difficult breathing, each breath dredged up with difficulty.
I want to quote here another large work (Untitled) which comes virtually as a point of culmination within the exhibition. It is a series of images contained within black metal boxes, each of which throws forth a pool of red light, inviting us to enter this visually charged space. To see the black and white images, of “anecdotes, diary like things found images/made images/memory images” one has to crouch half way down - they reveal objects of personal memory, interest and scrutiny. Water and air combine to make the rope in his garden in Jharkhand heavy with decay, it twists with malefic serpentine intent, taking root like an organic form. Fruit swells and bursts with a ripe urgency, dropping its seed on the ground, the wet earth puckers and swells under the first deluge of rain. Kali appears, like a primal reminder and Nirode Mazumdar’s images of “her figure-flower, blood hibiscus breasts, and black mysotis yoni” seem to come to life in the abundance of earth forms that split and cleave before our eyes. Appropriately perhaps at the heart of this installation, a single box is empty of all images, a blank, black frame. And then without preamble, we hear the first bells, like those of the cow or the dancer’s ghungroos. The bells gradually quicken and tense, and then culminate in a climax like a temple arti, causing the room, and the suspended works to shudder in unison. Chittrovanu may suggest that we recognize in this work not just libidinal urgency but female desire, not just the realization of life and of death in the self but also the other.
Chittrovanu speaks in related terms of the fragility of the artistic experience, and the view from the margins, both being informed by a constant sense of impending change. Like Helene Cixous states in her 1974 work, Prenoms de persona, the artist need not commit himself to the structure of narrative; or the ground of history. If there is a ground, it is in the challenge of linguistic and national boundaries. The ethical and political framework that he would argue for is then mediated through the sensorial image: it becomes the single broad discursive narrative flowing through his work.
Gayatri Sinha
New Delhi June 2007
Gayatri Sinha is an independent critic and writer on art, based in New Delhi.
Reference
1. A Roland Barthes Reader, ed Susan Sontag, Vintage Classics London 2000, pg 93.
2. The Kalika Purana was written as the Sthana Purana for the Kamakhya temple (c. 14th century) and expands on the aspects of Devi as Kali, Durga, Kamakhya etc. Ref. The Kalika Purana trans Dr. Biswanarayan Shastri (2 vols.) Nag Publishers, Delhi 1992.
3. ibid., pg 941
4. ibid.pg 896
5. Counterpath Travelling with Jacques Derrida by Catharine Malabou and Jacques Derrida trans. David Wills, Stanford University Press, California, 2004.
6. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin; Post Colonial Reader London; Routledge, 1995, pg 183, pg 209.