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'Up close and personal' is a shared diagram locating lives of significant figures in Contemporary Indian Art over the last four decades. The locus of this diagram is drafted through first person accounts, situations, art works, projects, events, texts, issues, people, cultures and geographies thereby trying to articulate an 'artistic context' that is simultaneously personal and historical. Art historian and writer, Kavitha Balakrishnan in this feature, historically contextualises the life and works of Rimzon. She also analyses the immediate history of Kerala art that shaped the artist in Rimzon.
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Sculpture as a practice was not in the mainstream of Modern Indian Art. Even when post independent Indian situations saw the emergence of ‘progressives’ and international abstract languages, all movements mainly surfaced through the genre of painting, perhaps because major visionaries who spoke about their conditions were mainly painters. There will be many other socio-political reasons for such lopsided importance gained by painting and relatively difficult prospects one could find for sculpture in the making of self-conscious Indian Artist. Concern of this essay is limited here so as to locate the contexts of N N Rimzon, who has been an articulate presence mainly as a sculptor in Contemporary Indian Art since mid 80s.
Born in Kerala, trained first in a regional art college at its transit stages in mid seventies and then exposed to broader frame of art practice as an art student in M S University Baroda and later at Royal college of Art London, Rimzon traced his inner voice further through European minimalist and conceptual Art. Equipped with a fresh and systematic sensitivity for materials and meanings, he went on to produce a significant body of work in 1990s.
Given his vein of subliminal sense-making practice through materials and minimal forms, the duality of ‘local / global’ was very complexly addressed. His works all throughout in 1990s made the most sophisticated nuance in the way Malayali artists, both painters and sculptors, faced the changing conditions of life. He did not ‘represent’ regional identity through a classical modernist romanticism ingrained in most of his fellow contemporaries from Kerala. He rather demonstrated a curiously human flexibility in matters of identity. He also made one of the first conceptually equipped en-routes into the broader world of the ‘Contemporary’, transcending the romantic and expressionistic literality of regional experiences.
1. Metaphysical stalwarts / struggling pedagogy /
‘Studio International’
Flipping through the formative teenage in Rimzon’s life will take one to the institutionally under-developing but reverberatingly intellectual Art scene in 1970s Kerala. It also takes one to the gleaming for-runners like K C S Panikker, sculptor Kanayi Kunjiraman, ideologue M V Devan and many other ‘Madras school’ personalities of the time. Young Rimzon was good at painting in school but was living in a social situation not congenial for developing on it satisfactorily. He was a naive beginner among stalwarts. On a regional cultural scheme of experiencing Art within which he was in, that was a time for ‘Modern Art’ of sorts. The pedagogic influences of Madras school, K C S Panikkar and Cholamandalam Artist’s village diffused through many art teachers in regional fine arts colleges in south India at that time. The so-called neo-tantric practitioners, varied projects of Indianness and ‘traditional numen’ through J .Swaminathan and others remained in the air, all generally trying to revise ‘tradition’ in a national context of modern Art. Practitioners of this generic modernism hovered in Rimzon’s life attracting only his partial attention. There were some conventional others who did not even interest him at all. They were commercial artists, calendar painters and local magazine illustrators. They had by then turned out to be marginalised remnants of colonial art education in the upsurge of ‘selective machineries of modernism’ (in the sense Raymond Williams used in ‘the politics of modernism) and its Art practices in a broader Indian perspective.
“Hailing from a rural area near Ernakulam, i had no chance to see ‘Art’ around me at that time. But there were calendar pictures and magazine illustrations around me. The so called ‘artists’ I saw were commercial artists doing bill board paintings. They constituted ultimate art at that time. I came across some exaggeratedly written biography of Ravivarma. I got some prizes in youth festivals. My name came published in local newspapers. A teacher gifted me a book of portraits done by Van Gogh’s. But nobody around me knew Van Gogh.
There were some art training institutes near Koothattukulam. Some masters were trained from RLV institute (currently RLV College of Music and Fine Arts, Thrippunithura, Ernakulam) that time. They painted garish academic works titled as ‘to the market’, ‘fish sellers’ etc. Those works were all very disappointing for me. No excitement. I could draw like that well at that stage itself. Accidentally I met somebody in my relation. He encouraged me. He introduced me to names like M V Devan and ‘Kerala institute of arts’ in Kochi. Kanayi Kunjiraman was there. I had heard of ‘Yakshi’ that time. I attended evening classes. Kanayi cracked jokes. I was too young for them to speak in more serious terms may be. M. V.Devan used to do a lot of model studies. I heard of KCS panikkar and Cholamandal artists. In their endeavours I somewhat sensed a big world around me in Art”.
In 1960s, Kanayi Kunjiraman, V.Viswanathan and Akkitam Narayanan were among the very few of those from south India who could go overseas to learn or practice Art in Europe. After a student stint in London, Kanayi back in Kerala was associating with ‘Kerala Institute of Arts’, Ernakulam (later known as ‘Kalapitam’) in early 1970s where Rimzon frequented for his earliest three months of imbibing Art around him. Kanayi had by then made a monumental public sculpture of a squatting female figure (named as ‘Yakshi’) placed in a dam site in Kerala that received outrageous responses from the moralistic local public. (slowly that turned out to be a picnic spot where lovers loved to get photographed). Image of a provocative modern artist (sculptor) vis-a-vis the conventional social fabric was formed through him by then. Human figure, mostly distorting and Indianised in size and shape was an important cue in the day’s Art practices of many. M.V. Devan, Vasudevan Namboodiri, A Sivaraman and C N Karunakaran, alumni of Madras school infiltrated the ‘artistic’ codes of modern figure drawings through the Malayalam periodical magazines as illustrations for literature since 50s. Human figure was very sentimentally and photogenically used as illustrations in the whole lot of pulp fiction narratives too. In all the cases, Rimzon did not try out any such sentimental possibilities or ‘artistic’ codes of distortion imparted through these situations. Kanayi appealed to him for his use of monumentality through a medium of sculpture. Still the whole discussion on ‘Indianness’ and its literal metaphorical and metaphysical permutations went over his head.
In spite of the efforts of many self-conscious artists around him to internalise the scope of Art as a modern discourse, it hugely remained as outsider knowledge. None of them except K C S Panikker to some extent (he was the art adviser from south for the first Delhi triennial. He envisaged an Art that is ‘Indian in spirit and world wide contemporary’), could make their presence felt in the mainstream of ‘nation building’. In the post independent scenario of modernising welfare state with socialist dreams, many senior people around Rimzon were engaging in a rhetorical exercise that was supposed to enable them ‘to live a fuller life in society as creative artist’. As in the case of Cholamandalam, an artist village set up in 1964 by Madras school practitioners, artistic vocation was generally conceived as a partial engagement of modern free spirit with traditional craft, ‘As paintings and sculptures do not sell sufficiently they would employ themselves part time, say two or three hours a day in creative handicrafts for independent living’ (‘Arttrends’, 1964).
“They spoke of Indianness. ‘bharateeyatha’. There were indigenous ideals for theatre forming around me. (‘thanathu nataka vedi’ (indigenous theatre) etc.) Kanayi Kunjiraman and some others looked at modernism in Art within a mystifying framework of tradition. In that situation, I doubted how far it is real in my social condition. How far their efforts were of impact...but the energy and novelty in those works attracted me. Those people had their own access to world art. In that sense they were interesting. I spent only 3 months in ‘Kerala institute of Arts’ which was an active centre in Kerala for many of them. It was a glimpse of broader intelligentsia formed in South Indian Art. Then I went to college of Fine Arts, Trivandrum”.
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Rimzon’s stint with south Indian art world and its sort of magical imagery was very short but that for the first time exposed an Art world out there to pursue. He started life as an art student with strong reservations and doubts in the way Indian Art was discussed and conceived as identities besieged by opposing ideologies (‘Indian’ vis-a-vis ‘western’ etc).. He was in the first batch of then newly upgraded institution for Art in Trivandrum in 1976. First time in Kerala an institution offered Bachelor degree in Art. First batch was really a formidable student community that contained many Malayali artists who made considerable impact in subsequent years of Contemporary Indian Art at its various points. Surendran Nair and Rimzon appeared together for entrance test. Sculptor Krishnakumar was already a student there in the older diploma scheme. Even after many months of starting the course, Trivandrum College was not fully evolved. Even Kanayi Kunjiraman, their promised teacher in sculpture could join after 6 months of the inception of the course. They all continuously did model study. Big importance was given to drawing. Rimzon was one of the three students loved by the principal C.L.Porinjukutty. He loved Krishnakumar’s lyrical quality of lines, Rimzon’s die-hard realism and Surendran Nair’s eerie and exotic sort of work. At that time Rimzon was a good academic in his attitude as an artist. He did not infest human figure with qualities other than formal and systemic. ‘Artistic’ codes of expressiveness and distortion were simply rare and accidental, if any in his sketchbooks. And it was criticised among fellow artists. He was interested in DLN Reddy’s realism of that time.
Major breakthrough in perception came in the form of ‘Studio International’ magazine gifted by British Council to the college library. It introduced that ambitious student community to the world avant-garde Art movements of 50s and 60s.”
Rimzon was actually entering into a regional Art institution at its frustrating transit stages. Humanist ideals and ideologies of resistance were floating in a very active Malayali cultural public domain affecting many of those who wanted to inlay a plan for cultural action. Some of the teachers in the college were directly involved in cultural agendas of left wing political parties. Their teacher A C K Raja was part of ‘Janakiya Samskarika Vedi’ that staged Maxim Gorky’s play ‘Amma’. He shared the typical Cholamandalam interest in the ‘mystical’ and the ‘spiritual’. At the same time, varied cultural subtexts of state oppression during emergency got translated into a deep felt anger against any form of conventionalism. A bohemian variety of artists were already there. But for somebody like Rimzon who could not associate with any monolithic exemplifications of creativity and its rhetoric in whatever progressive terms, knowing about Art in the pretexts of a frustrating pedagogic system was still like an outsider world coming in the form of attractive printed images of foreign Art magazines, like ‘Studio international’.
“At first we simply saw those pictures. We did not have the sufficient language capability or patience to understand Art theoretically. The drawback of the college at Trivandrum at that time was that it could not open up a language of Art that could reflect on the process of doing Art in actuality. Of course we did draw well. But more than that the issue was what to draw and how and where to execute Art. All were doing drawings, portraits, figure studies and landscape. What to do with it? No functional space evolved for it. No teachers evolved there. Some teachers were too much of emotional artists who didn’t impart deeper articulated insight into our problems. Most of the teachers didn’t give any clue to the actual situation that we were in. At that time, Bhupen Khakkar came there. Renowned poet in Malayalam Dr. Ayyappa Panikkar brought him there. He made some acute remarks on our situation. ‘All draw excellent. But no awareness to do what and how to do...’ He simply mentioned it and went. Then comes strikes in college. It closed down for many months.”
The ‘metaphysical-vocational attitude’ was getting very well surpassed on a national level by early 1970s. This period is well characterised by Geeta Kapur (catalogue for exhibition of the festival of India in the royal Academy of Arts, London, 1982) as a period that was ‘breaking the mystique’ of modernist magical imagery that had been largely ignoring and scorning any ‘description’ in Art. Bhupan khakkar was distinctive among those who were ‘bridging commonplace and fabulous worlds’. The ‘Narratives’ in Baroda were working pictorial elements towards ‘an optimum mutability’. But over those years, in both mystical and narrative nuances of Indian artist’s quasi-modern conditions there were glaring attempts in sculpture. Almost cultic monumental effigies of Mrinalini Mukherji and high technology materials of Satish Gujral were already achieving acclaim. In Baroda, Shankho Chawdhuri was a towering figure. Raghav kaneria and Himmat Shah experimented with materials of sorts.
The general ambience of a reified world of Art in India in its own terms was created well by mid 1970s. ‘Within this world, values were posited. This is the basic radical step in the wake of which questions of motives, ideology, bad faith could be posited—and then social transformation.” (Geeta Kapur, 1982). Rimzon sensed this political air very much through the life as an art student in Trivandrum.
Students there demanded timely functioning of the institution. There were no sufficient teachers, no library, no exam. Things were not falling in a proper structure. All were in an agitating mood. At one stage strikes became violent. Some students were suspended. College closed. To take the suspended students back, the students had to stage a second strike. For Rimzon the abrupt closure of the college put him into many related eventualities but he finally emerged picking up a serious taste for reading and systematic grasping of ideas.
“At that time the number of Art students was very small. Thirty or so. Even from among them, those who could go on strike together for a cause was still lesser. Sensing the bleak situation, most of us students went home. I and Akkitham Vasudevan were staying there contacting all student wings of supporting political parties outside. They were consulted by us on how to do strike. CPI ML supported us first. Many intellectuals of it had come out from jail after emergency. Some of them had published little magazines. I was exposed to leftist literature. Artist Prabhakaran had joined to study at the college. There got published a magazine called Bodhi. Krishnakumar did illustrations in it. Malayalam poet Satchidanandan and Marxist ideologues like B.Rajeevan spoke in our meetings. ACK Raja was there. So I turned to reading. I got little red covered books on Lenin, Marxism etc. In reading there formed a taste for Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc. They were regular late night readings...”
By the time he reached M S University Baroda for higher studies, ‘Studio international’ had in a way already introduced him into the actual concerns for an Art language within a system that had been by and large lying submerged in him. The Minimalist works, process art and conceptual art of the time were regarded the most fashionable and they were convincingly attractive to him. In his terms, an ‘Art language’ was felt missing in the Indian context especially in sculpture in spite of various practices that aestheticised our situations through the narratives on ‘Indian-ness’, tradition and the indigene.“Very less number of people in Art has actually worked in a system, be it in Kerala or all over India. Nobody at that time worked in a ‘system of artistic doing’ that could develop through a concept” he observes. Rimzon’s choices for going about art practice in a systematic conceptual method were in many ways determined by sensibilities grown in Europe. But in 1980s, the importance he gave to very ordinary basic things in Art must have been a refreshing route away from the rhetorical conceptualisation of Art as a political agenda of culture and society at large.
“I read about the process of art making in Sol LeWitt, Donald judd and Robert Morice. I felt intimate connections with Eva Hesse and Process art. Robert Smithson attracted me with ‘Spiral Jetty’. How far I related myself with all these is another issue. At that time I did not think much. But it was part of my deep need for a systematic process for art making. I loved a process that explored through an idea. See for example ‘One inch’ is a concept. One making thousands of these ‘one inch’ is pretty curious. A search into language by way of a concept attracted me. I realised that Contemporary Art was very conceptual and theoretical. In Europe, Cubism, fauvism, abstraction, all such turns in history were part of an objective enquiry on feeling. They reached abstraction. If line shape colour and such things can bring in emotion in a form, one can bring it without drawing it. One can follow a procedure. That was an interesting idea.”
In the beginning of his creative life, Rimzon faced dead ends of literalism in practicing one’s mysterious ‘Indian-ness’. Clogged polarisation between art and society in one’s romantic resistances against the system appeared to him too simplistic. He spent time to see original art works visiting important exhibitions in the country.
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Art as a systemic practice
In Baroda, he basically attempted to work with concepts. For example, join an ‘unreal’ with the situation that is ‘real’. He shuffled concepts through objects and the effect was different. He tried making a Wall on wall. He made a moulded wall that was hung on the gallery wall. He set pillars in the square frame. He was actually using very ordinary basic concepts in art.
“My problem was that these experiments were regarded as very ‘cold’. Nothing emotional was there in my scheme of making Art works. There was a distancing from emotional temperaments of art that I was too familiar with. So my friends told that there is no energy in them and dead as art works. They were not appreciated. More appreciated were those emotionally charged images of Krishnakumar and others. Especially their women, their facial expressions and mannerisms appeared more communicative. It became more popular among Students. My works were so harshly criticised as intellectual exercise. Teachers were also not supporting it. I was functioning in a very low key. I couldn’t enjoy as an impressive artist though got good marks in examinations because I did academically good works. It was depressing. Meanwhile readings on Brecht-ian theatre, alienation, montage in films felt convincing for my so called ‘intellectual exercise’. Finally I came to adopt the emotional into this scheme. The merging of these elements happened easily.”
Indian art generally could not approach Art in an objective framework that analysed its inherent elements. Even the strong issue-based writings on Art (mostly through individual efforts of people like Geeta Kapur or K.G.Subrahmaniam) discussed identity and survival in terms of literal contentions. The political impact of those debates helped many artists especially the feminist and subaltern politics of them to take a forefront in the contemporary art discourse. But Rimzon somehow worked out from the largely un-pampered theoretical situations that he personally created for himself and encountered in Baroda. It broke the frameworks of classical modernism and prescriptive post-modernism that placed artist either on romantic pedestal breaching oneself from reality or in a narrative rhetoric of the ‘political’.
Rimzon showed the work ‘departure’ done in (painted) plaster in ‘Seven Young sculptors exhibition’ held at Delhi in 1985. M.F. Hussain bought this work. His fellow sculptors of the same generation including Krishnakumar who was sculpting in classical modernist manoeuvre. Rimzon’s work was not monolithically romantic in attitude. He took great care in how actual space is to be used. His work titled ‘Three Heads on a Shelf’ gave a different idea of weight. At the same time it is a highly painted work. Paint is treated as a material here. Attitude to paint is not rather as a ‘surface covering’ on the form. Paint was in one way very expressively used by many of his fellow sculptors from Kerala to convey deep and aggressive anti-heroic reasons (like in Krishnakumar’s ‘Thief’ etc). Rimzon was positing himself more dialogically trying to generate mutative possibilities in the practices of looking through memories and meanings. He was trying to more objectively work out on materiality and the relationship between the onlooker and the art object.
“At that time no gallery allowed to fix nail onto their wall. So I had to fix a wooden plank for that floating plane. The three heads are not placed on it. ‘three heads on a shelf’ was a highly painted work. I remember Nalini Malani was an examiner when it was shown as an exam work in Baroda. ”
In 1975, Geeta Kapur had written a partisan view on human body in ‘Vrischik’ magazine edited by Gulam Muhammad Sheikh. It was almost like a treatise on human body as a significant form in Indian Art. In 1981, ‘Place for People’ exhibition and some other shows that followed asserted the ‘new contemporaries’ in Indian Art, especially in painting. It generally claimed a narrative space through human gestures, portrayals and multiple representational schemes within the compositional space in a painting. In sculpture, Rimzon seemed to have taken a strong humanist stance but in an entirely different route that even critically distanced itself from the rhetorical and political language in general shared by large stream of Indian artists. Rimzon reclaimed the naked male body on one hand in its existential frameworks (man in chalk circle) and on the other hand in its critical austerity (with underpinning religious allusions like in ‘inner voice’ 1992). He engages the questions related to the alternating subject positions of seeing and exposing in ‘Man in chalk circle’.
“Antony Gormley has seen this work in Royal college of Art London in 1987. He was visiting faculty there. I was there by then for higher studies. He was very friendly. He came to see my degree show later. In 1998 Gormely has done similar work. ‘Seeing and showing’ is its name. This work is exactly seeing and showing. There was a mutual sharing between me and Gormely at that time. Some similarities are there”
A subliminal idealism enriched Rimson’s manifestations equipping the viewer to weave through history and memory to encounter the present. At the same time it was a potential route of escape from multiple levels of fragmenting subjectivities that one vein of politically charged post modernism held forth for a long time. Earlier Modernist tendency for abstraction largely did not bother about the disturbed constituencies of material and meaning in relation to specific cultural situations. But the subliminal possibilities of material in terms of meaning that some minimalist tendencies arrived at, need not always take up rhetorical and literal narratives. Material can be posited more poetic and abstract yet retain the physicality and clarity for evocative meanings. He searched this possibility taking cues from European Process art and minimalists. When Rimzon speaks of the narrative painters and ideologues he came across in Baroda and thinking about them vis-a-vis his works of the time, one automatically gets aware of the reservations he must have had for those around him in Baroda. It is also a proof for the fact that ‘political’ was largely thought in terms of painting. A sculptor like Rimzon could not very well incept himself in to it. But the problem he earlier had in working on images was slowly getting solved in Baroda days.
“It was a peak time of narrative painters in Baroda. Bhupen Khakkar, Gulam Muhammad sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani were there. Also at that time we got extensive lectures by Timothy Hymen on narrative painting. He talked about Balthus and his classical and academic nudes. How psychological aspects are brought into human figuration. I remember his reference to Balthus’s work ‘la rue’ in which a man is carrying a wooden panel and the association one get to Christ and crucifixion. As a person I was getting matured too. I dropped a year of my course in Baroda. I read extensively. I painted too.”
‘Thousand stories on a cloth bundle’ is a significant work he did during this time. It was a curious configuration of objects and a flux of allusions to death, sexuality and fertility. He was imaging in no heroic terms. It was in no anti-heroic terms too, no ‘radical’ terms for that matter. Rimzon ‘conceived’ images brimming with meaning. They were necessarily paradoxical in form but more so in effect. Rimzon’s intellectual association with Antony Gormley is in no way derivative in terms of some identity rhetoric or professional validation. But it lies in the need of both contemporaries to express in some rigorous terms something that could not get accommodated either in self-referential modernism or in post-modern obsession with language. All through out, Rimzon has an aversion to German expressionist romantics ardently embraced by many painters (especially Malayalis) around him. He was in turn criticised as adapting and competing western contemporaries. He participated in gallery art. An exclusive radicalism of his fellow artists critiqued him for his ‘bourgeoisie practices’. However, a higher studies life in London further sublimated his language.
‘Story told by a rat’ was the first work he did in London. It is a plaster cast. The rector of royal college bought this work when exhibited in the degree show. ‘Blue moon in October’ was another work.
“The couple - male female – was done first. But it conveyed nothing more. I was experimenting many things on top of it. I found a semi circular object - a bumper lying out there. First I thought to make a rainbow. Then when I kept it on top it becomes more enclosed. So I kept it upside down. Then I finished the form by drawing circle on the wall. That imparts energy, a solid weight. At that time new British sculptors like Anish Kapur, Tony Crag , Antony Gormely, Richard Deacon and the like were very active in London. Josef Beuys was a cult figure among them all.”
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Evocative material scriptorium
Rimzon seems to have recognised communicating in the most abbreviated poetic and human terms as an inherent issue in Art and the situation in Royal College of Art crystallised his mindscape and methodology in some satisfactory ways. The Beuysian thoughts on ‘reappropriation’ (an attitude with regards to reconstruction than to conquest ex novo, towards discovery rather than invention, and therapeutic improvement as against substitution) and ‘free creativity’ (a solid and total vision) was working out in some clearly recognisable material terms around him. In Indian visual culture, there is a faith in the transcending ability of materials but left untapped in the systemic flux of contemporary Art as it developed here in post-independent years. This is exactly what Rimzon got reconnected through a rigorous training. That was because a capacity for abstraction in sculpture was made volatile in that situation. As Susan Stewart writes on the ‘sculptor as first finder’, this capacity is what makes it possible to remove ourselves from sense-bound context and locate ourselves in relation to the super sensible.
“Everybody over there discussed on materials. Wide varieties of materials were getting used in Art practice. The Italian ‘Art povera’ was pretty interesting in that context. I was trying to understand why materials were given this importance in their talks. I found that there they had a totally different approach to using materials”.
Using materials unconventional was not something new for him to see. In Indian contemporary experience of the time, there were many sculptors like that in Group 1890 who used unconventional means and materials, like Himmat Shah using sheet metal and Jeram Patel using blow torch etc. K G Subrahmaniam was then speaking about handling terracotta, wood, leather etc and their subtleties as medium of art. But the way in which interest in material was thought in the European context, made all difference. Nature of the material is not what is solely intended. Or much more was intended. They were concerned with the evocative relation between material and meaning. How material relates to the experiences of the present and how they are used since the ancient systems. That appealed to Rimzon as more philosophical matured and spiritual way of thinking.
“I recognised that materials evoke psychic memories and feelings. Materials have some inherent qualities and meaning – both in painting and sculpture – like in Beuysian practice fat was used to rejuvenate body. It is recognised as a life sustaining material. Felt produces heat. They used materials for transformation. We can not see an Art language like that as developed in the Indian art gallery context. We had been discussing Art as decorative descriptive or as reductively aesthetic terms. Not in an essential level of meaning... We haven’t done much in theory too. It is not developed here as in western art.”
In the beginning of 90s, it was very rare to see sculptors in India working in such essential level of meaning. Ravinder Reddy was bringing in some signifying possibilities of materials, especially garish paint largely connoting sexuality and other issues of a kitsch culture. Rimzon, back in India, Delhi to be precise, shared his subliminal attitudes with so many friends here. Sudarshan Shetty and Subodh Gupta were among them. Some others among his fellow sculptors assumed themselves as strategically ‘political’. The ‘radical’ group dispersed and diminished, more so by the suicide of sculptor Krishnakumar. Many continued working in a much subdued yet ‘radical’ state of mind. Through the students in college of fine arts Trivandrum in 90s, there emanated painterly resonances of subdued romantic mind that alienate itself from the system. The narratives of ordinary under-privileged life echoed in paintings of many and a nostalgic modernity pertained almost as an idiom of Malayali artists. Rimzon sensed from far this contingent situation that he too had belonged to. But he had by then opened some fresh route that no fellow artist could open at that time. He was also included in many curatorial ventures of Asian Contemporary Art, important among them is ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions,’ organised by Asia Society, New York, 1997.
Rimzon had done many drawings of fragmented houses in 1989. He conceived painting as a ‘process’ like in a sculpture. It was like a psychic connection in which material is action and meaning, like a Pollock-ian painting. In Rimzon’s sculptures, paintings and drawings, paint or the coating medium is curiously treated as a substance not as a decorative element. In paintings he sustained a sense of substance be it charcoal or pastel or colour dust. As in sculpture, his drawings and paintings too appear as part of a grand symbolic visual scriptorium that conceives ideas of fertility, departure, healing and violence.
No significance is attached to an ‘artistic merit’ in the conventional sense. For example, craftsmanship is negated in the figure sculpture in ‘inner voice’. But irony is that there is huge labour involved in making that standing figure. There is huge funding in Europe for some conceptual projects so that the ‘merit-less’ labour could be hired to craftsmen. In India huge imaginations that negate conventionally ‘artistic’ merit is a risk that artist personally need to bear. Competent galleries are only up and coming today. ‘Inner Voice’ had a total involvement of Rimzon. ‘Who else would bear it at that time?’ he asks. ‘Inner Voice’ was also a work that subtly liberated the idea of human body from the rhetoric of ‘partisan views on human body’. Found objects – the tools and weapons in the work -never stoop to formal permutation combinations. Iconic arrangement of tools in a semi-circle functioned in a transcending space. Tool is almost fetishist in Marxian thought that after all, in turn has almost fetishistic importance in the Malayali psyche. In a larger context, man creates tools and it refers to labour and production.
“I read Matin Heidegger ’s writings a lot that time. He proposes some language oriented means to ratify the estrangements caused in life because of human advancement that overexploit nature. He proposes a four-fold structure of language. Divine- mortal-earth- heaven. One can combine one with another of these four-fold to transgress the sick situations of communication. Interconnection establishes and one enters into essence of objects and meanings crossing the utility parameter. It is interesting.”
There is an un-equivocating idea of cultural relativism in Rimzon. He adopted the westerner’s methodology in terms of devising an artistic scheme for doing sculpture. But he reserves space for relative differences in cultural psyche that should be acknowledged on the way. “Life-cast sculptures are not possible for us. Europian psyche will associate with that more. Gormley does it. But Indian Art mostly did modelling, both in monumental and toy scales. It is not simply craft. Not solely in dimensions of ‘the real’. Its vitality and inner power won’t be achieved with real life casting.”
Politics of representation predominant in Indian art discourses of 1990s was all too literal though on the level of praxis it stretched the limits of many people bringing in many women for example on to the scene breaking grounds for a liberal ground to discuss sexuality, power relations, cultural diasporas etc. But over these years Rimzon was not much in that ideological mainstream though many major curated shows on international scale contained his works. A sort of cultic symbolism was working through his entire oeuvre. Recently it reached up to some explorations of ‘Healing’ (NewYork Bodhi show 2007). He was somehow bringing himself in to some sublime voices from the timeless human quests in significant terms of materiality. Generating evocative objects in memory to rejuvenate the social psyche at critical junctures of history was his means, almost inspired by Anselm Kiefer or Joseph Beuys who are in their respective contexts engaging the past raising ethical questions for the present expressing the possibility of the absolution of guilt through human effort.
Having set up a studio for himself in Trivandrum, Rimzon is continuing with his convictions gained over the years. He is also the principal of Govt. Ravi Varma College of fine arts, Mavelikkara, Kerala.
There is an increased visibility for new contemporary Indian Art in an international parlance. But Art today is leading to a sick state of affairs without a conceptual fabric of history and memory. A lack of closely documented materials on Indian Art even of recent past worsens the situation. Success or failure of an artist is looked upon in simple parochial terms of professional alignment with affluence and not much in terms of any rationality of thought and practice. So, the challenge for Contemporary Art is to engage with the contemporary world with refined nuances supported by a history of human sense-making mechanisms. ‘Up-close-personal’ is an exercise to identify those who make such substantial rigor of taste, history, language and materials in their art practice.
Let me remain for the while, quoting some interesting observations Rimzon expressed over our conversation, on the legitimacies and limits of theory as far as he could feel its presence in the course of his practice.
“Just as painting reached its dead end, ideologies also reached at a fag end of efficacy.
Other sources of image production were adopted. When classical theories of Marxism failed to explain, linguistic theories could explain structural similarities in form and meaning at desperately different cultural locations. When these theories applied in art, many methodologies emerged. It was a conceptual and theoretical practice. In India it did not develop like that. In the narrative school, only Bhupen Khakkar crossed many limits considerably. Indian art practice is still in terms of classical modernism. It doesn’t change much. Heroism in one form or the other pop up. On the critic’s front, the whole left-wing intelligentsia in the country formed through 60s and 70s - Geeta Kapur among them conceiving the dominant idea of ‘historical avant-garde’- predicted working class taking over power.(The furthering of its progress- emergence of middleclass - their concerns were projected) All these prediction-oriented writings were suddenly swept away in the flood of new methodologies of critical practices. Suddenly world over, an entirely different Art emerges. ‘Historical avant-garde’ lost ground. Many writers suddenly got nothing to say. In Kerala, many ideologues of ‘Samskarikavedi’ and all, had to reduce pace of their convictions. In 1990s the whole new attempt was felt to recover from this crisis through identity politics of sorts. Post modernity allowed for some critical cracks. But things are still working in the classical modernist pattern. No writer today writes on a theoretical foundation. That is the current situation. Theoretical discourses take a still back seat. Market discussions take a mainstream. Concepts get no space and a due discourse. This is not the correct focus that Indian Art is to be in. A more valuable focus should be made.
courtesy
http://www.artconcerns.net/2008march/html/upclose_Rimzon.htm
1 st april 2008