Reflections and Intimations
The Paintings of Tensing Joseph

R. Nandakumar

Socialism and globalisation, as different socio-economic systems, are also historically specific manifestations of what Roland Robertson calls globality, ‘the intensification of more-or-less worldwide connectivity and increasingly reflexive global consciousness’. As a cognitive condition, globality inheres in societies that have ‘become more and more conscious of and have acquired doctrines and views about the future of the world.’ Its complexity, moreover, involves matters of difference: the ‘problematic realization that there are other, alternative ways of life’ that coexist in the contemporary world. Globality thus engenders existential questions about identity and futurity in light of difference, of the uncertain, the unknown and the unknowable.

Christopher Lee1

Writing at this dreaded moment of the alarming spread of the pandemic COVID 19 when death is stalking the streets, it seems that the current situation for the whole mankind is about the balancing act of the will to survival in its fundamental biological sense, coming to grips with the apprehension about the mortal insignificance of everything human. If the last mentioned had evoked the ultimate existential concern that haunted humankind all along and had conventionally lent itself to be the mainstay of religion, the grimness of the current situation that is all-consuming is such that it has precluded religion from its scheme of things so as to render it redundant to human experience. To think of the sheer magnitude of human suffering and misery in this country at the beginning of the lockdown more than a year ago, especially for the migrant labourers who had to trudge their way back home several hundred kilometres from different parts of the country where they have been working, in the scorching sun with no food, water, shelter, or transportation and during which many lives have withered away, sends shudders down one’s spine. It is herein that the cognitive intimations of ‘an increasingly reflexive global consciousness’ born of ‘the intensification of more-or-less worldwide connectivity’ that leads to a cognitive condition that may be called ‘globality’ offers us a means to understand and place the present crisis in perspective.

The question looms large whether areas of human endeavour that have all along in history been the cherished preserves of the highest humanistic calling and the expressions of its lofty ideals (all forms of art included) are beating a retreat as another area of redundancy, having lost their relevance to the scourge which has the last laugh at least for now. Like much else, what remains to be seen is how far art could relate itself meaningfully to the emerging order of things and the changed social dispensation that have come about in its wake in some inexorable manner when the privileged amorphousness (the deferred meaning in the symbolic field) and rarefied aura (the incommensurability between the non-equivalence of art and its materiality) that are traditionally held to add up to the cultural capital of art, mediated by the narratives of the wishy-washy cult and trade of Art, can no longer be a redeeming feature to make up for its lost bearing on reality.

Now more than a year on, urged by the all-pervasive regimen of healthcare and medical regime, people have come to terms with the new ecology of mandatory precautions and protocols by way of social distancing, retreating into self-imposed isolation and masked anonymity that they now live by as if that is the way it is. With the public domain as the site of collective living, sharing and exchange having considerably shrunk, fragmented or receded, thereby obviating the need for the kind of orientations sustained by the psycho-behavioural spaces of inter-subjectivity, the very notional aspect of dimensional space (as for example, of the brick and mortar kind) has given way to an impersonal surrogate in the form of the virtual stand-in, from e-commerce, zoom conversation, chat box questions and webinar to online teaching. The sense of immediacy and intimacy evoked by human presence as predicated on everyday mores of social currency, used to be sustained by the sense of community in social transaction for which expressions of closeness, togetherness, proximity and neighbourliness were values that have a civilizational investment. It looks like people have forfeited this privilege as if the human race were at the transit point of an apocalyptic rite of passage into the late-human or post-human, if you like, phase. Much of these new modalities of social interaction and transaction that were initially resorted to in a spirit of ad hocism may as likely as not come to stay, with the ominous suggestion that they may as well be the way for the future.

However, the root causes of the pestilence still remaining unclear, what is fairly clear is that it is the accumulated result of the disruption of the foundational balance in the scheme of things of man/nature coexistence, wrought by the depredations that man has been inflicting on nature over long periods of time and his over-zealous self-assertion of greedy pragmatism that finally has met with its nemesis. While the reasons for this are far too overwhelming and complex to be ascribed to any single identifiable human factor (that is, man-made factor), it is almost certain that the great success story that man has been gloating over has finally become his own undoing. With all the portentous foreboding, what the nemesis has left us with is a certain awareness that man has much to atone for. However, life has to move on, like what Brueghel seems to be telling us through his Fall of Icarus.

If the foregoing sounds more like a speculative reflection on the larger implications of the cataclysmic changes that we are in for in the wake of the pandemic, it follows by extension that its global dimension prevails everywhere upon the local conditions, subject to their local variations. However, notwithstanding the all-encompassing global nature of the crisis, such a generalised connect may not go too far in meeting the case of the particular situation of each, given its social, political and cultural differences. This holds true with the situation in Kerala which is the particular local context vis-à-vis the global in which to locate the social and cultural underpinnings of the works of Tensing Joseph on display here which it turns out, were painted during and against the background of the above situation. It is all the more topically important in as much as the multi-sited presentation of these works in their implications being trans-local and trans-cultural, calls attention to the disengagement with a Euro-centric aesthetic mode, not as a means to privilege ‘difference’, and calls for a reappraisal of much of what is taken for granted in the art world goings-on in relation to art from the Third World.

Kerala, the southernmost state in the Indian subcontinent is bordered on the one side by mountainous tracts and forests, though dwindling and on the other, by the Arabian Sea. As plain as the topography of the plains is, the life of its people is attuned to a characteristically uneventful course with no turbulent social upheavals upsetting its even pace or cataclysmic natural disasters disrupting its not-so-problem-ridden life style. Its tropical climate has a prolonged warm summer during which time the onset of monsoon brings rains twice a year from two directions respectively which fact in spite of the wet spell, accounts for the sultry, stuffy and humid atmosphere characteristic of the land most of the year. Understandably, the people of Kerala are not much exposed to the phenomenon of seasonal changes with its susceptibility to evanescent shades of emotional streaks under the spell of nature’s bounty. This in short has been the general condition of the state and its people until recently.

But of late, starting from a few years preceding the outbreak of the pandemic, Kerala has been going through a fateful period quite unlike what it used to be otherwise that had marred the even-paced pattern of life of its people and had shaken them out of their snug comfort levels. The period in the first instance saw the outbreak of diseases hitherto unknown in the land that could be identified and diagnosed only later such as nipah that spread much panic among people. Though contained quickly and effectively, it had already taken its toll in the meantime. This was followed by a series of natural disasters of a magnitude that was unheard of by the people of Kerala in their lifetime, starting with a long spell of heavy rains and floods towards the end of 2018 that had swept away entire villages, followed by landslides that had buried rows of labour settlements along the hilly terrain. Again after a short while the land was ravaged by the severe cyclonic storm Ockhi that had wreaked havoc particularly on the coastal area and its people. The people of Kerala woke up to the unsettling realisation that all is not right with the world and that the increasing frequency with which such natural disasters recur is a matter of grave concern. Though the state administration rose to the occasion and did everything to alleviate the misery and distress, for those who were destined to bear the brunt and survive the ravages, it was a lingering trauma in the wake of having lost their dear ones. In a land where human tragedy on a large scale was rather unfamiliar, it was a situation of abject misery made the more acute by the haunting sense of deprivation, displacement and dispossession. The trauma of deprivation and dispossession is something that eludes being generalised or shared with others, embedded as it is in the inalienable singularity of subjective truth and the unmediated experiential matrix that it informs, the palpable immediacy of which one cannot but carry all within oneself. However, the immediacy and singularity of the existential situation as of here and now, slowly wears off to merge with the generality of broad categories of impersonal factual data. Submerged as it were like anonymous quotes of putative validity, those experiences which are now memories are told and retold as spin offs from a master narrative through impersonal generalities in the ebb and flow of life. Thus a cataclysmic human destiny is turned into the jaded ephemera of the past as a matter of course. Life goes on with its particularity being reconfigured and reinvested in subsequent narratives just as the sun is new every time it rises.

Amidst all this, as a redeeming feature, it incidentally brought to the fore the glory pure and simple of being human as seen in the selfless life-saving activities and rescue missions undertaken by people on their own during the flood, especially by the fishermen, for example who rushed to the flood-hit areas carrying their boats and other rescue gear from far-away places. It was an epic saga indeed! Their stoic selflessness was redemptive in its moral conviction particularly when seen beside the typically middleclass smugness and indifference in normal conditions to any larger human misery.

Having the singular distinction of being the first democratically elected Communist ministry to come to power in the world in 1957,2 Kerala has an enduring legacy of Left democratic institutions and progressive social movements that played a major role in radicalising political consciousness among its people. It is currently the lone state in the country whose political will has been consistently resisting the communal and fundamentalist agenda of the ruling right wing at the Centre in New Delhi for making political inroads into it. As a result, the state is programmatically subjected to a process of attrition by the central government by flouting the norms of constitutional legality and political morality, through coercion, discrimination and retaliation for its refusal to toe the line. Pressure is also brought to bear upon its normal functioning and governance through all fair and foul means, endorsed and abetted by concerted media campaign that sets afloat a whole demonology against the ruling Left-wing government. The present media environment that serves the vested interests of corporate houses and is predictably in the service of the powers that be, presses into service all methods of falsification, distortion and misrepresentation that drive at desensitising public responses and blunting public sensitivities by inducing a kind of media fatigue and numbness through unrelenting outpouring of post-truth media narratives and conspiracy theories that leave people in the limbo of a dazed stupor. Such media campaign ought virtually to lay siege on the powers of thinking and objective reasoning of people anywhere who are taken hostage while being driven into a state of disorientation through incessant hate campaign and media misrepresentation. But the political will of the people of Kerala has effectively resisted it as the state has recently entered the second consecutive term of government under the Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party (Marxist) of India with a resounding assertion of electoral mandate in the recently concluded elections, going against the grain of the widely-believed anti-incumbency factor. This in short is an overview of the present-day social and cultural scenario of Kerala.

This brief overview of the Kerala situation is deemed proper as it helps place in context the works of Tensing Joseph on view informed as they are by the truth conditions in terms of which they inhabit their habitus. The fact that Joseph has been at work on these paintings and reliefs during the time as above (one of the paintings has an inscription with an explicit reference to the pandemic) prompts us to see how he has responded to this human situation in whatever tenuous a manner and how it has a bearing on the general tenor and thematic import of his works. Environmental and ecological concerns are not anything new to the works of Joseph and they recur in his work from time to time with remarkable persistence though it is not that these form the lone concern that he is fixated on in any obsessive manner. Tracing as he does his ancestry to the early settlers who migrated from the plains of central Kerala to the eastern high ranges for farming, he has been keenly aware all along of how the forestland is undergoing drastic changes and in the process, is gradually being depleted of its natural environment and habitation. This awareness was sharpened and strengthened by his conviction about the devastating impact deforestation has wrought on nature, biodiversity, the human/animal interface and a whole range of related ecological issues. Writing about the works of Joseph in 2007, I have drawn attention to his ‘predilection for the organic form born of a native life-affirming sense of nurturing and regeneration, [that] has found a congenial and encouraging environment in the atmosphere of Santiniketan where he completed his post-graduation in sculpture…’3 and also to the visual undertones of his work ‘suggestive of an all-embracing natural and organic life-enhancing impulse.’4 Of course, his concerns in this regard cannot be seen as apart from his preoccupations with the broader aspects of life and the challenges of human coexistence with nature in a larger ecological perspective. It is not that he is alone to have such concerns in Kerala given the intellectual legacy of the Left wing movements in the land and the level of awareness they could instil in the people about man/nature interface and the importance of environmental conservation. These movements spearheaded by organisations with a scientific outlook and popular base have gone a long way in sensitising people towards ecological issues and have made them aware of the consequences and impact of environmental destruction on human and natural life in empirical terms. Having said that, it should be noted that environmental activism among the liberal intellectuals and idealists including some prominent poets and cultural figures, has generally maintained a different outlook and approach in that it has been as a single-constituency project with a vaguely humanist mission that by choice stays away from any political affiliation or social engagement. Such an idealistic mission in which environmentalism is pursued as an end in itself with its largely apolitical connotations risks being reductionist and one-dimensional, soon becoming a celebratory fad and fetish with its romantic baggage surrounding the ‘cult of nature’ to the neglect of the human factor. In the several paintings by Joseph which have a bearing on the theme of environmental destruction, he steers clear of the fetishism surrounding the trendiness of environmentalism with its political disavowal and moralistic lament even as they remain disturbing reflections on the onslaught on human habitat and nature as well as intimations of a grimly sordid future. At the same time, he does not project any apocalyptic vision of a devastated nature in terms of morbidly doom-laden images and cynical juxtaposition of dislocated disaster motifs, but creates an allegorised and at times bizarre topography with a desolate air in which the natives of the land appear as actors in a mise-en-scène of familiar activity, as in Far and Near, The Confession, and Guest Labourers. In the painting Far and Near a barren landscape is depicted cluttered with a crisscross of logs of wood, apparently trunks of felled trees, with the insignificant presence of diminutive figures of loggers themselves who were put on the job by their employers in the clandestine act. Strewn amidst the timber are the cacti littered all over and birds of all kinds perched on the branches of the lone tree that could have been home to them once and is now a remnant of what the forest used to be. To add to the subdued drama, the tree has a niche with a miniature deer showcased inside as it were and hovering above are the avian motifs of two beaked and winged anthropomorphic images. The niche-like hollow, incidentally, appears from his works of the earlier period onwards, signifying an opening, a threshold to let in or a portal for accessing what is beyond. As a motif it also metamorphoses into the modular units as boxes that were part of his site-specific installation Wall of Incarnations of 2006. The recurring motif of the deer as denoting the lost innocence associated with the bucolic serenity of the environment can be seen in several paintings without invoking in the least any sentimental lament or romanticised pantheism. One of the most compelling among these is the painting Yesterday I was a Deer where a lone deer is seen moving farther, lost in the steeply recessive space over a bridge below a roof of crisscross steel beams and girders suggestive of an industrial plant. The juxtaposition evokes the brute efficiency of the dehumanised techno-industrial environment in lieu of what is expected to be the sequestered sylvan atmosphere that is simply and conspicuously missing. In another painting Doe on the Bridge which is like a sequel to the above-mentioned with its similar spatial construction and in a clarified and centralised composition of neat symmetry, a herd of fleet-footed doe is moving past along a railway over-bridge seen sideways and the train below moving away in a straight line tapering into the far background, with lush green vegetation on either side. The presence of the herd of doe on the railway over-bridge where it is the last thing to be expected, adding a touch of the bizarre through the improbable juxtaposition, is a grim reminder of the disruption of natural order and sense of harmony. The avian motif appears in its various morphological attributes across the imagery in different paintings like The Confession where it is next to another figure with skull and antlers of a deer, obviously a reference to the custom of their being displayed as the proud trophy of a ‘successful’ hunting exploit.

In this context, the painting Sedimentation of River is a case in point. Sedimentation of rivers in the natural course is a slow and gradual process which the river has a way to cope with so that it does not affect the course of the current. But uncontrolled sedimentation or siltation of rivers is what results from large-scale illegal sand mining for long periods, carting away hundreds of truckloads of fine sand mined from the riverbed almost on a daily basis for construction work which is a clandestine big business operated by land mafia and construction companies with the connivance of local administration. This has caused the rivers with their ever-dwindling flow to dry up and exposed the barren riverbed to invasive weeds and the undergrowth of shrubs. These rivers have been historically the territorial landmarks that have left their impact on the patterns of life in the region and a live presence with their seasonal variations influencing the social and cultural life of the people, apart from being the source and sustenance of plant, animal and human life. The disastrous results of the dying rivers that have wreaked havoc on the environment and upset the natural ecological balance have been addressed by environmental activists and writers alike. Interestingly, there is no representation of riverine motif in this painting but for the looming figure of the fish itself in its surreal settings with outlandish accoutrements like a toy fishing net and a trumpet. However, there is an incidental female figure in the far background which from its vaguely-suggested quasi-religious attributes of a deity, could be an oblique reference to the river goddess that has been the creative muse to may eminent poets and writers in Malayalam. Some of these rivers in the state have been a perennial source of inspiration for the poets who have of late written odes in an elegiac vein to their dying muse with its depleting current and bare sandy riverbeds. The rivers also used to be the topographic markers of the fictional world of some of the landmark novels in Malayalam and literary motifs that represented the ‘objective correlatives’ of the affective world of the characters. By allegorising the thematic thrust and giving it a surreal turn through a touch of the burlesque, as in the representations of the deity-like diminutive figure in the far background and the looming figure of the fish as a metonymic representation of the river, with its impossible props including the two legs on which it walks and a trumpet with its loaded associations, the painting moves at a tangent from its literal narrative content. Incidentally, the image of the walking fish was suggested to the artist, as revealed by him, by a shot in Satyricon, the fantasy drama film by Frederico Fellini of 1969 where a huge cut-out image of a fish is carried by a person who is all but hidden behind it with only his legs seen from knee down while walking. This may be an unintentional take on his own predilection for the Magritte-like surrealist streak that is in evidence, but unlike the latter it is not by evoking the connotations of arbitrary juxtaposition of objects in apparent disjunction, but by that of their context-specific configuration in a congruent referential field. Moreover, the depletion of natural habitat of the fish is suggested by the wishful evocation of water as the sheen of a patch of bright blue the fluorescent lustre of which smacks of something ersatz. The fact that the allusion via Fellini is to the make-believe of another fantasy becomes all the more relevant here, given the context of the visual metabolism of creative process from the random intake of an incidental perceptual data to processing and articulating it into a coherent painterly imagery.5

Paradoxical as it may seem, the people who appear in some of these paintings are themselves party to the organised onslaught on nature like felling of trees without being aware of it as they become pawns in the unseen nexus between venal politicians and their corporate patrons. This is the interface at the moment of truth that Joseph engages as an irony which becomes evident from the way he represents these marginalised folk in his paintings in different thematic contexts, like Far and Near, Deaf Republic, Untold Tales, Guest Labourers etc. The painted relief on wood Guest Labourers for instance, which is a diptych representing on the left, the workers engaged in sawing the timber and on the right, preparing lunch conveys the drabness of their workaday life, a life spent in the service of their master and his illicit trade which offers them a means of livelihood. Here, the artist has put to great use the division of the pictorial plane that suggests the dualism of compartmentalised life torn between labour and livelihood. We have to keep in mind that the way these people figure in the narratives of environmental activism and the regimes of truth it constructs is mostly akin to ‘anthropology’s absent interlocutor’, the faceless permanent other. In such cases they are nothing more than anonymous quantifiable data for deriving statistical information to arrive at computational algorithms that can fit the bill of some feasibility report. Interestingly, there is another more popular and perhaps more trendy representation of the dispossessed and the underprivileged which also enjoys a gloss of being the more progressive voice of dissent and critique. While discussing the emergence of a new type of imagination in India that is fixated on the consumption of subalternity as exemplified by recent Hindi films, Sarunas Paunksnis points out how in spite of having an appearance of dissent and protest, they ‘instead produce a carnivalesque of subalternity as the “New India’s” Other, acting as a peculiar civilising process of the society into consumption.’6 These subaltern masses in India are part of the postmodern imaginary of the emerging ‘global’ India or ‘New India’ without being aware of it, not as consumers but as the consumed. In such a ‘New India’, argues Paunksnis, which is transitioning towards the pleasures of consumption, a high level of individualism and rising affluence among the urban upper middle class all of which is occurring within the discourse of neoliberalism, the ‘backward’ or ‘rural’ India is aestheticised for consumption of place of difference and of otherness. It is in this context that the representation of the marginalised and the voiceless people in the paintings of Joseph assumes the tenor of an emphatic statement. Here, apart from the works mentioned above, the reference is to works like Rural Workers, The Huskers and Rural Rubies. Even as his figures are starkly defined with distinct regional traits and physiognomic features as social markers, their representation is inflected through the allusive context and nuanced thematic resonance, as for example, the references to local myths and beliefs that bond them in the collective life-world. In this sense, these robust, earthy and unheroic men and women depicted in workaday situations, while being typical of their humble stock and social position, are not types. Not the protagonists of any valourised human drama of encounter or conflict, these swarthy figures in their bare and forthright representation deny the gaze of empathetic identification as they engage the social register where they belong with a situated authenticity, in vindication of the dignity of labour. It is not a surrogate proletarian agency that gets lip allegiance by the employer-state for its ‘selfless’ dedication to work but is the grounded reality of a labour force with hands-on participation in the several developmental programmes initiated by the state, as in Rural Workers or Rural Rubies. Joseph has been meeting and talking to these labourers many of whom are known to him, engaged in such work in the vicinity of his house in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of the state where he lives now.

Incidentally, the term ‘guest labourers’, the title of one of the paintings mentioned above, needs an elaboration here. Over the last two decades or so there has been a regular influx of migrant wage labourers, skilled and unskilled, arriving in Kerala in hordes from neighbouring states as far as West Bengal. They come to Kerala which is known for its high democratic and equalitarian values and respect for the dignity of labour, seeking better remuneration, terms of service, treatment by the employer and worker-friendly environment, compared to the woefully low wages and gruelling working environment and inhuman treatment at the hands of the employer in their respective home states. Many of them are employed in construction work either by the government or private agencies, for residential houses, public buildings, commercial complexes, bridges and so on. The Left Democratic government had through legislation asserted its commitment to the wellbeing of these migrant labourers arriving from other states who felt reassured by the welcoming and cordial attitude of the people of the land in spite the language barrier. The official use of the term ‘guest labourers’ to refer to them instead of ‘migrant labourers’ in the usual parlance that had a condescending tone, was adopted as a token of appreciation of their contribution and an expression of concern and goodwill on the part of the government for them. It was the wretched and heart-wrenching plight of these workers at the beginning of the COVID-induced country-wide lockdown announced by the central government in early 2020 that is mentioned at the very beginning of the essay – what with the whole public life coming to a standstill following strict restrictions on travel, curbs on practically every social transaction and the loss of means of livelihood that inevitably followed, these hapless people were the worst affected. They were stranded in cities with no respite in sight, nothing to hold on or look forward to. All the cities and metropolises in the country including those of Kerala, witnessed the unprecedented phenomenon of an exodus of tens of thousands of such dislocated and dispossessed labourers with their families and children trudging their way hundreds of kilometres back home in other states, carrying their meagre possessions.

It should be remembered in this regard that Joseph shares much in common with artists from the Third World countries in articulating such concerns which in themselves are translocal and transcultural as mentioned earlier (‘wide-ranging networks of embedded local and envisioned global imaginings of cultural landscapes’, to quote Alexandra Chang)7 in the way they are shared through the cognitive intimations of globality that embrace an inclusive vision of the future informed by a radical urgency. Partaking in the ideological thrust of these as knowledge projects does not mean that the artists at the same time are forsaking the status of those articulations as works of art. This is perhaps an instance where the borderline between art and science in the familiar dyad wears thin to allow crossovers of disciplinary boundaries between their respective domains in the spirit of inter-disciplinarity consistent with postmodernist thought. In a sense, it parallels and is consistent with the loss of medium-specificity that has spawned a range of practices that could not have been accommodated within the modernist painterly canon and its aesthetic hierarchy. Incidentally, this is also the context to be reminded of the significance of the installations that Joseph has been doing alongside from time to time. In the recent installation The Logic of Umbilical Cord (2021), consisting of 1500 small wooden blocks hanging on thin nylon thread and grouped in a pattern accompanied by audio clips of random screams of babies, it is consistent with his concerns about the genesis of the phenomenon of life – the biological substratum of the genetic life force which engenders life – and about how the instinctual drive for survival later becomes the moving principle that is internalised as struggle in collective living.8Writing about his earlier site-specific installation Wall of Incarnations of 2006, I have noted:

…he has hedged in an enclosure by assembling dried twigs gathered from the vicinity which otherwise serve as material for firewood for the Santals. He has in the process secured the participation of several artists as well as non-artists who were given empty cartons to be painted over. These painted cartons were fixed on to the tall fence-like structure fabricated from dry twigs and the whole structure when lit up from the ground had an apparitional castle-like look, creating a walk-through ambient space inside. The choice of the mundane material together with the participation of other people made it a collective and de-aestheticised art event in the truly democratic spirit that invites participation.9

Thinking of such environmental concerns that artists from the Third World articulate through their work, one is reminded for instance, of Liu Xiaodong, one of the most significant artists in contemporary China. Of any country in the world, China has the largest number of dams and some of the biggest, at that, most of them having been built after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 on its path to socialist modernisation in ideological opposition to the capitalist process that promoted modernisation of the former colonies. However, by 1980 close to three thousand of the eighty thousand dams built after 1949 collapsed and by then more than 10.2 million people had been displaced by the earlier projects. As Patrick D Murphy notes: ‘Megadam building is a continuation of modernity into the twenty-first century because it represents the fundamental imposition of an enlightenment-based instrumental reason extended to multinational and global scales of destruction.’10The devastating effects and the vast human misery caused by the Three Gorges Dam located on the Yangtze River, and yet at the same time, framed and projected by the government as one of its proud emblems of modernity, being considered the largest in the world in terms of hydroelectric power generation, have drawn much critical attention globally. The large-scale oil paintings that Liu Xiaodong has been doing since the mid-2000s, particularly the early ones, were consistently addressing issues of displacement and dispossession of people and the ecological devastation of vast areas in the region wrought by the massive dam project. ‘Panoramic in scope and monumental in size, [Liu Xiaodong’s paintings] involve striking depictions of people affected by the dam against the backdrop of the drastically changing landscape of the Three Gorges region.’11 Evacuation and displacement of population together with environmental devastation that such huge dam sites have caused has become more than ever a matter of grave concern as is resonating in the paintings of Joseph no less than of Liu Xiaodong, though in distinctly different stylistic terms.

Here we have to take a digression. Having referred earlier to the Leftist legacy and its lingering influence on the thinking and social life of Kerala, the flipside of the enlightenment narrative associated with it needs mention in passing. When the forms of ideological dissent and protest that once were invested with intellectual potential and ardour of conviction become part of commonsense forms of popular assumptions through dissipation, they come in ready to hand for appropriation by the same cultural forces that the ideology opposes, whereby those aspects are legitimised and absorbed into the dominant discourse in their tame and domesticated forms of surrogacy in the narratives of the everyday. Thus becoming part of the received cultural stock-in-trade of ‘legitimate’ radical thinking it has now taken unto itself the putative validity of a benchmark as it were for cultural templates of a kind. The social changes brought about by the Leftist movement in Kerala from the mid-20th century onwards had ushered in a new age of progressive social values and outlook that marked a definitive break with the past of a highly stratified society in which age-old caste prejudices were still ruling the roost and untouchability was still the order of the day in social practice. Particular mention may be made of the reforms in education and land relations effected through legislation that got under way since 1957 and had left a tumultuous impact on the bastions of the still feudal orthodoxy in the rigidly caste-ridden society of Kerala of those days. It set in motion a process that led to the gradual deprivation of age-old social privileges of rank and honour among the landed gentry and economic relevance among the upper castes, causing a major declassing process among the youth of those sections of society as they were forced to come to terms with their own changed identity vis-à-vis that of the hitherto underprivileged class emerging into a new social position and status. All these groundbreaking social changes and the consequent traumatic personal experiences have left on the margins of the individual psyche a particular pathology of the self verging on what may be called cultural schizophrenia for which fear-of-success-as-problem-solving becomes a coping mechanism to cushion the moral fears and anxieties internalised as a response to those changes. It became the pretext for a self-indulgent glorification of the pet theme of imagined ‘sufferings’ at the hands of the Establishment – the displaced father figure. This self-willed glorification of the theme of imagined ‘suffering’ as a cathartic escape and the compulsive celebration of the cult of failure with its self-deluding connotations of sacrifice, renunciation, abstention, stoicism, asceticism, etc., were the response to the moral anxiety that in turn was posited as a grand political design of ‘radicalism’. So much so that the popular quotable quote by Samuel Beckett that “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail…” that was taken to mean literally (leaving out the remaining part of the sentence), has been doing the rounds in various contexts like an adage or dictum in the received group-think among this class.

The above brief account was prompted by the need to mention here that it has been open season for a certain brand of compulsive ‘radicalism’ in the cultural ethos of Kerala in the recent past that in the first instance was a concomitant of the modernist tendencies (particularly, influenced by Existentialist thought) having come under the influence of the enlightenment narrative of the broad Left which in turn came under the impact of the National Emergency of mid-1975 to emerge in its present variant in a more acute form during the post-Emergency period. In many ways this trait still persists in the psychological profile of progressivism as the intellectual order of the day. So much so that when a small group of art students from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram gathered together in the late 1980s, it was along predictable lines that in the first place, the group cannot but style itself as ‘Radical’, in terms of those very templates mentioned above, thereby claiming leeway to sit in judgement on the larger contemporary Indian art scene and rhetorically denounce everything as ‘retrogressive’. In its initial days much was made of this coterie of self-styled ‘Radical’ artists comprising some senior students or those having just completed their course from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram where Joseph has been a student at the same time.12 Expecting to cause a ripple across the country by way of a movement and casting themselves in the mould of Dada-like anarchy, they hoped to announce themselves with a bang and make a vertical landing on the centre stage of contemporary Indian art. However, devoid of any valid ideological conviction or a conceptually coherent programme of art practice or social vision, it met with its natural end too soon to leave any impact and many of its participants went looking for pastures new which were of course the same mainstream art which they earlier derided. While many of his peers and fellow students of the College made a beeline for the so-called ‘Radical’ bandwagon, it is to Joseph’s credit that he chose to stay away from it and be on his own. This is just to mention how contentious the issue of being perceived ‘radical’ (and not of being radical) is in the ongoing local narratives of the Kerala art scene.

Coming back to the paintings by Joseph: the local myths, tropes and lore of the plantation culture embodied in the social imaginary of the settler farmers are an amalgam of collective articulation of the memories of a life left behind in the plains generations ago and the challenges and struggles of a life in transition adapting to an agrarian saga, buffeted by a hostile climate and environment. Naturally enough the environment they found themselves in was far removed from the romantic fantasies of a pastoral idyll. A painting like Story of Migrants is the most telling representation of this theme of a struggle for survival and against natural forces in order to harness them, without being against nature. Though in an under-narrativised manner, the painting is richly layered with local hue not only in terms of physiognomic features and generic traits of its figures but also the emotional undertones and atmosphere in terms of the collective belief system and social imaginary that bond their life-world together, represented through an allusive narrative consisting of an array of non-sequential vignettes. In some other paintings it is through allegorising the landscape and lending it an eerily surreal streak that Joseph lays out the scene of struggle in which his cast is caught, as in Far and Near, Sedimentation of River, The Sky is Everywhere, The Confession, Deaf Republic etc. It is interesting that while on the one hand, these paintings are grounded in an earthy sense of local life, on the other the intertextuality they evoke in stylistic terms of quotations from world art, seek to locate their premise within the context of artistic conventions and aesthetic parameters of the spectrum of world art.

Here, some of the stylistic features of Joseph’s work have to be taken note of. One of the prominent influences seems to be that of Diego Rivera which may be a happy confluence of ideas and affinities through intuitive assimilation rather than through conscious choice derived from any systematic academic study or training, as for one thing, the Mexican muralists hardly figure as anything more than a peripheral reference in the academic course of studio practice in India. This is of course quite unlike the case of some other influences seen in his work like that of René Magritte, Dali, Picasso, Rodin or Bosch who are well within the scheme of things of academic study in the country. All these painterly references and quotations together with those to Luis Buñuel and Gabriel García Márquez, inflect the field of signification of his pictorial text and render it subtly nuanced. From the choice of subject and the thematic preoccupations to stylistic affinities as in paintings like those discussed before (including the very scale of some other canvases), Joseph’s works share much in common with the public and civic sensitivities and mode of address of muralism envisioned as public art with a forthright communicative function.13 It does not seem fortuitous that the representation of these people in gross and stark figural imagery in its explicitly denotative semiotic function, is in adherence to the generic and formal conventions of a painterly idiom in apparent stylistic terms, yet the idiom is an unapologetic acknowledgement of its affinity with muralism. The summary rendering, for example, of their sturdy physical features and of their angular limbs lends a certain solid weightiness and ponderousness to the figures. At the same time, it allows him to avoid invoking any aesthetic baggage in terms of institutional trappings and canons of taste so as to give credence to the rhetorical certitudes of any political persuasion or align with its known ideological legacy. This, in a sense, helps his style maintain an ambivalent relation to the ambit of the art-world authority and acts as a counter-aesthetic strategy to underplay the artistic agency derived from it. Amidst all the volatilization of the artwork and the disappearance of the primacy of oil painting in postmodernist art (Fredric Jameson)14 both the return of the image as sign in its referential function and the restoration of meaning from its deferred indeterminacy in the symbolic field of signification, have to be seen as a critical turn in contemporary painting in the context of Third World countries. In a sense, what Joseph tries is to define the potential aesthetic rather than the aesthetic potential of his works vis-à-vis the hierarchy of modernist yet figurative painterly canon and in this respect he seems to be not inclined to forgo or disown the moorings of his style that are congruent and cognate with the modernist painterly canon while maintaining a self-critical distance from the rather ‘newer, ad hoc disposable canons’ (Fredric Jameson’s phrase) of postmodernism.

The matter of how an Indian artist sees him/herself in relation to international art or places him/herself in the context of the global art situation is something that never ceases to be of interest and yet problematic. Addressing the question, Geeta Kapur makes this interesting observation way back in 1972 which is as relevant today as it was then:

Modern Indian artists not unlike their foreign counterparts, settle in big cities because their education and their only art audience is [sic] to be found there. … These artists cut off from rural and provincial India, are in the cities, surrounded by a vapidly materialistic bourgeoisie. As a desperate measure they are merged into a small group, generally constituted of western educated Indians and foreign residents who are at least sympathetic to their art. Thus whatever their linguistic region, their social and economic background, the modern Indian artist by mere [sic] choice of his profession is part of an artificial ‘culture’. …. These artists then, form a kind of utopian elite, believing that art transcends social pressures, that its nourishment comes from like-minded people, wherever they are; therefore that it can survive on the rarefied diet of high culture, irrespective of the given state of culture and society surrounding them.15

Granted that the Indian art scene has come a long way since, where does it stand in the present moment vis-à-vis the situation that Geeta Kapur has outlined in precise terms? Such questions as were posed by her were hardly asked at that time when the whole problematique about modern Indian art was framed by the terms of discourse in relation to western or colonial modernity and drawn from questions surrounding Indianness and Indian identity, the conflict between tradition and modernity, etc., all of which were defined in terms of extra-cultural and ahistorical abstractions and located within the larger narrative of nationalism, nation building and shaking off the colonial past. Now that the nationalist categories of modernism together with the appeal of Euro-centric internationalism that addressed the emerging post-colonial societies have given way to the subsequent changes, first during the cold war when the race for technological advancement in the decolonised countries was encouraged and promoted by both the bipolar power centres, accompanied by the growth of national monopolies and the outreach of multinational capitalism until by the early 1990s, with economic deregulations when the previous colonies were drawn into the ambit of the neoliberal dispensation, how do these changes tell upon the tenuous and problematic relation of the Indian artist to the global art? Thomas McEvilley refers to the interesting instance of a contradiction in the stance of the modern Indian artist in relation to the West. He notes that the majority of people in India in terms of their living conditions and the quality of life belong in the Third World while the government of India from the early post-Independent period until the incumbent one, has been maintaining cordial though tenuous, diplomatic relations and ideological links with the Second World that was in tandem with the Nehruvian brand of socialist outlook, the Indian artist for his part has been consistently identifying with and owing allegiance to the First World, a phenomenon that was in evidence from the time of the Progressives. After making the observation that the earlier assumption of the West of its artistic hegemony has given way to that of the art-world hegemony by which he means the infrastructure comprising the various institutions of art pedagogy and the enterprises of art dealing, art trade, art market and art promotion, including art writing and publishing, McEvilley goes on to note:

[…] ‘contemporary’ is an especially loaded word in the modernist view of history. It does not mean simply that an art work was made at the present time, but that it is based on a study of the Western art tradition, possesses an awareness of the critical discourse surrounding the tradition, and is created with the purpose of contributing to that tradition and that discourse. So there could not be a ‘contemporary art’ that was made by a non-Westerner unless he or she had gone to school in the West and been initiated into its systems of thought.16

This takes us back to the issues raised by Geeta Kapur and their relevance as much today as then.

If what made modernism international in its authority and appeal was the unstated hegemony of the West over the previous colonies through which it tried to developmentally force a homogenisation of the world in terms of technological progress, the new economic deregulations and open market that promoted an unprecedented culture of consumption under the neoliberal persuasion with its concomitant cultural fallout in the form of postmodernism, placed a premium on multiculturalism that effectively replaced the earlier centre-periphery stratification with the new geo-political realignments. The dedifferentiation of culture and artistic production as a natural expression of multiculturalism that has come about in its wake assumes a value qualitatively different from the eclecticism that found favour with modernism, consistent as it was with the cultural exclusivity and stratification implicit in internationalism. This also marks a definitive shift in aesthetic parameters predicated on the ideological legacy of internationalist modernism that ‘represents a fundamental imposition of an enlightenment-based instrumental reason extended to multinational and global scales of destruction’, in the words of Patrick D Murphy quoted earlier. As the aesthetic hierarchy of modernism that had its ideological underpinnings in a concept of developmentalism exemplified by heavy industry and the techno-industrial reign of the perceived progress epitomised by national monopolies and multi-national capital, is giving way to a horizontal and inclusive concept of art and cultural production, the borderline between the older canonical categories are blurring to let them emerge from the supersessive and subsumptive logic of historicism. This is also the context of the renewed interest of the Western art establishment in the art of Asian and other non-Western countries. Can there be an Indian art in the contemporary moment that can afford to live up to (without taking it upon itself as a liability to prove its credentials) the expectations of contemporaneity without recourse to paying obeisance or affirming allegiance to the ‘art world hegemony’ (in the sense of McEvilley mentioned above) of the West and its extra-artistic authority? Perhaps Joseph’s works point towards the possibilities of a positive direction worth taking note of.

Notes and References

  1. Christopher Lee, ‘Globality and Aesthetics: Framing the Three Gorges Dam’, Third Text, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2014, p. 33
  2. See for the subject under discussion : Ajayan Dr. T., Dismissal of the First Communist Ministry in Kerala and the US, Partridge India, 2016; Georges Kristoffel Lieten, ‘Progressive State Governments: An Assessment of First Communist Ministry in Kerala’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 14, No. 1, 6 January 1979, pp. 29-39;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Namboodiripad_ministry
  3. R. Nandakumar, ‘Installation/Investiture: The Sculptures and Drawings of Tensing Joseph’ for the Exhibition Objects of Resemblance, Santiniketan, 2007, pages not numbered
  4. R. Nandakumar, ibid, pages not numbered
  5. The same imagery of the ‘walking’ fish appears in a sculpture by Joseph done around the same time.
  6. Sarunas Paunksnis, ‘Postmodern Experience in India: Imaginary Subaltern Space and Cinema’, History and Sociology of South Asia, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 2015, p. 36
  7. Alexandra Chang, ‘Approaching the Infinite Narrative – Asian Art “Now”: The Tomato Grey Artist Collective’ , Third Text, Vol. 28, No. 1, 20014, p. 13
  8. The installation The Logic of Umbilical Cord was originally proposed to be included in the present exhibition but as it turns out, could not be because of the ongoing COVID-induced restrictions on air cargo consisting of wooden articles. It is currently part of an extensive exhibition comprising only of Malayali artists from all over the world, Lokame Tharavadu (The World is the Family) being held in Alappuzha. My observations on the work are based on what the artist has stated about it in a personal communication by email dated 24 April 2021. However, I have freely adapted and paraphrased his statement as given in the text of the essay.
  9. R. Nandakumar, ibid, pages not numbered
  10. Patrick D Murphy, ‘Damning Damming Modernity: The Destructive Role of Megadams’, quoted by Christopher Lee, ibid, p. 32
  11. Christopher Lee, ibid, p. 40
  12. For a detailed study of this phenomenon from the methodological perspective combining cultural anthropology and Lacanian concepts by comparing two sculptures by an artist from this group, see: R. Nandakumar, ‘The Syndrome of Radical Regression or The Anatomy of Cultural Schizophrenia’, Tapasam, bilingual journal for Kerala Studies, vol. 3, nos. 1 – 2 (July – October 2007), pp. 185 – 203.
  13. For an extensive survey of the socio-cultural context and aesthetic concepts of the Mexican mural movement, see: Mary Katherine Coffey, ‘The “Mexican Problem”: Nation and “Native” in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse’, Cultural Studies: A Research Annual, ed. Norman K. Denzin, Vol. 5, Stanford, 2000, pp. 147 – 189
  14. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, New Left Review 92, March – April 2015, p. 107
  15. Geeta Kapur, ‘In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in post-colonial culture with special reference to contemporary Indian painting’, Vrischik, vol. 3, nos. 8 – 9 (June/July 1972, Baroda), pages not numbered.
  16. Thomas McEvilley, ‘Eurocentricm and Contemporary Indian Art’, Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, Ed. Yashodhara Dalmia, Marg, Vol. 53, No. 3, (March 2002), p. 93

R. Nandakumar is an art historian and culture critic with a deep interest in cultural musicology. He has taught art history in various Fine Arts colleges and has been Professor and Head of the Department of Visual Arts, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. He was formerly a Senior Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, as well as a Senior Nehru Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. His writings are mostly monographic extended essays that have appeared in academic journals. His extensive critique of the tantric style that was in vogue in the 1960s and 70s in India, published in Malayalam in the early eighties, is one of the early attempts at locating the historical premises of the ideology of Indianness by problematising the tradition/modernity binary in the context of art and nationalism. He is known particularly for his groundbreaking work on the artist Raja Ravi Varma who he has studied as looked at from the perspective of gender and the family in nineteenth-century Kerala. He is also one of the first Indian art historians to apply Lacanian concepts to the work of an Indian artist. Influenced by the philosophy of art and art theory (but not strictly bound by them), his criticism is informed by the attempt to incorporate theory with cultural critique by locating art in the area of intercultural study. He remains invested in the sociology of culture and writes frequently in both English and Malayalam. Presently he lives and works in Trivandrum.