Of Language and Metalanguage
Vijayakumar Menon
The end of Physics is the beginning of Metaphysics and the frontier of reality merges with fantasy. Art has many dimensions ranging from physical phenomenon to metaphysical overtones, from reality to fantasy and from obvious visual sensation to (secular) spirituality. To impart the sensation of things in art as they are perceived and envisaged is an extension of what is known. The very process of encountering with ‘reality’ is to make it unfamiliar first by deconstructing it keeping the artfulness of object where the ‘object’ is important. The very process of preception is a continuous one and showing its momentum it extends from the sensory aspects to the cognitive ones and vice versa. Artfulness and artistry then merge together to make any ordinary thing a ‘fable’ removing the apparent contradiction between the fable and realism. The fantasy in painting has strong and phenomenal potentiality to make the situation a fable by its marrative dimensions latent in the stylised figuration and composition. As the structural features of nature are not just confined to the shape and colour but also to the ideas deposited in it by the thinkers and artists the ‘visual linguistics’ of art always looks for specific differences. These differences between nature and art are the main force behind the phenomenal relation between expression and design / composition. It can be a kind of subjective and creative element of ideation which reigns superior. The apparent referent / context in visual art is codified so that the relation between encoder (artist) and the decoder (onlooker) is schematised. The schema of the language, whose function is the transmission of some message, is emotive which is denotative and also cognitive. The painting is ‘object language’ and when the onlookers see and do discourse it becomes the ‘metalanguage’ of it. The very process of art-growth from its referential level to the metalanguage level is empirical as well as aesthetic. This experience often moves counter to the simplistic concept of linearity of events, but it shows the segments of experience and correspondence. The continuous shift of experience is the empirical reality behind the images of communication in art, where the relation between the signified and the signifier varies according to the person concerned.
Discourse on Nature
Nature has all kinds of dichotomies varying from the vast stretch of vegetation to the desert, from the decidous forest to grasslands, from loafty hills to the disturbed seas and from animal to the human. As the natural history creates a platform to probe into the intricacies of it the astonishment in experience is inevitable that makes the nature look magical. Tensingh joseph is basically a sculptor who has shaped the
slopes of existence in three dimensional plasticity of sculpture. His figuration in line and colour on two dimensional space is a presentation of the relation between the flora and fauna around him and inside him. The inside-outside enigma is the source that can make any tiny form the focal element of existence of a fable or a myth; and the cultural milieu of people is comprised of the beliefs of the individual as well as the community / village. giving added values to everyday experience is a mark of observation and the naivety of the villagers is the source for any kind of fantasy, myth or fable. Around a tiny insect or elephant the fable moves communicating crucial moments of experience and existence. The vegetation and the habitat of the people are not only nature in the conventional sense but the lively pulse of belief also. Tensingh Joseph who has experienced the pulse of the village in santiniketan during his student life in viswabharati University is recasting the visual and vision, which automatically make the situation a kind of fantasy / fable. The delicate process of osmosis between the real and fantasy is the reality of existence of the village. Nature is the sign and the signifier at the same time that prompts it to make its existence signified and magical.
Perhaps the most powerful lyrical enbrace of fantasy and reality would be in the amalgamation of visual and music, the spirit of which could be the source for the Indian psyche that produced the concept of Ragamala paintings. The lyrical chromatic tones of wind touching the woods or violin could be musical, painterly and so a fantasy. The aesthetic spirituality would help any village psyche to have ideas of animism and animatism; and Tensingh Joseph has shown the infinite space and time suspended in the world of fantasy which is super – realism for the naive villagers. The apotheosis of the villagers that deify anything in nature is not just surrealistic technically, but it is spirituality derived from the eco – love of the first people of the country. The embarassment experienced there is social as well as personal, but it is also Ascharya, the art experience according to the concept of Indian aesthetics.
The Folk and their Lore
The Primeval people who worshipped the tree-spirit in many forms were the ones who protected the nature. The planting of sapling, its growth, flowering etc are stages in the life of tree, which, with its canopy protects the wisdom personified by the concept of Dakshinamurthy and Budha. The concept of Nakshatravana (star forest) is ethno-botanical in spirit. The santhal tribe which shows a strong collective introspection is a sign of the present phenomenon of marginalisation due to globalised culture.. The village Prantik is a Santhal landscape where the upper class and the marginalised are the opposite islands of existence. The paradoxical existence on the leafy surface of reality is a statement of the facts of being in the work ‘Fertile Infertile’, whose narrative
sequence carries satire and despair. The narrative pattern is made synoptic in
‘Between the Earth and the Sky’, where the flowering earth is subjugated by the near vision of the part of an aeroplane. The fantasy of development and the reality of growth are always juxtaposed in the over – propagated modernisation in the context of globalisation. The tree can have a metamorphosis into a chair made of it ironically with the suspended canopy in ‘Nowhere else’. The childhood memory of the hills, the concept of ‘umbrella stones’ of Kerala for ancestral worship, the boyhood fantasy about elephant and the Vishnupur terracotta temples he saw while in Santiniketan are floating fragments in the sky in ‘Cloudy memories”. Fantasy is not just romantic, but it also can have some scientific undernarrative images in Tensingh Joseph who envisages the spirally moving upward sap of the tree in a suggestive DNA pattern with eggs, birds and colours scattered to show the turmoil of nature in ‘Fantasy Here and Now’. The feathered angels at the sub – conscious level are as real as fables; they need not be just dreams.
In the present context of globalisation and market aesthetics the statement on reality of existence, nature or pangs of the marginalised can have only perepheral value. Tensingh Joseph who has an intuitive bondage of fantasy has a ‘Rene Magritte undercurrent’ in him, as he confesses. But when his fantasy touches the reality the sensibility soars to the heights of vision which is not just dreamy but physical as well as cultural. Touched by human concerns he has processed a world of vision where fantasy is a language, the metalanguage of which is the soul of it. The material and spiritual are essentially aesthetic and the spatialisation warrants a language of significant figuration and composition.